[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case a firsthand look at the CloudFest Hackathon.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have something different. Usually it’s me, Nathan Wrigley, chatting with a guest about something related to WordPress, whether that’s a plugin, Core updates, or perhaps an aspect of the WordPress community.
\n\n\n\nThis time around, it’s me, and later on, a bunch of guests talking about an event. The event in question has already taken place, but the next iteration of it is just around the corner. And if you read the title of this episode, you’ll already know that I’m talking about CloudFest.
\n\n\n\nCloudFest is an unusual event. The most obvious indicator of this fact is that it takes place in Europa Park in Rust, Germany. It’s one of the world’s premier theme parks.
\n\n\n\nCloudFest is at its heart, a tech conference, but every year, just before the main CloudFest conference begins, a very different event takes place. It’s called the CloudFest Hackathon. So whilst the rollercoasters are testing the laws of physics outside, inside a group of developers, UX designers and system architects are testing the limits of the modern internet.
\n\n\n\nDozens of the world’s most talented engineers strip away the corporate sales pitches and set themselves a variety of collaborative challenges to be completed in just three days. Now we see hackathons all the time. Usually they’re sponsored by a single company trying to get people to use their specific API, or their high pressure competitions, to build a disruptive startup in 48 hours. But the CloudFest Hackathon isn’t like this. It’s professional, it’s non-commercial, and its primary intention isn’t necessarily to build a product, it’s to maintain the ecosystem.
\n\n\n\nSo let’s hear from somebody who knows all about the CloudFest Hackathon, and that person, is Carole Olinger.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:04] Carole Olinger: My name is Carole, and I am the head of CloudFest Hackathon. I’m very excited about my role here and to be able to connect so many awesome people and talent around the world.
\n\n\n\nSo I think there are multiple definitions for a hackathon. In this case I would probably define it as a gathering of open source enthusiasts who are going to be working and coding and designing a lot of exciting projects together. They haven’t met before in many cases, and they are put in the same room for three days being fed, being caffeinated and trying to improve the open web.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: Who’s on the organizing team?
\n\n\n\n[00:03:44] Carole Olinger: So basically, I am leading the whole operation in my role for CloudFest and the World Hosting Days. And I have the most amazing supporting team around me that anyone could ever imagine. So it is Lucas Ratke from Automattic, Alain Schlesser from Yoast, and Thierry Muller from Google, who are on the project support team, and making sure that we have all these really valuable projects in our event. And that project leads are prepared in the best possible way.
\n\n\n\nAnd for the first time we also have a volunteer that is helping during the event. And is specifically helping me wrangling the 110 amazing sheep around me, and to make sure that there are accommodations are covered. That all the catering is being done. And that is a Simon Kraft from Group One.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:36] Nathan Wrigley: I show up to an event like this, all the jigsaw pieces are in place you think, oh, it just happens, but of course it doesn’t just happen. How long have you spent working on this event? How long have you been wrangling this whole thing into existence?
\n\n\n\n[00:04:49] Carole Olinger: Usually we start in September. And then it’s more okay, what are our objectives? What are our goals for this edition? We are really trying to take as much feedback as possible from previous year’s attendees, to make sure that we have improvements in place and new additions to the event for the following edition. So that happens in September. Creating the team, making sure that we have specific objectives and goals and those are manageable.
\n\n\n\nAnd then the actual work starts in October, and then becoming more and more intense over the upcoming months. And I would say January is probably the most crazy month. I barely slept.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:31] Nathan Wrigley: So the idea really is that you put. In this case, 10 projects in a room. You’ve got 10 project leads and, in some cases there’s multiple people leading a project. And then you add into that mix over a hundred people, many of whom appear to be developers, and you stir that pot up a bit, and hope that things come out the end that are useful, that have been enjoyable to work on.
\n\n\n\nHow do you decide what the 10, in this case, projects were? And are you oversubscribed with people wishing to be a part of it? And so how do you decide what makes it? How do you decide which projects are interesting to CloudFest Hackathon each year?
\n\n\n\n[00:06:10] Carole Olinger: So this has been evolving over the years. So I remember additions, three or four years ago, or previous to the pandemic. Where our project team was pulling projects out of the different CMS communities, open source project communities. So we had ideas about what we wanted to tackle, and some projects came out of the communities. So we were like hunting ideas, and also planting ideas inside communities.
\n\n\n\nThis year is the first year where we didn’t have to do any of that. We had 22 pitches from different CMS communities and other open source projects that were pitching their ideas to us. So it was like a kind of a hard choice to determine which ones are going to make it.
\n\n\n\nSo usually we are trying to take into consideration what the theme of the main event CloudFest is, and obviously as everyone is excited about AI these days, that is something we wanted to cover. So we made sure we had some projects that had AI involvement. And then what is really important to my heart, and to the team’s heart, is that we are having cross CMS collaborations.
\n\n\n\nSo we are trying to have WordPress people here, which is obviously the community that I am mostly connected with. But also TYPO3. TYPO3 is one of our, the W3 Association is one of our top level sponsors. We since years we have Joomla people, Drupal people joining us. We are trying to find a good mix to empower those cross CMS collaborations and also cross-project collaborations. So even within one platform, just to name WordPress as an example, we try to make sure that we have projects that could eventually benefit from each other.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:54] Nathan Wrigley: I’m guessing also, there’s a component of trying to work out projects that if you put a hundred people in a room, there’s not a hundred replicas of the same person. Each of them are different. That there are 10 different places where they can land. Because one thing that I didn’t realize and was really curious to me, is when the Hackathon started, apart from the project leads, nobody’s assigned a place to go. They listen to a little speech at the beginning. It’s like a promotional thing. Two minutes, this is what we want to do, the pitch. And then the people make a decision. And for 10 minutes or something, there’s this sort of chaotic moving of people around, and then it all settles down.
\n\n\n\nSo presumably you have a wide array of project pitches, so that those a hundred plus people can decide, they’re not all surrounding the one table and there’s a table over there that’s empty, I guess that fits in the jigsaw as well.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:44] Carole Olinger: So we are taking very much care about the selection process of applicants. So when we know what our projects are going to look like, we are trying to match their needs in terms of skills that attendees are going to present to us during their application.
\n\n\n\nSo usually we have between 300 and 400 applications for the Hackathon, and we have 110 slots. But, and this is important to understand, our partners are bringing team members within these 110 attendees. And our partners this year have been super actively involved, which I love. So they were not only giving us money to make this event possible, to be able to invite open source contributors to this place, including their hotel, accommodation and food. They were bringing, people resources. I hate the term, but you know what I mean. So they were sending their crew to lead, to participate in these open source ideas and projects. So in the end we had 60 available spots for open source contributors. And then we made sure that we are matching the skills that they were sharing with us in their applications with the needs that the projects will have on the table.
\n\n\n\nSo we have a pretty good understanding already about who’s going to be at what table. And obviously we are monitoring that. So we give them some time to make the decisions. And if we see that there are skills missing at a certain table, or if there’s another table that is going to be too full and too complicated to manage by the project lead, we are kindly convincing, and reassigning people, to participate in different projects.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:19] Nathan Wrigley: So that’s interesting. So it’s not just a free for all? The idea is to maximize the output of the projects, the 10 different projects at the end, and you will, like you said, politely, ask people to move over if you believe that the thing that they have said that they’re good at, is, matching. And there’s a, I don’t know, a hole in one particular project.
\n\n\n\nThat brings me to this question then. Is the intention that these projects have a life after this event has finished? Or is it just a case of, okay, we’ve all had a nice time, the event has closed, let’s all move on with our lives.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:48] Carole Olinger: This is becoming more and more important to us. As I said earlier, we are trying to improve something every year like, like focusing on something when we are fixing our goals that we can do better every year. And what we can definitely do better is spreading the word about what amazing achievements the teams have been building during the event, and make sure that this project’s become more sustainable. So that the world knows that there’s potential in the outcomes of CloudFest Hackathon project, and to potentially unlock support and resources for these projects to continue.
\n\n\n\nI would love to spread the word, making it possible to unlock these resources. And then also inside our team, building more and more resources to follow up with this project leads from our end.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:33] Nathan Wrigley: There’s an element of, how to describe it? There’s this time pressure in the whole event. So that the thing is basically three days long, from inception until final judging, three days. So the pressure is on, and I can feel at the moment the pressure is increasing slightly. You can sense that people are getting quite into the project they’re working on.
\n\n\n\nI noticed last night, long after the event had officially closed down, there was quite a lot of people still sitting there. They’re were obviously wedded to what they’re doing. There is this sort of like Shark Tank element where there’s going to be a judgment at the end and somebody’s going to win.
\n\n\n\nHow does that work? Who gets to decide who’s the winner?
\n\n\n\n[00:12:06] Carole Olinger: So we do have a jury, and the jury is composed of representatives of our top tier partners. And they send one representative to the jury. Then we do have one representatives from the Groundbreaker Talents charity project. Because, on a side note, all these awards are being sponsored by companies, and everything that we are collecting in terms of sponsorships is going to the Groundbreak Talents initiative. And then we have the project support team, and myself being on the juries. And it’s an uneven number. So we have nine people, which is always good to have on a jury. And after the presentation of results on the last day of the hackathon, the jury is going to deliberate.
\n\n\n\nAnd then we are going to listen to the project support team, who has been working the room and connecting with the project tables during the three days in terms of technical achievements, challenges they have seen. So they’re going to give us some impression on that. And that is mostly important for the Tech Visionary Award. And then, all of us have had the chance to obviously see the presentations, which is important for the Pitch Perfect Award. Who has the most appealing presentation of results? We do have the Social Media Master Award, that is fully being tracked.
\n\n\n\nSo Simon and I, we are going to give the jury some insights on who has created the most boss on social media. . And, then we do have the Breaking Barriers Award, which is a new one. So this is about using inclusive technologies, and getting some outputs that are going to be helpful for a diverse set of users, and connecting people on the user base, but also how the people have been working together in terms of having diverse skills and perspectives on the table.
\n\n\n\nSo these are some of the awards, and there’s going to be an overall winner. We have five categories, and an overall winner. And the overall winner is, the one that has the most points.
\n\n\n\nThanks to Carole for that comprehensive introduction to the CloudFest Hackathon. Now, let’s look at the why. Why do people travel from 30 plus different countries around the world to do all of this?
\n\n\n\nIn our industry, we talk a lot about the cloud, but we often forget that the cloud is just a massive collection of interconnected open source projects. You have WordPress powering 40 plus percent of the web, you have the Linux kernel, you’ve got PHP and Python communities, and then you have the hosting providers and hardware manufacturers. Normally, these groups live in silos. They communicate via GitHub issues or formal API documentation. Well, the intention of the hackathon is to create what might be called the human API. It’s about taking a person who might maintain a security plugin, and sitting them at the same table as an engineer who manages millions of servers for a global host.
\n\n\n\nWhen you remove the barrier of the screen, the friction of the internet disappears. Problems that have been sitting in a backlog for six months get solved over a coffee, or a shared meal because the right people are finally in the same physical space.
\n\n\n\nAlthough, as Carole mentioned, there is a winner, this isn’t really about winning a prize. In fact, the prizes are almost secondary to the real goal, which is contributing back to open source projects, some of which already exist, some of which are new. The intention is all free and open source software or FOSS for short.
\n\n\n\nThese contributors aren’t there to build something proprietary and closed. They’re there to ensure the plumbing of the internet stays robust, secure, and interoperable. Oh, and to have some fun collaborating at the same time.
\n\n\n\nSpeaking of contributors, let’s hear from some of them now and get a little taste of what their project was all about.
\n\n\n\nThe room as you will hear was a little noisy.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:52] Javier Casares: I am Javier Casares and I am one of the co-leads from for the CMS Cloud Manager Project.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:58] Nathan Wrigley: What does this project hope to achieve?
\n\n\n\n[00:16:00] Javier Casares: Usually when you have a cPanel or Plesk or some kind of panel, you can install a WordPress, for example, with one click, but the server is not configured.
\n\n\n\nSo in this project, we want to configure not only the CMS, but also the server where the CMS is going to be
\n\n\n\n[00:16:20] Nathan Wrigley: And how’s it going so far?
\n\n\n\n[00:16:22] Javier Casares: It’s fine. We have the public part because we want to have a website so you can configure things and prepare everything. And then we have this software, the real software that creates everything. And more or less it’s, fine, at this moment. So I think we can achieve everything for the hackathon, for the finals.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:46] Mattias Pfefferle: I’m Mathias. I am working on Activity Pub and the Fediverse.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:51] Nathan Wrigley: And what’s the project that you’re working on at CloudFest, the Hackathon?
\n\n\n\n[00:16:55] Mattias Pfefferle: We are working on federated events. So it’s very much a special case of the Fediverse.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:02] Nathan Wrigley: And what is the intention of the project? What are you hoping to get out of it?
\n\n\n\n[00:17:05] Mattias Pfefferle: We try to build a decentralized, alternative to the big social networks around events, so that people does not have to rely on something they do not have control over. So we would hope to get an alternative to meetup.com, maybe, or any other big closed proprietary social network, around events.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:29] Nathan Wrigley: And how’s it going so far?
\n\n\n\n[00:17:30] Mattias Pfefferle: It’s mixed, because even if it’s a standard, there are different variations of using the standard. So we filed a lot of bug reports, and tried to work on a standard that better describes the standard , if that makes sense? And we’re trying to make federation happen using WordPress and some other platforms that are built by people that are part of the Hackathon team.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:58] Milana Cap: My name is Milana Cap, and I’m on a project WPCLI as MCP. MCP stands for Milana Cap pro. No, it doesn’t
\n\n\n\n[00:18:09] Nathan Wrigley: What is the intention of this project then?
\n\n\n\n[00:18:11] Milana Cap: We are introducing AI into WPCLI. So, you could use AI in different aspects of WordPress, like content creation and all of that. But it was missing in development process, especially in local instances. So now we have that, and it’s actually a lot of fun. Much more fun than I thought.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:32] Nathan Wrigley: And how’s it going so far?
\n\n\n\n[00:18:34] Milana Cap: So far we build a spam machine, and that’s official name. And we actually had a MVP on first day. It’s really fun. Yeah. And we are just learning how this AI is behaving by itself in our locals.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:52] Patricia BT: Hello, Nathan. I’m Patricia BT. I’m living in Geneva, Switzerland. I speak French, and I am my own boss, . And I came, with that pitch, as a project for the Hackathon because for me it’s very important to own your data and preserve what exists on the web, and not lose anything.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:11] Nathan Wrigley: And what’s the name of your project?
\n\n\n\n[00:19:13] Patricia BT: CMS Freedom.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:14] Nathan Wrigley: And how’s it going so far?
\n\n\n\n[00:19:16] Patricia BT: It’s going very well. We have, tech people here, engineer, who are doing amazing work with, especially LLMs. So we are using AI to grab any HTML content and discover the format, the elements, and then later be able to import that into WordPress block theme.
\n\n\n\nFor now it’s WordPress block theme and content. And later the hope is that people from other CMSs, other system, can just modify that last bit and import what the tool extracts, and import to their own system. So we can move from any HTML, render any page on the web and create that for your CMS.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:59] Nemanja Cimbaljevic: Hi, I am Nemanja. I come from Serbia and currently I’m with GoDaddy as a software engineer.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:05] Nathan Wrigley: And what’s the name of your project?
\n\n\n\n[00:20:07] Nemanja Cimbaljevic: I will not break my tongue. We will call it AI Accessibility Content Updater.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:12] Nathan Wrigley: And what is the intention? What are you hoping to achieve over these three days?
\n\n\n\n[00:20:16] Nemanja Cimbaljevic: We will try to make a proof of concept that will allow us to move on in the future where the AI is capable to help with accessibility of the websites that can be improved? Not all of them.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:29] Nathan Wrigley: Are there any constraints around what it is that you are hoping to be able to do? Or is it literally all the accessibility?
\n\n\n\n[00:20:35] Nemanja Cimbaljevic: It’s all about accessibility, and yes, we will see where we will go. It was announced as a trial and error. So we will see if there is any trial or just error.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:48] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Hi, I’m Anne Bovelett.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:50] Nathan Wrigley: And what’s the name of the project you’ve got at CloudFest Hackathon?
\n\n\n\n[00:20:54] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: It’s called Accessible Infographics.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:56] Nathan Wrigley: And what is the intention? What are you hoping to achieve in these three days?
\n\n\n\n[00:21:01] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Right now we’re creating a plugin for WordPress. . And when you have infographics on your site because you produce medicine, or machines, or you have statistics on your site. You can use our WordPress block, and upload an image through that, and then it will help you to make it accessible by creating extra information under the hood.
\n\n\n\nAnd the best thing of this is it’s not just going to be for WordPress, because we’re conceptualizing that for others so they can easily recreate this in other open source CMSs. And it will save millions and millions of people from sitting in the dark with very important information on websites.
\n\n\n\nWhat it actually means is that, also when we manage to move on with this project in the next phase, we’re gonna try and do this in bulk. To do it backwards for companies that already have a lot of infographics on their website, and understand that they have to do it either by law, or because they’re smart and want higher converting web shops, for example.
\n\n\n\nAnd then the possibility will come that they can do that backwards in bulk, and it will save them thousands and thousands in money that they have to invest in making this happen.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:20] Wesley Stessens: Yes. My name is Wesley Stessens, and I’m from Belgium, and we work on the Peer-to-peer Federated RAG Framework with, our team.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:30] Nathan Wrigley: And can I ask, what is the intention of that project over the three days? What are you hoping to achieve?
\n\n\n\n[00:22:35] Wesley Stessens: We are hoping to achieve something that hasn’t been done before in the, in the RAG space.
\n\n\n\nSo basically RAG, or Retrieval Augmented Generation is way how you can augment an LLM and AI with extra data. And we want to allow everyone to create their own databases. And anyone can just join our network with their own knowledge.
\n\n\n\nFor example, someone who knows a lot about beers, they can join our network and have like a library full of all information about very specific niche beers, maybe beers they brew themselves or whatever. And then any other node in the network can ask a specific question. And then our purpose is to route that question to the best matching node in a decentralized way. So there’s no servers or big companies. In between everything is done in a peer to peer way. So they get back the best matching documents from other people’s libraries, so to speak.
\n\n\n\nAnd then we use that to ask an LLM, or an AI a question with the context that we got from other people’s databases that matched best. And now we show the results to the user, or we create like a chat interface maybe around that. That’s the end result that we hope to achieve.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:49] Tadas Pukas: I’m Tadas.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:50] Nathan Wrigley: And what is the name of the project?
\n\n\n\n[00:23:52] Tadas Pukas: It’s WordPress Staging Environment Manager. It’s a bit complex to understand, but it does very simple thing.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:59] Nathan Wrigley: And what’s the intention at the end of these three days? What would you ideally like to be shipping? Have finished?
\n\n\n\n[00:24:05] Tadas Pukas: Yeah, so we want to have open source plugin, and actually we have it almost, so it’s the final touches.
\n\n\n\nAnd this will be distributed. It’s already in the public GitHub repo. So people will be able to download zip file, install a plugin, and create staging environments. Not only create but sync changes from staging to live. Actually, our name of the plugin is Staging to Live, so it’s, yeah, almost done.
\n\n\n\nAlmost ready.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I hope that you enjoyed this different style of podcast. Hopefully you learned something about CloudFest and the CloudFest Hackathon.
\n\n\n\nYou certainly got to hear from a wide variety of contributors, and got to peel back the curtain about what a hackathon is, and the different projects people work on. There’s a great energy at events like this, and maybe this will convince you to explore hackathons in the future.
\n\n\n\nYou don’t need to be a coder. Each project needs a wide array of talents from coders to marketers, designers, to project wranglers.
\n\n\n\nLike I said, at the top of the show, CloudFest 2026 is just around the corner. There’s an annual event both in the US and the one discussed here in Germany.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast.
\n\n\n\nAnd we’ll be back next week with more from CloudFest and the CloudFest Hackathon.
\nOn the podcast today we have something different.
\n\n\n\nUsually it\u2019s me, Nathan Wrigley, chatting with a guest about something related to WordPress, whether that\u2019s a plugin, Core updates or perhaps an aspect of the WordPress community.
\n\n\n\nThis time around it\u2019s me, and later on a bunch of guests talking about an event. The event in question has already taken place, but the next iteration of it is just around the corner, and if you read the title of the episode, you\u2019ll already know that I\u2019m talking about CloudFest.
\n\n\n\nCloudFest is an unusual event; the most obvious indicator of this is the fact that it takes place in Europa-Park in Rust, Germany. It\u2019s one of the world\u2019s premier theme parks.
\n\n\n\nCloudFest is at its heart a tech conference, but every year, just before the main CloudFest conference begins, a very different event takes place. It\u2019s called the CloudFest Hackathon. So, whilst the roller coasters are testing the laws of physics outside, inside, a group of developers, UX designers, and system architects are testing the limits of the modern internet.
\n\n\n\nDozens of the world\u2019s most talented engineers, strip away the corporate sales pitches, and set themselves a variety of collaborative challenges, to be completed in just three days.
\n\n\n\nNow, we see “hackathons” all the time. Usually, they\u2019re sponsored by a single company trying to get people to use their specific API, or they\u2019re high-pressure competitions to build a “disruptive” startup in 48 hours. But the CloudFest Hackathon is not like this. It\u2019s professional, it\u2019s non-commercial, and its primary intention isn’t to build a product, it\u2019s to maintain the ecosystem.
\n\n\n\nToday we’re going to be hearing from a variety of people who were involved in the 2025 event. The 2026 event is just around the corner.
\n\n\n\nYou’ll hear from:
\n\n\n\nThey’re a tiny sample of who was present at the event, but hopefully they will give you a flavour of what the CloudFest Hackathon is, why people attend, and what kinds of projects they’re involved in.
\n\n\n\nCloudFest Hackathon 2025 Recap
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "content_text": "Transcript\n[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case a firsthand look at the CloudFest Hackathon.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have something different. Usually it’s me, Nathan Wrigley, chatting with a guest about something related to WordPress, whether that’s a plugin, Core updates, or perhaps an aspect of the WordPress community.\n\n\n\nThis time around, it’s me, and later on, a bunch of guests talking about an event. The event in question has already taken place, but the next iteration of it is just around the corner. And if you read the title of this episode, you’ll already know that I’m talking about CloudFest.\n\n\n\nCloudFest is an unusual event. The most obvious indicator of this fact is that it takes place in Europa Park in Rust, Germany. It’s one of the world’s premier theme parks.\n\n\n\nCloudFest is at its heart, a tech conference, but every year, just before the main CloudFest conference begins, a very different event takes place. It’s called the CloudFest Hackathon. So whilst the rollercoasters are testing the laws of physics outside, inside a group of developers, UX designers and system architects are testing the limits of the modern internet.\n\n\n\nDozens of the world’s most talented engineers strip away the corporate sales pitches and set themselves a variety of collaborative challenges to be completed in just three days. Now we see hackathons all the time. Usually they’re sponsored by a single company trying to get people to use their specific API, or their high pressure competitions, to build a disruptive startup in 48 hours. But the CloudFest Hackathon isn’t like this. It’s professional, it’s non-commercial, and its primary intention isn’t necessarily to build a product, it’s to maintain the ecosystem.\n\n\n\nSo let’s hear from somebody who knows all about the CloudFest Hackathon, and that person, is Carole Olinger.\n\n\n\n[00:03:04] Carole Olinger: My name is Carole, and I am the head of CloudFest Hackathon. I’m very excited about my role here and to be able to connect so many awesome people and talent around the world.\n\n\n\nSo I think there are multiple definitions for a hackathon. In this case I would probably define it as a gathering of open source enthusiasts who are going to be working and coding and designing a lot of exciting projects together. They haven’t met before in many cases, and they are put in the same room for three days being fed, being caffeinated and trying to improve the open web.\n\n\n\n[00:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: Who’s on the organizing team?\n\n\n\n[00:03:44] Carole Olinger: So basically, I am leading the whole operation in my role for CloudFest and the World Hosting Days. And I have the most amazing supporting team around me that anyone could ever imagine. So it is Lucas Ratke from Automattic, Alain Schlesser from Yoast, and Thierry Muller from Google, who are on the project support team, and making sure that we have all these really valuable projects in our event. And that project leads are prepared in the best possible way.\n\n\n\nAnd for the first time we also have a volunteer that is helping during the event. And is specifically helping me wrangling the 110 amazing sheep around me, and to make sure that there are accommodations are covered. That all the catering is being done. And that is a Simon Kraft from Group One.\n\n\n\n[00:04:36] Nathan Wrigley: I show up to an event like this, all the jigsaw pieces are in place you think, oh, it just happens, but of course it doesn’t just happen. How long have you spent working on this event? How long have you been wrangling this whole thing into existence?\n\n\n\n[00:04:49] Carole Olinger: Usually we start in September. And then it’s more okay, what are our objectives? What are our goals for this edition? We are really trying to take as much feedback as possible from previous year’s attendees, to make sure that we have improvements in place and new additions to the event for the following edition. So that happens in September. Creating the team, making sure that we have specific objectives and goals and those are manageable.\n\n\n\nAnd then the actual work starts in October, and then becoming more and more intense over the upcoming months. And I would say January is probably the most crazy month. I barely slept.\n\n\n\n[00:05:31] Nathan Wrigley: So the idea really is that you put. In this case, 10 projects in a room. You’ve got 10 project leads and, in some cases there’s multiple people leading a project. And then you add into that mix over a hundred people, many of whom appear to be developers, and you stir that pot up a bit, and hope that things come out the end that are useful, that have been enjoyable to work on.\n\n\n\nHow do you decide what the 10, in this case, projects were? And are you oversubscribed with people wishing to be a part of it? And so how do you decide what makes it? How do you decide which projects are interesting to CloudFest Hackathon each year?\n\n\n\n[00:06:10] Carole Olinger: So this has been evolving over the years. So I remember additions, three or four years ago, or previous to the pandemic. Where our project team was pulling projects out of the different CMS communities, open source project communities. So we had ideas about what we wanted to tackle, and some projects came out of the communities. So we were like hunting ideas, and also planting ideas inside communities.\n\n\n\nThis year is the first year where we didn’t have to do any of that. We had 22 pitches from different CMS communities and other open source projects that were pitching their ideas to us. So it was like a kind of a hard choice to determine which ones are going to make it.\n\n\n\nSo usually we are trying to take into consideration what the theme of the main event CloudFest is, and obviously as everyone is excited about AI these days, that is something we wanted to cover. So we made sure we had some projects that had AI involvement. And then what is really important to my heart, and to the team’s heart, is that we are having cross CMS collaborations.\n\n\n\nSo we are trying to have WordPress people here, which is obviously the community that I am mostly connected with. But also TYPO3. TYPO3 is one of our, the W3 Association is one of our top level sponsors. We since years we have Joomla people, Drupal people joining us. We are trying to find a good mix to empower those cross CMS collaborations and also cross-project collaborations. So even within one platform, just to name WordPress as an example, we try to make sure that we have projects that could eventually benefit from each other.\n\n\n\n[00:07:54] Nathan Wrigley: I’m guessing also, there’s a component of trying to work out projects that if you put a hundred people in a room, there’s not a hundred replicas of the same person. Each of them are different. That there are 10 different places where they can land. Because one thing that I didn’t realize and was really curious to me, is when the Hackathon started, apart from the project leads, nobody’s assigned a place to go. They listen to a little speech at the beginning. It’s like a promotional thing. Two minutes, this is what we want to do, the pitch. And then the people make a decision. And for 10 minutes or something, there’s this sort of chaotic moving of people around, and then it all settles down.\n\n\n\nSo presumably you have a wide array of project pitches, so that those a hundred plus people can decide, they’re not all surrounding the one table and there’s a table over there that’s empty, I guess that fits in the jigsaw as well.\n\n\n\n[00:08:44] Carole Olinger: So we are taking very much care about the selection process of applicants. So when we know what our projects are going to look like, we are trying to match their needs in terms of skills that attendees are going to present to us during their application.\n\n\n\nSo usually we have between 300 and 400 applications for the Hackathon, and we have 110 slots. But, and this is important to understand, our partners are bringing team members within these 110 attendees. And our partners this year have been super actively involved, which I love. So they were not only giving us money to make this event possible, to be able to invite open source contributors to this place, including their hotel, accommodation and food. They were bringing, people resources. I hate the term, but you know what I mean. So they were sending their crew to lead, to participate in these open source ideas and projects. So in the end we had 60 available spots for open source contributors. And then we made sure that we are matching the skills that they were sharing with us in their applications with the needs that the projects will have on the table.\n\n\n\nSo we have a pretty good understanding already about who’s going to be at what table. And obviously we are monitoring that. So we give them some time to make the decisions. And if we see that there are skills missing at a certain table, or if there’s another table that is going to be too full and too complicated to manage by the project lead, we are kindly convincing, and reassigning people, to participate in different projects.\n\n\n\n[00:10:19] Nathan Wrigley: So that’s interesting. So it’s not just a free for all? The idea is to maximize the output of the projects, the 10 different projects at the end, and you will, like you said, politely, ask people to move over if you believe that the thing that they have said that they’re good at, is, matching. And there’s a, I don’t know, a hole in one particular project.\n\n\n\nThat brings me to this question then. Is the intention that these projects have a life after this event has finished? Or is it just a case of, okay, we’ve all had a nice time, the event has closed, let’s all move on with our lives.\n\n\n\n[00:10:48] Carole Olinger: This is becoming more and more important to us. As I said earlier, we are trying to improve something every year like, like focusing on something when we are fixing our goals that we can do better every year. And what we can definitely do better is spreading the word about what amazing achievements the teams have been building during the event, and make sure that this project’s become more sustainable. So that the world knows that there’s potential in the outcomes of CloudFest Hackathon project, and to potentially unlock support and resources for these projects to continue.\n\n\n\nI would love to spread the word, making it possible to unlock these resources. And then also inside our team, building more and more resources to follow up with this project leads from our end.\n\n\n\n[00:11:33] Nathan Wrigley: There’s an element of, how to describe it? There’s this time pressure in the whole event. So that the thing is basically three days long, from inception until final judging, three days. So the pressure is on, and I can feel at the moment the pressure is increasing slightly. You can sense that people are getting quite into the project they’re working on.\n\n\n\nI noticed last night, long after the event had officially closed down, there was quite a lot of people still sitting there. They’re were obviously wedded to what they’re doing. There is this sort of like Shark Tank element where there’s going to be a judgment at the end and somebody’s going to win.\n\n\n\nHow does that work? Who gets to decide who’s the winner?\n\n\n\n[00:12:06] Carole Olinger: So we do have a jury, and the jury is composed of representatives of our top tier partners. And they send one representative to the jury. Then we do have one representatives from the Groundbreaker Talents charity project. Because, on a side note, all these awards are being sponsored by companies, and everything that we are collecting in terms of sponsorships is going to the Groundbreak Talents initiative. And then we have the project support team, and myself being on the juries. And it’s an uneven number. So we have nine people, which is always good to have on a jury. And after the presentation of results on the last day of the hackathon, the jury is going to deliberate.\n\n\n\nAnd then we are going to listen to the project support team, who has been working the room and connecting with the project tables during the three days in terms of technical achievements, challenges they have seen. So they’re going to give us some impression on that. And that is mostly important for the Tech Visionary Award. And then, all of us have had the chance to obviously see the presentations, which is important for the Pitch Perfect Award. Who has the most appealing presentation of results? We do have the Social Media Master Award, that is fully being tracked.\n\n\n\nSo Simon and I, we are going to give the jury some insights on who has created the most boss on social media. . And, then we do have the Breaking Barriers Award, which is a new one. So this is about using inclusive technologies, and getting some outputs that are going to be helpful for a diverse set of users, and connecting people on the user base, but also how the people have been working together in terms of having diverse skills and perspectives on the table.\n\n\n\nSo these are some of the awards, and there’s going to be an overall winner. We have five categories, and an overall winner. And the overall winner is, the one that has the most points.\n\n\n\nThanks to Carole for that comprehensive introduction to the CloudFest Hackathon. Now, let’s look at the why. Why do people travel from 30 plus different countries around the world to do all of this?\n\n\n\nIn our industry, we talk a lot about the cloud, but we often forget that the cloud is just a massive collection of interconnected open source projects. You have WordPress powering 40 plus percent of the web, you have the Linux kernel, you’ve got PHP and Python communities, and then you have the hosting providers and hardware manufacturers. Normally, these groups live in silos. They communicate via GitHub issues or formal API documentation. Well, the intention of the hackathon is to create what might be called the human API. It’s about taking a person who might maintain a security plugin, and sitting them at the same table as an engineer who manages millions of servers for a global host.\n\n\n\nWhen you remove the barrier of the screen, the friction of the internet disappears. Problems that have been sitting in a backlog for six months get solved over a coffee, or a shared meal because the right people are finally in the same physical space.\n\n\n\nAlthough, as Carole mentioned, there is a winner, this isn’t really about winning a prize. In fact, the prizes are almost secondary to the real goal, which is contributing back to open source projects, some of which already exist, some of which are new. The intention is all free and open source software or FOSS for short.\n\n\n\nThese contributors aren’t there to build something proprietary and closed. They’re there to ensure the plumbing of the internet stays robust, secure, and interoperable. Oh, and to have some fun collaborating at the same time.\n\n\n\nSpeaking of contributors, let’s hear from some of them now and get a little taste of what their project was all about.\n\n\n\nThe room as you will hear was a little noisy.\n\n\n\n[00:15:52] Javier Casares: I am Javier Casares and I am one of the co-leads from for the CMS Cloud Manager Project.\n\n\n\n[00:15:58] Nathan Wrigley: What does this project hope to achieve?\n\n\n\n[00:16:00] Javier Casares: Usually when you have a cPanel or Plesk or some kind of panel, you can install a WordPress, for example, with one click, but the server is not configured.\n\n\n\nSo in this project, we want to configure not only the CMS, but also the server where the CMS is going to be\n\n\n\n[00:16:20] Nathan Wrigley: And how’s it going so far?\n\n\n\n[00:16:22] Javier Casares: It’s fine. We have the public part because we want to have a website so you can configure things and prepare everything. And then we have this software, the real software that creates everything. And more or less it’s, fine, at this moment. So I think we can achieve everything for the hackathon, for the finals.\n\n\n\n[00:16:46] Mattias Pfefferle: I’m Mathias. I am working on Activity Pub and the Fediverse.\n\n\n\n[00:16:51] Nathan Wrigley: And what’s the project that you’re working on at CloudFest, the Hackathon?\n\n\n\n[00:16:55] Mattias Pfefferle: We are working on federated events. So it’s very much a special case of the Fediverse.\n\n\n\n[00:17:02] Nathan Wrigley: And what is the intention of the project? What are you hoping to get out of it?\n\n\n\n[00:17:05] Mattias Pfefferle: We try to build a decentralized, alternative to the big social networks around events, so that people does not have to rely on something they do not have control over. So we would hope to get an alternative to meetup.com, maybe, or any other big closed proprietary social network, around events.\n\n\n\n[00:17:29] Nathan Wrigley: And how’s it going so far?\n\n\n\n[00:17:30] Mattias Pfefferle: It’s mixed, because even if it’s a standard, there are different variations of using the standard. So we filed a lot of bug reports, and tried to work on a standard that better describes the standard , if that makes sense? And we’re trying to make federation happen using WordPress and some other platforms that are built by people that are part of the Hackathon team.\n\n\n\n[00:17:58] Milana Cap: My name is Milana Cap, and I’m on a project WPCLI as MCP. MCP stands for Milana Cap pro. No, it doesn’t\n\n\n\n[00:18:09] Nathan Wrigley: What is the intention of this project then?\n\n\n\n[00:18:11] Milana Cap: We are introducing AI into WPCLI. So, you could use AI in different aspects of WordPress, like content creation and all of that. But it was missing in development process, especially in local instances. So now we have that, and it’s actually a lot of fun. Much more fun than I thought.\n\n\n\n[00:18:32] Nathan Wrigley: And how’s it going so far?\n\n\n\n[00:18:34] Milana Cap: So far we build a spam machine, and that’s official name. And we actually had a MVP on first day. It’s really fun. Yeah. And we are just learning how this AI is behaving by itself in our locals.\n\n\n\n[00:18:52] Patricia BT: Hello, Nathan. I’m Patricia BT. I’m living in Geneva, Switzerland. I speak French, and I am my own boss, . And I came, with that pitch, as a project for the Hackathon because for me it’s very important to own your data and preserve what exists on the web, and not lose anything.\n\n\n\n[00:19:11] Nathan Wrigley: And what’s the name of your project?\n\n\n\n[00:19:13] Patricia BT: CMS Freedom.\n\n\n\n[00:19:14] Nathan Wrigley: And how’s it going so far?\n\n\n\n[00:19:16] Patricia BT: It’s going very well. We have, tech people here, engineer, who are doing amazing work with, especially LLMs. So we are using AI to grab any HTML content and discover the format, the elements, and then later be able to import that into WordPress block theme.\n\n\n\nFor now it’s WordPress block theme and content. And later the hope is that people from other CMSs, other system, can just modify that last bit and import what the tool extracts, and import to their own system. So we can move from any HTML, render any page on the web and create that for your CMS.\n\n\n\n[00:19:59] Nemanja Cimbaljevic: Hi, I am Nemanja. I come from Serbia and currently I’m with GoDaddy as a software engineer.\n\n\n\n[00:20:05] Nathan Wrigley: And what’s the name of your project?\n\n\n\n[00:20:07] Nemanja Cimbaljevic: I will not break my tongue. We will call it AI Accessibility Content Updater.\n\n\n\n[00:20:12] Nathan Wrigley: And what is the intention? What are you hoping to achieve over these three days?\n\n\n\n[00:20:16] Nemanja Cimbaljevic: We will try to make a proof of concept that will allow us to move on in the future where the AI is capable to help with accessibility of the websites that can be improved? Not all of them.\n\n\n\n[00:20:29] Nathan Wrigley: Are there any constraints around what it is that you are hoping to be able to do? Or is it literally all the accessibility?\n\n\n\n[00:20:35] Nemanja Cimbaljevic: It’s all about accessibility, and yes, we will see where we will go. It was announced as a trial and error. So we will see if there is any trial or just error.\n\n\n\n[00:20:48] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Hi, I’m Anne Bovelett.\n\n\n\n[00:20:50] Nathan Wrigley: And what’s the name of the project you’ve got at CloudFest Hackathon?\n\n\n\n[00:20:54] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: It’s called Accessible Infographics.\n\n\n\n[00:20:56] Nathan Wrigley: And what is the intention? What are you hoping to achieve in these three days?\n\n\n\n[00:21:01] Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Right now we’re creating a plugin for WordPress. . And when you have infographics on your site because you produce medicine, or machines, or you have statistics on your site. You can use our WordPress block, and upload an image through that, and then it will help you to make it accessible by creating extra information under the hood.\n\n\n\nAnd the best thing of this is it’s not just going to be for WordPress, because we’re conceptualizing that for others so they can easily recreate this in other open source CMSs. And it will save millions and millions of people from sitting in the dark with very important information on websites.\n\n\n\nWhat it actually means is that, also when we manage to move on with this project in the next phase, we’re gonna try and do this in bulk. To do it backwards for companies that already have a lot of infographics on their website, and understand that they have to do it either by law, or because they’re smart and want higher converting web shops, for example.\n\n\n\nAnd then the possibility will come that they can do that backwards in bulk, and it will save them thousands and thousands in money that they have to invest in making this happen.\n\n\n\n[00:22:20] Wesley Stessens: Yes. My name is Wesley Stessens, and I’m from Belgium, and we work on the Peer-to-peer Federated RAG Framework with, our team.\n\n\n\n[00:22:30] Nathan Wrigley: And can I ask, what is the intention of that project over the three days? What are you hoping to achieve?\n\n\n\n[00:22:35] Wesley Stessens: We are hoping to achieve something that hasn’t been done before in the, in the RAG space.\n\n\n\nSo basically RAG, or Retrieval Augmented Generation is way how you can augment an LLM and AI with extra data. And we want to allow everyone to create their own databases. And anyone can just join our network with their own knowledge.\n\n\n\nFor example, someone who knows a lot about beers, they can join our network and have like a library full of all information about very specific niche beers, maybe beers they brew themselves or whatever. And then any other node in the network can ask a specific question. And then our purpose is to route that question to the best matching node in a decentralized way. So there’s no servers or big companies. In between everything is done in a peer to peer way. So they get back the best matching documents from other people’s libraries, so to speak.\n\n\n\nAnd then we use that to ask an LLM, or an AI a question with the context that we got from other people’s databases that matched best. And now we show the results to the user, or we create like a chat interface maybe around that. That’s the end result that we hope to achieve.\n\n\n\n[00:23:49] Tadas Pukas: I’m Tadas.\n\n\n\n[00:23:50] Nathan Wrigley: And what is the name of the project?\n\n\n\n[00:23:52] Tadas Pukas: It’s WordPress Staging Environment Manager. It’s a bit complex to understand, but it does very simple thing.\n\n\n\n[00:23:59] Nathan Wrigley: And what’s the intention at the end of these three days? What would you ideally like to be shipping? Have finished?\n\n\n\n[00:24:05] Tadas Pukas: Yeah, so we want to have open source plugin, and actually we have it almost, so it’s the final touches.\n\n\n\nAnd this will be distributed. It’s already in the public GitHub repo. So people will be able to download zip file, install a plugin, and create staging environments. Not only create but sync changes from staging to live. Actually, our name of the plugin is Staging to Live, so it’s, yeah, almost done.\n\n\n\nAlmost ready.\n\n\n\n[00:24:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I hope that you enjoyed this different style of podcast. Hopefully you learned something about CloudFest and the CloudFest Hackathon.\n\n\n\nYou certainly got to hear from a wide variety of contributors, and got to peel back the curtain about what a hackathon is, and the different projects people work on. There’s a great energy at events like this, and maybe this will convince you to explore hackathons in the future.\n\n\n\nYou don’t need to be a coder. Each project needs a wide array of talents from coders to marketers, designers, to project wranglers.\n\n\n\nLike I said, at the top of the show, CloudFest 2026 is just around the corner. There’s an annual event both in the US and the one discussed here in Germany.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast.\n\n\n\nAnd we’ll be back next week with more from CloudFest and the CloudFest Hackathon.\n\n\n\n\nOn the podcast today we have something different.\n\n\n\nUsually it\u2019s me, Nathan Wrigley, chatting with a guest about something related to WordPress, whether that\u2019s a plugin, Core updates or perhaps an aspect of the WordPress community. \n\n\n\nThis time around it\u2019s me, and later on a bunch of guests talking about an event. The event in question has already taken place, but the next iteration of it is just around the corner, and if you read the title of the episode, you\u2019ll already know that I\u2019m talking about CloudFest.\n\n\n\nCloudFest is an unusual event; the most obvious indicator of this is the fact that it takes place in Europa-Park in Rust, Germany. It\u2019s one of the world\u2019s premier theme parks.\n\n\n\nCloudFest is at its heart a tech conference, but every year, just before the main CloudFest conference begins, a very different event takes place. It\u2019s called the CloudFest Hackathon. So, whilst the roller coasters are testing the laws of physics outside, inside, a group of developers, UX designers, and system architects are testing the limits of the modern internet.\n\n\n\nDozens of the world\u2019s most talented engineers, strip away the corporate sales pitches, and set themselves a variety of collaborative challenges, to be completed in just three days.\n\n\n\nNow, we see “hackathons” all the time. Usually, they\u2019re sponsored by a single company trying to get people to use their specific API, or they\u2019re high-pressure competitions to build a “disruptive” startup in 48 hours. But the CloudFest Hackathon is not like this. It\u2019s professional, it\u2019s non-commercial, and its primary intention isn’t to build a product, it\u2019s to maintain the ecosystem.\n\n\n\nToday we’re going to be hearing from a variety of people who were involved in the 2025 event. The 2026 event is just around the corner.\n\n\n\nYou’ll hear from:\n\n\n\n\nCarole Olinger (the Hackathon lead)\n\n\n\nJavier Casares\n\n\n\nMattias Pfefferle\n\n\n\nMilana Cap\n\n\n\nPatricia BT\n\n\n\nNemanja Cimbaljevic\n\n\n\nAnne-Mieke Bovelett\n\n\n\nWesley Stessens\n\n\n\nTadas Pukas\n\n\n\n\nThey’re a tiny sample of who was present at the event, but hopefully they will give you a flavour of what the CloudFest Hackathon is, why people attend, and what kinds of projects they’re involved in.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\nCloudFest Hackathon 2025 Recap\n\n\n\nCloudFest\n\n\n\nCloudFest Hackathon", "date_published": "2026-03-11T10:00:00-04:00", "date_modified": "2026-03-11T08:53:07-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/208-Behind-the-Scenes-at-the-CloudFest-Hackathon.jpg", "tags": [ "CloudFest", "hackathon", "podcast" ], "summary": "In this WP Tavern episode, Nathan Wrigley explores the CloudFest Hackathon, an event bringing together open source enthusiasts to collaborate on innovative projects in just three days. Carole Olinger, the Hackathon lead, details the organising process and project selection, talking about cross-CMS collaboration and sustainability. Contributors like Javier Casares, Matthias Pfefferle, Milana Cap, and others share their diverse projects, ranging from AI-enhanced tools to accessibility solutions. The episode covers the energy, teamwork, and lasting impact of the Hackathon on the open web community. Go listen.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2390282/c1e-3gd9diwjv1xs6xpwd-1pr33093swz2-svxbs0.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=202950", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/207-rob-ruiz-on-wp-rig-and-the-future-of-theme-development", "title": "#207 \u2013 Rob Ruiz on WP Rig and the Future of Theme Development", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case the future of theme development.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Rob Ruiz. Rob has been involved in the WordPress ecosystem since around 2010. He began as a designer, but over the years WordPress has helped him transition into a developer, software engineer, and now an architect. Currently, he’s working full-time at an agency whilst taking on side projects independently.
\n\n\n\nThe main topic for today’s conversation, centers around themes, a subject that hasn’t been covered in depth on the podcast for quite some time. You see, Rob is the current custodian of WP Rig, a free and open source toolkit for WordPress theme development. WP Rig offers a modern, minimal, and best practice driven starting point for developers who want to build custom themes. Providing tools like Composer and Node integration to streamline workflows, enforce coding standards, and enable the use of future facing CSS features, right now.
\n\n\n\nWe start the episode with Rob sharing what attracted him to WP Rig, and his journey from user to Project Maintainer. We talk about who WP Rig is for, from experienced developers, to those just starting to dip their toes into theme building and code customization.
\n\n\n\nThe discussion moves on to talking about what a theme development framework actually is, and why this approach might suit people wanting more control, and education, in their WordPress journey. Rob describes the learning curve, the workflow, and the satisfaction of creating your own theme from scratch, while highlighting tools and guardrails built into WP RIG that make professional standards and best practices accessible to all.
\n\n\n\nWe also get into how WP Rig fits into the changing WordPress ecosystem. With the advent of full site editing and block-based themes, Rob explains how WP Rig has evolved to stay relevant, supporting classic, hybrid, and block-based paradigms, even enabling block development at the theme level.
\n\n\n\nTowards the end, we discuss the community behind WP Rig, how you can get involved, and the many educational resources available for those who want to learn theme development, or even become contributors themselves.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in building custom WordPress themes, want to understand the nuts and bolts of theme frameworks, or are simply looking for a modern and educational starting point for WordPress tinkering, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you, Rob Ruiz.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Rob Ruiz. Hello, Rob.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:56] Rob Ruiz: Hi. How are you, Nathan?
\n\n\n\n[00:03:57] Nathan Wrigley: Rob’s joining me today to talk primarily about themes, which I confess is a subject that we haven’t touched in a good long while. So before we get into that, Rob, would you just mind spending a minute just letting the listeners know who you are? If we are on a WordPress podcast, probably better to align that with what your journey is in the WordPress space, if that’s okay.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:17] Rob Ruiz: Certainly. Yeah. So my name is Rob Ruiz. I’ve been leveraging WordPress since about 2010 ish, although my web development experience goes prior to that. And so I’ve been tinkering and getting more and more into it as I go along.
\n\n\n\nI started off as mostly a designer back in the early two thousands, I guess. And WordPress has facilitated my journey from being a designer to more of a developer, software engineer, today, architect. And so yeah, it’s been a very fun journey. I’ve learned so much over the years, so I’m very grateful to WordPress for helping me do that at my own pace.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:58] Nathan Wrigley: Do you work for yourself? Are you perhaps engaged in an agency or something like that?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:02] Rob Ruiz: So currently, right now I work full-time at an agency, but I do also do work for myself as well. So it’s kind of a hybrid situation.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:09] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so the reason that Rob is on the podcast today, well, there’s a variety of reasons. Most of it will bind itself to the subject of themes, as I said right at the start. But we’re also going to be talking, maybe towards the end a little bit about AI and things like that.
\n\n\n\nHowever, Rob is now the custodian. I didn’t realise he was now the custodian. We’ll get into that in a minute. But Rob is the custodian at the moment of a project called WP Rig. And you can find this, it’s a really quick URL to type in, it’s WP Rig, so WPRIG .io.
\n\n\n\nCompletely free to download, completely unencumbered by a pricing page or anything like that. There’s a GitHub repo I think. Yes, that’s right. So do you just want to give us the elevator pitch for what WP Rig is. And just because it makes me happy, can you tell us how you got involved? Because that’s lovely too.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:00] Rob Ruiz: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So WP Rig is a theme development toolkit or framework, but it’s also a starter theme as well. So you could think of it as kind of like underscores but with a whole modern development toolkit situation built into it, meaning there’s a bunch of composer dependencies, Node dependencies, and other kind of developer tools baked into it to prepare developers for the best developer experience possible when developing themes for WordPress.
\n\n\n\nHow I got involved with it essentially is I was, first off, I was looking for a theme development framework. I had gone on a journey to explore many. And during that journey, I came across WP Rig, and kind of fell in love with it. It was really, really cool. I liked it a lot. I liked a lot of the opinions. I liked how well aligned it was with Core WordPress itself. I like the WordPress best practices that it enforces, you know, automatically. You don’t even have to like go look them up and think about it. You could just run a tool that’s built into it and it’ll check all your code for said best practices.
\n\n\n\nAnd so that was very interesting to me. I was like, I’m going to start using this. And so I did. I did start using it. And then, shortly thereafter, I had been browsing my favorite WordPress news site, WP Tavern, and noticed an interesting article about the project that I had just recently fell in love with out of sheer coincidence, I suppose. Out of sheer coincidence, it just so happens this project is now looking for new maintainers, and that they were having a Zoom call in the near future where anybody interested in maintaining the project could join the Zoom call.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I did. I joined the Zoom call and I got to meet the previous maintainers, or maintainer rather, and ended up having ongoing conversations with him after the call. And one thing led to another, and now the project is basically managed solely by me with a handful of other light contributors.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:04] Nathan Wrigley: So that’s really nice. I love the fact that there’s some sort of combination of WP Tavern and WP Rig out there. That’s lovely. So I appreciate that. The audience for this podcast is pretty varied. So there’ll be developers with a longstanding history with WordPress, you know, deep in the code. Will go to WP Rig and immediately everything will connect, and they’ll be like, yep, I get this. I understand what this is. It’s for me. It’s not for me, yada, yada.
\n\n\n\nHowever, we also have quite a lot of people listening to this who are brand new to WordPress. They’ve got no experience with code. They may be living inside of a page builder or something like that where everything is point, click, drag, drop, save, that kind of an environment. It just occurred to me that they very well might not know what even a theme development framework is. So can we begin there? What is the point of a thing like this? What’s the problem you’re trying to solve? Let’s start there.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:53] Rob Ruiz: Yeah, that’s a great question. So like anything in WordPress, because it’s open source and so beautifully designed, might I add, from an architectural standpoint, there are lots of ways to extend WordPress beyond its base functionality.
\n\n\n\nTwo of the most common ways to do this is via the plugin system, and via the theme system. And so we can add custom plugins to extend the functionality of WordPress, but we can also add custom themes to alter the way our website looks and feels aesthetically.
\n\n\n\nSo if you’re somebody who’s more of a designer maybe, or you appreciate aesthetics and perhaps you’ve dabbled in some CSS, you might be more inclined, if you’re looking to go beyond just what Core WordPress provides to you in terms of a site building experience, I would encourage those people to look at themes and possibly creating your own custom theme. Or altering an existing theme using a concept called child theming where you can take any theme that you get from anywhere, whether you buy it or find it on the wordpress.org theme repository. You can extend themes using child themes, or you can just build your own themes from scratch.
\n\n\n\nSo that does include some work outside of the WordPress admin area. So once you get into developing themes for WordPress, the concept here is you’re kind of straying away from the WordPress admin experience, and you’re now like in the code editor realm, right? Because under the hood, WordPress is all just a bunch of code, PHP, JavaScript, CSS. There’s a lot going on, the React now. There’s a lot of things kind of built into WordPress.
\n\n\n\nAnd so the beautiful thing about WordPress is that you can kind of, if you’re interested in learning how to develop, you can kind of dip your toes into the development pool as frequently as possible, as quickly as you want. Whatever you are comfortable with, you can kind of pace yourself there and say, okay, let me try and make a custom theme, or let me try to make a custom plugin. And if it doesn’t work out, it’s easy to just deactivate it, delete it, remove it, whatever. It’s a great way to learn how to develop, in my personal opinion, because a lot of the heavy lifting is done by the Core WordPress system.
\n\n\n\nBasically what WP Rig offers is, instead of having to create a file system, a theme system from scratch, you know, a lot of people will reach for a concept called a boilerplate. Something that will scaffold kind of like the common files and folders that would be necessary in a theme, and then allow you to work from there. So you’re not just starting from like ground zero, create a new directory, create a new file.
\n\n\n\nAnd so that’s kind of what WP Rig offers is like, okay, go to our GitHub repo, clone the GitHub repo down, and then there are directions in the repo on how to get it to scaffold all the tools that come with it, all of the Node and Composer tools. And then you’re kind of off to the races.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:46] Nathan Wrigley: So with WP Rig, I’m guessing we would describe this as a framework or something like that. The idea being that you can bring this, kind of learn how it works, become adept at it, and then it’s like your constant friend. It’s always in the background. It’s the thing that you can rely on. It’s the muscle memory which develops over time. So you can ship your own themes, which kind of depend on the framework, but also, you know, you’re familiar with it so that bit is taken care of and straightforward.
\n\n\n\nWhat is it that attracted you to this particular theme development framework, at the time when you were sort of scrambling around looking for a project to become involved with?
\n\n\n\nI mean, one of the things that I always found curious was the leaner, the better. You know, the less that there was in such a thing, the more I was drawn towards it, because it gave me a, the basis, the scaffolding basically from which I could start building. Now, I don’t know if that’s what drew you here. So there’s the question. What is it that you thought was superior for want of a better word about this one?
\n\n\n\n[00:12:41] Rob Ruiz: Well, you nailed it. It’s really that. Like, it is quite minimal at its core. I also really appreciated how it treated CSS, as somebody who comes from a design background. I love modern CSS. I love following CSS influencers on YouTube, and learning all the new tricks. It’s a lot to keep up with and as, now that Internet Explorer is gone, CSS is progressing at an enormous rate, which I’m very excited about. But it also forces you to keep in tune with what you can do with it and what you shouldn’t do with it. And so there are tools built into WP Rig to help you assess those things as you’re developing your CSS in there.
\n\n\n\nWhen I originally was brought onto it, we were using a tool called PostCSS. That would essentially allow you to use future CSS before it was adopted by all modern browsers. And during the compilation process, it would convert your future CSS to today CSS essentially. And so the idea there is that as CSS catches up, your compilation would just have to do less work, right? So when it compiles all your CSS, it would, you know, like now that nesting is a thing, right? I was using WP Rig before CSS nesting was supported by all modern browsers, but I was able still to use CSS nesting in WP Rig, which I really liked. So there’s that aspect of things
\n\n\n\nand yes, it is very light. I’ve used other theme development frameworks where they encourage you to use kind of like a templating language or framework. I didn’t really like that approach because it felt very foreign to WordPress. Nothing else in WordPress uses such a thing. That kind of turned me off a little bit because I was like, I don’t want to learn this whole other concept that like really doesn’t exist anywhere except for Laravel. I liked that about it. It kept it simple in that regard.
\n\n\n\nAnd then if you’re using WordPress at like a agency level, if you’re building bespoke custom sites for clients, something like WP Rig is extremely powerful because it allows you to increase your level of customisation as much as you want, and the tools are all there to help you handle that. Also, meanwhile, if you’re working on a team of developers, which is often the case if you’re working with an agency or something like that, WP Rig becomes kind of like a home base, if you will, for opinions, for coding practices, for checks and balances.
\n\n\n\nAll these things, it helps put everybody on the same vehicle, I guess, if you want to think of it like that. Everybody’s using the same vehicle, so there’s not wildly different ways of doing things, which can be very, very handy when working on a team and assessing other people’s code, and perhaps taking over work for other people and so on and so forth.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:23] Nathan Wrigley: So the thing about frameworks, I guess, is that, if you are in the WordPress space and you are that page builder user, so everything is within the WP admin, you know, you download a plugin, which creates pages or a theme, I guess you could do the same thing, but you’ve got that kind of experience with WordPress. Is this something that would map to those kind of users perfectly, or is there more of a learning curve? Do you need to be leaning more into the developer side of things?
\n\n\n\nMaybe there’s a happy transition that can be made. Because, you know, when you’re on the website, you have interesting acronyms. So, you know, CSS, JS, we’re probably entirely familiar with those, but then we get into things like esbuild, Lightning CSS, ESLint, NPM, Composer and so on. And at this point I can imagine quite a few of the inexperienced users thinking, you know what, this is going to be tough for me.
\n\n\n\nSo I just want you to give us an impression, reassure people. How hard is it to go from that, I’ve never done anything like this before. To up and running, becoming familiar, if not necessarily completely familiar in a heartbeat?
\n\n\n\n[00:16:25] Rob Ruiz: In my opinion, it’s not hard because you can kind of just focus on where you want to focus. And so for instance, if you’re only interested in writing CSS styles and you just want to change colors, and sizing, and fonts, and stuff like that, you could use WP Rig to make an extremely simple theme, which is what I would encourage people to do if they’re just getting up and running.
\n\n\n\nBack to your question about page builders and such, there is like this, I don’t want to call it a problem, but there is a paradigm in WordPress that I think, especially for newer WordPress developers, they need to be very aware of, which is that you kind of have two schools of thought.
\n\n\n\nYou have this school of thought of like, okay, I want to just use the WordPress admin to customise every little bit, every little piece of my WordPress site. I should be able to do it in the WordPress admin. And so that’s where some of these more complex page builders kind of come in and provide a lot more control than just what Core WordPress provides you.
\n\n\n\nBut with that said, it will never be ultimate control. It will never be ultimate control, because there’s always going to be some amount of constraints. You’re always going to be constrained by what configurations, what settings, what fields, what controls that page builder provides you.
\n\n\n\nAnd not only that, you have to keep in mind some of these rules, I like to think of them as rules, configurations, settings, whether it’s at the block level, widget level, element level, whatever word you want to use to describe a part of your page, like an object or a component, it’s a very common word. When you’re using a page builder, that’s all getting saved into the database. Anytime you enter a value, you click save or whatever. Everything is in the database, all of it, right?
\n\n\n\nAnd so if you need to make a global change across your whole site, let’s say you want all of the blocks on your website to all of a sudden have a border around them, or you want to change something about them, the colour, background colour, something like that. In a page builder world, you’re going to have to go into every single one of those elements, those blocks, whatever, and you’re going to have to change those values everywhere.
\n\n\n\nWhere, when you’re doing things with just code, you have kind of superpowers. In my opinion, coding, if you want ultimate control over your site and you want to be able to do literally anything you can imagine, and be able to do it in a way that’s progressive and is comprehensive, without any barriers, without any limitations, code will always be the best way to exercise that control that you’re going after.
\n\n\n\nNow, obviously, newer people, too much control can lead to confusion and all this stuff. So I don’t fault people for using some of these other solutions like page builders to kind of get their feet wet and get up and going and kind of figure out how to use just WordPress itself.
\n\n\n\nBut once you get to a point where you’ve been doing that for a while and you’re looking at like other websites that aren’t even WordPress that have all kinds of interesting, cool features built into them, new paradigms being presented and exposed. Let’s say you follow CSS and you’re looking at all the newest CSS features that are coming out. Many of those newest CSS features that are coming out, there’s really no ability to control those things in your WordPress site, because that stuff literally just got adopted by Chrome or whatever, just reached modern browser adoption like recently, right?
\n\n\n\nAnd so you have to kind of wait for the page builders, for WordPress to kind of now provide you new controls, new tools, so that you can then control those things. But when you’re doing things with code, you could just do it immediately, and you could do whatever you want.
\n\n\n\nSo when you’re building your own theme from scratch or you’re trying to, even creating your own plugin from scratch, it’s never really going to be a concept that’s for like new WordPress people that are just very, very new to just developing websites in general. But it is nice to know that these tools are out there and they’re there, so that when you do get to a point where you’re ready to kind of spread your wings a little bit more, you know what tools are out there to reach for. And you can begin to play with them a little bit instead of forever feeling confined to one paradigm.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there is something exceedingly satisfying about understanding how, whatever the thing is works. I imagine that as a child, you were perhaps that child that took things apart and enjoyed the experience of looking at the insides and thinking, how did that work? Okay, that’s how it worked. Okay, that cogs connected to that thing, and then that spins around in that way. And, oh, and look that on the front spins around as well. Got it. I understand that now. And you reassemble it and what have you.
\n\n\n\nI think there is something exceedingly interesting about that in the WordPress space. Obviously, WordPress, CMS, incredibly powerful out of the box. You’ve got the WP admin, and perhaps that’s as far as you wish to go.
\n\n\n\nBut peeling back the layers and understanding, how is a page constructed? Where does the CSS get called from? How is the HTML finally output? What are the bits and pieces that make it up? How does the theme layer do its bits and pieces? You don’t have to kind of understand it all in one hit. You can, with a framework, the likes of which we’re talking about, WP Rig, there is this capacity to just take little nibbles and have a slow, but realising appreciation. Oh, okay, that’s how it works.
\n\n\n\nBut not only that’s how it works, okay, now that I know how that works, I now am in control of it. Whereas in a way, previously, I just was sort of a passive observer. Perhaps there was a setting area in my page builder or what have you. And if it was there, I could make use of it, and if it wasn’t, I couldn’t.
\n\n\n\nBut also I think it drives you into that journey of understanding the open standards, the open web, the things that make up the technology which is free, available to everybody. What WordPress builds upon.
\n\n\n\nAnd I’m talking specifically about HTML, CSS and JavaScript, just those three things. The foundational pieces of the web. And it allows you to get involved in that, and be interested in that and understand where the web is heading. And especially like you said, with modern CSS’, it is coming really fast and it is fast replacing, in many respects, I think a lot of JavaScript really is going to be obsolete, for the front end side of things, in the fairly short term.
\n\n\n\nSo it allows you to sort of nibble away at that and become more experienced. And if you haven’t had that journey but you’ve got a curiosity, this is possibly a great place to start. There is no question there, but I’m just sort of offering that up to see if that jibes with what you think.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:52] Rob Ruiz: I couldn’t agree more. And not only that, I think an important thing to think about WordPress as we move forward into the future and more competitors to WordPress emerge, I think it has never been more important to make sure that we have tools out there that are designed to facilitate people in their journey to getting into development. Because let’s be real, WordPress is open source, and we have to remember that WordPress is at the mercy of its contributors.
\n\n\n\nAnd so if the number of people contributing to WordPress starts to decline, so too will the progress of WordPress itself, unless other big companies with other developers that they’re actually paying are willing to foot the bill to like pay people to contribute to WordPress.
\n\n\n\nI don’t know that that’s the bright future that WordPress had originally like looked towards, right? I think what’s made WordPress so powerful and so successful over the years are the tinkerers, are the people that are willing to get in there and start to like learn things and figure things out. And then those people will slowly become contributors. And the more contributors we have to WordPress, the more WordPress itself will flourish. And then if that starts to go in the opposite direction, so too will WordPress.
\n\n\n\nAnd now these other services, and other solutions that are out there, are going to like eclipse WordPress and then people are kind of forced into a situation where it’s like, oh, well now you have to constantly go out and pay for and buy things, and now you’re at the mercy of these product authors, if you will, as opposed to being a part of a community of people that are all kind of collectively working together to make this one platform better all the time.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the open web and all of the web standards that are behind that, it is such an interesting time for that. Rewind the clock, I don’t know, 10 years or something, and there was this whole bond fight thing where browser vendors were just distributing things which were either in opposition, certainly in competition to features. And so you could never really figure out what the heck you were doing, and each browser would behave differently.
\n\n\n\nThat is so far in the rear view mirror now. In the majority of cases, new things like new CSS, the new CSS spec is broadly speaking, adopted by everybody out of the box. I mean, there might be a few tiny edge cases where, I don’t know, let’s say Mozilla is just not implementing something because they just haven’t quite got round to it yet.
\n\n\n\nBut there’s no, Mozilla’s not doing that. It’s just a case of, we didn’t get around to it. And understanding that and being interested in that and thinking to yourself, well, goodness me, if I change my CMS of choice, at the end of the day, I still need to be able to output HTML and CSS. And so having that tinkerer mentality, which you are providing within the WordPress space is so interesting and so credible. So thank you for that.
\n\n\n\nRight, I’m going to pivot a little bit. So again, this is leaning in more to the inexperienced user. Forgive me if you are an experienced user listening to this, you probably know what you are doing. So maybe, you know, you don’t need all the 101 stuff.
\n\n\n\nWhat do you need to get WP Rig up and running? Because I think a lot of the audience listening to this will simply be, I have a server somewhere. You know, I don’t really know where it is, but I pay some company and I click a button in some control panel and WordPress magically happens. And then I install a theme and plugins, and that’s basically it.
\n\n\n\nSo what do we need to get WP Rig up and running? What are the core parts, the processes that we would need to go through?
\n\n\n\n[00:26:24] Rob Ruiz: Yeah, well the important thing to keep in mind here is that it’s all on your own computer that you’re doing all of the work, as opposed to the WP admin approach where, when you’re interacting with WordPress, you are actually interacting with a remote server. The databases on the remote server, the files are on the remote server, all that stuff.
\n\n\n\nWhen you’re developing a theme or plugin from scratch, more often than not, I would say 99% of the time you’re doing it on your own computer. And so you do have to have, if you want these tools that facilitate this development process, you have to install them on your computer so that they’re available when you go to use them.
\n\n\n\nSo there are some pre-reqs to using WP Rig. You do have to install Node. Node.js is a very common JavaScript runtime that runs on your computer and allows your computer to process JavaScript as if it’s a browser kind of, but it’s not, it’s just doing it on a server, which essentially any computer can be a server at any time.
\n\n\n\nAnd so you have to have Node installed. You have to have Composer installed. Composer is just a package manager for PHP, and it’s used beyond just WordPress. It’s used in Laravel. It’s used in any, even just raw, vanilla PHP development. Composer is very popular. So we do leverage some Composer packages to do some PHP level work in the theme.
\n\n\n\nAnd you need a local development environment, of course. So there’s the wp-env package out there. If you’re into the Docker way of doing local development. I’m a big fan of Local WP. I think that’s a great solution. WordPress Studio is another very good one. There’s lots to choose from out there.
\n\n\n\nSo just choosing a local development environment and getting to know one of those is really handy because now you’re not dealing with a WordPress instance that’s on a remote server, you’re dealing with a WordPress instance that’s running on your computer. And this is where all of that magic is going to happen. All the automatic conversion of your CSS, all automatic conversion of TypeScript to ES5 JavaScript. All of the automatic things that WP Rig handles for you, all of that is happening on your computer.
\n\n\n\nAnd then there’s a process, a bundle process that happens. Once you’re done working on your theme, you can bundle the theme and then, this is where things get a little weird. So like when you first get working with WP Rig, you can think of the WP Rig theme, the starter theme as kind of like a source theme. But when you bundle, WP Rig actually generates a whole new theme for you that has the name of your theme baked into it. And not just like how it shows up in the WordPress admin, it goes through and it replaces all references to WP Rig in the code everywhere, across the entire code base of the theme. It changes the words WP Rig to whatever the name of your theme is.
\n\n\n\nSo if you build a theme with WP Rig and you decide to sell it or deploy it or ship it or whatever to anybody, user, wherever, anywhere. Anybody that’s looking through that source code, for whatever reason, they would have no way of knowing that it was built with WP Rig because it’s just going to look like your theme.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:31] Nathan Wrigley: There’s something extremely satisfying about seeing your theme. The first time you see your theme. Stick it on a website somewhere and, oh, look, there’s the thing that I built. Whereas, you know, for many people, it’s been an entire experience of going to the repo, going to commercial theme houses and what have you, and downloading something and tweaking it and what have you.
\n\n\n\nAnd you really can start really, really, really small. You know, a few lines is really all that you need to get going and build up from there. Obviously it will start plain, but the more complexity you add.
\n\n\n\nBut given that it’s all happening on your local computer, it’s not like you need to rush. This could be something which is years in the making. You know, you start today and maybe two years from now you are entirely happy and you’ve got something that you think is worthy of the world looking at. Well, that’s the point at which you can start to distribute it. As you’ve just described, because it’s all free, completely open source, when you ship that theme, export it, everything is run in such a way that nobody would ever know, which is just lovely.
\n\n\n\nOkay, so given all of this fresh, interesting stuff about WordPress themes, we’re in an interesting space in the WordPress theme marketplace, let’s call it that.
\n\n\n\nSeveral years ago, full site editing came along and now we’ve got this sort of different way of doing themes. Previously we had to open up an IDE and fiddle with template files and things like that. And now we’ve moved more into a page builder, let’s go with that. You know, there’s this Gutenberg block based editing of themes, where you can do more or less everything in a UI.
\n\n\n\nHow does this fit into that piece, and what do you make of this new paradigm, this new way of doing themes? Are there benefits to it that you see, or drawbacks? Are you still doing it? Do you see a bright future for WP Rig? I’m guessing the answer’s yes, otherwise you wouldn’t be on this podcast.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:16] Rob Ruiz: That’s right. Yeah. Well, I will say that as somebody who had recently decided to adopt WP Rig, when the whole concept of FSE was first announced or introduced, I did have some strong opinions because I was like, oh my gosh, this is going to make my life very difficult if this becomes the way of doing things. And so I kind of foresaw a lot of where things have gone over the past few years.
\n\n\n\nSo at the beginning I was a little hesitant because it kind of threw a wrench in this new thing that I was excited to adopt and start advancing. Over time I have come to appreciate it quite a bit. And in my opinion, it’s just allowed me as the maintainer of WP Rig, a lot of opportunity to really get in there and learn a lot, and get my hands dirty, and allow WP Rig to become something that was more my own, as opposed to something that I just adopted from some other people that had done a bunch of work, right?
\n\n\n\nHad that not happened, I probably would’ve just been like encouraged to just kind of sit back and be like, ah, yeah, you know what, this is my thing and it works and whatever. But this presented a lot of challenges and those challenges present a lot of opportunity if you look at it the right way. Not just opportunity to make something my own, not just opportunity to build things, but also opportunity, most importantly, I think, to learn things. And so that’s really been the gift of where all of this has gone for me personally.
\n\n\n\nDo I think that full site editing makes it so that you don’t have to make your own theme as much? Yes, I do think that is a thing because you have a lot more control of the way your website looks from within the WordPress admin area and creating templates and block patterns and all that stuff from within WordPress. It is different than how we used to do it, let’s put it that way.
\n\n\n\nHowever, as somebody who has decided to just like adopt it, I will say that if you can keep the paradigms and concepts all categorised and separated in your brain, then it’s actually quite powerful and can be extremely handy, especially with how fast the WordPress admin experience has gotten over the past few versions. It is very snappy now, almost to the point where it’s satisfying to use. Crazy to say. But it’s just so snappy. And we’ve got lots of little micro animations coming in there now where you can, you know, just the way everything happens is like, to me, it makes it a little bit more fun.
\n\n\n\nWhat does that mean for WP Rig? Well, that means there’s multiple paradigms that WP Rig has to support. So because WP Rig was originally created in the classic paradigm, when you first start using WP Rig, it does assume that you’re creating a classic style theme. But that doesn’t mean you’re forced to build a classic style theme. Because one of WP Rig’s strongest features is that there are whole bunch of custom command line commands that you can type in and run that will automatically convert WP Rig into these other paradigms.
\n\n\n\nSo if you want to build a block-based theme or a universal theme, which is kind of halfway between classic and block-based, you could just run a command in your terminal and it will just automatically change a bunch of files in WP Rig to convert it to this other paradigm. And now you have full site editing as part of your theme.
\n\n\n\nAnd many people may not be aware of this, but the whole concept of full site editing is controlled by the theme. Whether or not you even have full site editing on WordPress is dependent on the theme. It’s not well, Gutenberg can be removed via a plugin, but in order to enable these functionalities, like if you want to be able to do full site editing, it is the theme that dictates that, not a plugin.
\n\n\n\nSo it is important for WP Rig to facilitate that part of things. And so that is something that I’ve had to build out among many other things. Now WP Rig has a full block authoring experience built into it.
\n\n\n\nNow, this is where things get very, very opinionated among developers. But a lot of people argue that blocks are a, that’s plugin territory, right? Now, I don’t know about you, I’m not really much for territories. I like to pretend that borders don’t exist sometimes. And so there are situations where building theme level blocks do make sense. Keep in mind that if you decide to bake custom blocks into your theme, you have immediately disqualified yourself from contributing this theme to the wordpress.org theme repository. So keep that in mind. That’s a big cautionary, little tidbit.
\n\n\n\nBut if this theme is just for you, or a client, or for usage outside of the WordPress repository, WordPress does have the ability to enable block authoring within WP Rig. And then now you can start to author blocks within your theme.
\n\n\n\nWhere I like to think of this as like navigation, right? When I’m looking for themes, if I’m like shopping for themes, one of the first things I look at is, what is the navigation for this theme? What is that experience like? Because there’s lots of different kind of like styles of navigation.
\n\n\n\nIf you need to create a custom navigation, maybe there’s a situation where the navigation block in Core WordPress doesn’t suit your needs for whatever reason. Maybe the design of what you’re trying to build somehow goes beyond what that block provides to you in terms of functionality. You could create your own custom navigation block, and in my opinion, that makes a lot of sense to be part of the theme as opposed to a plugin, right?
\n\n\n\nSo there’s opinions there. Again, this is the nice thing about open source. There’s freedom there. But yeah, WP Rig has not just the ability to facilitate full site editing, but also the ability to facilitate block authoring at the theme level. So, yeah, one could look at this and be like, oh, this makes theme development kind of pointless because you could just do everything within the full site editor. I’m somebody that likes to kind of flip things on its head a little bit sometimes and say, actually, you know what that really means is that this gives the theme more control than perhaps you would’ve thought previously. And if you exercise said control, and if somebody provides an easy way to allow you to exercise that control, now we have a whole new paradigm. And in my opinion, that’s extremely interesting.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think the thing that I’m taking away, well, there’s a few things from what you just said. The first one, fully hybrid. You know, it could be classic, it could be block based, or it could be somewhere in the middle, like this hybrid sort of approach, which doesn’t really get talked about all that much anymore, actually, which is curious. It was a big thing for a while, and now people seem to be on one side or the other. So there’s that.
\n\n\n\nBut also the bit that I’m taking away from all of this is how much you are encouraging people to use this as an education piece. How to learn and scaffold your learning around something like the WP Rig project. It enables you to sort of peel back the layers. Start from a base of kind of nothing and build that up, slowly one piece at a time.
\n\n\n\nAnd your navigation is a really great example. You might have, I don’t know, maybe a client comes along who have proclivities around, it’s got to be 100%, we’ve got to give everything over on the accessibility side, we’ve really got to do that perfectly. Well, this maybe is a great place to start. You know, you start with a blank template for that, and you build your navigation. So you will end up exploring all sorts of documentation over on the W3C website. Probably not necessarily so much on the WordPress side of things. Figure out how to do that really well, import your knowledge that you’ve gained from that into the navigation aspect of WP Rig, ship that, you’re off to the races.
\n\n\n\nNow, with that in mind, if you go to the WP Rig website, there’s a lot of educational content there. So there’s the inevitable kind of getting started, which is what we talked about earlier, all of the packages and the package managers and what have you that you need to get up and running. So it explains how that is all to be done. Relatively straightforward to follow that through, I would’ve thought.
\n\n\n\nBut then entirely separate to that is two different sections. You’ve got this like learn section where you’ve got documentation, video tutorials and things like that. But then you’ve also got like the docs area where you go into explain, oh I don’t know, how you might use JavaScript or CSS or some sort of compiled CSS or PHP and so on and so forth.
\n\n\n\nSo again, no question there really, but it does feel, from my point of view, looking at this project that education is kind of the big piece. That’s the thing that you are most interested in. I don’t know if I’ve misrepresented this project, but that’s what it feels like.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:58] Rob Ruiz: A hundred percent. And I think that’s inevitable when it comes to getting into this tinkerer mindset. There must be a way to learn how to tinker properly. It is also nice to add guardrails to said, because let’s be honest, there’s like a million different ways to do everything, but there’s very, very few correct ways to do everything.
\n\n\n\nAnd so that’s another nice feature of WP Rig is that it has these sort of guardrails in place that allow you to check and make sure that you’re doing things properly. And if there’s anything that you’re doing improperly, you can obviously ignore those if you want to for whatever reason, or you can like dive into the weeds and say, okay, why is this improper?
\n\n\n\nSo for instance, WordPress, Automattic created a package. It’s essentially an extension for a tool called PHPCS, which stands for PHP Coding Standards. This tool is used by PHP widely beyond just WordPress. But then WordPress adopted it a while back and decided to use it and create their own extension for it called the WordPress Coding Standard. It’s WPCS.
\n\n\n\nAnd so they’ve iterated on it over the years and WPCS is baked into WordPress, or into WP Rig rather. So if you want to make sure that your theme is following all of the WordPress coding standards for whatever reason, maybe it’s because you’re going to create a theme that you want to contribute to the wordpress.org theme repository, then that tool is baked into WP Rig for you, so that you can make sure that your theme meets all of the requirements for a properly developed theme before you even try to go and like submit it for a review or whatever.
\n\n\n\nBecause that’s one of the most frustrating things ever is somebody who wants to contribute. If you try to contribute and then you get pushed back on, that’s like not a great experience. And so what I try to do with WP Rig is bake in this layer that is kind of like a, test it yourself type situation. Where you can kind of like have the system sort of, kind of review the code for you, and then that way you can make sure you’ve done your due diligence before you even try to submit it for review. To prevent that unfortunate situation where your theme might get rejected for one reason or another, and now you got to go back and rework it and then back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
\n\n\n\nHaving a tool like WP Rig that just tells you early on before you even try to submit it, hey, you should change this, you should change that. I think that’s extremely valuable for people. And again, I really want WP Rig to be something that encourages people to get more into contributing back into Core as opposed to. I mean, it can also be looked at as something like, okay, well you want to go develop your own thing and it’s for profit or whatever. It does very much facilitate that way of doing things too. But let’s be honest, anything that meets WordPress’s coding standards is probably going to make your theme, even if you’re putting it up for sale, it’s going to make it better.
\n\n\n\n[00:42:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I love that you’ve built all of that in. That’s really interesting. So it does a lot of the heavy lifting, trying to make sure that you are adhering to the standards, which one would hope would be in a shippable, distributable product.
\n\n\n\nSpeaking of community, do you have a community which coalesce around this project? Is it basically just you? Or is there like a little team? And if not necessarily a team, is there a little community which gathers and sort of helps you put this project together? And a corollary to that question really is, do you anticipate in the future that you will like some contributors to help you maintain this as well?
\n\n\n\n[00:43:27] Rob Ruiz: Yeah, for sure. So when I first started, when I first adopted this as my own, there was more of a team in place because Morten is a very well-known individual. And so he had a lot of followers and so a lot of those followers had followed WP Rig. As time has progressed, a lot of those people have kind of unfortunately gone their own way. For whatever reason, a lot of the people that were following him weren’t really like, they might have been into learning how to develop themes. They certainly were into WordPress. But working on a project like this is more than just knowing how to develop themes. You also have to know how the underlying tools work too.
\n\n\n\nSo that’s been my biggest challenge is learning, what is Lightning CSS? How do you use it? What is esbuild? How does that work? When I first took it over, it was ran on Gulp. What is Gulp? And what is that, and how do I modify it? And like that’s kind of far beyond WordPress, and so I think people became aware of that over time. And so while I rose up to the challenge, other people were just kind of moved on to other things.
\n\n\n\nSo it is largely me. We do have a handful of contributors that kind of, when they have time, you know, they’ll feel ambitious again and jump in and do some more contributions and they’ll fall back and do their own thing for a while. And so there’s a lot of that. It’s not a very active community, certainly not as active as it was when I first adopted it. However, we do have a Discord now. You can find a link to the Discord on the website. If you go to the Learn V3 link in the header, there’s links to our YouTube channel and the Discord server.
\n\n\n\nSo we are looking, I do want more of a community around WP Rig. And so I do encourage people to come on. Obviously we’ve been on GitHub this entire time, so if anybody wants to raise issues or submit a PR, there are guides on there. There’s a contributing.md file in there for anybody that wants to contribute, or wants to raise an issue. If you have ideas for how WP Rig could be better, that’s always been there. It’s just that, for one reason or another, it’s just not popular, which is a big reason why I’m on your show today actually is just to raise awareness about WP Rig now that I have had the opportunity to overhaul it dramatically over the past couple years.
\n\n\n\nIn my opinion, it was a little bit, it started to feel a little bit slow compared to most modern tools. If anybody’s familiar with like Vite, or just modern frontend development frameworks. In general, they use more modern tools that build things faster and better, and they’re leaner. And so WP Rig was falling behind a little bit in that regard. And so I did have to like overhaul the project a lot. That’s why we came out with the version three because it is a pretty substantial overhaul.
\n\n\n\nAnd so now that we have version three and it is much better and there are all kinds of new features built into it as a result of it being faster, it’s now more capable. I want to raise awareness. A, I’ve already done the work, so it would be a shame for all that work to go unnoticed and unappreciated. But also, for anybody who was familiar with WP Rig from previous years, back in the version one, version two days, I think it’s important to make people aware that version three is substantially more capable than what it was prior.
\n\n\n\n[00:46:38] Nathan Wrigley: That’s wonderful. I’m just going to round off the episode by mentioning the URL once more so that after that clarion call, if people have been inspired and they have listened to this and think, I’d like to explore that. You know, for the multitude of reasons that we’ve covered in this topic. The URL, it’s really easy. It’s WP Rig, wprig.io. Go there, there’s a whole bunch of ways to get involved. So there’s the Learn documentation, there’s the contribute tab and so on and so forth. You can peruse at your leisure.
\n\n\n\nRob, just before we end, is there a way that people could communicate with you more directly if they wanted to off the back of this? Is there a, like a, I don’t know, a social network or something that you frequent? Or a contact form that you’d like people to be mindful of?
\n\n\n\n[00:47:22] Rob Ruiz: Yeah, sure. I mean, I am very responsive to people on LinkedIn, so if you want to find me on LinkedIn, I am on there, Rob Ruiz, just look me up. If it looks like it’s a Rob Ruiz that does WordPress stuff, it’s probably me. And then of course, I’m on the Discord server. So if you want to communicate directly with me, joining the Discord and then messaging me directly is a nice way to do that. I’d love to help people, hold their hand if needed, get up and running with WP Rig. If you have any questions about specifics, I’m happy to address them, or you just need a little guidance, I’d be happy to help there as well.
\n\n\n\n[00:47:54] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you so much for chatting to me today, Rob. It’s been really interesting. So once more, just before we end to find out more. Rob Ruiz, thank you very much for chatting to me today.
\n\n\n\n[00:48:04] Rob Ruiz: Thank you so much for your time, Nathan. I really appreciate it.
\nOn the podcast today we have Rob Ruiz.
\n\n\n\nRob has been involved in the WordPress ecosystem since around 2010. He began as a designer, but over the years WordPress has helped him transition into a developer, software engineer, and now an architect. Currently, he\u2019s working full-time at an agency while still taking on projects independently.
\n\n\n\nThe main topic for today\u2019s conversation centres around themes, a subject that hasn\u2019t been covered in depth on the podcast for quite some time. You see, Rob is the current custodian of WP Rig, a free and open source toolkit for WordPress theme development. WP Rig offers a modern, minimal, and best-practice driven starting point for developers who want to build custom themes, providing tools like Composer and Node integration to streamline workflows, enforce coding standards, and enable the use of future-facing CSS features right now.
\n\n\n\nWe start the episode with Rob sharing what attracted him to WP Rig, and his journey from user to project maintainer. We talk about who WP Rig is for, from experienced developers to those just starting to dip their toes into theme building and code customisation.
\n\n\n\nThe discussion moves on to talking about what a theme development framework actually is, and why this approach might suit people wanting more control, and education, in their WordPress journey. Rob describes the learning curve, the workflow, and the satisfaction of creating your own theme from scratch, while highlighting tools and guardrails built into WP Rig that make professional standards and best practices accessible to all.
\n\n\n\nWe also get into how WP Rig fits into the changing WordPress ecosystem. With the advent of full site editing and block-based themes, Rob explains how WP Rig has evolved to stay relevant, supporting classic, hybrid, and block-based paradigms, even enabling block development at the theme level.
\n\n\n\nTowards the end, we discuss the community behind WP Rig, how you can get involved, and the many educational resources available for those who want to learn theme development, or even become contributors themselves.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re interested in building custom WordPress themes, want to understand the nuts and bolts of theme frameworks, or are simply looking for a modern and educational starting point for WordPress tinkering, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nWordPress.org theme repository
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMorten\u00a0Rand-Hendriksen on the WP Tavern Jukebox podcast
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "content_text": "Transcript\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case the future of theme development.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Rob Ruiz. Rob has been involved in the WordPress ecosystem since around 2010. He began as a designer, but over the years WordPress has helped him transition into a developer, software engineer, and now an architect. Currently, he’s working full-time at an agency whilst taking on side projects independently.\n\n\n\nThe main topic for today’s conversation, centers around themes, a subject that hasn’t been covered in depth on the podcast for quite some time. You see, Rob is the current custodian of WP Rig, a free and open source toolkit for WordPress theme development. WP Rig offers a modern, minimal, and best practice driven starting point for developers who want to build custom themes. Providing tools like Composer and Node integration to streamline workflows, enforce coding standards, and enable the use of future facing CSS features, right now.\n\n\n\nWe start the episode with Rob sharing what attracted him to WP Rig, and his journey from user to Project Maintainer. We talk about who WP Rig is for, from experienced developers, to those just starting to dip their toes into theme building and code customization.\n\n\n\nThe discussion moves on to talking about what a theme development framework actually is, and why this approach might suit people wanting more control, and education, in their WordPress journey. Rob describes the learning curve, the workflow, and the satisfaction of creating your own theme from scratch, while highlighting tools and guardrails built into WP RIG that make professional standards and best practices accessible to all.\n\n\n\nWe also get into how WP Rig fits into the changing WordPress ecosystem. With the advent of full site editing and block-based themes, Rob explains how WP Rig has evolved to stay relevant, supporting classic, hybrid, and block-based paradigms, even enabling block development at the theme level.\n\n\n\nTowards the end, we discuss the community behind WP Rig, how you can get involved, and the many educational resources available for those who want to learn theme development, or even become contributors themselves.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in building custom WordPress themes, want to understand the nuts and bolts of theme frameworks, or are simply looking for a modern and educational starting point for WordPress tinkering, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you, Rob Ruiz.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Rob Ruiz. Hello, Rob.\n\n\n\n[00:03:56] Rob Ruiz: Hi. How are you, Nathan?\n\n\n\n[00:03:57] Nathan Wrigley: Rob’s joining me today to talk primarily about themes, which I confess is a subject that we haven’t touched in a good long while. So before we get into that, Rob, would you just mind spending a minute just letting the listeners know who you are? If we are on a WordPress podcast, probably better to align that with what your journey is in the WordPress space, if that’s okay.\n\n\n\n[00:04:17] Rob Ruiz: Certainly. Yeah. So my name is Rob Ruiz. I’ve been leveraging WordPress since about 2010 ish, although my web development experience goes prior to that. And so I’ve been tinkering and getting more and more into it as I go along.\n\n\n\nI started off as mostly a designer back in the early two thousands, I guess. And WordPress has facilitated my journey from being a designer to more of a developer, software engineer, today, architect. And so yeah, it’s been a very fun journey. I’ve learned so much over the years, so I’m very grateful to WordPress for helping me do that at my own pace.\n\n\n\n[00:04:58] Nathan Wrigley: Do you work for yourself? Are you perhaps engaged in an agency or something like that?\n\n\n\n[00:05:02] Rob Ruiz: So currently, right now I work full-time at an agency, but I do also do work for myself as well. So it’s kind of a hybrid situation.\n\n\n\n[00:05:09] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so the reason that Rob is on the podcast today, well, there’s a variety of reasons. Most of it will bind itself to the subject of themes, as I said right at the start. But we’re also going to be talking, maybe towards the end a little bit about AI and things like that.\n\n\n\nHowever, Rob is now the custodian. I didn’t realise he was now the custodian. We’ll get into that in a minute. But Rob is the custodian at the moment of a project called WP Rig. And you can find this, it’s a really quick URL to type in, it’s WP Rig, so WPRIG .io.\n\n\n\nCompletely free to download, completely unencumbered by a pricing page or anything like that. There’s a GitHub repo I think. Yes, that’s right. So do you just want to give us the elevator pitch for what WP Rig is. And just because it makes me happy, can you tell us how you got involved? Because that’s lovely too.\n\n\n\n[00:06:00] Rob Ruiz: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So WP Rig is a theme development toolkit or framework, but it’s also a starter theme as well. So you could think of it as kind of like underscores but with a whole modern development toolkit situation built into it, meaning there’s a bunch of composer dependencies, Node dependencies, and other kind of developer tools baked into it to prepare developers for the best developer experience possible when developing themes for WordPress.\n\n\n\nHow I got involved with it essentially is I was, first off, I was looking for a theme development framework. I had gone on a journey to explore many. And during that journey, I came across WP Rig, and kind of fell in love with it. It was really, really cool. I liked it a lot. I liked a lot of the opinions. I liked how well aligned it was with Core WordPress itself. I like the WordPress best practices that it enforces, you know, automatically. You don’t even have to like go look them up and think about it. You could just run a tool that’s built into it and it’ll check all your code for said best practices.\n\n\n\nAnd so that was very interesting to me. I was like, I’m going to start using this. And so I did. I did start using it. And then, shortly thereafter, I had been browsing my favorite WordPress news site, WP Tavern, and noticed an interesting article about the project that I had just recently fell in love with out of sheer coincidence, I suppose. Out of sheer coincidence, it just so happens this project is now looking for new maintainers, and that they were having a Zoom call in the near future where anybody interested in maintaining the project could join the Zoom call.\n\n\n\nAnd so I did. I joined the Zoom call and I got to meet the previous maintainers, or maintainer rather, and ended up having ongoing conversations with him after the call. And one thing led to another, and now the project is basically managed solely by me with a handful of other light contributors.\n\n\n\n[00:08:04] Nathan Wrigley: So that’s really nice. I love the fact that there’s some sort of combination of WP Tavern and WP Rig out there. That’s lovely. So I appreciate that. The audience for this podcast is pretty varied. So there’ll be developers with a longstanding history with WordPress, you know, deep in the code. Will go to WP Rig and immediately everything will connect, and they’ll be like, yep, I get this. I understand what this is. It’s for me. It’s not for me, yada, yada.\n\n\n\nHowever, we also have quite a lot of people listening to this who are brand new to WordPress. They’ve got no experience with code. They may be living inside of a page builder or something like that where everything is point, click, drag, drop, save, that kind of an environment. It just occurred to me that they very well might not know what even a theme development framework is. So can we begin there? What is the point of a thing like this? What’s the problem you’re trying to solve? Let’s start there.\n\n\n\n[00:08:53] Rob Ruiz: Yeah, that’s a great question. So like anything in WordPress, because it’s open source and so beautifully designed, might I add, from an architectural standpoint, there are lots of ways to extend WordPress beyond its base functionality.\n\n\n\nTwo of the most common ways to do this is via the plugin system, and via the theme system. And so we can add custom plugins to extend the functionality of WordPress, but we can also add custom themes to alter the way our website looks and feels aesthetically.\n\n\n\nSo if you’re somebody who’s more of a designer maybe, or you appreciate aesthetics and perhaps you’ve dabbled in some CSS, you might be more inclined, if you’re looking to go beyond just what Core WordPress provides to you in terms of a site building experience, I would encourage those people to look at themes and possibly creating your own custom theme. Or altering an existing theme using a concept called child theming where you can take any theme that you get from anywhere, whether you buy it or find it on the wordpress.org theme repository. You can extend themes using child themes, or you can just build your own themes from scratch.\n\n\n\nSo that does include some work outside of the WordPress admin area. So once you get into developing themes for WordPress, the concept here is you’re kind of straying away from the WordPress admin experience, and you’re now like in the code editor realm, right? Because under the hood, WordPress is all just a bunch of code, PHP, JavaScript, CSS. There’s a lot going on, the React now. There’s a lot of things kind of built into WordPress.\n\n\n\nAnd so the beautiful thing about WordPress is that you can kind of, if you’re interested in learning how to develop, you can kind of dip your toes into the development pool as frequently as possible, as quickly as you want. Whatever you are comfortable with, you can kind of pace yourself there and say, okay, let me try and make a custom theme, or let me try to make a custom plugin. And if it doesn’t work out, it’s easy to just deactivate it, delete it, remove it, whatever. It’s a great way to learn how to develop, in my personal opinion, because a lot of the heavy lifting is done by the Core WordPress system.\n\n\n\nBasically what WP Rig offers is, instead of having to create a file system, a theme system from scratch, you know, a lot of people will reach for a concept called a boilerplate. Something that will scaffold kind of like the common files and folders that would be necessary in a theme, and then allow you to work from there. So you’re not just starting from like ground zero, create a new directory, create a new file.\n\n\n\nAnd so that’s kind of what WP Rig offers is like, okay, go to our GitHub repo, clone the GitHub repo down, and then there are directions in the repo on how to get it to scaffold all the tools that come with it, all of the Node and Composer tools. And then you’re kind of off to the races.\n\n\n\n[00:11:46] Nathan Wrigley: So with WP Rig, I’m guessing we would describe this as a framework or something like that. The idea being that you can bring this, kind of learn how it works, become adept at it, and then it’s like your constant friend. It’s always in the background. It’s the thing that you can rely on. It’s the muscle memory which develops over time. So you can ship your own themes, which kind of depend on the framework, but also, you know, you’re familiar with it so that bit is taken care of and straightforward.\n\n\n\nWhat is it that attracted you to this particular theme development framework, at the time when you were sort of scrambling around looking for a project to become involved with?\n\n\n\nI mean, one of the things that I always found curious was the leaner, the better. You know, the less that there was in such a thing, the more I was drawn towards it, because it gave me a, the basis, the scaffolding basically from which I could start building. Now, I don’t know if that’s what drew you here. So there’s the question. What is it that you thought was superior for want of a better word about this one?\n\n\n\n[00:12:41] Rob Ruiz: Well, you nailed it. It’s really that. Like, it is quite minimal at its core. I also really appreciated how it treated CSS, as somebody who comes from a design background. I love modern CSS. I love following CSS influencers on YouTube, and learning all the new tricks. It’s a lot to keep up with and as, now that Internet Explorer is gone, CSS is progressing at an enormous rate, which I’m very excited about. But it also forces you to keep in tune with what you can do with it and what you shouldn’t do with it. And so there are tools built into WP Rig to help you assess those things as you’re developing your CSS in there.\n\n\n\nWhen I originally was brought onto it, we were using a tool called PostCSS. That would essentially allow you to use future CSS before it was adopted by all modern browsers. And during the compilation process, it would convert your future CSS to today CSS essentially. And so the idea there is that as CSS catches up, your compilation would just have to do less work, right? So when it compiles all your CSS, it would, you know, like now that nesting is a thing, right? I was using WP Rig before CSS nesting was supported by all modern browsers, but I was able still to use CSS nesting in WP Rig, which I really liked. So there’s that aspect of things\n\n\n\nand yes, it is very light. I’ve used other theme development frameworks where they encourage you to use kind of like a templating language or framework. I didn’t really like that approach because it felt very foreign to WordPress. Nothing else in WordPress uses such a thing. That kind of turned me off a little bit because I was like, I don’t want to learn this whole other concept that like really doesn’t exist anywhere except for Laravel. I liked that about it. It kept it simple in that regard.\n\n\n\nAnd then if you’re using WordPress at like a agency level, if you’re building bespoke custom sites for clients, something like WP Rig is extremely powerful because it allows you to increase your level of customisation as much as you want, and the tools are all there to help you handle that. Also, meanwhile, if you’re working on a team of developers, which is often the case if you’re working with an agency or something like that, WP Rig becomes kind of like a home base, if you will, for opinions, for coding practices, for checks and balances.\n\n\n\nAll these things, it helps put everybody on the same vehicle, I guess, if you want to think of it like that. Everybody’s using the same vehicle, so there’s not wildly different ways of doing things, which can be very, very handy when working on a team and assessing other people’s code, and perhaps taking over work for other people and so on and so forth.\n\n\n\n[00:15:23] Nathan Wrigley: So the thing about frameworks, I guess, is that, if you are in the WordPress space and you are that page builder user, so everything is within the WP admin, you know, you download a plugin, which creates pages or a theme, I guess you could do the same thing, but you’ve got that kind of experience with WordPress. Is this something that would map to those kind of users perfectly, or is there more of a learning curve? Do you need to be leaning more into the developer side of things?\n\n\n\nMaybe there’s a happy transition that can be made. Because, you know, when you’re on the website, you have interesting acronyms. So, you know, CSS, JS, we’re probably entirely familiar with those, but then we get into things like esbuild, Lightning CSS, ESLint, NPM, Composer and so on. And at this point I can imagine quite a few of the inexperienced users thinking, you know what, this is going to be tough for me.\n\n\n\nSo I just want you to give us an impression, reassure people. How hard is it to go from that, I’ve never done anything like this before. To up and running, becoming familiar, if not necessarily completely familiar in a heartbeat?\n\n\n\n[00:16:25] Rob Ruiz: In my opinion, it’s not hard because you can kind of just focus on where you want to focus. And so for instance, if you’re only interested in writing CSS styles and you just want to change colors, and sizing, and fonts, and stuff like that, you could use WP Rig to make an extremely simple theme, which is what I would encourage people to do if they’re just getting up and running.\n\n\n\nBack to your question about page builders and such, there is like this, I don’t want to call it a problem, but there is a paradigm in WordPress that I think, especially for newer WordPress developers, they need to be very aware of, which is that you kind of have two schools of thought.\n\n\n\nYou have this school of thought of like, okay, I want to just use the WordPress admin to customise every little bit, every little piece of my WordPress site. I should be able to do it in the WordPress admin. And so that’s where some of these more complex page builders kind of come in and provide a lot more control than just what Core WordPress provides you.\n\n\n\nBut with that said, it will never be ultimate control. It will never be ultimate control, because there’s always going to be some amount of constraints. You’re always going to be constrained by what configurations, what settings, what fields, what controls that page builder provides you.\n\n\n\nAnd not only that, you have to keep in mind some of these rules, I like to think of them as rules, configurations, settings, whether it’s at the block level, widget level, element level, whatever word you want to use to describe a part of your page, like an object or a component, it’s a very common word. When you’re using a page builder, that’s all getting saved into the database. Anytime you enter a value, you click save or whatever. Everything is in the database, all of it, right?\n\n\n\nAnd so if you need to make a global change across your whole site, let’s say you want all of the blocks on your website to all of a sudden have a border around them, or you want to change something about them, the colour, background colour, something like that. In a page builder world, you’re going to have to go into every single one of those elements, those blocks, whatever, and you’re going to have to change those values everywhere.\n\n\n\nWhere, when you’re doing things with just code, you have kind of superpowers. In my opinion, coding, if you want ultimate control over your site and you want to be able to do literally anything you can imagine, and be able to do it in a way that’s progressive and is comprehensive, without any barriers, without any limitations, code will always be the best way to exercise that control that you’re going after.\n\n\n\nNow, obviously, newer people, too much control can lead to confusion and all this stuff. So I don’t fault people for using some of these other solutions like page builders to kind of get their feet wet and get up and going and kind of figure out how to use just WordPress itself.\n\n\n\nBut once you get to a point where you’ve been doing that for a while and you’re looking at like other websites that aren’t even WordPress that have all kinds of interesting, cool features built into them, new paradigms being presented and exposed. Let’s say you follow CSS and you’re looking at all the newest CSS features that are coming out. Many of those newest CSS features that are coming out, there’s really no ability to control those things in your WordPress site, because that stuff literally just got adopted by Chrome or whatever, just reached modern browser adoption like recently, right?\n\n\n\nAnd so you have to kind of wait for the page builders, for WordPress to kind of now provide you new controls, new tools, so that you can then control those things. But when you’re doing things with code, you could just do it immediately, and you could do whatever you want.\n\n\n\nSo when you’re building your own theme from scratch or you’re trying to, even creating your own plugin from scratch, it’s never really going to be a concept that’s for like new WordPress people that are just very, very new to just developing websites in general. But it is nice to know that these tools are out there and they’re there, so that when you do get to a point where you’re ready to kind of spread your wings a little bit more, you know what tools are out there to reach for. And you can begin to play with them a little bit instead of forever feeling confined to one paradigm.\n\n\n\n[00:20:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there is something exceedingly satisfying about understanding how, whatever the thing is works. I imagine that as a child, you were perhaps that child that took things apart and enjoyed the experience of looking at the insides and thinking, how did that work? Okay, that’s how it worked. Okay, that cogs connected to that thing, and then that spins around in that way. And, oh, and look that on the front spins around as well. Got it. I understand that now. And you reassemble it and what have you.\n\n\n\nI think there is something exceedingly interesting about that in the WordPress space. Obviously, WordPress, CMS, incredibly powerful out of the box. You’ve got the WP admin, and perhaps that’s as far as you wish to go.\n\n\n\nBut peeling back the layers and understanding, how is a page constructed? Where does the CSS get called from? How is the HTML finally output? What are the bits and pieces that make it up? How does the theme layer do its bits and pieces? You don’t have to kind of understand it all in one hit. You can, with a framework, the likes of which we’re talking about, WP Rig, there is this capacity to just take little nibbles and have a slow, but realising appreciation. Oh, okay, that’s how it works.\n\n\n\nBut not only that’s how it works, okay, now that I know how that works, I now am in control of it. Whereas in a way, previously, I just was sort of a passive observer. Perhaps there was a setting area in my page builder or what have you. And if it was there, I could make use of it, and if it wasn’t, I couldn’t.\n\n\n\nBut also I think it drives you into that journey of understanding the open standards, the open web, the things that make up the technology which is free, available to everybody. What WordPress builds upon.\n\n\n\nAnd I’m talking specifically about HTML, CSS and JavaScript, just those three things. The foundational pieces of the web. And it allows you to get involved in that, and be interested in that and understand where the web is heading. And especially like you said, with modern CSS’, it is coming really fast and it is fast replacing, in many respects, I think a lot of JavaScript really is going to be obsolete, for the front end side of things, in the fairly short term.\n\n\n\nSo it allows you to sort of nibble away at that and become more experienced. And if you haven’t had that journey but you’ve got a curiosity, this is possibly a great place to start. There is no question there, but I’m just sort of offering that up to see if that jibes with what you think.\n\n\n\n[00:22:52] Rob Ruiz: I couldn’t agree more. And not only that, I think an important thing to think about WordPress as we move forward into the future and more competitors to WordPress emerge, I think it has never been more important to make sure that we have tools out there that are designed to facilitate people in their journey to getting into development. Because let’s be real, WordPress is open source, and we have to remember that WordPress is at the mercy of its contributors.\n\n\n\nAnd so if the number of people contributing to WordPress starts to decline, so too will the progress of WordPress itself, unless other big companies with other developers that they’re actually paying are willing to foot the bill to like pay people to contribute to WordPress.\n\n\n\nI don’t know that that’s the bright future that WordPress had originally like looked towards, right? I think what’s made WordPress so powerful and so successful over the years are the tinkerers, are the people that are willing to get in there and start to like learn things and figure things out. And then those people will slowly become contributors. And the more contributors we have to WordPress, the more WordPress itself will flourish. And then if that starts to go in the opposite direction, so too will WordPress.\n\n\n\nAnd now these other services, and other solutions that are out there, are going to like eclipse WordPress and then people are kind of forced into a situation where it’s like, oh, well now you have to constantly go out and pay for and buy things, and now you’re at the mercy of these product authors, if you will, as opposed to being a part of a community of people that are all kind of collectively working together to make this one platform better all the time.\n\n\n\n[00:24:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the open web and all of the web standards that are behind that, it is such an interesting time for that. Rewind the clock, I don’t know, 10 years or something, and there was this whole bond fight thing where browser vendors were just distributing things which were either in opposition, certainly in competition to features. And so you could never really figure out what the heck you were doing, and each browser would behave differently.\n\n\n\nThat is so far in the rear view mirror now. In the majority of cases, new things like new CSS, the new CSS spec is broadly speaking, adopted by everybody out of the box. I mean, there might be a few tiny edge cases where, I don’t know, let’s say Mozilla is just not implementing something because they just haven’t quite got round to it yet.\n\n\n\nBut there’s no, Mozilla’s not doing that. It’s just a case of, we didn’t get around to it. And understanding that and being interested in that and thinking to yourself, well, goodness me, if I change my CMS of choice, at the end of the day, I still need to be able to output HTML and CSS. And so having that tinkerer mentality, which you are providing within the WordPress space is so interesting and so credible. So thank you for that.\n\n\n\nRight, I’m going to pivot a little bit. So again, this is leaning in more to the inexperienced user. Forgive me if you are an experienced user listening to this, you probably know what you are doing. So maybe, you know, you don’t need all the 101 stuff.\n\n\n\nWhat do you need to get WP Rig up and running? Because I think a lot of the audience listening to this will simply be, I have a server somewhere. You know, I don’t really know where it is, but I pay some company and I click a button in some control panel and WordPress magically happens. And then I install a theme and plugins, and that’s basically it.\n\n\n\nSo what do we need to get WP Rig up and running? What are the core parts, the processes that we would need to go through?\n\n\n\n[00:26:24] Rob Ruiz: Yeah, well the important thing to keep in mind here is that it’s all on your own computer that you’re doing all of the work, as opposed to the WP admin approach where, when you’re interacting with WordPress, you are actually interacting with a remote server. The databases on the remote server, the files are on the remote server, all that stuff.\n\n\n\nWhen you’re developing a theme or plugin from scratch, more often than not, I would say 99% of the time you’re doing it on your own computer. And so you do have to have, if you want these tools that facilitate this development process, you have to install them on your computer so that they’re available when you go to use them.\n\n\n\nSo there are some pre-reqs to using WP Rig. You do have to install Node. Node.js is a very common JavaScript runtime that runs on your computer and allows your computer to process JavaScript as if it’s a browser kind of, but it’s not, it’s just doing it on a server, which essentially any computer can be a server at any time.\n\n\n\nAnd so you have to have Node installed. You have to have Composer installed. Composer is just a package manager for PHP, and it’s used beyond just WordPress. It’s used in Laravel. It’s used in any, even just raw, vanilla PHP development. Composer is very popular. So we do leverage some Composer packages to do some PHP level work in the theme.\n\n\n\nAnd you need a local development environment, of course. So there’s the wp-env package out there. If you’re into the Docker way of doing local development. I’m a big fan of Local WP. I think that’s a great solution. WordPress Studio is another very good one. There’s lots to choose from out there.\n\n\n\nSo just choosing a local development environment and getting to know one of those is really handy because now you’re not dealing with a WordPress instance that’s on a remote server, you’re dealing with a WordPress instance that’s running on your computer. And this is where all of that magic is going to happen. All the automatic conversion of your CSS, all automatic conversion of TypeScript to ES5 JavaScript. All of the automatic things that WP Rig handles for you, all of that is happening on your computer.\n\n\n\nAnd then there’s a process, a bundle process that happens. Once you’re done working on your theme, you can bundle the theme and then, this is where things get a little weird. So like when you first get working with WP Rig, you can think of the WP Rig theme, the starter theme as kind of like a source theme. But when you bundle, WP Rig actually generates a whole new theme for you that has the name of your theme baked into it. And not just like how it shows up in the WordPress admin, it goes through and it replaces all references to WP Rig in the code everywhere, across the entire code base of the theme. It changes the words WP Rig to whatever the name of your theme is.\n\n\n\nSo if you build a theme with WP Rig and you decide to sell it or deploy it or ship it or whatever to anybody, user, wherever, anywhere. Anybody that’s looking through that source code, for whatever reason, they would have no way of knowing that it was built with WP Rig because it’s just going to look like your theme.\n\n\n\n[00:29:31] Nathan Wrigley: There’s something extremely satisfying about seeing your theme. The first time you see your theme. Stick it on a website somewhere and, oh, look, there’s the thing that I built. Whereas, you know, for many people, it’s been an entire experience of going to the repo, going to commercial theme houses and what have you, and downloading something and tweaking it and what have you.\n\n\n\nAnd you really can start really, really, really small. You know, a few lines is really all that you need to get going and build up from there. Obviously it will start plain, but the more complexity you add.\n\n\n\nBut given that it’s all happening on your local computer, it’s not like you need to rush. This could be something which is years in the making. You know, you start today and maybe two years from now you are entirely happy and you’ve got something that you think is worthy of the world looking at. Well, that’s the point at which you can start to distribute it. As you’ve just described, because it’s all free, completely open source, when you ship that theme, export it, everything is run in such a way that nobody would ever know, which is just lovely.\n\n\n\nOkay, so given all of this fresh, interesting stuff about WordPress themes, we’re in an interesting space in the WordPress theme marketplace, let’s call it that.\n\n\n\nSeveral years ago, full site editing came along and now we’ve got this sort of different way of doing themes. Previously we had to open up an IDE and fiddle with template files and things like that. And now we’ve moved more into a page builder, let’s go with that. You know, there’s this Gutenberg block based editing of themes, where you can do more or less everything in a UI.\n\n\n\nHow does this fit into that piece, and what do you make of this new paradigm, this new way of doing themes? Are there benefits to it that you see, or drawbacks? Are you still doing it? Do you see a bright future for WP Rig? I’m guessing the answer’s yes, otherwise you wouldn’t be on this podcast.\n\n\n\n[00:31:16] Rob Ruiz: That’s right. Yeah. Well, I will say that as somebody who had recently decided to adopt WP Rig, when the whole concept of FSE was first announced or introduced, I did have some strong opinions because I was like, oh my gosh, this is going to make my life very difficult if this becomes the way of doing things. And so I kind of foresaw a lot of where things have gone over the past few years.\n\n\n\nSo at the beginning I was a little hesitant because it kind of threw a wrench in this new thing that I was excited to adopt and start advancing. Over time I have come to appreciate it quite a bit. And in my opinion, it’s just allowed me as the maintainer of WP Rig, a lot of opportunity to really get in there and learn a lot, and get my hands dirty, and allow WP Rig to become something that was more my own, as opposed to something that I just adopted from some other people that had done a bunch of work, right?\n\n\n\nHad that not happened, I probably would’ve just been like encouraged to just kind of sit back and be like, ah, yeah, you know what, this is my thing and it works and whatever. But this presented a lot of challenges and those challenges present a lot of opportunity if you look at it the right way. Not just opportunity to make something my own, not just opportunity to build things, but also opportunity, most importantly, I think, to learn things. And so that’s really been the gift of where all of this has gone for me personally.\n\n\n\nDo I think that full site editing makes it so that you don’t have to make your own theme as much? Yes, I do think that is a thing because you have a lot more control of the way your website looks from within the WordPress admin area and creating templates and block patterns and all that stuff from within WordPress. It is different than how we used to do it, let’s put it that way.\n\n\n\nHowever, as somebody who has decided to just like adopt it, I will say that if you can keep the paradigms and concepts all categorised and separated in your brain, then it’s actually quite powerful and can be extremely handy, especially with how fast the WordPress admin experience has gotten over the past few versions. It is very snappy now, almost to the point where it’s satisfying to use. Crazy to say. But it’s just so snappy. And we’ve got lots of little micro animations coming in there now where you can, you know, just the way everything happens is like, to me, it makes it a little bit more fun.\n\n\n\nWhat does that mean for WP Rig? Well, that means there’s multiple paradigms that WP Rig has to support. So because WP Rig was originally created in the classic paradigm, when you first start using WP Rig, it does assume that you’re creating a classic style theme. But that doesn’t mean you’re forced to build a classic style theme. Because one of WP Rig’s strongest features is that there are whole bunch of custom command line commands that you can type in and run that will automatically convert WP Rig into these other paradigms.\n\n\n\nSo if you want to build a block-based theme or a universal theme, which is kind of halfway between classic and block-based, you could just run a command in your terminal and it will just automatically change a bunch of files in WP Rig to convert it to this other paradigm. And now you have full site editing as part of your theme.\n\n\n\nAnd many people may not be aware of this, but the whole concept of full site editing is controlled by the theme. Whether or not you even have full site editing on WordPress is dependent on the theme. It’s not well, Gutenberg can be removed via a plugin, but in order to enable these functionalities, like if you want to be able to do full site editing, it is the theme that dictates that, not a plugin.\n\n\n\nSo it is important for WP Rig to facilitate that part of things. And so that is something that I’ve had to build out among many other things. Now WP Rig has a full block authoring experience built into it.\n\n\n\nNow, this is where things get very, very opinionated among developers. But a lot of people argue that blocks are a, that’s plugin territory, right? Now, I don’t know about you, I’m not really much for territories. I like to pretend that borders don’t exist sometimes. And so there are situations where building theme level blocks do make sense. Keep in mind that if you decide to bake custom blocks into your theme, you have immediately disqualified yourself from contributing this theme to the wordpress.org theme repository. So keep that in mind. That’s a big cautionary, little tidbit.\n\n\n\nBut if this theme is just for you, or a client, or for usage outside of the WordPress repository, WordPress does have the ability to enable block authoring within WP Rig. And then now you can start to author blocks within your theme.\n\n\n\nWhere I like to think of this as like navigation, right? When I’m looking for themes, if I’m like shopping for themes, one of the first things I look at is, what is the navigation for this theme? What is that experience like? Because there’s lots of different kind of like styles of navigation.\n\n\n\nIf you need to create a custom navigation, maybe there’s a situation where the navigation block in Core WordPress doesn’t suit your needs for whatever reason. Maybe the design of what you’re trying to build somehow goes beyond what that block provides to you in terms of functionality. You could create your own custom navigation block, and in my opinion, that makes a lot of sense to be part of the theme as opposed to a plugin, right?\n\n\n\nSo there’s opinions there. Again, this is the nice thing about open source. There’s freedom there. But yeah, WP Rig has not just the ability to facilitate full site editing, but also the ability to facilitate block authoring at the theme level. So, yeah, one could look at this and be like, oh, this makes theme development kind of pointless because you could just do everything within the full site editor. I’m somebody that likes to kind of flip things on its head a little bit sometimes and say, actually, you know what that really means is that this gives the theme more control than perhaps you would’ve thought previously. And if you exercise said control, and if somebody provides an easy way to allow you to exercise that control, now we have a whole new paradigm. And in my opinion, that’s extremely interesting.\n\n\n\n[00:37:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think the thing that I’m taking away, well, there’s a few things from what you just said. The first one, fully hybrid. You know, it could be classic, it could be block based, or it could be somewhere in the middle, like this hybrid sort of approach, which doesn’t really get talked about all that much anymore, actually, which is curious. It was a big thing for a while, and now people seem to be on one side or the other. So there’s that.\n\n\n\nBut also the bit that I’m taking away from all of this is how much you are encouraging people to use this as an education piece. How to learn and scaffold your learning around something like the WP Rig project. It enables you to sort of peel back the layers. Start from a base of kind of nothing and build that up, slowly one piece at a time.\n\n\n\nAnd your navigation is a really great example. You might have, I don’t know, maybe a client comes along who have proclivities around, it’s got to be 100%, we’ve got to give everything over on the accessibility side, we’ve really got to do that perfectly. Well, this maybe is a great place to start. You know, you start with a blank template for that, and you build your navigation. So you will end up exploring all sorts of documentation over on the W3C website. Probably not necessarily so much on the WordPress side of things. Figure out how to do that really well, import your knowledge that you’ve gained from that into the navigation aspect of WP Rig, ship that, you’re off to the races.\n\n\n\nNow, with that in mind, if you go to the WP Rig website, there’s a lot of educational content there. So there’s the inevitable kind of getting started, which is what we talked about earlier, all of the packages and the package managers and what have you that you need to get up and running. So it explains how that is all to be done. Relatively straightforward to follow that through, I would’ve thought.\n\n\n\nBut then entirely separate to that is two different sections. You’ve got this like learn section where you’ve got documentation, video tutorials and things like that. But then you’ve also got like the docs area where you go into explain, oh I don’t know, how you might use JavaScript or CSS or some sort of compiled CSS or PHP and so on and so forth.\n\n\n\nSo again, no question there really, but it does feel, from my point of view, looking at this project that education is kind of the big piece. That’s the thing that you are most interested in. I don’t know if I’ve misrepresented this project, but that’s what it feels like.\n\n\n\n[00:39:58] Rob Ruiz: A hundred percent. And I think that’s inevitable when it comes to getting into this tinkerer mindset. There must be a way to learn how to tinker properly. It is also nice to add guardrails to said, because let’s be honest, there’s like a million different ways to do everything, but there’s very, very few correct ways to do everything.\n\n\n\nAnd so that’s another nice feature of WP Rig is that it has these sort of guardrails in place that allow you to check and make sure that you’re doing things properly. And if there’s anything that you’re doing improperly, you can obviously ignore those if you want to for whatever reason, or you can like dive into the weeds and say, okay, why is this improper?\n\n\n\nSo for instance, WordPress, Automattic created a package. It’s essentially an extension for a tool called PHPCS, which stands for PHP Coding Standards. This tool is used by PHP widely beyond just WordPress. But then WordPress adopted it a while back and decided to use it and create their own extension for it called the WordPress Coding Standard. It’s WPCS.\n\n\n\nAnd so they’ve iterated on it over the years and WPCS is baked into WordPress, or into WP Rig rather. So if you want to make sure that your theme is following all of the WordPress coding standards for whatever reason, maybe it’s because you’re going to create a theme that you want to contribute to the wordpress.org theme repository, then that tool is baked into WP Rig for you, so that you can make sure that your theme meets all of the requirements for a properly developed theme before you even try to go and like submit it for a review or whatever.\n\n\n\nBecause that’s one of the most frustrating things ever is somebody who wants to contribute. If you try to contribute and then you get pushed back on, that’s like not a great experience. And so what I try to do with WP Rig is bake in this layer that is kind of like a, test it yourself type situation. Where you can kind of like have the system sort of, kind of review the code for you, and then that way you can make sure you’ve done your due diligence before you even try to submit it for review. To prevent that unfortunate situation where your theme might get rejected for one reason or another, and now you got to go back and rework it and then back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.\n\n\n\nHaving a tool like WP Rig that just tells you early on before you even try to submit it, hey, you should change this, you should change that. I think that’s extremely valuable for people. And again, I really want WP Rig to be something that encourages people to get more into contributing back into Core as opposed to. I mean, it can also be looked at as something like, okay, well you want to go develop your own thing and it’s for profit or whatever. It does very much facilitate that way of doing things too. But let’s be honest, anything that meets WordPress’s coding standards is probably going to make your theme, even if you’re putting it up for sale, it’s going to make it better.\n\n\n\n[00:42:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I love that you’ve built all of that in. That’s really interesting. So it does a lot of the heavy lifting, trying to make sure that you are adhering to the standards, which one would hope would be in a shippable, distributable product.\n\n\n\nSpeaking of community, do you have a community which coalesce around this project? Is it basically just you? Or is there like a little team? And if not necessarily a team, is there a little community which gathers and sort of helps you put this project together? And a corollary to that question really is, do you anticipate in the future that you will like some contributors to help you maintain this as well?\n\n\n\n[00:43:27] Rob Ruiz: Yeah, for sure. So when I first started, when I first adopted this as my own, there was more of a team in place because Morten is a very well-known individual. And so he had a lot of followers and so a lot of those followers had followed WP Rig. As time has progressed, a lot of those people have kind of unfortunately gone their own way. For whatever reason, a lot of the people that were following him weren’t really like, they might have been into learning how to develop themes. They certainly were into WordPress. But working on a project like this is more than just knowing how to develop themes. You also have to know how the underlying tools work too.\n\n\n\nSo that’s been my biggest challenge is learning, what is Lightning CSS? How do you use it? What is esbuild? How does that work? When I first took it over, it was ran on Gulp. What is Gulp? And what is that, and how do I modify it? And like that’s kind of far beyond WordPress, and so I think people became aware of that over time. And so while I rose up to the challenge, other people were just kind of moved on to other things.\n\n\n\nSo it is largely me. We do have a handful of contributors that kind of, when they have time, you know, they’ll feel ambitious again and jump in and do some more contributions and they’ll fall back and do their own thing for a while. And so there’s a lot of that. It’s not a very active community, certainly not as active as it was when I first adopted it. However, we do have a Discord now. You can find a link to the Discord on the website. If you go to the Learn V3 link in the header, there’s links to our YouTube channel and the Discord server.\n\n\n\nSo we are looking, I do want more of a community around WP Rig. And so I do encourage people to come on. Obviously we’ve been on GitHub this entire time, so if anybody wants to raise issues or submit a PR, there are guides on there. There’s a contributing.md file in there for anybody that wants to contribute, or wants to raise an issue. If you have ideas for how WP Rig could be better, that’s always been there. It’s just that, for one reason or another, it’s just not popular, which is a big reason why I’m on your show today actually is just to raise awareness about WP Rig now that I have had the opportunity to overhaul it dramatically over the past couple years.\n\n\n\nIn my opinion, it was a little bit, it started to feel a little bit slow compared to most modern tools. If anybody’s familiar with like Vite, or just modern frontend development frameworks. In general, they use more modern tools that build things faster and better, and they’re leaner. And so WP Rig was falling behind a little bit in that regard. And so I did have to like overhaul the project a lot. That’s why we came out with the version three because it is a pretty substantial overhaul.\n\n\n\nAnd so now that we have version three and it is much better and there are all kinds of new features built into it as a result of it being faster, it’s now more capable. I want to raise awareness. A, I’ve already done the work, so it would be a shame for all that work to go unnoticed and unappreciated. But also, for anybody who was familiar with WP Rig from previous years, back in the version one, version two days, I think it’s important to make people aware that version three is substantially more capable than what it was prior.\n\n\n\n[00:46:38] Nathan Wrigley: That’s wonderful. I’m just going to round off the episode by mentioning the URL once more so that after that clarion call, if people have been inspired and they have listened to this and think, I’d like to explore that. You know, for the multitude of reasons that we’ve covered in this topic. The URL, it’s really easy. It’s WP Rig, wprig.io. Go there, there’s a whole bunch of ways to get involved. So there’s the Learn documentation, there’s the contribute tab and so on and so forth. You can peruse at your leisure.\n\n\n\nRob, just before we end, is there a way that people could communicate with you more directly if they wanted to off the back of this? Is there a, like a, I don’t know, a social network or something that you frequent? Or a contact form that you’d like people to be mindful of?\n\n\n\n[00:47:22] Rob Ruiz: Yeah, sure. I mean, I am very responsive to people on LinkedIn, so if you want to find me on LinkedIn, I am on there, Rob Ruiz, just look me up. If it looks like it’s a Rob Ruiz that does WordPress stuff, it’s probably me. And then of course, I’m on the Discord server. So if you want to communicate directly with me, joining the Discord and then messaging me directly is a nice way to do that. I’d love to help people, hold their hand if needed, get up and running with WP Rig. If you have any questions about specifics, I’m happy to address them, or you just need a little guidance, I’d be happy to help there as well.\n\n\n\n[00:47:54] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you so much for chatting to me today, Rob. It’s been really interesting. So once more, just before we end to find out more. Rob Ruiz, thank you very much for chatting to me today.\n\n\n\n[00:48:04] Rob Ruiz: Thank you so much for your time, Nathan. I really appreciate it.\n\n\n\n\nOn the podcast today we have Rob Ruiz.\n\n\n\nRob has been involved in the WordPress ecosystem since around 2010. He began as a designer, but over the years WordPress has helped him transition into a developer, software engineer, and now an architect. Currently, he\u2019s working full-time at an agency while still taking on projects independently.\n\n\n\nThe main topic for today\u2019s conversation centres around themes, a subject that hasn\u2019t been covered in depth on the podcast for quite some time. You see, Rob is the current custodian of WP Rig, a free and open source toolkit for WordPress theme development. WP Rig offers a modern, minimal, and best-practice driven starting point for developers who want to build custom themes, providing tools like Composer and Node integration to streamline workflows, enforce coding standards, and enable the use of future-facing CSS features right now.\n\n\n\nWe start the episode with Rob sharing what attracted him to WP Rig, and his journey from user to project maintainer. We talk about who WP Rig is for, from experienced developers to those just starting to dip their toes into theme building and code customisation.\n\n\n\nThe discussion moves on to talking about what a theme development framework actually is, and why this approach might suit people wanting more control, and education, in their WordPress journey. Rob describes the learning curve, the workflow, and the satisfaction of creating your own theme from scratch, while highlighting tools and guardrails built into WP Rig that make professional standards and best practices accessible to all.\n\n\n\nWe also get into how WP Rig fits into the changing WordPress ecosystem. With the advent of full site editing and block-based themes, Rob explains how WP Rig has evolved to stay relevant, supporting classic, hybrid, and block-based paradigms, even enabling block development at the theme level.\n\n\n\nTowards the end, we discuss the community behind WP Rig, how you can get involved, and the many educational resources available for those who want to learn theme development, or even become contributors themselves.\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re interested in building custom WordPress themes, want to understand the nuts and bolts of theme frameworks, or are simply looking for a modern and educational starting point for WordPress tinkering, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\nWP Rig website\n\n\n\nRob on LinkedIn\n\n\n\nWordPress.org theme repository\n\n\n\nPostCSS\n\n\n\nGet started with wp-env\n\n\n\nWordPress Studio\n\n\n\nWordPress Coding Standards\n\n\n\nMorten\u00a0Rand-Hendriksen on the WP Tavern Jukebox podcast\n\n\n\nWP Rig’s Discord\n\n\n\nWP Rig’s YouTube channel\n\n\n\nVite", "date_published": "2026-03-04T12:08:13-05:00", "date_modified": "2026-03-04T12:08:17-05:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/207-Rob-Ruiz-on-WP-Rig-and-the-Future-of-Theme-Development.jpg", "tags": [ "podcast", "Themes" ], "summary": "In this episode, Nathan Wrigley interviews Rob Ruiz, current maintainer of WP Rig, a free WordPress theme development toolkit and starter theme. Rob Ruiz shares his journey from designer to theme developer, discusses the benefits of WP Rig for both beginners and agencies, and highlights how it teaches best practices, supports modern tools, and adapts to both classic and block-based WordPress themes. The episode focuses on empowering users to learn, contribute, and better understand theme development within the evolving WordPress ecosystem. Go listen.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2382733/c1e-41krkb8gkmdt8nwqw-1prwmmr2anm-o9waua.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=202772", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/206-jonathan-desrosiers-on-wordpress-sustainability-community-engagement-and-release-strategies", "title": "#206 \u2013 Jonathan Desrosiers on WordPress Sustainability, Community Engagement, and Release Strategies", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case WordPress sustainability, community engagement and release strategies.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Jonathan Desrosiers. Jonathan has been involved with WordPress for almost two decades, both as a user and a contributor. He’s a principal software engineer at Bluehost, where his role sees him sponsored to work on WordPress through the Five for the Future program. Over the years, he’s become a Core committer, and has spent many hours thinking about how to enhance the contributor experience, and make it easier for people to get involved in the project.
\n\n\n\nIn this episode we discuss how WordPress releases might become more impactful by synchronizing them with flagship community events like WordCamps and State of the Word. A recent experiment of combining a major release with a live event spark some excitement, and Jonathan shares insights on the logistics behind such synchronized moments, the challenges posed by international holidays, and regional scheduling, and the broader vision for connecting releases with community gatherings.
\n\n\n\nWe also get into the challenging landscape of the WordPress community, how it’s recovering from the effects of COVID, the struggle to rebuild local Meetups, and efforts like mentorship and educational initiatives to bring in new contributors, particularly from younger generations.
\n\n\n\nJonathan reflects on the importance of making release moments engaging and fun, akin to the anticipation of a new TV series or software launch, and the role of AI and open source in empowering a new wave of builders.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in how release cycles, community events, and contributor onboarding are involved in WordPress, or what the future might hold for the platform and its community, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Jonathan Desrosiers.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Jonathan Desrosiers. Hello.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:06] Jonathan Desrosiers: Hi, how are you?
\n\n\n\n[00:03:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Jonathan’s joining me again. Most recently, I think we were at WordCamp somewhere. I can’t exactly remember where, but I was chatting with him and Joe Dolson if memory serves. And a very different conversation to be had today because Jonathan has been mulling over how we can make releases impactful, and also how we can bind those to community events, particularly flagship WordPress events like WordCamps, things like that.
\n\n\n\nBefore we begin that conversation, Jonathan, I wonder, it’s a bit of a banal question, but people like to have the context of who you are. So would you mind just, very quick potted bio. Just tell us who you are and what you do in the WordPress space.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:44] Jonathan Desrosiers: Sure. So my name is Jonathan Desrosiers. I am a principal software engineer at Bluehost and I am sponsored there, the majority of my time is sponsored to contribute back to the WordPress project through the Five for the Future program. And so I’ve been there, probably since 2018, I think. And I’ve been a Core committer for almost eight years now.
\n\n\n\nI’ve been involved as an accredited contributor for 13 years now. And so I’ve been involved with WordPress for over a decade in many ways, contributing, but also as a user for almost, geez, almost two decades now I think. And so, I just had that realisation, it’s been a really long time. It’s been almost 20 years that I’ve been at least using WordPress in some way.
\n\n\n\nBut week to week I do a lot of thinking about contributor experience, how we can automate things, or how we can make our processes more clear so that more people can participate. And just generally making sure that everybody has what they need to be successful. And whether that’s mentorship, or they have blockers they need, certain people to come together and discuss, and get a consensus or understanding, you know, how the sausage is made in some way.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:56] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s fair to say that you are very much connected to the WordPress project. I think it’s the fulcrum of your working life, and you are working at a very high level as well. So Core committer, things like that.
\n\n\n\nNow, in the recent past, it was probably, I want to say December in the year 2025, we had a kind of strange event happened. Not strange in the sense of weird, but strange in the sense of different, unusual. A release of WordPress came out and it coincided with an actual event. Now, in this case, it was State of the Word. So there was a bunch of people, and I believe they were gathered in New York. I could be wrong about that, but I think it was in.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:33] Jonathan Desrosiers: It was in San Francisco.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:35] Nathan Wrigley: San Francisco. Okay, there we go. Thank you for the correction. It was in San Francisco and the idea was that the release of WordPress would go out and it would be bound to this event. And there was this almost, how can we describe it? It was almost like television, basically. It was being filmed and streamed live all over the place. And there was this feeling of a big red button. There was a lot of people gathered around and they all sort of leaned in and pushed a big red button, and the release of WordPress came out.
\n\n\n\nNow, I don’t know if the button actually did anything or if it was really sort of smoke and mirrors. I like the idea that the button actually did signal the release, but I don’t know if that’s the case. But the point was, there was a little bit of theater put into it. There was this idea that, okay, we’ve got this live event which lots of people will be watching. We’ve got a release which we need to do, which lots of people will be looking forward to. Why don’t we sort of combine the two things?
\n\n\n\nAnd so it was a bit of PR really. And it also felt a bit like sort of marketing, and I’m going to use gimmick in the real sense of the word. So not like gimmick as in something pointless, but gimmick as in something different, unique. Something to draw your attention and grab you in. And I think the idea has been proposed that in the year 2026, the flagship events, the flagship WordCamps, so I’ll list them in order in which they’re happening.
\n\n\n\nSo we’ve got WordCamp Asia, and then we’ve WordCamp Europe, and then we’ve got WordCamp US. The three releases of WordPress during 2026 will happen in tandem with those events. Now, why? Why would we want to do this?
\n\n\n\n[00:07:12] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, so I don’t think it was intentional, but the schedule just happened to coincide. You know, we were working on 6.9 and we realised, oh, the release date is the same as State of the Word. And so, I can’t remember who originally had the idea, but it was mentioned that it would be really neat to just be able to publish it live at the event and celebrate that.
\n\n\n\nI guess the main reason behind it is just that, the more I’m involved in open source, the more I realise that the code and the license and all those things are important, but the most important thing underneath any open source project is the community that’s involved with it. And what better way to celebrate our achievements and our accomplishments when we get together in different ways.
\n\n\n\nAnd so, typically that’s in Slack or social media, right? We celebrate a release and we share the posts and say what we’re excited about. But we also get together at different events and we do the same thing, right? We talk about what we’re excited about, what we’re working on, what’s coming, or what we think should change in certain ways. Why not just do that at the same time and create even a more ultimate celebration, right? Another community moment where people have another opportunity to feel involved in something greater than them.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:25] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have any notion that this is going to be carried forward? I mean, I know that there was obviously a bit of serendipity in how it happened. The coincidence of timing and things like that. But do you have every confidence that this will happen, that Asia will get a release, Europe will get a release, and the US will get a release. In the year 2026, do you think that’s going to actually occur?
\n\n\n\n[00:08:46] Jonathan Desrosiers: We will see. So as the proposed schedule is for this calendar year, right? There’s three releases. Unfortunately, it’s tough because the people planning WordCamps don’t plan around our software’s release cadence, right? They plan around budget, regional holidays, travel factors, weather, cost of venues and availability.
\n\n\n\nAnd so, you know, it’s not reasonable for the Core team and the people working on releases to say you have to have an event in a certain month, right? And so this year, some people may not have noticed, but WordCamp Asia is in April this year, which it’s been in February so far in the previous editions. And WordCamp Europe is in June, which it’s traditionally usually in.
\n\n\n\nAnd so that’s not a big enough gap to have another major release. And so the proposed schedule is saying, let’s release during WordCamp Asia, let’s release during WordCamp US, and then we’ll release again at the end of the year around State of the Word. We don’t have a date for State of the Word yet, but it’s around where we think it might be.
\n\n\n\nAnd likewise, creating a schedule for releases is incredibly hard because if we don’t release in the first week of April, for example, then I believe the whole month of April has major religious holidays scattered throughout it in different areas of the world. And if we released in March, that was way too soon because we started the alpha phase of 7.0, that starts when the previous release is branched, like it’s separated from the primary branch in the code base, and that happened in like November.
\n\n\n\nBut there’s US Thanksgiving, there’s Hanukkah, there’s Christmas, there’s New Year’s, right? A lot of people in the community take the majority of December off, and so that’s like a washed month, right? And so we would’ve had essentially four weeks until the feature complete point of the release. So that was too soon. And so it’s just as hard to plan the release schedule in a way that doesn’t negatively impact everybody as best as possible as it is to plan these major events.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I can’t say that it will be a guarantee going forward. We’re trying it out this year to see how it goes and what we can learn from it. We felt that the State of the Word was successful and it was exciting. It was unique in its own ways. And so we want to try, continue trying this this year and see how it goes.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:06] Nathan Wrigley: Gosh, the piece that you just said there about the religious holidays and what have you, that really opens up a really interesting discussion. Because it is quite likely, I imagine, that the listenership to this podcast probably never gave that any thought, that this kind of international calendar, be it a religious calendar or maybe just a vacation calendar in certain parts of the globe would really impact when the release can happen.
\n\n\n\nBecause there are people who are committing to the project, and they tend to be in certain jurisdictions. And so if there are people who are on, I don’t know, a week long holiday, nationally, in a specific jurisdiction, and they typically are a large part of the team that are committing in various different respects, that’s important, but probably something that many people would not have thought about.
\n\n\n\nNow, in terms of these releases then, is the idea, well, I’ll backpedal a little bit. It occurred to me that quite a lot of the people who may be involved in releases are the very kind of people who would find themselves also at some of these flagship events. Now, obviously it’s not going to be 100%, maybe it’s 25% of the people who are release leads and part of the teams that are committing here, there, and everywhere.
\n\n\n\nI was worried that there’d be people on airplanes, people trying to land and orientate themselves in the country that they’ve landed in in the same period of time when they would’ve been heads down, in their office, in their study, figuring out the bits that might be broken with the upcoming release. Is that a thing? Is that part of the jigsaw puzzle of this?
\n\n\n\n[00:12:32] Jonathan Desrosiers: It definitely is, yeah. With any release, there’s no time of the day where everyone on the planet is available to work on something, right? And so another part of this is that, in a way it forces us to have a major release in different geographic areas so that everywhere on the globe there’s a WordPress release that they may be able to participate in, right?
\n\n\n\nAnd so, likewise with travel, right? So when we assemble a release squad, we have to think, okay, it’s based in, for example, this one was planned to be released at WordCamp Asia in India. So we want to make sure we have a mix of people that are in different areas of the world. And not just so that there’s always people around to respond to things throughout the entire cycle, but we also want to have people that are present and not present at the event that are participating. And maybe the wifi is completely unusable or maybe something happens, right? So it’s good to have people that are there and not.
\n\n\n\nAnd that was part of the announcement too, is that we tried to underscore the point that it would be great if everybody could go to WordCamp Asia, but traveling is not a requirement to participate in the release at all. And that’s a good thing, because it’s good to have people in multiple areas, multiple time zones.
\n\n\n\nWith WordCamp Asia, once contributor day ends, it’s the beginning of the US daytime, right? And so those contributors can sign off and there’s people around to help carry that torch and continue on if there’s any follow-up issues or anything that needs to be investigated.
\n\n\n\nAnd so, yeah, that’s also a consideration is how, I guess we can call it global coverage, right? Like, how can we ensure we have global coverage so that there are people with the right skill sets, and right availability, and right knowledge, to be able to take on certain tasks or responsibilities or perform investigations, whatever may need to be done as part of that release process.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:26] Nathan Wrigley: I, like you, am really in the weeds of the WordPress project. I obsess about it in a way that’s probably not all that healthy. I’m very well aware of when the next release is coming up. I’m usually fairly aware of what is going to be in that release. But I imagine most people using WordPress, it’s probably a bit of a surprise. You know, they open up WordPress one day and either it has updated. If it’s a point release, probably it’s a more manual thing, if it’s a major release, I should say, but if it’s a more minor release, maybe things have updated in the background during the course of the night and what have you.
\n\n\n\nBut I’m thinking of TV series now. So when a successful TV series has a new season, there’s all this fanfare and buildup and you know it’s coming. You see the commercials, you see the adverts. And the moment that TV series comes around, you are excited, you’re ready to go. And I remember back in the day, this is going back a long time, when Firefox would make a release, they sort of did this thing like, I don’t know, every 18 months or something like that. Not like now where it’s every couple of hours it seems, that browsers update themselves.
\n\n\n\nBut when it went to, I don’t know, 3.6 or something like that, there was this big fanfare, this big moment. Everybody took stock and what have you. And are you trying to encourage a bit of that? Are you trying to create a bit of razzmatazz and drama and intrigue and awareness and all of that around the release, and make it feel like an important thing, which with the best will in the world, it kind of has not been more recently? Most people, it just updates. There’s no fanfare whatsoever. But we can leverage it to make it important, significant, fun, interesting.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:04] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yes and no, right? Like, we want to celebrate the community and the work we’re doing now. I actually would love it if we could get to a point where we’re releasing every, I don’t know, every week or every month even, right? Not have to wait every three or four months. There’s some value in having that penultimate moment, right? Of, we’ve worked for three months on this. But there’s also aspects of the world where we expect things faster and more instant and waiting for the patch that you submit in January to be released in April is not really, like maybe you lose interest in contributing in that time, right? So there’s many different things like that.
\n\n\n\nSome things that you mentioned really resonated with me as far as awareness of what’s coming or like what’s been done. In a way, the fact that users are not so aware of what’s being added or what their site has updated to, it’s a sign of the success of auto updates and how seamless those are.
\n\n\n\nBecause for a little while I’ve been considering, when you update WordPress manually, you’re redirected into the about page in the dashboard, right? And every release, there’s a new about page that’s designed, it works hand in hand with, we call them the micro sites, which is like a wordpress.org’s landing page that showcases the release. And it just explains all the features that have been added.
\n\n\n\nBut you only see that if you either go to the about page manually or you manually click update when you’re in the dashboard. And a site might have many administrators that only the person that actually updates will see it. And so I’ve been thinking about ways that we can make users more aware that their site is updated. Or maybe that’s not the important part, but maybe it’s just the important part to make them aware of the new features that are available to them, right?
\n\n\n\nMaybe we put some type of a widget on the dashboard where we link off to a Learn WordPress page that teaches you about how to use the Notes feature that got added. The other thing too is you mentioned about the TV shows advertise when they’re coming up, right? Maybe we need to do a better job of advertising what’s coming up and encouraging people to opt in early and test.
\n\n\n\nAnd in a way a more rapid release cycle leads to that because many of the browsers have different feature flags and they build features out in different branches, and you can actually opt into testing a specific feature and that would get turned on, but maybe not all the other things that they’re working on until it’s ready.
\n\n\n\nAnd so maybe we need different ways for people to get involved testing, or trying things out earlier to understand what’s coming, but also to give us valuable feedback, how it works on their site, what breaks, what it doesn’t interact with. All of that is very valuable feedback, and we should always be striving to get more testers and more awareness around what’s coming because it creates new feedback loops that are valuable for different reasons.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting, and what I’m about to say, I am sure that a significant proportion of the listeners to this podcast will say, no, Nathan, we don’t want this. But here’s a proposal then. Here’s an idea. And again, I’m going to hark back to the TV series.
\n\n\n\nThe TV series, typically when they’ve started advertising between other television programs, that TV series has been made, the footage has been shot, the graphics have been done. It’s basically ready to roll. And then they parcel all that up and then they release little snippets of what’s coming so that you can prepare yourself and get excited.
\n\n\n\nI kind of wondered if something like that in the dashboard, akin to the about us page, but in the run up to the release. So all the graphics have been made. We know basically what’s going to drop in this release. Now it may get tweaked here and there at the edges, but we know what’s coming. I’ve always thought that would be a really nice idea.
\n\n\n\nI would love to see that. And I realise a proportion of people would think, no, we really don’t want that. But I think that’s a perfect opportunity to get people drawn into, oh, this is coming. Collaborative editing, that’s about to happen is it? Gosh, that’s really interesting.
\n\n\n\nAnd then this call to action could be dropped in, but we need some testing around the edges of it. We’ve got the bare bones of it, but we need some more eyeballs on it and what have you. So that proactive demonstration of what’s going to happen rather than the reactive, your site has been updated, here’s what there is, which is already there. This is more of a here’s what’s coming, get excited, get involved, yada yada.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:29] Jonathan Desrosiers: In some ways the feature branch model that I described lends to that, right? Because then it’s not, here comes this feature and then, oh, actually we left it out of this release, right? It’s its own thing that’s being worked on. And then when it’s released, it’s released, and it’s here. But it doesn’t make it any less, any worse off than other things that are shipping in the release, right? Because it’s its own thing, and it’s its own, it has its own criteria to be ready, in a state that we’re comfortable with shipping it and supporting it forever because of backwards compatibility.
\n\n\n\nAnd so yeah, I think that what you’re describing is essentially what I was describing, a little bit more detail. And there’s of course a lot of nuance there around how often do we do that? We have a lot of parts of the release process that need to be automated before we can even consider that. The different parts of the block editor are, many of it is managed as packages, NPM packages. And so a lot of those are so interconnected, it’s a little difficult to release just one feature because they’re all being updated at the same time.
\n\n\n\nAnd so like there’s some architectural things to think about around that. Like, how do we compartmentalize things better to be able to do that? Make sure we don’t accidentally include something that’s not ready but when we intended to include a certain feature. There’s a lot to unpack there and I don’t know that we’ll ever get there just because of the sheer size of the project and how, backwards compatibility, how long we’ve been around.
\n\n\n\nBut I think that training users that auto updates are important to have enabled that are quality, you know, not shipping things that break people’s sites as much as possible, even though it’s unavoidable because of how flexible WordPress is.
\n\n\n\nAfter 6.9 came out, I was looking into some of the data because I had this gut feeling that 6.9 was being updated to, slower than other releases. And so for a little while I was looking at that. And after about a month, I was like, okay, this is just a hunch. Let me go and actually look at the data around this.
\n\n\n\nAnd so what I noticed was actually the opposite. When I looked at, I created 5% thresholds for the percentage of total WordPress sites. And when I looked at the data, I realised that for the last 10 releases, let’s see here. So every major version of the last six to eight releases has passed 35% of all WordPress sites in two days or less. And also every one of these columns as far as percentages is increasing.
\n\n\n\nAnd so WordPress 6.9 reached the 50% threshold of all WordPress sites in 10 days, and that’s four days faster than 6.8, which was the next fastest. And currently we’re approaching 65% threshold of all WordPress sites. And only six other releases have done that so far. All of them are the most recent ones, except for 4.9, which we all know had a waiting period for Gutenberg. And the only release the past 70% was 6.8.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I’m interested to see how this trend continues because it’s showing an acceleration of adoption for each new major version of WordPress. They’re getting installed faster, by more people. It’s a sign that we’re shipping stable software. People are more confident. People are opting into auto updates for major versions. And in general, it’s just a quality sign that we’re doing something right here. And so how can we lean into that more?
\n\n\n\n[00:23:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, let’s pivot a little bit. Let’s sort of bind community, we did touch on this a minute ago, but let’s spend a little bit of time binding the community to these kind of things because right at the start you mentioned that really the community is the underpinnings of your interest in the WordPress space. The code is obviously tremendously important, but without the community there is no code basically.
\n\n\n\nAnd so we’ve got these events. We’re trying to create interest around the WordCamps and the releases at the same time. But just looking back over the last period of time, let’s go for year, two years, something like that. I don’t know what your spidey sense is telling you, but my spidey sense is telling me that that community portion, it’s sort of slowly but surely, it feels like it’s withering away slightly.
\n\n\n\nI’m not really picking up on like this angry mob of people who are stamping their feet and shouting, I don’t want anything to do with the WordPress community and then disappearing. I mean maybe there’s a few of those, probably, somewhere. But I don’t get a sense of that. I just get this sense of sort of, somebody’s pulled the plug out of a bathtub and it’s slowly sort of draining away.
\n\n\n\nAttendance down at WordCamps. Meetups struggling to sort of get the numbers that they had several years ago. And so it would feel like at the moment, you would have to be watching the news fairly closely, especially right now. So at the beginning of February, 2026 is when we’re recording this. There does seem to be a push from the senior leadership to make WordPress Meetups and things like that, a much more central part.
\n\n\n\nAnd then there’s this whole broad spectrum of educational initiatives as well going on. So we’ve got WP Campus Connect, we’ve got the Credits Program and a whole smorgasbord of other things which is happening.
\n\n\n\nSo there’s no question there, really, what I’m just trying to do is give you the opportunity to bind the two things, the WordPress community and the software, and really just talk about whether you’ve noticed the same thing as me, where there’s this slow, withering of the community. And maybe this is a part of just sort of getting it all back together, making events like this a bit more fun and interesting.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:02] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah. I think there’s a few things there to call out. The first observation I’ve had over the last year is there’s a palpable excitement to build with WordPress again. I’m noticing there’s a renewed enthusiasm. People, they want to move on from certain things, and they want to get back to building experiences and tools and things on the WordPress platform.
\n\n\n\nBut there’s also, I think we’re dealing with some, in some ways, a long tail COVID effect, right? There was obviously, you know, a lack of in-person events for a while, and during that time a lot of the people who were keeping Meetups alive and WordCamps alive, they moved on, or burnt out, and chose not to return after. And so there was a break in that pipeline of, usually there’s a lead doing that and there’s other people learning under them, and then they move up and take over. And that was totally disrupted and I think that we’re still trying to rebuild that.
\n\n\n\nI think that it manifests differently in different areas too. So for example, the APAC WordCamp community is very strong and they have lots of WordCamps. But in the United States, there was one WordCamp that wasn’t WordCamp US last year, I think, Montclair. And I lead the Boston WordPress Meetup and so finding speakers is difficult. Getting people to come out is difficult as well. And I think those are partially just larger societal shifts where it’s harder to get people to come out to certain things. And we just have different preferences as far as how we consume information or learn.
\n\n\n\nBut I’m still not sure why the difference in the geographical areas, and I think it may have to do more with, APAC is a more emerging market when it comes to WordPress, right? Like their community, especially in certain areas has been growing and is much newer than it is in the US. And so I think that they’re growing their communities for the first time in many ways, right? But in the US it’s the second or third or fourth time that we’re growing those communities or revitalising those communities. And the form that that needs to take, I think is a little different. And I’m not clear on what the holdup is there.
\n\n\n\nBut I do know that a big factor of that is to get new people involved with WordPress and interested in WordPress, and that’s why some of the priorities that Mary Hubbard published, and one of them in particular is education and awareness and all of those different things that work together in the form of the WP Credits program, mentorship programs. There’s been the contributor mentorship programs that happen every few quarters in WordPress over the last few years.
\n\n\n\nAnd we’ve seen some really great contributors who were mentored in that program, and then the next time the program happened, they mentored, and then they became a team lead, and then they served on release squads. And so we’ve seen some really great contributed journeys through those paths.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:53] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll just sort of run through with you the kind of things that I’ve noticed in my part of the world. So I think COVID is an enormous part of it. It upended so many ordinary things in life. So, as an example, you know, people obviously, they ceased going out, and then that pattern of not going out became habituated. People didn’t go out because that’s not what you do.
\n\n\n\nAnd in the UK we have this institution called the pub, which I’m sure you’ve heard of. And it used to be that prior to COVID, the pub was the real centerpiece of many communities. You know, towns, suburbs, what have you. Everybody would coalesce around the pub and that was very important. Since the pandemic, a lot of those institutions, they don’t really function in that way anymore. You know, there isn’t the throughput, there isn’t the footfall and so they go out of business.
\n\n\n\nAnd the same, I presume is true in the WordPress space. You know, we’re trying to encourage people to get up, leave their home, spend money on transportation. Obviously there’s the time cost, the sunk cost of time and what have you as well. It’s difficult, but it makes me more sanguine that it’s not just like, it’s not just a WordPress thing, you know, it’s the whole of society.
\n\n\n\nBut like you said, I get the feeling that the WordPress community has begun to address it. And the way it’s being addressed is through these educational initiatives. Trying to get a throughput of younger talent. So get them at the school age, get them at the university age, and then hopefully they will have an interest. They’ll get a flavor of what it means to be involved in these Meetups and things like that and hopefully take those on.
\n\n\n\nIt’s a laudable goal. I hope that it has the capacity to transfer. You know, so in a decade’s time we can look back and say, look what happened. This young blood emerged. I think it’s yet to be seen. I think certainly in the area, the locale where I am, the United Kingdom, we don’t see evidence of that yet. Maybe in the US that would also mirror.
\n\n\n\nBut from everything that I’ve learned and the people that I’ve talked to for this podcast and events in Asia and places like that, that seems to be a really different picture. There seems to be a real thirst for solutions like WordPress. Because there’s a direct kind of career path there. You know, you can pick up a free piece of open source software, crack open a laptop and get going and start to sell your services far and wide. And so again, there’s no question there, just observations that I hope these initiatives bear fruit. But it’ll be interesting to see. Only time will tell.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:16] Jonathan Desrosiers: I think at the root of what we’re dealing with is that people are motivated by what they see as valuable, right? If they’re not going out to events, so they’re not engaging with the community, they don’t recognise or feel that it’s valuable to them in some way. And so we’re having to reprove why communities are valuable, why open source is valuable, why you should care.
\n\n\n\nAnd then the other aspect of it is, you know, overall project sustainability. We can’t just keep getting older. We need to have a balance of new, younger people that get involved as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so one way to lean into getting younger is obviously, like you said, to approach people at schooling age, right? Or university, and teach them about open source. Show them how to contribute, how to be a part of a community, and why it’s valuable. But we have to be really careful because we need to be prepared to, I’ve written in the past that we need to be prepared to activate these contributors, right?
\n\n\n\nSo it’s one thing to make them aware of this, but it’s another thing to make sure they’re properly supported and we give them pathways to grow. We give them clear criteria to be successful, clear projects to work on, so they understand what they’re doing and what they’re trying to accomplish.
\n\n\n\nAnd I think that this is one thing that is also a benefit of having the releases coincide with these major events because new people are getting together already, so why not use that opportunity?
\n\n\n\nOne of the goals that every table lead and every organiser of a Contributor Day has is to ensure as many contributors see, realise their work over the finish line. And so on the Core team that’s a patch that someone tests gets committed, or a patch someone writes gets committed to WordPress, right? How can we make that more valuable, where it’s not just ending when they leave Contributor Day?
\n\n\n\nAnd so I’ve been thinking about all the different logistics and helping to coordinate with the WordCamp Asia team and the 7.0 release team to make sure we’re prepared for that final day. And one of the things I’ve been thinking about is the release process itself. One of the best, lowest friction ways to get involved with WordPress in the actual release process. And you don’t need any experience contributing to really take part in it. And that’s when we get to a point where we say, okay, here’s the zip file of what we think we’re going to ship, go test it.
\n\n\n\nAnd so people will take it, and they install it on their server and they say which version of PHP they’re using, and how they installed it and what they did and, you know, it worked. And the majority of that though is just looking for problems. And when problems don’t come up, we just don’t do anything with all the information that people are dropping, right? And there might be 50 people at a major release. We call them parties, but at the release parties that are dropping information. And again, if there’s no red flags, that information just largely goes away.
\n\n\n\nBut, how can we rethink that and make that effort more meaningful, and also create a pathway for them to continue contributing in some way past that moment? And having everybody in person is a great way to have pilot programs for different approaches, because there can be someone that briefs a set of contributors on what we’re going to try this time, here’s what we want to do, give us feedback on how you felt it went. Everybody that’s involved in the squad and doing the release can say, oh yeah, that actually was really helpful and better than what we do before.
\n\n\n\nAnd these newer individuals that are learning also have fresh perspective. And so having them participate in these, I guess I’ll call them experiments of such, but just these processes and things that we are considering, it helps get that fresh opinion and perspective on why things are working and why things aren’t and helps us just improve.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:04] Nathan Wrigley: I’ve got three children and they’re all of a certain age now, they’re certainly no longer small. You know, they’re basically adults. And it’s really fascinating looking at the kind of things that engage them. I think they’ve just grown up in a different era. The diet of the kind of things that excite them is very different to the kind of things that excited somebody of my generation, just because, you know, they’ve had the whole world in their pocket ever since they were born.
\n\n\n\nAnd having that dialogue with the next generation, and trying to figure out what it is that they want and that they desire. And even things like open source. So when, I was already an adult before the internet began to be put into everybody’s homes, and people started to own personal computers and things like that. And so I was ready to receive that message of open source right at the start. And it became really obvious to me, oh, that’s a really clever way of making software.
\n\n\n\nBut now of course we’ve got this landscape of closed platforms. Everything’s free at the point of use, but everything’s not free in any way, shape, or form. You can think of the siloed platforms that I’m talking about. My children have been raised with those and so just even making the argument about open source is hard enough.
\n\n\n\nSo I think what I’m really advocating for is, obviously we’ve got to shepherd these people in, but at the same time, I think we have to be willing to let go of a lot of the things that we think the project is. We think the Meetup should contain. We think the WordCamp should maintain. Because at the end of the day, we’re competing for eyeballs and if we don’t make it, I’m going to use the word exciting, if we don’t make it exciting, they’re just not going to show up.
\n\n\n\nAnd I feel that’s a piece of the next five, six years, trying to figure out what excites these people. Because unless we do excite them, I fear the Meetups are going to be empty and there’ll be a certain throughput from the WordPress initiatives, Campus Connect and what have you. But we need to make these things exciting, interesting, innovative, fun. But I don’t have an answer to that.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:59] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, you touched on something interesting that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. I gave a talk last year about how to implement AI into open source communities while maintaining what makes them great in the first place, which is the human element, right? The community aspects of it.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I’ve been thinking a lot about just AI and how it’s affecting us. And there’s a few things that I’m really excited about with AI and those are empowerment and learning. And so you can have an AI model that digests massive amounts of information and summarises it in the specific way that you learn best, right?
\n\n\n\nAnd likewise, I’m noticing that people feel more empowered to try things themselves because they have more of an ability to distill a lot of information down into something that’s digestible, right?
\n\n\n\nAnd so I feel that the tension between those two areas of closed and open is growing. Because when I was growing up, computers were just starting to be less than the size of a car, right? People were starting to have them in their house. But they were still at a point where, the computer went bad, you took it apart and fixed it. You didn’t trade it in for a new one, right?
\n\n\n\nAnd so I feel like my generation, there was a level of, we had the tools, but we had to go out and build the things we needed ourselves in some ways, and experiment. And then there’s been the generations between that and now where they pretty much had everything that they needed.
\n\n\n\nBut AI is changing what we need, or what we want, and what ways we want it. And so now there’s a new found need to build again in some ways. And in some ways it’s kind of a circle, right? Because it’s, the AI is making it easier to build, but it’s also making you more aware you have to build. It’s kind of like building against itself in certain ways.
\n\n\n\nBut I’m finding that there’s more of a willingness to do things on your own, try to tackle something you would typically need to hire a professional to do in the past. You know in many ways we need to lean into that because then that gets people excited. Oh, WordPress, I could use WordPress to build this, or I could use just the WordPress for just the database part of it and the REST API and have some type of application on it because it scales well and it caches or whatever it may be.
\n\n\n\nBut I feel like people are starting to scoff at the walled gardens a little bit more, and I’m seeing that there’s a resurgence in things like RSS. I’m seeing new RSS readers are popping up. People are leaning towards the Fediverse. People are blogging more, having their own website instead of just their business on Facebook, right? Because that can get taken away.
\n\n\n\nWe saw with Twitter how they just chose to close their platform. And embeds no longer work in WordPress because they shut down oEmbeds. And I feel like it changes every month, but there’s times where you have to log in to see a post, or you can’t see a post, or you can see one post and then you can’t see any more that’s shared externally. Yeah, so it gives you more control.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. And I also noticed that swing. Obviously, I don’t have any broader data. I can only point to the things in my life, the little intuitions that I’m gaining. But I see the same thing. I see an interest in AI, so we’ll just put that to one side for a moment. But in terms of the closed platforms, I do see that the people that I know who are significantly younger than me, they have intuitions around that, and they’ve kind of figured out for themselves that this is not great. It seems to be a vehicle to serve me ads, and I wonder what the incentive is for the stuff that I’m seeing, and maybe it’s kind of pushing me off in one direction politically and all of that.
\n\n\n\nAnd yeah, this resurgence of RSS, of the blog. I know it’s hard to talk about, but it’s almost like we’re doing some sort of archaeology in the internet space. We’ve gone back to something older. We kind of dug up the relics from the past and we found that they’re still usable. They’re still there.
\n\n\n\nIt’ll be so interesting. But I think if it was just the RSS and it was just the open nature of things, I think that’s going to be a hard sell. But throw AI into the mix, this capacity for somebody with very little relationship with writing code who can get something credible out. Now, it may not be robust, it may have security problems here and there. The accessibility may be something that needs to be addressed and what have you. But who can argue with the excitement of it.
\n\n\n\nYou know, you tell a computer to make a colourful website that’s got rainbows and pictures of cats, and sure enough, two minutes later you have a website with rainbows and pictures of cats. And that wasn’t possible until just a couple of years ago. And so I think we’ve got the tools. I think there’s things that we can deploy. AI seems to be the primary one at the moment. Let’s hope that that continues to be sustainable.
\n\n\n\nBut that’s interesting. That gives me some hope. And the way that you’ve encapsulated it, open source combined with things like AI. Trying to get Meetups back. Trying to combine it with educational initiatives. Trying to combine it with WordCamps and releases.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:52] Jonathan Desrosiers: You mentioned something that’s important there in that it’s very easy for someone to get something built that they need specifically, right? And I think that’s where we’re at right now where AI is, like I said, is empowering, but more on a personal level. Once you need to scale those things, that’s when it gets difficult.
\n\n\n\nAnd it’s a rollercoaster of, oh my God, there’s going to be no software. And then, oh, look at all this crappy software that AI built. We are always going to have a job. And then it’s like up and down all throughout time as new tools get released. And it definitely matches what I’m seeing is like the personal empowerment level, they could take that and run with it and build this really massive thing, or they could just build something that they just want, that does specifically what they want, that they haven’t found out there that it accomplishes.
\n\n\n\nAnd I think that another aspect of that is I’m noticing that a lot of people that you may not have thought would try things in the physical world on their own are more likely to do so as well. So maybe changing their faucet, or doing a landscaping project or something. I feel like we’ve had YouTube tutorials, right, has been a big thing for maybe a decade, right? But I feel like AI has unlocked a new level of empowerment where people feel more confident to try things because of the knowledge that’s available to them in different ways.
\n\n\n\n[00:43:09] Nathan Wrigley: The year 2026 is going to be punctuated by WordCamps. It’s going to be punctuated by WordPress releases. Hopefully we will start to see the needle move on educational initiatives, and maybe some younger people joining in with the community.
\n\n\n\nThat has been a fascinating chat, Jonathan. I really appreciate that, getting your insight into what I think we both hope is going to happen in the WordPress project. That it will still be relevant in 10 years time, and that there’ll be children who are now, not old enough to be using computers, in a decade, they’ll be coming on podcasts like this, and hosting podcasts like this, and being involved in the community that we love so very much.
\n\n\n\nWhere can we find you, Jonathan? If people want to talk to you and have a bit of a natter, where’s the best place to locate you?
\n\n\n\n[00:43:48] Jonathan Desrosiers: My website is just jonathandesrosiers.com. I’m desrosej pretty much everywhere on the internet. I try to keep it consistent and easy. And you can also, of course, find me in the wordpress.org Slack.
\n\n\n\n[00:44:01] Nathan Wrigley: I will link to all of those in the show notes. So if you go to the wptavern.com website, search for the episode with Jonathan Desrosiers, you’ll be able to find all of the links probably at the bottom underneath the transcript and the preamble. Go and have a look down there and hopefully we’ll be speaking soon. I’ll probably see you in Mumbai in a few weeks time. Take care, Jonathan.
\n\n\n\n[00:44:21] Jonathan Desrosiers: Thank you. Look forward to it, and hopefully I see your listeners there as well.
\nOn the podcast today we have Jonathan Desrosiers.
\n\n\n\nJonathan has been involved with WordPress for almost two decades, both as a user and a contributor. He\u2019s a principal software engineer at Bluehost, where his role sees him sponsored to work on WordPress through the Five for the Future program. Over the years, he\u2019s become a Core committer, and has spent many hours thinking about how to enhance the contributor experience and make it easier for people to get involved in the project.
\n\n\n\nIn this episode we discuss how WordPress releases might be made more impactful by synchronizing them with flagship community events like WordCamps and State of the Word. A recent experiment of combining a major release with a live event sparked some excitement, and Jonathan shares insights on the logistics behind such synchronized moments, the challenges posed by international holidays and regional scheduling, and the broader vision for connecting releases with community gatherings.
\n\n\n\nWe also get into the changing landscape of the WordPress community, how it\u2019s recovering from the effects of COVID, the struggle to rebuild local Meetups, and efforts (like mentorship and educational initiatives) to bring in new contributors, particularly from younger generations. Jonathan reflects on the importance of making release moments engaging and fun, akin to the anticipation of a new TV series or software launch, and the role of AI and open source in empowering a new wave of builders.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re interested in how release cycles, community events, and contributor onboarding are evolving in WordPress, or what the future might hold for the platform and its community, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nMary Hubbard on the importance of education – Big Picture Goals for 2026
\n\n\n\n\n", "content_text": "Transcript\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case WordPress sustainability, community engagement and release strategies.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Jonathan Desrosiers. Jonathan has been involved with WordPress for almost two decades, both as a user and a contributor. He’s a principal software engineer at Bluehost, where his role sees him sponsored to work on WordPress through the Five for the Future program. Over the years, he’s become a Core committer, and has spent many hours thinking about how to enhance the contributor experience, and make it easier for people to get involved in the project.\n\n\n\nIn this episode we discuss how WordPress releases might become more impactful by synchronizing them with flagship community events like WordCamps and State of the Word. A recent experiment of combining a major release with a live event spark some excitement, and Jonathan shares insights on the logistics behind such synchronized moments, the challenges posed by international holidays, and regional scheduling, and the broader vision for connecting releases with community gatherings.\n\n\n\nWe also get into the challenging landscape of the WordPress community, how it’s recovering from the effects of COVID, the struggle to rebuild local Meetups, and efforts like mentorship and educational initiatives to bring in new contributors, particularly from younger generations.\n\n\n\nJonathan reflects on the importance of making release moments engaging and fun, akin to the anticipation of a new TV series or software launch, and the role of AI and open source in empowering a new wave of builders.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in how release cycles, community events, and contributor onboarding are involved in WordPress, or what the future might hold for the platform and its community, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Jonathan Desrosiers.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Jonathan Desrosiers. Hello.\n\n\n\n[00:03:06] Jonathan Desrosiers: Hi, how are you?\n\n\n\n[00:03:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Jonathan’s joining me again. Most recently, I think we were at WordCamp somewhere. I can’t exactly remember where, but I was chatting with him and Joe Dolson if memory serves. And a very different conversation to be had today because Jonathan has been mulling over how we can make releases impactful, and also how we can bind those to community events, particularly flagship WordPress events like WordCamps, things like that.\n\n\n\nBefore we begin that conversation, Jonathan, I wonder, it’s a bit of a banal question, but people like to have the context of who you are. So would you mind just, very quick potted bio. Just tell us who you are and what you do in the WordPress space.\n\n\n\n[00:03:44] Jonathan Desrosiers: Sure. So my name is Jonathan Desrosiers. I am a principal software engineer at Bluehost and I am sponsored there, the majority of my time is sponsored to contribute back to the WordPress project through the Five for the Future program. And so I’ve been there, probably since 2018, I think. And I’ve been a Core committer for almost eight years now.\n\n\n\nI’ve been involved as an accredited contributor for 13 years now. And so I’ve been involved with WordPress for over a decade in many ways, contributing, but also as a user for almost, geez, almost two decades now I think. And so, I just had that realisation, it’s been a really long time. It’s been almost 20 years that I’ve been at least using WordPress in some way.\n\n\n\nBut week to week I do a lot of thinking about contributor experience, how we can automate things, or how we can make our processes more clear so that more people can participate. And just generally making sure that everybody has what they need to be successful. And whether that’s mentorship, or they have blockers they need, certain people to come together and discuss, and get a consensus or understanding, you know, how the sausage is made in some way.\n\n\n\n[00:04:56] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s fair to say that you are very much connected to the WordPress project. I think it’s the fulcrum of your working life, and you are working at a very high level as well. So Core committer, things like that.\n\n\n\nNow, in the recent past, it was probably, I want to say December in the year 2025, we had a kind of strange event happened. Not strange in the sense of weird, but strange in the sense of different, unusual. A release of WordPress came out and it coincided with an actual event. Now, in this case, it was State of the Word. So there was a bunch of people, and I believe they were gathered in New York. I could be wrong about that, but I think it was in.\n\n\n\n[00:05:33] Jonathan Desrosiers: It was in San Francisco.\n\n\n\n[00:05:35] Nathan Wrigley: San Francisco. Okay, there we go. Thank you for the correction. It was in San Francisco and the idea was that the release of WordPress would go out and it would be bound to this event. And there was this almost, how can we describe it? It was almost like television, basically. It was being filmed and streamed live all over the place. And there was this feeling of a big red button. There was a lot of people gathered around and they all sort of leaned in and pushed a big red button, and the release of WordPress came out.\n\n\n\nNow, I don’t know if the button actually did anything or if it was really sort of smoke and mirrors. I like the idea that the button actually did signal the release, but I don’t know if that’s the case. But the point was, there was a little bit of theater put into it. There was this idea that, okay, we’ve got this live event which lots of people will be watching. We’ve got a release which we need to do, which lots of people will be looking forward to. Why don’t we sort of combine the two things?\n\n\n\nAnd so it was a bit of PR really. And it also felt a bit like sort of marketing, and I’m going to use gimmick in the real sense of the word. So not like gimmick as in something pointless, but gimmick as in something different, unique. Something to draw your attention and grab you in. And I think the idea has been proposed that in the year 2026, the flagship events, the flagship WordCamps, so I’ll list them in order in which they’re happening.\n\n\n\nSo we’ve got WordCamp Asia, and then we’ve WordCamp Europe, and then we’ve got WordCamp US. The three releases of WordPress during 2026 will happen in tandem with those events. Now, why? Why would we want to do this?\n\n\n\n[00:07:12] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, so I don’t think it was intentional, but the schedule just happened to coincide. You know, we were working on 6.9 and we realised, oh, the release date is the same as State of the Word. And so, I can’t remember who originally had the idea, but it was mentioned that it would be really neat to just be able to publish it live at the event and celebrate that.\n\n\n\nI guess the main reason behind it is just that, the more I’m involved in open source, the more I realise that the code and the license and all those things are important, but the most important thing underneath any open source project is the community that’s involved with it. And what better way to celebrate our achievements and our accomplishments when we get together in different ways.\n\n\n\nAnd so, typically that’s in Slack or social media, right? We celebrate a release and we share the posts and say what we’re excited about. But we also get together at different events and we do the same thing, right? We talk about what we’re excited about, what we’re working on, what’s coming, or what we think should change in certain ways. Why not just do that at the same time and create even a more ultimate celebration, right? Another community moment where people have another opportunity to feel involved in something greater than them.\n\n\n\n[00:08:25] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have any notion that this is going to be carried forward? I mean, I know that there was obviously a bit of serendipity in how it happened. The coincidence of timing and things like that. But do you have every confidence that this will happen, that Asia will get a release, Europe will get a release, and the US will get a release. In the year 2026, do you think that’s going to actually occur?\n\n\n\n[00:08:46] Jonathan Desrosiers: We will see. So as the proposed schedule is for this calendar year, right? There’s three releases. Unfortunately, it’s tough because the people planning WordCamps don’t plan around our software’s release cadence, right? They plan around budget, regional holidays, travel factors, weather, cost of venues and availability.\n\n\n\nAnd so, you know, it’s not reasonable for the Core team and the people working on releases to say you have to have an event in a certain month, right? And so this year, some people may not have noticed, but WordCamp Asia is in April this year, which it’s been in February so far in the previous editions. And WordCamp Europe is in June, which it’s traditionally usually in.\n\n\n\nAnd so that’s not a big enough gap to have another major release. And so the proposed schedule is saying, let’s release during WordCamp Asia, let’s release during WordCamp US, and then we’ll release again at the end of the year around State of the Word. We don’t have a date for State of the Word yet, but it’s around where we think it might be.\n\n\n\nAnd likewise, creating a schedule for releases is incredibly hard because if we don’t release in the first week of April, for example, then I believe the whole month of April has major religious holidays scattered throughout it in different areas of the world. And if we released in March, that was way too soon because we started the alpha phase of 7.0, that starts when the previous release is branched, like it’s separated from the primary branch in the code base, and that happened in like November.\n\n\n\nBut there’s US Thanksgiving, there’s Hanukkah, there’s Christmas, there’s New Year’s, right? A lot of people in the community take the majority of December off, and so that’s like a washed month, right? And so we would’ve had essentially four weeks until the feature complete point of the release. So that was too soon. And so it’s just as hard to plan the release schedule in a way that doesn’t negatively impact everybody as best as possible as it is to plan these major events.\n\n\n\nAnd so I can’t say that it will be a guarantee going forward. We’re trying it out this year to see how it goes and what we can learn from it. We felt that the State of the Word was successful and it was exciting. It was unique in its own ways. And so we want to try, continue trying this this year and see how it goes.\n\n\n\n[00:11:06] Nathan Wrigley: Gosh, the piece that you just said there about the religious holidays and what have you, that really opens up a really interesting discussion. Because it is quite likely, I imagine, that the listenership to this podcast probably never gave that any thought, that this kind of international calendar, be it a religious calendar or maybe just a vacation calendar in certain parts of the globe would really impact when the release can happen.\n\n\n\nBecause there are people who are committing to the project, and they tend to be in certain jurisdictions. And so if there are people who are on, I don’t know, a week long holiday, nationally, in a specific jurisdiction, and they typically are a large part of the team that are committing in various different respects, that’s important, but probably something that many people would not have thought about.\n\n\n\nNow, in terms of these releases then, is the idea, well, I’ll backpedal a little bit. It occurred to me that quite a lot of the people who may be involved in releases are the very kind of people who would find themselves also at some of these flagship events. Now, obviously it’s not going to be 100%, maybe it’s 25% of the people who are release leads and part of the teams that are committing here, there, and everywhere.\n\n\n\nI was worried that there’d be people on airplanes, people trying to land and orientate themselves in the country that they’ve landed in in the same period of time when they would’ve been heads down, in their office, in their study, figuring out the bits that might be broken with the upcoming release. Is that a thing? Is that part of the jigsaw puzzle of this?\n\n\n\n[00:12:32] Jonathan Desrosiers: It definitely is, yeah. With any release, there’s no time of the day where everyone on the planet is available to work on something, right? And so another part of this is that, in a way it forces us to have a major release in different geographic areas so that everywhere on the globe there’s a WordPress release that they may be able to participate in, right?\n\n\n\nAnd so, likewise with travel, right? So when we assemble a release squad, we have to think, okay, it’s based in, for example, this one was planned to be released at WordCamp Asia in India. So we want to make sure we have a mix of people that are in different areas of the world. And not just so that there’s always people around to respond to things throughout the entire cycle, but we also want to have people that are present and not present at the event that are participating. And maybe the wifi is completely unusable or maybe something happens, right? So it’s good to have people that are there and not.\n\n\n\nAnd that was part of the announcement too, is that we tried to underscore the point that it would be great if everybody could go to WordCamp Asia, but traveling is not a requirement to participate in the release at all. And that’s a good thing, because it’s good to have people in multiple areas, multiple time zones.\n\n\n\nWith WordCamp Asia, once contributor day ends, it’s the beginning of the US daytime, right? And so those contributors can sign off and there’s people around to help carry that torch and continue on if there’s any follow-up issues or anything that needs to be investigated.\n\n\n\nAnd so, yeah, that’s also a consideration is how, I guess we can call it global coverage, right? Like, how can we ensure we have global coverage so that there are people with the right skill sets, and right availability, and right knowledge, to be able to take on certain tasks or responsibilities or perform investigations, whatever may need to be done as part of that release process.\n\n\n\n[00:14:26] Nathan Wrigley: I, like you, am really in the weeds of the WordPress project. I obsess about it in a way that’s probably not all that healthy. I’m very well aware of when the next release is coming up. I’m usually fairly aware of what is going to be in that release. But I imagine most people using WordPress, it’s probably a bit of a surprise. You know, they open up WordPress one day and either it has updated. If it’s a point release, probably it’s a more manual thing, if it’s a major release, I should say, but if it’s a more minor release, maybe things have updated in the background during the course of the night and what have you.\n\n\n\nBut I’m thinking of TV series now. So when a successful TV series has a new season, there’s all this fanfare and buildup and you know it’s coming. You see the commercials, you see the adverts. And the moment that TV series comes around, you are excited, you’re ready to go. And I remember back in the day, this is going back a long time, when Firefox would make a release, they sort of did this thing like, I don’t know, every 18 months or something like that. Not like now where it’s every couple of hours it seems, that browsers update themselves.\n\n\n\nBut when it went to, I don’t know, 3.6 or something like that, there was this big fanfare, this big moment. Everybody took stock and what have you. And are you trying to encourage a bit of that? Are you trying to create a bit of razzmatazz and drama and intrigue and awareness and all of that around the release, and make it feel like an important thing, which with the best will in the world, it kind of has not been more recently? Most people, it just updates. There’s no fanfare whatsoever. But we can leverage it to make it important, significant, fun, interesting.\n\n\n\n[00:16:04] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yes and no, right? Like, we want to celebrate the community and the work we’re doing now. I actually would love it if we could get to a point where we’re releasing every, I don’t know, every week or every month even, right? Not have to wait every three or four months. There’s some value in having that penultimate moment, right? Of, we’ve worked for three months on this. But there’s also aspects of the world where we expect things faster and more instant and waiting for the patch that you submit in January to be released in April is not really, like maybe you lose interest in contributing in that time, right? So there’s many different things like that.\n\n\n\nSome things that you mentioned really resonated with me as far as awareness of what’s coming or like what’s been done. In a way, the fact that users are not so aware of what’s being added or what their site has updated to, it’s a sign of the success of auto updates and how seamless those are.\n\n\n\nBecause for a little while I’ve been considering, when you update WordPress manually, you’re redirected into the about page in the dashboard, right? And every release, there’s a new about page that’s designed, it works hand in hand with, we call them the micro sites, which is like a wordpress.org’s landing page that showcases the release. And it just explains all the features that have been added.\n\n\n\nBut you only see that if you either go to the about page manually or you manually click update when you’re in the dashboard. And a site might have many administrators that only the person that actually updates will see it. And so I’ve been thinking about ways that we can make users more aware that their site is updated. Or maybe that’s not the important part, but maybe it’s just the important part to make them aware of the new features that are available to them, right?\n\n\n\nMaybe we put some type of a widget on the dashboard where we link off to a Learn WordPress page that teaches you about how to use the Notes feature that got added. The other thing too is you mentioned about the TV shows advertise when they’re coming up, right? Maybe we need to do a better job of advertising what’s coming up and encouraging people to opt in early and test.\n\n\n\nAnd in a way a more rapid release cycle leads to that because many of the browsers have different feature flags and they build features out in different branches, and you can actually opt into testing a specific feature and that would get turned on, but maybe not all the other things that they’re working on until it’s ready.\n\n\n\nAnd so maybe we need different ways for people to get involved testing, or trying things out earlier to understand what’s coming, but also to give us valuable feedback, how it works on their site, what breaks, what it doesn’t interact with. All of that is very valuable feedback, and we should always be striving to get more testers and more awareness around what’s coming because it creates new feedback loops that are valuable for different reasons.\n\n\n\n[00:18:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting, and what I’m about to say, I am sure that a significant proportion of the listeners to this podcast will say, no, Nathan, we don’t want this. But here’s a proposal then. Here’s an idea. And again, I’m going to hark back to the TV series.\n\n\n\nThe TV series, typically when they’ve started advertising between other television programs, that TV series has been made, the footage has been shot, the graphics have been done. It’s basically ready to roll. And then they parcel all that up and then they release little snippets of what’s coming so that you can prepare yourself and get excited.\n\n\n\nI kind of wondered if something like that in the dashboard, akin to the about us page, but in the run up to the release. So all the graphics have been made. We know basically what’s going to drop in this release. Now it may get tweaked here and there at the edges, but we know what’s coming. I’ve always thought that would be a really nice idea.\n\n\n\nI would love to see that. And I realise a proportion of people would think, no, we really don’t want that. But I think that’s a perfect opportunity to get people drawn into, oh, this is coming. Collaborative editing, that’s about to happen is it? Gosh, that’s really interesting.\n\n\n\nAnd then this call to action could be dropped in, but we need some testing around the edges of it. We’ve got the bare bones of it, but we need some more eyeballs on it and what have you. So that proactive demonstration of what’s going to happen rather than the reactive, your site has been updated, here’s what there is, which is already there. This is more of a here’s what’s coming, get excited, get involved, yada yada.\n\n\n\n[00:20:29] Jonathan Desrosiers: In some ways the feature branch model that I described lends to that, right? Because then it’s not, here comes this feature and then, oh, actually we left it out of this release, right? It’s its own thing that’s being worked on. And then when it’s released, it’s released, and it’s here. But it doesn’t make it any less, any worse off than other things that are shipping in the release, right? Because it’s its own thing, and it’s its own, it has its own criteria to be ready, in a state that we’re comfortable with shipping it and supporting it forever because of backwards compatibility.\n\n\n\nAnd so yeah, I think that what you’re describing is essentially what I was describing, a little bit more detail. And there’s of course a lot of nuance there around how often do we do that? We have a lot of parts of the release process that need to be automated before we can even consider that. The different parts of the block editor are, many of it is managed as packages, NPM packages. And so a lot of those are so interconnected, it’s a little difficult to release just one feature because they’re all being updated at the same time.\n\n\n\nAnd so like there’s some architectural things to think about around that. Like, how do we compartmentalize things better to be able to do that? Make sure we don’t accidentally include something that’s not ready but when we intended to include a certain feature. There’s a lot to unpack there and I don’t know that we’ll ever get there just because of the sheer size of the project and how, backwards compatibility, how long we’ve been around.\n\n\n\nBut I think that training users that auto updates are important to have enabled that are quality, you know, not shipping things that break people’s sites as much as possible, even though it’s unavoidable because of how flexible WordPress is.\n\n\n\nAfter 6.9 came out, I was looking into some of the data because I had this gut feeling that 6.9 was being updated to, slower than other releases. And so for a little while I was looking at that. And after about a month, I was like, okay, this is just a hunch. Let me go and actually look at the data around this.\n\n\n\nAnd so what I noticed was actually the opposite. When I looked at, I created 5% thresholds for the percentage of total WordPress sites. And when I looked at the data, I realised that for the last 10 releases, let’s see here. So every major version of the last six to eight releases has passed 35% of all WordPress sites in two days or less. And also every one of these columns as far as percentages is increasing.\n\n\n\nAnd so WordPress 6.9 reached the 50% threshold of all WordPress sites in 10 days, and that’s four days faster than 6.8, which was the next fastest. And currently we’re approaching 65% threshold of all WordPress sites. And only six other releases have done that so far. All of them are the most recent ones, except for 4.9, which we all know had a waiting period for Gutenberg. And the only release the past 70% was 6.8.\n\n\n\nAnd so I’m interested to see how this trend continues because it’s showing an acceleration of adoption for each new major version of WordPress. They’re getting installed faster, by more people. It’s a sign that we’re shipping stable software. People are more confident. People are opting into auto updates for major versions. And in general, it’s just a quality sign that we’re doing something right here. And so how can we lean into that more?\n\n\n\n[00:23:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, let’s pivot a little bit. Let’s sort of bind community, we did touch on this a minute ago, but let’s spend a little bit of time binding the community to these kind of things because right at the start you mentioned that really the community is the underpinnings of your interest in the WordPress space. The code is obviously tremendously important, but without the community there is no code basically.\n\n\n\nAnd so we’ve got these events. We’re trying to create interest around the WordCamps and the releases at the same time. But just looking back over the last period of time, let’s go for year, two years, something like that. I don’t know what your spidey sense is telling you, but my spidey sense is telling me that that community portion, it’s sort of slowly but surely, it feels like it’s withering away slightly.\n\n\n\nI’m not really picking up on like this angry mob of people who are stamping their feet and shouting, I don’t want anything to do with the WordPress community and then disappearing. I mean maybe there’s a few of those, probably, somewhere. But I don’t get a sense of that. I just get this sense of sort of, somebody’s pulled the plug out of a bathtub and it’s slowly sort of draining away.\n\n\n\nAttendance down at WordCamps. Meetups struggling to sort of get the numbers that they had several years ago. And so it would feel like at the moment, you would have to be watching the news fairly closely, especially right now. So at the beginning of February, 2026 is when we’re recording this. There does seem to be a push from the senior leadership to make WordPress Meetups and things like that, a much more central part.\n\n\n\nAnd then there’s this whole broad spectrum of educational initiatives as well going on. So we’ve got WP Campus Connect, we’ve got the Credits Program and a whole smorgasbord of other things which is happening.\n\n\n\nSo there’s no question there, really, what I’m just trying to do is give you the opportunity to bind the two things, the WordPress community and the software, and really just talk about whether you’ve noticed the same thing as me, where there’s this slow, withering of the community. And maybe this is a part of just sort of getting it all back together, making events like this a bit more fun and interesting.\n\n\n\n[00:26:02] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah. I think there’s a few things there to call out. The first observation I’ve had over the last year is there’s a palpable excitement to build with WordPress again. I’m noticing there’s a renewed enthusiasm. People, they want to move on from certain things, and they want to get back to building experiences and tools and things on the WordPress platform.\n\n\n\nBut there’s also, I think we’re dealing with some, in some ways, a long tail COVID effect, right? There was obviously, you know, a lack of in-person events for a while, and during that time a lot of the people who were keeping Meetups alive and WordCamps alive, they moved on, or burnt out, and chose not to return after. And so there was a break in that pipeline of, usually there’s a lead doing that and there’s other people learning under them, and then they move up and take over. And that was totally disrupted and I think that we’re still trying to rebuild that.\n\n\n\nI think that it manifests differently in different areas too. So for example, the APAC WordCamp community is very strong and they have lots of WordCamps. But in the United States, there was one WordCamp that wasn’t WordCamp US last year, I think, Montclair. And I lead the Boston WordPress Meetup and so finding speakers is difficult. Getting people to come out is difficult as well. And I think those are partially just larger societal shifts where it’s harder to get people to come out to certain things. And we just have different preferences as far as how we consume information or learn.\n\n\n\nBut I’m still not sure why the difference in the geographical areas, and I think it may have to do more with, APAC is a more emerging market when it comes to WordPress, right? Like their community, especially in certain areas has been growing and is much newer than it is in the US. And so I think that they’re growing their communities for the first time in many ways, right? But in the US it’s the second or third or fourth time that we’re growing those communities or revitalising those communities. And the form that that needs to take, I think is a little different. And I’m not clear on what the holdup is there.\n\n\n\nBut I do know that a big factor of that is to get new people involved with WordPress and interested in WordPress, and that’s why some of the priorities that Mary Hubbard published, and one of them in particular is education and awareness and all of those different things that work together in the form of the WP Credits program, mentorship programs. There’s been the contributor mentorship programs that happen every few quarters in WordPress over the last few years.\n\n\n\nAnd we’ve seen some really great contributors who were mentored in that program, and then the next time the program happened, they mentored, and then they became a team lead, and then they served on release squads. And so we’ve seen some really great contributed journeys through those paths.\n\n\n\n[00:28:53] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll just sort of run through with you the kind of things that I’ve noticed in my part of the world. So I think COVID is an enormous part of it. It upended so many ordinary things in life. So, as an example, you know, people obviously, they ceased going out, and then that pattern of not going out became habituated. People didn’t go out because that’s not what you do.\n\n\n\nAnd in the UK we have this institution called the pub, which I’m sure you’ve heard of. And it used to be that prior to COVID, the pub was the real centerpiece of many communities. You know, towns, suburbs, what have you. Everybody would coalesce around the pub and that was very important. Since the pandemic, a lot of those institutions, they don’t really function in that way anymore. You know, there isn’t the throughput, there isn’t the footfall and so they go out of business.\n\n\n\nAnd the same, I presume is true in the WordPress space. You know, we’re trying to encourage people to get up, leave their home, spend money on transportation. Obviously there’s the time cost, the sunk cost of time and what have you as well. It’s difficult, but it makes me more sanguine that it’s not just like, it’s not just a WordPress thing, you know, it’s the whole of society.\n\n\n\nBut like you said, I get the feeling that the WordPress community has begun to address it. And the way it’s being addressed is through these educational initiatives. Trying to get a throughput of younger talent. So get them at the school age, get them at the university age, and then hopefully they will have an interest. They’ll get a flavor of what it means to be involved in these Meetups and things like that and hopefully take those on.\n\n\n\nIt’s a laudable goal. I hope that it has the capacity to transfer. You know, so in a decade’s time we can look back and say, look what happened. This young blood emerged. I think it’s yet to be seen. I think certainly in the area, the locale where I am, the United Kingdom, we don’t see evidence of that yet. Maybe in the US that would also mirror.\n\n\n\nBut from everything that I’ve learned and the people that I’ve talked to for this podcast and events in Asia and places like that, that seems to be a really different picture. There seems to be a real thirst for solutions like WordPress. Because there’s a direct kind of career path there. You know, you can pick up a free piece of open source software, crack open a laptop and get going and start to sell your services far and wide. And so again, there’s no question there, just observations that I hope these initiatives bear fruit. But it’ll be interesting to see. Only time will tell.\n\n\n\n[00:31:16] Jonathan Desrosiers: I think at the root of what we’re dealing with is that people are motivated by what they see as valuable, right? If they’re not going out to events, so they’re not engaging with the community, they don’t recognise or feel that it’s valuable to them in some way. And so we’re having to reprove why communities are valuable, why open source is valuable, why you should care.\n\n\n\nAnd then the other aspect of it is, you know, overall project sustainability. We can’t just keep getting older. We need to have a balance of new, younger people that get involved as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so one way to lean into getting younger is obviously, like you said, to approach people at schooling age, right? Or university, and teach them about open source. Show them how to contribute, how to be a part of a community, and why it’s valuable. But we have to be really careful because we need to be prepared to, I’ve written in the past that we need to be prepared to activate these contributors, right?\n\n\n\nSo it’s one thing to make them aware of this, but it’s another thing to make sure they’re properly supported and we give them pathways to grow. We give them clear criteria to be successful, clear projects to work on, so they understand what they’re doing and what they’re trying to accomplish.\n\n\n\nAnd I think that this is one thing that is also a benefit of having the releases coincide with these major events because new people are getting together already, so why not use that opportunity?\n\n\n\nOne of the goals that every table lead and every organiser of a Contributor Day has is to ensure as many contributors see, realise their work over the finish line. And so on the Core team that’s a patch that someone tests gets committed, or a patch someone writes gets committed to WordPress, right? How can we make that more valuable, where it’s not just ending when they leave Contributor Day?\n\n\n\nAnd so I’ve been thinking about all the different logistics and helping to coordinate with the WordCamp Asia team and the 7.0 release team to make sure we’re prepared for that final day. And one of the things I’ve been thinking about is the release process itself. One of the best, lowest friction ways to get involved with WordPress in the actual release process. And you don’t need any experience contributing to really take part in it. And that’s when we get to a point where we say, okay, here’s the zip file of what we think we’re going to ship, go test it.\n\n\n\nAnd so people will take it, and they install it on their server and they say which version of PHP they’re using, and how they installed it and what they did and, you know, it worked. And the majority of that though is just looking for problems. And when problems don’t come up, we just don’t do anything with all the information that people are dropping, right? And there might be 50 people at a major release. We call them parties, but at the release parties that are dropping information. And again, if there’s no red flags, that information just largely goes away.\n\n\n\nBut, how can we rethink that and make that effort more meaningful, and also create a pathway for them to continue contributing in some way past that moment? And having everybody in person is a great way to have pilot programs for different approaches, because there can be someone that briefs a set of contributors on what we’re going to try this time, here’s what we want to do, give us feedback on how you felt it went. Everybody that’s involved in the squad and doing the release can say, oh yeah, that actually was really helpful and better than what we do before.\n\n\n\nAnd these newer individuals that are learning also have fresh perspective. And so having them participate in these, I guess I’ll call them experiments of such, but just these processes and things that we are considering, it helps get that fresh opinion and perspective on why things are working and why things aren’t and helps us just improve.\n\n\n\n[00:35:04] Nathan Wrigley: I’ve got three children and they’re all of a certain age now, they’re certainly no longer small. You know, they’re basically adults. And it’s really fascinating looking at the kind of things that engage them. I think they’ve just grown up in a different era. The diet of the kind of things that excite them is very different to the kind of things that excited somebody of my generation, just because, you know, they’ve had the whole world in their pocket ever since they were born.\n\n\n\nAnd having that dialogue with the next generation, and trying to figure out what it is that they want and that they desire. And even things like open source. So when, I was already an adult before the internet began to be put into everybody’s homes, and people started to own personal computers and things like that. And so I was ready to receive that message of open source right at the start. And it became really obvious to me, oh, that’s a really clever way of making software.\n\n\n\nBut now of course we’ve got this landscape of closed platforms. Everything’s free at the point of use, but everything’s not free in any way, shape, or form. You can think of the siloed platforms that I’m talking about. My children have been raised with those and so just even making the argument about open source is hard enough.\n\n\n\nSo I think what I’m really advocating for is, obviously we’ve got to shepherd these people in, but at the same time, I think we have to be willing to let go of a lot of the things that we think the project is. We think the Meetup should contain. We think the WordCamp should maintain. Because at the end of the day, we’re competing for eyeballs and if we don’t make it, I’m going to use the word exciting, if we don’t make it exciting, they’re just not going to show up.\n\n\n\nAnd I feel that’s a piece of the next five, six years, trying to figure out what excites these people. Because unless we do excite them, I fear the Meetups are going to be empty and there’ll be a certain throughput from the WordPress initiatives, Campus Connect and what have you. But we need to make these things exciting, interesting, innovative, fun. But I don’t have an answer to that.\n\n\n\n[00:36:59] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, you touched on something interesting that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. I gave a talk last year about how to implement AI into open source communities while maintaining what makes them great in the first place, which is the human element, right? The community aspects of it.\n\n\n\nAnd so I’ve been thinking a lot about just AI and how it’s affecting us. And there’s a few things that I’m really excited about with AI and those are empowerment and learning. And so you can have an AI model that digests massive amounts of information and summarises it in the specific way that you learn best, right?\n\n\n\nAnd likewise, I’m noticing that people feel more empowered to try things themselves because they have more of an ability to distill a lot of information down into something that’s digestible, right?\n\n\n\nAnd so I feel that the tension between those two areas of closed and open is growing. Because when I was growing up, computers were just starting to be less than the size of a car, right? People were starting to have them in their house. But they were still at a point where, the computer went bad, you took it apart and fixed it. You didn’t trade it in for a new one, right?\n\n\n\nAnd so I feel like my generation, there was a level of, we had the tools, but we had to go out and build the things we needed ourselves in some ways, and experiment. And then there’s been the generations between that and now where they pretty much had everything that they needed.\n\n\n\nBut AI is changing what we need, or what we want, and what ways we want it. And so now there’s a new found need to build again in some ways. And in some ways it’s kind of a circle, right? Because it’s, the AI is making it easier to build, but it’s also making you more aware you have to build. It’s kind of like building against itself in certain ways.\n\n\n\nBut I’m finding that there’s more of a willingness to do things on your own, try to tackle something you would typically need to hire a professional to do in the past. You know in many ways we need to lean into that because then that gets people excited. Oh, WordPress, I could use WordPress to build this, or I could use just the WordPress for just the database part of it and the REST API and have some type of application on it because it scales well and it caches or whatever it may be.\n\n\n\nBut I feel like people are starting to scoff at the walled gardens a little bit more, and I’m seeing that there’s a resurgence in things like RSS. I’m seeing new RSS readers are popping up. People are leaning towards the Fediverse. People are blogging more, having their own website instead of just their business on Facebook, right? Because that can get taken away.\n\n\n\nWe saw with Twitter how they just chose to close their platform. And embeds no longer work in WordPress because they shut down oEmbeds. And I feel like it changes every month, but there’s times where you have to log in to see a post, or you can’t see a post, or you can see one post and then you can’t see any more that’s shared externally. Yeah, so it gives you more control.\n\n\n\n[00:40:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. And I also noticed that swing. Obviously, I don’t have any broader data. I can only point to the things in my life, the little intuitions that I’m gaining. But I see the same thing. I see an interest in AI, so we’ll just put that to one side for a moment. But in terms of the closed platforms, I do see that the people that I know who are significantly younger than me, they have intuitions around that, and they’ve kind of figured out for themselves that this is not great. It seems to be a vehicle to serve me ads, and I wonder what the incentive is for the stuff that I’m seeing, and maybe it’s kind of pushing me off in one direction politically and all of that.\n\n\n\nAnd yeah, this resurgence of RSS, of the blog. I know it’s hard to talk about, but it’s almost like we’re doing some sort of archaeology in the internet space. We’ve gone back to something older. We kind of dug up the relics from the past and we found that they’re still usable. They’re still there.\n\n\n\nIt’ll be so interesting. But I think if it was just the RSS and it was just the open nature of things, I think that’s going to be a hard sell. But throw AI into the mix, this capacity for somebody with very little relationship with writing code who can get something credible out. Now, it may not be robust, it may have security problems here and there. The accessibility may be something that needs to be addressed and what have you. But who can argue with the excitement of it.\n\n\n\nYou know, you tell a computer to make a colourful website that’s got rainbows and pictures of cats, and sure enough, two minutes later you have a website with rainbows and pictures of cats. And that wasn’t possible until just a couple of years ago. And so I think we’ve got the tools. I think there’s things that we can deploy. AI seems to be the primary one at the moment. Let’s hope that that continues to be sustainable.\n\n\n\nBut that’s interesting. That gives me some hope. And the way that you’ve encapsulated it, open source combined with things like AI. Trying to get Meetups back. Trying to combine it with educational initiatives. Trying to combine it with WordCamps and releases.\n\n\n\n[00:41:52] Jonathan Desrosiers: You mentioned something that’s important there in that it’s very easy for someone to get something built that they need specifically, right? And I think that’s where we’re at right now where AI is, like I said, is empowering, but more on a personal level. Once you need to scale those things, that’s when it gets difficult.\n\n\n\nAnd it’s a rollercoaster of, oh my God, there’s going to be no software. And then, oh, look at all this crappy software that AI built. We are always going to have a job. And then it’s like up and down all throughout time as new tools get released. And it definitely matches what I’m seeing is like the personal empowerment level, they could take that and run with it and build this really massive thing, or they could just build something that they just want, that does specifically what they want, that they haven’t found out there that it accomplishes.\n\n\n\nAnd I think that another aspect of that is I’m noticing that a lot of people that you may not have thought would try things in the physical world on their own are more likely to do so as well. So maybe changing their faucet, or doing a landscaping project or something. I feel like we’ve had YouTube tutorials, right, has been a big thing for maybe a decade, right? But I feel like AI has unlocked a new level of empowerment where people feel more confident to try things because of the knowledge that’s available to them in different ways.\n\n\n\n[00:43:09] Nathan Wrigley: The year 2026 is going to be punctuated by WordCamps. It’s going to be punctuated by WordPress releases. Hopefully we will start to see the needle move on educational initiatives, and maybe some younger people joining in with the community.\n\n\n\nThat has been a fascinating chat, Jonathan. I really appreciate that, getting your insight into what I think we both hope is going to happen in the WordPress project. That it will still be relevant in 10 years time, and that there’ll be children who are now, not old enough to be using computers, in a decade, they’ll be coming on podcasts like this, and hosting podcasts like this, and being involved in the community that we love so very much.\n\n\n\nWhere can we find you, Jonathan? If people want to talk to you and have a bit of a natter, where’s the best place to locate you?\n\n\n\n[00:43:48] Jonathan Desrosiers: My website is just jonathandesrosiers.com. I’m desrosej pretty much everywhere on the internet. I try to keep it consistent and easy. And you can also, of course, find me in the wordpress.org Slack.\n\n\n\n[00:44:01] Nathan Wrigley: I will link to all of those in the show notes. So if you go to the wptavern.com website, search for the episode with Jonathan Desrosiers, you’ll be able to find all of the links probably at the bottom underneath the transcript and the preamble. Go and have a look down there and hopefully we’ll be speaking soon. I’ll probably see you in Mumbai in a few weeks time. Take care, Jonathan.\n\n\n\n[00:44:21] Jonathan Desrosiers: Thank you. Look forward to it, and hopefully I see your listeners there as well.\n\n\n\n\nOn the podcast today we have Jonathan Desrosiers.\n\n\n\nJonathan has been involved with WordPress for almost two decades, both as a user and a contributor. He\u2019s a principal software engineer at Bluehost, where his role sees him sponsored to work on WordPress through the Five for the Future program. Over the years, he\u2019s become a Core committer, and has spent many hours thinking about how to enhance the contributor experience and make it easier for people to get involved in the project.\n\n\n\nIn this episode we discuss how WordPress releases might be made more impactful by synchronizing them with flagship community events like WordCamps and State of the Word. A recent experiment of combining a major release with a live event sparked some excitement, and Jonathan shares insights on the logistics behind such synchronized moments, the challenges posed by international holidays and regional scheduling, and the broader vision for connecting releases with community gatherings.\n\n\n\nWe also get into the changing landscape of the WordPress community, how it\u2019s recovering from the effects of COVID, the struggle to rebuild local Meetups, and efforts (like mentorship and educational initiatives) to bring in new contributors, particularly from younger generations. Jonathan reflects on the importance of making release moments engaging and fun, akin to the anticipation of a new TV series or software launch, and the role of AI and open source in empowering a new wave of builders.\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re interested in how release cycles, community events, and contributor onboarding are evolving in WordPress, or what the future might hold for the platform and its community, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\nJonathan’s website\n\n\n\nJonathan on WordPress.org\n\n\n\nJonathan on X\n\n\n\nBluehost\n\n\n\nFive for the Future\n\n\n\nState of the Word 2025 recap\n\n\n\nWP Campus Connect\n\n\n\nWordPress Credits\n\n\n\nMary Hubbard on the importance of education – Big Picture Goals for 2026\n\n\n\nFediverse", "date_published": "2026-02-25T10:00:00-05:00", "date_modified": "2026-02-26T02:05:35-05:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/206-Jonathan-Desrosiers-on-WordPress-Sustainability-Community-Engagement-and-Release-Strategies.jpg", "tags": [ "community", "meetups", "podcast", "releases", "wordcamp" ], "summary": "In this episode, Nathan Wrigley speaks with Jonathan Desrosiers about tying WordPress releases to flagship community events like WordCamps. They discuss the logistical challenges, especially around scheduling, international holidays, and global contributor coverage. The conversation explores the evolving WordPress community, impacts of COVID, renewed excitement for building, and initiatives to involve younger contributors. They touch on the role of AI, resurgence in open web tools, and ensuring WordPress remains relevant and exciting for future generations.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2371244/c1e-q4m0mu7pj3gij98o5-9jwpvm3kfm0v-ewmafm.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=202688", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/205-matt-cromwell-on-redefining-wordpress-product-growth-in-a-crowded-ecosystem", "title": "#205 \u2013 Matt Cromwell on Redefining WordPress Product Growth in a Crowded Ecosystem", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, redefining WordPress product growth in a crowded ecosystem.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Matt Cromwell. Matt has been an influential figure in the WordPress ecosystem for many years. He co-founded GiveWP, led its growth, and continued his journey as part of the StellarWP leadership after it was acquired.
\n\n\n\nRecently, Matt has shifted gears, launching something new. It’s called Roots and Fruit, and is an agency dedicated to helping WordPress product businesses thrive. In recent years, WordPress has gone through a period of flux. There’s been shifting stats about WordPress’s market share, tightening budgets, and increasing competition from both within and outside the.org plugin repo. Despite these changes, Matt remains optimistic about the opportunities for product makers, especially as WordPress evolves alongside emerging technologies like AI.
\n\n\n\nMatt starts off by sharing his background, his experience with GiveWP, and the unique perspective he gained navigating growth, crisis, and the challenges facing plugin developers. We then talk about how the WordPress product space has matured. Why building a plugin, or theme, and hoping users will simply discover it is no longer enough, and how focusing on the customer journey, branding, and marketing is more crucial than ever.
\n\n\n\nMatt is now positioning himself as a mentor and guide for solo founders and product teams, helping them prioritize growth efforts, refine their product experience, and avoid the scattered approach that many developers fall into. He brings practical insights from years of hand-on experience, and explains why a successful WordPress product business relies on process, diligence, and wise prioritization, not just code and hope.
\n\n\n\nIf you are building digital products in WordPress, and want to learn how to make them stand out in a crowded, competitive ecosystem, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Matt Cromwell.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Matt Cromwell. Hello, Matt.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:22] Matt Cromwell: Hi. Happy to be here.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:24] Nathan Wrigley: Matt and I have chatted many times. In fact, we were having a nice chat just before we realised that the time was going to get away from us. So we’ve diverted and pressed record. We were getting into AI, but we’re going to park that because that’s a whole different episode. Well, maybe not. Maybe there’ll be bits of that leaking into this episode.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:39] Matt Cromwell: It’ll come up.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:39] Nathan Wrigley: I’m sure it will. But as I say, Matt’s been on the podcast before. He has had a significant sort of reshaping of his career in the recent past. And so we’re going to talk a little bit about what the new direction is, and where he’s going to be focusing his efforts in the near to long term.
\n\n\n\nBut Matt, just before we begin, do you want to tell us a little bit about you and what you’ve been doing in the WordPress space these many years?
\n\n\n\n[00:04:01] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Thanks so much. I’m Matt Cromwell. I am was, it’s hard to figure out how to introduce myself anymore. I was co-founder of GiveWP and sold that product in 2021 to Liquid Web and stayed on and came on the leadership team of what became StellarWP, and took all the things I learned from Give and got to apply them across lots of products, in an excellent learning journey.
\n\n\n\nRecently exited back this last fall, 2025, and went on a journey of discovering in what I want to do, and found that I could not prime myself away from the keyboard enough and decided that now’s the time I get to invest my time and efforts and energy in the WordPress product ecosystem like I always have. So I built a new agency called Roots & Fruit, which I have basically said is your fractional chief growth officer agency. I just launched a couple weeks ago and it’s going well. So that’s what I’m doing. That’s how I say it.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I love the domain, by the way. The minute I saw that, I think I got where you were going without even having read a word. Roots & Fruit sort of says it all, doesn’t it? It’s the growth to the actual harvesting at the end. And so we will get into that.
\n\n\n\nCan I just ask you though, we’ll begin this way because we’ve had several years now of flux in the WordPress ecosystem. You have charted the growth of many products in the WordPress space. You’ve been involved in them personally, and you’ve seen the journeys of other founders and what have you.
\n\n\n\nDo you have the same level of optimism that the Matt Cromwell, let’s say from the year 2020, when everything was going gangbusters, that 35% went to 38%, went to 40%, and on it went. Do you have the same level of optimism? Do you think there still is fruit to be harvested in the WordPress space in 2026?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:59] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely I do. There’s a lot of caveats in there, I have to say. Being at GiveWP, we had a unique perspective when it came to things like a pandemic. It was like an internal thing where we were afraid of becoming ambulance chasers, okay? Because, especially in the US, when a crisis would come, suddenly our sales would go through the roof. And it’s because when bad things happen, people need to do fundraising. And the worst thing we wanted to do was start capitalising on trauma or things like that.
\n\n\n\nAnd so when COVID came along, we were like, woah, this is going to be significant. And it was. It was a very significant thing. But we had been through the motions, so we knew that it was going to have a downside on the tail end of it, sales-wise. And I think a lot of folks understood that conceptually as well. But we had experienced it a lot.
\n\n\n\nBut what a lot of folks found out on the tail side of COVID was that the downside was worse than it was pre COVID. A lot of folks felt that, even GiveWP to some extent and several of the Stellar products were like, oh, we’ve leveled out, we’ve come down off of the COVID high, and actually it feels a little bit worse than it was before. Budgets got tight in terms of businesses and agencies, nonprofits, things like that. There’s lots of circumstances to those things. But over the last year or so, a lot of product companies have started to see things start to slowly climb again.
\n\n\n\nBut in the WordPress space, I think it’s important that everybody also look at our ecosystem in the bigger ecosystem of just the web. On the web there are small to medium to large companies launching all the time with huge amounts of success. Just a couple years ago, nobody knew what Lovable was. Now it’s a billion dollar company. Things like that do happen and they happen regularly. That to me means there is still lots of appetite for the kinds of solutions that we are trying to bring to the world through the web. And we can be part of that solution.
\n\n\n\nNow, the conversation you and I had a little bit before was more about like, what about WordPress and the threat or the opportunity of AI? I do think the way in which WordPress Core has been tackling AI and trying to bring tooling into WordPress Core is making sure that WordPress itself as a platform has not only a future, but it has a lucrative future. I think the way that they’re going about it is really smart and really intelligent, and it is going to actually build the platform in a way that makes AI understand how to build with WordPress better than anything else out there.
\n\n\n\nWordPress is the most, one of the most documented, open source projects in the world, and it’s been open source this whole time, and AI loves that kind of stuff. So it just has been able to scrape the WordPress database, the WordPress code, all the WordPress documentation over years and years and years. AI now knows WordPress really, really, really well. So I think there’s lots of opportunity.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no, it’s really great because you covered a lot of ground there. I should say, dear listener, at this point, maybe go and have a look at Matt’s domain. I mentioned it, but I’ll just read it into the record. So it’s Roots with an S. Roots and fruit singular, .com, rootsandfruit.com. So go and check that out. Maybe pause the podcast if you’re at a screen and.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:28] Matt Cromwell: Singular and plural.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:29] Nathan Wrigley: Both. Yeah, you’ve managed to get all the goodness in there. Go and pause the podcast and have a little poke around and you’ll get some intuition as to what Matt is doing over there.
\n\n\n\nI’m going to sort of sidestep a little bit though, because I want to frame this question slightly differently, and that is to, I’ll frame it like this. I, as a consumer of WordPress things, I’ve spent the last 15 or so years pottering around, having a problem, then going to Google and discovering that there’s typically a WordPress plugin or theme or what have you, for that. And then I go to their website and perhaps there’s two or three websites that I might be juggling and thinking which one is superior for the needs that I have. And then I purchase something, you know, I go and I buy a premium version of something or maybe download the free version to give it a test.
\n\n\n\nBut the point is, I have this really abstracted concept of what it is. I’m buying a commodity. So I buy the finished thing and it comes as a zip file, and I typically don’t interact with a human being. And that’s the interesting bit that I want to get into to begin with, is the human behind all of this, which was you for many years.
\n\n\n\nAnd so can we just explore that a little bit? What is the stuff that somebody like you, when you were with GiveWP, but maybe now the clients that you are going to be servicing, what is their day involved with? What do these people do? What are the anxieties they have? What is the stuff that makes up a plugin or theme developer’s life and business?
\n\n\n\n[00:10:55] Matt Cromwell: Generally speaking, product folks are nerds, love to be behind the screen. And they like this kind of industry, specifically because they don’t have to be the person dealing with the customer as much. That distance that goes between the screen basically, is something that gives them a sense of safety, where they get to focus on the work that they love and they enjoy, without having to deal with the noise of the people.
\n\n\n\nThe exception to that are all the folks that are highly motivated to help with technical support. And I love those people. Those are my people. My focus as a founder was more on the customer support and marketing side of things, so I enjoyed being more of the face of things for our brands over the years.
\n\n\n\nBut the allure there is both being able to have that separation from the noise of the public, but also having a little bit of the security of what might be called mildly passive income. And that’s the big difference between folks who are running an agency and folks who love to run product. Agencies are service oriented folks. They have to be with the customer and the client all the time. You are paying for hours. You’re being paid for the time that you put in, in many ways. With agency service work, there’s ways to get away from just purely time-based charging, but by and large.
\n\n\n\nIn the product space, you’re not being paid for the time you put in. You’re being paid for the product, and for the outcomes that the customer experiences. And that’s what you bought Nathan, when you went and bought a utility or a tool or whatnot. You weren’t looking to hire a person, you were looking for a specific outcome on your website, and you felt that that one product could provide you that outcome. And once you had that outcome, you’re happy.
\n\n\n\nAnd that’s exactly why product shops are, in my mind, have to be customer oriented first because all of the success, all of the success of the product, of the marketing, of the business, all starts with whether or not the customer is happy.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. We have this expression in the English language which is, a rising tide carries all boats. And essentially what it means is, when there’s this sort of groundswell of growth, everything touching it grows. And I think we had that in all sorts of ways recently, over the last decade or so.
\n\n\n\nThe mobile phone app ecosystem, that just was taking off and all the developers over there were doing incredibly well. Same with the WordPress space. Just year on year growth. And so there was this notion, which you reference on your website quite a lot, of build it and they will come. And that phrase essentially is, okay, I am one of those people. You said, nerds.
\n\n\n\nI’m going to build a product, and I have a complete expectation that I am part of that rising tide. I’m one of the boats. I’ll build this thing, I’ll mention it a few times on social media, and this thing that I’ve spent hours and hours doing will take off and I will be able to have some kind of passive income from it.
\n\n\n\nNow, I don’t know when you started saying that those days were gone, but you are definitely saying those days are gone. Why are those days gone? What happened? What changed to make it so that the rising tide carries all boats analogy, possibly no longer fits?
\n\n\n\n[00:14:17] Matt Cromwell: It depends on the context. I mean, it fits in several different ways. But when it comes to product in the WordPress space nowadays, we used to depend so much on the wordpress.org plugin, or theme, directory as a primary outlet for discoverability. I want people to find that I exist and that I am a solution for their problems, and this is where you find me.
\n\n\n\nThe plugin directory in particular, when we launched GiveWP, I think there were 30,000 plugins at the time, or approaching 30,000. And now there’s over 60, and they are growing every day more or less. They grow and they shrink. They get rid of plugins too, actually. But that does increase the amount of surface area where you have to break through in order to be found. If you try to be an AI alt text generator right now, good luck. There are three dozen of those that got shipped yesterday. It’s crazy.
\n\n\n\nBut even more so than just the noise and the volume on the plugin directory, it’s also that the consumers that are building their websites, they are not thinking about WordPress as much anymore. They’re building with WordPress, but they kind of don’t care that it’s WordPress. They’re just building a website. They have specific outcomes and they know that there are lots of products out there that can serve their needs, and they don’t care if it’s a SaaS, or a platform, or a plugin, or a theme. They don’t care. They’re just going to look for that outcome and they’re going to plug it into their website in one form or another, if that solution is pluggable.
\n\n\n\nAnd that space, the SaaS space in particular, has gotten a lot more crowded and a lot more competitive for being applied directly to the WordPress customer. So we’re not just competing WordPress to WordPress, we’re competing WordPress to the rest of the whole world.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s interesting. So my analogy, when I said a rising tide carries all boats, what I’m imagining 10 years ago is that there was a really nice looking harbor with a few little boats. And the tide came up and these little boats just bobbed along and they all rose up. Whereas now it feels like the harbor is just chockablock. There’s boats cheek by jowl with other boats. They’re slamming into each other. And instead of it being a gentle rise, it’s stormy, clouds. The sea is choppy all over the place, and everything is sort of bumping into each other.
\n\n\n\nIn other words, it’s saturated. If you are going to be doing the alt text plugin for AI, well, there were six that came out this morning. There’s going to be nine more by the time we close the doors this evening. Whatever it is that you are doing in the WordPress space, chances are somebody’s already done it. They may already have an existing audience. They may already have paid subscribers.
\n\n\n\nSo this all sounds very bleak. It sounds like we’ve got no way out of this. But your endeavor, what you want to turn your attention to in the years to come, is to persuade people that’s not the case. So what is the rainbow? What is the shining light on the horizon? How would a plugin developer, a theme developer, somebody in the WordPress space, how do they cut through all of this and get noticed?
\n\n\n\n[00:17:28] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. A lot of things have changed over the years, but I would say the majority of things, when it comes to digital products, have not changed. And that’s really the brass tacks of what it takes to be a winning product on the web in general. SaaS companies have known this for a really long time because they didn’t have the obvious distribution channel of wordpress.org that we have.
\n\n\n\nSo they knew if they were going to ship a product, they’re going to have to market it a ton. In the SaaS space, there’s very, very, very few just handy developers who are like, hey, I just built this cool thing, I’ll just put it out there. And then all of a sudden it just goes off like crazy. It doesn’t work that way, and they know it. And so they partner up with marketers.
\n\n\n\nAnd in the WordPress space, for way too long, we got lazy because we had the .org distribution channel. And we assumed that we could build it and people would come. And that’s not like one hundred percent wrong. The directory is still a good tool, and it’s still helpful, and I love the freemium model for products in general. But the thing that WordPress product folks in particular have to learn is to learn how to be a product business, not a code business.
\n\n\n\nAnd that’s even more significant now that everyone is learning that code was never the product, because now nobody is building with code anymore. The humans do not build the code anymore. The machines build the code. And you’ll find lots of marketers or CX folks who are building their own apps now as well because they’re savvy enough to use the tools to be able to generate the code that they need and that they want.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:11] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just pause for a second there Matt, is that all right? Just because there’s a couple of things that you said, and clearly for you it’s common knowledge. You know, you’ve been in and out of this all the whole time. You painted a strong definition there between a product and code. What’s the boundary between those two things? I mean, I think I can encapsulate, I just want to be clear that the audience know. What’s the difference between product and code businesses, if you know what I mean?
\n\n\n\n[00:19:33] Matt Cromwell: Let’s go back to when you said, I’m building my website and I have a problem that needs to be solved, and I see this plugin and it solves my problem. And I installed it, or I bought it and I installed it and it worked. That process that you went through, all of those things that you said, you never once said, I inspected the code to figure out if it was good enough or not. You never once said that. All of the things that convinced you to use that product had nothing to do with the code at all.
\n\n\n\nYou went to the website and there was marketing involved that told you that we know what your problem is, and we know how to solve it. And there was a checkout experience that was calm and soothing enough and giving you enough confidence that they’re not just stealing your money. Then you installed the product and there was a user experience involved that made you feel like it’s actually going to solve your problem, and then it did actually solve your problem. All of those things cannot happen without code, but that is what a product does. And that’s a product experience, is the whole entire customer journey that happens from discovery, to purchase, to adoption is what a product is actually made of.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:43] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m going to infer from that then that from the year 2026 and onwards, what you are saying is that the focus now needs to be on the product. More than ever, the product and the way that you market the product and the way that you pitch the product, and all of the things that wrap around the sales process and the discovery process of the product. That’s where a significant amount of the effort needs to go once the code is in place. Have I parsed that correctly?
\n\n\n\n[00:21:11] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, I might even go at it from the perspective of the customer because you only understand the product when you look at that whole thing through the lens of the customer. If you think about everything from, oh, I can build that, I just need to pipe these APIs and do this kind of thing, and then you get the outcome, it’s like, well that’s not really what the customer’s ever going to experience.
\n\n\n\nThey’re going to experience a website first. They’re going to try to have trust first. Look at the whole thing through the customer lens and then you’ll start to understand your product. I mean, you’ll understand your brand in the first place. A lot of WordPress folks don’t think about brand particularly well either. They just name it like Advanced Custom Fields. Now, I love that product. It’s a great, but it’s one of those things where like, let’s just name it what it is. Okay, I guess.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:04] Nathan Wrigley: So this is really interesting. So presumably then, if product is the way forward, it feels like you have now kind of invented a new career angle for yourself where you are going to hopefully kind of helicopter yourself in, or be helicoptered in, to businesses who maybe have got this product bit missing. You know, there are bits of that they, I don’t know, maybe they feel that they’re weak on that, or that past endeavors haven’t really worked out. Or maybe they’re at the first step of that journey and they just want to try and figure out what direction they should point themselves in to have some success.
\n\n\n\nSo that’s kind of interesting. That’s the role that you are going to be taking on in the future. And I can see you nodding. Dear listener, he’s nodding away, so that’s good. But, do you have like a one size fits all template here, or is the endeavor very much to be, okay, I’m going to go in, have a long listen, figure out how you differ from the other people that are on my roster? There’s not really a question in there, but I’m kind of asking you how you are going to position yourself for the different clients that you’re no doubt going to be taking on.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:06] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, yeah, Well, one thing I’ll caveat a little bit is I’m trying to position myself towards two related audiences. The primary one, for the fractional CGO, is the teams. Product shops that are a team of people. A small team, medium sized team. They’ve built something, it’s successful, they are paying employees, but they’re looking for that next level up, in order to start growing into what they hope to be, more sustainable growth in the long term.
\n\n\n\nThe other one is what I call the solo lab, where I am trying to position more towards solo individual founders who are by themselves and maybe just got their product out the door and are trying to grow from the ground up. That’s more of like a coaching environment and it’s a group environment and things like that. But both of them are, it’s not that there’s a, I don’t believe really in playbooks. I don’t believe in silver bullets. I believe in process and diligence.
\n\n\n\nAnd that’s what I am trying to bring in both of those circumstances is I help the solo folks understand the type of activities that they have to force themselves to do. The solo folks typically are very dev oriented. They know how to build more things. And if you ask them to write a blog post, they’re like, okay, I’ll do that tomorrow and tomorrow never comes. You know, helping them to focus on the work that they have to do to grow their product.
\n\n\n\nWhile the teams, it’s more generally about, they have founders who have done all the things. They have been the dev, they have been the HR lead, they have been the marketer, they have been the support guru. They’ve done all of it, and they’re just tired. And they need the growth but there’s just a missing gap. They need somebody to kind of put on the hat of, you are going to be responsible for finding growth in this team, so that that founder can focus more on other parts, the things that energise them more.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:59] Nathan Wrigley: I’m curious as to whether or not, when you were doing the busy work of being at GiveWP and then StellarWP, whether you drew the intuitions that you are now going to be helping people with. Whether you were aware of this in your head, or it was just the busy work that you were doing. You know, day in, day out, you do this task and over the decade or more that you were doing it, you just kind of perfected it. And, okay, when this thing arises, I do this thing. And when this thing arises, I do this thing.
\n\n\n\nNow I expect you’re in that curious position where you are having to lift yourself away from the whole process, stare back at it, and sort of examine how you would do it with a third party. Again, there’s no real question there, but I’m curious as to how different that is for you being the outsider, but relying on the insider knowledge that you must have acquired over time.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:49] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. I think that’s one of the reasons why I felt a certain amount of confidence in moving in this direction is because I’m helping people that are in the position I was in years ago. I’ve been there and I have done that, and I have absolutely failed. And I don’t have a perfect record or a perfect playbook, but I know what it’s like, and I have done the hard work to see successes.
\n\n\n\nI think what also makes my experience a little bit unique is that I had the experience of GiveWP and I honestly, going into being acquired and working at Liquid Web, I had that whole feeling of like, what if I’m a one hit wonder? What if I like did a great job with Give, but I try to apply this anywhere else and it just is like, well you got lucky with Give, that doesn’t work anywhere else? And it turns out that most of the things that I learned can be applied to other products with success as well. It does give me a fair amount of confidence that I do believe I can be helpful with these other shops.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:50] Nathan Wrigley: You’re not sort of saying there’s a formula, you know, that kind of snake oil mentality. But there are wise things to do and less wise things to do. Let’s just put it that way. And by repeating the wise things over and over again, you give yourself kind of a fighting.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:05] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, and there’s a process and there’s also the ability to form smart priorities. That’s, I think, a lot of what I’m trying to help provide is being able to help founders learn how to say no to a lot of things. Because sometimes, especially when it comes to anything that’s growth oriented or marketing oriented, we see a million opportunities. And so then we start dabbling in all the things because we don’t know what else to do.
\n\n\n\nWe’re like, oh, there’s like, I can go and jump into Reddit and find a whole bunch of leads, or I can like spend a bunch of time on LinkedIn, or I could write a whole bunch of really good emails, or I can maybe do a paid ad campaign. And then we start doing just like a million small things. But that doesn’t lead to growth, you know? So the ability to prioritise around growing rather than noise and activity.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:57] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s just really nice to be able to put down the scatter gun. You know, that thing that you’re firing tiny pellets in a million different directions. But you put the scatter gun down because somebody says, put the gun down because that’s not effective, and here’s why it’s not effective, and here’s some things that you could do to try which might be more effective.
\n\n\n\nThere’s just something nice in listening to the words of wisdom coming out of somebody else’s mouth who’s obviously been there, done that. It’s kind of hard to put that into words, but just knowing that somebody’s got your back, and that somebody’s been through that before. And the million, gazillion little things that you are trying without a great deal of success are things that you can put away and listen to your advice.
\n\n\n\nI feel that you’ve hit a real vein of, well, let’s go fruit. You’ve got that in the title of your business. And the reason I say that, and I’ve said this in this podcast a few times before, it really does feel like there are an awful lot of people who have done the code side of things in our ecosystem. They are, as you’ve described, you know, you used the word nerd or something like that. They have built this thing with very little thought for the business side of it because WordPress, for many people, has been like this sort of hobby thing, this passive income thing, this side gig kind of thing. But they don’t know how to do it. And I get email, no doubt you get email, and certainly will be getting email, about this kind of thing. And so I feel that there is a real undercurrent of people who hopefully will tap into your service. Let’s hope so anyway.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:29] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, let’s hope so. So far, so good. I’ve already secured a couple folks.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:33] Nathan Wrigley: In which case, we’re sort of around the half an hour mark, which is exactly perfect. So I will just point the people to the domain once more. It is rootsandfruit.com. Go check that out. Where would we find you, apart from the contact us form, which no doubt exists on that website? Where might we find you elsewhere online, Matt?
\n\n\n\n[00:29:52] Matt Cromwell: I have been on LinkedIn a lot. So look for Matt Cromwell on LinkedIn. You can also look for Roots & Fruit on LinkedIn. That’s kind of where I prefer, but I’m also on the nefarious x.com as learnwithmattc.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:06] Nathan Wrigley: Well, good luck with the new adventure, Matt. I really hope it works out well and, yeah, speak to you soon.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:12] Matt Cromwell: Thanks.
\nOn the podcast today we have Matt Cromwell.
\n\n\n\nMatt has been an influential figure in the WordPress ecosystem for many years. He co-founded GiveWP, led its growth, and continued his journey as part of the StellarWP leadership after it was acquired. Recently, Matt has shifted gears, launching something new. It\u2019s called Roots and Fruit, and is an agency dedicated to helping WordPress product businesses thrive.
\n\n\n\nIn recent years, WordPress has gone through a period of flux. There\u2019s been shifting stats about WordPress\u2019 market share, tightening budgets, and increasing competition from both within and outside the .org plugin repo. Despite these changes, Matt remains optimistic about the opportunities for product makers, especially as WordPress evolves alongside emerging technologies like AI.
\n\n\n\nMatt starts off by sharing his background, his experience with GiveWP, and the unique perspective he gained navigating growth, crisis, and the challenges facing plugin developers. We then talk about how the WordPress product space has matured, why building a plugin or theme and hoping users will simply discover it is no longer enough, and how focusing on the customer journey, branding, and marketing is more crucial than ever.
\n\n\n\nMatt is now positioning himself as a mentor and guide for solo founders and product teams, helping them prioritise growth efforts, refine their product experience, and avoid the scattered approach that many developers fall into. He brings practical insights from years of hands-on experience, and explains why a successful WordPress product business relies on process, diligence, and wise prioritisation, not just code and hope.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re building digital products in WordPress and want to learn how to make them stand out in a crowded, competitive ecosystem, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the hidden settings page you never knew existed, options.php.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast, player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Russell Aaron. Russell is a longtime WordPress enthusiast, power user since 2004, and developer since 2011. He’s organized WordCamp Las Vegas, played a key role in the Las Vegas WordPress meetup group for years, and is dedicated to helping beginners find their feet in the WordPress world. Support has been his main focus throughout his career, always keeping the needs of newcomers in mind.
\n\n\n\nIf you’ve ever wondered about the lesser known corners of the WordPress admin, today’s episode will be right up your street. Russell introduces a hidden feature, the little explored options which is accessible from your site’s WP admin area. Many seasoned users, including myself, have never heard of it, but this page exposes the entirety of your WordPress options table in an editable format. We talk about what this page does, why it exists, and the ways it can be both helpful and hazardous.
\n\n\n\nRussell shares his own use cases, how it can be useful for plugin development and database management, but we also discuss concerns around its discoverability, and the risks of making changes without understanding the consequences.
\n\n\n\nIt’s a short episode, but there’s a lot in here for anyone curious about WordPress’ inner workings, or eager to learn about hidden tools that most people don’t stumble upon. So if you fancy poking around behind the scenes, or have ever wondered what might be right under your nose in WordPress, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you can find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you. Russell Aaron.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Russell Aaron. Hello Russell.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:02] Russell Aaron: Hello. Thank you.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:03] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. I didn’t know Russell until just a few minutes ago, but we’ve probably spent, I don’t know, 20 minutes or so already, just shooting the breeze. And I’m getting to know you a little bit. But it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
\n\n\n\nI put a tweet out, or whatever you call it on X these days, a couple of days ago, asking if anybody had an interesting topic. And what you are going to hear about today is what Russell came back with, and I had no idea this thing existed. So let’s get into that in a minute, but it’s very curious. Stay tuned.
\n\n\n\nBut Russell, would you mind just telling us a little bit about your, what I now know is a long and storied history with WordPress. Just tell us all about yourself.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:40] Russell Aaron: Sure. My name is Russell Aaron. Nice to meet everyone. I’m a WordPress enthusiast and a fan, first and foremost. That is what keeps me coming back to WordPress every day. I’ve been a power user since 2004. I’ve been a developer since 2011. I organised WordCamp Las Vegas 2015 and then our meetup, I was a co-organiser from 2011 all the way up to 2018 or so. So I’ve been around, I’ve spoken at many WordCamps and stuff like that.
\n\n\n\nI’ve worked at all the places, all the things. I mean, you know, yet another WordPress developer shop is just like the plugins, yet another, whatever. But I’ve mostly been doing support for my entire WordPress career. And I always like to take things back, even though I’ve been using it for X amount of years, I still like to learn what it’s like to be a beginner walking into WordPress. Because no matter what, we always have beginners coming in and they need help. They need to be pointed, where to go, who to see. And I kind of own that side of the world when it comes to like what I do. I’m very beginner friendly.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:52] Nathan Wrigley: Do you still get the same excitement? I remember the first time I ever opened up WordPress, which was probably something like 2014, something like that. So I was definitely not right at the beginning. I was much later to the party than a lot of people. But I’d been using Drupal and Magento and things like that.
\n\n\n\nI remember getting really excited, like genuinely looking around thinking, oh, and it can do this. And then, you know, a week later, oh, and it can do this. And on and on that went. At some point, that level of curiosity, it never really left me, but I kind of managed to learn the things I needed to learn. But then that was just because I was doing stuff that I needed to do.
\n\n\n\nBut if you’re in a role where you communicate with customers, presumably that’s a never ending conveyor belt of new things that you’re constantly having to learn, because some curious person comes up and says, I’ve broken it in this way, and you’ve got to figure all that out. So long question, but are you still excited about it?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:42] Russell Aaron: I’ve had this saying, and I say it every day when I sit down is, the hardest thing I have to do is log into WP admin. From there, I’ll figure everything else out. Make a backup is number one. Second thing is, the hardest thing I have to do is log into WP Admin. And you know what really gets me excited is, you know, you have a blog, I have a blog, and essentially we do the same thing, but underneath the hood, how we got to the same point, those are different paths. You use this caching plugin, I use this caching plugin. You use Yoast, I use Rank Math. So the different configurations and stuff like that, that’s what keeps me coming back. And that’s why I’m in support.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, this almost kind of infinite permutations of ways that you can do WordPress. And I guess if you’re like me and you’re just using it on a few sites, that’s fairly trivial. But if you, like you, you’re having to support every possible permutation, oh.
\n\n\n\nOkay, so as I said, I went out on X and I suggested that if anybody would like to get in touch and put themselves on the WP Tavern Jukebox Podcast, fire me a message back. And very quickly Russell came to me with this. And I have no idea, I had no idea that this was even a thing.
\n\n\n\nLike I said, I’ve been using WordPress for over a decade. I didn’t know there was a page that you can navigate to, once you are logged into the WP Admin. So, okay, we’ve logged in, and then if you append options.php to the end of your WP admin URL, so example.com/wp-admin/options.php. Maybe pause the podcast. If you’re logged in, go there, click return, then move away from the keyboard.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:24] Russell Aaron: Yeah, don’t touch it.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:25] Nathan Wrigley: Don’t touch the keyboard. I didn’t know this existed. Tell us, what the heck is this?
\n\n\n\n[00:07:31] Russell Aaron: I mean, just like you, you know, I’ve been knee deep in WordPress and installing it when it was the famous five minute install, you know, and Custom Post Types before they were cool. And still, same thing is, it was something that was shown to me a very, very long time ago. But what I like to imagine is that WordPress, when it first got started, it was always user forward, so they wanted to show you either what was on the page or what was in the Post. And so options PHP, or wp-admin/options with an s, you have to add the s, but .php, it basically spits out your entire options table.
\n\n\n\nSo from your database, it spits out your entire options table onto one page. And I mean, depending on how big your options table is, you can have a very small page or, you know, I’m still scrolling. I can doom scroll on my options page and just keep going. But it’s one of those things that I believe was there from the beginning to help you see maybe some information that’s in your database and then, you know, like you could tweak things. And then a database admin, or whatever tools you have on your host to see your database, you know, stuff like that came out. And I think it’s one of those legacy features that’s just always been there, but it gets ignored all the time.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:58] Nathan Wrigley: No kidding. I mean, basically I’m looking at, not a vanilla WordPress website, but I’m looking at a WordPress website with a third party block-based theme, and maybe four plugins. And the four plugins are not that heavy, as far as I’m concerned. But it says, so I navigated to that in that website. And the page is just entitled, all settings. And then underneath that is the warning. So I shall read that out because this is important.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:21] Russell Aaron: That should be giant H1. Like, I don’t know what a 235 pixel font looks like, it should be that.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:28] Nathan Wrigley: Blinking as well. It says, this page allows direct access to your site settings, you can break things here. Please be cautious. And then it’s just two columns. On the left it’s just the name of the key. And then on the other side, the value. And so it’s just a list of things on one side, a list of things on the other. Now obviously the key is uneditable. It just shows it to you. But more or less, now that’s not entirely the case, but more or less every value is editable, meaning that, I don’t know, if some of this was particularly important. Let’s start at the top. I’ve got the admin email. You know, if I change that I’m going to lock myself out if I don’t remember what I’m doing.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:07] Russell Aaron: Or emails are going to go to the wrong place.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:08] Nathan Wrigley: Emails are going to go to the wrong place. And then it goes down, and you’ve basically dumped yourself in the options table. So it’s like you’re in, I don’t know, some sort of database manager, phpMyAdmin or something like that. But there it is inside of WordPress.
\n\n\n\nNow you mentioned it’s probably a legacy. Do you think it should be here anymore? Because so much of this is exposed in such an easy to fiddle way, that it strikes me that somebody could easily go in here, not really know what they’re doing, amend something, delete something, click return, and bork the website entirely.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:43] Russell Aaron: I mean, it’s not a bad idea. If you have a database plugin and it’s active, and for whatever reason that lets some kind of intrusion in, yeah, somebody could get into that information and start wreaking some havoc. And so it would be one of those things where, maybe it should be optionable or maybe it should be stepped into a plugin itself.
\n\n\n\nBut I mean, I’m also not against it either. For what it’s done, I’ve never really heard of this page being the cause for whatever malware or whatever Core file is being overwritten. Like it’s usually, knock on wood, it’s usually a plugin that allowed some kind of intrusion or just a bad code that allowed something, and it’s never really been like, well, this site was hacked and it went to this file.
\n\n\n\nSo it seems to be okay. But it’s probably, what I would say is it’s the biggest difference. Because like when you write a plugin and you submit it to wordpress.org, they’re going to go through it with a fine tooth comb and they’re just going to make sure that things are working. They want a tool tip or they want some kind of explanation of like, what this field does. But you go here to this page and it’s just kind of key, pair, and it doesn’t say like, well, this value comes from here, or changing this. Like, there’s no information on it whatsoever, you know? It’s one of those things where like, I see WordPress has a default standardisation of how they want things done, but then you come to this page and none of it’s there.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so as an example, so if you scroll down, I’ve just literally scrolled down and there’s hundreds and hundreds of entries. And I’ve ended up at fresh_site. Now that has zero, a value of zero. I have no idea what that does. I don’t know what would happen if I turned the zero into a one, but there it is. Right above it is finished updating comment type. That’s got a one. And you are right, there’s absolutely no text in any of the fields to give you any indication.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:43] Russell Aaron: Other than like site URL like, you know, you kind of know what that is. But everything else, yeah. Unless you kind of know what that key, or what that pair is supposed to be, yeah, you really have no idea.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:53] Nathan Wrigley: And there’s no way of knowing that other than presumably going out and finding it. And so that in itself is quite curious. Just the idea that this entire list of things doesn’t give you some sort of helping hand to kind of say, okay, this one in particular, be mindful of this one. This one’s very important, or at least, here’s what it does. There’s none of that. So it’s just curious.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:13] Russell Aaron: Well, I mean even with the Core post types that come with the Core install, they have that documented. I think there’s seven now, Core post types. And out of seven of those, three are hidden, you know? You have the menu stuff. And even that, I wouldn’t expect it, but I would say that when you install just a very basic install WordPress, you set it up for the first time, no themes, no plugin, you just spun it up.
\n\n\n\nAt least that page should say all the default stuff that’s there. When the database gets created, wp-options table is created, these values go in. I would maybe hope that a default thing of just says like, this is a default field, or this is a default option that gets installed and here’s what it does. But again, there’s just none of that.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:59] Nathan Wrigley: No, no. So again, caveat emptor. Right at the top, obey the warning. Don’t modify anything in here.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:04] Russell Aaron: Right. Mind the gap, that’s for sure.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:06] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I say don’t modify anything. Presumably it’s there so that things can be modified. And so I guess my question to you is, you’ve brought this to my attention, have you found a use for this? Have you ever been in there and, is it like a daily thing that you are fiddling with? What’s the purpose?
\n\n\n\n[00:14:22] Russell Aaron: I can tell you my use case. And I think for me, it’s not being lazy, but I don’t want to have a SQL program running on my computer, or I don’t want to have phpMyAdmin up, and I have to refresh and go to page two to find my option or whatever. What I like is that I have been rebuilding some of my plugins. And some of my plugins set options. And so when you deactivate my plugin, I have a uninstall.php file that should remove information from the database, right?
\n\n\n\nSo that’s where I go to check, is my plugin doing its job? Well, let’s go look for this option name. And if I uninstalled and deactivated my plugin and it’s fully gone, but I still see whatever option name, I know my uninstall PHP file didn’t do its job. That’s the biggest use case I have.
\n\n\n\nI have a local site for everything that I develop, like my personal website, I have a local site. All my .org plugins, I have a local site for that where I do development. And that’s the same thing is, I use that option thing and okay, did I set my option? Do I see it? Okay, there it is. Here’s what I see it in the database. Here’s what I can query against. Like, it gives you all that information. All you have to do is one refresh. You don’t have to rebuild your database or go searching through it in like a MySQL kind of program. It’s all just spit out there and you really just, you know, find search and stuff like that. That’s my use case for it.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s no search or filter anything in there. You would have to use the browser search to find the thing that you need. But that’s a really interesting use case of it. And also, thank you for having that feature in your plugins whereby you actually remove the data in the database that, obviously, at the point of uninstall is no longer required. I know why people leave that stuff there, but also it’s quite nice that you make it so that it doesn’t remain.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:21] Russell Aaron: That’s one of those interesting arguments. If I accidentally deactivate WooCommerce, I don’t want my stuff gone. So that shouldn’t have it, but my tiny little plugin that I built for a contest 10 years ago, it should probably remove it’s stuff.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:34] Nathan Wrigley: So obviously you can see that, but again, there’s no way of searching for things. You’d have to manually search through the browser and what have you. Now, the curious thing is, I’ve never stumbled across this, and I’ve clicked every single link in a WordPress install. There’s no doubt I’ve clicked every link multiple times over and over again. Presumably this is not linked from anywhere within the WP Admin at all. And yet when you land on it, the sidebar, the WP admin sidebar ends up at settings, so the settings is highlighted.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:05] Russell Aaron: And settings is expanded.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:08] Nathan Wrigley: Settings is expanded, but it’s not, you know, it’s not a child item which suddenly appears. It’s just settings. So is that true? It’s not linked anywhere.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:15] Russell Aaron: Not that I have found anywhere. Other than people like you and me talking about this, it’s not very spoken about. It’s kind of one of those things where if you know then you know, or if somebody like myself is a developer, they can say, oh yeah, hey, there’s this other thing. But other than that, I mean, it tends to be skipped over from a beginner perspective.
\n\n\n\nLike you said, you’ve been using WordPress for 10 plus years at least. Never been there before. Didn’t even know this thing existed. Now you’re kind of like, what else is there that I don’t know.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:48] Nathan Wrigley: That is exactly where my head has gone, is what else is there that I don’t know about? You know, other curious things that are there.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:53] Russell Aaron: Is there a gold pot at the end of the rainbow? We don’t know.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, some little Easter egg that I never spotted that’s somewhere buried in a menu. Yeah, that would be kind of cool.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:01] Russell Aaron: What if you go to that page and there’s a coupon code for Gravity Forms and it says like, free updates for life because you visited here.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s a great idea. Yeah, okay, so developers hijack this page and add those. No, don’t. Don’t do that. But you were saying earlier that the fact that nobody is really talking about it, I suppose that leads us into the idea that, it’s not really a problem. If this was exposing problems that, let’s say for example, I don’t know, hackers were leveraging, I don’t know quite how they would do that, but you know what I mean. Then presumably this would’ve been pulled out years and years ago because it would be easy to remove this. But presumably it doesn’t have a great attack surface. It’s not widely known about. This is the first time I’ve heard about it, so there it is. It’s going to stay, I presume.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:47] Russell Aaron: I always make the joke that it’s the largest form in WordPress.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it really is.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:53] Russell Aaron: I mean, that’s all it is. It’s a giant form that pulls data. And, you know, you can hit save at the bottom. So it’s the biggest non Gravity Form that you can have in WordPress.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:03] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know if it’s possible for, so for example, the site that I’m logged into, I am an administrator. That’s the account that I’ve got. So the level of permissions is equal to administrator. I’m wondering how far this goes down. So, for example, I don’t know, if I’m a contributor or a subscriber or an editor, I’m guessing that this wouldn’t be available, but I don’t know if you know the answer to that.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:24] Russell Aaron: It’s only, you have to have the manage options permission, which I think is tied to administrator, and I think that’s about it.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:32] Nathan Wrigley: So in that sense it is also, I suppose, fairly secure because it’s hidden behind an administrator account. And by the time an administrator account.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:41] Russell Aaron: If logged in and administrator is true, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:43] Nathan Wrigley: Right. So you can more or less kill the site if you wish to, of your own volition by going to the, and I’m doing air quotes, the normal settings anyway.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:51] Russell Aaron: At that point, you can’t complain. You’re an admin. You did it yourself, you know.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:54] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know if, this isn’t something curious that sort of hopped in like the last five years, six years, something like that? Do you know if this has a history which goes back right to the beginning of WordPress?
\n\n\n\n[00:20:06] Russell Aaron: I would be curious to go figure out when this file was introduced. I want to say, like, if I had to guess, I think it’s at least in 2.0. It might go further back. 2.3 is when I started using WordPress. So I mean, as far as I know, I think it’s that far, but I haven’t actually dove back to see like, when it was introduced.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:28] Nathan Wrigley: Have you ever used it and killed a site accidentally?
\n\n\n\n[00:20:33] Russell Aaron: Yes.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:33] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you have. Oh, go on, tell us. What did you do?
\n\n\n\n[00:20:35] Russell Aaron: So, I see this argument all the time where it is, you know, too many plugins, slow your site down or whatever. There’s actually an option in your database and it, you know, when you activate a plugin, there’s this wide array, it says akismet-1, so it’s active. And then it says jetpack-0, so it’s not active.
\n\n\n\nAnd so it tells you what’s an active plugin and what’s not. And I’ve gone in there and I’ve thought, oh, I’ll just change this value or, can I activate a plugin just by changing this value? And it’s one of those things where, whoops, probably forgot a comma or forgot a period somewhere. I mean, it’s very finicky. I mean, it’s the same thing as editing your database. If you go in there and you make a mistake in your database, it’s going to blow up the site. Same thing with this.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the curious thing about the database, I suppose though, is that obviously not many inexperienced people presumably would be given an administrator account. So there’s that.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:38] Russell Aaron: Hopefully.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:38] Nathan Wrigley: But also they’re never, well, okay, alright. Yeah, I’ll take that back immediately. Well, okay, in an ideal world, an administrator account would not be given to somebody inexperienced. Plus the fact that almost nobody, until now, knew that this whole thing existed. And I bet I get loads of emails saying, we’ve known about this, Nathan, forever. It’s just you that didn’t know about it.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:59] Russell Aaron: No, this is one of those things where like, you show up to WordCamp US and it’s like, what do you know that I don’t know? And you go, have you ever been to options.php? And then people are like, wait, what? It’s one of those things where like, look at the big brain on Russ, it’s one of those kind of things.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:16] Nathan Wrigley: There’s a cabal of just me and you now, and then anybody who’s listened to this podcast. But also, the inexperienced user, presumably wouldn’t have the access to the tooling to use a database tool. So that’s why I find this so amazingly curious, that essentially you’ve just completely listed out everything in an editor. I mean, I could understand it if it just showed what the content of that.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:37] Russell Aaron: Just read only?
\n\n\n\n[00:22:37] Nathan Wrigley: Right, just show what it is and then you could go into a database tool and amend it if you needed to. But the fact that almost everything is editable and saveable, that is the bit that I find so curious.
\n\n\n\nDo you know of other things like this, or is this the only one? What I mean by that is, any curious, hidden Easter egg, strange things inside of WordPress, or is this the one and only?
\n\n\n\n[00:22:59] Russell Aaron: Sure, sure. I mean, as far as I know, I mean there’s other block visibility controls and stuff like that, that aren’t really displayed anywhere. It’s not like you can make those adjustments. But I mean, as far as I know, you know, like that’s all controlled by either the code in a plugin, or by a Core file, or it’s in the options. So I mean, you have both worlds right here. You have a Core file in WordPress showing you your database. This is kind of where it all is.
\n\n\n\nI would also say that I’ve spent many moons looking for my Gravity Forms license or, why is this not updating or whatever? And this is one of those things where, if you’re looking in a database, it’s all kind of black and white, squished, and it’s like tiny little tables that are off color. At least with this, there’s a margin, there’s some padding around things, there’s some gaps. So it’s kind of more user friendly than a database would be.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:00] Nathan Wrigley: Actually that’s a curious way of thinking about it, isn’t it? Because you’re right. If you do go into.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:05] Russell Aaron: You go into phpMyAdmin you’re kind of like.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:07] Nathan Wrigley: It’s not pretty. There are definitely some tools that you can have that make a database a pleasure to look at, but most of the ones that we’re all familiar with, that we use day in, day out, you’re right, they’re hard to use. Also, they have curious dropdowns and inadvertently, you click return on something and suddenly you’ve dropped the table entirely, and we’re in a bit of trouble. So this is at least easy to see.
\n\n\n\nI think we’ve probably used up all the oxygen in terms of this. I’m going to encourage you to go and have a poke around.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:34] Russell Aaron: It’s multi-site as well too, so if you go to a multi-site, you can’t see, like if you go into the backend, it’s per site. So it’s not every database option for the multi-site. But if you go into just the actual network site, yeah, then you could see all that there.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:50] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m going to encourage people to go and have a little poke around, but I’m also not going to encourage you, don’t fiddle with anything. Just leave every single field exactly as you saw it. It’s example.com, so your domain.com, whatever that would be /wp-admin/options, with an S so plural php.
\n\n\n\nGo and have a look, and I’d be very curious, if you’ve got anything that you think is interesting in there, or indeed you’ve also found something in the same way that Russell has which is unexpected and unknown. I’d be very curious to hear about that, and maybe we can get you on a podcast episode as well.
\n\n\n\nSo, Russell, thank you so much for enlightening me. What a peculiar episode that was. I really appreciate it.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:30] Russell Aaron: I appreciate you putting it out there. Like, blow my mind, what do you have? And I’m glad that I can at least register that in some sort of of way.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:38] Nathan Wrigley: There’s always something new, and this definitely was something new. Thank you, Russell.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:41] Russell Aaron: Thank you.
\nOn the podcast today we have Russell Aaron.
\n\n\n\nRussell is a long-time WordPress enthusiast, power user since 2004, and developer since 2011. He\u2019s organised WordCamp Las Vegas, played a key role in the Las Vegas WordPress Meetup group for years, and is dedicated to helping beginners find their feet in the WordPress world. Support has been his main focus throughout his career, always keeping the needs of newcomers in mind.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019ve ever wondered about the lesser-known corners of the WordPress admin, today\u2019s episode will be right up your street. Russell introduces a hidden feature, the little explored options.php page, which is accessible from your site\u2019s wp-admin area. Many seasoned users, including myself, have never heard of it, but this page exposes the entirety of your WordPress options table in an editable format.
\n\n\n\nWe talk about what this page actually does, why it exists, and the ways it can be both helpful and hazardous. Russell shares his own use cases, how it can be useful for plugin development and database management, but we also discuss concerns around its discoverability, and the risks of making changes without understanding the consequences.
\n\n\n\nIt\u2019s a short episode, but there\u2019s a lot in here for anyone curious about WordPress\u2019 inner workings or eager to learn about hidden tools that most people don\u2019t stumble upon.
\n\n\n\nSo, if you fancy poking around behind the scenes, or have ever wondered what might be hiding right under your nose in WordPress, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case Elementor’s decade of growth and its future plans with AI.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Miriam Schwab. Miriam has been deeply immersed in the WordPress ecosystem for around two decades. Starting out offering WordPress as a service, she went on to lead a custom WordPress agency serving major tech companies and nonprofits before founding the startup Strattic, pioneering static WordPress architecture. After Strattic’s acquisition by Elementor in 2022, Miriam took the role of Head of WordPress acting as the key liaison between Elementor and the wider WordPress community.
\n\n\n\nElementor growth over the last decade has been prolific. Miriam says that it now powers over 13% of the entire web. She gives insights into the challenges and responsibilities that come with maintaining such a large user base, especially around major updates and backwards compatibility.
\n\n\n\nMuch of our conversation centers around the rise of AI in WordPress, from built in AI tools for generating images and content to the standalone Angie plugin that introduces agentic AI capabilities across WordPress. Miriam outlines Elementor’s multi-pronged approach to innovation, talking about how their Site Planner tool uses conversational AI to guide beginners and professionals from an idea all the way to a wire framed website. And how the upcoming AI integrations promise even more granular design control.
\n\n\n\nMiriam also shares her perspectives on how the new Abilities API is set to change what’s possible inside WordPress, and what this means for developers, designers, and support teams navigating the complexities of AI driven workflows.
\n\n\n\nFor those interested in how AI is shaping the future of WordPress, Elementor’s strategy, and the evolving role of creators within this ecosystem, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to find out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Miriam Schwab.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Miriam Schwab. Hello Miriam.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:23] Miriam Schwab: Hi.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:24] Nathan Wrigley: Nice to have you with us. Now, dear listener, I have to be very grateful to Miriam because about three weeks ago we tried to capture this exact podcast. In fact, we did. We captured this exact podcast. Unfortunately, the tech failed and Miriam’s audio was entirely silent. So we had a nice long conversation, Miriam divulged her experience and wisdom, and I got to put it out on the podcast and there was nothing there. It was completely blank. So firstly, an apology for that. And secondly, enormous thanks for coming back and talking to me.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:54] Miriam Schwab: Well, I have to thank you for giving this another shot because I have a feeling that the technical difficulties were also on my side. So thank you for giving this another go.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well, I appreciate it. So Miriam has a long and storied history in WordPress. She’s working with Elementor at the moment, but the story goes back way further than that. Let’s just do the little potted bio at the beginning, Miriam. Just tell us a, just a short version of who you are in the WordPress space, and what you’ve achieved in the past.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:20] Miriam Schwab: Okay, so about 20 years ago, I discovered WordPress. Loved it, decided to work with it, started offering it as a service. Eventually that expanded into being an agency, and working on custom implementations of WordPress for tech companies and large nonprofits, which was a lot of fun and a great learning experience.
\n\n\n\nDid that for about 13 years. Sold the agency and founded a startup based on one of the many ideas I had had over the years. I had many ideas for products over the years, but I knew that I needed to make sure I wasn’t over spending my abilities, like between family and work and everything.
\n\n\n\nBut I got to the stage where I was like, okay, I can do this. And I actually really loved the idea. So I founded a startup that was called Strattic. It published WordPress websites in a static architecture while retaining dynamic capabilities. And by doing that, it solved pretty much all the issues related to speed security and scalability. Raised venture capital funding for it, and it was acquired by Elementor in June, 2022.
\n\n\n\nAnd after joining Elementor, continued to lead the Strattic team for about six months, and then they offered me this new position that hadn’t existed before. Initially, we called it the Head of WordPress Relations, and then it evolved to just being called Head of WordPress, where I act as a liaison between Elementor and the broader WordPress community on many levels. Practically, strategically, community, like you name it and I’m probably doing it. So that’s a bit about me.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:43] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have like a job description? Because when you say sort of Head of WordPress, there really seems to be almost no bounds in terms of the WordPress and Elementor connection. Do you have constraints on what is out of bounds? Or is it literally anything that’s connected with WordPress comes under your purview?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:57] Miriam Schwab: It is literally anything, pretty much. It suits me because I was the CEO of two companies, right? I led them. So I have an entrepreneurial character, I guess you could say. And I’ve always been involved in a lot of aspects of the businesses that I’ve been running, and I like that. I actually like to be involved in marketing and sales and even the financial side of things, and internal and external and all that kind of stuff. So it allows me to continue to embrace that side of me, even though I’m now like corporate. And I really appreciate that Elementor allows me that flexibility. It keeps the work that I do very interesting.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’ll bet. And you’ve always me as an extremely curious person, who likes to be busy, let’s put it that way.
\n\n\n\nDoes Elementor continue to grow? I mean, I guess Elementor for me feels like it’s coming up to a decade old or something along those lines.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:48] Miriam Schwab: Yes, exactly. June is going to be 10 years since it was founded. We’re in our 10th year now, like heading up to it.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and when it began, the plugin offered an incredibly valuable free version. And this was a real good way of kind of promoting growth because page builders were becoming all the rage at that point, and the market was already becoming saturated. But Elementor managed to put some daylight between themselves and the competitors because of the fully rounded free version. And then obviously, you know, built the pro version on top of that.
\n\n\n\nAnd then when you chart the numbers of WordPress’s growth over the last decade, I don’t know what the exact numbers are, perhaps you can fill us in on that, but it feels like quite a bit of the WordPress growth, so WordPress generally, that 43% figure that we constantly like to refer to, it feels like quite a bit of that belongs, well, not belongs, but you know what I mean, is because of the popularity of Elementor. So the growth was meteoric. And I don’t know how that’s carried on, whether the line continues that trajectory, or whether it’s kind of flat lined, but still growing. Can we just get into that a bit?
\n\n\n\n[00:07:50] Miriam Schwab: After Elementor was launched, it really quickly reached a million active installs, I think within a year or something because it was the right, very much the right product at the right time, bringing a lot of value to users. And like you mentioned, like with the free version, for sure, that definitely helped power its growth and adoption. But also because it was a valuable, and is a valuable product for web builders to use.
\n\n\n\nIn terms of the growth, so amazingly, Elementor’s adoption continues to grow. So you know W3Techs? Every year they publish like top stuff. And the various categories is based on the absolute number of sites that that particular technology accrued over the course of 2025. For the third year running, Elementor was given the title of Top Content Management System by W3Techs, beating out Wix and Shopify and WordPress. WordPress was the winner for many years.
\n\n\n\nAnd I’m not privy to the exact numbers or their exact calculations, but based on what they say, if Elementor is the top CMS, it’s because over the course of 2025, it’s usage base grew by more websites than those other platforms grew, which is wild. And like there, they even states, I think Elementor started off 2025 with 11.7% of the internet, and ended off 2025 with 13.1% of the internet.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:12] Nathan Wrigley: Wait. Do that again.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:13] Miriam Schwab: Of the entire web, yes, of the web. Not WordPress.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:17] Nathan Wrigley: We use the 43% figure to be WordPress. So that same kind of sentence, but substitute Elementor for the word WordPress in there. 13%?
\n\n\n\n[00:09:27] Miriam Schwab: Yeah, over 13%. So over the course of 2025, Elementor continued to grow at a very significant pace. So Elementor is still growing.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s remarkable. Do you know if that’s because of new adoption or is that that the current users of the platform, you know, who have a license for multiple sites and what have you, are just using it more and more, so that number kind of creeps up? So I guess the question there is, do you have a growing user base or is it just more broad use by your current user base?
\n\n\n\n[00:09:54] Miriam Schwab: Our current user base definitely contributes to growth, but by our estimation, we grew by something like three and a half million sites over the course of 2025. So a significant number of those sites are new. New users, or new sites, or whatever, that kind of thing.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:12] Nathan Wrigley: What a phenomenal story that, I mean it is the story really inside of the WordPress space over the last decade. I presume there’s nothing that can touch those kind of stats. That’s really remarkable. And I suppose it’s a blessing and also a curse. And what I mean by that is, you’ve got this giant platform, enormous user base, but I suppose it also means that anything that you do with the Elementor platform, there’s a lot of care that needs to be taken on every single update. So if you’re going to update to the 4.0 version, which you recently did, big overhaul, but a big user base to get annoyed if things go wrong. So I guess a lot of care and attention required because of your popularity.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:52] Miriam Schwab: Yeah. Backwards compatibility, you know, it’s a very important aspect of WordPress development in general. So at Elementor it’s the same. It’s super critical in terms of every update that we push out, determining how far back we’re going to support things, et cetera. So every version that goes out, it has to be super duper QA’d.
\n\n\n\nAnd even so, you know what WordPress is like, it’s like the wild west. Every site is like a snowflake. It has its own combination of themes, plugins, server configuration, PHP version, you know what I mean? Like, good luck with that. But the team does an amazing job of really managing to make sure that pretty much every version doesn’t cause issues.
\n\n\n\nAnd with regards to version four, that is an overhaul. And the team, while moving ahead with creating version four, because it’ll bring a lot of value to our users and it pulls Elementor even more towards the future, it’s being done so carefully. Like every step is considered.
\n\n\n\nAnd in terms of how it’s being developed and also how it’s going to work in conjunction with the previous approach to Elementor. Because the assumption is, not everyone’s going to just jump over to version four. Migrating an existing site to version four may be complicated. There’s discussions around how to do that in the best way, but it may be complicated.
\n\n\n\nSo even an existing site, it might have pages still built on version three and prior, while new pages will be built with version four to gain the benefits of version four. So they have to live side by side for some amount of time. It’s incredibly complicated, but it’s a really important, exciting project because, like you said, Elementor is 10 years old, which means a 10-year-old code base. That means it’s time to give it an overhaul, even with all the risk and complication involved.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:32] Nathan Wrigley: What’s the staff count that you’ve got over there now?
\n\n\n\n[00:12:34] Miriam Schwab: It’s something like 350 now, I think.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:37] Nathan Wrigley: So enormous. But again, I presume that speaks to the things that you’ve got to do. You know, if you’re going to ship a big update, you need a lot of bodies doing the coding for that. But also, you know, checking the backwards compatibility and things.
\n\n\n\nOkay, so you mentioned the future. In the year 2025, the words, well, the letters AI, I think probably were said by more people than just about anything else in the English language. Apart from maybe the word the. Everything else seems to have gone AI. If you look in the WordPress space, all of the media, all of the excitement, all of the interest, all of the everything, the oxygen is being sucked out of the room by AI, let’s put it that way.
\n\n\n\nAnd so Elementor, I presume, has to keep up with those current trends. What is happening over there? In terms of the page builder, and also I know there’s other ancillary products and plugins that, whilst built by you, aren’t necessarily part of that page building experience. What’s going on?
\n\n\n\n[00:13:26] Miriam Schwab: So we have like a number of approaches to AI and each one is getting a lot of attention. And while users are enthusiastic about them, we’re trying to figure out where to give them the best experience and how with AI. I think just like the whole world, we’re also working on figuring out AI and how to implement the best way possible.
\n\n\n\nBut we strongly believe that WordPress must have strong AI capabilities in order to secure its future. And we want to see WordPress have a strong future for many years to come. But not only that, AI in WordPress will actually give it a big leg up and advantage over the more proprietary platforms in our opinion. So there’s like intense effort being made on our side to create amazing AI tooling in order to try to secure WordPress’s feature.
\n\n\n\nSo what do we have? We have the kind of basic obvious stuff, which is, you’re in Elementor editor, you want to generate an image, here, you can generate an image with AI. You want to create copy, text, add title, all that kind of stuff, the content release stuff, there you go. HTML, CSS, okay. Kind of like check the box, pretty expected stuff.
\n\n\n\nThen we have Angie which is its own standalone plugin, which applies to all of WordPress, not just Elementor. And it gives agentic capabilities to WordPress in general. So whatever you would think an AI assistant would be able to do for you in your WordPress environment, it can pretty much do that. As we know, AI is non-deterministic. You tell it to do something and it will do it one way, and it tells you to do something else and it’ll do it the other way. So there’s a lot of guardrails being developed by our team to direct Angie to give the results that the user probably wants.
\n\n\n\nBut you can do things like around managing your site, managing users, creating content, changing categories, WooCommerce management, product management, things like that. So it streamlines a lot of stuff. And the team is working on some like really exciting capabilities, which hopefully will be released soon. And then we’ll be able to talk about it. But in the meantime, it’s free to use. Anyone can go into the repo, install it, start using it, and of course we want to hear feedback about that. So that’s Angie.
\n\n\n\nAnd then the third approach with AI is our Site Planner. So Site Planner is a very cool tool. You chat to it, and you chat your way to a very robust website. It’s not like a one line prompt, build me a flower shop website, and then it just kind of guesses what you might want. It asks you very specific and useful questions so that it can get the fullest picture of what you want to build. And it guides you along the way by asking you the right questions, and then it generates a site for you in Elementor, and then you can export that site into your own hosting environment, or into our hosting environment, or you can download it as a zip file or whatever.
\n\n\n\nSo the Site Planner can be the first stage in your AI website building journey. It takes you, let’s say from zero to 80, I would say. And then the last 20% of the site you can do with Angie, you can do manually, you can do with Elementor, you could do not with Elementor. You could do however you want, and launch your site.
\n\n\n\nSo that’s pretty much what’s going on with AI. We have some more stuff coming out soon, but we’ll talk about it when we can, you know?
\n\n\n\n[00:16:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so let me just reprise that and make sure I’ve understood. So the first piece of that jigsaw puzzle was the things with inside of Elementor, the page builder itself. And if we rewound the clock just five years, even though you are now saying, oh, the expected stuff, that stuff was the stuff of Star Trek. You know, oh, ask it for an image and it’ll make an image. Yeah, okay, that seems like a distant future that we’ll never reach. And yet now that’s kind of de rigueur. Everybody expects that stuff. So that’s the stuff inside of the page builder as you’d expect. Text, images and what have you.
\n\n\n\nBut then you’ve got this Angie product, which if I’m parsing that correctly, enables you to leverage the abilities of WordPress. So I would like you to create me a post and assign these categories to it and publish it on this particular date. Do you know, does that leverage the sort of Abilities API, or have you done the foundational work yourselves as opposed to the Core Abilities API, which the teams have been working on more recently?
\n\n\n\n[00:17:32] Miriam Schwab: That’s a very good question. So the Angie team started building Angie at least a year ago, which was before the Abilities API was, I don’t know, even a twinkle in someones eye. So the team, in order to make Angie work, built their own tools, like it’s called tools, exposing WordPress’ capabilities, so actually invested a ton in exposing something like 200 tools in WordPress to Angie.
\n\n\n\nAnd not only in Angie, the team actually also did some work to expose tools in WooCommerce and ACF as like a starting point for, because they’re very popular plugins. So when the Abilities API came around, the team already had a lot that was done and also more than what the Abilities API has. The goal is to sync up with the Abilities API and leverage it. At the moment there’s still some issues, at least on our end using it. But we’re in constant communication with the WordPress AI teams and giving feedback and things like that. So hopefully we’ll be able to resolve that. But the team did build all of that themselves, which is pretty amazing.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that is amazing. But I guess given what Elementor touches, and the fact that you’ve got that enormous staff there that can try to build that, it kind of made sense to go at that because you didn’t know that the team were working on the Abilities API. I remember when that dropped. So I’ve been covering WordPress news for, I don’t know, a decade or something like that. I remember thinking, this is probably the most consequential piece of news that I’ve ever covered.
\n\n\n\nThe idea of binding AI, so AI in the scenario that you described first, where I’m in Elementor, I want an image, I’m in Elementor, I want some text. That’s interesting, but it’s really confined. There’s lots of boxes around that, there’s only a certain permutation of things that you can do. But the minute you start to bind an AI to all the things that WordPress can do, so create a user, delete a user, create a page, schedule it for this time. Oh, I don’t know. Just imagine clicking around inside the WordPress admin interface and wherever you end up, there’s a thing, there’s a box or a field to fill out, and there’s an ability that can be done by that thing.
\n\n\n\nAnd uncovering those and making it so that the AI agent can understand what that is, it’s very hard to me to encapsulate in English why I think that’s so impressive. But, do you know what I mean? Can you see the thread of what I’m trying to say there, how important that is?
\n\n\n\n[00:19:49] Miriam Schwab: It is super impressive. What you’re saying about AI being like, if we had thought about it five years ago, it would be amazing. Even agentic AI, everyone talks about agents as if it’s like obvious that AI can be agentic. But for quite a bit of time in the beginning, and of course AI years are like a million years.
\n\n\n\nSo for the first year and a half or something of us, of the world using AI, something like that, there wasn’t even agentic AI. So the fact that there’s agentic AI, and that it can be applied to WordPress is pretty wild. And I’ll tell you why I also think it’s wild. Because WordPress is 20 years old, 23 years old, whatever it is at this point. It’s a legacy platform. And the fact that it can be, the Abilities API is a really smart approach to it because it kind of slackens the exposure of everything that’s going on behind WordPress.
\n\n\n\nInstead of needing like a million different APIs and different approaches and that every plugin’s creating their own way to integrate with WordPress. It standardises it in a way that actually is also good for development, but also is good for the AI future, because it means that the way AI will interface with WordPress is straightforward and standard enough that regardless of what the LLMs end up doing going forward, if there’s more capabilities, if we move beyond agentic to who knows what, I don’t know what, like implants in our brains, then we can still interface with WordPress even though it’s over 20 years old. I think that’s amazing. So kudos to the team for accomplishing that.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and it was a penny that just didn’t drop for me. I saw AI as this interesting thing where it could create content, but I didn’t make the connection with all of the myriad things that WordPress could do. I just thought, okay, it’ll be inside the block editor, or it’ll be inside of Elementor or wherever it lives. That’s where the AI will belong. And then when I first read a summary of what the Abilities API was going to achieve, and that then binds to a whole other layer of APIs surrounding that, that was when the penny dropped. And I thought, okay, so basically what you’ve done there is you’ve opened the door and you’ve said, here’s all the things that a WordPress website can do. Until now, the AI was just in the interface and you could, you know, words and images and what have you. Now it’s, okay, we’ve opened the doors, now you can do the whole range of things that you’d like to do with the AI. And so it opens up all of those capabilities.
\n\n\n\nAgain, the words fail me, but the import of it, the importance of it, I think only time will tell. But it feels like it’s probably one of the more important things. And again, like you said, 20 year old legacy system, there could have been a moment where the two paths split and, you know, AI became more interesting outside of WordPress, and WordPress sudden decline and what have you. But by opening the doors and saying, actually let’s just let all of the AI in and you can explore that if you wish to, kind of interesting for those people that want to.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:29] Miriam Schwab: Yeah, WordPress could have struggled to keep up with AI and we, I’m not saying it’s not a struggle. I think we’re a bit late to the AI game in general as a, like an ecosystem, which is understandable. We’re open source, things like, you know, move slower and by committee, so that’s just how it goes. But the fact that it picked itself up, the team was established and within six months of being established or something like that, it already had accomplished their four pillars of work that they had set out for themselves, is really amazing. And it’s super important for the future of WordPress, and it’s great to see that they were able to accomplish that.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and also it feels like the moment has arrived where a lot of the people that write in the WordPress space, so content creators and what have you, they’ve sort of got this now and they’re now creating content. And some of the people that no doubt, you and I both follow, who may be writing on their own blog or on social media or what have you, there seems to have been over the last couple of months, a real, a sense that, okay, WordPress has a place. We don’t need to worry about that anymore. We’ve now got a path with this AI team. State of the Word AI team sort gathered there and pressed the big red button and all that kind of stuff. There seems to have been so much focus that it’s built itself into relevance again. And there seems to be less worry. People now writing content about the things that WordPress can do with these abilities bound to it.
\n\n\n\nOkay, so let’s move on to the third strand of what you mentioned, which was, forgive me if I get this wrong. You said Site Planner, right? Was that correct?
\n\n\n\n[00:23:51] Miriam Schwab: Site planner, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And this is a conversation that you have. This is something that I always find kind of interesting. You know, getting into a conversation with something which is essentially an AI, that’s kind of curious. But you mentioned that whole process was a back and forth. So it’s not, I want a website. You write this great, big, long prompt, click the button, wait for five minutes and kind of cross your fingers and hope for the best. This is more of a dialogue, is it? Where you repeatedly get asked a series of smaller questions, which hopefully then build up to the sort of final thing. Tell us a little bit more.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:19] Miriam Schwab: The way that works is, yes, you can like paste in some kind of giant prompt, but even then, whether you start with like one sentence or a prompt, the Site Planner will ask you questions, clarifying questions, and also suggestive questions. Do you want any of these types of pages, or content on your site? And things like that. It’s really good for guiding non-professionals.
\n\n\n\nIt then creates actually a brief, like it writes out a brief for your website based on this conversation. So it’s really good for non-professionals who don’t know the questions to ask, right? They don’t know what they should be even considering. So it asks questions for them.
\n\n\n\nBut it’s also great for professionals. It cuts down a lot of time in the research stage of building a site for a client. And the AI can actually like give them added value in terms of asking questions they might not have thought of. That conversation process can be cut short whenever the user wants. Like it can go on for as long as they want, but they can also say, that’s enough, let’s build the site based on what we discussed.
\n\n\n\nWhen the AI is creating the brief, it will tell you the strength of the brief, like in the top right corner of Site Planner. So once you get to the stage where it says strong brief, you could stop there, but you could keep going. The more information you give it, the better the outcome will be. Just like with AI in general.
\n\n\n\nSo once you finish that conversation, you say, let’s move to the next stage. It creates a site map. So it shows the hierarchy of the site based on the conversation. But also, on each page it shows you like what type of content it will have, and it actually gives you the content. The nice thing about the way the AI builds the site is that, first of all, content is king, which it always has been on websites. And here you really get to see the strength of that.
\n\n\n\nSo the content that it creates is really good because it’s based on this conversation that you had with it. At that site map stage you can drag and drop things around, add different pages that it didn’t include, remove sections from pages, but it’s just content chunks. Once you are happy with that stage, you go to the next stage, which is the website stage.
\n\n\n\nWe call it the wireframe stage because it’s not like a fully designed site, it’s more like the site with a structure, but it’s like 80% of the way there. It could have like testimonials section, contact page form, gallery. I created a demo site for a cafe that also has community events. So it has an events page. It’s really great. It like really gets you 80% of the way there. It saves a lot of time, and if you’re a professional, you can show your client that at that stage and work off of that.
\n\n\n\nIf anyone works with clients, you know that communicating and getting to a point where everyone’s happy can be very challenging when you don’t have something to show. But here, when you have something to show, you get past that blank canvas stage, which is very hard for people to like even imagine anything, and then you can work from there.
\n\n\n\nSo once you have the wire frames done, also at that wire frame stage, by the way, you can also there edit things, remove things, et cetera. Change the colour palette, upload a logo to be used across the site, and things like that.
\n\n\n\nThen you can publish the site. You can publish it into our own hosting environment in one click, but you can also publish it into any existing Elementor account. You just kind of add your It hooks up to your account and it will send it to wherever that site is hosted. Or you can download and upload it somewhere else. So it gets you from zero to 80, or 90% of the way with a site through a conversation and then you can like tweak it, polish it, and finalise it from there. So it’s really useful in my opinion.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:34] Nathan Wrigley: So prior to the publication of it, you mentioned that you could show it to your clients. Is the capacity to have a public facing yet not public facing, if you know what I mean? So a URL, which is visible to you, but not the wider world for SEO and what have you. Is it possible to sort of take an up and running version, give it to a client so that they can have a little bit of a poke around?
\n\n\n\n[00:27:52] Miriam Schwab: That’s an interesting question. At that point, when it’s still in site planner, I think it’s only visible to you. So you would have to download and put it somewhere. But then you could put it in like a staging site or wherever you want to put it. You could share your screen with the client. But yeah, I think you can’t share the URL to that particular project within a third party.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:09] Nathan Wrigley: Because that’s all so very instantaneous compared to, you know, it may be that you get into this dialogue, which takes half an hour or what have you. But, you know, compared to the old way of building things, it’s more or less instantaneous. I had this notion that a service like that would be kind of interesting if it spat out four or five variations of the same thing at the same time.
\n\n\n\nSo I realise there’s a sort of, you know, a burden in terms of technology and overhead and all of that, cPU time and what have you. But the idea of entering that client meeting with five versions of the same basic thing. So, okay, I have a, I don’t know, a bricks and mortar store and I sell widgets. So I build the one version, but Elementor, for example, in this scenario, builds me four others as well. And then I can go through and cherry pick which bits of this one do you like or, I like the colour scheme of that, if you know what I mean? So I don’t know if it’s possible to do that. In other words, is it possible to spin up multiple versions of the same thing, or would you have to sort of start from scratch each time?
\n\n\n\n[00:29:02] Miriam Schwab: Well, what you can do within the project is you can ask it to regenerate a section. Like, you could be like, I don’t like that. So you could say like, do it differently and then it will suggest something else. You could theoretically, I guess like create a second page, let’s say a second about page and then be like, okay, suggest a different format for me for this. Like a different structure because it’s not exactly design.
\n\n\n\nThe design afterwards can be worked on with a client or whatever. It’s more like the structure of the page. So, and even though it’s a live website, it is like structure. So you could be like, no, I want the testimonials to be a different style, like suggest something else. And then you could show, I guess the customer various pages within the site. It’s an interesting idea.
\n\n\n\nI know that the team is working on Site Planner, and it will be more rolled into the WordPress Elementor environment, like in the site. Right now, it’s an external tool, so once it’s in there, you could like duplicate pages, you could regenerate pages, things like that. I don’t have an ETA on when that’s happening but that’s the general direction.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:58] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a fascinating conversation. And the other thing I was going to say is that there’s obviously, in your community, there’s a lot of people who are, they have a lot of history of building things with Elementor. They’ve learned the UI inside and out. They’ve become experts. They know where every checkbox is. If you show them something in Figma and then give them 10 minutes, they’ll mimic that perfectly.
\n\n\n\nAnd I was wondering what kind of capabilities the AI has within the Elementor interface. So in other words, does it do a sort of cookie cutter job of creating rows and sections and what have you, based upon things that have already been prebuilt? Or can it, in its AI wire frame stage, can it do, I don’t know, unique padding or crazy CSS things? Can it get into all of the bits and pieces that Elementor offers, all of those rich experiences? Or is it more kind of, okay, somebody in the team built these testimonial elements, and so we’re going to basically pick one of those and mimic that onto this wire frame?
\n\n\n\n[00:30:52] Miriam Schwab: So there’s Angie as it exists now and there’s Angies that will be over the next few months. So I’m going to be giving like, I guess kind of a sneak preview into what’s coming.
\n\n\n\nAt the moment it can do a lot within Elementor, but it is kind of constrained within what Elementor classically does. However, v4 is going to enable the AI, or let’s say the v4 AI partnership will give it a lot more creative capabilities, and extend basically to whatever you want it to do, that you can do with Angie. From custom code snippets, to custom widgets, to custom anything, or working within the Elementor. There’s going to be a lot of interesting things that people can do, basically in some ways just limited by their creative ideas.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:38] Nathan Wrigley: Right, so much more granular. Because I have this vision that at some point in the future, and maybe some tool out there can do this. But I have this vision that, let’s say you’re inside Elementor, you’ve got 99% of the way there, and then you suddenly realise that that picture of the cat is the wrong cat. And so you just sort of say, can we have a different cat? No, not that one. Okay, that cat. And now, could we make the borders rounder on that particular image and give it a bit of a box shadow? That would be nice. Oh, and then swap it around so the text is on the other side.
\n\n\n\nSo you end up in this sort of dialogue, almost like you’re chatting to the designer and you are watching over their shoulder as they build it. That seems to be the kind of place where we would love to get to. And then of course we enter this curious, difficult moment for the web developers and web designers, where these things become so dreadfully straightforward and easy that we then have to start questioning, how do you offer this as a client service if almost everybody can speak to a website and get it to do whatever you would like it to do?
\n\n\n\nSo there’s two things in there. I sort of smuggled the last one in. But the first one is this sort of dialogue with the website, and then the second one is whether or not these tools are making it more difficult to be in the industry that we all love so much.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:44] Miriam Schwab: With regards to the dialogue description, so AI in general, it’s become like our team members for certain things. You know, in the past, if I wanted to, let’s say, post something on social media on behalf of Elementor, I would go to the design team and ask them to design something and go through that process, and then get what they gave me and then post it.
\n\n\n\nAnd now my design team is Nano Banana, right? Or ChatGPT. I get two versions, they compete against each other. Whichever one works best for me is what I take. And so it’s like that in almost everything we do if we’re using AI, and also in the world of website creation, design, development, and management. Our team for many aspects of it will become AI, which will create greater efficiency and also it seems like greater redundancy.
\n\n\n\nBut I think like anything with a tool, the results will be defined by the abilities and skills of the person directing it. AI needs direction and that conversation to happen. And the quality of the results will be dependent on the skillset of the user, not skillset in terms of, how do I get AI to do stuff? But skillset of, what should an excellent website be?
\n\n\n\nSo the human in the loop, I think, will continue to be a very important part. It’s just we’re kicking the can down the road kind of thing in terms of where we bring value. So instead of us bringing value, sitting and clicking on an image and changing the background using Photoshop, our value will be in being the director and producer of what output we want it to have and getting it there.
\n\n\n\nSo we’re not like the tinkerers and like the hammer or nail people, we’re the contractor or the strategist, or the blueprint creators. So the conversations will take place, but the human in the loop part will still be really important. We all, whether we’re web creators or whatever profession we have, have to figure out how to use AI to help us do what we’re doing better.
\n\n\n\nI actually don’t exactly agree with the idea that AI helps us do more. It does, a lot of things become faster, but I think the value is that a lot of things get done better and a higher quality. So there’s that.
\n\n\n\nSo how do we use AI to the best of our abilities to help us do our work even better. But also, how do we continue to provide value in a world that’s dominated by AI? And that’s like, I don’t know what the answers are. 2026 is going to be the year of, who knows? Because AI changes every second. They could invent a new model or release a new model tomorrow that changes this whole conversation.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:19] Nathan Wrigley: One of the things that, sort of round it off with this one maybe. I’m thinking about your support system. So your support system, which has built up over 10 years, and presumably worked to help your clients. But the clients themselves probably started with a blank canvas and then, you know, made mistakes along the way, but were able to describe the mistakes that they made along the way to your support agents. Like, okay, I was doing this and then something went wrong. Can you unpick that for me? Where did I go wrong?
\n\n\n\nThe realignment that needs to take place for your support team with the advent of AI, I suppose is fairly profound because you’ll probably have a lot of users who will just know that they did a prompt. And now this thing happened and I didn’t want that thing to happen. How do I go back? I mean there’s obviously a case of click undo, or don’t save the changes or whatever. But I’m also imagining the support that you provide has to pivot a lot as well.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:06] Miriam Schwab: The development of AI has to include implementing a ton of guardrails to prevent users from doing things that can damage their site. I’ll give you an example. In the early days of Angie, I generally love pushing tools to their limits, so I was pushing Angie to its limit and I got it to kick me out of my own site and remove my user. And I was like, well that’s not cool. So guardrails were put in place around that.
\n\n\n\nThere’s concepts of, first of all, not allowing a user to implement something until they’re sure. Like meaning, not just be like, hey AI, can you do this? And the AI is like, done. No. AI is like, okay, here’s what it will look like, here’s what it will do, that kind of thing. Do you want to go ahead? Then, of course, undo buttons.
\n\n\n\nBut then even with all of that, yeah, support could be different. We can have logs and things like that about what happened and why it happened and things like that. And that can help troubleshoot things. But on the other hand, I think support can become much better because while still the human is in the loop, getting the answers to issues, you know, you end up with this huge knowledge base of stuff, and a support agent can only know so much. Our brains are finite. We don’t know what someone discovered yesterday as an issue and as a solution and all that kind of stuff. So once you have AI kind of like analysing your corpus of knowledge and then pulling out what can help you or the user, then that becomes much better.
\n\n\n\nBut I’ll give you another interesting angle of where support becomes complicated, where you have the Abilities API, or Angie or both, and a user is interacting with Angie, let’s say, and Elementor and also a third party plugin that is also working with AI. And then there’s something borks. And then the user is like, was it Elementor that was a problem? Was it WordPress that was a problem? Was it this third party plugin that was a problem? How do I even ask for support when I don’t know what just caused that issue? I guess it’s another version of plugin conflicts, but it’s just taking it to another level.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s a different level altogether. I said that was my final question. Turns out I was being insincere. I have one more. And that is, I know that Elementor has done a lot of work trying to make websites more accessible in the recent past. And so that’s the final question, I promise. The idea that we hand over the agency of this to our AI builder and so things like accessibility, there may be other things that we could smuggle in there as well, but we’ll go with accessibility. Is work being done to ensure that the output follows WCAG guidelines and things along those lines?
\n\n\n\n[00:38:32] Miriam Schwab: So something that I’ve seen as we’re working on implementing AI capabilities is that there’s this idea that I had, and I think others do as well, that AI is the all powerful whatever. And if you just say to it, make my site accessible, it will make my site accessible. So it turns out it’s not like that. Maybe one day it will be. But AI needs tools, needs direction, needs the capabilities, and it doesn’t just have it just because it’s AI.
\n\n\n\nSo it’s kind of the same with accessibility. So actually Elementor created an accessibility plugin called Ally, which is very useful because it goes through the website, analyses it, tells you where there’s issues, but doesn’t just tell you where there is issues, it gives you solutions. And it can, with AI, implement those solutions. Like you can click and be like, fix that.
\n\n\n\nAnd that kind of ongoing accessibility assistance means that a person can, first of all do like a once through of their site and bring it to a better level of accessibility. We don’t guarantee like 100% accessibility, I don’t know if anyone can, but it improves accessibility on many levels.
\n\n\n\nAnd then as you’re going along, it can keep an eye on things or you can like trigger it and it can help make sure that whatever you’re doing going forward also stays within accessibility guidelines. So it’s like a really useful assistant, slash solution, slash tool that users can implement on an ongoing basis with their site. So worth checking out.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’ll put that into the show notes as well. And if memory serves, I could be wrong about this, if memory serves it’s not an Elementor specific solution.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:06] Miriam Schwab: Oh, right, exactly. It’s for all sites, all WordPress sites.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:08] Nathan Wrigley: So any WordPress website can benefit from that. Okay, that’s interesting. Okay, so who knows what the year 2026 will bring. It no doubt will be chaos, turmoil.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:18] Miriam Schwab: It won’t be boring.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:19] Nathan Wrigley: That’s the words. Yeah, it definitely won’t be boring. And, yeah, good luck for Elementor in the year 2026.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:26] Miriam Schwab: Thank you. I’m excited, by the way, for 2026. It’s like a whole new world, and I think in some ways, at least for me, and I see this with others, it like reignited a spark for innovation in WordPress. WordPress is amazing, it’s been amazing for over 20 years and we’ve always, you know, been seeking, looking for ways to innovate. But AI takes it to a whole other level and makes innovation more accessible, if we’re going to use that word. And it’s really fun to see what people are creating around AI for WordPress. And I think we’re going to see some amazing things released over the course of 2026, not just by Elementor, that will make WordPress, wow. Anyways, that’s just my thoughts about 2026.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:00] Nathan Wrigley: Miriam Schwab, thank you for chatting to me today.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:02] Miriam Schwab: Thank you.
\nOn the podcast today we have Miriam Schwab.
\n\n\n\nMiriam has been deeply immersed in the WordPress ecosystem for around two decades. Starting out offering WordPress as a service, she went on to lead a custom WordPress agency serving major tech companies and nonprofits, before founding the startup Strattic, pioneering static WordPress architecture. After Strattic\u2019s acquisition by Elementor in 2022, Miriam took on the role of Head of WordPress, acting as the key liaison between Elementor and the wider WordPress community.
\n\n\n\nElementor\u2019s growth over the last decade has been prolific. Miriam says that it now powers over 13% of the entire web. She gives insights into the challenges and responsibilities that come with maintaining such a large user base, especially around major updates and backwards compatibility.
\n\n\n\nMuch of our conversation centres around the rise of AI in WordPress. From built-in AI tools for generating images and content, to the stand-alone Angie plugin that introduces agentic AI capabilities across WordPress. Miriam outlines Elementor\u2019s multi-pronged approach to innovation, talking about how their Site Planner tool uses conversational AI to guide beginners and professionals from an idea all the way to a wireframed website, and how the upcoming AI integrations promise even more granular design control.
\n\n\n\nMiriam also shares her perspective on how the new Abilities API is set to change what\u2019s possible inside WordPress, and what this means for developers, designers, and support teams navigating the complexities of AI-driven workflows.
\n\n\n\nFor those interested in how AI is shaping the future of WordPress, Elementor\u2019s strategy, and the evolving roles of creators within this ecosystem, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nElementor Acquires Strattic To Redefine WordPress Hosting
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "content_text": "Transcript\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case Elementor’s decade of growth and its future plans with AI.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Miriam Schwab. Miriam has been deeply immersed in the WordPress ecosystem for around two decades. Starting out offering WordPress as a service, she went on to lead a custom WordPress agency serving major tech companies and nonprofits before founding the startup Strattic, pioneering static WordPress architecture. After Strattic’s acquisition by Elementor in 2022, Miriam took the role of Head of WordPress acting as the key liaison between Elementor and the wider WordPress community.\n\n\n\nElementor growth over the last decade has been prolific. Miriam says that it now powers over 13% of the entire web. She gives insights into the challenges and responsibilities that come with maintaining such a large user base, especially around major updates and backwards compatibility.\n\n\n\nMuch of our conversation centers around the rise of AI in WordPress, from built in AI tools for generating images and content to the standalone Angie plugin that introduces agentic AI capabilities across WordPress. Miriam outlines Elementor’s multi-pronged approach to innovation, talking about how their Site Planner tool uses conversational AI to guide beginners and professionals from an idea all the way to a wire framed website. And how the upcoming AI integrations promise even more granular design control.\n\n\n\nMiriam also shares her perspectives on how the new Abilities API is set to change what’s possible inside WordPress, and what this means for developers, designers, and support teams navigating the complexities of AI driven workflows.\n\n\n\nFor those interested in how AI is shaping the future of WordPress, Elementor’s strategy, and the evolving role of creators within this ecosystem, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to find out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Miriam Schwab.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Miriam Schwab. Hello Miriam.\n\n\n\n[00:03:23] Miriam Schwab: Hi.\n\n\n\n[00:03:24] Nathan Wrigley: Nice to have you with us. Now, dear listener, I have to be very grateful to Miriam because about three weeks ago we tried to capture this exact podcast. In fact, we did. We captured this exact podcast. Unfortunately, the tech failed and Miriam’s audio was entirely silent. So we had a nice long conversation, Miriam divulged her experience and wisdom, and I got to put it out on the podcast and there was nothing there. It was completely blank. So firstly, an apology for that. And secondly, enormous thanks for coming back and talking to me.\n\n\n\n[00:03:54] Miriam Schwab: Well, I have to thank you for giving this another shot because I have a feeling that the technical difficulties were also on my side. So thank you for giving this another go.\n\n\n\n[00:04:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well, I appreciate it. So Miriam has a long and storied history in WordPress. She’s working with Elementor at the moment, but the story goes back way further than that. Let’s just do the little potted bio at the beginning, Miriam. Just tell us a, just a short version of who you are in the WordPress space, and what you’ve achieved in the past.\n\n\n\n[00:04:20] Miriam Schwab: Okay, so about 20 years ago, I discovered WordPress. Loved it, decided to work with it, started offering it as a service. Eventually that expanded into being an agency, and working on custom implementations of WordPress for tech companies and large nonprofits, which was a lot of fun and a great learning experience.\n\n\n\nDid that for about 13 years. Sold the agency and founded a startup based on one of the many ideas I had had over the years. I had many ideas for products over the years, but I knew that I needed to make sure I wasn’t over spending my abilities, like between family and work and everything.\n\n\n\nBut I got to the stage where I was like, okay, I can do this. And I actually really loved the idea. So I founded a startup that was called Strattic. It published WordPress websites in a static architecture while retaining dynamic capabilities. And by doing that, it solved pretty much all the issues related to speed security and scalability. Raised venture capital funding for it, and it was acquired by Elementor in June, 2022.\n\n\n\nAnd after joining Elementor, continued to lead the Strattic team for about six months, and then they offered me this new position that hadn’t existed before. Initially, we called it the Head of WordPress Relations, and then it evolved to just being called Head of WordPress, where I act as a liaison between Elementor and the broader WordPress community on many levels. Practically, strategically, community, like you name it and I’m probably doing it. So that’s a bit about me.\n\n\n\n[00:05:43] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have like a job description? Because when you say sort of Head of WordPress, there really seems to be almost no bounds in terms of the WordPress and Elementor connection. Do you have constraints on what is out of bounds? Or is it literally anything that’s connected with WordPress comes under your purview?\n\n\n\n[00:05:57] Miriam Schwab: It is literally anything, pretty much. It suits me because I was the CEO of two companies, right? I led them. So I have an entrepreneurial character, I guess you could say. And I’ve always been involved in a lot of aspects of the businesses that I’ve been running, and I like that. I actually like to be involved in marketing and sales and even the financial side of things, and internal and external and all that kind of stuff. So it allows me to continue to embrace that side of me, even though I’m now like corporate. And I really appreciate that Elementor allows me that flexibility. It keeps the work that I do very interesting.\n\n\n\n[00:06:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’ll bet. And you’ve always me as an extremely curious person, who likes to be busy, let’s put it that way.\n\n\n\nDoes Elementor continue to grow? I mean, I guess Elementor for me feels like it’s coming up to a decade old or something along those lines.\n\n\n\n[00:06:48] Miriam Schwab: Yes, exactly. June is going to be 10 years since it was founded. We’re in our 10th year now, like heading up to it.\n\n\n\n[00:06:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and when it began, the plugin offered an incredibly valuable free version. And this was a real good way of kind of promoting growth because page builders were becoming all the rage at that point, and the market was already becoming saturated. But Elementor managed to put some daylight between themselves and the competitors because of the fully rounded free version. And then obviously, you know, built the pro version on top of that.\n\n\n\nAnd then when you chart the numbers of WordPress’s growth over the last decade, I don’t know what the exact numbers are, perhaps you can fill us in on that, but it feels like quite a bit of the WordPress growth, so WordPress generally, that 43% figure that we constantly like to refer to, it feels like quite a bit of that belongs, well, not belongs, but you know what I mean, is because of the popularity of Elementor. So the growth was meteoric. And I don’t know how that’s carried on, whether the line continues that trajectory, or whether it’s kind of flat lined, but still growing. Can we just get into that a bit?\n\n\n\n[00:07:50] Miriam Schwab: After Elementor was launched, it really quickly reached a million active installs, I think within a year or something because it was the right, very much the right product at the right time, bringing a lot of value to users. And like you mentioned, like with the free version, for sure, that definitely helped power its growth and adoption. But also because it was a valuable, and is a valuable product for web builders to use.\n\n\n\nIn terms of the growth, so amazingly, Elementor’s adoption continues to grow. So you know W3Techs? Every year they publish like top stuff. And the various categories is based on the absolute number of sites that that particular technology accrued over the course of 2025. For the third year running, Elementor was given the title of Top Content Management System by W3Techs, beating out Wix and Shopify and WordPress. WordPress was the winner for many years.\n\n\n\nAnd I’m not privy to the exact numbers or their exact calculations, but based on what they say, if Elementor is the top CMS, it’s because over the course of 2025, it’s usage base grew by more websites than those other platforms grew, which is wild. And like there, they even states, I think Elementor started off 2025 with 11.7% of the internet, and ended off 2025 with 13.1% of the internet.\n\n\n\n[00:09:12] Nathan Wrigley: Wait. Do that again.\n\n\n\n[00:09:13] Miriam Schwab: Of the entire web, yes, of the web. Not WordPress.\n\n\n\n[00:09:17] Nathan Wrigley: We use the 43% figure to be WordPress. So that same kind of sentence, but substitute Elementor for the word WordPress in there. 13%?\n\n\n\n[00:09:27] Miriam Schwab: Yeah, over 13%. So over the course of 2025, Elementor continued to grow at a very significant pace. So Elementor is still growing.\n\n\n\n[00:09:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s remarkable. Do you know if that’s because of new adoption or is that that the current users of the platform, you know, who have a license for multiple sites and what have you, are just using it more and more, so that number kind of creeps up? So I guess the question there is, do you have a growing user base or is it just more broad use by your current user base?\n\n\n\n[00:09:54] Miriam Schwab: Our current user base definitely contributes to growth, but by our estimation, we grew by something like three and a half million sites over the course of 2025. So a significant number of those sites are new. New users, or new sites, or whatever, that kind of thing.\n\n\n\n[00:10:12] Nathan Wrigley: What a phenomenal story that, I mean it is the story really inside of the WordPress space over the last decade. I presume there’s nothing that can touch those kind of stats. That’s really remarkable. And I suppose it’s a blessing and also a curse. And what I mean by that is, you’ve got this giant platform, enormous user base, but I suppose it also means that anything that you do with the Elementor platform, there’s a lot of care that needs to be taken on every single update. So if you’re going to update to the 4.0 version, which you recently did, big overhaul, but a big user base to get annoyed if things go wrong. So I guess a lot of care and attention required because of your popularity.\n\n\n\n[00:10:52] Miriam Schwab: Yeah. Backwards compatibility, you know, it’s a very important aspect of WordPress development in general. So at Elementor it’s the same. It’s super critical in terms of every update that we push out, determining how far back we’re going to support things, et cetera. So every version that goes out, it has to be super duper QA’d.\n\n\n\nAnd even so, you know what WordPress is like, it’s like the wild west. Every site is like a snowflake. It has its own combination of themes, plugins, server configuration, PHP version, you know what I mean? Like, good luck with that. But the team does an amazing job of really managing to make sure that pretty much every version doesn’t cause issues.\n\n\n\nAnd with regards to version four, that is an overhaul. And the team, while moving ahead with creating version four, because it’ll bring a lot of value to our users and it pulls Elementor even more towards the future, it’s being done so carefully. Like every step is considered.\n\n\n\nAnd in terms of how it’s being developed and also how it’s going to work in conjunction with the previous approach to Elementor. Because the assumption is, not everyone’s going to just jump over to version four. Migrating an existing site to version four may be complicated. There’s discussions around how to do that in the best way, but it may be complicated.\n\n\n\nSo even an existing site, it might have pages still built on version three and prior, while new pages will be built with version four to gain the benefits of version four. So they have to live side by side for some amount of time. It’s incredibly complicated, but it’s a really important, exciting project because, like you said, Elementor is 10 years old, which means a 10-year-old code base. That means it’s time to give it an overhaul, even with all the risk and complication involved.\n\n\n\n[00:12:32] Nathan Wrigley: What’s the staff count that you’ve got over there now?\n\n\n\n[00:12:34] Miriam Schwab: It’s something like 350 now, I think.\n\n\n\n[00:12:37] Nathan Wrigley: So enormous. But again, I presume that speaks to the things that you’ve got to do. You know, if you’re going to ship a big update, you need a lot of bodies doing the coding for that. But also, you know, checking the backwards compatibility and things.\n\n\n\nOkay, so you mentioned the future. In the year 2025, the words, well, the letters AI, I think probably were said by more people than just about anything else in the English language. Apart from maybe the word the. Everything else seems to have gone AI. If you look in the WordPress space, all of the media, all of the excitement, all of the interest, all of the everything, the oxygen is being sucked out of the room by AI, let’s put it that way.\n\n\n\nAnd so Elementor, I presume, has to keep up with those current trends. What is happening over there? In terms of the page builder, and also I know there’s other ancillary products and plugins that, whilst built by you, aren’t necessarily part of that page building experience. What’s going on?\n\n\n\n[00:13:26] Miriam Schwab: So we have like a number of approaches to AI and each one is getting a lot of attention. And while users are enthusiastic about them, we’re trying to figure out where to give them the best experience and how with AI. I think just like the whole world, we’re also working on figuring out AI and how to implement the best way possible.\n\n\n\nBut we strongly believe that WordPress must have strong AI capabilities in order to secure its future. And we want to see WordPress have a strong future for many years to come. But not only that, AI in WordPress will actually give it a big leg up and advantage over the more proprietary platforms in our opinion. So there’s like intense effort being made on our side to create amazing AI tooling in order to try to secure WordPress’s feature.\n\n\n\nSo what do we have? We have the kind of basic obvious stuff, which is, you’re in Elementor editor, you want to generate an image, here, you can generate an image with AI. You want to create copy, text, add title, all that kind of stuff, the content release stuff, there you go. HTML, CSS, okay. Kind of like check the box, pretty expected stuff.\n\n\n\nThen we have Angie which is its own standalone plugin, which applies to all of WordPress, not just Elementor. And it gives agentic capabilities to WordPress in general. So whatever you would think an AI assistant would be able to do for you in your WordPress environment, it can pretty much do that. As we know, AI is non-deterministic. You tell it to do something and it will do it one way, and it tells you to do something else and it’ll do it the other way. So there’s a lot of guardrails being developed by our team to direct Angie to give the results that the user probably wants.\n\n\n\nBut you can do things like around managing your site, managing users, creating content, changing categories, WooCommerce management, product management, things like that. So it streamlines a lot of stuff. And the team is working on some like really exciting capabilities, which hopefully will be released soon. And then we’ll be able to talk about it. But in the meantime, it’s free to use. Anyone can go into the repo, install it, start using it, and of course we want to hear feedback about that. So that’s Angie.\n\n\n\nAnd then the third approach with AI is our Site Planner. So Site Planner is a very cool tool. You chat to it, and you chat your way to a very robust website. It’s not like a one line prompt, build me a flower shop website, and then it just kind of guesses what you might want. It asks you very specific and useful questions so that it can get the fullest picture of what you want to build. And it guides you along the way by asking you the right questions, and then it generates a site for you in Elementor, and then you can export that site into your own hosting environment, or into our hosting environment, or you can download it as a zip file or whatever.\n\n\n\nSo the Site Planner can be the first stage in your AI website building journey. It takes you, let’s say from zero to 80, I would say. And then the last 20% of the site you can do with Angie, you can do manually, you can do with Elementor, you could do not with Elementor. You could do however you want, and launch your site.\n\n\n\nSo that’s pretty much what’s going on with AI. We have some more stuff coming out soon, but we’ll talk about it when we can, you know?\n\n\n\n[00:16:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so let me just reprise that and make sure I’ve understood. So the first piece of that jigsaw puzzle was the things with inside of Elementor, the page builder itself. And if we rewound the clock just five years, even though you are now saying, oh, the expected stuff, that stuff was the stuff of Star Trek. You know, oh, ask it for an image and it’ll make an image. Yeah, okay, that seems like a distant future that we’ll never reach. And yet now that’s kind of de rigueur. Everybody expects that stuff. So that’s the stuff inside of the page builder as you’d expect. Text, images and what have you.\n\n\n\nBut then you’ve got this Angie product, which if I’m parsing that correctly, enables you to leverage the abilities of WordPress. So I would like you to create me a post and assign these categories to it and publish it on this particular date. Do you know, does that leverage the sort of Abilities API, or have you done the foundational work yourselves as opposed to the Core Abilities API, which the teams have been working on more recently?\n\n\n\n[00:17:32] Miriam Schwab: That’s a very good question. So the Angie team started building Angie at least a year ago, which was before the Abilities API was, I don’t know, even a twinkle in someones eye. So the team, in order to make Angie work, built their own tools, like it’s called tools, exposing WordPress’ capabilities, so actually invested a ton in exposing something like 200 tools in WordPress to Angie.\n\n\n\nAnd not only in Angie, the team actually also did some work to expose tools in WooCommerce and ACF as like a starting point for, because they’re very popular plugins. So when the Abilities API came around, the team already had a lot that was done and also more than what the Abilities API has. The goal is to sync up with the Abilities API and leverage it. At the moment there’s still some issues, at least on our end using it. But we’re in constant communication with the WordPress AI teams and giving feedback and things like that. So hopefully we’ll be able to resolve that. But the team did build all of that themselves, which is pretty amazing.\n\n\n\n[00:18:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that is amazing. But I guess given what Elementor touches, and the fact that you’ve got that enormous staff there that can try to build that, it kind of made sense to go at that because you didn’t know that the team were working on the Abilities API. I remember when that dropped. So I’ve been covering WordPress news for, I don’t know, a decade or something like that. I remember thinking, this is probably the most consequential piece of news that I’ve ever covered.\n\n\n\nThe idea of binding AI, so AI in the scenario that you described first, where I’m in Elementor, I want an image, I’m in Elementor, I want some text. That’s interesting, but it’s really confined. There’s lots of boxes around that, there’s only a certain permutation of things that you can do. But the minute you start to bind an AI to all the things that WordPress can do, so create a user, delete a user, create a page, schedule it for this time. Oh, I don’t know. Just imagine clicking around inside the WordPress admin interface and wherever you end up, there’s a thing, there’s a box or a field to fill out, and there’s an ability that can be done by that thing.\n\n\n\nAnd uncovering those and making it so that the AI agent can understand what that is, it’s very hard to me to encapsulate in English why I think that’s so impressive. But, do you know what I mean? Can you see the thread of what I’m trying to say there, how important that is?\n\n\n\n[00:19:49] Miriam Schwab: It is super impressive. What you’re saying about AI being like, if we had thought about it five years ago, it would be amazing. Even agentic AI, everyone talks about agents as if it’s like obvious that AI can be agentic. But for quite a bit of time in the beginning, and of course AI years are like a million years.\n\n\n\nSo for the first year and a half or something of us, of the world using AI, something like that, there wasn’t even agentic AI. So the fact that there’s agentic AI, and that it can be applied to WordPress is pretty wild. And I’ll tell you why I also think it’s wild. Because WordPress is 20 years old, 23 years old, whatever it is at this point. It’s a legacy platform. And the fact that it can be, the Abilities API is a really smart approach to it because it kind of slackens the exposure of everything that’s going on behind WordPress.\n\n\n\nInstead of needing like a million different APIs and different approaches and that every plugin’s creating their own way to integrate with WordPress. It standardises it in a way that actually is also good for development, but also is good for the AI future, because it means that the way AI will interface with WordPress is straightforward and standard enough that regardless of what the LLMs end up doing going forward, if there’s more capabilities, if we move beyond agentic to who knows what, I don’t know what, like implants in our brains, then we can still interface with WordPress even though it’s over 20 years old. I think that’s amazing. So kudos to the team for accomplishing that.\n\n\n\n[00:21:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and it was a penny that just didn’t drop for me. I saw AI as this interesting thing where it could create content, but I didn’t make the connection with all of the myriad things that WordPress could do. I just thought, okay, it’ll be inside the block editor, or it’ll be inside of Elementor or wherever it lives. That’s where the AI will belong. And then when I first read a summary of what the Abilities API was going to achieve, and that then binds to a whole other layer of APIs surrounding that, that was when the penny dropped. And I thought, okay, so basically what you’ve done there is you’ve opened the door and you’ve said, here’s all the things that a WordPress website can do. Until now, the AI was just in the interface and you could, you know, words and images and what have you. Now it’s, okay, we’ve opened the doors, now you can do the whole range of things that you’d like to do with the AI. And so it opens up all of those capabilities.\n\n\n\nAgain, the words fail me, but the import of it, the importance of it, I think only time will tell. But it feels like it’s probably one of the more important things. And again, like you said, 20 year old legacy system, there could have been a moment where the two paths split and, you know, AI became more interesting outside of WordPress, and WordPress sudden decline and what have you. But by opening the doors and saying, actually let’s just let all of the AI in and you can explore that if you wish to, kind of interesting for those people that want to.\n\n\n\n[00:22:29] Miriam Schwab: Yeah, WordPress could have struggled to keep up with AI and we, I’m not saying it’s not a struggle. I think we’re a bit late to the AI game in general as a, like an ecosystem, which is understandable. We’re open source, things like, you know, move slower and by committee, so that’s just how it goes. But the fact that it picked itself up, the team was established and within six months of being established or something like that, it already had accomplished their four pillars of work that they had set out for themselves, is really amazing. And it’s super important for the future of WordPress, and it’s great to see that they were able to accomplish that.\n\n\n\n[00:23:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and also it feels like the moment has arrived where a lot of the people that write in the WordPress space, so content creators and what have you, they’ve sort of got this now and they’re now creating content. And some of the people that no doubt, you and I both follow, who may be writing on their own blog or on social media or what have you, there seems to have been over the last couple of months, a real, a sense that, okay, WordPress has a place. We don’t need to worry about that anymore. We’ve now got a path with this AI team. State of the Word AI team sort gathered there and pressed the big red button and all that kind of stuff. There seems to have been so much focus that it’s built itself into relevance again. And there seems to be less worry. People now writing content about the things that WordPress can do with these abilities bound to it.\n\n\n\nOkay, so let’s move on to the third strand of what you mentioned, which was, forgive me if I get this wrong. You said Site Planner, right? Was that correct?\n\n\n\n[00:23:51] Miriam Schwab: Site planner, yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:23:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And this is a conversation that you have. This is something that I always find kind of interesting. You know, getting into a conversation with something which is essentially an AI, that’s kind of curious. But you mentioned that whole process was a back and forth. So it’s not, I want a website. You write this great, big, long prompt, click the button, wait for five minutes and kind of cross your fingers and hope for the best. This is more of a dialogue, is it? Where you repeatedly get asked a series of smaller questions, which hopefully then build up to the sort of final thing. Tell us a little bit more.\n\n\n\n[00:24:19] Miriam Schwab: The way that works is, yes, you can like paste in some kind of giant prompt, but even then, whether you start with like one sentence or a prompt, the Site Planner will ask you questions, clarifying questions, and also suggestive questions. Do you want any of these types of pages, or content on your site? And things like that. It’s really good for guiding non-professionals.\n\n\n\nIt then creates actually a brief, like it writes out a brief for your website based on this conversation. So it’s really good for non-professionals who don’t know the questions to ask, right? They don’t know what they should be even considering. So it asks questions for them.\n\n\n\nBut it’s also great for professionals. It cuts down a lot of time in the research stage of building a site for a client. And the AI can actually like give them added value in terms of asking questions they might not have thought of. That conversation process can be cut short whenever the user wants. Like it can go on for as long as they want, but they can also say, that’s enough, let’s build the site based on what we discussed.\n\n\n\nWhen the AI is creating the brief, it will tell you the strength of the brief, like in the top right corner of Site Planner. So once you get to the stage where it says strong brief, you could stop there, but you could keep going. The more information you give it, the better the outcome will be. Just like with AI in general.\n\n\n\nSo once you finish that conversation, you say, let’s move to the next stage. It creates a site map. So it shows the hierarchy of the site based on the conversation. But also, on each page it shows you like what type of content it will have, and it actually gives you the content. The nice thing about the way the AI builds the site is that, first of all, content is king, which it always has been on websites. And here you really get to see the strength of that.\n\n\n\nSo the content that it creates is really good because it’s based on this conversation that you had with it. At that site map stage you can drag and drop things around, add different pages that it didn’t include, remove sections from pages, but it’s just content chunks. Once you are happy with that stage, you go to the next stage, which is the website stage.\n\n\n\nWe call it the wireframe stage because it’s not like a fully designed site, it’s more like the site with a structure, but it’s like 80% of the way there. It could have like testimonials section, contact page form, gallery. I created a demo site for a cafe that also has community events. So it has an events page. It’s really great. It like really gets you 80% of the way there. It saves a lot of time, and if you’re a professional, you can show your client that at that stage and work off of that.\n\n\n\nIf anyone works with clients, you know that communicating and getting to a point where everyone’s happy can be very challenging when you don’t have something to show. But here, when you have something to show, you get past that blank canvas stage, which is very hard for people to like even imagine anything, and then you can work from there.\n\n\n\nSo once you have the wire frames done, also at that wire frame stage, by the way, you can also there edit things, remove things, et cetera. Change the colour palette, upload a logo to be used across the site, and things like that.\n\n\n\nThen you can publish the site. You can publish it into our own hosting environment in one click, but you can also publish it into any existing Elementor account. You just kind of add your It hooks up to your account and it will send it to wherever that site is hosted. Or you can download and upload it somewhere else. So it gets you from zero to 80, or 90% of the way with a site through a conversation and then you can like tweak it, polish it, and finalise it from there. So it’s really useful in my opinion.\n\n\n\n[00:27:34] Nathan Wrigley: So prior to the publication of it, you mentioned that you could show it to your clients. Is the capacity to have a public facing yet not public facing, if you know what I mean? So a URL, which is visible to you, but not the wider world for SEO and what have you. Is it possible to sort of take an up and running version, give it to a client so that they can have a little bit of a poke around?\n\n\n\n[00:27:52] Miriam Schwab: That’s an interesting question. At that point, when it’s still in site planner, I think it’s only visible to you. So you would have to download and put it somewhere. But then you could put it in like a staging site or wherever you want to put it. You could share your screen with the client. But yeah, I think you can’t share the URL to that particular project within a third party.\n\n\n\n[00:28:09] Nathan Wrigley: Because that’s all so very instantaneous compared to, you know, it may be that you get into this dialogue, which takes half an hour or what have you. But, you know, compared to the old way of building things, it’s more or less instantaneous. I had this notion that a service like that would be kind of interesting if it spat out four or five variations of the same thing at the same time.\n\n\n\nSo I realise there’s a sort of, you know, a burden in terms of technology and overhead and all of that, cPU time and what have you. But the idea of entering that client meeting with five versions of the same basic thing. So, okay, I have a, I don’t know, a bricks and mortar store and I sell widgets. So I build the one version, but Elementor, for example, in this scenario, builds me four others as well. And then I can go through and cherry pick which bits of this one do you like or, I like the colour scheme of that, if you know what I mean? So I don’t know if it’s possible to do that. In other words, is it possible to spin up multiple versions of the same thing, or would you have to sort of start from scratch each time?\n\n\n\n[00:29:02] Miriam Schwab: Well, what you can do within the project is you can ask it to regenerate a section. Like, you could be like, I don’t like that. So you could say like, do it differently and then it will suggest something else. You could theoretically, I guess like create a second page, let’s say a second about page and then be like, okay, suggest a different format for me for this. Like a different structure because it’s not exactly design.\n\n\n\nThe design afterwards can be worked on with a client or whatever. It’s more like the structure of the page. So, and even though it’s a live website, it is like structure. So you could be like, no, I want the testimonials to be a different style, like suggest something else. And then you could show, I guess the customer various pages within the site. It’s an interesting idea.\n\n\n\nI know that the team is working on Site Planner, and it will be more rolled into the WordPress Elementor environment, like in the site. Right now, it’s an external tool, so once it’s in there, you could like duplicate pages, you could regenerate pages, things like that. I don’t have an ETA on when that’s happening but that’s the general direction.\n\n\n\n[00:29:58] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a fascinating conversation. And the other thing I was going to say is that there’s obviously, in your community, there’s a lot of people who are, they have a lot of history of building things with Elementor. They’ve learned the UI inside and out. They’ve become experts. They know where every checkbox is. If you show them something in Figma and then give them 10 minutes, they’ll mimic that perfectly.\n\n\n\nAnd I was wondering what kind of capabilities the AI has within the Elementor interface. So in other words, does it do a sort of cookie cutter job of creating rows and sections and what have you, based upon things that have already been prebuilt? Or can it, in its AI wire frame stage, can it do, I don’t know, unique padding or crazy CSS things? Can it get into all of the bits and pieces that Elementor offers, all of those rich experiences? Or is it more kind of, okay, somebody in the team built these testimonial elements, and so we’re going to basically pick one of those and mimic that onto this wire frame?\n\n\n\n[00:30:52] Miriam Schwab: So there’s Angie as it exists now and there’s Angies that will be over the next few months. So I’m going to be giving like, I guess kind of a sneak preview into what’s coming.\n\n\n\nAt the moment it can do a lot within Elementor, but it is kind of constrained within what Elementor classically does. However, v4 is going to enable the AI, or let’s say the v4 AI partnership will give it a lot more creative capabilities, and extend basically to whatever you want it to do, that you can do with Angie. From custom code snippets, to custom widgets, to custom anything, or working within the Elementor. There’s going to be a lot of interesting things that people can do, basically in some ways just limited by their creative ideas.\n\n\n\n[00:31:38] Nathan Wrigley: Right, so much more granular. Because I have this vision that at some point in the future, and maybe some tool out there can do this. But I have this vision that, let’s say you’re inside Elementor, you’ve got 99% of the way there, and then you suddenly realise that that picture of the cat is the wrong cat. And so you just sort of say, can we have a different cat? No, not that one. Okay, that cat. And now, could we make the borders rounder on that particular image and give it a bit of a box shadow? That would be nice. Oh, and then swap it around so the text is on the other side.\n\n\n\nSo you end up in this sort of dialogue, almost like you’re chatting to the designer and you are watching over their shoulder as they build it. That seems to be the kind of place where we would love to get to. And then of course we enter this curious, difficult moment for the web developers and web designers, where these things become so dreadfully straightforward and easy that we then have to start questioning, how do you offer this as a client service if almost everybody can speak to a website and get it to do whatever you would like it to do?\n\n\n\nSo there’s two things in there. I sort of smuggled the last one in. But the first one is this sort of dialogue with the website, and then the second one is whether or not these tools are making it more difficult to be in the industry that we all love so much.\n\n\n\n[00:32:44] Miriam Schwab: With regards to the dialogue description, so AI in general, it’s become like our team members for certain things. You know, in the past, if I wanted to, let’s say, post something on social media on behalf of Elementor, I would go to the design team and ask them to design something and go through that process, and then get what they gave me and then post it.\n\n\n\nAnd now my design team is Nano Banana, right? Or ChatGPT. I get two versions, they compete against each other. Whichever one works best for me is what I take. And so it’s like that in almost everything we do if we’re using AI, and also in the world of website creation, design, development, and management. Our team for many aspects of it will become AI, which will create greater efficiency and also it seems like greater redundancy.\n\n\n\nBut I think like anything with a tool, the results will be defined by the abilities and skills of the person directing it. AI needs direction and that conversation to happen. And the quality of the results will be dependent on the skillset of the user, not skillset in terms of, how do I get AI to do stuff? But skillset of, what should an excellent website be?\n\n\n\nSo the human in the loop, I think, will continue to be a very important part. It’s just we’re kicking the can down the road kind of thing in terms of where we bring value. So instead of us bringing value, sitting and clicking on an image and changing the background using Photoshop, our value will be in being the director and producer of what output we want it to have and getting it there.\n\n\n\nSo we’re not like the tinkerers and like the hammer or nail people, we’re the contractor or the strategist, or the blueprint creators. So the conversations will take place, but the human in the loop part will still be really important. We all, whether we’re web creators or whatever profession we have, have to figure out how to use AI to help us do what we’re doing better.\n\n\n\nI actually don’t exactly agree with the idea that AI helps us do more. It does, a lot of things become faster, but I think the value is that a lot of things get done better and a higher quality. So there’s that.\n\n\n\nSo how do we use AI to the best of our abilities to help us do our work even better. But also, how do we continue to provide value in a world that’s dominated by AI? And that’s like, I don’t know what the answers are. 2026 is going to be the year of, who knows? Because AI changes every second. They could invent a new model or release a new model tomorrow that changes this whole conversation.\n\n\n\n[00:35:19] Nathan Wrigley: One of the things that, sort of round it off with this one maybe. I’m thinking about your support system. So your support system, which has built up over 10 years, and presumably worked to help your clients. But the clients themselves probably started with a blank canvas and then, you know, made mistakes along the way, but were able to describe the mistakes that they made along the way to your support agents. Like, okay, I was doing this and then something went wrong. Can you unpick that for me? Where did I go wrong?\n\n\n\nThe realignment that needs to take place for your support team with the advent of AI, I suppose is fairly profound because you’ll probably have a lot of users who will just know that they did a prompt. And now this thing happened and I didn’t want that thing to happen. How do I go back? I mean there’s obviously a case of click undo, or don’t save the changes or whatever. But I’m also imagining the support that you provide has to pivot a lot as well.\n\n\n\n[00:36:06] Miriam Schwab: The development of AI has to include implementing a ton of guardrails to prevent users from doing things that can damage their site. I’ll give you an example. In the early days of Angie, I generally love pushing tools to their limits, so I was pushing Angie to its limit and I got it to kick me out of my own site and remove my user. And I was like, well that’s not cool. So guardrails were put in place around that.\n\n\n\nThere’s concepts of, first of all, not allowing a user to implement something until they’re sure. Like meaning, not just be like, hey AI, can you do this? And the AI is like, done. No. AI is like, okay, here’s what it will look like, here’s what it will do, that kind of thing. Do you want to go ahead? Then, of course, undo buttons.\n\n\n\nBut then even with all of that, yeah, support could be different. We can have logs and things like that about what happened and why it happened and things like that. And that can help troubleshoot things. But on the other hand, I think support can become much better because while still the human is in the loop, getting the answers to issues, you know, you end up with this huge knowledge base of stuff, and a support agent can only know so much. Our brains are finite. We don’t know what someone discovered yesterday as an issue and as a solution and all that kind of stuff. So once you have AI kind of like analysing your corpus of knowledge and then pulling out what can help you or the user, then that becomes much better.\n\n\n\nBut I’ll give you another interesting angle of where support becomes complicated, where you have the Abilities API, or Angie or both, and a user is interacting with Angie, let’s say, and Elementor and also a third party plugin that is also working with AI. And then there’s something borks. And then the user is like, was it Elementor that was a problem? Was it WordPress that was a problem? Was it this third party plugin that was a problem? How do I even ask for support when I don’t know what just caused that issue? I guess it’s another version of plugin conflicts, but it’s just taking it to another level.\n\n\n\n[00:38:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s a different level altogether. I said that was my final question. Turns out I was being insincere. I have one more. And that is, I know that Elementor has done a lot of work trying to make websites more accessible in the recent past. And so that’s the final question, I promise. The idea that we hand over the agency of this to our AI builder and so things like accessibility, there may be other things that we could smuggle in there as well, but we’ll go with accessibility. Is work being done to ensure that the output follows WCAG guidelines and things along those lines?\n\n\n\n[00:38:32] Miriam Schwab: So something that I’ve seen as we’re working on implementing AI capabilities is that there’s this idea that I had, and I think others do as well, that AI is the all powerful whatever. And if you just say to it, make my site accessible, it will make my site accessible. So it turns out it’s not like that. Maybe one day it will be. But AI needs tools, needs direction, needs the capabilities, and it doesn’t just have it just because it’s AI.\n\n\n\nSo it’s kind of the same with accessibility. So actually Elementor created an accessibility plugin called Ally, which is very useful because it goes through the website, analyses it, tells you where there’s issues, but doesn’t just tell you where there is issues, it gives you solutions. And it can, with AI, implement those solutions. Like you can click and be like, fix that.\n\n\n\nAnd that kind of ongoing accessibility assistance means that a person can, first of all do like a once through of their site and bring it to a better level of accessibility. We don’t guarantee like 100% accessibility, I don’t know if anyone can, but it improves accessibility on many levels.\n\n\n\nAnd then as you’re going along, it can keep an eye on things or you can like trigger it and it can help make sure that whatever you’re doing going forward also stays within accessibility guidelines. So it’s like a really useful assistant, slash solution, slash tool that users can implement on an ongoing basis with their site. So worth checking out.\n\n\n\n[00:39:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’ll put that into the show notes as well. And if memory serves, I could be wrong about this, if memory serves it’s not an Elementor specific solution.\n\n\n\n[00:40:06] Miriam Schwab: Oh, right, exactly. It’s for all sites, all WordPress sites.\n\n\n\n[00:40:08] Nathan Wrigley: So any WordPress website can benefit from that. Okay, that’s interesting. Okay, so who knows what the year 2026 will bring. It no doubt will be chaos, turmoil.\n\n\n\n[00:40:18] Miriam Schwab: It won’t be boring.\n\n\n\n[00:40:19] Nathan Wrigley: That’s the words. Yeah, it definitely won’t be boring. And, yeah, good luck for Elementor in the year 2026.\n\n\n\n[00:40:26] Miriam Schwab: Thank you. I’m excited, by the way, for 2026. It’s like a whole new world, and I think in some ways, at least for me, and I see this with others, it like reignited a spark for innovation in WordPress. WordPress is amazing, it’s been amazing for over 20 years and we’ve always, you know, been seeking, looking for ways to innovate. But AI takes it to a whole other level and makes innovation more accessible, if we’re going to use that word. And it’s really fun to see what people are creating around AI for WordPress. And I think we’re going to see some amazing things released over the course of 2026, not just by Elementor, that will make WordPress, wow. Anyways, that’s just my thoughts about 2026.\n\n\n\n[00:41:00] Nathan Wrigley: Miriam Schwab, thank you for chatting to me today.\n\n\n\n[00:41:02] Miriam Schwab: Thank you.\n\n\n\n\nOn the podcast today we have Miriam Schwab.\n\n\n\nMiriam has been deeply immersed in the WordPress ecosystem for around two decades. Starting out offering WordPress as a service, she went on to lead a custom WordPress agency serving major tech companies and nonprofits, before founding the startup Strattic, pioneering static WordPress architecture. After Strattic\u2019s acquisition by Elementor in 2022, Miriam took on the role of Head of WordPress, acting as the key liaison between Elementor and the wider WordPress community.\n\n\n\nElementor\u2019s growth over the last decade has been prolific. Miriam says that it now powers over 13% of the entire web. She gives insights into the challenges and responsibilities that come with maintaining such a large user base, especially around major updates and backwards compatibility.\n\n\n\nMuch of our conversation centres around the rise of AI in WordPress. From built-in AI tools for generating images and content, to the stand-alone Angie plugin that introduces agentic AI capabilities across WordPress. Miriam outlines Elementor\u2019s multi-pronged approach to innovation, talking about how their Site Planner tool uses conversational AI to guide beginners and professionals from an idea all the way to a wireframed website, and how the upcoming AI integrations promise even more granular design control.\n\n\n\nMiriam also shares her perspective on how the new Abilities API is set to change what\u2019s possible inside WordPress, and what this means for developers, designers, and support teams navigating the complexities of AI-driven workflows.\n\n\n\nFor those interested in how AI is shaping the future of WordPress, Elementor\u2019s strategy, and the evolving roles of creators within this ecosystem, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\nElementor\n\n\n\nElementor Acquires Strattic To Redefine WordPress Hosting\n\n\n\nW3Tech\n\n\n\nAngie plugin\n\n\n\nAbilities API\n\n\n\nAlly plugin", "date_published": "2026-02-04T10:00:00-05:00", "date_modified": "2026-02-02T10:24:48-05:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/203-Miriam-Schwab-on-Elementors-Decade-of-Growth-and-Its-Future-With-AI-1.jpg", "tags": [ "ai", "Elementor", "podcast" ], "summary": "In this episode, Miriam Schwab discusses her journey in the WordPress space, from running an agency to founding Strattic, which was later acquired by Elementor. Now serving as Elementor\u2019s Head of WordPress, she shares insights on Elementor\u2019s growth, their careful approach to major updates, and their deep dive into AI innovation, including tools like Angie and Site Planner. The conversation also explores AI\u2019s impact on WordPress, plugin development, support, and accessibility, highlighting an exciting future for the platform as it embraces new technologies. For those interested in how AI is shaping the future of WordPress, Elementor\u2019s strategy, and the evolving roles of creators within this ecosystem, this episode is for you.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2346042/c1e-kd4k4cdz1o6cg80w4-xx7k85gnc6n2-pnicow.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=202405", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/202-charly-leetham-on-using-wordpress-to-enable-a-digital-nomad-life", "title": "#202 \u2013 Charly Leetham on Using WordPress to Enable a Digital Nomad Life", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, using WordPress to enable a digital nomad life.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Charly Leetham. Charly’s journey with technology spans over four decades, from tinkering with amateur radio as a teenager in Australia, to working in electronic engineering and eventually building a career in WordPress and small business tech support. With a background in field service, sales, and running retail businesses, Charly pivoted to helping people with their websites and tech needs right around the time WordPress was in its infancy. Today, nearly 20 years later, she’s still involved in the WordPress ecosystem, providing troubleshooting, support, and plain English tech translations for business owners who need their digital lives demystified.
\n\n\n\nBut in this episode, we are focusing less on her technical skills and more on her unique lifestyle. Charly is a true digital nomad. Someone who’s not bound to a fixed address, but instead lives and works from a camper van fitted with a Starlink system traveling and working all over Australia.
\n\n\n\nWe talk about what it was like to embrace remote working long before it was commonplace, and how she built a business that supports complete flexibility. We explore both the upsides of the digital nomad life, the freedom to travel, spend quality time with family, and work from beautiful locations, as well as the trade-offs such as limited space, and having to ruthlessly prioritize her longings.
\n\n\n\nCharlie discusses the essential tech setup that empowers her nomadism. From laptops and microphones to how Starlink satellite internet lets her work reliably from almost anywhere, even in places with little or no mobile signal.
\n\n\n\nThere’s practical advice on working with clients, so support can happen on her schedule, and reflections on building a business that matches her values, even if it sometimes means saying goodbye to clients who aren’t the right fit.
\n\n\n\nIf you’ve ever imagined trading your desk for the open road, or wondered what’s technologically, and personally possible, as a remote WordPress worker this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Charly Leetham.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Charly Leetham. Hello Charly.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:29] Charly Leetham: Hi Nathan. It’s really good to be here, and we are literally on other side of the world from each other.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:35] Nathan Wrigley: We could probably not be further apart. You are in Australia, and we’ve never met. We spent probably the last 20 minutes or so having a good old natter. It’s been really interesting. And actually, the way that this podcast was going to go, I think has been upended by the conversation that we just had. Because you talked to me about your digital nomadism, I’m going to say, and I want to lean into that.
\n\n\n\nBut before we get into all of that story about how you’ve ended up working remotely and things, do you just want to give us a little bit of background about how you’ve come to work, be on a WordPress podcast? What’s your background with tech, your life in general? Whatever you wish.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:09] Charly Leetham: Okay, well, look, I’ll try and keep it short. There is like 40 years to sort of condense into three or four minutes here.
\n\n\n\nLook, I have always been interested in tech from a very, very, very young age. My dad kind of encouraged me, if I was showed interest in anything, he’d say, well, go and find out about and let’s do this and let’s do that. The age of 13, I had my amateur radio license. By the time I was 16, I’d just left year 10, grade 10, and I went and did an associate diploma, electronic engineering. I worked full-time as a junior laboratory technician in an electronics lab at the Australian University while I was doing that.
\n\n\n\nAnd from there I went to be a field service tech with a private company. I’ve done field service, I’ve done pre-sales, I’ve done sales, I’ve done contract management. I’ve done customer service management. Done bid management.
\n\n\n\nAnd then I had a need after I decided, I was really, really sick and tired of doing all of this, so I went and bought myself a business with a franchise. We ran retail businesses for four years. They failed spectacularly. And I had a need that I had to actually get some money through the door so that I could feed the kids, pay the bills, eventually feed myself, and the husband is part of it.
\n\n\n\nSo this was born. And this was, people need help with their technology. People need help with their websites, people need help with their emails, people need help with all of this. And at that point in time, that was 2007 and WordPress was just in its infancy. I think it was, maybe three or four generations in at that point, but it was still in its infancy. And I learned, WordPress from that.
\n\n\n\nSomeone said, I’ve got a WordPress website, it’s not working. Can you look at it? Sure. I can look at it. I know C++, I know Pascal, I know Basic. Oh, this is PHP. What’s that? I learned PHP, I learned themes, I learned plugins, I learned how to troubleshoot things. And here we are nearly 20 years later, doing the thing that I love the most.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:16] Nathan Wrigley: There’s a lot in there, Charly. Genuinely, there is a lot in there. But what I’ve taken from that is that you have always been a bit of a tinkerer. You’ve always been somebody that’s fascinated by the technology side of things. Not just the software, but also, you know, the engineering side of things. And so, gosh, what a history you’ve got.
\n\n\n\nWe’ll get onto all the WordPress stuff a little bit later. Obviously that’s a big part of why you’re on this particular podcast because we are a WordPress focussed podcast. But it was the conversation that we had about half an hour ago that captured my attention and is just going to divert us for a little while.
\n\n\n\nAnd that is, you got on the call, we started talking about where we are in the world and the fact that you are over there and I’m over here, and isn’t it amazing that we can talk to each other? And the fact that this technology is here and, you know, when we were both children, this was the realm of science fiction. Being able to speak to somebody on the other side of the planet without prearranging it, and organising it with a telephone network and a great expense and all that.
\n\n\n\nAnd then we started talking about literally where you are. And I was kind of curious about your location. It turns out you are a digital nomad. Now, for those people tuning in who don’t know what this is, a digital nomad, I guess is somebody who is not bound to a specific location. I live in the UK. I have a house and a mortgage and all those kind of things. So I’ve kind of saddled myself to that, and I’ve got this definite spot in the world where I call home. You’ve decided to kind of get rid of all of that. And so just tell us about your life and what it is that you do, and how you move around and how you empower that with technology, and what technology you use to make that even possible.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:53] Charly Leetham: Okay. Let’s start by telling you a story. When my kids were all, all my kids are now in their early thirties, late twenties, so they’re adults. They’re gone, they’re out doing their own thing. But when my kids were born in the mid nineties, I wanted nothing more than to be able to stay home with them. But because of my experience, because of what I was doing, I was the breadwinner. I was the one that had the money coming in, so I had to go back to work. Went back to it when my kids were really young.
\n\n\n\nAnd as much as I loved my job and I loved what I was doing, I really hated not being able to be with him. And what I wanted to do was what I’m doing now, then. The ability to help people with their tech. The technology didn’t exist. We couldn’t remote into computers, we couldn’t do video conferencing. We couldn’t even do audio calls like phone networks for what we had. So if you just think about, you know, a young 20-year-old woman with two kids, working in IT, wanting to do this.
\n\n\n\nNow we come forward nearly 20 years, or nearly 30 years because my kids are 30. I can do exactly what I wanted to do 30 years ago today. I can sit wherever I am, I can run up my computer, I can get an internet connection, I can talk to you. Someone says to me, my computer’s not working, or my email’s not sending, I can’t do this. I can remote into their computer. I can do a face-to-face call with them. I can remote into their computer. I can give them that support. I don’t have to be on site to do that.
\n\n\n\nThat is what a digital nomad is. That’s what me as a digital nomad does. I provide tech support to people wherever I am, literally in the world. I said to you, I traveled in the US for a couple of years. Well, I got stuck in the US for a couple of years. And I didn’t work over there. I want to be really, really clear because you’re allowed to work in the US when you’re over there on a visitor visa. But I was helping people. People would say to me, my computer’s broken, well, let me remote in. I’ll have a look. Let me go and do this, I’ll help you. My dad would ring me from Australia and say, my email’s broken. What can I do? I’d fix it for him.
\n\n\n\nSo that’s what I do. So how does that work for me today? There is a housing crisis. That’s the first thing that we really need to recognise is there is a housing crisis. Finding a house is really, really difficult. Finding a house that is affordable is even more difficult. Rather than stressing on the fact that I can’t find a house, or I can’t afford the rent for a house, or I don’t want to have that stress of having a rent for a house. I fitted out a vehicle, I got a Starlink system. My brother fitted the vehicle out for me. My son, who is the electrician, put the electrical into it. And I literally live on the road. I go from place to place. I find somewhere I can hook into power for a couple of days. I throw my Starlink out the site, and I work. I support people.
\n\n\n\nYou could talk to me tomorrow, well, not tomorrow. Talk to me in a month, and I’m going to be in far North Queensland. A month from today, I will be in far North Queensland doing things up in far North Queensland because I’ve got to be up there for something. That’s what my life is like.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:55] Nathan Wrigley: If we rewind the clock, I don’t know, 10 years, did you desire something like that? From what you said, it sounds like you did. You always had some sort of intuition that if the technology allowed, you would wish for something like that. But obviously, kids and bills and all of that kind of got in the way. Has this been something which, if you sort of look back on your life, you think instinctively this was something that you wished to do?
\n\n\n\n[00:11:17] Charly Leetham: Not on the road. Not mobile like I am. Being able to do it from home, being able to be a work from home mum, absolutely. Being on the road and moving around, no, not even my wildest dreams would I have even imagined it. I didn’t even know that was available to us. I had no idea.
\n\n\n\nLook, I’ve met people, just to sort of segue very quickly. I have met people while I’m doing this, and they are young families. They are mum and dad and the kids, and they’re living on the road. They’ve got homeschooling curriculums for the kids. The kids do all their schooling. They get all these extra education of the places they’re in, all the things that they’re doing. Mum and dad will arrange to take the kids out on a bushwalk, and go and see a place that very few people in Australia will ever get to see. And these kids are living this life. I didn’t know that was available. If I had known that was available, I might have done that with my kids.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:08] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the curious things is that, if you are working in the tech space, and obviously we’ll talk more about WordPress in a moment, there is a significant chance that this is available to you. I mean obviously you may have a job which is office bound. We understand that that means that you’ve got to show up to the office and what have you. But I’m imagining that there’s quite a few people listening to this podcast who, if they were to really examine it, these possibilities are open to them.
\n\n\n\nBut it may not be something that they, A, wish to do, or B, they’ve not really thought about it too much. You know, they’ve decided that, okay, life is fine, I like my local environment or what have you.
\n\n\n\nWhat are like the key benefits, if you know what I mean? If you were to advertise this lifestyle to our audience, so we’ll do this in two parts. Let’s do the benefits first and then we’ll do the drawbacks later. What are the key things which you look at in your life at the moment and think, I’m so grateful for that? What are they?
\n\n\n\n[00:12:57] Charly Leetham: Freedom. Absolutely the freedom. I mean, we’re going to talk about drawbacks in a minute, so that’s going to get balanced out. But it is the freedom. It’s the ability to say, it’s getting cold in the south of Australia, remembering we’re in the southern hemisphere. So, I actually have to say that because people like, it’s hot in the south. No, it’s cold in the south. So as the winter months come and it gets colder, we migrate north. So I can literally say, no, it’s too cold here, I’m going to go north. Going to go to Queensland and spend winter in Queensland. It still gets cold, but not as cold as it does in the south. So you’ve got that ability.
\n\n\n\nI guess one of the biggest benefits is my dad is, he’s in his late seventies and I get to travel with dad. Dad’s traveled for many, many years and he still is. But I get to travel with dad. I get to spend these years with my dad. There’s not many people that can say they get to spend this sort of time, and this quality time, with their parents at this stage of life, because life gets in our way. But we make it work.
\n\n\n\nWe will, once a week, arrange to go and do something. He’ll come and knock on the door and say, you are working too hard. I’m like, I’m working, go away, leave me alone. But then it’ll be, okay, yes, you’re right. I’m working too hard, so why don’t I take this morning off and we go and visit this place where we are staying. Go and find a touristy place or a bush walk to do, or go for a swim in the sea, or go and do something together so I can spend time with my dad. If the family needs me to be somewhere, I can be there, generally.
\n\n\n\nI also just to sort of pad this out a little, I also house sit while I’m doing it. So sometimes I’ll get to a place, someone will be advertising, we need a house sitter. We need someone to come and live in the house, or live at the house, for a couple of weeks while we’re away. So I’ll go and house sit for them, and I get another experience in all of that. So that’s the benefits. It’s just that flexibility. I would be doing exactly what I’m doing, but I would be stuck in a house. I’d be stuck in a room, in a house, grinding. I can grind and be in some of the most beautiful places in the country.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:02] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know, it’s so curious because I’m imagining there’s a proportion of the people listening to this who are just so in awe of that description. You know, oh gosh, you can really spend the time in the locations that you wish. I’m imagining there’ll also be other people who think, no, that’s not what I want at all. But I’ve got to say, I’m really drawn to what you’re saying. The idea of being able to go and, I don’t know, work with a spectacular view. Or work in a particular city for a period of time, and then go somewhere slightly more rural. In other words, it’s not the same view that you get every day when you wake up. There’s that variety in life which, certainly for me, there’s a lot of appeal there. Okay, let’s do the drawbacks. What are the downsides?
\n\n\n\n[00:15:44] Charly Leetham: The downsize is I live in a car. Literally, I live in a little camper van. My workspace is probably, because I fitted out a little commercial vehicle, a little commercial van as my van and as, you know, as my income improves, my savings improve, I will probably upgrade it. But my workspace is probably a metre by a metre. It’s not very big. And when I finish up for the day, I’ve got to pack everything up so I’ve got room for relaxation. I can’t sort of just walk out of a room, shut the door and say, well, that’s work done.
\n\n\n\nNow, work’s done for me, I’ve got to pack everything up, I’ve got to put everything away. You are living on the road, so you don’t have all of your stuff. And I’m going to put stuff in double quotes, they’re in inverted commas. You learn very quickly what is important to you, and what is necessary, and you have what is necessary. And then you have a few of those things that you go, these are really important to me and I’m not going to give them up.
\n\n\n\nSo it is not like you can say, oh, I’ve got that plate that is really good for this entertaining thing, and go to a cupboard and pull that plate out that you use maybe once a year. No, you don’t have that. You’ve got the plates that you use every day.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The plates.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:52] Charly Leetham: Yeah, well, I travel on my own. I could literally live with one plate, one cup, one bowl, knife and fork. You are trading off that flexibility of having a house where you can have things stored, and all of storage space. You really have to think about what it is you want. I have a rule. I literally have a rule and I think everyone should live with this rule anyway. I have to have needed it four times before I go and buy it. If I haven’t needed it four times, then I’m not going to buy it. If I look at something, I go, oh, that’d be really cool and it’d be really convenient. Then I go, but would I use it? Have I needed it four times? Have I needed the functionality that gives me four times? No, don’t buy it. Because where the hell am I going to put it?
\n\n\n\n[00:17:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and I guess whatever you’re buying, you have to buy the tiny version of it as well. You can’t get the sort of jumbo version of whatever it is.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:44] Charly Leetham: There’s your other trade off is you can’t buy food in bulk. Like, I used to go and buy several cans of food and put them in the cupboard. Whether I used them or not immediately, there would be several cans of the same thing in the cupboard just in case I needed it. And if it was sort of, oh, I’m down to the last can, I’ll go and buy a few more. Well, now I’m down to buying two or three cans at a time. And once I’ve run those out, I’ve got to go and find the nearest shop and go and buy another one just to sort of keep it topped up.
\n\n\n\nYou’re not buying in bulk, you’re not buying your meat, you’re not buying your fruit veg in bulk. Does that matter? No, because when you get to certain places, you normally find the local providers, you normally find the local fruit seller or the local fruit and veg shop, and go and buy there. You go and support the local community, and you pick up a few things there and, yep, that’s what you’re going to use. That’s what we do.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:31] Nathan Wrigley: Just to interrupt there, Charly, do you try to spend a significant portion of time in a particular place so that rather than just sort of driving through it, I guess, and spending a couple of days here and a couple of days there, do you spend significant amounts of time there, and therefore begin to have some feeling of what that community is like?
\n\n\n\nI guess the underpinnings of that question really is, how do you get that sort of human interaction that so many people think is important? Because clearly you are meeting fresh people every day, and you probably don’t get the chance to form those roots and what have you. So there’s a lot there. But do you know what I mean? Do you try to sort of spend a bit of time so that you gather some of those human connections along the way?
\n\n\n\n[00:19:12] Charly Leetham: Okay, so there’s a couple of things there that you’ve touched on. On my way to a location, I may only spend a day in a location, as I’m heading to a final destination or the next stop along the way. When I get to that next stop along the way, I do try to spend a bit of time, because I like to put my roots down. I like to be able to just settle on in, be able to work for really long periods and not have to worry about, oh, I’ve got to pack everything up and be on the road again. I’ve worked for three days, now I’ve got to spend the next two or three hours packing everything up so I can get on the road and drive for another couple of hours. Yes, I know English people are going to say, couple of hours driving, you’d be across the country.
\n\n\n\nWe’d spend a couple of hours driving and then you get to the other end and you’ve got to set it up. So you’re losing a day when you’re doing that. So my preference is when I get to where I want to be, getting my feet down and staying there for a couple of weeks if I can. And then from there, I use that as a base of, okay, what is within a hundred kilometers that I can go and visit, and do the site seeing, and do the local colour, and make that a hub for my activities.
\n\n\n\nYou then asked about human interaction and honestly, I think I’m a little different to people. I don’t need it as much as others. I am really, really quite happy to just be in my sphere. I’ve got my online connections. If I need to speak to someone, I’ve normally got someone on the other, on Discord, or one of the chat programs that I can chat to. And then if I feel like I’m getting to that stir crazy point, you go to the local pub or you go to the local cafe and you sort of sit around and you have a chat to the locals.
\n\n\n\nThat fills that need for me. I’m not a person who is, it sounds terrible, I’m actually really good in a public environment, but it drains me. So I really, once that’s done, I’m done for a couple of days and I can just go sit in nature and not worry about it.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think everybody can totally see that. There’s just so many different personality types, isn’t there? I can identify exactly with what you’re saying. I can go for extended periods of time, and not really require that human interaction. And then occasionally I sort of crave it, and so I satisfy it and go and meet people and hang out with all sorts of different people.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I guess really that is the piece that you would need to examine in your own life. Because if you were going to go nomadic, for want of a better word, you’ve got to really understand that bit. What is your need? On what level do you need to be with other people and interact with other people? Because that’s really the fulcrum around what makes this whole thing possible.
\n\n\n\nSpeaking of what makes the whole thing possible, I’m interested to delve into the tech a little bit. Because you mentioned this sort of one metre square, and the fact that you’ve got to pack things away and what have you. I’m curious as to what technology do you have which enables this? Ignoring the vehicle and all that, I’m just trying to imagine what you might put in your shopping cart. If you were telling somebody this digital nomad life was available, what would be the requirements to make that happen?
\n\n\n\n[00:22:01] Charly Leetham: So I’m doing this with my laptop computer. Now, I buy as top of the range as I can when I buy, and it lasts me for years. So I’ve got, I don’t know if you’re familiar with them, I have an MSI gaming computer, because it’s got the extra fans in it. So it really, really works well when you’re doing a lot of processor intensive stuff. So it’s not just for gaming, because I do a bit of graphic design and I do a bit of this and I do a bit of that. So the extra fans make the world a difference.
\n\n\n\nSo I’ve got an MSI gaming computer, or an MSI computer. I have an external microphone. I’ve actually just recently bought an external webcam. I was using the webcam on the computer. It was perfectly fine. I’ve changed my setup to where I now have an external monitor mounted on the wall in my van. So when I settle in, I pull my 21 inch monitor out and I plug my computer into it and I’ve got this beautiful big monitor. I’ve got my external keyboard, and I’ve got my mouse.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I mean it’s the bare essentials, isn’t it? I think we can all understand that. And then I think you mentioned the internet connectivity bit, which I suppose is also a crucial part of the tech. Because where I am, it’s a landline. I obviously have, you know, I’ve got a mobile phone, so there’s the cell signal, which will allow me to roam within Europe and North America and what have you, but there’s all the cost and everything associated with that. Where you go, I think it’s fair to say that you would quickly lose all manner of possibilities because the reception in Australia, you said is not that great in terms of the internet. So how do you overcome that? I think you said Starlink.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:30] Charly Leetham: Yes, Starlink. I kind of looked into it for a very long time. I was relying on our mobile data and using my phone as a hot link. But in Australia, I was joking with you about it when we started this call, I’m on the NBN here. And if anyone knows anything about the NBN, you’ll know that most Australians hate the NBN. It’s terrible. If it works, you’ve got to consider yourself lucky.
\n\n\n\nIt’s great if you are in a capital city, but you go a hundred kilometers, and I’m being a little flippant when I say that, but I’m not too far wrong. Go a hundred kilometers away from a regional center and you’ve got nothing. There’s no radio signal. By radio signal, I mean mobile signal. You can’t make phone calls. You’ve got that little, there is no signal icon on your phone. You can’t actually get a connection. I say a hundred kilometers, maybe it’s 200, maybe it’s 250, but that’s not a very long way in Australia. It really isn’t.
\n\n\n\nSo I bought Starlink. I spoke to someone who was traveling along the way. And I actually want to come back to just the nomadic lifestyle when we’re done here, Nathan. And I met someone while they were traveling. They said, oh, Starlink, it’s wonderful. And it was still relatively new at the time. I’m like, oh, really? Are you sure? And he explained it to me like, oh. So when I got the car, I went and bought myself the Starlink and it’s fantastic.
\n\n\n\nOh my goodness, it’s so good. You’ve got to have power because the routers take power. You can just get, you know, one of the, I don’t know if you’ve got them there, the power stations, the USB power station that you charge up and you can run all your devices off it for a couple of hours. You could do that. I’ve seen people run them off of just car batteries with the clamps on the battery terminals. I’m an Australian, this is pretty normal.
\n\n\n\nSo you’ve got to have the power for the router, to run the router. That then powers the dish and you’ve basically got, in inverted commas, uninterruptable internet for as long as your power lasts. For as long as you’ve got power, you’ve got uninterruptable internet. I have found where I’ve been, I house sat for my sister-in-law during winter, and her internet was terrible. So I went and got my Starlink out and threw it up and connected to it, and I had better internet. The connection speed on the internet on the Starlink versus her landline connection was like 10 times. I had 10 times better internet connection using Starlink than I did on a landline.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:50] Nathan Wrigley: With the Starlink technology, do you have to, so I really am ignorant of this. I mean I know it’s to do with satellites, and I know that you can have it bolted onto the side of your house, I guess if you live in a rural area where there is no regular landline. But yours is this sort of peripatetic, mobile version of that.
\n\n\n\nFirstly, do you have to point it at a particular part of the sky? Do you have to spend time lining it up or do you just have to, just plonk it in daylight? So you know, outside basically? And is it bulky, or is it the kind of stuff that you could throw in a backpack if you were nomadic in that sense? You know, you didn’t have wheels, you didn’t have a vehicle, you were just sort of backpacking around. So two things. Where do you have to point it and is it big?
\n\n\n\n[00:26:27] Charly Leetham: Okay. You asked some really great questions. I’m just going to say they are really, really inspired questions. The first thing I want to say is that the stuff that you see bolted onto the side of a house is typically the stuff that we would use when we’re out mobile. It’s the same hardware. They’ve just got mounting technology, or mounting systems, that will allow you to mount it to the house.
\n\n\n\nQuick story before I answer the second question about how big is it and all the rest of it. I had a version 2 Starlink, which, it would now be five or six years old, and it’s got a pole and it’s got the dish on it. And the dish is, I say dish, it’s a rectangular panel and you’ve got put it on a base so that it’s stable. That’s heavier than the version three. I had that last week, the week before I had a problem with it and I was a bit concerned. So I contacted Starlink and I said, listen, it’s doing this, here’s all my, being a tech I had all the diagnostics and stuff I’d done and I laid it all out and I said, and I just really want to say that I’m a little concerned. Because I’m traveling and I’m often outside of mobile range, I don’t want to get outside of mobile range, put my Starlink on and have it fail. I’m concerned that I’ve got an intermittent fault that is going to be a problem.
\n\n\n\nAnd they said, no worries, we’ll send you a version 3, no charge. Because I’ve been with Starlink now, probably two, two and a half, no, two years now. And they just sent me the new hardware. So I’ve just upgraded to the version 3. So I can actually talk about both. So the version two is a little bigger. You’re probably talking, I’m just holding my hands up. It’s probably about 40 centimeters wide and 70 centimeters tall, the panel. It’s only 10 mil, five centimeters deep, I guess.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:06] Nathan Wrigley: It’s like the sort of size of a modestly big laptop screen. Something along those lines.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:13] Charly Leetham: Actually, it would be about the same size as my, I’m just looking at, it would be a little larger than my computer here. And I’ve got a 21, is this the 15? No, this is a 17 inch. This is a 17 inch monitor. So I’ve got a 17 inch laptop.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so we’re in the order of, got my hands out and I’m imagining how big that is. It certainly answers my backpacking question anyway.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:32] Charly Leetham: Well, let me answer that question for you in a different way. There is now actually what they call a Starlink Mini, which is designed for backpacks. It’s designed to fit inside a backpack. It’s got a portable power supply so that you can go hiking, you can go backpacking and take your Starlink with you. I don’t know a lot about it. I do know that the plan that you put it on is a little different to what you would put our plans on, the plans you would use for ours, because it’s designed for you to be really, really mobile, not just mobile like we are. And it’s really light. It’s designed for a backpack.
\n\n\n\nSo that answers that question as well as like, you’ve got the technology. The version 3, and I wanted you to say this, the version 3 would probably be half as light as the version 2. So it’s much lighter. And one of the things that I really liked about the way this all works is that they’ve got ground mounts, right? So you just put them down on the ground, which is going to answer your next question. Do you need to position it? No. You just put it out. You’ve got to make sure it’s got a clear view of the sky. You’ve got to make sure that there’s no real obstructions, and that means no trees, no buildings. So nothing that’s going to sort of overshadow it as the satellites go over. And it will find the satellites for you. You don’t have to do anything. You just hit the button and it just works.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:45] Nathan Wrigley: Miraculous really when you think about it. I mean, actually think about it. You’ve got this box that you just plonk out under the stars somewhere, and a bunch of, I mean, I’m just actually thinking about what I’m about to say, and it is ridiculous. There’s a bunch of satellites, so they had to go into space, moving around the planet. And they connect to the little box somehow send TCP IP packets all over the place, literally off the planet, which then get bounced down somewhere and, you know, end up in this case talking to me. Insane that any of that works.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:19] Charly Leetham: So let me just add to that, at faster speeds than your standard internet will give you in Australia. I don’t know what it’s like in the US, I don’t know what it’s like in Britain, the UK, but it’s faster and more stable speeds than you get in Australia in general.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I actually, so it’s probably about six months ago I looked at Starlink. I’ve never seriously looked at it. I’m always just curious about it so I’ve ended up on the Starlink website. In terms of the speeds that you can get, they’re not comparable to what you can get through a landline. You can get significantly faster. But they are still impressive. And there’s nothing that day-to-day use wouldn’t be afforded by a Starlink package. I mean, maybe if you were sort of streaming 4K video left, right and center, maybe it would struggle in that scenario. But for any normal, and I’m doing air quotes, any normal use of the internet, more than enough. Absolutely incredible.
\n\n\n\nOkay, so all of that stuff, absolutely amazing. I’m so impressed with everything that you’ve just said. It really, it speaks to me. I think there’s an awful lot in your life that I think, oh gosh, wish I was Charly. But I’m kind of curious then as to the kind of work that you do actually do, because you painted this picture of all these infinite possibilities and what have you. And now I’m turning the attention really to what is it that you do do? What are the kind of things that you’ve been able to create in your life in this nomadic way? What kind of work are you able to pull off?
\n\n\n\n[00:31:43] Charly Leetham: So what I do, what my business is, is I help businesses manage their tech. I like to sit between a business and they’re tech. Some people might call me their CTO, some people might just call me their technical team. I try to translate tech into plain English for business owners so that it takes all of that stress out of it.
\n\n\n\nWhen your business owner says, I need an email address, or I need a new email account, or whatever it is, and they’re talking to a provider, and the provider’s giving them all of the marketing guff, and all of the sales thing, and then it’s not working. So then they’re speaking to the technical people and the technical people are talking their jargon to them. It’s overwhelming for them, and they’re not spending time running their businesses when they’re dealing with that.
\n\n\n\nThey need someone who can sit between them and that morass, if you like, and then say, okay, what is it you want? Oh, right, cool. Let me go and talk to people. Let me get you some answers and I’ll come back to you. So I often say, I don’t walk into a business and say, the answer is this, now what was the question? Which is what a lot of product salespeople would do. And I don’t want to, I’m not trying to bag salespeople here, because they’re needed. But I don’t go in and say, the answer is this, now what was the question? I go in and I say, okay, what is it you’re trying to do?
\n\n\n\nI don’t want to know about the technology you want to use. I want to know about what your business application is. I want to know, what is your input and what is your output? What are you trying to do here? Cool. Now, what systems do you already have? Let me go and investigate those systems. Let me see what they can do for you. Let me see if we can make those systems work to do what you want them to do. They can’t do it, okay, let me go and find some technology that we can plug in and we’ll work with what you’ve got.
\n\n\n\nThe big thing I find with a lot of small businesses is, two things. They get caught with the bright shiny object syndrome. Oh, this new technology’s coming out. It’s going to make my business run well, it’s going to make me money. Technology never makes you money, by the way. Technology only ever helps you make money if you use it right. So they get caught with the bright shiny object syndrome. Or they get caught with the sales person said it would work. I didn’t understand what it did, and I bought this system and now it doesn’t interact with the rest of my systems and I’ve now got to put all these other processes and all these other things in places to make it work.
\n\n\n\nThat’s kind of where I sit. But I’m a tech as well, so I can make it work, I can troubleshoot it. I build websites, which is how I got into WordPress. I build websites. I fix websites. Like I actually also troubleshoot plugins. You know when we upgrade something or something’s not working and you’re getting all the error message? I’ll go and actually troubleshoot a plugin and say, oh, that plugin’s doing this. Can I fix it? No. Okay, I’ll send a support response off to the plugin provider and say, here’s all the logs, here’s what I’ve done, here’s what I’ve found. Can you get this fixed up for me? Or can you get it fixed up for us? Or, I’m really stuck because I’m getting to this point and it’s just not working and I don’t know where it’s going wrong, but I’m pretty certain it’s between here and here.
\n\n\n\nThe other thing I do in all of that is, when you get the two suppliers going, it’s them with the fingers going both ways. I tend to be the one that sits between it and mediates to try and get that sorted out. So that’s what I do, and I do that all remotely.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:54] Nathan Wrigley: I’ve totally understood all of that. You know, you’ve got this, you’re sort of sitting in between, and being that kind of agent that helps people with the tech because they’re busy and they’re doing all the things and they haven’t got the time to gain that expertise in all of that.
\n\n\n\nSo the follow up question, I guess from that, and it’s kind of leaning into your nomadic thing a little bit as well, is I guess that kind of work, the kind of work that you’ve got for yourself there, you can do it because, and I’m going to say this like it’s true and then you can correct me if I’m false, because you can do that when you have time available.
\n\n\n\nAnd what I mean by that is, it’s not like if you were working in an office and you need to be there from nine o’clock in the morning until five o’clock at night, because the telephone lines open up and you’ve got to field all this support. I’m guessing you’ve built a business where the channels of communication are a little bit more async than that. I don’t know, like an email exchange, or Discord, or Slack or whatever it may be. In other words, you can be in the car driving at 7:30 in the morning or 5:30 in the afternoon, or 3 or whatever it may be, because you are not needed at that exact moment by, I’m going to say your employer, but in this case, your clients. It’s more async than that. So I’ve said that like it’s true. Is that true?
\n\n\n\n[00:36:07] Charly Leetham: It is true for me. You are entirely correct. I’m sort of laughing because you’re like, oh, you can be driving in the car. The amount of times where I’ve been traveling with dad and my phone’s buzzed at me and I’ve gone, oh. And he goes, okay, hang on, I’ll pull over. Because we’ve got radio signal, we’ve got mobile signal. And he pulls over and I’ll fix the problem. Like, it might be a five minute fix and I will actually fix the problem then and we’ll keep moving. I’m sitting having a cup of coffee somewhere and one of my clients messages. And they message. I rarely spend time on the phone, or on video conferences with them. They know that the best way to get me is to book a time. I’ve trained my clients.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:44] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating. So to you, that piece of the jigsaw puzzle is entirely obvious. And so it kind of just gets glossed over in your head. But you have created a business where that bit is the kind of foundational piece. If you had clients that wanted you on call 24/7, that really wouldn’t work because you’ve carved out a life for yourself where you don’t want to be on call 24/7. You want be able to do what you want to do when you want to do it, with the understanding that the clients are important, but the async nature of it is, they’ll message you. As soon as you can get to it, you’ll get to it.
\n\n\n\nAnd I’m guessing that when you onboard these clients, there’s that whole education piece. This is what I do, this is the way we respond to support. You’ll get an answer with, I don’t know, 12 hours, 24 hours, whatever it may be. And it may be that somebody listening to this podcast is firefighting all the time and they kind of haven’t figured that piece out. So I think that’s really interesting that you’ve got that, but yet it’s self-evident to you.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:39] Charly Leetham: I think I want to also add to that is that my clients trust me. So there might be point in time where I am always on for that client for a while at least. And when, I’m always on for them. If they message me, I will, and I do this for all of my clients actually. If they message me and say, hey, this is a problem, and I’ve got access, I actually have the ability to respond to them. I will normally respond to them and say, I’m letting you know, I’ve seen this on the road today, or I’ve got meetings all day. I’ve got this, you are in my queue, I’ll get to you as soon as I can. And they know that actually means not tomorrow, not the next day, not, whenever it is. I really do mean as soon as I get a space available, they’re going to get my attention. We’ve built that trust relationship.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:26] Nathan Wrigley: I think probably that is another foundational piece of your business. Without that trust, that’s going to be difficult to onboard clients. Do you tend to gather clients by word of mouth more, or do you have a marketing website where people onboard to you and you have to build that trust up over time? Or is it more a case of your clients recommend your services to other clients who then bring in that trust with them, if you know what I mean?
\n\n\n\n[00:38:49] Charly Leetham: Mostly column A, little bit of column B and more of column C. So yeah, it’s a bit of everything. I am actually just starting to ramp up my marketing as I start to get more comfortable with what I’m doing. And it sounds strange, right? Because I’ve been doing it for a while, but I’m starting to get more comfortable.
\n\n\n\nSo now I’m starting to ramp up my marketing, because I can talk to people about how it works and what it does. And I have very frank conversations. It’s one of my things is to be, make sure that I am upfront, I am frank, I am honest about what goes on. I don’t like. I can talk salesy. I prefer not to. I prefer to be plain English and real world with people.
\n\n\n\nI think the other thing because, if we are talking to your audience, the other thing that I really wanted to highlight there is that I have had clients sack me because they don’t like the way I work. That’s not a reflection on me. That’s not a reflection on the surface I provide. It was a reflection on the relationship that was developed, and that relationship didn’t work for them. I’m good with that. I hope I found someone that can actually work with them the way they need them to work.
\n\n\n\nThe other side of that is I have actually suggested to some clients that they would be better off with another provider. And as a service provider, that’s something that we have to be utterly comfortable with. Being able to say this client is not the client that works for us. We are going to spend too much time, too much energy, too much money supporting them, than we are going to get out of that relationship. It is commercial, and it sounds mercantile, and it sounds cutthroat, and it is. But by doing that, what you’re also doing is making space for another client to come in that is actually going to fit your ideals better, it’s going to fit the way you work better. You’re also allowing that client to find a provider that works better for them.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:39] Nathan Wrigley: This has been such an interesting conversation Charly. This is your life, right? So it’s just oh, this is the way I wake up and I do these things and what have you. But it’s in such contrast to my life at the moment, and yet there’s so many bits of the jigsaw puzzle that you’ve just described that are really fascinating to me.
\n\n\n\nI would imagine there’s going to be quite a lot of people listening to this who have intuitions that, I got into tech and I got into building WordPress websites so that I too could have a little bit more of that freedom. Maybe even going as far as you’ve done to make it more nomadic. So they own their own vehicle and potter about all over the place. Or they backpack for three months of the year. It’s just fascinating. And because it’s your life, it probably doesn’t seem that extraordinary, but from where I’m sitting, totally remarkable.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:24] Charly Leetham: No, it doesn’t seem like it’s every day to me. I will say that I think I have a concept of how blessed I am being able to do it. I try not to become so blase about, oh, this is just the way my life is. It’s yeah, I worked hard to get it to this point. So I’ve got to accept that I’ve put in a lot of work to get there, but I’ve also got to accept that there is a lot of blessings that have come from it. And I thank the Lord every day for the life that I have.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:50] Nathan Wrigley: Well Charly, we’ve reached the 45 minute mark, and although we had a whole range of different things that we could talk about, I hope that you are happy that’s where we ended up. We talked mostly about digital nomadism. We didn’t really stray into WordPress too much, but what a fascinating conversation.
\n\n\n\nMaybe we’ll have a conversation another day, and lean in heavily to the WordPress side of things, but digital nomadism it was.
\n\n\n\nCharly, where can people reach you? And I don’t mean that in a physical sense because obviously we have no idea where you’re going to be, but if they were to reach out online, or try and find you on a social network, or a website or whatever it may be, where would be some of the places where we could find you?
\n\n\n\n[00:42:27] Charly Leetham: The best place to find me is on my website. If you go to askcharlyleetham.com, and then at the end of it put /connect-me. So connect to me with the dashes between it, you will get wherever you can find me. All the networks I’m on. You can book a free 30 minute breakthrough session. And guys, if you just want to come and talk to me about how you can set up your business, or the things that you’re doing and the things that you need to consider, I’d happily talk to you for 30 minutes about that. That’s not a problem at all. And just so you know, I’m on Facebook, I’m on X, I’m on LinkedIn. I’ve got a YouTube channel.
\n\n\n\nI do a podcast every other day. I do a podcast, Making Tech Easy for Small Business Owners. It’s a 10 to 15, or 15 to 20 minute episode about something tech, and tries to try to simplify it out. I do interviews every now and again, much like this that I put up on there. I’m on Rumble, I’m on Odyssey.
\n\n\n\n[00:43:22] Nathan Wrigley: I will link to all of those different bits and pieces. Anything that we’ve mentioned just then I will put into the show notes. So if you head to wptavern.com. Search for the episode with Charly in it. And Charly, I should have said at the beginning is not a typical spelling, it’s c h a r l y. So if you search for that this episode will surface.
\n\n\n\nSo absolutely fascinating, Charly. Thank you so much for chatting to me today and good luck. I hope that you managed to get wherever it is that you are going in the days, weeks, months, and years to come. Thank you so much.
\n\n\n\n[00:43:52] Charly Leetham: Thank you Nathan. I have had an absolute ball. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, and I love talking about the life I’ve built, so thank you.
\nOn the podcast today we have Charly Leetham.
\n\n\n\nCharly\u2019s journey with technology spans over four decades, from tinkering with amateur radio as a teenager in Australia, to working in electronic engineering, and eventually building a career in WordPress and small business tech support. With a background in field service, sales, and running retail businesses, Charly pivoted to helping people with their websites and tech needs right around the time WordPress was in its infancy. Today, nearly 20 years later, she\u2019s still involved in the WordPress ecosystem, providing troubleshooting, support, and plain-English tech translations for business owners who need their digital lives demystified.
\n\n\n\nBut in this episode, we\u2019re focusing less on her technical skills and more on her unique lifestyle. Charly is a true digital nomad, someone who\u2019s not bound to a fixed address, but instead lives and works from a camper van fitted with a Starlink system, traveling, and working, all over Australia.
\n\n\n\nWe talk about what it was like to embrace remote working long before it was commonplace, and how she built a business that supports complete flexibility. We explore both the upsides of the digital nomad life, the freedom to travel, spend quality time with family, and work from beautiful locations, as well as the tradeoffs, such as limited space and having to ruthlessly prioritise her belongings.
\n\n\n\nCharly discusses the essential tech setup that empowers her nomadism: from laptops and microphones to how Starlink satellite internet lets her work reliably from almost anywhere, even in places with little or no mobile signal. There\u2019s practical advice on working with clients, so support can happen on her schedule, and reflections on building a business that matches her values, even if it sometimes means saying goodbye to clients who aren\u2019t the right fit.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019ve ever imagined trading your desk for the open road, or wondered what\u2019s technologically and personally possible as a remote WordPress worker, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nCharly can be found on the following platforms:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "content_text": "Transcript\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, using WordPress to enable a digital nomad life.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Charly Leetham. Charly’s journey with technology spans over four decades, from tinkering with amateur radio as a teenager in Australia, to working in electronic engineering and eventually building a career in WordPress and small business tech support. With a background in field service, sales, and running retail businesses, Charly pivoted to helping people with their websites and tech needs right around the time WordPress was in its infancy. Today, nearly 20 years later, she’s still involved in the WordPress ecosystem, providing troubleshooting, support, and plain English tech translations for business owners who need their digital lives demystified.\n\n\n\nBut in this episode, we are focusing less on her technical skills and more on her unique lifestyle. Charly is a true digital nomad. Someone who’s not bound to a fixed address, but instead lives and works from a camper van fitted with a Starlink system traveling and working all over Australia.\n\n\n\nWe talk about what it was like to embrace remote working long before it was commonplace, and how she built a business that supports complete flexibility. We explore both the upsides of the digital nomad life, the freedom to travel, spend quality time with family, and work from beautiful locations, as well as the trade-offs such as limited space, and having to ruthlessly prioritize her longings.\n\n\n\nCharlie discusses the essential tech setup that empowers her nomadism. From laptops and microphones to how Starlink satellite internet lets her work reliably from almost anywhere, even in places with little or no mobile signal.\n\n\n\nThere’s practical advice on working with clients, so support can happen on her schedule, and reflections on building a business that matches her values, even if it sometimes means saying goodbye to clients who aren’t the right fit.\n\n\n\nIf you’ve ever imagined trading your desk for the open road, or wondered what’s technologically, and personally possible, as a remote WordPress worker this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Charly Leetham.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Charly Leetham. Hello Charly.\n\n\n\n[00:03:29] Charly Leetham: Hi Nathan. It’s really good to be here, and we are literally on other side of the world from each other.\n\n\n\n[00:03:35] Nathan Wrigley: We could probably not be further apart. You are in Australia, and we’ve never met. We spent probably the last 20 minutes or so having a good old natter. It’s been really interesting. And actually, the way that this podcast was going to go, I think has been upended by the conversation that we just had. Because you talked to me about your digital nomadism, I’m going to say, and I want to lean into that.\n\n\n\nBut before we get into all of that story about how you’ve ended up working remotely and things, do you just want to give us a little bit of background about how you’ve come to work, be on a WordPress podcast? What’s your background with tech, your life in general? Whatever you wish.\n\n\n\n[00:04:09] Charly Leetham: Okay, well, look, I’ll try and keep it short. There is like 40 years to sort of condense into three or four minutes here.\n\n\n\nLook, I have always been interested in tech from a very, very, very young age. My dad kind of encouraged me, if I was showed interest in anything, he’d say, well, go and find out about and let’s do this and let’s do that. The age of 13, I had my amateur radio license. By the time I was 16, I’d just left year 10, grade 10, and I went and did an associate diploma, electronic engineering. I worked full-time as a junior laboratory technician in an electronics lab at the Australian University while I was doing that.\n\n\n\nAnd from there I went to be a field service tech with a private company. I’ve done field service, I’ve done pre-sales, I’ve done sales, I’ve done contract management. I’ve done customer service management. Done bid management.\n\n\n\nAnd then I had a need after I decided, I was really, really sick and tired of doing all of this, so I went and bought myself a business with a franchise. We ran retail businesses for four years. They failed spectacularly. And I had a need that I had to actually get some money through the door so that I could feed the kids, pay the bills, eventually feed myself, and the husband is part of it.\n\n\n\nSo this was born. And this was, people need help with their technology. People need help with their websites, people need help with their emails, people need help with all of this. And at that point in time, that was 2007 and WordPress was just in its infancy. I think it was, maybe three or four generations in at that point, but it was still in its infancy. And I learned, WordPress from that.\n\n\n\nSomeone said, I’ve got a WordPress website, it’s not working. Can you look at it? Sure. I can look at it. I know C++, I know Pascal, I know Basic. Oh, this is PHP. What’s that? I learned PHP, I learned themes, I learned plugins, I learned how to troubleshoot things. And here we are nearly 20 years later, doing the thing that I love the most.\n\n\n\n[00:06:16] Nathan Wrigley: There’s a lot in there, Charly. Genuinely, there is a lot in there. But what I’ve taken from that is that you have always been a bit of a tinkerer. You’ve always been somebody that’s fascinated by the technology side of things. Not just the software, but also, you know, the engineering side of things. And so, gosh, what a history you’ve got.\n\n\n\nWe’ll get onto all the WordPress stuff a little bit later. Obviously that’s a big part of why you’re on this particular podcast because we are a WordPress focussed podcast. But it was the conversation that we had about half an hour ago that captured my attention and is just going to divert us for a little while.\n\n\n\nAnd that is, you got on the call, we started talking about where we are in the world and the fact that you are over there and I’m over here, and isn’t it amazing that we can talk to each other? And the fact that this technology is here and, you know, when we were both children, this was the realm of science fiction. Being able to speak to somebody on the other side of the planet without prearranging it, and organising it with a telephone network and a great expense and all that.\n\n\n\nAnd then we started talking about literally where you are. And I was kind of curious about your location. It turns out you are a digital nomad. Now, for those people tuning in who don’t know what this is, a digital nomad, I guess is somebody who is not bound to a specific location. I live in the UK. I have a house and a mortgage and all those kind of things. So I’ve kind of saddled myself to that, and I’ve got this definite spot in the world where I call home. You’ve decided to kind of get rid of all of that. And so just tell us about your life and what it is that you do, and how you move around and how you empower that with technology, and what technology you use to make that even possible.\n\n\n\n[00:07:53] Charly Leetham: Okay. Let’s start by telling you a story. When my kids were all, all my kids are now in their early thirties, late twenties, so they’re adults. They’re gone, they’re out doing their own thing. But when my kids were born in the mid nineties, I wanted nothing more than to be able to stay home with them. But because of my experience, because of what I was doing, I was the breadwinner. I was the one that had the money coming in, so I had to go back to work. Went back to it when my kids were really young.\n\n\n\nAnd as much as I loved my job and I loved what I was doing, I really hated not being able to be with him. And what I wanted to do was what I’m doing now, then. The ability to help people with their tech. The technology didn’t exist. We couldn’t remote into computers, we couldn’t do video conferencing. We couldn’t even do audio calls like phone networks for what we had. So if you just think about, you know, a young 20-year-old woman with two kids, working in IT, wanting to do this.\n\n\n\nNow we come forward nearly 20 years, or nearly 30 years because my kids are 30. I can do exactly what I wanted to do 30 years ago today. I can sit wherever I am, I can run up my computer, I can get an internet connection, I can talk to you. Someone says to me, my computer’s not working, or my email’s not sending, I can’t do this. I can remote into their computer. I can do a face-to-face call with them. I can remote into their computer. I can give them that support. I don’t have to be on site to do that.\n\n\n\nThat is what a digital nomad is. That’s what me as a digital nomad does. I provide tech support to people wherever I am, literally in the world. I said to you, I traveled in the US for a couple of years. Well, I got stuck in the US for a couple of years. And I didn’t work over there. I want to be really, really clear because you’re allowed to work in the US when you’re over there on a visitor visa. But I was helping people. People would say to me, my computer’s broken, well, let me remote in. I’ll have a look. Let me go and do this, I’ll help you. My dad would ring me from Australia and say, my email’s broken. What can I do? I’d fix it for him.\n\n\n\nSo that’s what I do. So how does that work for me today? There is a housing crisis. That’s the first thing that we really need to recognise is there is a housing crisis. Finding a house is really, really difficult. Finding a house that is affordable is even more difficult. Rather than stressing on the fact that I can’t find a house, or I can’t afford the rent for a house, or I don’t want to have that stress of having a rent for a house. I fitted out a vehicle, I got a Starlink system. My brother fitted the vehicle out for me. My son, who is the electrician, put the electrical into it. And I literally live on the road. I go from place to place. I find somewhere I can hook into power for a couple of days. I throw my Starlink out the site, and I work. I support people.\n\n\n\nYou could talk to me tomorrow, well, not tomorrow. Talk to me in a month, and I’m going to be in far North Queensland. A month from today, I will be in far North Queensland doing things up in far North Queensland because I’ve got to be up there for something. That’s what my life is like.\n\n\n\n[00:10:55] Nathan Wrigley: If we rewind the clock, I don’t know, 10 years, did you desire something like that? From what you said, it sounds like you did. You always had some sort of intuition that if the technology allowed, you would wish for something like that. But obviously, kids and bills and all of that kind of got in the way. Has this been something which, if you sort of look back on your life, you think instinctively this was something that you wished to do?\n\n\n\n[00:11:17] Charly Leetham: Not on the road. Not mobile like I am. Being able to do it from home, being able to be a work from home mum, absolutely. Being on the road and moving around, no, not even my wildest dreams would I have even imagined it. I didn’t even know that was available to us. I had no idea.\n\n\n\nLook, I’ve met people, just to sort of segue very quickly. I have met people while I’m doing this, and they are young families. They are mum and dad and the kids, and they’re living on the road. They’ve got homeschooling curriculums for the kids. The kids do all their schooling. They get all these extra education of the places they’re in, all the things that they’re doing. Mum and dad will arrange to take the kids out on a bushwalk, and go and see a place that very few people in Australia will ever get to see. And these kids are living this life. I didn’t know that was available. If I had known that was available, I might have done that with my kids.\n\n\n\n[00:12:08] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the curious things is that, if you are working in the tech space, and obviously we’ll talk more about WordPress in a moment, there is a significant chance that this is available to you. I mean obviously you may have a job which is office bound. We understand that that means that you’ve got to show up to the office and what have you. But I’m imagining that there’s quite a few people listening to this podcast who, if they were to really examine it, these possibilities are open to them.\n\n\n\nBut it may not be something that they, A, wish to do, or B, they’ve not really thought about it too much. You know, they’ve decided that, okay, life is fine, I like my local environment or what have you.\n\n\n\nWhat are like the key benefits, if you know what I mean? If you were to advertise this lifestyle to our audience, so we’ll do this in two parts. Let’s do the benefits first and then we’ll do the drawbacks later. What are the key things which you look at in your life at the moment and think, I’m so grateful for that? What are they?\n\n\n\n[00:12:57] Charly Leetham: Freedom. Absolutely the freedom. I mean, we’re going to talk about drawbacks in a minute, so that’s going to get balanced out. But it is the freedom. It’s the ability to say, it’s getting cold in the south of Australia, remembering we’re in the southern hemisphere. So, I actually have to say that because people like, it’s hot in the south. No, it’s cold in the south. So as the winter months come and it gets colder, we migrate north. So I can literally say, no, it’s too cold here, I’m going to go north. Going to go to Queensland and spend winter in Queensland. It still gets cold, but not as cold as it does in the south. So you’ve got that ability.\n\n\n\nI guess one of the biggest benefits is my dad is, he’s in his late seventies and I get to travel with dad. Dad’s traveled for many, many years and he still is. But I get to travel with dad. I get to spend these years with my dad. There’s not many people that can say they get to spend this sort of time, and this quality time, with their parents at this stage of life, because life gets in our way. But we make it work.\n\n\n\nWe will, once a week, arrange to go and do something. He’ll come and knock on the door and say, you are working too hard. I’m like, I’m working, go away, leave me alone. But then it’ll be, okay, yes, you’re right. I’m working too hard, so why don’t I take this morning off and we go and visit this place where we are staying. Go and find a touristy place or a bush walk to do, or go for a swim in the sea, or go and do something together so I can spend time with my dad. If the family needs me to be somewhere, I can be there, generally.\n\n\n\nI also just to sort of pad this out a little, I also house sit while I’m doing it. So sometimes I’ll get to a place, someone will be advertising, we need a house sitter. We need someone to come and live in the house, or live at the house, for a couple of weeks while we’re away. So I’ll go and house sit for them, and I get another experience in all of that. So that’s the benefits. It’s just that flexibility. I would be doing exactly what I’m doing, but I would be stuck in a house. I’d be stuck in a room, in a house, grinding. I can grind and be in some of the most beautiful places in the country.\n\n\n\n[00:15:02] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know, it’s so curious because I’m imagining there’s a proportion of the people listening to this who are just so in awe of that description. You know, oh gosh, you can really spend the time in the locations that you wish. I’m imagining there’ll also be other people who think, no, that’s not what I want at all. But I’ve got to say, I’m really drawn to what you’re saying. The idea of being able to go and, I don’t know, work with a spectacular view. Or work in a particular city for a period of time, and then go somewhere slightly more rural. In other words, it’s not the same view that you get every day when you wake up. There’s that variety in life which, certainly for me, there’s a lot of appeal there. Okay, let’s do the drawbacks. What are the downsides?\n\n\n\n[00:15:44] Charly Leetham: The downsize is I live in a car. Literally, I live in a little camper van. My workspace is probably, because I fitted out a little commercial vehicle, a little commercial van as my van and as, you know, as my income improves, my savings improve, I will probably upgrade it. But my workspace is probably a metre by a metre. It’s not very big. And when I finish up for the day, I’ve got to pack everything up so I’ve got room for relaxation. I can’t sort of just walk out of a room, shut the door and say, well, that’s work done.\n\n\n\nNow, work’s done for me, I’ve got to pack everything up, I’ve got to put everything away. You are living on the road, so you don’t have all of your stuff. And I’m going to put stuff in double quotes, they’re in inverted commas. You learn very quickly what is important to you, and what is necessary, and you have what is necessary. And then you have a few of those things that you go, these are really important to me and I’m not going to give them up.\n\n\n\nSo it is not like you can say, oh, I’ve got that plate that is really good for this entertaining thing, and go to a cupboard and pull that plate out that you use maybe once a year. No, you don’t have that. You’ve got the plates that you use every day.\n\n\n\n[00:16:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The plates.\n\n\n\n[00:16:52] Charly Leetham: Yeah, well, I travel on my own. I could literally live with one plate, one cup, one bowl, knife and fork. You are trading off that flexibility of having a house where you can have things stored, and all of storage space. You really have to think about what it is you want. I have a rule. I literally have a rule and I think everyone should live with this rule anyway. I have to have needed it four times before I go and buy it. If I haven’t needed it four times, then I’m not going to buy it. If I look at something, I go, oh, that’d be really cool and it’d be really convenient. Then I go, but would I use it? Have I needed it four times? Have I needed the functionality that gives me four times? No, don’t buy it. Because where the hell am I going to put it?\n\n\n\n[00:17:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and I guess whatever you’re buying, you have to buy the tiny version of it as well. You can’t get the sort of jumbo version of whatever it is.\n\n\n\n[00:17:44] Charly Leetham: There’s your other trade off is you can’t buy food in bulk. Like, I used to go and buy several cans of food and put them in the cupboard. Whether I used them or not immediately, there would be several cans of the same thing in the cupboard just in case I needed it. And if it was sort of, oh, I’m down to the last can, I’ll go and buy a few more. Well, now I’m down to buying two or three cans at a time. And once I’ve run those out, I’ve got to go and find the nearest shop and go and buy another one just to sort of keep it topped up.\n\n\n\nYou’re not buying in bulk, you’re not buying your meat, you’re not buying your fruit veg in bulk. Does that matter? No, because when you get to certain places, you normally find the local providers, you normally find the local fruit seller or the local fruit and veg shop, and go and buy there. You go and support the local community, and you pick up a few things there and, yep, that’s what you’re going to use. That’s what we do.\n\n\n\n[00:18:31] Nathan Wrigley: Just to interrupt there, Charly, do you try to spend a significant portion of time in a particular place so that rather than just sort of driving through it, I guess, and spending a couple of days here and a couple of days there, do you spend significant amounts of time there, and therefore begin to have some feeling of what that community is like?\n\n\n\nI guess the underpinnings of that question really is, how do you get that sort of human interaction that so many people think is important? Because clearly you are meeting fresh people every day, and you probably don’t get the chance to form those roots and what have you. So there’s a lot there. But do you know what I mean? Do you try to sort of spend a bit of time so that you gather some of those human connections along the way?\n\n\n\n[00:19:12] Charly Leetham: Okay, so there’s a couple of things there that you’ve touched on. On my way to a location, I may only spend a day in a location, as I’m heading to a final destination or the next stop along the way. When I get to that next stop along the way, I do try to spend a bit of time, because I like to put my roots down. I like to be able to just settle on in, be able to work for really long periods and not have to worry about, oh, I’ve got to pack everything up and be on the road again. I’ve worked for three days, now I’ve got to spend the next two or three hours packing everything up so I can get on the road and drive for another couple of hours. Yes, I know English people are going to say, couple of hours driving, you’d be across the country.\n\n\n\nWe’d spend a couple of hours driving and then you get to the other end and you’ve got to set it up. So you’re losing a day when you’re doing that. So my preference is when I get to where I want to be, getting my feet down and staying there for a couple of weeks if I can. And then from there, I use that as a base of, okay, what is within a hundred kilometers that I can go and visit, and do the site seeing, and do the local colour, and make that a hub for my activities.\n\n\n\nYou then asked about human interaction and honestly, I think I’m a little different to people. I don’t need it as much as others. I am really, really quite happy to just be in my sphere. I’ve got my online connections. If I need to speak to someone, I’ve normally got someone on the other, on Discord, or one of the chat programs that I can chat to. And then if I feel like I’m getting to that stir crazy point, you go to the local pub or you go to the local cafe and you sort of sit around and you have a chat to the locals.\n\n\n\nThat fills that need for me. I’m not a person who is, it sounds terrible, I’m actually really good in a public environment, but it drains me. So I really, once that’s done, I’m done for a couple of days and I can just go sit in nature and not worry about it.\n\n\n\n[00:20:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think everybody can totally see that. There’s just so many different personality types, isn’t there? I can identify exactly with what you’re saying. I can go for extended periods of time, and not really require that human interaction. And then occasionally I sort of crave it, and so I satisfy it and go and meet people and hang out with all sorts of different people.\n\n\n\nAnd so I guess really that is the piece that you would need to examine in your own life. Because if you were going to go nomadic, for want of a better word, you’ve got to really understand that bit. What is your need? On what level do you need to be with other people and interact with other people? Because that’s really the fulcrum around what makes this whole thing possible.\n\n\n\nSpeaking of what makes the whole thing possible, I’m interested to delve into the tech a little bit. Because you mentioned this sort of one metre square, and the fact that you’ve got to pack things away and what have you. I’m curious as to what technology do you have which enables this? Ignoring the vehicle and all that, I’m just trying to imagine what you might put in your shopping cart. If you were telling somebody this digital nomad life was available, what would be the requirements to make that happen?\n\n\n\n[00:22:01] Charly Leetham: So I’m doing this with my laptop computer. Now, I buy as top of the range as I can when I buy, and it lasts me for years. So I’ve got, I don’t know if you’re familiar with them, I have an MSI gaming computer, because it’s got the extra fans in it. So it really, really works well when you’re doing a lot of processor intensive stuff. So it’s not just for gaming, because I do a bit of graphic design and I do a bit of this and I do a bit of that. So the extra fans make the world a difference.\n\n\n\nSo I’ve got an MSI gaming computer, or an MSI computer. I have an external microphone. I’ve actually just recently bought an external webcam. I was using the webcam on the computer. It was perfectly fine. I’ve changed my setup to where I now have an external monitor mounted on the wall in my van. So when I settle in, I pull my 21 inch monitor out and I plug my computer into it and I’ve got this beautiful big monitor. I’ve got my external keyboard, and I’ve got my mouse.\n\n\n\n[00:22:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I mean it’s the bare essentials, isn’t it? I think we can all understand that. And then I think you mentioned the internet connectivity bit, which I suppose is also a crucial part of the tech. Because where I am, it’s a landline. I obviously have, you know, I’ve got a mobile phone, so there’s the cell signal, which will allow me to roam within Europe and North America and what have you, but there’s all the cost and everything associated with that. Where you go, I think it’s fair to say that you would quickly lose all manner of possibilities because the reception in Australia, you said is not that great in terms of the internet. So how do you overcome that? I think you said Starlink.\n\n\n\n[00:23:30] Charly Leetham: Yes, Starlink. I kind of looked into it for a very long time. I was relying on our mobile data and using my phone as a hot link. But in Australia, I was joking with you about it when we started this call, I’m on the NBN here. And if anyone knows anything about the NBN, you’ll know that most Australians hate the NBN. It’s terrible. If it works, you’ve got to consider yourself lucky.\n\n\n\nIt’s great if you are in a capital city, but you go a hundred kilometers, and I’m being a little flippant when I say that, but I’m not too far wrong. Go a hundred kilometers away from a regional center and you’ve got nothing. There’s no radio signal. By radio signal, I mean mobile signal. You can’t make phone calls. You’ve got that little, there is no signal icon on your phone. You can’t actually get a connection. I say a hundred kilometers, maybe it’s 200, maybe it’s 250, but that’s not a very long way in Australia. It really isn’t.\n\n\n\nSo I bought Starlink. I spoke to someone who was traveling along the way. And I actually want to come back to just the nomadic lifestyle when we’re done here, Nathan. And I met someone while they were traveling. They said, oh, Starlink, it’s wonderful. And it was still relatively new at the time. I’m like, oh, really? Are you sure? And he explained it to me like, oh. So when I got the car, I went and bought myself the Starlink and it’s fantastic.\n\n\n\nOh my goodness, it’s so good. You’ve got to have power because the routers take power. You can just get, you know, one of the, I don’t know if you’ve got them there, the power stations, the USB power station that you charge up and you can run all your devices off it for a couple of hours. You could do that. I’ve seen people run them off of just car batteries with the clamps on the battery terminals. I’m an Australian, this is pretty normal.\n\n\n\nSo you’ve got to have the power for the router, to run the router. That then powers the dish and you’ve basically got, in inverted commas, uninterruptable internet for as long as your power lasts. For as long as you’ve got power, you’ve got uninterruptable internet. I have found where I’ve been, I house sat for my sister-in-law during winter, and her internet was terrible. So I went and got my Starlink out and threw it up and connected to it, and I had better internet. The connection speed on the internet on the Starlink versus her landline connection was like 10 times. I had 10 times better internet connection using Starlink than I did on a landline.\n\n\n\n[00:25:50] Nathan Wrigley: With the Starlink technology, do you have to, so I really am ignorant of this. I mean I know it’s to do with satellites, and I know that you can have it bolted onto the side of your house, I guess if you live in a rural area where there is no regular landline. But yours is this sort of peripatetic, mobile version of that.\n\n\n\nFirstly, do you have to point it at a particular part of the sky? Do you have to spend time lining it up or do you just have to, just plonk it in daylight? So you know, outside basically? And is it bulky, or is it the kind of stuff that you could throw in a backpack if you were nomadic in that sense? You know, you didn’t have wheels, you didn’t have a vehicle, you were just sort of backpacking around. So two things. Where do you have to point it and is it big?\n\n\n\n[00:26:27] Charly Leetham: Okay. You asked some really great questions. I’m just going to say they are really, really inspired questions. The first thing I want to say is that the stuff that you see bolted onto the side of a house is typically the stuff that we would use when we’re out mobile. It’s the same hardware. They’ve just got mounting technology, or mounting systems, that will allow you to mount it to the house.\n\n\n\nQuick story before I answer the second question about how big is it and all the rest of it. I had a version 2 Starlink, which, it would now be five or six years old, and it’s got a pole and it’s got the dish on it. And the dish is, I say dish, it’s a rectangular panel and you’ve got put it on a base so that it’s stable. That’s heavier than the version three. I had that last week, the week before I had a problem with it and I was a bit concerned. So I contacted Starlink and I said, listen, it’s doing this, here’s all my, being a tech I had all the diagnostics and stuff I’d done and I laid it all out and I said, and I just really want to say that I’m a little concerned. Because I’m traveling and I’m often outside of mobile range, I don’t want to get outside of mobile range, put my Starlink on and have it fail. I’m concerned that I’ve got an intermittent fault that is going to be a problem.\n\n\n\nAnd they said, no worries, we’ll send you a version 3, no charge. Because I’ve been with Starlink now, probably two, two and a half, no, two years now. And they just sent me the new hardware. So I’ve just upgraded to the version 3. So I can actually talk about both. So the version two is a little bigger. You’re probably talking, I’m just holding my hands up. It’s probably about 40 centimeters wide and 70 centimeters tall, the panel. It’s only 10 mil, five centimeters deep, I guess.\n\n\n\n[00:28:06] Nathan Wrigley: It’s like the sort of size of a modestly big laptop screen. Something along those lines.\n\n\n\n[00:28:13] Charly Leetham: Actually, it would be about the same size as my, I’m just looking at, it would be a little larger than my computer here. And I’ve got a 21, is this the 15? No, this is a 17 inch. This is a 17 inch monitor. So I’ve got a 17 inch laptop.\n\n\n\n[00:28:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so we’re in the order of, got my hands out and I’m imagining how big that is. It certainly answers my backpacking question anyway.\n\n\n\n[00:28:32] Charly Leetham: Well, let me answer that question for you in a different way. There is now actually what they call a Starlink Mini, which is designed for backpacks. It’s designed to fit inside a backpack. It’s got a portable power supply so that you can go hiking, you can go backpacking and take your Starlink with you. I don’t know a lot about it. I do know that the plan that you put it on is a little different to what you would put our plans on, the plans you would use for ours, because it’s designed for you to be really, really mobile, not just mobile like we are. And it’s really light. It’s designed for a backpack.\n\n\n\nSo that answers that question as well as like, you’ve got the technology. The version 3, and I wanted you to say this, the version 3 would probably be half as light as the version 2. So it’s much lighter. And one of the things that I really liked about the way this all works is that they’ve got ground mounts, right? So you just put them down on the ground, which is going to answer your next question. Do you need to position it? No. You just put it out. You’ve got to make sure it’s got a clear view of the sky. You’ve got to make sure that there’s no real obstructions, and that means no trees, no buildings. So nothing that’s going to sort of overshadow it as the satellites go over. And it will find the satellites for you. You don’t have to do anything. You just hit the button and it just works.\n\n\n\n[00:29:45] Nathan Wrigley: Miraculous really when you think about it. I mean, actually think about it. You’ve got this box that you just plonk out under the stars somewhere, and a bunch of, I mean, I’m just actually thinking about what I’m about to say, and it is ridiculous. There’s a bunch of satellites, so they had to go into space, moving around the planet. And they connect to the little box somehow send TCP IP packets all over the place, literally off the planet, which then get bounced down somewhere and, you know, end up in this case talking to me. Insane that any of that works.\n\n\n\n[00:30:19] Charly Leetham: So let me just add to that, at faster speeds than your standard internet will give you in Australia. I don’t know what it’s like in the US, I don’t know what it’s like in Britain, the UK, but it’s faster and more stable speeds than you get in Australia in general.\n\n\n\n[00:30:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I actually, so it’s probably about six months ago I looked at Starlink. I’ve never seriously looked at it. I’m always just curious about it so I’ve ended up on the Starlink website. In terms of the speeds that you can get, they’re not comparable to what you can get through a landline. You can get significantly faster. But they are still impressive. And there’s nothing that day-to-day use wouldn’t be afforded by a Starlink package. I mean, maybe if you were sort of streaming 4K video left, right and center, maybe it would struggle in that scenario. But for any normal, and I’m doing air quotes, any normal use of the internet, more than enough. Absolutely incredible.\n\n\n\nOkay, so all of that stuff, absolutely amazing. I’m so impressed with everything that you’ve just said. It really, it speaks to me. I think there’s an awful lot in your life that I think, oh gosh, wish I was Charly. But I’m kind of curious then as to the kind of work that you do actually do, because you painted this picture of all these infinite possibilities and what have you. And now I’m turning the attention really to what is it that you do do? What are the kind of things that you’ve been able to create in your life in this nomadic way? What kind of work are you able to pull off?\n\n\n\n[00:31:43] Charly Leetham: So what I do, what my business is, is I help businesses manage their tech. I like to sit between a business and they’re tech. Some people might call me their CTO, some people might just call me their technical team. I try to translate tech into plain English for business owners so that it takes all of that stress out of it.\n\n\n\nWhen your business owner says, I need an email address, or I need a new email account, or whatever it is, and they’re talking to a provider, and the provider’s giving them all of the marketing guff, and all of the sales thing, and then it’s not working. So then they’re speaking to the technical people and the technical people are talking their jargon to them. It’s overwhelming for them, and they’re not spending time running their businesses when they’re dealing with that.\n\n\n\nThey need someone who can sit between them and that morass, if you like, and then say, okay, what is it you want? Oh, right, cool. Let me go and talk to people. Let me get you some answers and I’ll come back to you. So I often say, I don’t walk into a business and say, the answer is this, now what was the question? Which is what a lot of product salespeople would do. And I don’t want to, I’m not trying to bag salespeople here, because they’re needed. But I don’t go in and say, the answer is this, now what was the question? I go in and I say, okay, what is it you’re trying to do?\n\n\n\nI don’t want to know about the technology you want to use. I want to know about what your business application is. I want to know, what is your input and what is your output? What are you trying to do here? Cool. Now, what systems do you already have? Let me go and investigate those systems. Let me see what they can do for you. Let me see if we can make those systems work to do what you want them to do. They can’t do it, okay, let me go and find some technology that we can plug in and we’ll work with what you’ve got.\n\n\n\nThe big thing I find with a lot of small businesses is, two things. They get caught with the bright shiny object syndrome. Oh, this new technology’s coming out. It’s going to make my business run well, it’s going to make me money. Technology never makes you money, by the way. Technology only ever helps you make money if you use it right. So they get caught with the bright shiny object syndrome. Or they get caught with the sales person said it would work. I didn’t understand what it did, and I bought this system and now it doesn’t interact with the rest of my systems and I’ve now got to put all these other processes and all these other things in places to make it work.\n\n\n\nThat’s kind of where I sit. But I’m a tech as well, so I can make it work, I can troubleshoot it. I build websites, which is how I got into WordPress. I build websites. I fix websites. Like I actually also troubleshoot plugins. You know when we upgrade something or something’s not working and you’re getting all the error message? I’ll go and actually troubleshoot a plugin and say, oh, that plugin’s doing this. Can I fix it? No. Okay, I’ll send a support response off to the plugin provider and say, here’s all the logs, here’s what I’ve done, here’s what I’ve found. Can you get this fixed up for me? Or can you get it fixed up for us? Or, I’m really stuck because I’m getting to this point and it’s just not working and I don’t know where it’s going wrong, but I’m pretty certain it’s between here and here.\n\n\n\nThe other thing I do in all of that is, when you get the two suppliers going, it’s them with the fingers going both ways. I tend to be the one that sits between it and mediates to try and get that sorted out. So that’s what I do, and I do that all remotely.\n\n\n\n[00:34:54] Nathan Wrigley: I’ve totally understood all of that. You know, you’ve got this, you’re sort of sitting in between, and being that kind of agent that helps people with the tech because they’re busy and they’re doing all the things and they haven’t got the time to gain that expertise in all of that.\n\n\n\nSo the follow up question, I guess from that, and it’s kind of leaning into your nomadic thing a little bit as well, is I guess that kind of work, the kind of work that you’ve got for yourself there, you can do it because, and I’m going to say this like it’s true and then you can correct me if I’m false, because you can do that when you have time available.\n\n\n\nAnd what I mean by that is, it’s not like if you were working in an office and you need to be there from nine o’clock in the morning until five o’clock at night, because the telephone lines open up and you’ve got to field all this support. I’m guessing you’ve built a business where the channels of communication are a little bit more async than that. I don’t know, like an email exchange, or Discord, or Slack or whatever it may be. In other words, you can be in the car driving at 7:30 in the morning or 5:30 in the afternoon, or 3 or whatever it may be, because you are not needed at that exact moment by, I’m going to say your employer, but in this case, your clients. It’s more async than that. So I’ve said that like it’s true. Is that true?\n\n\n\n[00:36:07] Charly Leetham: It is true for me. You are entirely correct. I’m sort of laughing because you’re like, oh, you can be driving in the car. The amount of times where I’ve been traveling with dad and my phone’s buzzed at me and I’ve gone, oh. And he goes, okay, hang on, I’ll pull over. Because we’ve got radio signal, we’ve got mobile signal. And he pulls over and I’ll fix the problem. Like, it might be a five minute fix and I will actually fix the problem then and we’ll keep moving. I’m sitting having a cup of coffee somewhere and one of my clients messages. And they message. I rarely spend time on the phone, or on video conferences with them. They know that the best way to get me is to book a time. I’ve trained my clients.\n\n\n\n[00:36:44] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating. So to you, that piece of the jigsaw puzzle is entirely obvious. And so it kind of just gets glossed over in your head. But you have created a business where that bit is the kind of foundational piece. If you had clients that wanted you on call 24/7, that really wouldn’t work because you’ve carved out a life for yourself where you don’t want to be on call 24/7. You want be able to do what you want to do when you want to do it, with the understanding that the clients are important, but the async nature of it is, they’ll message you. As soon as you can get to it, you’ll get to it.\n\n\n\nAnd I’m guessing that when you onboard these clients, there’s that whole education piece. This is what I do, this is the way we respond to support. You’ll get an answer with, I don’t know, 12 hours, 24 hours, whatever it may be. And it may be that somebody listening to this podcast is firefighting all the time and they kind of haven’t figured that piece out. So I think that’s really interesting that you’ve got that, but yet it’s self-evident to you.\n\n\n\n[00:37:39] Charly Leetham: I think I want to also add to that is that my clients trust me. So there might be point in time where I am always on for that client for a while at least. And when, I’m always on for them. If they message me, I will, and I do this for all of my clients actually. If they message me and say, hey, this is a problem, and I’ve got access, I actually have the ability to respond to them. I will normally respond to them and say, I’m letting you know, I’ve seen this on the road today, or I’ve got meetings all day. I’ve got this, you are in my queue, I’ll get to you as soon as I can. And they know that actually means not tomorrow, not the next day, not, whenever it is. I really do mean as soon as I get a space available, they’re going to get my attention. We’ve built that trust relationship.\n\n\n\n[00:38:26] Nathan Wrigley: I think probably that is another foundational piece of your business. Without that trust, that’s going to be difficult to onboard clients. Do you tend to gather clients by word of mouth more, or do you have a marketing website where people onboard to you and you have to build that trust up over time? Or is it more a case of your clients recommend your services to other clients who then bring in that trust with them, if you know what I mean?\n\n\n\n[00:38:49] Charly Leetham: Mostly column A, little bit of column B and more of column C. So yeah, it’s a bit of everything. I am actually just starting to ramp up my marketing as I start to get more comfortable with what I’m doing. And it sounds strange, right? Because I’ve been doing it for a while, but I’m starting to get more comfortable.\n\n\n\nSo now I’m starting to ramp up my marketing, because I can talk to people about how it works and what it does. And I have very frank conversations. It’s one of my things is to be, make sure that I am upfront, I am frank, I am honest about what goes on. I don’t like. I can talk salesy. I prefer not to. I prefer to be plain English and real world with people.\n\n\n\nI think the other thing because, if we are talking to your audience, the other thing that I really wanted to highlight there is that I have had clients sack me because they don’t like the way I work. That’s not a reflection on me. That’s not a reflection on the surface I provide. It was a reflection on the relationship that was developed, and that relationship didn’t work for them. I’m good with that. I hope I found someone that can actually work with them the way they need them to work.\n\n\n\nThe other side of that is I have actually suggested to some clients that they would be better off with another provider. And as a service provider, that’s something that we have to be utterly comfortable with. Being able to say this client is not the client that works for us. We are going to spend too much time, too much energy, too much money supporting them, than we are going to get out of that relationship. It is commercial, and it sounds mercantile, and it sounds cutthroat, and it is. But by doing that, what you’re also doing is making space for another client to come in that is actually going to fit your ideals better, it’s going to fit the way you work better. You’re also allowing that client to find a provider that works better for them.\n\n\n\n[00:40:39] Nathan Wrigley: This has been such an interesting conversation Charly. This is your life, right? So it’s just oh, this is the way I wake up and I do these things and what have you. But it’s in such contrast to my life at the moment, and yet there’s so many bits of the jigsaw puzzle that you’ve just described that are really fascinating to me.\n\n\n\nI would imagine there’s going to be quite a lot of people listening to this who have intuitions that, I got into tech and I got into building WordPress websites so that I too could have a little bit more of that freedom. Maybe even going as far as you’ve done to make it more nomadic. So they own their own vehicle and potter about all over the place. Or they backpack for three months of the year. It’s just fascinating. And because it’s your life, it probably doesn’t seem that extraordinary, but from where I’m sitting, totally remarkable.\n\n\n\n[00:41:24] Charly Leetham: No, it doesn’t seem like it’s every day to me. I will say that I think I have a concept of how blessed I am being able to do it. I try not to become so blase about, oh, this is just the way my life is. It’s yeah, I worked hard to get it to this point. So I’ve got to accept that I’ve put in a lot of work to get there, but I’ve also got to accept that there is a lot of blessings that have come from it. And I thank the Lord every day for the life that I have.\n\n\n\n[00:41:50] Nathan Wrigley: Well Charly, we’ve reached the 45 minute mark, and although we had a whole range of different things that we could talk about, I hope that you are happy that’s where we ended up. We talked mostly about digital nomadism. We didn’t really stray into WordPress too much, but what a fascinating conversation.\n\n\n\nMaybe we’ll have a conversation another day, and lean in heavily to the WordPress side of things, but digital nomadism it was.\n\n\n\nCharly, where can people reach you? And I don’t mean that in a physical sense because obviously we have no idea where you’re going to be, but if they were to reach out online, or try and find you on a social network, or a website or whatever it may be, where would be some of the places where we could find you?\n\n\n\n[00:42:27] Charly Leetham: The best place to find me is on my website. If you go to askcharlyleetham.com, and then at the end of it put /connect-me. So connect to me with the dashes between it, you will get wherever you can find me. All the networks I’m on. You can book a free 30 minute breakthrough session. And guys, if you just want to come and talk to me about how you can set up your business, or the things that you’re doing and the things that you need to consider, I’d happily talk to you for 30 minutes about that. That’s not a problem at all. And just so you know, I’m on Facebook, I’m on X, I’m on LinkedIn. I’ve got a YouTube channel.\n\n\n\nI do a podcast every other day. I do a podcast, Making Tech Easy for Small Business Owners. It’s a 10 to 15, or 15 to 20 minute episode about something tech, and tries to try to simplify it out. I do interviews every now and again, much like this that I put up on there. I’m on Rumble, I’m on Odyssey.\n\n\n\n[00:43:22] Nathan Wrigley: I will link to all of those different bits and pieces. Anything that we’ve mentioned just then I will put into the show notes. So if you head to wptavern.com. Search for the episode with Charly in it. And Charly, I should have said at the beginning is not a typical spelling, it’s c h a r l y. So if you search for that this episode will surface.\n\n\n\nSo absolutely fascinating, Charly. Thank you so much for chatting to me today and good luck. I hope that you managed to get wherever it is that you are going in the days, weeks, months, and years to come. Thank you so much.\n\n\n\n[00:43:52] Charly Leetham: Thank you Nathan. I have had an absolute ball. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, and I love talking about the life I’ve built, so thank you.\n\n\n\n\nOn the podcast today we have Charly Leetham.\n\n\n\nCharly\u2019s journey with technology spans over four decades, from tinkering with amateur radio as a teenager in Australia, to working in electronic engineering, and eventually building a career in WordPress and small business tech support. With a background in field service, sales, and running retail businesses, Charly pivoted to helping people with their websites and tech needs right around the time WordPress was in its infancy. Today, nearly 20 years later, she\u2019s still involved in the WordPress ecosystem, providing troubleshooting, support, and plain-English tech translations for business owners who need their digital lives demystified.\n\n\n\nBut in this episode, we\u2019re focusing less on her technical skills and more on her unique lifestyle. Charly is a true digital nomad, someone who\u2019s not bound to a fixed address, but instead lives and works from a camper van fitted with a Starlink system, traveling, and working, all over Australia.\n\n\n\nWe talk about what it was like to embrace remote working long before it was commonplace, and how she built a business that supports complete flexibility. We explore both the upsides of the digital nomad life, the freedom to travel, spend quality time with family, and work from beautiful locations, as well as the tradeoffs, such as limited space and having to ruthlessly prioritise her belongings.\n\n\n\nCharly discusses the essential tech setup that empowers her nomadism: from laptops and microphones to how Starlink satellite internet lets her work reliably from almost anywhere, even in places with little or no mobile signal. There\u2019s practical advice on working with clients, so support can happen on her schedule, and reflections on building a business that matches her values, even if it sometimes means saying goodbye to clients who aren\u2019t the right fit.\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019ve ever imagined trading your desk for the open road, or wondered what\u2019s technologically and personally possible as a remote WordPress worker, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\nCharly’s website\n\n\n\nCharly can be found on the following platforms:\n\n\n\n\nFacebook\n\n\n\nInstagram\n\n\n\nLinkedIn\n\n\n\nX\n\n\n\n\nStarlink\n\n\n\nCharly’s podcast", "date_published": "2026-01-28T10:00:00-05:00", "date_modified": "2026-01-27T08:28:36-05:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/202-Charly-Leetham-on-Using-WordPress-to-Enable-a-Digital-Nomad-Life.jpg", "tags": [ "podcast", "remote work" ], "summary": "In this episode of WP Tavern, Nathan Wrigley chats with Charly Leetham about her journey as a digital nomad using WordPress. Charly shares how evolving technology allowed her to build a flexible, location-independent tech support business. She discusses the freedoms and challenges of living on the road, remote work essentials like Starlink for internet access, and how she supports clients with their tech and websites. The conversation highlights both practical insights and the personal rewards of a nomadic, tech-enabled lifestyle. If you\u2019ve ever imagined trading your desk for the open road, or wondered what\u2019s technologically and personally possible as a remote WordPress worker, this episode is for you.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2340049/c1e-89rgrhvrowrhr5vg6-gp59102vbo3n-srprqd.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=202326", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/201-marc-benzakein-on-how-life-has-changed-during-the-internet-era", "title": "#201 \u2013 Marc Benzakein on How Life Has Changed During the Internet Era", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how life has changed during the internet era.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Marc Benzakein. Marc’s story is one that spans nearly the entire history of the internet, with roots reaching back to the mid nineties. He explores, how curiosity and an enthusiastic embrace of technology led him from running a small coffee importing business, accepting payments by snail mail, fax, then email, to helping wire up schools for internet access when modems worked incredibly slowly, and only a handful of people were online.
\n\n\n\nThis episode is a departure from our usual topic about plugins, themes, and WordPress community news. Instead, we are more in the business of reminiscing this week, taking a reflective walk down memory lane to look at how the internet has evolved, not just as a technology, but as an integral part of society that’s transformed how we work, communicate, and think.
\n\n\n\nMarc shares some personal stories, building bulletin board systems, forging long distance friendships over phone lines and slow modems, and watching as internet access shifted from an intentional, difficult to navigate hobby for a few, to an invisible always on utility that we all take for granted.
\n\n\n\nWe talk about how technology has affected not only business and productivity, often creating more work instead of less, but also our attention spans, expectations around entertainment, the pace of life, and even the social fabric that binds us together.
\n\n\n\nWe discuss the cultural shifts that came with always connected living, digital minimalism, and the recent push by younger generations to step back from tech and reclaim a bit of analog life.
\n\n\n\nWe chat about the early optimism of open standards, the rise of walled gardens and social networks, and the challenges of regulation, commercialisation, and the balancing act between freedom and responsibility online.
\n\n\n\nMarc’s perspective is shaped by decades of direct technical experience, as well as thoughtful observations of how technology is reshaping the world around us, sometimes for the better, sometimes in ways we need to pause and question.
\n\n\n\nWhether you are nostalgic for the old days of dial up, intrigued by how the internet’s culture has shifted, or curious about how these transformations might play out as new technologies like AI reshape society, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Marc Benzakein.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Marc Benzakein. Hello, Marc.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:44] Marc Benzakein: Hello, Nathan. How are you?
\n\n\n\n[00:03:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. This is going to be an episode unlike one I think we’ve ever done on the WP Tavern podcast. Because usually we have a conversation about, I don’t know, a plugin, a theme, a community idea, something along those lines. And today we’re just going to do memory lane. We’re going to go hand in hand down memory lane.
\n\n\n\nI think Marc’s memory lane is a little bit longer than my memory lane because it’s all about the internet and the way we’ve been using it and how it’s evolved and all of that. So if you’ve got an expectation of a plugin show, this is not the one for you. This is going to be a little bit different.
\n\n\n\nSo before we crack in properly and have that conversation, Marc, would you just sort of paint the picture a little bit about your bio? Maybe go back right to the beginning of your experiences on the internet. When did you first get online and all that kind of stuff?
\n\n\n\n[00:04:30] Marc Benzakein: So I want to go back to, I think it was 1995 or 1996. There was a, of course people hear about, and it still exists, AOL and things like that. And then there was Prodigy. I got involved as a user of the internet with a company called Netcom. And it was kind of one of the first true internet service providers that I knew of at the time. It wasn’t like, it didn’t have like this interface and kind of guide you through where you needed to go and everything. You had to use things like Gopher, and you had to do research in order to be able to use the internet.
\n\n\n\nI of course, became fascinated with it always being a, kind of a tech head or just curious. I’m just infinitely curious. It doesn’t really matter, it doesn’t have to be technology. It can be anything and I find it, like I said, I’m infinitely curious and that leads to distractions sometimes, but it also leads me down paths that I never would’ve thought.
\n\n\n\nAnd while I was working on the internet, so this was at a time that I was actually importing coffee from Africa. So yeah, so related. So related. And I had actually made some pretty good money with the coffee business. I was doing the email thing. I had like my three friends who had email addresses and we were like, oh, this is cool. Look at this, instant gratification. And I thought, man, it sure would be cool to see what this looks like from the other side of things. Because I have no clue how any of this works.
\n\n\n\nAnd so curious thing happened with the coffee company. I was importing from a country called Burundi in Africa. Some people know where it is, some people don’t. I actually never visited, but my uncle was actually a big shot in the agriculture department there which is how I had the connection to be able to import coffee into the United States. They had a lot of civil and political unrest, and essentially burned the coffee fields. And my uncle fled the country because it had become so dangerous.
\n\n\n\nSo one day I’m, basically I had set up a system in which I import the coffee, it goes to a distributor. Once a month I would go out to the mailbox and collect a cheque. And that was my job. It was the easiest thing I ever did, once I got the system built. And so, lo and behold, civil unrest and all that, which was just awful by the way, but I’m out of business because I can’t import coffee from Burundi. And I was really young, and probably not smart enough to think, maybe I should back this up with other countries too.
\n\n\n\nBut coincidentally, a person that I had gone to high school with, they built computers for schools and things like that, so they had some government contracts and things like that. And they had this crazy idea that they wanted to connect schools to the internet. And they wanted to give them high speed access. Now, keep in mind that back in these days we’re talking about 14.4K, it was, well, we thought it was fast at the time. You know, you had US robotics with their HST standard. And we thought that we were doing well, but most people were actually on 24 hundreds back then.
\n\n\n\nSo if you can imagine that, 2,400 baud modems. I remember it like it was a meal ago. I mean it was just crazy. And so now, I was like importing coffee and I was trying to figure out what to do next and Greg Franklin, who I have partnered with since like the eighties, we’ve been through a lot. We were partners at ServerPress. We’ve been through it all. He and I, you know, we were always good friends. And he says, hey, I’m going to work with Phil and Steve on this internet thing, and it’d be kind of cool if you help me out because I have no clue what I’m doing. I’m like, well, I have no clue what I’m doing either. And he said, yeah, but between the two of us, we can figure it out.
\n\n\n\nSo the idea was, they had already set up, Phil and Steve, who were the other partners in this company, they had set up digital ISDN access. Now, ISDN, let’s see, what did that stand for? Something, something, digital network.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:32] Nathan Wrigley: I can’t remember what the acronym stood for, but it was banded around a lot, I remember that.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:36] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. And what made it fantastic was you had a modem, okay, but it was kind of on demand. So when your computer sent out a network request that was outside of your internal network, which nobody had home internal networks back then. You know, if they had a computer, that was it, right? Back then, internal networks were things like, there was like LANtastic was one of them, and then there was Novell networking and all that stuff. So it was like that token ring network stuff, right? Okay. So you have to go way back, right? So I can’t believe I’m remembering some of these terms because it’s been so long.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I remember all of the ways that they could be connected. I remember seeing the, you know, you’d read through TCP IP documentation and there’d be diagrams of computers connected with T cables all in circles because that was the most efficient way to connect them all. Oh gosh, you’ve taken me back.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:26] Marc Benzakein: It wasn’t just the most efficient way, it was, if any part of that ring broke, the whole network broke down. You had have it, you know? So this concept of plugging into a switch or a router or something like that was like completely, pardon the pun, but completely novel. Not Novell, novel.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:45] Nathan Wrigley: Novell, yeah, very good. Very good.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:48] Marc Benzakein: So I built a lot of token ring systems for local businesses and things like that, but nobody had a network at home. They generally, at most had one computer at home. And when they wanted to go online, I should go back even before that, I used to run a bulletin board service, a BBS, which was even more ridiculous than a 2,400 baud modem.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:11] Nathan Wrigley: This was when there were like three people in the United States online.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:14] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. And essentially I would have my computer, I was living in an apartment at the time. I would have my computer set up and only one person could connect at a time to my computer, which was set up with this BBS software on it. And they would play games. I had downloads of different files and things like that. I was the first BBS in our region to have a one gigabyte SCSI hard drive. And so I became very, obviously my BBS became very popular, not because I offered anything incredible, but because I had a one gigabyte hard drive.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you had the badge of honor.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:48] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. And word spread quickly and all that. In the old fashioned ways, which was carrier pigeons and things like that.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:53] Nathan Wrigley: That’s right. There was no, yeah, or the bulletin board.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:57] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, or the bulletin, yeah. And I think that was probably where I got kind of this taste of like how cool it could be because I would modify my own stuff. So I would, we used a bulletin board software called WWIV. It was all C++ coded. And there was this guy that somehow I found, I don’t even know, in Virginia. His name was Tony. And he and I got to be really good friends because he ran a bulletin board system too in Virginia and I’m in California. And we would get on phone calls, long distance mind you. If you remember what long distance was.
\n\n\n\nWe would talk for hours and this guy was one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met. I mean we would, he would just call me up to tell me, we got to the point where he’d just call me up to tell me jokes and we would just laugh for hours. But he was in the military. He worked on the helicopters that flew George Bush senior around. He was in the Marines.
\n\n\n\nAnd we met up one time because he flew out to California. But that’s a whole side story. So that’s where I got started. And then I invested in a US Robotics 14.4 HST modem. So I could do, yeah, 14,400K per second, which was like, I don’t know what the time of $500 modem or something ridiculous like that.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’ve suddenly taken your computer onto the highway instead of being stuck on back lanes.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:16] Marc Benzakein: Right. So not only did I have my one gigabyte SCSI drive, but I also had high speed BBS connection.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:23] Nathan Wrigley: You got all the bling that you can have.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:26] Marc Benzakein: I had all the bling on my 286 computer. It might have been a 486, I don’t know. I don’t remember the computer. But what was funny was like you would sit there, we’d be watching TV and I’d hear my modem go off because someone would be connecting to the BBS. I would drop what I was doing just so that I could go and see what they were doing, right? Because at my end I could see everything that people were doing, so on top of it all. That was probably my foray into the internet, even though I didn’t realise it at the time.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:53] Nathan Wrigley: Although for a proportion of the listeners, they’ll be kind of nodding their head and going, oh yeah, all of the things that you described make perfect sense. I guess for a significant proportion of the audience, all of this will sort of sound like a mystery. But hopefully you’ll have got some impression, deal listener, the internet as we now know it, where it’s ubiquitous, it really is everywhere. You know, you’ve got a connection if you’re walking down the street with your cellular network and what have you.
\n\n\n\nIn the part of the world, certainly where I live, and I imagine where you live, there’s no real black spot where the internet does not really exist. And everything’s really straightforward. You buy a device from a shop, turn it on and it connects almost immediately. And yet that really wasn’t the case. It was kind of like more pioneering days. Most things didn’t work, but it was a heck of a lot of fun, and a heck of a lot hobbying. So more of actually. Now that I think about it, that’s the best way to phrase it. It was a hobby, things to do.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:48] Marc Benzakein: It absolutely was a hobby. Very few of us actually had, well, I don’t think any of us had the foresight that the internet would become what it is right now. At least none of the people in my circles. I think it was, it would be the equivalent of like being a Ham radio operator. You know, it’s kind of the same sort of thing. You kind of felt like you were part of this like little elite group of people who understood how it worked and could make it work, and it made you feel special. And for those of us who grew up kind of being that nerd in high school and things like that, and especially back in the seventies and eighties when, I mean I went to school, there were only three people who even knew how to use a keyboard on a computer. And of course we, I mean they made a fricking movie called Revenge of the Nerds. They made fun of us.
\n\n\n\nIt’s amazing that we haven’t had, well, I think a lot of us have had to go through years and years and years of therapy. And I think that I just probably deflected a lot of that sort of treatment of nerds with like a very sharp tongue and a, you know, a very, I would laugh at it and things like that. So that was kind of my coping mechanism probably. And I probably have some trauma from all that that I don’t even remember. But there’s probably something there, but that’s a whole other show. We can talk about that another time.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So the fact that it was a hobby and also the fact that, so my recollections start a little bit later than yours, but we’re not like a whole decade out of kilter. I think you definitely started at times where I can remember some of that stuff. You certainly got the march on me. But nevertheless, I don’t think in my estimation I had any conception that it would grow beyond a thing that hobbyists did.
\n\n\n\nSo I think it was always going to remain this sort of niche hobby thing. Maybe some sort of place where you would communicate with a handful of people, and that handful of people would be, you know, equally nerdy in the same way that you or I were. But no expectation that it would be adopted en masse. No expectation that every single human being would have some sort of device, either that they’re walking around with or just in their home or anything like that.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I think, looking back, I predicted it would just be this hobby thing and would never grow into anything else. And so it was just a bit of a lark, a bit of fun. Something that you’d put away from time, you know, you would set it down, go and do your regular day, then come back. There was no email, nothing like that. So you could safely put it away and then come back to it.
\n\n\n\nI look back on it very fondly. It’s almost like halcyon days. And so many things that the internet has been connected with, and is connected with now are fabulous, but there’s also a lot of downsides which have come serendipitously along the way as well. Nobody foresaw those either. So I think, like I say, it was sort of halcyon days. Just this notion that it would be, I don’t know, unicorns and rainbows all the way down.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:33] Marc Benzakein: Right. The closest prediction that I had made back then was I said, you know, one day we are all going to be connected. But I thought it was going to be one of these kind of like, we go on and we intentionally connect with each other, not like we’re always connected all the time kind of thing. Of course I was young and quite the gamer at the time. I said, here’s what’s going to happen is, I predict that one day games will exist where we keep all the files on our own systems, and the only thing that’s being transmitted to each other is just data to like, so we can like play together all at the same time in these games.
\n\n\n\nThat was my prediction and people would laugh at me. And now of course it’s gone way, way, way beyond that. But every once in a while I’m like, see, I told them and I did nothing about it. I just knew it was going to happen and I did nothing about it.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: I remember when I was at school, sitting in a physics class, and I for some reason got sat next to probably the nerdiest nerd I’ve ever met. I won’t name him, but he is still very nerdy. He really was like on the extreme end of interested in all of this kind of stuff. And I remember we got into a conversation once where he said, do you know what I think is going to happen in the future? I think you’ll be able to, so we still had cathode ray tellies, so you’d turn the tele on, you’d wait for three minutes for the TV to warm up, and then the picture would slowly appear. And that was the level that we were at, and you had to walk over and press a button on the screen if you want to change it between the four channels or three channels that were available in the UK at the time.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:01] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, the kids were the remotes back in those days.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:03] Nathan Wrigley: That’s right. We were literally, either that or a big stick that you could try and prod from the sofa. But he said to me, in the future we’ll have televisions that are just connected to computers somehow, and we’ll pick what we want to watch, and we won’t have to just watch what’s provided to us. We’ll be able to say, I’d like that now, and this now, and watch this film now. And he just predicted this future. And I remember sitting there thinking, that’s never going to happen.
\n\n\n\nNow that’s kind of like the starting gate for children growing up in this era. That’s like the basic provision. If you haven’t got, you know, the computer switched on and the TV and the music and the radio and all of that on demand, yeah, that’s not life, that’s just some sort of poor version of life. It’s so interesting how it’s transformed what we expect.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:55] Marc Benzakein: It’s funny because, yeah, you hear the kids being like, what do you mean you had to wait till Tuesday night at eight o’clock in order to watch? And if you didn’t see it, you’d miss it completely. What do you mean by that?
\n\n\n\n[00:19:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But even map that further back and, you know, you go back a whole generation or a generation and a half prior to you and I, even the notion that you could watch anything on a box in a house, what do you mean, the theater? Somebody brought the theater to your house. Well, yeah, kind of, in a little box. What, they shrunk the people down? How? It’s insane.
\n\n\n\nAnd yet, every single generation, this is now the assumption. The technology of the magnitude that we’ve got now, and the complexity that we’ve got now, and the miniaturisation that we’ve got now, this is now the benchmark for the beginning of the next generation. And it’s so interesting watching it happen.
\n\n\n\nI don’t know what you feel. I’m probably jumping ahead because I want to go back and talk about some of the things which have gone wrong. But what’s your, do you see yourself fully able to engage with all of the new things that are happening?
\n\n\n\nSo we’re in the year, we’re at the very, very end of 2025 and, you know, we’ve got things like AI. We’ve had all sorts of interesting things happening. And I do wonder, for me at least anyway, I do wonder if there’s a point in time where it just races ahead at such a speed that somebody like me really does genuinely struggle to kind of keep up. I don’t know if you’ve got the same intuitions.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:13] Marc Benzakein: I actually think everybody does. I think that kids do too. I just think that kids are focused, for instance, on what’s important to them. And they’re at a different point in their life, so what’s important to them is not important to us. And so the technology that’s important to them like, say for instance, TikTok or whatever, is just an example, right? I only care about TikTok insofar as, what can it do to boost my brand? Or something like that.
\n\n\n\nAlthough it is interesting that kids are interested in boosting their brand on TikTok and they’re kids. But that’s, they may not realise that that’s what they’re doing, but that’s what they’re doing. But as far as technologies go, I think we just tend to use a technology, I think we’ve reached an age where, with the exception of maybe teleportation, we really feel like, if I can think this, we can do this. And so we just kind of like, now we’re just like, okay, I want to do this, what do I have to do in order to do it? Not, that’s impossible. You know, I think we’ve crossed over that hump of things being impossible.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:15] Nathan Wrigley: I remember sitting in the car with my children. So this is going back several years now. I mean quite, maybe a decade or more. And I remember my child asking to play a certain song on the car radio. I said to him, we don’t have that. And he looked at me and he said, what do you mean we don’t have it? Because the setup that I had in the car still required compact disks. You know, the old CD player. You would put the CD in and so the arrangement of CDs that we had in the car was the available catalog of songs.
\n\n\n\nBut he could not get over, unavailable. What? What do you mean? I mean, genuinely, it was a real moment where he had to think, the song is bound to that round thing. It’s not just coming out of the ether somehow. And that was quite a profound moment for me thinking, wow, your world is a lot bigger than mine, well, smaller and bigger at the same time, but your expectations are so different to what mine were when I grew up.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:10] Marc Benzakein: I think that, oh, I mean I hate to sound like, oh, kids today, but kids today, I mean they barely know what an iPod is. And how long ago was that? That wasn’t even that long ago. Because it’s like, what, you had to download your music onto this device? Yeah, because it could hold more music than a CD. For us, the iPod was groundbreaking, right? But I remember the first time I could put music on my phone and I was like, oh, this is awesome. I don’t even, once again, I don’t even know why we call them phones anymore. I hardly ever use it to talk to people.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, your pocket computer.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:40] Marc Benzakein: It’s way more powerful than anything I ever had in the past. I think because kids are in a constant state of having to adapt anyway, that’s just what growing up is, is a constant state of adaptation. I think that it’s easier for them. I do find that I’m a little bit slower or I might be just more selective. I might just be like, you know, this doesn’t interest me. And it may this be like I’m becoming more and more, get off my lawn as I get older. Or it may be that I’ve always, even back when we started the internet service provider, my feeling was that we have all this power at our hands and we are still children when it comes to us as a society and our ability to be responsible.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s a curious insight isn’t it?
\n\n\n\n[00:23:28] Marc Benzakein: Technology has always been kind of a double-edged sword for me. It’s amazing what you can do, but going back to the coffee days, I remembered how the speed of business changed for me because we had fax machines. And so I would fax to the people in Burundi because we would, coffee would go to auction. I’d have to bid on it and, you know, get the lot and then have it shipped over here. And the next morning I would, you know, because of the time difference, I would send them a fax in my morning and then the next morning I’d have a fax from them.
\n\n\n\nAnd we’re talking about not even 10 years ago, everything had to be done by courier and things like that. And it would be days and days and days before you got information or you’d have to make a phone call. And so that was like the first part of, you could sign contracts in a fax machine. And then we got email, which became even more instantaneous. And as a result, going back to like when personal computers came into our homes, a big part of it was, hey, these things, well, you can do in two hours, what you used to be able to do it eight hours.
\n\n\n\nAnd I very quickly learned that nobody was working a two hour day once technology came into our homes. In fact, people were not only bringing their work home, but they were working 14 and 16 hour days. And my thought, I was probably 18 or 20 years old, and my thought even at that time was like, we are not responsible enough to have this kind of technology at our fingertips. And I still feel that way. And so I’ve always struggled with this like, we have technology but we do not have the ability to limit ourselves or to discipline ourselves to say, okay, but how much is actually enough here?
\n\n\n\n[00:25:06] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know? That’s really curious. It’s not something I dwell on a lot, but when you say it, it makes perfect sense. It’s not like the amount of work that we were doing 50 years ago, the amount that needs to be done objectively is the same now than it was then. I don’t think that’s the case. I think the amount of work always fills up the available time.
\n\n\n\nAnd so this promise, which has been offered in multiple generations over hundreds of years, you know, you can go back to the industrial revolution or the agricultural revolution, just the idea that the technology will free up time. Clearly it does, but I think it’s true to say that other things occupy that time because there’s an efficiency gained over here. Well, that leaves you a little bit of time to do this extra other task over here. And because everybody’s bound up to the technology, everybody has this available time, which they then fill up. And so the cycle begins.
\n\n\n\nAnd in many ways, I feel exactly like you’ve just described. Instead of going from an eight hour day, the fact that we’ve got the technology in our homes and we can check the email during the middle of the night, and so on and so forth, I think it is entirely possible that the workday could be longer now than it ever has been. I mean not for everybody, and not all the time, but it certainly could be.
\n\n\n\nCuriously, last night I went to, there’s a history society that I attend locally and we had a magic lantern show. And I don’t know if you’ve come across a magic lantern show, but a magic lantern show is, it’s a wooden box with a whole bunch of candles in it. They put painted glass slides in, and some of the painted glass slides, if they manipulate them in a certain way, they can simulate movement, or arms moving around or.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:41] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, they’re really cool.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I really was hit by a sense of, that was entertainment. And there was such pleasure and innovation in that. And it’s the same now, right? Along comes the internet and we get the same pleasure out of that. And along comes AI and the next generation will get the same amount of pleasure out of that. But it was also curious to see, and I’m just going to use the word slow, how slow that activity was.
\n\n\n\nThere was a lot of breathing room. There was a lot of space for you to inject your own thoughts. There was a lot of time waiting for the chap to pull out one slide and put the other one in. Whole minutes would go by and nothing would happen. But there was no expectation that, well, we just lost a couple of minutes there.
\n\n\n\nSo I think that’s kind of leading me onto an unexpected consequence of the internet is maybe that we’ve lost the capacity to think in that kind of slow manner, which I really hadn’t parsed it until last night when I saw what entertainment was 150 years ago. And it was so gentle and slow and enormously pleasurable. Once you’d suspended that there’s no CGI, there’s no Tom Cruise there, it’s just a person on a glass slide. But it was absolutely fascinating. It gave me a real window into the pace of life and what that might have been and how that has changed. And it will, I presume, never, that genie will never go back in the box.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:05] Marc Benzakein: Well, no. I mean it’s impossible for any of that. I mean I can bring it to modern day terms. When you watch or listen to a podcast, do you listen to it at regular speed or do you listen to it at 1.5 or 2?
\n\n\n\n[00:28:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there you go. Yeah, most people I think.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:18] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. If I have a day where I am doing nothing, I even watch my movies now, I watch them at 1.5x or 2x. And it’s crazy because your brain adapts to it very quickly. But then what happens is, if I’ve gone through a whole day of like listening to podcasts or something like that, which I’ll have going on in the background and I have no interaction with people, when I’m done listening to them, it is dreadfully dreadful. I become impatient talking to people because they talk so slowly.
\n\n\n\nAnd then I wonder, am I speaking faster than I normally do now because I’ve been listening to this podcast. And I have to reset my brain. And the thing is, I kind of feel like, I have this theory on ADHD, which I definitely have. My theory on ADHD is, there’s this misconception that ADHD is something where you can’t keep your attention on any one thing, which we’re finding out that’s not true. You either hyperfocus or you’re not focused, in simple terms.
\n\n\n\nAnd I feel like what it boils down to is a ADHDers have to have 100% of their bandwidth taken up all the time. That’s what it boils down to. So if what I’m working on requires a hundred percent of my bandwidth, I can hyper focus on it and do nothing else. If I don’t then, I’ve got four screens on my computer. I used to have six, but I’ve got four. I’ve pared it down to four and I’ve got something going on on all those screens. If I’m doing something that’s kind of mundane and just, because I have to have that filled all the time.
\n\n\n\nBut I think that as a society, you talked about time, and it’s really kind of a rule of economics, right? You spend what you make. No matter what you’re making, you’re going to spend it all. That’s kind of like this echo. And it’s the same with time. Unless we actually discipline ourselves to say, look, mental health is just as important, so that means downtime, meditation, all these things are just as important no matter what society tells us. Those things are just as productive as putting out a widget or whatever you’re doing.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I think that what has to happen at a societal level, in order for us to gain back some of this discipline, is we need to recognise that while, yes, we need to take up a hundred percent of our time, what are the important things that we need to do in order to take up that a hundred percent of the time? And the reality is, some of that is downtime. Some of that is sleep, some of that is eating, some of that is interacting with people or whatever it may be. And I think technology, because it is constantly the shining new object, takes us away from all of that.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:45] Nathan Wrigley: I think for me, the profundity of the internet, let’s just use that term, you know, whatever is bound up inside that term, is enormous. You know, it’s probably the most, up till now, maybe AI will come to surpass that, but up until this point, I think the internet is probably the most profound technological invention of all time.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:04] Marc Benzakein: I call it the eighth wonder of the world.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, right. So the capacity for all that it brings. The fact that you can communicate with people, as I am with you. You are literally on the other side of the planet, and I’m talking to you as if you are stood next to me. The mind boggles. But also access to news, access to publishing your own information, seeking out communities that are just like you and the myriad way, oh, commerce. Let’s not forget that. That whole thing. The capacity for that, remarkable. All of it, remarkable and amazing.
\n\n\n\nBut I think fair to say that there’s always swings and roundabouts. All of those wonderful things that we’ve just described, there’s probably some missteps along the way. And that was one of the things that I wanted to ask you. Are there any bits during the internet’s evolution to where we are now, where you think, do you know what, maybe we shouldn’t have done that? Maybe that wasn’t a good idea. Have you got any sort of thoughts on that, where you look back and you think the internet probably could have avoided that aspect?
\n\n\n\n[00:31:58] Marc Benzakein: I could think of a lot of little things. I think it’s one of those million little things, right? So going back to those days, it was really quite interesting. You know, I didn’t know what DNS was. I didn’t know, I barely knew what an ethernet cable was. We had this box sitting there that was a Cisco router. I had no idea what a router was. I mean, all this stuff because it was all pre-configured.
\n\n\n\nAnd I think the thing that blew me away back then, and this doesn’t really answer your question, but the thing that blew me away was, here we had people that we would get on phone calls with each other to work through problems, because this guy understood DNS, this guy understood routing. The two didn’t both understand both. It was really insane that it worked at all.
\n\n\n\nAnd I remembered sitting there going, this is a worldwide thing and it’s going to become a worldwide phenomenon. I mean it’s already working on a worldwide level. And it’s a bunch of people who don’t know each other, who probably if they were in the same room as each other, wouldn’t like each other.
\n\n\n\nI mean there were guys that I dealt with, there was this one guy, Frank, every time there was a DNS problem, I had to call him. I would dread calling him because his first question would be, what did you do now? It wouldn’t be like, ironically, it would be like, accusatorily, right? If that’s a word. I hated calling this guy, right? But somehow or another, we knew that we were working on something bigger than all of us, and so we tolerated each other at these various levels.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:22] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just inject a couple of my things? Yeah. Is that all right?
\n\n\n\n[00:33:25] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, sure. Go ahead. Absolutely.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:26] Nathan Wrigley: Because where I was going with this was, at the outset of the internet, I think there was a widespread assumption, and hope, that open things would win. And for a period of time, I think they did. So an example would be, I don’t know, things like RSS and things like that. Just widespread, open standards, everybody understood. And I think a lot of that has been upended, you know, the social networks came along, and made these utterly beguiling interfaces, which consumed lots of time. I’ll get onto that as my second point in a moment.
\n\n\n\nBut the standards sort of got, not thrown out the window because they’re still there and, you know, you can still build on top of them, but they got usurped. More utilitarian things that were more easily understood because you were in this silo worked. And so closed things started to dominate.
\n\n\n\nI have this notion, I have this hope that we are maybe seeing a little bit of a pushback against that. Obviously you and I are in the WordPress space where those kind of things are incredibly important. So that would be one of my things.
\n\n\n\nAnd the other thing, which I think I can say for me, and I think it maps across many people, but I can’t be certain about that, is the time that can be consumed on the internet, which with the benefit of hindsight could have been better spent doing other things. I think it’s easy to become, not addicted, but for me to really get lost in the internet.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:51] Marc Benzakein: What you’re talking about is a natural evolution though, because there’s no real way to regulate that. That’s like, you can’t. How do you regulate that? And I mean that was of course the appeal of all of it back then. Just like blockchain, that’s the appeal of blockchain is like, how do you regulate it? We knew that eventually people would figure out how to regulate it, even then. Because I remember us having these congressional hearings and things about monopolies and things like that, and all these things that had to do with the internet.
\n\n\n\nAnd it was very clear that the people asking questions had no clue what they were asking, because they had no clue what the internet really was other than they used email. They had no clue how far reaching. And so they would try to put standards in that just didn’t make sense. But we all knew that eventually people would be in those positions that actually grew up with the internet, understood it. And, of course, you can be cynical or whatever, the government is going to figure out a way to regulate everything so they can get their piece of the pie somehow.
\n\n\n\nAnd we saw a little bit of that with the regulation of, say, for instance, IP addresses, which back then were a lot harder to come by because there was a big concern about IP address shortages because we were on IP v4 and there was no such thing as what they call network address translation. So like every single website, if you had a web server, every website had its own IP address. If you were at home, you had a static IP address that was assigned to you.
\n\n\n\nAnd I remember filling out the forms, which was like a 20 page application, it may not have been 20, but it sure felt like it, application for more IP addresses, more blocks of IP addresses because after, so we had ISDN, which was kind of a big flop, and then we went to the modem standard which was dial up, which was actually, became very highly profitable for us. But then we got into DSL, which was the digital subscriber line concept. And it was cable or DSL. Those were the two high speed or broadband options.
\n\n\n\nAnd even when DSL just came out, we had to assign people IP addresses. So it’d be like, here’s your DSL modem. We would go out, we would install it in their home. Here’s your IP address. And with your DSL subscription comes a dial up subscription, so that when you’re traveling, you can access the internet and you can dial in from your hotel room or whatever.
\n\n\n\nAnd I’d say that the only thing we could have changed maybe was the messaging. Because everything else, and it’s still a matter of, look, the internet represents freedom. It represents the freedom to do what you want, when you want, how you want. And hopefully you’re not doing anything illegal. But of course there was a lot of that going on as well. But I don’t, the whole point of the wild westiness of it is that it was the wild west and you could do whatever you wanted. And people loved that freedom.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I don’t know, you know, my big frustration is I’d have people call me at two in the morning on my home phone line, because their internet was down and they were going to go on a raid on World of Warcraft or something like that, and they were the raid leader and, by the way, true story. I’m not making this up. And somehow this guy got my phone number and death threat. I mean, I got a death threat because he couldn’t go on this raid.
\n\n\n\nI mean the stories during that time are crazy. And I think it really is just a matter of, I think as always, with everything, messaging is everything, but people are still going to do what they’re going to do, whether it’s legal or not. So I’m not sure that there were any mistakes that were made because it was an evolution. It wasn’t, there was nothing intentional.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:21] Nathan Wrigley: I mean, it’s a technology which is just flooded with all of humanity. So the idea that it was going to be unicorns and rainbows all the way down was misguided because it was just waiting for humans to come in with all their interesting, fun, curious, illegal, time wasting stuff, and pour all of that into the internet. I am so fascinated about where all of that will go.
\n\n\n\nThe bit that makes me most interested is that I had quite a significant portion of my life when the internet didn’t exist. And so I had a childhood which was completely inoculated from the internet. And so I have that perspective and so, okay, here’s the bit where I sound like the curmudgeonly old man and, you know, the youths of today and all of that. And that’s not really the intention.
\n\n\n\nBut my children’s generation have never had that. And it’ll be curious to see how they grow up in a world in which always on was always a thing. From very early age, they had access to technology. The endeavor to acquire information is now more or less trivial. You just log onto something and all of that is available to you. We’ve got AI coming at a breathtaking pace. It would just be so interesting to see how this goes. And also very interesting to see how my generation cope with its onset because, sure as anything, it doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down. And so we are going to have to try and keep up, and hopefully we will, without becoming too curmudgeonly.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:52] Marc Benzakein: My son is going to be 21 this next year, and he hates everything that has to do with technology, which is really fascinating. He’s in college and outside of college, he works at a Barnes and Noble. He has his girlfriend and they go hiking every single day. He takes a hammock with him and puts it between two trees and lays in his hammock and reads books. And this is not something that I trained him to do.
\n\n\n\nThis was, I mean I appreciate that about him other than he’s, you know, not nearby so the only way I can contact him is texting and phone calls, but he prefers phone calls to texting. He prefers email to texting because emails, you check your email when you want to, you don’t get interrupted by the text message notification. And he’s very, very bright and his whole circle of friends are very, very bright and they’re not into technology either.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:44] Nathan Wrigley: I was just going to say, I’ve noticed that that seemingly would be a bit of a trend over this side of the pond as well. There does seem to be a groundswell of turning things off or minimalising, tech minimalism, let’s call it that. So things like vinyl is coming back as a format for consuming music. The phone’s getting simplified so that there’s less on there. Apps being deleted because the assumption that it’s good to have more things coming in and that more connection is a good thing has been sort of pushed to the back.
\n\n\n\nActually many of my children’s generations seem to have now grown weary of that, and they realise that actually that’s not in their best interest to be engaged all the time, every day. And so that will be a curious pushback. It almost seems like a sort of Hollywood plot that, doesn’t it?
\n\n\n\n[00:41:24] Marc Benzakein: Maybe it’s just that it’s so taken for granted now just like a car is or anything else, that they don’t think of it as anything other than what it is.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:36] Nathan Wrigley: So we were sort of caught up, our generation were caught up with this constant cycle of innovation, newness, the shiny thing. And actually for a whole sort of 20 years, there was no let up in that, was there? The internet came along, home computers came along. They got smaller. They became laptops, which you could then take everywhere. Internet and mobile phone networks got switched on. Then the advent of a computer, which you could hold in your hand came along. Social networks came along. All of that completely switched on, connectivity came along. There was a constant churn of evolution and next new thing. Maybe you’re right.
\n\n\n\n[00:42:09] Marc Benzakein: It’s like you’re talking about the television set. In our house growing up, the TV set was something that was kind of always on, and so when we turned it off, it wasn’t a big deal or we didn’t feel the need to watch it constantly. We didn’t need to, I mean let’s say that you live in a place where, out your front window, you have like this beautiful view. But every single day you see that same exact view, to the point where you can acknowledge that it’s a beautiful view, but you’re not as likely to acknowledge it every single day.
\n\n\n\nI think that that’s the way that technology has become. And of course, I welcome that because I want our kids to have some of the same experiences that we Gen Xers had, you know, where we had to drink water out of the garden hose because our parents told us to go out the door and not come back until after dark. And I don’t want to go that extreme but the point is that they have these things at their disposal, and they just know that they’re there, so they don’t feel like they have to constantly pursue it.
\n\n\n\nAnd I mean, I remember last year when my son was out visiting, I took him to this place called, it’s called the Medicine Buddha, which is about, it’s out by Santa Cruz. And it’s about, I don’t know how many acres it is, but it’s redwoods. It’s nothing but redwoods. And we were out there for about two hours hiking. He’s like, Dad, why didn’t you bring me here two days ago? We could have spent the whole weekend here. I mean, it was like, to give you an idea of what it’s like, it is so quiet there because the trees are so tall that the birds don’t even come down,
\n\n\n\nSo I think that the pendulum is swinging in the right direction. I do think that youth today has a lot of the right ideas. You know, hopefully our generations haven’t screwed it up too much for them, that they get to appreciate all of that. But I’m not as worried about it.
\n\n\n\nBut I will also say that with our kids, we were not super restrictive with the screen time with our kids. And it was always funny, you know, we kind of started it out as an experiment and what we found was that they’d play on their tablets, or on their computers for an hour or whatever, and then they’d be like, let’s go play basketball, or let’s go play football, or whatever.
\n\n\n\nAnd they would just put the things down and they’d go out and explore on their own. And my kids, it’s crazy how sometimes hard it is to get a hold of them because, oh, I left my phone at home, sorry Dad. And so I see it going in a good direction. But that’s the funny thing is like we went from this period, and I know this was supposed to be about the whole evolution of the internet and we kind of, as you and I do, went down.
\n\n\n\n[00:44:36] Nathan Wrigley: We segued.
\n\n\n\n[00:44:37] Marc Benzakein: We segued. But there was a time as crazy as it is, that when you wanted to get on the internet, it had to be intentional. You had to deliberately want to get on the internet. So if you went traveling and you had dial up access, you would have to hook up your laptop computer to a modem, unplug the phone line from the hotel phone line, plug it into your computer, and then hope that the dialing worked, right? That you could get an outside line and that it would take you to the internet and that you’d be able to have a connection. And then it would, nine times out of ten, it would be a long distance number that you had to call because you were in a hotel somewhere else. And now if we go into a hotel that doesn’t have WiFi, we freak out.
\n\n\n\n[00:45:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It’s like, what’s going on? This isn’t normal.
\n\n\n\n[00:45:25] Marc Benzakein: Welcome to the 20th century, I mean.
\n\n\n\n[00:45:27] Nathan Wrigley: I feel like we’ve grown up in such an interesting time. If you look back and if, like me, you’re into things like archaeology. Archaeology really does show that for most of humanity, especially if you go pre-history, thousands of years go by and the innovation is very small. You know, there might be one or two little things which built up this growing corpus of things which humanity use.
\n\n\n\nBut it might be that somebody invents a slightly new way of cutting the wheat down, or it might be a new way of building a wall or what have you. And that’s the pattern of history. Slow, fairly slow, pedestrian until you get to much more recent times, couple of hundred years ago, and things start to pick up speed. And now we’re at a point where, goodness knows what is going to happen even in the next six months, especially in the realm of AI. We really are at a rate of change, which is very difficult to keep track of.
\n\n\n\nBut it’s exciting. It’s a time when everything is up for grabs. It really is exciting. And hopefully we are going to maintain that enthusiasm, maintain that interest. Make sure that, you know, we’re all safe and well fed and everybody’s looked after. Let’s hope those kind of things happen. But what a breathtaking time to live in. What an interesting time we are in.
\n\n\n\n[00:46:43] Marc Benzakein: Well, I mean the idea of the internet, and I remember saying this when we started our internet service provider. I said, look, we have an opportunity to level the playing field for businesses. It doesn’t matter if you’re small or if you’re big. On the web, it all looks the same. And I think that that’s always been kind of one of the drivers for a lot of us, especially in the open source world, is this idea of leveling the playing field between kind of the haves and the have nots, right?
\n\n\n\nSo we have the same access to knowledge that people with means might have. We have the same access to products. We have all the same accesses. So in many ways, from a consumption level, I’m talking about consuming knowledge as well as products, but from a consumption level, we have a level playing field. From the other side of things, it’s not as level as it used to be.
\n\n\n\nA Walmart or an Amazon obviously is going to show up in every search for everything, as opposed to back in the day, all you really had to do was just put in a few keywords and somehow or another you’d show up on Yahoo or AltaVista or Ask Jeeves or whatever it was at the time, you know, before Google came along. And then Google came along and the same thing was still true for a while, where you could like do just minimal amounts of SEO and get attention to your website and get business.
\n\n\n\nSo the idea and I think the mission of the internet kind of should always be to keep the playing field level. I just don’t know that that’s necessarily possible because obviously the people who have the power and the money are going to be able to tilt things in their direction. But having said that, it is still the greatest opportunity for us to level the playing field of anything out there.
\n\n\n\n[00:48:33] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that’s such a good way, I think we should probably end it on that, because that’s such a nice and optimistic note actually, in many ways.
\n\n\n\nWe began this conversation not really knowing where we were going to end up, and that has proved to be the case. We really did go in all sorts of different directions there, but absolutely fascinating.
\n\n\n\nYou know, we revealed a lot about our own past and our sort of heuristics and intuitions about how it’s going to be for our children’s generation, and what we’ve enjoyed and what we think might be of concern in the future. That was absolutely fascinating. Marc Benzakein, where can we find you online, 24/7?
\n\n\n\n[00:49:05] Marc Benzakein: You can find me online, not 24/7, I actually do try to take some time off of technology. But I am with MainWP. I do their marketing and partnerships, for MainWP, which is a fantastic WordPress management dashboard. That’s my plug. And you can also find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on Twitter, Marc Benzakein. I’m pretty sure I’m the only Marc Benzakein out there. I’m marcbenzak Twitter and Bluesky and those things. And then you can find me on Facebook and I’m just kind of generally all over the place.
\n\n\n\n[00:49:38] Nathan Wrigley: I will endeavor to find those links and I’ll drop them into the show notes. So if you go to wptavern.com and search for, well, I suspect if you just search for Marc’s first name, which is Marc with a C, M-A-R-C. If you search for that, you’ll probably come up in the search. But Benzakein, B-E-N-Z, as we say in the UK, A-K-E-I-N. Marc Benzakein, thank you so much for a really interesting chat today. I appreciate that.
\n\n\n\n[00:50:03] Marc Benzakein: Thanks for having me, Nathan. Appreciate it.
\nOn the podcast today we have Marc Benzakein.
\n\n\n\nMarc\u2019s story is one that spans nearly the entire history of the Internet. With roots reaching back to the mid-90s. He explores how curiosity and an enthusiastic embrace of technology led him from running a small coffee importing business, accepting payments by snail mail, fax, then email, to helping wire up schools for Internet access when modems worked incredibly slowly, and only a handful of people were online.
\n\n\n\nThis episode is a departure from our usual topics about plugins, themes, and WordPress community news. Instead, we\u2019re more in the business of reminiscing this week. Taking a reflective walk down memory lane to look at how the Internet has evolved, not just as a technology, but as an integral part of society that\u2019s transformed how we work, communicate, and think.
\n\n\n\nMarc shares some personal stories, building bulletin board systems, forging long-distance friendships over phone lines and slow modems, and watching as Internet access shifted from an intentional, difficult-to-navigate hobby for the few, to an invisible, always-on utility that we all take for granted.
\n\n\n\nWe talk about how technology has affected not only business and productivity (often creating more work instead of less), but also our attention spans, expectations around entertainment, the pace of life, and even the social fabric that binds us together. We discuss the cultural shifts that came with always-connected living, digital minimalism, and the recent push by younger generations to step back from tech and reclaim a bit of analog life.
\n\n\n\nWe chat about the early optimism of open standards, the rise of walled gardens and social networks, and the challenges of regulation, commercialisation, and the balancing act between freedom and responsibility online.
\n\n\n\nMarc\u2019s perspective is shaped by decades of direct technical experience, as well as thoughtful observations of how technology is reshaping the world around us, sometimes for the better, sometimes in ways we need to pause and question.
\n\n\n\nWhether you\u2019re nostalgic for the old days of dial-up, intrigued by how the Internet\u2019s culture has shifted, or curious about how these transformations might play out as new technologies like AI reshape society, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case real life AI tools and workflows in WordPress development.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Corey Maass. Corey’s been building for the web since the late nineties, starting out in the early days of Photoshop and tables. Learning JavaScript, ASP Classic and PHP, and eventually falling into the world of WordPress around 2010. Since then, he’s taken on building SaaS apps, managing client projects, and experimenting with a growing number of productivity tools and frameworks.
\n\n\n\nHe’s joined us before, and today he’s here to share his perspective on what it’s been like adopting AI tools into his workflows, especially from the point of view of building projects for clients.
\n\n\n\nAlthough AI has dominated headlines over the last couple of years, Corey brings a practical angle to the conversation. He discusses the evolution of his tech stack and how embracing AI tools like Cursor, Claude Code and GitHub Copilot have completely changed the way he builds software and manages projects, allowing him to work faster, automate code, review, and unlock creativity in places he hadn’t expected.
\n\n\n\nWe hear about how his journey with AI started, how he’s reimagined old projects using new tools, and how learning to interact with these models, sometimes granular, sometimes letting them run freely, has reshaped his daily workflow.
\n\n\n\nCorey describes the shift from using AI to just save time, to using it as a sounding board for inspiration and idea generation, even weaving it into artistic endeavors like music production.
\n\n\n\nMuch of the discussion centers around how these advances have affected client work with Corey exploring the real world balance of responsibility, efficiency, and the changing nature of value for developers. Do clients care who, or what, wrote the code? Or just that it works? What does authentic creativity mean in an era where prompting and randomness a part of the toolkit?
\n\n\n\nWhether you’re a developer, curious about what working alongside AI means, or just wondering about the future of tech, and WordPress, in an increasingly automated world, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you, Corey Maass.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Corey Maass. Hello, Corey.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:33] Corey Maass: Hello.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:33] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. Corey’s been on the podcast several times before. He’s here today to talk about the subject, which almost nobody has touched during the year 2025, that’s AI.
\n\n\n\nBut actually I think we’ve got a curious angle because we’re not just going to touch it from a sort of more generic point of view, although we might. We’re going to talk about it from a client point of view and building things for clients and how, I guess, Corey is leveraging that to make life a little bit easier for himself. Let’s find out.
\n\n\n\nFirst of all, Corey, would you just introduce yourself? Give us you a little bio, tell us about you.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:04] Corey Maass: Absolutely, Corey Maass. I currently live in New Hampshire, which is in the northeast of the United States. I’ve been building for the web since 97, I think. Back in the day when we would do designs in Photoshop and then slice them up and put them in tables. And then I learned JavaScript, and I learned ASP Classic, and I learned PHP, and I got obsessed with building SaaS apps, you know, making websites actually do stuff instead of just look pretty. And then I found WordPress in about 2010 and it’s all been a wonderful, joyous, rollercoaster ride of happiness without exception.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:45] Nathan Wrigley: That’s lovely. And I think we should end the podcast right there.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:48] Corey Maass: And I met this wonderful guy named Nathan somewhere along the way, and my heart is full.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:53] Nathan Wrigley: It does not get better than that. I really think we should end there. Congratulations, Corey Maass, we’ll see you next time. No, let’s get into it properly.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:01] Corey Maass: And then the robots came.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:03] Nathan Wrigley: That’s right. That’s what we are going to talk about. But you’ve been building for a long time. I mean, in terms of the internet, you really are like the heritage, aren’t you? 1997 was when people were just sort of starting out. I mean, there’s a few people that go maybe a little bit longer than that, but you’ve seen the whole thing.
\n\n\n\nSeems like in the year 2023, something like that, maybe 2024, certainly 2025, we’ve now got the advent of companions, AI companions that are helping us to do things online and build websites and so on. And I’m kind of just curious, let’s talk about your stack and where it is at the moment, and then we’ll get into how that stack has changed. But just tell us what you’re using right now. And we’re recording that December, 2025. And no doubt that will change fairly soon.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:45] Corey Maass: Still changes frequently. We’re chatting before we started recording and you said, have you updated Mac OS to this glass nonsense? And I went, absolutely. I bought into, to put myself in context, like I bought into the Apple ecosystem a few years ago. And I tend to, when they say update, I update. I might wait a day or two. Usually I will hear about, if something is truly crashing your computer, I’ll usually hear about it on Reddit or what have you. And so I might wait a day or a week, but I’m generally an early adopter is the point I’m trying to make.
\n\n\n\nBut with that said, I’m also a pragmatic developer. So I want to use the tools that are the most beneficial, but I’m also not cutting edge, bleeding edge on what model is the absolute best and all that kind of stuff. But I’m also not not going to use AI once it actually benefits me. So I’m probably somewhere on one side of the bell curve or the other, but I’m not bleeding edge.
\n\n\n\nAnyway. So as of today, I am using Cursor as an IDE, but I am not using the AI in Cursor at all. I have been meaning to, but again, it’s pragmatically. I’m not trying to use things because they’re in front of me or what have you. So we can talk about why I wound up using Cursor. But what I generally am doing during the day is opening Terminal inside Cursor and using Claude Code almost exclusively. Which then, a buddy of mine has gotten me back into the process of actually doing pull requests, so that the code gets pushed to Git. And then I’m running Copilot, which is GitHub’s AI to do code reviews. That’s what I was trying to say. I’ve got Claude generally writing the code, and then I’ve got GitHub’s Copilot checking the code.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, so that’s where you’re at the moment. But historically, if we were to gaze back over the last year, let’s go with that, how often does that iteration change? How often do you move from one thing to another because the landscape has moved or something superior appears to have come along?
\n\n\n\n[00:07:53] Corey Maass: Yeah, it’s kind of amazing. This is part of why I wanted to have this conversation is, for me it started pretty much in March. I went to Thailand for a few weeks visiting a buddy of mine there who’s a developer, he had to work. Like, every weekend we were running around looking at temples and stuff like that. During the week he had to work, and so I was left to entertain myself. And so doing my usual client work, which was still very clicky, clickly, because it’s still WordPress, and WordPress hasn’t quite crossed that bridge, though we’re working on it.
\n\n\n\nBut I said, okay, I want to use this time to start my AI journey. That’s where I said, let me subscribe to Cursor, 20 bucks a month, not unreasonable in the scheme of all of the software subscriptions that I have, and let me see what I can do.
\n\n\n\nAnd I have an app called Timerdoro, which is a productivity timer app, Pomodoro and that kind of thing. Friends and I built it, now it’s got to be 20 years ago, and we’ve never figured out how to monetise. In fact, yesterday I finally just slapped some ads on it because I couldn’t stand it anymore. And, no, that’s not true. I found an ad network that I wanted to try. But that’s kind of a perfect indication of how I think of Timerdoro. Timerdoro, I have rewritten at least a dozen times in at least four different, using four different tech stacks because a lot of people use it.
\n\n\n\nIt has a hundred users a day or something, which is really cool. None of them want to give me any money, which I totally am fine with. It doesn’t cost me anything. But it gives me an opportunity to, here is a product that people are using, let me continue to play with it, tweak it, design it, totally rewrite it. And so I rewrote it again in March using Cursor, which was an okay experience.
\n\n\n\nLooking back, I can see how much Cursor has improved, both the IDE and the models that are built in. And I have completely changed, because a big part of it is your own learning how to work with it. And so, at what level do you give it, build a productivity timer, go? Or do you say, install the following libraries, create the following files, make the classes look like this, name the methods and functions like this? Like, too granular, where it just does the typing for you. Versus, it totally conceptualises everything. And so you’ve got to fall somewhere in the middle, maybe, right? Or figure out where you are in the middle.
\n\n\n\nAnd I generally, having written my own code for years and years, sure enough, was too granular. But I think that benefited me at the time. Whereas we’ve come a long way, where you can be more in the middle and something like Claude can figure it out.
\n\n\n\nThe buddy that I was visiting, coincidentally, has absolutely doubled down. So he follows, he always talks about Tech Dev Dan or something, Dev Dan, who is sort of the thought leader in AI that he follows. And so he signs up for anything that Dan puts out, classes or courses or videos. And then he tends to, my friend Robert tends to distill some of that down to me. And so I might or might not implement it.
\n\n\n\nBut then I’ve also got other colleagues in the WordPress world. I actually had a friend of mine come to me and be like, hey, will you kind of be my AI buddy as we figure out how to negotiate all of this changing landscape? I said, absolutely. And coincidentally, it has turned out that I’ve kind of been the Robert to him a little bit, where I am a little bit ahead of him, and a little more embracing of things than he is. And so we’ve all kind of, we all evolve, but we’re all kind of getting information from different sources.
\n\n\n\nSo somewhere along the way, I mean Reddit and Twitter were just absolutely blowing up nonstop Claude. Claude Code when that came out. And so I was actually a little slow on the uptake, meaning a month, because I just, I didn’t get it. Like, so many of these things, people are like AI, and you’re like, right, but where do I type? Where does the code go? Or, I want to use AI, I am doing air quotes here, how do I get a website on the internet where people can click on it? It’s actually not intuitive necessarily to make that leap until, again, Robert has explained some things to me of, because again, he’s much more up on the words where he’s like, I think it’s called a harness is the thing you type into versus, the model is the actual AI you’re interacting with.
\n\n\n\nAnd so you’ve got TypingMind or you’ve got Claude, or you’ve got Terminal, but then you’ve got Claude, but you can actually use Claude with Gemini’s model if you want, or a Cursor. You know, if you go into the preferences, you can select which model. Do you want to use Open AI Opus, or do you want to use Gemini or do you want? And it was like, oh, right, okay, so there’s a thing you type into or interact with, and then there’s the actual model. But then, again, what are the patterns?
\n\n\n\nAnd like I said, I’ve just recently started, so with my buddy, we’ve been rebuilding, I have a game that I’ve talked about for a while. Mexicantrain.online is the website. And so it’s an online version of the Domino game, Mexican Train. I built it during COVID and I talked about it at WordCamp US two years ago, because it was kind of an amazing, one of those projects that I built because my wife told me I should, so that our family could play, continue to play, during COVID. And then it turned into thousands of users, and so it just became this, organically became this nice thing that a lot of people use. And it’s run by donations, which cynically, I never would’ve thought actually works. But people continue to give, I mean it’s amazing.
\n\n\n\nBut it’s been a long time coming that it needs, the tech is now five years old. I needed to rebuild it. I approached my friend and said, hey, would you mind building this with me? Because we’ve kind of looked for a reason to work together. We worked together at a big WordPress agency five years, eight years ago, which is how we met, but we haven’t worked together since. And he’s gone very enterprise, and I tend to be still my freelancer self, working with individual clients directly and stuff like that.
\n\n\n\nAnd so what’s been hand ringing, but good is he’s like, okay, we’re going to introduce pull requests because we’re going to have Copilot check our work, and we’re going to have full suite testing. And I tend to not, like I can do that stuff, and there’s the occasional project where I need to do it, but for the most part I’m a, make a change and push it to the internet and see what happens kind of developer. And so we’ve introduced more process, but again, it’s neat because I have to make myself be like, do what he tells you kid. And so then I’m learning better ways to use these tools to build more robust software.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:31] Nathan Wrigley: Was there ever a moment where, I don’t know if you were always bullish about technology, especially AI, it’s entirely conceivable to imagine that any given person that you see could be extremely bullish about AI, you know, somewhere in the middle or extremely, a little bit allergic to it or what have you. Now, I don’t know if there was any point where you swung between those two extremes or anything like that. But I was just curious if there was an epiphany that you had, like if there’s a particular moment that you can remember where you thought to yourself, oh, this is curious, you know? This is not something we’ve seen before. And if you do have one of those, I’d love to know what it was.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:07] Corey Maass: There’ve definitely been those moments where, mind blown, mind blown, mind blown. Even recently, Nano Banana the new image AI is mind bogglingly good. And so there hasn’t been one moment, there have been many moments because things like, I did pay for whatever the original ChatGPT was for a while. When it really became popular, I think last year, right? And so I said, well, let me pay 20 bucks a month. But I wasn’t using it. It wasn’t that good. It was definitely helpful, but again, it was more of a dumb typing companion. I need an email that says this. There’s your 20 lines. I didn’t have to think about it. I skim it, I edited a little, I might run it back through, and then I’d go, yep, good enough. Take out the em dashes so it doesn’t look like AI, paste, send.
\n\n\n\nTreated it more like that. A year ago when I tried to have it right code, sorry robots, I love you. In the future, don’t murder me. You know, but a year ago, like the code that it was generating wasn’t great. It really was hallucinating a lot. Oh, you need to write a WordPress function that uses this hook. A quick Google determines that hook does not actually exist. Stop making stuff up. Whereas I very rarely encounter hallucinations these days.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s a profound realisation.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:23] Corey Maass: Yeah, but to answer your question, like there were just these great moments of, like I had it write song lyrics and I was like, wow, these are surprisingly good. Or I remember early silly moments like we all had where I was like, take these song lyrics and rewrite them so that they’re in pirate speak or whatever, ha ha ha. Like this is a gimmick, right?
\n\n\n\nBut then, again, probably in March, working through my first project building Timerdoro again, using Cursor. Googling how to use Cursor, taking the time to watch videos to understand how better to use it. And then again, moving along throughout the year, these little moments of, oh, that’s amazing code or, wow, and in 45 seconds we had an entire authentication system with front end that a user can sign into and it all just works. The database is already created and all this stuff. And you’re like, oh, okay, wow, it’s getting more and more powerful.
\n\n\n\nThere’s always this thing in the back of my mind, I’m like, has it always been capable of this, meaning in the last year? And I’m just sort of taking, giving it more lead. Because again, I mean a big part of this is how we interact with it. And I keep thinking about scientists using it, or artists using it, because it’s the, little by little, again, we’re taking the collar off or, there’s a horse or a dog metaphor in here somewhere, I can’t quite. But giving it its own freedom to do what it wants, you know?
\n\n\n\nAnd how far can you take that? Like I keep thinking about, again, like science, where if you could give a model enough information, could it conceivably jump ahead months or years in our own research? Now research needs to be done, and things need to be proven and all that kind of stuff, but like in terms of thinking, are there things that it can conceive of that we just can’t? Brian Eno, the musician. I think it was him. I want to say it was him. I’m going to pretend it was him.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:14] Nathan Wrigley: He feels like the kind of character that it easily could be him. There’s a lot of technology in Brian Eno’s life, isn’t there?
\n\n\n\n[00:18:20] Corey Maass: Even away from technology, he, I believe it was him, I have to Google this. He created a deck of cards that said, as a musician, you’re in the studio and you’re like, my creativity needs help, right? And so there’s this deck of cards where you’d flip over a card and it would say, play the melody backwards. Or you’d flip over a card and it would say, what if this piece of music was being performed underwater? Or, what if somebody had a gun to your head? These thought experiments, right?
\n\n\n\nAnd you could actually look at that as, I don’t think anybody really would, but you could look at that as, oh, that’s not true creativity because something else is helping you do the work, right? As a human, if you’re a pure artist, it’s all supposed to come from your brain. You’re supposed to sit there in a dark room with a pen and a piece of paper. If it doesn’t come purely from your brain, then it’s not pure. And again, I don’t, it’s a weird example, but I don’t think most people would actually say that. They’d be like, it’s fine that you found random inspiration. Just like looking at nature, it’s going to inspire a painting or whatever, right?
\n\n\n\n[00:19:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, or looking at a previous painting will inspire your next painting.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:26] Corey Maass: As long as in theory it’s not too derivative or whatever, right? So the interesting thing about AI that I keep trying to use, the way that I’m using it, even past writing code or what have you is, help me introduce that element of randomness, the flipping of a card. Next time you’re having your favorite AI model write an email, or do some creative writing, or come up with funny slogans for, like a lot of us are using it for. Help me come up with the tagline for the next SaaS landing page that I’m building or whatever. Introduce negatives. What is it not? Or say things like, have it write this in German and then translate it back to English or, write it like a 5-year-old would. Basically like help introduce that element of randomness and creativity.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:08] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting, the sort of through line that I’ve gathered from that is that at the beginning when you were using AI, correct me if I’m wrong, but it feels like the entire productivity gain, or the gain was a function of time. You were trying to reduce the amount of time a thing took to do. So, you know, if you want to, oh, I don’t know, modify the game that you were describing, this train game that you’ve got. You were trying to reduce the amount of time it would take to do the next iteration of that.
\n\n\n\nBut it sounds like in the last year to 18 months, something along those lines, the expectation has now shifted. I’m presuming that the time thing is now just in the background. That’s guaranteed all the time. It’s always going to be quicker than it would be for a human to do it. But you’ve now moved into this curious creativity phase, which for many people I think was almost like the Turing test. You know, it was the bit that the computers, you could never imagine that the computer would ever be able to approximate something like that. And there’s a whole philosophical thing in there, which is probably too deep for us to open.
\n\n\n\nBut it sounds like you are making use of that. You are using it to generate ideas, to come up with variations around a theme and relying on it to be creative. Now, if that’s the case, I wonder how long it will be before that becomes just the normal, in the same way that maybe the time function has become normal. I wonder how long it will be before we’re all just, well, yeah, the creativity piece, of course, go to a computer, go to an AI if you want ideas.
\n\n\n\nI wonder what the next thing, the next sort of hurdle to fall is? Because it’s hard for me to imagine anything beyond creativity in all honesty. Once it’s got approximations and mastered that, I’m doing air quotes this time, if it’s mastered that, it’s difficult for me to imagine what the next domino to fall would be. But no doubt there is one.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:49] Corey Maass: And that’s what I’m getting at with the science stuff. There’s definitely, I think we’ve sort of chosen not to talk about the negatives. There are plenty and, or we’re foreseeing plenty or fearing a lot of things. Optimistically, at least in terms of output, to me we’re looking at coworkers who can do things faster, or employees or, I’m hesitant to say people who work for us but, you know, work that gets done on our behalf faster than we can do it, and in a way that we are satisfied with, right? Writing code is black and white. That’s not true at all, but it’s much more black and white compared to like writing a song.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s true. I think the, sorry to interrupt. I was just going to sort of establish that point a little bit more. I think you are absolutely right. The WordPress slogan, code is poetry, obviously kind of leans into this a little bit, but there is a kind of binary nature to it. When you finish it, it either works or it doesn’t to some extent. The goal is to do this thing, does it do this thing? No. Okay, something’s wrong in that. Something needs to be ironed out. The ones need to be zeros and the zeros need to be ones, whatever it may be.
\n\n\n\nIn the real world, things can be a lot more messy than that. So for the tech industry, it feels like the technology is perfectly aligned to satisfy the goals of that. But, I don’t know, let’s say you are a, let’s find something which would be a great example. Let’s say you are a psychoanalysts, or a therapist or something like that. It’s not quite so straightforward, but the industry that we are in, it lends itself heavily to great success in that arena. Right, sorry, that was my interruption over.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:20] Corey Maass: No absolutely. Perfectly restated. The code, there are degrees of efficiency. There are, you’re taking into context all of the different elements. So like Claude might write a method but it needs to work well with the way that the database is set up or whatever, right? So there’s nuances. This is what we’ve made careers off of.
\n\n\n\nBut exactly as you say, at the end of the day, it needs to work, it needs to be performant, it needs to be sustainable code, a few things. You check off these boxes and good enough if nothing else. Versus like, I am also a music producer. I make dance music and I like the way that I make dance music. It probably could be made by AI, if I’m honest, but it won’t scratch that itch for me, and that’s fine, right? This is a thing that I will probably, I and my music colleagues will all continue to do, even in the face of AI, because that’s not the point. It’s not about a thing that does work. And we’re going to talk about a client project in a minute. We said we’d talk about that, right?
\n\n\n\nI have a client who’s hired me to build a piece of software that needs to do a certain thing. And so with her blessing, I am co-writing it with Claude Code, having it checked by Copilot, but at the end of the day, she doesn’t care who writes it or what language it’s in or, dot, dot, dot. It has to do a thing. It has to let people do a certain kind of work, right?
\n\n\n\nDifferent from music. I’m not, for me, bedroom producer, I’m not trying to make millions of sales. I’m not a pop recording artist who’s reliant on this stuff. And so for me, it’s about connecting with other humans after I produce a piece of, let’s call it art, which is, I think a stretch.
\n\n\n\nBut I’m also, I’ve always struggled with the actual mixing of the music. Like hearing all of the frequencies and optimising the output. Because there is, again, a right way, like it’s not, again, it’s not black and white, but it’s much closer to, there is a right way for a song to sound with infinite variations, but within a very narrow gap, right? So I could write any kind of song I want, but the way that it should sound when I release it on Bandcamp does have answers. And in fact, this morning, I had finished a mix of a song last night, different from writing it, I’m going back through and tweaking it to try to make it sound as best as it could so that when I send it to DJs and they play it on dance floors, everybody throws their hands in the air, right?
\n\n\n\nI’ve always struggled with that. My ears aren’t good at hearing those kinds of things. I dropped the track into Gemini, and Gemini came back with a, you’ve got a peak of frequencies at around 5,000, so you should drop that by two db. Your kick and your base are competing, and so you should add a ducker to the base so that the kick comes through and that’ll actually save you four db of headroom when you’re mastering. Like, I mean it was.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:09] Nathan Wrigley: It just gave you all the science, which is absolutely fascinating. That is genuinely interesting.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:15] Corey Maass: It probably isn’t perfect, and it definitely can be subjective, like maybe I’m going for Lo-Fi House instead of Big Room House. But I gave it that information where I said, here’s the genre, make me sound like these other artists. And so it said, well, here’s sort of how to help guide you closer to their sound.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:33] Nathan Wrigley: The interesting thing there, I think, is it gave you a new rabbit hole that should you wish to explore, you just got it prized open. And you wouldn’t have known what any of that was. And so you could probably map that into a million different scenarios, you know, music, art, whatever may be. And it will just give you something back and you’ll be, oh, there’s that universe of stuff to get interested in. You know, the headroom of the dbs and all of that kind of, I mean it means nothing to me, but I kind of grasped that there’s a thing there.
\n\n\n\nDo you know, you said something really interesting earlier and it probably just slipped out of your mouth and you didn’t notice how interesting or profound it was. You said it wasn’t the point. And you were talking about making music and using AI for that isn’t the point. I think that’s going to become the metric of so much in the future. What’s the point of that thing?
\n\n\n\nSo as an example, if I want to go and see a band, I do not want to watch a video of a band where I have a suspicion that there was an AI involved and it created this video and the music. The point is I want to go and see a bunch of human beings who I know have struggled with their art and their discipline and, you know, failure and moderate success and all of that kind of stuff. I want to know that there was that soul searching going on in that musical arena.
\n\n\n\nBut curiously, when I go to a SaaS app, the point is, does it work? It’s really simple. Does it work? And do I care too much about how the functioning of it was achieved? Not really. The point is, does it work? And maybe we’ll be asking ourselves that question more. What is the point of the thing I’m about to do? Does it matter to me if AI was involved? On closer examination, yes it does. I’m going to avoid that thing. Or, no, it doesn’t. That’s fine. I’ll embrace that thing. It really landed with me what you said there. So that’s kind of curious. I wonder if I’ll start doing that more in my own life, examining the point of it. Is it a human enterprise, something extremely human and only for humans, or is it somewhere else on that spectrum? Yeah, interesting.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:32] Corey Maass: An example just came to mind, which of course has now just gone out of my mind because I started thinking about six other things. But like I read a couple of graphic novels. That’s what it was, memes. I read a couple of graphic novels and some of it is, I read for the artistry. Some of it I read for the stories. There’s graphic novels where I actually really don’t like the artwork, but I like the storytelling. How would I feel about the art being generated by AI? Because the person who was writing the story couldn’t draw, but could tell a good story.
\n\n\n\nOr the example that had come to mind were memes, or funny photos, right? I’m not a meme person. I generally don’t repost animated gifs, or can haz cheeseburger, or any of that stuff. Some of it’s cute or whatever, and I’m not against it, but it doesn’t tickle my sense of humor, right?
\n\n\n\nBut lately, I’ve long been proficient in Photoshop because like we said, I started in 97 when you were designing websites in Photoshop or whatever. And so for a long time, like I would say, so here’s a good example. One of my big clients is Seattle Magazine. And so we were doing, I don’t remember, there was some reference of Sasquatch, creatures that are most active in the Pacific Northwest, often around the Seattle area. They are real, by the way.
\n\n\n\nBut the joke was that our editor was writing his letter or something. And so I, quick, ran over to AI and said, here’s the picture of Bigfoot that everybody knows, walking across the stream bed or whatever. Here’s headshots of my editor. Put my editor in this photo. And it generated a photo of Jonathan as Sasquatch, like walking across the river. And it made us all laugh. And I think we did end up putting it in the magazine. I don’t remember.
\n\n\n\nI would have done the same thing in Photoshop, much less effectively. Even 10 years before, I would’ve grabbed a copy of the original photo and done my best to Photoshop Jonathan into the photo, maybe he’s hiding behind a bush or something. I couldn’t actually change his body to be walking in that pose. Now I can.
\n\n\n\nIs the effect the same? And again, we’re not talking about the negatives, or obvious negatives, about image generation of other people. Used in a harmless, funny way or day to day. Like, another good example. So on the Mexican Train website, one of the things that I wanted when I created mexicantrain.online was, again, this was about people connecting. This was my COVID project. And so I, a couple of years before, I’m chatting with a buddy online, I was joking about how I was eating Cheez-its, which we like never have in the house and how Cheez-its are just the best thing in the world, and they’re dangerous to have in the house. And a week later, a box of like 50 packs of Cheez-its arrived because he had shipped it to me as a joke.
\n\n\n\nSo I took a picture of me like looking absolutely exalted, elated, holding up Cheez-its. Oh my God, Cheez-its, right? And that’s what I put on the Mexican Train website as a like, hey, I’m Corey, I built this thing, because it was a very relatable photo. A funny little side story is that still, five years later, a lot of people who play Mexican Train daily or weekly using my website buy Cheez-its, or buy Cheez-its for each other as prizes and things like that. Like, it all became an inside joke.
\n\n\n\nIn building the new version, I wanted a new homepage. But that photo, I’ve actually lost the original file of it, and I only have a low res version. So I uploaded that into Gemini. I’m also more bald and my beard is longer. And so I uploaded the original photo and then a couple of photos of me more recently and said, hey, Gemini, using Nano Banana, create a new version of this. And also, like the original photo is very zoomed in. You could really just see my face. And so I was like, I want head and shoulders. And it did a beautiful job. Fixed the lighting. It looks almost a little too polished, frankly. And my wife looks at it and she’s like, I don’t know why, but I can tell that’s AI generated, like I can tell that’s not you. But to anybody else, it’s certainly close enough. I look at it and I’m like, it’s me but I’ve been photoshopped a little or, you know, it’s been cleaned up or something. But it’s close enough. But it’s a better photo that still conveys the same message, but it works better on the page, I think. But it’s not authentic, air quotes.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that whole authenticity thing is going to be, well, I guess it’s going to be a question for everybody going forward, certainly in, you know, you can imagine politics and things like that. Just judging whether or not the politician that’s on your screen at the moment is in fact doing that thing.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:12] Corey Maass: That’s the terrifying part is, what’s real anymore?
\n\n\n\n[00:33:15] Nathan Wrigley: There’s no doubt that we are going to have to kind of work that through.
\n\n\n\nWhen you are using your AI, and we will get onto your client bits in a minute. When you are using the AI, on what level do you feel that you are in some kind of relationship with it? That’s a very ephemeral question. But, do you view it as, so you described that a year ago it was less good. So in human terms you might say, okay, it’s more childlike or something like that. You know, it’s a smaller version of a human being. It’s less mature and what have you. Now it’s grown up, for want of a better word. It’s a little bit older perhaps, or more mature or whatever it may be. Do you think about it in any human terms?
\n\n\n\n[00:33:48] Corey Maass: Oh, absolutely.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:49] Nathan Wrigley: Isn’t that fascinating.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:49] Corey Maass: So what’s funny is, we’ve had a few of these conversations lately. My neighbors have Alexa in their house and they changed it to respond to computer, and they will only refer to it as, it. They did not want it to be humanised dogmatically. Like, it’s important to them that this is not a companion, a creature, a whatever, right?
\n\n\n\nI don’t care that much, and in fact, I enjoy playing with language. And I don’t see, the current state of how we’re interacting with our technology, I don’t have a problem with humanising it, or at least using certain pronouns and things like that.
\n\n\n\nAnd that’s why I say that specifically, Claude is a, he, it’s a male name, male, Western English name, right? Or if nothing else, I’ve never met or heard of a woman named Claude. Claude has always been a he. But one of the funny things that happened working with my buddy Robert, is he, like I said, he introduced Copilot to do code reviews and we’re chatting, he’s one of my, the buddies that I have where, you know, we chat online all day, every day, ongoing conversation. And he just started saying she about Copilot. And I did too. I did notice it, but I’m like, I have no objection, reaction to this. I see no harm in it.
\n\n\n\nI have no idea if we’re going to take this conversation way too far. The Octocat, that is the mascot of GitHub. I don’t know if the Octocat has a gender or pronouns or what have you. If you’re going to think of Copilot as some version of the Octocat, like I don’t, how you might get there, even subconsciously, right? But like just using Copilot, Robert started saying she, so I started saying she. And then he actually said after, Robert, after a couple of days was like, you know, by the way, I don’t know if you noticed, but I’d started saying she for Copilot. For some reason I got a, call it a feminine energy off of her. And I was like, yeah, I noticed. I could maybe pick up, perceive that too, if I’m going to overanalyse it. I mean it so doesn’t matter.
\n\n\n\nSo now Copilot is she and Claude is he. I’ve never thought to ask Copilot if they have preferred pronouns, which I guess would then actually get it into that like real world and societal conversations and philosophical, not to say that a gender discussion is philosophical but, you know what I mean? Like, actual consequences of real world issues, let’s call it that.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:06] Nathan Wrigley: It is so interesting that a lot of things, the sort of anthropomorphic nature of it, so we’re trying to build robots at the minute, and in many cases we’re trying to build a version of a human being. You know, it’s got legs and arms and clearly in many cases that is the least plausible design for the thing it’s trying to achieve. But we have this notion that, well, if we get a human being out of robots, that’s going to be great. It will be able to do all the things that we can do.
\n\n\n\nBut equally, on some level, we’re trying to get it to approximate human intelligence, human creativity, and things like that. And that kind of leads me to this one final thing before we talk about your clients, and that is, at what point do we start learning from it?
\n\n\n\n[00:36:43] Corey Maass: Aren’t we already? You’re constantly asking questions.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:45] Nathan Wrigley: Well, that was exactly the question. Yeah, so it would appear that in the case of code, at least anyway, you know, you ask it to do a particular thing and it will come up with this, I mean you could ignore what it’s done and just play the output and interact with what it has achieved. But if you were to delve into the code, I suspect there is quite a lot of head scratching and looking at things and going, gosh, that’s interesting. Why has it done it that way? That’s curious. Oh, I should be doing it that way.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:08] Corey Maass: Is it better than me, versus is it better than everybody? We don’t have a way to determine that. And that’s why I brought up the science stuff earlier. I’m like, okay, so if a bunch of scientists, let’s just be vague here, are in a laboratory, or in a think tank and are working together, but they’re also feeding everything that they’re thinking into an AI who is also thinking, at what point if, somebody comes up with a brand new concept or a new way to approach a medical issue or something like that, you’re like, oh, that’s amazing. I don’t think that’s been done before. What happens when that’s Claude or ChatGPT?
\n\n\n\nPresumably, in that specific instance, like the same process of like, oh, that’s, I don’t think any of us have thought of that before, let’s go do some experiments to see if that actually works, kind of thing. What if it’s well beyond our comprehension? What if it’s, there’s a conclusion, words that are typed on a screen that are so far beyond anything that we’re doing? You think of Einstein or you think of these scientists who have done stuff that, you know, or even, I mean you could be as vague as like painters who died in poverty and obscurity, but we revere them today. Vincent Van Gogh of course comes to mind.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of curious because obviously each one of us is a little entity and we’re constrained by our biology. You know, we’ve got this finite capacity in our brain. You have a finite time span on earth so, you know, for much of that time, you are just basically a recipient of knowledge, if you like? You’re this sponge, which is sucking things in. And then for a period of time you’ll be able to regurgitate it. You know, if you have an accident, your capacity will be diminished. If you’re knocked on the head or something like that. But you’re bound in time and you are bound in capacity because of the size of the neural network that you’ve got in your head.
\n\n\n\nAnd yet we’re now being confronted with this other thing, which can do things remarkably quickly, can have the entire corpus of more or less everything at its disposal at a moment’s notice. And it can, this version of the entity over there, inside that other box is exactly the same as this one over here. You know, they’re kind of replicas of each other. And then if you put those two together, they can do things in symbiosis at twice the speed than, basically they’ve got this whole load of stuff going on that we can’t hope to manage.
\n\n\n\nAnd it’ll be so interesting being in relation with that, and how we start to learn from it because, when was the last time you actually went to a book or went to a human teacher in your adult life to learn something? You just sort of go to Google, don’t you? And you’ve trusted on a computer to serve up the information for you for a long time. We’ve now got a new route to that information. I wasn’t really going anywhere with that. It was more of a sort of thought process. Yeah, interesting. Okay, let’s move to your client then.
\n\n\n\nYou did allude to this a little while ago, and it sounded like, certainly for the one client that you’ve got, there’s no obstacle here. You are just building the stuff. The client is entirely happy. I presume you are taking on the responsibility if the things that you produce with the AI kind of backfires or something is not working correctly. Is that your estimation of sort of the future into 2026, 2027, that the clients basically don’t care?
\n\n\n\nAnd if that’s the case, does it allow you to be more profitable because you are spending less time? Or more effective because you can do more complicated things? Or, do you sense that maybe we’re going to hit a point in the years that come where the clients start to, well, rebel is the wrong word, but you know what I mean, their expectations will be, well, it’s no longer, well, I know that Corey’s using AI, so my expectation’s going to go up in terms of his output, but also my expectation of his fee is going to go down as well? So there’s a lot in that question, but unpack bits however you choose.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:47] Corey Maass: So answering part 2.6b first.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, that’s helpful.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:52] Corey Maass: The story is, I had a client who had software built, it didn’t work out. But that meant that, largely her budget had been spent and so she was left with software that was, didn’t do everything she needed it to and, or at least there was not a lot of budget leftover for, because it’s, when the rubber hits the road kind of thing. Going, oh wait, we didn’t think of this. Now that we’re actually using it every day, we need it to do this and this instead of this and this. You design in a bubble and then you actually need to use the thing. And there just wasn’t budget left over.
\n\n\n\nAnd so when we started talking, she’s like, I need these few things fixed. I looked at it and was like, I can’t really maintain this. We really want to, I mean typical, this is going to sound like every developer is like, I have to build it from scratch my way. But in some sense, at least in order for me to maintain it, it needed to be rebuilt my way. But we kept looking at, what would that cost? And she’s like, I’ve already spent my budget and so we’re waiting for new clients to come in or lightning to strike so that Corey can do this.
\n\n\n\nAI happened to be that lightning. And I went back to her and I said, I think we’re to the point now, this was just a couple months ago, that I can build it for probably half based on hours. Because we’re still, at least at the moment, going, okay, we’re charging X dollars per hour of Corey’s time which isn’t, has never been, or at least for a long, long time, has not been just me typing characters into an IDE, right? A code editor. You’re paying for Corey’s experience, you’re paying for Corey’s planning, you’re paying for conversations that we’re having in order to come to certain conclusions to figure out the software we’re going to build, blah, blah, blah.
\n\n\n\nSo thinking of it in that same context, it’s not just about me typing. And so now it’s not about me typing at all. And in fact, I’ve had friends now, and I’ve read this too where the sentiment, or a sentiment, of developers now is we are project managers. We are product designers, or acting as the client in classic agile project management style. We are code reviewers because we’re not, why should we take the time to write the code anymore? And again, this is why, part of why we introduced Copilot, because it’s like, oh, then if we can also not do that part of it.
\n\n\n\nHumans are valuable. That was something that you inadvertently alluded to earlier, is that we are still currently, we think we’re steering the ship, telling AI what to do and controlling how we’re using it and stuff like that, but like we make mistakes just as much as AI does. We aren’t the stop gap we often think we are, because we often make mistakes, or we don’t know what we don’t know, like you said a minute ago about just googling everything and that kind of thing.
\n\n\n\nSo anyway, talked to the client, said, look I think we can build this for half the price. I’m willing to take the risk if you are. I’m very upfront about like, we’re building this with AI, which is part of why we can do this. And she said, great, let’s do it. And so it’s been a slightly different experience. We still had to have the conversations about what the product looks like, what it does, and stuff like that. But I was in fact able to get it going a lot faster than I would have before. And because this is client work, I’m checking it a lot more diligently. Because again, like you said, there’s liability, or at least I’m going to be the one that has to fix it, so I need to make sure that it’s written in a language that I understand, and it’s laid out in a way that I understand.
\n\n\n\nAnd I was a little more opinionated because I want to make sure that files are in certain folders, which nobody, as we said at the beginning of the call, nobody cares about. Like, as long as the software works, nobody cares where the files are. But we’ve, over 30 years of development, we’ve developed certain patterns that just make it easier. So why shouldn’t we take the time to make it easier? And especially since I don’t have to do the work, I can say, hey, Claude, you put this file over here, put it over here instead. And Claude goes, sure. Why not? I don’t care.
\n\n\n\n[00:44:47] Nathan Wrigley: I guess if we ever get to the point where the AI is literally doing everything, then all of that would go out the window, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t ever need to care where that file was, so long as the AI had a hand in knowing where that was, and it could retrieve that information and modify things as it was. But it feels like we’re certainly still in that human diagnosis phase, where you need it to look a certain way. I’m doing air quotes again, the sort of old fashioned way, you know what I mean? The way you’ve always done it, so that when it puts something out, you, yourself can look at it and go, okay, this is comprehensible to me. I can understand and see if there’s been errors. But I would imagine it’s not going to be long until that moment has passed.
\n\n\n\n[00:45:23] Corey Maass: With the new version of Mexican Train, treating it kind of like I talked about Timerdoro early on, I’m caring a lot less, and I’m forcing myself to care a lot less. I’ve got a working version, this is an online game that is important to people, and it’s not that it’s not important to me, but I am comfortable with taking a little more risk. And so I am letting it more freely do what it wants.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s interesting is we are not to the point yet where, as you said, this box is the identical to this box. So I am finding that on certain days it’ll go, well, I’ll put the file here, and on other days it’ll say, put the file here. It doesn’t matter, right? At least with that example, it doesn’t matter. You want it to write performant code, so you want it to make choices where things like performance matter, but whether a file is in one directory or another does not have real impact on the performance of the game.
\n\n\n\nBut comprehension down the road, because this is where we overlap with humans. You’re like, okay, so Claude tomorrow needs to understand where things are. It still makes more sense to have a logical file structure so that Claude tomorrow can go, oh, it looks like all of these types of files are in this directory. And so we end up coming to some of the same conclusions that 30 years of human development has decided are the better patterns.
\n\n\n\n[00:46:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, that’s kind of interesting. I mean, I guess it was ultimately because it’s creating its own, I don’t know, it’s next word based upon the whole corpus of the human word written down on the internet. It’s probably going to make, draw some broadly similar conclusions.
\n\n\n\nIt sounds, from what you just said, you used the word like half, I think a minute ago when you were talking about maybe the budget or the time available. Sounds like you were at roughly 0.5, half of whatever the commodity was, budget or time or what have you. Is that roughly where you think you are at the moment compared to pre AI in terms of efficiency? And do you see that efficiency, again, time or money, whatever it may be, do you see that dynamic changing so that you eventually get to, I don’t know, 0.4, 0.3, 0.1 of the amount of time that you would’ve done? And do you have an expectation that, at the time that you are doing 0.1 of the work for the same outcome, that you’ll get 1.0 of the salary that you got? Or will you have to do, you know, the other 0.9 on other jobs?
\n\n\n\n[00:47:43] Corey Maass: There’s a reason why developers really like starting new projects or rewriting them from scratch, right? Clean slate. And I think that that work, where you are in total control, in an empty directory, all technology at your fingertips, I see that quickly speeding up. I’ll tell you, one of the biggest hacks, I should have said this way up front, like the best value, because I’m finding a lot of people don’t know this, is screenshots will save you.
\n\n\n\nClaude Code does not, there are ways around this, but largely Claude Code or other AIs do not know what things look like in the browser. So taking screenshots, dropping them in, you can now say, look, the columns are misaligned or whatever. But also, even text, like I am just constantly taking screenshots and throwing them in to Claude, right?
\n\n\n\nSo part of what I’m doing right now, I know there’s a better way to do this, but I haven’t stopped to figure it out yet, is, Copilot reviews the code and then spits out a bunch of comments, right? I am taking screenshots of each one of those comments and dropping it back into Claude and saying, here’s what Copilot said, fix it. But I don’t even really have to type any words because Claude just reads the words that are in the screenshot. So it takes me three seconds to take a screenshot, drop it into Claude, and then Claude goes, oh, it looks like Copilot said we should do this instead, that makes sense. Or even has come back and said, well, Copilot doesn’t understand the bigger context, so I’ll push back on this kind of thing, right?
\n\n\n\nBut I’m still copying, I’m still taking screenshots and pasting. There’s got to be a way, I fully intend to do this soon, to figure out how to have Claude just read those comments and so the two of them can work together. So I shouldn’t be involved until there’s, I want a system that comes back and says, Claude did all, made all these changes, Copilot made all these comments, Claude is cool with these and not with these. Overall, we’re good to go.
\n\n\n\n[00:49:41] Nathan Wrigley: It’d be so interesting to set the two agents against each other, I don’t know, at bedtime on one evening, and to wake up in the morning and see quite how they’ve got along, if you know what I mean? You know, has it been this entirely, because obviously it’s built upon the corpus of human knowledge, it’d be interesting to see if it’s been this entirely productive experience, or if there has been some element of humanity creeping into that conversation where, you know, one of them throws their toys out the trolley halfway through and things like that. It’d be absolutely fascinating to see if they, you know, or if one just sort of, I don’t know, determines that maybe, oh, that AI’s doing a much better job than I am. I’m going to slow it down with some.
\n\n\n\n[00:50:19] Corey Maass: Or level up or, yeah. So getting back to your question though, right? Nothing is the same as actual humans interacting with something. So if we’re talking about traditional software that humans are clicking on, and then that’s my second biggest point right now is, since we’re supposed to be talking about WordPress, WordPress is all about clicking, right? It’s all about interface. It’s all about, you’re signing into an admin so you think about how visual that is, and then in the admin, you’ve got this left menu with, here’s all your options, click, click, click, click. And then the design of the page, right?
\n\n\n\nEvery client wants the logo to be bigger. And so you can go into AI and say like, oh, where I’m at right now is, if I’m building something new, I can use AI, I can generate it if I’m building software. But trying to essentially retrofit into current existing WordPress sites, we’ve got all these features that require clicky clicky on buttons, and AI can’t do that readily or what have you.
\n\n\n\nSo I’m still spending a large part of my day signing into WordPress sites, clicking around actually making changes, reconnecting. When we post a story, it pushes to Facebook and so I’ve got to actually go in and connect and click through the screens and all that kind of stuff. Which at the end of the day, most of the changes that you’re making in UI correspond to things being saved in a database. So at some point we’re going to get to where AI knows, oh, for Beaver Builder, I can make this change, store it in the database in a certain shape, and Beaver Builder will know how to render that on the front end.
\n\n\n\nI’m already finding that with ACF, for example, like I have ACF save field groups as JSON, a feature they’ve had for a decade. But because it’s in JSON, in text files, AI can read that and then go in and make changes or replicate it sideways because it says, oh, it wants the data to look, have this certain structure so I can create another file and make the data have this certain structure and does a great job. But there are 50,000 plugins. And I’m not about to let AI go and look at my database willy-nilly to say, oh, Elementor wants the data to be stored this way in the database, let me just start writing things to, you know? And so there’s still that disconnect right now.
\n\n\n\n[00:52:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think WordPress is doing a lot of work with things like the Abilities API and things like that to sort of surface what WordPress is capable of. And I would imagine, you know, you mentioned Beaver Builder and Elementor, I’m imagining that in a future, they’ll be writing what their capabilities are, and where they’re storing their information in such a way that the, hopefully anybody with any AI can kind of instruct the AI to do the thing, and it will know what the thing is.
\n\n\n\nAbsolutely fascinating. I’m so curious because you are doing a whole load of stuff that I’m just not doing. I was never really an out and out developer, I was kind of dangerous with code. But equally it does seem like folk like me, who are not really experimenting with this too much are getting, well, left behind is maybe one way of describing it, maybe we’re sort of enjoying it on some level as well. We’re enjoying watching other people do it, and we get to worry about what the societal impacts will be.
\n\n\n\n[00:53:44] Corey Maass: It’s points of integration. Electric cars came along and most of us were like, I don’t want or can’t buy a Tesla. But then the Prius came out and everybody went, oh, I can buy a Toyota. That’s probably historically inaccurate. Maybe the Prius came out before Tesla, but you get my point.
\n\n\n\nThe people around me, my neighbors are teachers. One of them has no interest, has no reason to use AI other than like, oh, let me look up a recipe or something. Versus, the other neighbor who really wants to be cutting edge and also thinks that this stuff is really neat. Is constantly trying to figure out, how can I run, generate, bingo cards was the new thing? Have AI figure out how to do these bingo cards for my students, or what have you. And you get into the moral gray area of, who’s actually writing papers and then who’s actually grading them? And so basically you’ve got AI grading papers that were written by AI. And you can get into, like anything, there’s all these sort of side effects. But, again, trying to keep it upbeat, like there’s neat things.
\n\n\n\n[00:54:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No, I think we’ve done a great job of kind of keeping it upbeat. You’ve just been relentlessly positive about it. You know, it’s obviously had a profound impact on your life, your capacity to do things. You sound like you’re infinitely curious about it as well. So it’s, maybe the life of a developer was something that wouldn’t have held the same level of excitement for the next decade or more. But this new technology getting injected and shaking everything up a bit, makes it so that you can do things that you might not have ever taken on, because the technical challenges or time might have been too difficult.
\n\n\n\n[00:55:12] Corey Maass: Would I want to be a new developer? I don’t know. Again, I think things are, I’m trying to describe where I’m at now, where, again, like WordPress is still very clicky clicky, and that happens to be the majority of the work that I do professionally.
\n\n\n\nI also think that, like I run a lot of websites for friends and for local nonprofits and stuff like that because there’s still something to be said for having a website. And the easiest way, so like we have a local, city owned, calling it a ski mountain is generous. You can technically ski on it. Most of the value to the community is there’s a tubing hill. So you get pulled up the hill in a tube and then you come screaming down the hill at 25 miles an hour. It’s freaking awesome.
\n\n\n\nI volunteer there and so when we needed a new website, I said, let me make a new website, right? I don’t want to be, if I’m involved in a tubing accident, this is the pointed version of getting hit by a bus, the developer scenario of getting hit by a bus, right? Somebody else needs to be able to step in and maintain that. So the website can’t, the value of something like WordPress, a CMS software in general for generating websites, right. I can’t, and even, TMI, but the guy who had the previous website had built it all by hand, and so nobody else could begin to maintain it or make changes to it.
\n\n\n\nAnd so for the new version, I was like, this is literally the best scenario for WordPress because I created the website and then I shot a video of how to update the website. And just a week ago, the head of the board in charge of it got in touch and said, hey, how do we make changes to the website? Do I have to send them to you? And I said, here’s a video, go give it a try. And if you get stuck, then absolutely contact me. But if there was any sort of running of scripts or FTPing into the server to make changes, or any of that stuff, like it would fall flat. And so you still need, at the moment, you still need clicky clicky.
\n\n\n\nShortly, as you said with the new API and stuff, there’ll be a little chat bot where you’ll say, look at this website. And the AI will go, oh, it looks like you’re using Beaver Builder with ACF, and you’ve got Yoast installed, dah, dah, dah. And then you’ll say, okay, we need to change the homepage to say the following things. And I think we’re going to go through, like any of this stuff, we’re going to go through a phase where it’s going to absolutely break the website and my phone will ring.
\n\n\n\nBut six months later, it’ll get better and better and better, and then using certain plugins. And I think, you talk about adoption, I think, if the plugins that lean into making AI be able to use their software well and quickly. So like I’m a big fan of Beaver Builder. So if Beaver Builder leans into enabling AI to interact with Beaver Builder, right? Then we are going to, just like any of the things in WordPress, there’s good and there’s bad, there’s favorites, there’s things that break over time. There’s all that kind of stuff, things that are maintained well and whatnot.
\n\n\n\nAnd so we’re going to get to a point where certain stacks are going to work better with AI. And I think site creators like me are going to say, oh, I don’t want to maintain this website for our local ski hill more than I have to. But instead of them having to go in and click on things and adjust boxes on a screen, I’m going to use Beaver Builder, but maybe I give up, ACF will never let me down but let’s, hypothetically, ACF doesn’t work well with AI, but Meta Box does. So I might say, okay, I’m going to switch my AI friendly stack to be Beaver Builder with Meta Box, so that they can just go in and type something, it’ll all sort itself out more reliably. And I think that’s what we’re going to see over time.
\n\n\n\n[00:58:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think there’s been so many interesting predictions about what is coming. Most of my predictions have turned out to be just hot air, essentially, because the rate of change is so, so, very fast. But I do like the direction that WordPress is going in, where it’s being sort of agnostic of the AI, the actual API, for want of a better word. You know, it’s just going to hopefully be able to bind to any of those. I think that’s a curious direction, and it kind of leans into that, I guess the philosophy of something like WordPress as well. That it’s there for everybody and it’s not there to generate money for a particular company, be it Open AI or Gemini or what have you.
\n\n\n\nWe’ve probably hit the sweet spot in terms of the amount of time that we can give to this. What an interesting discussion though. So far ranging. We ended up with lots of sort of philosophical points, and lifestyle points and all sorts in there. But I think in the end we sort of wrestled it back to WordPress.
\n\n\n\nSo Corey, where can we find you? If somebody’s interested in sort of having a chat and wants to talk AI, where would you be online?
\n\n\n\n[00:59:53] Corey Maass: Sure. Twitter, @coreymaass, is probably the social that I’m most active on. But also, Post Status, the WordPress community. Always love shouting that out. That’s been invaluable in my life and career. And then me as a developer, company, gelform.com. G-E-L-F-O-R-M .com. You can email me there if you want to yell at me or praise me or, but privately.
\n\n\n\n[01:00:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. We will put all of those into the show notes so that anybody that wants to reach Corey can do that. Head to wptavern.com, search for Corey’s name. It’s a slightly unusual spelling. The surname, it’s C-O-R-E-Y, the Corey bit, but Maass is M-A-A-S-S. So search for that and you’ll be able to find him. Corey, thank you so much for chatting to me today.
\n\n\n\n[01:00:39] Corey Maass: Thanks Nathan. Always a pleasure.
\nOn the podcast today we have Corey Maass.
\n\n\n\nCorey\u2019s been building for the web since the late nineties, starting out in the early days of Photoshop and tables, learning JavaScript, ASP Classic, and PHP, and eventually falling into the world of WordPress around 2010. Since then, he\u2019s taken on building SaaS apps, managing client projects, and experimenting with a growing number of productivity tools and frameworks. He\u2019s joined us before, and today he\u2019s here to share his perspective on what it\u2019s been like adopting AI into his workflows, especially from the point of view of building projects for clients.
\n\n\n\nAlthough AI has dominated headlines over the last couple of years, Corey brings a practical angle to the conversation. He discusses the evolution of his tech stack, and how embracing AI tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot have completely changed the way he builds software and manages projects, allowing him to work faster, automate code review, and unlock creativity in places he hadn\u2019t expected.
\n\n\n\nWe hear about how his journey with AI started, how he\u2019s reimagined old projects using new tools, and how learning to interact with these models, sometimes granular, sometimes letting them run freely, has reshaped his daily workflow. Corey describes the shift from using AI just to save time, to using it as a sounding board for inspiration and idea generation, even weaving it into artistic endeavours like music production.
\n\n\n\nMuch of the discussion centres around how these advances have affected client work, with Corey exploring the real-world balance of responsibility, efficiency, and the changing nature of value for developers. Do clients care who, or what, wrote the code, or just that it works? What does authentic creativity mean in an era where prompting and randomness are part of the toolkit?
\n\n\n\nWhether you\u2019re a developer curious about what \u2018working alongside AI\u2019 means \u200cor just wondering about the future of tech and WordPress in an increasingly automated world, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nCorey’s Mexican Train game
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "content_text": "Transcript\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case real life AI tools and workflows in WordPress development.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Corey Maass. Corey’s been building for the web since the late nineties, starting out in the early days of Photoshop and tables. Learning JavaScript, ASP Classic and PHP, and eventually falling into the world of WordPress around 2010. Since then, he’s taken on building SaaS apps, managing client projects, and experimenting with a growing number of productivity tools and frameworks.\n\n\n\nHe’s joined us before, and today he’s here to share his perspective on what it’s been like adopting AI tools into his workflows, especially from the point of view of building projects for clients.\n\n\n\nAlthough AI has dominated headlines over the last couple of years, Corey brings a practical angle to the conversation. He discusses the evolution of his tech stack and how embracing AI tools like Cursor, Claude Code and GitHub Copilot have completely changed the way he builds software and manages projects, allowing him to work faster, automate code, review, and unlock creativity in places he hadn’t expected.\n\n\n\nWe hear about how his journey with AI started, how he’s reimagined old projects using new tools, and how learning to interact with these models, sometimes granular, sometimes letting them run freely, has reshaped his daily workflow.\n\n\n\nCorey describes the shift from using AI to just save time, to using it as a sounding board for inspiration and idea generation, even weaving it into artistic endeavors like music production.\n\n\n\nMuch of the discussion centers around how these advances have affected client work with Corey exploring the real world balance of responsibility, efficiency, and the changing nature of value for developers. Do clients care who, or what, wrote the code? Or just that it works? What does authentic creativity mean in an era where prompting and randomness a part of the toolkit?\n\n\n\nWhether you’re a developer, curious about what working alongside AI means, or just wondering about the future of tech, and WordPress, in an increasingly automated world, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you, Corey Maass.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Corey Maass. Hello, Corey.\n\n\n\n[00:03:33] Corey Maass: Hello.\n\n\n\n[00:03:33] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. Corey’s been on the podcast several times before. He’s here today to talk about the subject, which almost nobody has touched during the year 2025, that’s AI.\n\n\n\nBut actually I think we’ve got a curious angle because we’re not just going to touch it from a sort of more generic point of view, although we might. We’re going to talk about it from a client point of view and building things for clients and how, I guess, Corey is leveraging that to make life a little bit easier for himself. Let’s find out.\n\n\n\nFirst of all, Corey, would you just introduce yourself? Give us you a little bio, tell us about you.\n\n\n\n[00:04:04] Corey Maass: Absolutely, Corey Maass. I currently live in New Hampshire, which is in the northeast of the United States. I’ve been building for the web since 97, I think. Back in the day when we would do designs in Photoshop and then slice them up and put them in tables. And then I learned JavaScript, and I learned ASP Classic, and I learned PHP, and I got obsessed with building SaaS apps, you know, making websites actually do stuff instead of just look pretty. And then I found WordPress in about 2010 and it’s all been a wonderful, joyous, rollercoaster ride of happiness without exception.\n\n\n\n[00:04:45] Nathan Wrigley: That’s lovely. And I think we should end the podcast right there.\n\n\n\n[00:04:48] Corey Maass: And I met this wonderful guy named Nathan somewhere along the way, and my heart is full.\n\n\n\n[00:04:53] Nathan Wrigley: It does not get better than that. I really think we should end there. Congratulations, Corey Maass, we’ll see you next time. No, let’s get into it properly.\n\n\n\n[00:05:01] Corey Maass: And then the robots came.\n\n\n\n[00:05:03] Nathan Wrigley: That’s right. That’s what we are going to talk about. But you’ve been building for a long time. I mean, in terms of the internet, you really are like the heritage, aren’t you? 1997 was when people were just sort of starting out. I mean, there’s a few people that go maybe a little bit longer than that, but you’ve seen the whole thing.\n\n\n\nSeems like in the year 2023, something like that, maybe 2024, certainly 2025, we’ve now got the advent of companions, AI companions that are helping us to do things online and build websites and so on. And I’m kind of just curious, let’s talk about your stack and where it is at the moment, and then we’ll get into how that stack has changed. But just tell us what you’re using right now. And we’re recording that December, 2025. And no doubt that will change fairly soon.\n\n\n\n[00:05:45] Corey Maass: Still changes frequently. We’re chatting before we started recording and you said, have you updated Mac OS to this glass nonsense? And I went, absolutely. I bought into, to put myself in context, like I bought into the Apple ecosystem a few years ago. And I tend to, when they say update, I update. I might wait a day or two. Usually I will hear about, if something is truly crashing your computer, I’ll usually hear about it on Reddit or what have you. And so I might wait a day or a week, but I’m generally an early adopter is the point I’m trying to make.\n\n\n\nBut with that said, I’m also a pragmatic developer. So I want to use the tools that are the most beneficial, but I’m also not cutting edge, bleeding edge on what model is the absolute best and all that kind of stuff. But I’m also not not going to use AI once it actually benefits me. So I’m probably somewhere on one side of the bell curve or the other, but I’m not bleeding edge.\n\n\n\nAnyway. So as of today, I am using Cursor as an IDE, but I am not using the AI in Cursor at all. I have been meaning to, but again, it’s pragmatically. I’m not trying to use things because they’re in front of me or what have you. So we can talk about why I wound up using Cursor. But what I generally am doing during the day is opening Terminal inside Cursor and using Claude Code almost exclusively. Which then, a buddy of mine has gotten me back into the process of actually doing pull requests, so that the code gets pushed to Git. And then I’m running Copilot, which is GitHub’s AI to do code reviews. That’s what I was trying to say. I’ve got Claude generally writing the code, and then I’ve got GitHub’s Copilot checking the code.\n\n\n\n[00:07:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, so that’s where you’re at the moment. But historically, if we were to gaze back over the last year, let’s go with that, how often does that iteration change? How often do you move from one thing to another because the landscape has moved or something superior appears to have come along?\n\n\n\n[00:07:53] Corey Maass: Yeah, it’s kind of amazing. This is part of why I wanted to have this conversation is, for me it started pretty much in March. I went to Thailand for a few weeks visiting a buddy of mine there who’s a developer, he had to work. Like, every weekend we were running around looking at temples and stuff like that. During the week he had to work, and so I was left to entertain myself. And so doing my usual client work, which was still very clicky, clickly, because it’s still WordPress, and WordPress hasn’t quite crossed that bridge, though we’re working on it.\n\n\n\nBut I said, okay, I want to use this time to start my AI journey. That’s where I said, let me subscribe to Cursor, 20 bucks a month, not unreasonable in the scheme of all of the software subscriptions that I have, and let me see what I can do.\n\n\n\nAnd I have an app called Timerdoro, which is a productivity timer app, Pomodoro and that kind of thing. Friends and I built it, now it’s got to be 20 years ago, and we’ve never figured out how to monetise. In fact, yesterday I finally just slapped some ads on it because I couldn’t stand it anymore. And, no, that’s not true. I found an ad network that I wanted to try. But that’s kind of a perfect indication of how I think of Timerdoro. Timerdoro, I have rewritten at least a dozen times in at least four different, using four different tech stacks because a lot of people use it.\n\n\n\nIt has a hundred users a day or something, which is really cool. None of them want to give me any money, which I totally am fine with. It doesn’t cost me anything. But it gives me an opportunity to, here is a product that people are using, let me continue to play with it, tweak it, design it, totally rewrite it. And so I rewrote it again in March using Cursor, which was an okay experience.\n\n\n\nLooking back, I can see how much Cursor has improved, both the IDE and the models that are built in. And I have completely changed, because a big part of it is your own learning how to work with it. And so, at what level do you give it, build a productivity timer, go? Or do you say, install the following libraries, create the following files, make the classes look like this, name the methods and functions like this? Like, too granular, where it just does the typing for you. Versus, it totally conceptualises everything. And so you’ve got to fall somewhere in the middle, maybe, right? Or figure out where you are in the middle.\n\n\n\nAnd I generally, having written my own code for years and years, sure enough, was too granular. But I think that benefited me at the time. Whereas we’ve come a long way, where you can be more in the middle and something like Claude can figure it out.\n\n\n\nThe buddy that I was visiting, coincidentally, has absolutely doubled down. So he follows, he always talks about Tech Dev Dan or something, Dev Dan, who is sort of the thought leader in AI that he follows. And so he signs up for anything that Dan puts out, classes or courses or videos. And then he tends to, my friend Robert tends to distill some of that down to me. And so I might or might not implement it.\n\n\n\nBut then I’ve also got other colleagues in the WordPress world. I actually had a friend of mine come to me and be like, hey, will you kind of be my AI buddy as we figure out how to negotiate all of this changing landscape? I said, absolutely. And coincidentally, it has turned out that I’ve kind of been the Robert to him a little bit, where I am a little bit ahead of him, and a little more embracing of things than he is. And so we’ve all kind of, we all evolve, but we’re all kind of getting information from different sources.\n\n\n\nSo somewhere along the way, I mean Reddit and Twitter were just absolutely blowing up nonstop Claude. Claude Code when that came out. And so I was actually a little slow on the uptake, meaning a month, because I just, I didn’t get it. Like, so many of these things, people are like AI, and you’re like, right, but where do I type? Where does the code go? Or, I want to use AI, I am doing air quotes here, how do I get a website on the internet where people can click on it? It’s actually not intuitive necessarily to make that leap until, again, Robert has explained some things to me of, because again, he’s much more up on the words where he’s like, I think it’s called a harness is the thing you type into versus, the model is the actual AI you’re interacting with.\n\n\n\nAnd so you’ve got TypingMind or you’ve got Claude, or you’ve got Terminal, but then you’ve got Claude, but you can actually use Claude with Gemini’s model if you want, or a Cursor. You know, if you go into the preferences, you can select which model. Do you want to use Open AI Opus, or do you want to use Gemini or do you want? And it was like, oh, right, okay, so there’s a thing you type into or interact with, and then there’s the actual model. But then, again, what are the patterns?\n\n\n\nAnd like I said, I’ve just recently started, so with my buddy, we’ve been rebuilding, I have a game that I’ve talked about for a while. Mexicantrain.online is the website. And so it’s an online version of the Domino game, Mexican Train. I built it during COVID and I talked about it at WordCamp US two years ago, because it was kind of an amazing, one of those projects that I built because my wife told me I should, so that our family could play, continue to play, during COVID. And then it turned into thousands of users, and so it just became this, organically became this nice thing that a lot of people use. And it’s run by donations, which cynically, I never would’ve thought actually works. But people continue to give, I mean it’s amazing.\n\n\n\nBut it’s been a long time coming that it needs, the tech is now five years old. I needed to rebuild it. I approached my friend and said, hey, would you mind building this with me? Because we’ve kind of looked for a reason to work together. We worked together at a big WordPress agency five years, eight years ago, which is how we met, but we haven’t worked together since. And he’s gone very enterprise, and I tend to be still my freelancer self, working with individual clients directly and stuff like that.\n\n\n\nAnd so what’s been hand ringing, but good is he’s like, okay, we’re going to introduce pull requests because we’re going to have Copilot check our work, and we’re going to have full suite testing. And I tend to not, like I can do that stuff, and there’s the occasional project where I need to do it, but for the most part I’m a, make a change and push it to the internet and see what happens kind of developer. And so we’ve introduced more process, but again, it’s neat because I have to make myself be like, do what he tells you kid. And so then I’m learning better ways to use these tools to build more robust software.\n\n\n\n[00:14:31] Nathan Wrigley: Was there ever a moment where, I don’t know if you were always bullish about technology, especially AI, it’s entirely conceivable to imagine that any given person that you see could be extremely bullish about AI, you know, somewhere in the middle or extremely, a little bit allergic to it or what have you. Now, I don’t know if there was any point where you swung between those two extremes or anything like that. But I was just curious if there was an epiphany that you had, like if there’s a particular moment that you can remember where you thought to yourself, oh, this is curious, you know? This is not something we’ve seen before. And if you do have one of those, I’d love to know what it was.\n\n\n\n[00:15:07] Corey Maass: There’ve definitely been those moments where, mind blown, mind blown, mind blown. Even recently, Nano Banana the new image AI is mind bogglingly good. And so there hasn’t been one moment, there have been many moments because things like, I did pay for whatever the original ChatGPT was for a while. When it really became popular, I think last year, right? And so I said, well, let me pay 20 bucks a month. But I wasn’t using it. It wasn’t that good. It was definitely helpful, but again, it was more of a dumb typing companion. I need an email that says this. There’s your 20 lines. I didn’t have to think about it. I skim it, I edited a little, I might run it back through, and then I’d go, yep, good enough. Take out the em dashes so it doesn’t look like AI, paste, send.\n\n\n\nTreated it more like that. A year ago when I tried to have it right code, sorry robots, I love you. In the future, don’t murder me. You know, but a year ago, like the code that it was generating wasn’t great. It really was hallucinating a lot. Oh, you need to write a WordPress function that uses this hook. A quick Google determines that hook does not actually exist. Stop making stuff up. Whereas I very rarely encounter hallucinations these days.\n\n\n\n[00:16:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s a profound realisation.\n\n\n\n[00:16:23] Corey Maass: Yeah, but to answer your question, like there were just these great moments of, like I had it write song lyrics and I was like, wow, these are surprisingly good. Or I remember early silly moments like we all had where I was like, take these song lyrics and rewrite them so that they’re in pirate speak or whatever, ha ha ha. Like this is a gimmick, right?\n\n\n\nBut then, again, probably in March, working through my first project building Timerdoro again, using Cursor. Googling how to use Cursor, taking the time to watch videos to understand how better to use it. And then again, moving along throughout the year, these little moments of, oh, that’s amazing code or, wow, and in 45 seconds we had an entire authentication system with front end that a user can sign into and it all just works. The database is already created and all this stuff. And you’re like, oh, okay, wow, it’s getting more and more powerful.\n\n\n\nThere’s always this thing in the back of my mind, I’m like, has it always been capable of this, meaning in the last year? And I’m just sort of taking, giving it more lead. Because again, I mean a big part of this is how we interact with it. And I keep thinking about scientists using it, or artists using it, because it’s the, little by little, again, we’re taking the collar off or, there’s a horse or a dog metaphor in here somewhere, I can’t quite. But giving it its own freedom to do what it wants, you know?\n\n\n\nAnd how far can you take that? Like I keep thinking about, again, like science, where if you could give a model enough information, could it conceivably jump ahead months or years in our own research? Now research needs to be done, and things need to be proven and all that kind of stuff, but like in terms of thinking, are there things that it can conceive of that we just can’t? Brian Eno, the musician. I think it was him. I want to say it was him. I’m going to pretend it was him.\n\n\n\n[00:18:14] Nathan Wrigley: He feels like the kind of character that it easily could be him. There’s a lot of technology in Brian Eno’s life, isn’t there?\n\n\n\n[00:18:20] Corey Maass: Even away from technology, he, I believe it was him, I have to Google this. He created a deck of cards that said, as a musician, you’re in the studio and you’re like, my creativity needs help, right? And so there’s this deck of cards where you’d flip over a card and it would say, play the melody backwards. Or you’d flip over a card and it would say, what if this piece of music was being performed underwater? Or, what if somebody had a gun to your head? These thought experiments, right?\n\n\n\nAnd you could actually look at that as, I don’t think anybody really would, but you could look at that as, oh, that’s not true creativity because something else is helping you do the work, right? As a human, if you’re a pure artist, it’s all supposed to come from your brain. You’re supposed to sit there in a dark room with a pen and a piece of paper. If it doesn’t come purely from your brain, then it’s not pure. And again, I don’t, it’s a weird example, but I don’t think most people would actually say that. They’d be like, it’s fine that you found random inspiration. Just like looking at nature, it’s going to inspire a painting or whatever, right?\n\n\n\n[00:19:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, or looking at a previous painting will inspire your next painting.\n\n\n\n[00:19:26] Corey Maass: As long as in theory it’s not too derivative or whatever, right? So the interesting thing about AI that I keep trying to use, the way that I’m using it, even past writing code or what have you is, help me introduce that element of randomness, the flipping of a card. Next time you’re having your favorite AI model write an email, or do some creative writing, or come up with funny slogans for, like a lot of us are using it for. Help me come up with the tagline for the next SaaS landing page that I’m building or whatever. Introduce negatives. What is it not? Or say things like, have it write this in German and then translate it back to English or, write it like a 5-year-old would. Basically like help introduce that element of randomness and creativity.\n\n\n\n[00:20:08] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting, the sort of through line that I’ve gathered from that is that at the beginning when you were using AI, correct me if I’m wrong, but it feels like the entire productivity gain, or the gain was a function of time. You were trying to reduce the amount of time a thing took to do. So, you know, if you want to, oh, I don’t know, modify the game that you were describing, this train game that you’ve got. You were trying to reduce the amount of time it would take to do the next iteration of that.\n\n\n\nBut it sounds like in the last year to 18 months, something along those lines, the expectation has now shifted. I’m presuming that the time thing is now just in the background. That’s guaranteed all the time. It’s always going to be quicker than it would be for a human to do it. But you’ve now moved into this curious creativity phase, which for many people I think was almost like the Turing test. You know, it was the bit that the computers, you could never imagine that the computer would ever be able to approximate something like that. And there’s a whole philosophical thing in there, which is probably too deep for us to open.\n\n\n\nBut it sounds like you are making use of that. You are using it to generate ideas, to come up with variations around a theme and relying on it to be creative. Now, if that’s the case, I wonder how long it will be before that becomes just the normal, in the same way that maybe the time function has become normal. I wonder how long it will be before we’re all just, well, yeah, the creativity piece, of course, go to a computer, go to an AI if you want ideas.\n\n\n\nI wonder what the next thing, the next sort of hurdle to fall is? Because it’s hard for me to imagine anything beyond creativity in all honesty. Once it’s got approximations and mastered that, I’m doing air quotes this time, if it’s mastered that, it’s difficult for me to imagine what the next domino to fall would be. But no doubt there is one.\n\n\n\n[00:21:49] Corey Maass: And that’s what I’m getting at with the science stuff. There’s definitely, I think we’ve sort of chosen not to talk about the negatives. There are plenty and, or we’re foreseeing plenty or fearing a lot of things. Optimistically, at least in terms of output, to me we’re looking at coworkers who can do things faster, or employees or, I’m hesitant to say people who work for us but, you know, work that gets done on our behalf faster than we can do it, and in a way that we are satisfied with, right? Writing code is black and white. That’s not true at all, but it’s much more black and white compared to like writing a song.\n\n\n\n[00:22:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s true. I think the, sorry to interrupt. I was just going to sort of establish that point a little bit more. I think you are absolutely right. The WordPress slogan, code is poetry, obviously kind of leans into this a little bit, but there is a kind of binary nature to it. When you finish it, it either works or it doesn’t to some extent. The goal is to do this thing, does it do this thing? No. Okay, something’s wrong in that. Something needs to be ironed out. The ones need to be zeros and the zeros need to be ones, whatever it may be.\n\n\n\nIn the real world, things can be a lot more messy than that. So for the tech industry, it feels like the technology is perfectly aligned to satisfy the goals of that. But, I don’t know, let’s say you are a, let’s find something which would be a great example. Let’s say you are a psychoanalysts, or a therapist or something like that. It’s not quite so straightforward, but the industry that we are in, it lends itself heavily to great success in that arena. Right, sorry, that was my interruption over.\n\n\n\n[00:23:20] Corey Maass: No absolutely. Perfectly restated. The code, there are degrees of efficiency. There are, you’re taking into context all of the different elements. So like Claude might write a method but it needs to work well with the way that the database is set up or whatever, right? So there’s nuances. This is what we’ve made careers off of.\n\n\n\nBut exactly as you say, at the end of the day, it needs to work, it needs to be performant, it needs to be sustainable code, a few things. You check off these boxes and good enough if nothing else. Versus like, I am also a music producer. I make dance music and I like the way that I make dance music. It probably could be made by AI, if I’m honest, but it won’t scratch that itch for me, and that’s fine, right? This is a thing that I will probably, I and my music colleagues will all continue to do, even in the face of AI, because that’s not the point. It’s not about a thing that does work. And we’re going to talk about a client project in a minute. We said we’d talk about that, right?\n\n\n\nI have a client who’s hired me to build a piece of software that needs to do a certain thing. And so with her blessing, I am co-writing it with Claude Code, having it checked by Copilot, but at the end of the day, she doesn’t care who writes it or what language it’s in or, dot, dot, dot. It has to do a thing. It has to let people do a certain kind of work, right?\n\n\n\nDifferent from music. I’m not, for me, bedroom producer, I’m not trying to make millions of sales. I’m not a pop recording artist who’s reliant on this stuff. And so for me, it’s about connecting with other humans after I produce a piece of, let’s call it art, which is, I think a stretch.\n\n\n\nBut I’m also, I’ve always struggled with the actual mixing of the music. Like hearing all of the frequencies and optimising the output. Because there is, again, a right way, like it’s not, again, it’s not black and white, but it’s much closer to, there is a right way for a song to sound with infinite variations, but within a very narrow gap, right? So I could write any kind of song I want, but the way that it should sound when I release it on Bandcamp does have answers. And in fact, this morning, I had finished a mix of a song last night, different from writing it, I’m going back through and tweaking it to try to make it sound as best as it could so that when I send it to DJs and they play it on dance floors, everybody throws their hands in the air, right?\n\n\n\nI’ve always struggled with that. My ears aren’t good at hearing those kinds of things. I dropped the track into Gemini, and Gemini came back with a, you’ve got a peak of frequencies at around 5,000, so you should drop that by two db. Your kick and your base are competing, and so you should add a ducker to the base so that the kick comes through and that’ll actually save you four db of headroom when you’re mastering. Like, I mean it was.\n\n\n\n[00:26:09] Nathan Wrigley: It just gave you all the science, which is absolutely fascinating. That is genuinely interesting.\n\n\n\n[00:26:15] Corey Maass: It probably isn’t perfect, and it definitely can be subjective, like maybe I’m going for Lo-Fi House instead of Big Room House. But I gave it that information where I said, here’s the genre, make me sound like these other artists. And so it said, well, here’s sort of how to help guide you closer to their sound.\n\n\n\n[00:26:33] Nathan Wrigley: The interesting thing there, I think, is it gave you a new rabbit hole that should you wish to explore, you just got it prized open. And you wouldn’t have known what any of that was. And so you could probably map that into a million different scenarios, you know, music, art, whatever may be. And it will just give you something back and you’ll be, oh, there’s that universe of stuff to get interested in. You know, the headroom of the dbs and all of that kind of, I mean it means nothing to me, but I kind of grasped that there’s a thing there.\n\n\n\nDo you know, you said something really interesting earlier and it probably just slipped out of your mouth and you didn’t notice how interesting or profound it was. You said it wasn’t the point. And you were talking about making music and using AI for that isn’t the point. I think that’s going to become the metric of so much in the future. What’s the point of that thing?\n\n\n\nSo as an example, if I want to go and see a band, I do not want to watch a video of a band where I have a suspicion that there was an AI involved and it created this video and the music. The point is I want to go and see a bunch of human beings who I know have struggled with their art and their discipline and, you know, failure and moderate success and all of that kind of stuff. I want to know that there was that soul searching going on in that musical arena.\n\n\n\nBut curiously, when I go to a SaaS app, the point is, does it work? It’s really simple. Does it work? And do I care too much about how the functioning of it was achieved? Not really. The point is, does it work? And maybe we’ll be asking ourselves that question more. What is the point of the thing I’m about to do? Does it matter to me if AI was involved? On closer examination, yes it does. I’m going to avoid that thing. Or, no, it doesn’t. That’s fine. I’ll embrace that thing. It really landed with me what you said there. So that’s kind of curious. I wonder if I’ll start doing that more in my own life, examining the point of it. Is it a human enterprise, something extremely human and only for humans, or is it somewhere else on that spectrum? Yeah, interesting.\n\n\n\n[00:28:32] Corey Maass: An example just came to mind, which of course has now just gone out of my mind because I started thinking about six other things. But like I read a couple of graphic novels. That’s what it was, memes. I read a couple of graphic novels and some of it is, I read for the artistry. Some of it I read for the stories. There’s graphic novels where I actually really don’t like the artwork, but I like the storytelling. How would I feel about the art being generated by AI? Because the person who was writing the story couldn’t draw, but could tell a good story.\n\n\n\nOr the example that had come to mind were memes, or funny photos, right? I’m not a meme person. I generally don’t repost animated gifs, or can haz cheeseburger, or any of that stuff. Some of it’s cute or whatever, and I’m not against it, but it doesn’t tickle my sense of humor, right?\n\n\n\nBut lately, I’ve long been proficient in Photoshop because like we said, I started in 97 when you were designing websites in Photoshop or whatever. And so for a long time, like I would say, so here’s a good example. One of my big clients is Seattle Magazine. And so we were doing, I don’t remember, there was some reference of Sasquatch, creatures that are most active in the Pacific Northwest, often around the Seattle area. They are real, by the way.\n\n\n\nBut the joke was that our editor was writing his letter or something. And so I, quick, ran over to AI and said, here’s the picture of Bigfoot that everybody knows, walking across the stream bed or whatever. Here’s headshots of my editor. Put my editor in this photo. And it generated a photo of Jonathan as Sasquatch, like walking across the river. And it made us all laugh. And I think we did end up putting it in the magazine. I don’t remember.\n\n\n\nI would have done the same thing in Photoshop, much less effectively. Even 10 years before, I would’ve grabbed a copy of the original photo and done my best to Photoshop Jonathan into the photo, maybe he’s hiding behind a bush or something. I couldn’t actually change his body to be walking in that pose. Now I can.\n\n\n\nIs the effect the same? And again, we’re not talking about the negatives, or obvious negatives, about image generation of other people. Used in a harmless, funny way or day to day. Like, another good example. So on the Mexican Train website, one of the things that I wanted when I created mexicantrain.online was, again, this was about people connecting. This was my COVID project. And so I, a couple of years before, I’m chatting with a buddy online, I was joking about how I was eating Cheez-its, which we like never have in the house and how Cheez-its are just the best thing in the world, and they’re dangerous to have in the house. And a week later, a box of like 50 packs of Cheez-its arrived because he had shipped it to me as a joke.\n\n\n\nSo I took a picture of me like looking absolutely exalted, elated, holding up Cheez-its. Oh my God, Cheez-its, right? And that’s what I put on the Mexican Train website as a like, hey, I’m Corey, I built this thing, because it was a very relatable photo. A funny little side story is that still, five years later, a lot of people who play Mexican Train daily or weekly using my website buy Cheez-its, or buy Cheez-its for each other as prizes and things like that. Like, it all became an inside joke.\n\n\n\nIn building the new version, I wanted a new homepage. But that photo, I’ve actually lost the original file of it, and I only have a low res version. So I uploaded that into Gemini. I’m also more bald and my beard is longer. And so I uploaded the original photo and then a couple of photos of me more recently and said, hey, Gemini, using Nano Banana, create a new version of this. And also, like the original photo is very zoomed in. You could really just see my face. And so I was like, I want head and shoulders. And it did a beautiful job. Fixed the lighting. It looks almost a little too polished, frankly. And my wife looks at it and she’s like, I don’t know why, but I can tell that’s AI generated, like I can tell that’s not you. But to anybody else, it’s certainly close enough. I look at it and I’m like, it’s me but I’ve been photoshopped a little or, you know, it’s been cleaned up or something. But it’s close enough. But it’s a better photo that still conveys the same message, but it works better on the page, I think. But it’s not authentic, air quotes.\n\n\n\n[00:32:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that whole authenticity thing is going to be, well, I guess it’s going to be a question for everybody going forward, certainly in, you know, you can imagine politics and things like that. Just judging whether or not the politician that’s on your screen at the moment is in fact doing that thing.\n\n\n\n[00:33:12] Corey Maass: That’s the terrifying part is, what’s real anymore?\n\n\n\n[00:33:15] Nathan Wrigley: There’s no doubt that we are going to have to kind of work that through.\n\n\n\nWhen you are using your AI, and we will get onto your client bits in a minute. When you are using the AI, on what level do you feel that you are in some kind of relationship with it? That’s a very ephemeral question. But, do you view it as, so you described that a year ago it was less good. So in human terms you might say, okay, it’s more childlike or something like that. You know, it’s a smaller version of a human being. It’s less mature and what have you. Now it’s grown up, for want of a better word. It’s a little bit older perhaps, or more mature or whatever it may be. Do you think about it in any human terms?\n\n\n\n[00:33:48] Corey Maass: Oh, absolutely.\n\n\n\n[00:33:49] Nathan Wrigley: Isn’t that fascinating.\n\n\n\n[00:33:49] Corey Maass: So what’s funny is, we’ve had a few of these conversations lately. My neighbors have Alexa in their house and they changed it to respond to computer, and they will only refer to it as, it. They did not want it to be humanised dogmatically. Like, it’s important to them that this is not a companion, a creature, a whatever, right?\n\n\n\nI don’t care that much, and in fact, I enjoy playing with language. And I don’t see, the current state of how we’re interacting with our technology, I don’t have a problem with humanising it, or at least using certain pronouns and things like that.\n\n\n\nAnd that’s why I say that specifically, Claude is a, he, it’s a male name, male, Western English name, right? Or if nothing else, I’ve never met or heard of a woman named Claude. Claude has always been a he. But one of the funny things that happened working with my buddy Robert, is he, like I said, he introduced Copilot to do code reviews and we’re chatting, he’s one of my, the buddies that I have where, you know, we chat online all day, every day, ongoing conversation. And he just started saying she about Copilot. And I did too. I did notice it, but I’m like, I have no objection, reaction to this. I see no harm in it.\n\n\n\nI have no idea if we’re going to take this conversation way too far. The Octocat, that is the mascot of GitHub. I don’t know if the Octocat has a gender or pronouns or what have you. If you’re going to think of Copilot as some version of the Octocat, like I don’t, how you might get there, even subconsciously, right? But like just using Copilot, Robert started saying she, so I started saying she. And then he actually said after, Robert, after a couple of days was like, you know, by the way, I don’t know if you noticed, but I’d started saying she for Copilot. For some reason I got a, call it a feminine energy off of her. And I was like, yeah, I noticed. I could maybe pick up, perceive that too, if I’m going to overanalyse it. I mean it so doesn’t matter.\n\n\n\nSo now Copilot is she and Claude is he. I’ve never thought to ask Copilot if they have preferred pronouns, which I guess would then actually get it into that like real world and societal conversations and philosophical, not to say that a gender discussion is philosophical but, you know what I mean? Like, actual consequences of real world issues, let’s call it that.\n\n\n\n[00:36:06] Nathan Wrigley: It is so interesting that a lot of things, the sort of anthropomorphic nature of it, so we’re trying to build robots at the minute, and in many cases we’re trying to build a version of a human being. You know, it’s got legs and arms and clearly in many cases that is the least plausible design for the thing it’s trying to achieve. But we have this notion that, well, if we get a human being out of robots, that’s going to be great. It will be able to do all the things that we can do.\n\n\n\nBut equally, on some level, we’re trying to get it to approximate human intelligence, human creativity, and things like that. And that kind of leads me to this one final thing before we talk about your clients, and that is, at what point do we start learning from it?\n\n\n\n[00:36:43] Corey Maass: Aren’t we already? You’re constantly asking questions.\n\n\n\n[00:36:45] Nathan Wrigley: Well, that was exactly the question. Yeah, so it would appear that in the case of code, at least anyway, you know, you ask it to do a particular thing and it will come up with this, I mean you could ignore what it’s done and just play the output and interact with what it has achieved. But if you were to delve into the code, I suspect there is quite a lot of head scratching and looking at things and going, gosh, that’s interesting. Why has it done it that way? That’s curious. Oh, I should be doing it that way.\n\n\n\n[00:37:08] Corey Maass: Is it better than me, versus is it better than everybody? We don’t have a way to determine that. And that’s why I brought up the science stuff earlier. I’m like, okay, so if a bunch of scientists, let’s just be vague here, are in a laboratory, or in a think tank and are working together, but they’re also feeding everything that they’re thinking into an AI who is also thinking, at what point if, somebody comes up with a brand new concept or a new way to approach a medical issue or something like that, you’re like, oh, that’s amazing. I don’t think that’s been done before. What happens when that’s Claude or ChatGPT?\n\n\n\nPresumably, in that specific instance, like the same process of like, oh, that’s, I don’t think any of us have thought of that before, let’s go do some experiments to see if that actually works, kind of thing. What if it’s well beyond our comprehension? What if it’s, there’s a conclusion, words that are typed on a screen that are so far beyond anything that we’re doing? You think of Einstein or you think of these scientists who have done stuff that, you know, or even, I mean you could be as vague as like painters who died in poverty and obscurity, but we revere them today. Vincent Van Gogh of course comes to mind.\n\n\n\n[00:38:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of curious because obviously each one of us is a little entity and we’re constrained by our biology. You know, we’ve got this finite capacity in our brain. You have a finite time span on earth so, you know, for much of that time, you are just basically a recipient of knowledge, if you like? You’re this sponge, which is sucking things in. And then for a period of time you’ll be able to regurgitate it. You know, if you have an accident, your capacity will be diminished. If you’re knocked on the head or something like that. But you’re bound in time and you are bound in capacity because of the size of the neural network that you’ve got in your head.\n\n\n\nAnd yet we’re now being confronted with this other thing, which can do things remarkably quickly, can have the entire corpus of more or less everything at its disposal at a moment’s notice. And it can, this version of the entity over there, inside that other box is exactly the same as this one over here. You know, they’re kind of replicas of each other. And then if you put those two together, they can do things in symbiosis at twice the speed than, basically they’ve got this whole load of stuff going on that we can’t hope to manage.\n\n\n\nAnd it’ll be so interesting being in relation with that, and how we start to learn from it because, when was the last time you actually went to a book or went to a human teacher in your adult life to learn something? You just sort of go to Google, don’t you? And you’ve trusted on a computer to serve up the information for you for a long time. We’ve now got a new route to that information. I wasn’t really going anywhere with that. It was more of a sort of thought process. Yeah, interesting. Okay, let’s move to your client then.\n\n\n\nYou did allude to this a little while ago, and it sounded like, certainly for the one client that you’ve got, there’s no obstacle here. You are just building the stuff. The client is entirely happy. I presume you are taking on the responsibility if the things that you produce with the AI kind of backfires or something is not working correctly. Is that your estimation of sort of the future into 2026, 2027, that the clients basically don’t care?\n\n\n\nAnd if that’s the case, does it allow you to be more profitable because you are spending less time? Or more effective because you can do more complicated things? Or, do you sense that maybe we’re going to hit a point in the years that come where the clients start to, well, rebel is the wrong word, but you know what I mean, their expectations will be, well, it’s no longer, well, I know that Corey’s using AI, so my expectation’s going to go up in terms of his output, but also my expectation of his fee is going to go down as well? So there’s a lot in that question, but unpack bits however you choose.\n\n\n\n[00:40:47] Corey Maass: So answering part 2.6b first.\n\n\n\n[00:40:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, that’s helpful.\n\n\n\n[00:40:52] Corey Maass: The story is, I had a client who had software built, it didn’t work out. But that meant that, largely her budget had been spent and so she was left with software that was, didn’t do everything she needed it to and, or at least there was not a lot of budget leftover for, because it’s, when the rubber hits the road kind of thing. Going, oh wait, we didn’t think of this. Now that we’re actually using it every day, we need it to do this and this instead of this and this. You design in a bubble and then you actually need to use the thing. And there just wasn’t budget left over.\n\n\n\nAnd so when we started talking, she’s like, I need these few things fixed. I looked at it and was like, I can’t really maintain this. We really want to, I mean typical, this is going to sound like every developer is like, I have to build it from scratch my way. But in some sense, at least in order for me to maintain it, it needed to be rebuilt my way. But we kept looking at, what would that cost? And she’s like, I’ve already spent my budget and so we’re waiting for new clients to come in or lightning to strike so that Corey can do this.\n\n\n\nAI happened to be that lightning. And I went back to her and I said, I think we’re to the point now, this was just a couple months ago, that I can build it for probably half based on hours. Because we’re still, at least at the moment, going, okay, we’re charging X dollars per hour of Corey’s time which isn’t, has never been, or at least for a long, long time, has not been just me typing characters into an IDE, right? A code editor. You’re paying for Corey’s experience, you’re paying for Corey’s planning, you’re paying for conversations that we’re having in order to come to certain conclusions to figure out the software we’re going to build, blah, blah, blah.\n\n\n\nSo thinking of it in that same context, it’s not just about me typing. And so now it’s not about me typing at all. And in fact, I’ve had friends now, and I’ve read this too where the sentiment, or a sentiment, of developers now is we are project managers. We are product designers, or acting as the client in classic agile project management style. We are code reviewers because we’re not, why should we take the time to write the code anymore? And again, this is why, part of why we introduced Copilot, because it’s like, oh, then if we can also not do that part of it.\n\n\n\nHumans are valuable. That was something that you inadvertently alluded to earlier, is that we are still currently, we think we’re steering the ship, telling AI what to do and controlling how we’re using it and stuff like that, but like we make mistakes just as much as AI does. We aren’t the stop gap we often think we are, because we often make mistakes, or we don’t know what we don’t know, like you said a minute ago about just googling everything and that kind of thing.\n\n\n\nSo anyway, talked to the client, said, look I think we can build this for half the price. I’m willing to take the risk if you are. I’m very upfront about like, we’re building this with AI, which is part of why we can do this. And she said, great, let’s do it. And so it’s been a slightly different experience. We still had to have the conversations about what the product looks like, what it does, and stuff like that. But I was in fact able to get it going a lot faster than I would have before. And because this is client work, I’m checking it a lot more diligently. Because again, like you said, there’s liability, or at least I’m going to be the one that has to fix it, so I need to make sure that it’s written in a language that I understand, and it’s laid out in a way that I understand.\n\n\n\nAnd I was a little more opinionated because I want to make sure that files are in certain folders, which nobody, as we said at the beginning of the call, nobody cares about. Like, as long as the software works, nobody cares where the files are. But we’ve, over 30 years of development, we’ve developed certain patterns that just make it easier. So why shouldn’t we take the time to make it easier? And especially since I don’t have to do the work, I can say, hey, Claude, you put this file over here, put it over here instead. And Claude goes, sure. Why not? I don’t care.\n\n\n\n[00:44:47] Nathan Wrigley: I guess if we ever get to the point where the AI is literally doing everything, then all of that would go out the window, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t ever need to care where that file was, so long as the AI had a hand in knowing where that was, and it could retrieve that information and modify things as it was. But it feels like we’re certainly still in that human diagnosis phase, where you need it to look a certain way. I’m doing air quotes again, the sort of old fashioned way, you know what I mean? The way you’ve always done it, so that when it puts something out, you, yourself can look at it and go, okay, this is comprehensible to me. I can understand and see if there’s been errors. But I would imagine it’s not going to be long until that moment has passed.\n\n\n\n[00:45:23] Corey Maass: With the new version of Mexican Train, treating it kind of like I talked about Timerdoro early on, I’m caring a lot less, and I’m forcing myself to care a lot less. I’ve got a working version, this is an online game that is important to people, and it’s not that it’s not important to me, but I am comfortable with taking a little more risk. And so I am letting it more freely do what it wants.\n\n\n\nWhat’s interesting is we are not to the point yet where, as you said, this box is the identical to this box. So I am finding that on certain days it’ll go, well, I’ll put the file here, and on other days it’ll say, put the file here. It doesn’t matter, right? At least with that example, it doesn’t matter. You want it to write performant code, so you want it to make choices where things like performance matter, but whether a file is in one directory or another does not have real impact on the performance of the game.\n\n\n\nBut comprehension down the road, because this is where we overlap with humans. You’re like, okay, so Claude tomorrow needs to understand where things are. It still makes more sense to have a logical file structure so that Claude tomorrow can go, oh, it looks like all of these types of files are in this directory. And so we end up coming to some of the same conclusions that 30 years of human development has decided are the better patterns.\n\n\n\n[00:46:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, that’s kind of interesting. I mean, I guess it was ultimately because it’s creating its own, I don’t know, it’s next word based upon the whole corpus of the human word written down on the internet. It’s probably going to make, draw some broadly similar conclusions.\n\n\n\nIt sounds, from what you just said, you used the word like half, I think a minute ago when you were talking about maybe the budget or the time available. Sounds like you were at roughly 0.5, half of whatever the commodity was, budget or time or what have you. Is that roughly where you think you are at the moment compared to pre AI in terms of efficiency? And do you see that efficiency, again, time or money, whatever it may be, do you see that dynamic changing so that you eventually get to, I don’t know, 0.4, 0.3, 0.1 of the amount of time that you would’ve done? And do you have an expectation that, at the time that you are doing 0.1 of the work for the same outcome, that you’ll get 1.0 of the salary that you got? Or will you have to do, you know, the other 0.9 on other jobs?\n\n\n\n[00:47:43] Corey Maass: There’s a reason why developers really like starting new projects or rewriting them from scratch, right? Clean slate. And I think that that work, where you are in total control, in an empty directory, all technology at your fingertips, I see that quickly speeding up. I’ll tell you, one of the biggest hacks, I should have said this way up front, like the best value, because I’m finding a lot of people don’t know this, is screenshots will save you.\n\n\n\nClaude Code does not, there are ways around this, but largely Claude Code or other AIs do not know what things look like in the browser. So taking screenshots, dropping them in, you can now say, look, the columns are misaligned or whatever. But also, even text, like I am just constantly taking screenshots and throwing them in to Claude, right?\n\n\n\nSo part of what I’m doing right now, I know there’s a better way to do this, but I haven’t stopped to figure it out yet, is, Copilot reviews the code and then spits out a bunch of comments, right? I am taking screenshots of each one of those comments and dropping it back into Claude and saying, here’s what Copilot said, fix it. But I don’t even really have to type any words because Claude just reads the words that are in the screenshot. So it takes me three seconds to take a screenshot, drop it into Claude, and then Claude goes, oh, it looks like Copilot said we should do this instead, that makes sense. Or even has come back and said, well, Copilot doesn’t understand the bigger context, so I’ll push back on this kind of thing, right?\n\n\n\nBut I’m still copying, I’m still taking screenshots and pasting. There’s got to be a way, I fully intend to do this soon, to figure out how to have Claude just read those comments and so the two of them can work together. So I shouldn’t be involved until there’s, I want a system that comes back and says, Claude did all, made all these changes, Copilot made all these comments, Claude is cool with these and not with these. Overall, we’re good to go.\n\n\n\n[00:49:41] Nathan Wrigley: It’d be so interesting to set the two agents against each other, I don’t know, at bedtime on one evening, and to wake up in the morning and see quite how they’ve got along, if you know what I mean? You know, has it been this entirely, because obviously it’s built upon the corpus of human knowledge, it’d be interesting to see if it’s been this entirely productive experience, or if there has been some element of humanity creeping into that conversation where, you know, one of them throws their toys out the trolley halfway through and things like that. It’d be absolutely fascinating to see if they, you know, or if one just sort of, I don’t know, determines that maybe, oh, that AI’s doing a much better job than I am. I’m going to slow it down with some.\n\n\n\n[00:50:19] Corey Maass: Or level up or, yeah. So getting back to your question though, right? Nothing is the same as actual humans interacting with something. So if we’re talking about traditional software that humans are clicking on, and then that’s my second biggest point right now is, since we’re supposed to be talking about WordPress, WordPress is all about clicking, right? It’s all about interface. It’s all about, you’re signing into an admin so you think about how visual that is, and then in the admin, you’ve got this left menu with, here’s all your options, click, click, click, click. And then the design of the page, right?\n\n\n\nEvery client wants the logo to be bigger. And so you can go into AI and say like, oh, where I’m at right now is, if I’m building something new, I can use AI, I can generate it if I’m building software. But trying to essentially retrofit into current existing WordPress sites, we’ve got all these features that require clicky clicky on buttons, and AI can’t do that readily or what have you.\n\n\n\nSo I’m still spending a large part of my day signing into WordPress sites, clicking around actually making changes, reconnecting. When we post a story, it pushes to Facebook and so I’ve got to actually go in and connect and click through the screens and all that kind of stuff. Which at the end of the day, most of the changes that you’re making in UI correspond to things being saved in a database. So at some point we’re going to get to where AI knows, oh, for Beaver Builder, I can make this change, store it in the database in a certain shape, and Beaver Builder will know how to render that on the front end.\n\n\n\nI’m already finding that with ACF, for example, like I have ACF save field groups as JSON, a feature they’ve had for a decade. But because it’s in JSON, in text files, AI can read that and then go in and make changes or replicate it sideways because it says, oh, it wants the data to look, have this certain structure so I can create another file and make the data have this certain structure and does a great job. But there are 50,000 plugins. And I’m not about to let AI go and look at my database willy-nilly to say, oh, Elementor wants the data to be stored this way in the database, let me just start writing things to, you know? And so there’s still that disconnect right now.\n\n\n\n[00:52:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think WordPress is doing a lot of work with things like the Abilities API and things like that to sort of surface what WordPress is capable of. And I would imagine, you know, you mentioned Beaver Builder and Elementor, I’m imagining that in a future, they’ll be writing what their capabilities are, and where they’re storing their information in such a way that the, hopefully anybody with any AI can kind of instruct the AI to do the thing, and it will know what the thing is.\n\n\n\nAbsolutely fascinating. I’m so curious because you are doing a whole load of stuff that I’m just not doing. I was never really an out and out developer, I was kind of dangerous with code. But equally it does seem like folk like me, who are not really experimenting with this too much are getting, well, left behind is maybe one way of describing it, maybe we’re sort of enjoying it on some level as well. We’re enjoying watching other people do it, and we get to worry about what the societal impacts will be.\n\n\n\n[00:53:44] Corey Maass: It’s points of integration. Electric cars came along and most of us were like, I don’t want or can’t buy a Tesla. But then the Prius came out and everybody went, oh, I can buy a Toyota. That’s probably historically inaccurate. Maybe the Prius came out before Tesla, but you get my point.\n\n\n\nThe people around me, my neighbors are teachers. One of them has no interest, has no reason to use AI other than like, oh, let me look up a recipe or something. Versus, the other neighbor who really wants to be cutting edge and also thinks that this stuff is really neat. Is constantly trying to figure out, how can I run, generate, bingo cards was the new thing? Have AI figure out how to do these bingo cards for my students, or what have you. And you get into the moral gray area of, who’s actually writing papers and then who’s actually grading them? And so basically you’ve got AI grading papers that were written by AI. And you can get into, like anything, there’s all these sort of side effects. But, again, trying to keep it upbeat, like there’s neat things.\n\n\n\n[00:54:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No, I think we’ve done a great job of kind of keeping it upbeat. You’ve just been relentlessly positive about it. You know, it’s obviously had a profound impact on your life, your capacity to do things. You sound like you’re infinitely curious about it as well. So it’s, maybe the life of a developer was something that wouldn’t have held the same level of excitement for the next decade or more. But this new technology getting injected and shaking everything up a bit, makes it so that you can do things that you might not have ever taken on, because the technical challenges or time might have been too difficult.\n\n\n\n[00:55:12] Corey Maass: Would I want to be a new developer? I don’t know. Again, I think things are, I’m trying to describe where I’m at now, where, again, like WordPress is still very clicky clicky, and that happens to be the majority of the work that I do professionally.\n\n\n\nI also think that, like I run a lot of websites for friends and for local nonprofits and stuff like that because there’s still something to be said for having a website. And the easiest way, so like we have a local, city owned, calling it a ski mountain is generous. You can technically ski on it. Most of the value to the community is there’s a tubing hill. So you get pulled up the hill in a tube and then you come screaming down the hill at 25 miles an hour. It’s freaking awesome.\n\n\n\nI volunteer there and so when we needed a new website, I said, let me make a new website, right? I don’t want to be, if I’m involved in a tubing accident, this is the pointed version of getting hit by a bus, the developer scenario of getting hit by a bus, right? Somebody else needs to be able to step in and maintain that. So the website can’t, the value of something like WordPress, a CMS software in general for generating websites, right. I can’t, and even, TMI, but the guy who had the previous website had built it all by hand, and so nobody else could begin to maintain it or make changes to it.\n\n\n\nAnd so for the new version, I was like, this is literally the best scenario for WordPress because I created the website and then I shot a video of how to update the website. And just a week ago, the head of the board in charge of it got in touch and said, hey, how do we make changes to the website? Do I have to send them to you? And I said, here’s a video, go give it a try. And if you get stuck, then absolutely contact me. But if there was any sort of running of scripts or FTPing into the server to make changes, or any of that stuff, like it would fall flat. And so you still need, at the moment, you still need clicky clicky.\n\n\n\nShortly, as you said with the new API and stuff, there’ll be a little chat bot where you’ll say, look at this website. And the AI will go, oh, it looks like you’re using Beaver Builder with ACF, and you’ve got Yoast installed, dah, dah, dah. And then you’ll say, okay, we need to change the homepage to say the following things. And I think we’re going to go through, like any of this stuff, we’re going to go through a phase where it’s going to absolutely break the website and my phone will ring.\n\n\n\nBut six months later, it’ll get better and better and better, and then using certain plugins. And I think, you talk about adoption, I think, if the plugins that lean into making AI be able to use their software well and quickly. So like I’m a big fan of Beaver Builder. So if Beaver Builder leans into enabling AI to interact with Beaver Builder, right? Then we are going to, just like any of the things in WordPress, there’s good and there’s bad, there’s favorites, there’s things that break over time. There’s all that kind of stuff, things that are maintained well and whatnot.\n\n\n\nAnd so we’re going to get to a point where certain stacks are going to work better with AI. And I think site creators like me are going to say, oh, I don’t want to maintain this website for our local ski hill more than I have to. But instead of them having to go in and click on things and adjust boxes on a screen, I’m going to use Beaver Builder, but maybe I give up, ACF will never let me down but let’s, hypothetically, ACF doesn’t work well with AI, but Meta Box does. So I might say, okay, I’m going to switch my AI friendly stack to be Beaver Builder with Meta Box, so that they can just go in and type something, it’ll all sort itself out more reliably. And I think that’s what we’re going to see over time.\n\n\n\n[00:58:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think there’s been so many interesting predictions about what is coming. Most of my predictions have turned out to be just hot air, essentially, because the rate of change is so, so, very fast. But I do like the direction that WordPress is going in, where it’s being sort of agnostic of the AI, the actual API, for want of a better word. You know, it’s just going to hopefully be able to bind to any of those. I think that’s a curious direction, and it kind of leans into that, I guess the philosophy of something like WordPress as well. That it’s there for everybody and it’s not there to generate money for a particular company, be it Open AI or Gemini or what have you.\n\n\n\nWe’ve probably hit the sweet spot in terms of the amount of time that we can give to this. What an interesting discussion though. So far ranging. We ended up with lots of sort of philosophical points, and lifestyle points and all sorts in there. But I think in the end we sort of wrestled it back to WordPress.\n\n\n\nSo Corey, where can we find you? If somebody’s interested in sort of having a chat and wants to talk AI, where would you be online?\n\n\n\n[00:59:53] Corey Maass: Sure. Twitter, @coreymaass, is probably the social that I’m most active on. But also, Post Status, the WordPress community. Always love shouting that out. That’s been invaluable in my life and career. And then me as a developer, company, gelform.com. G-E-L-F-O-R-M .com. You can email me there if you want to yell at me or praise me or, but privately.\n\n\n\n[01:00:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. We will put all of those into the show notes so that anybody that wants to reach Corey can do that. Head to wptavern.com, search for Corey’s name. It’s a slightly unusual spelling. The surname, it’s C-O-R-E-Y, the Corey bit, but Maass is M-A-A-S-S. So search for that and you’ll be able to find him. Corey, thank you so much for chatting to me today.\n\n\n\n[01:00:39] Corey Maass: Thanks Nathan. Always a pleasure.\n\n\n\n\nOn the podcast today we have Corey Maass.\n\n\n\nCorey\u2019s been building for the web since the late nineties, starting out in the early days of Photoshop and tables, learning JavaScript, ASP Classic, and PHP, and eventually falling into the world of WordPress around 2010. Since then, he\u2019s taken on building SaaS apps, managing client projects, and experimenting with a growing number of productivity tools and frameworks. He\u2019s joined us before, and today he\u2019s here to share his perspective on what it\u2019s been like adopting AI into his workflows, especially from the point of view of building projects for clients.\n\n\n\nAlthough AI has dominated headlines over the last couple of years, Corey brings a practical angle to the conversation. He discusses the evolution of his tech stack, and how embracing AI tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot have completely changed the way he builds software and manages projects, allowing him to work faster, automate code review, and unlock creativity in places he hadn\u2019t expected.\n\n\n\nWe hear about how his journey with AI started, how he\u2019s reimagined old projects using new tools, and how learning to interact with these models, sometimes granular, sometimes letting them run freely, has reshaped his daily workflow. Corey describes the shift from using AI just to save time, to using it as a sounding board for inspiration and idea generation, even weaving it into artistic endeavours like music production.\n\n\n\nMuch of the discussion centres around how these advances have affected client work, with Corey exploring the real-world balance of responsibility, efficiency, and the changing nature of value for developers. Do clients care who, or what, wrote the code, or just that it works? What does authentic creativity mean in an era where prompting and randomness are part of the toolkit?\n\n\n\nWhether you\u2019re a developer curious about what \u2018working alongside AI\u2019 means \u200cor just wondering about the future of tech and WordPress in an increasingly automated world, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\nCorey on X\n\n\n\nCorey’s Gelform website\n\n\n\nCursor\n\n\n\nClaude Code\n\n\n\nGitHub Copilot\n\n\n\nTimerdoro\n\n\n\nTypingMind\n\n\n\nGemini\n\n\n\nChatGPT\n\n\n\nCorey’s Mexican Train game\n\n\n\nIndyDevDan\n\n\n\nNano Banana\n\n\n\nSeattle Magazine\n\n\n\nBeaver Builder\n\n\n\nElementor\n\n\n\nAbilities API\n\n\n\nYoast\n\n\n\nACF\n\n\n\nMeta Box", "date_published": "2026-01-14T10:00:00-05:00", "date_modified": "2026-01-12T11:42:50-05:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/200-Corey-Maass-on-His-Real-Life-AI-Tools-and-Workflows-in-WordPress-Development.jpg", "tags": [ "ai", "podcast" ], "summary": "In this episode, Nathan Wrigley talks with Corey Maass about how AI tools have transformed web development, especially for client projects. Corey Maass shares his ever-changing tech stack, the impact of AI on productivity and creativity, and how tools like Claude Code and Copilot are saving time and changing traditional workflows. They discuss the philosophical implications of AI, the human vs. machine dynamic, and explore how WordPress and its plugins might adapt to better integrate AI-driven features in the future. Whether you\u2019re a developer curious about what \u2018working alongside AI\u2019 means \u200cor just wondering about the future of tech and WordPress in an increasingly automated world, this episode is for you.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2319958/c1e-z92w2h7qkn0t1xozj-pkwj2nr9hx57-dx1ivt.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=202139", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/199-brian-coords-on-woocommerces-challenges-and-innovations-in-a-changing-wordpress-landscape", "title": "#199 \u2013 Brian Coords on WooCommerce\u2019s Challenges and Innovations in a Changing WordPress Landscape", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, WooCommerce’s challenges and innovations in a changing WordPress landscape.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Brian Coords.
\n\n\n\nBrian has been active in the WordPress space for over a decade, starting out in agencies, building and managing websites, and is now a developer advocate at WooCommerce, bridging the gap between woo’s internal engineers and the wider developer community. His journey includes being a high school teacher, working for nonprofits, and writing for the WP Tavern before landing his role at Automatic.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in where WooCommerce and WordPress itself are headed, this episode will help as Brian shares insights on WordPress’s evolving focus, the importance of embracing AI, and how a slower pace of change can be a strength in any open source ecosystem.
\n\n\n\nHe talks about the massive rebrand at WooCommerce, the challenges and opportunities in competing with SaaS giants, and the unique developer relations role that balances his technical experience with communication skills.
\n\n\n\nWe get into how the team Brian works with supports developers and agencies with documentation, office hours, and feedback loops, and how WooCommerce’s global Reach makes for a complex but thriving ecosystem.
\n\n\n\nThere’s discussion about recent marketing efforts, the realities of open source support, and the surprising diversity of WooCommerce users worldwide.
\n\n\n\nTowards the end, we look ahead to what’s coming for WooCommerce, which is greater integration with block based editing in WordPress Core, major investments in AI to streamline store management, and the future landscape of online shopping.
\n\n\n\nIf you want to hear how WooCommerce and WordPress are responding to a rapidly changing tech environment, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Brian Coords.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Brian Cords. Hello Brian.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:09] Brian Coords: Hey, thank you for having me.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:11] Nathan Wrigley: You’re very welcome. I have a lot of respect for Brian. I’m hoping that by the end of this podcast you also have a lot of respect for Brian.
\n\n\n\nBrian has been kind of part of my browsing on the internet and WordPress journey, I want to say, for five or six years, something along those lines, I’ve known about you and followed your stuff. Pretty much everything that you’ve done. I’m really pleased that you’ve come on the podcast to talk to me today about WooCommerce.
\n\n\n\nThose people that don’t know Brian, I’m going to give you an opportunity just to introduce yourself. So would you mind, I know it’s a banal question, but little potted bio, couple of minutes about your WordPress journey, or you can talk about the guitars in the background if you prefer.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:47] Brian Coords: Yeah, nobody wants to hear me talk about or play a guitar.
\n\n\n\nYeah, so I’m Brian. I’m a developer advocate at WooCommerce, so I work on sort of the community side, bridging the gap between the community of developers that build on top of WooCommerce or build stores with WooCommerce, and then our internal engineers and make sure that communication channel stays open.
\n\n\n\nBut before that, I spent probably 10 years working at a WordPress agency. So building sites, managing team of developers, doing all the kind of work that a WordPress agency does and sort of lived through that time from early page builders all the way until the last few years in the rise of the block editor. So I kind of have that personal experience of what it’s like just selling WordPress websites for a living.
\n\n\n\nAnd before that, my career went through a whole bunch of different places. Was a high school teacher, worked at nonprofit, all sorts of different things. So happy to be at Automattic, where I get to sort of teach, sort of build websites and just hang out with people.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:44] Nathan Wrigley: I had no idea that you were a high school teacher. I have enormous respect for anybody who takes on a role in public education. So that’s interesting.
\n\n\n\nSo I’m going to segue a little bit. This question’s just occurred to me from everything that you’ve just said, given that you’ve been in the space of WordPress for the last 10 years, more.
\n\n\n\nSo it’s a bit of a peculiar one, but are you as excited about it as a project as you were, let’s say, 10 years ago? Do you still think that it’s got the future that you probably thought it had a decade ago?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:13] Brian Coords: Yeah, I mean that’s a good question. I would say overall, yes, I am excited about it. I think that if there’s any concerns about WordPress or things to be not excited or scared about, it has nothing to do with WordPress and has everything to do with the internet as we know it, and AI and everything changing and economics and all these other sorts of things.
\n\n\n\nThe project itself, it seems to, I would say over the last year, really narrowed its focus on what it thinks its role is. And I think it’s adopted the AI change really well, and that’s made me very excited. I think it understands, you know, I think some of the things about WordPress is sometimes the day to day, you feel like the decisions are a little confusing, but if you look at it over the long term, it’s half the internet. So clearly the decisions tend to work out in the long run. So I think I still have faith in the project.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:01] Nathan Wrigley: I find that the slow pace of change is actually one of its greatest strengths, but it takes an awful lot of mulling it over and sitting down and being calm with yourself to think, why hasn’t it got all these features? Why is it not keeping track of this, that, and the other thing that’s going on on the internet? But broadly, when you look back at any 2, 3, 4, 5 year period, I think usually that was the right decision, although it feels like it might not have been the right decision when that moment is passing.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:32] Brian Coords: Yeah, there’s a lot of people who look at a lot of decisions, like say the block editor and they say, well, why didn’t they just take Elementor and stick that in Core and stuff, you know? Regardless of the fact that Elementor is a successful business that probably doesn’t want their software stolen and taken into Core. But I think if you look at it now you, a lot of those decisions would’ve seemed a little crazy.
\n\n\n\nAnd the fact that it doesn’t throw everything and that it just throws the kind of basic foundational layer, and then it allows something like Elementor or any of these other page builders to be successful businesses and do their thing. The fact that it empowers that to exist, or it empowers all the other builders to exist, or it empowers WooCommerce or all these other plugins to exist, is a testament to the fact that it didn’t try to be everything to everyone, and it just kind of stayed in its lane as a foundational layer. And so I think it’s, it doesn’t feel like it’s doing that much, but it’s working out well for everyone in the ecosystem.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:24] Nathan Wrigley: We don’t want to get into this, in fact, I’m going to insist that we don’t get into this. But I think it is a really interesting time with the tsunami of things that are going on with AI to see how a CMS can cope with the future with AI as a possible tool to do everything. To do every single thing that would be required in building a website. It’ll be interesting to see how the project goes.
\n\n\n\nAnd, you know, there’s a lot going on there, and I think this is one of those moments where we have to just sort of sit down and be calm and see what the teams are doing and just have faith. I think at least that’s my position anyway. So you don’t have to respond to that if you don’t want to.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:00] Brian Coords: Yeah, I’m just overwhelmed by AI sometimes on my day-to-day work. And so I do have to remind myself the only thing you can do is sit and go slow and just see what happens, because I don’t think we can predict it.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:11] Nathan Wrigley: No, I think you would be right. So when you joined Automattic, how long ago was that now? Roughly.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:16] Brian Coords: Almost a year. Early this year.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Did you have intuitions at that point that WooCommerce was where you were going to end up? Was that where you were heading or is that just sort of serendipity?
\n\n\n\n[00:08:26] Brian Coords: No, well, not really. When I first started, I kind of was all over the place. I was here at WP Tavern for a few weeks as part of that trial writing project. I did some work with wordpress.com and kind of got to see behind the scenes of that, and I had friends at all different parts of the company.
\n\n\n\nWhat I knew that I wanted to do was developer advocacy or what some people call developer relations. I knew that that’s where the role that I wanted, but I don’t think I would’ve thought of Woo. But then when the opportunity came up, there was a lot that I really liked about WooCommerce that I thought it had such a strong idea of what the product is, who the customers are. They had just done that rebrand where they had the new logo and the new colours and the new design. It felt like the whole company was kind of just doing really cool things.
\n\n\n\nSo once the opportunity came up, I’ll be honest, I didn’t build a lot of WooCommerce stores before I joined. So other than being kind of afraid of learning all of this stuff it was, definitely it made sense once the opportunity came up.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. With the sort of WooCommerce side of things, are you happy with that move? You know, you’ve got your feet onto the table now and you feel that’s where you’re going to stay, I guess, for the near future.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:32] Brian Coords: Yeah, definitely. What’s interesting about Automattic is over the last year, since I joined it’s been kind of a turbulent year at the company, but one of the things they’ve been really trying to do is centralise things and be more consistent.
\n\n\n\nSo in WooCommerce, there’s a lot of stuff that WooCommerce would go off and do, and it would be kind of different from say, Core WordPress or wordpress.com or WordPress VIP, or all these different kind of parts of WordPress inside of Automattic.
\n\n\n\nAnd over the last year, they’ve tried to kind of centralise and say, why do we have three different plugins that are doing similar things. Or why can’t we streamline all of this or have everybody working on the same stuff. So WooCommerce has been doing a lot of work really towards Core WordPress, and making the Core WordPress experience better so that WooCommerce can use those tools instead of doing it.
\n\n\n\nSo in a weird way, I’ve actually gotten to collaborate a lot more with some of the other sides of the company and people who do this job but are not in WooCommerce. There’s a whole team that has people like, let’s see, Ryan Welcher, Justin Tadlock, Jonathan Bossenger, that whole group. So it’s kind of nice. We’re in our little Woo bubble too, but then I get to work with them and learn from them, and work on Core WordPress too. So it’s kind of, it’s been nice. We’ve kind of brought everyone a little closer, I think.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:42] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of interesting over the last 18 months or so, having spoken to quite a few Automatticians, it does feel like the landscape inside the company has changed. I don’t think we need to go into that, but it is interesting you saying that, because feels there was some realignment and moving around, and decisions about which teams were going to collaborate more with which teams. And that seems like what you are saying as well, so there we go.
\n\n\n\nSo on the WooCommerce side of things, you mentioned that you are a developer, well, you said developer advocate, developer relations, kind of the same term really. For anybody listening to this who doesn’t know what that is, basically, what is the job contract that you’ve got there? What is your role?
\n\n\n\n[00:11:19] Brian Coords: Yeah, so we cover a few different things. From a high level, it really is, we’re there to help developers inside the company know what developers outside the company are doing and vice versa. So if you’re building stores with WooCommerce or you’re building extensions to sell in the marketplace, you know, like plugins that add-on to WooCommerce, or you’re working at one of our partner companies like Stripe and Google and Snapchat and Reddit and all these companies that integrate with WooCommerce, our job is to make sure that you have access to good documentation and good examples.
\n\n\n\nWe make sure that when a new version of WooCommerce comes out, which is every five weeks, that we publish all the release notes, and make sure that that information is, you know what’s coming, what’s changing, what’s different. We do some video content, we do some office hours hangouts in a community Slack, we keep an eye on the repo for community contributions. So it’s a lot of different things, but it’s really just, at the end of the day like, hey, does this help developers on either side of the wall move forward basically?
\n\n\n\n[00:12:19] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have to be technical in order to carry out your role, or would there be any scope for somebody in your position to be non-technical? Let’s say, you’re a marketing person or something like that. Is there any aspect of that to it? Or is everybody doing your kind of role a technical person with a background in coding and what have you?
\n\n\n\n[00:12:37] Brian Coords: It’s a unique role and it’s kind of a long debate inside of the developer relations community is, does this team go in an engineering department or does it go in the marketing department?
\n\n\n\nSo for example, at Automattic there is another developer relations team that handles a lot of that WordPress Core stuff that I was talking about, and they’re kind of a little more attached to engineering.
\n\n\n\nFor our team, we’re part of the WooCommerce marketing department. So of course that’s going to change a little bit of what we work on, how our decisions are made, that sort of stuff. I don’t think it changes that much, and in some ways it gives us access to a lot of cool stuff like their design team, which is really nice to have.
\n\n\n\nSo it goes both ways, but you really have to be a unique person where you have to be a good communicator, and you have to have some amount of technical experience. You kind of really need both, because at the end of the day we look at a new version of WooCommerce and it’s, oh, we changed this API and it’s going to affect developers in this way. It’s like, I need to be able to communicate that. I need to be able to understand it. I need to be able to know what the implications of that are. So it’s kind of both.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:35] Nathan Wrigley: Do you produce this content in multiple languages or is it kind of English first and then it gets translated in some other department, or indeed does it get translated into another language, do you know?
\n\n\n\n[00:13:45] Brian Coords: No, I think pretty much English first. There is a lot of stuff that is translated for, I would say on the, what we call like the merchant side, sort of like the user side. So if you’re looking for extensions in the marketplace, that’s available in a lot of different languages. The software itself is translated, but the developer stuff is pretty much English only. Because we’re a really small team. Like when we look at, there’s only, at any time, three or four of us working on this for software that’s on whatever, 8% of the internet, so English only for now.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the reason I ask, maybe you were present at State of the Word where Matt went through a bunch of statistics. And it was curious to see, for the first time, so WordPress more broadly, not WooCommerce specifically, but WordPress more broadly is now used on non-English websites more than it is on English websites. And so if we’d have had this interview a week ago, that question probably would not have arisen.
\n\n\n\nBut I’m guessing that WooCommerce goes along for the ride there. I’m guessing it’s not just on English speaking websites, I’m guessing WooCommerce is just literally in more or less every part of the world, in every locale and every jurisdiction. There are people who are using your code, but probably not speaking English.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:52] Brian Coords: That’s definitely the case. So we have a free Slack, that’s the WooCommerce Community Slack, and it’s more than 30,000 people in there. It’s all over. You can definitely tell that people are coming from all over the world.
\n\n\n\nOne of the weird things about e-commerce is it’s very geographically based because the currency matters. The payment provider that handles the payments matters. The shipping options matter. So there are certain places where you can only use WooCommerce because you want to use the custom bank payment provider that’s only in this one country, that sort of stuff.
\n\n\n\nSo because of how diverse the types of integrations you would need, yeah, WooCommerce is very global. That was one of the things that really surprised me was finding out that, oh yeah, there’s payment providers you’ve never heard of, and banks you’ve never heard of, and shipping companies you’ve never heard of and they need to integrate.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: And tax. So much tax, I’m sure.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:43] Brian Coords: Oh my, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:45] Nathan Wrigley: I’m sure it gets brutal. I don’t know exactly when the time was, but it feels like about, I’m going to say 18 months or something, when Woo underwent a fairly significant rebranding. So from a marketing point of view, the logo changed, the colour palette changed, the website changed.
\n\n\n\nI didn’t really notice until that moment when it did change that it needed to have changed, if you know what I mean? It just always looked fine to me. But the moment it changed, I kind of got a sense that, oh, okay, this is real now. We’ve kind of identified that there are these SaaS players, so you know, we don’t need to name them, we all know who they are, where you pay your monthly fee and you get a shop and yada, yada, yada. But I don’t know if that’s a part of the roadmap.
\n\n\n\nAnd summing it up as more serious, obviously that’s trivial and a bit, really not the right term, but do you know what I mean? It feels like WooCommerce has, I don’t know, grown up a little bit over the last 18 months and realises the, I don’t want to use the word fight, but I’m going to, the fight that it’s in with the SaaS players.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:41] Brian Coords: Yeah, I think that was the intention of that rebrand. So I think the goal was to go from saying, hey, we’re a WordPress plugin that lets you sell things. To saying, we’re an e-commerce solution, and we happen to run on WordPress. It’s kind of just a different framing.
\n\n\n\nBut one of the big things is a huge investment in marketing. And so the marketing team has gotten really big. We have a pretty killer CMO. There’s a ton of investment into different types of ads and demand generation and leads and all this stuff that I kind of don’t understand, a lot of like acronyms that are thrown around that I don’t fully track. But it’s a huge investment to basically reposition WooCommerce as something that feels a bit more modern and, not a SaaS, but kind of can sit there next to the SaaS. So when a company is looking at the options and they’re saying, oh, do we want to use Magento or BigCommerce or Shopify or WooCommerce, we look like we belong there, and it looks like it’s an option.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of curious that there’s, real money has to be spent on this endeavor because, I was in London just a few weeks ago and I walked onto the Tube, you know, the underground train network. And the platform that I was on, the first thing that I saw when I walked onto the platform was this huge ad for Shopify. And then I looked left and I looked right and it was Shopify ads all the way down. They’d obviously, I mean I can only imagine how expensive that real estate is.
\n\n\n\nBut the same thing would be true on radio, on TV, online, on print. These companies have gigantic, I mean truly eye watering budgets. And I don’t know if the WooCommerce side has to be a bit more guerrilla or if you also have a fairly gigantic budget. I don’t know if you’re able to peel any of that back. It sounds like marketing’s not really your thing, but maybe there’s bit of interest there.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:25] Brian Coords: Yeah, I mean since we’re in the team, we see a lot of it. We did an event earlier this year where our marketing team walked through some of this stuff, so I can maybe give you a link to put in the show notes. We kind of wrote it, did a write up about that very concept. Because we get asked that a lot, why am I seeing Squarespace and Shopify ads everywhere? And it’s, you know, obviously if you look at the size of the companies, it’s a fact, like a whole factor difference, like we’re not anywhere near the size of those companies.
\n\n\n\nAnd part of the issue is that you don’t just go to woocommerce.com and hand us money, you know? The Core plugin is free so the way we monetise is a lot different. You can run it anywhere. You can, a lot of people that run WooCommerce, they’re not paying us in any way because they’re using their own payment providers and those sorts of things.
\n\n\n\nSo it is definitely more of a challenge. But this past year, that’s why the rebrand started, that’s why they’ve been investing in it. And it’s been kind of cool. There’s a lot of podcast ads that we’ve been running and LinkedIn ads and all these sorts of things. And part of the issue too is that our target market is just much more narrowly defined, and so WooCommerce is much more customisable. It’s extensible. You can do whatever you want with it. And that’s just a different value proposition then you would say to somebody who just wants the easy SaaS solution.
\n\n\n\nSo it’s a lot of things, but it’s kind of just knowing who we want and targeting directly to them. And so you probably won’t see ads on the Tube at any time, but for certain areas you’re going to start seeing really targeted ads for people at the places that would actually really benefit from having WooCommerce.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:51] Nathan Wrigley: That was the thought that I had about seeing the Shopify, in this case, ad on the London underground was just how much the audience, the eyeballs that were actually staring at that had no interest in it at all. And so almost like the bottomless pit of money that they must have to throw at these things. And obviously it sounds like you are targeting people.
\n\n\n\nAre you kind of like riding on the coattails of WordPress in general? In other words, are you targeting existing WordPress users in the hope that they’ll think, okay, yeah, we’ve got a WordPress site, now it’s time to upgrade to WooCommerce, or is it a bit more scatter gone, you need a website, you need e-commerce, we’re your solution?
\n\n\n\n[00:20:26] Brian Coords: Yeah, I mean that’s an interesting question because I think when WordPress was growing, it was a lot easier to target inside of WordPress, and I think now we’re seeing all the big companies reevaluate that. So I would say the ads that I see a lot are, you know, Hostinger, Elementor, wordpress.com. And I think a lot of them are realising now, you know, we need to target outside.
\n\n\n\nSo for example, WooCommerce this year, we go to all the WordCamps, but we started going to e-commerce expos that are trade shows that are not anything to do with WordPress. It’s just for people in the commerce industry and partnering with companies that are in the marketing and commerce side. And so, yeah, it really is about branching out and finding those new areas.
\n\n\n\nI think all WordPress companies are going to kind of have to start facing that as well because WordPress is 43% of the web. It’s like, how much bigger realistically can you get, once we pass 50%? I mean that’s, it’s pretty hard to grow at that point.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:19] Nathan Wrigley: Did you attend any of those events? The sort of expos for e-commerce more generally?
\n\n\n\n[00:21:23] Brian Coords: No.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was going to follow up with a question about whether or not there was brand recognition. At those events, if you’ve got a WooCommerce stall, I was curious as to know what proportion of the public would walk past a WooCommerce sign and go, yeah, yeah, I know what that is, I’ve got complete familiarity with it. I feel like some of the SaaS ones, maybe they’ve done that job so well that that brand recognition is there, but maybe that work still needs to be done on the Woo side, I’m not sure.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:49] Brian Coords: There’s definitely not going to be the same level of brand awareness. I think, like you said, like guerrilla marketing is definitely part of it. One of the things they do at these is they’ll find a local store that uses Woo and use them for swag. So they’ll get really good swag. They did like homemade, like embroidery things and all this sort of stuff. And so they end up getting very popular because of how cool the swag is, and how meaningful it is, and it supports a local merchant. But yeah, it’s a big battle, you know, to raise that brand awareness.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, let’s just turn a bit more to your Dev Rel stuff. And you were saying that, well, I don’t need to repeat what you said. You said a little while ago, who it is that you are interfacing with out in the real world.
\n\n\n\nHow does that work? Like, do you just sort of put content out there and tutorials out there and videos out there and change logs out there, and kind of hope that the people that need it get to see it somehow? Or is there more of an endeavor of, I don’t know, providing the bat phone, for want of a better word, to agencies and people so that they can communicate directly with you? How does that whole thing work?
\n\n\n\n[00:22:48] Brian Coords: Yeah, so it’s interesting because there’s definitely different audiences that we have. So we have developers who are building extensions and are, you know, they’re selling WooCommerce plugins basically. And so we have them that we need to communicate with. And then we have the agencies and the agencies are building WooCommerce stores for people. So they’re setting up WooCommerce.
\n\n\n\nAnd those two audiences, they both need some of the same information, but they also need a lot of different information. And so we’ve kind of seen a lot of change over the last year.
\n\n\n\nAutomattic has launched a program called Automattic for Agencies. I’m not sure if you’ve seen this. It’s kind of like an agency program where you sign up and you get access to extensions, you can get affiliate fees, you can get kickbacks on payments, volume, all that sort of stuff.
\n\n\n\nSo that side has really, sort of owned the agency space. And so what’s nice is we can go to them with any new information. We could say, hey, just pass this along to your audience in your next newsletter, that sort of thing. But really, if we want to have the conversations, I would say the Slack is the most common and we never lack for feedback. We get plenty of feedback. We do a monthly office hours in Slack or sometimes on Zoom, where developers will come and share their questions, that sort of thing. So we get tons of feedback. But yeah, it’s really just about being present there, being present on Twitter. We’re ramping up YouTube, because YouTube’s really important right now. And we’re just, like I said, small team and trying to hit all of those different content areas.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:13] Nathan Wrigley: My sort of follow up question there really was going to be something about shouting into the void and I wondered if that, it was in fact what was happening. But it sounds from what you are saying is if, no, there is an actual loop there. You put stuff out and you get feedback. I mean I’m guessing, from the sounds of it, there’s maybe more feedback than you can actually cope with, which is intriguing. I had an intuition that would be the other way around.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:32] Brian Coords: Yeah, I mean it definitely depends on, sometimes you get feedback that’s kind of the same. We know what people want, and we’re trying to work as fast as we can to make the changes that developers and the community want. And sometimes you put out a feature and it doesn’t resonate.
\n\n\n\nBut generally when we do calls for testing of a new feature we’ll post, all right, we have a new feature coming, it’s in experimental mode, here’s how to turn it on and then let us know if it’s working for you, if it’s working with your plugin and stuff. We definitely have a pretty healthy group that will take the time to contribute back, let us know if things are working. I mean it’s an open source project. We get community pull requests. We get people, they need a feature, they build it and submit it and, you know, hopefully we merge it. And so the feedback loop is definitely there.
\n\n\n\nBut if you’re, the thing that I’ve learned about WordPress is that I think it’s like an iceberg and like 90% of the WordPress community, they’re not really listening to WordPress content, and they’re not listening, they’re not even tracking WordPress in general. And so I think there’s probably a much broader community that we’re not getting access to, and they’re just living their daily lives and just building stores and stuff. And so I would love to find more of those groups. I think Facebook is probably a place that we haven’t even touched yet, and I’m sure a lot of them are there. There’s definitely work to be done there.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that was maybe the piece that I was thinking. Is that Woo is the biggest solution out there. If memory serves, Woo is the biggest e-commerce platform out there. It kind of dwarfs all the others. I don’t even know if WooCommerce is bigger than the rest of them combined but, you know, it’s on that kind of level.
\n\n\n\nAnd yet, if you were to have a, I don’t know, a Shopify store or something, there is probably like a little submit feedback button in the UI somewhere, and you can talk to the support representatives, and they’ll have the answer specifically because they know exactly what the platform does.
\n\n\n\nBut the jigsaw puzzle over on the Woo side is, yeah, it must be much more messy, much more kind of difficult to wrangle everything. You know, you’ve got people, end users who are using WooCommerce. You’ve got developers who are building plugins. You’ve got agencies who are building on behalf of clients. You’ve got people who are building rival things so you’re in direct competition with people in the plugin space who are building rivals to WooCommerce. It’s just, well, messy. But that’s open source, right?
\n\n\n\n[00:26:44] Brian Coords: I mean that’s exactly what it is. You know, we have, you have WooCommerce support, right? And our support team is really great. Every time I go to a conference and one of our support engineers is there, I’m always pointing to them to answer all the questions because they know the product so deeply.
\n\n\n\nBut if you imagine the, you know, most WooCommerce stores will come to us for support, but there’s no financial relationship. If they’re not using our hosting company or they’re not using Woo Payments, or they’re not using extensions that they bought in the marketplace, maybe they bought their extensions just off the internet or something, there’s a good chance they might not be paying us any money at all. And yet, you know, we’re going to support them and make sure that they’re having a good experience, because that’s kind of the goal of it. So it’s definitely a bit of the Wild West out there.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:28] Nathan Wrigley: There must be some kind of strange tension there as well. I mean, you’ve described it very eloquently and I think you’ve stepped around that beautifully, but that is a peculiar thing, isn’t it, that you would not have to deal with elsewhere? The fact that you may very well be dealing with rivals. You may well be dealing with people who are using up your time, but like you said, they have no relationship with you financially at all, but they built something, third party thing on top of the WooCommerce ecosystem, and I guess that’s just the broader philanthropic goal of something like WooCommerce. You’ve just got to step up and be there.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:00] Brian Coords: Yeah, I mean I think wordpress.com probably has a lot of the same things because if you Google WordPress, you know, you’re probably going to end up on wordpress.com, even if you’re not their customer.
\n\n\n\nOn the flip side though, you know, the benefit of being open source is that, like I said, we get community contributions. We get a lot of eyes on the software. A lot of people, they give us feedback, they give us code, they give us all sorts of things. So it is a bit of a trade off.
\n\n\n\nBut I think it’s kind of worth it for the software to just exist freely and for everybody who runs on it, to always kind of know deep down that they own their store and they can do whatever they want with it, and they can put it wherever they want, and Automattic or WordPress or WooCommerce is never really going to take that away from them or take them down, you know?
\n\n\n\n[00:28:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’d be curious to know what proportion of Woo kind of props up the broader WordPress project, if you know what I mean? I don’t think we need to go into that, and I don’t know if there’s any data out there anywhere, but there must be a lot of money sloshing around inside the WooCommerce ecosystem. It’d be interesting to know what proportion the broader WordPress ecosystem was was made up of just Woo stuff. That’d be an interesting thing to dig into.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:01] Brian Coords: When I worked at an agency, the kind of rule was if you wanted to make money making websites, you did websites that made money. So e-commerce was a big part. People, you know, their website’s more critical to their business, so they’re going to be buying more plugins, they’re going to be paying more developers, they’re going to be using more tools. So I think that’s part of it. E-commerce isn’t the only way websites make money. There’s definitely a lot of other things, big publishers and that sort of stuff. But yeah, it’s definitely a big part of the community.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:26] Nathan Wrigley: Well, big and not going anywhere. Speaking of going places though, what’s coming up in the near future? So when we’re recording this, it’s kind of the middle of December. I imagine this episode will hit in the beginning of 2026 at some point. Roughly around that kind of time, what’s the thinking? What are the, some of the top level items that people may not know about? What’s the stuff that you’re working on? Roadmap stuff, I guess.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:46] Brian Coords: Yeah, I would say the big things that I’ve seen that are really the big focus right now is, number one is really making WooCommerce closer to WordPress Core, which means making WordPress Core a little better. So WooCommerce has been pretty ahead of the curve of transitioning to blocks, using block templates and block based everything. So, I mean you can do your whole WooCommerce store in the block editor, which gives you a lot of kind of design freedom. But that means if we need something better in the block editor, we’ve got to commit that up to the block editor and make Gutenberg better. So there’s a lot of work to improve a lot of stuff inside of Gutenberg so that your WooCommerce experience is better.
\n\n\n\nSo that’s been a lot of the focus. And so we’re, there’s a lot of cool stuff coming around just new blocks, new block designs, patterns, things you can do to really customise the visual aspects of your store. And then the second big thing, I think that is taking up everybody’s mental space is AI. You can’t not talk about it. So it’s, that’s the other piece.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:42] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, despite the fact that it consumes all the air in the room, it is so fascinating. Do you have any insight into some of the things that may be on the agenda for a WooCommerce store owner in the near future? The kind of things that you are thinking of. Even if they’re just aspirational for a WooCommerce store owner. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on that.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:01] Brian Coords: Yeah, I think there’s two different aspects of it that are really going to be important. One is managing your store. So we have right now in beta what’s called an MCP server in Woo. And what it basically lets you do is open up, you know, ChatGPT or Claude or something and say, log into my WooCommerce store and update all my products, put them on sale, change out the pictures, write better copy for them. It kind of lets AI log into your store and do things for you.
\n\n\n\nAnd so that’s in beta right now, and it’s pretty cool. I’ve been using it. It’s pretty neat. I’ve been setting up some demo stores for people, and I just go, all right, log in and make me, you know, 50 fake sweaters with a nice description in different colours. And it does it. It’s kind of mind blowing.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:43] Nathan Wrigley: Do you trust it at this point? And I don’t mean, you know, the broader kind of debate about AI and whether it’s trustworthy. I mean, in terms of the store, you know, do you trust it to update all of the particular product lines and what have you, or update the images? Do you feel that if you’ve given that prompt, you can sort of sit back and go, okay, that is definitely being done?
\n\n\n\n[00:32:02] Brian Coords: I haven’t done it on a live site, I will say. The nice thing too is you can have it ask you for permission every single time, and you can kind of see what it’s going to do. That obviously kind of ruins the whole efficiency part of it, but it can do that. So I think it’s early days.
\n\n\n\nBut I do think, once you start interacting where you don’t have to actually log in and click a bunch of buttons, and you can just tell your computer what you want it to do, I think it’s going to be hard to come back from that. I think people are going to start expecting it. But I, yeah that’s, I mean we’re not doing that on the live, on any live sites, I hope not.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:32] Nathan Wrigley: So that was half of it by the sounds of it. That was one of the threads. What was the other one?
\n\n\n\n[00:32:35] Brian Coords: The other one, I think is about how people are going to be shopping in the future. And I think showing up, obviously all these chat companies, they need to make money, and we know that they’re going to start showing ads and they’re going to start wanting to do the same thing when you go to Google, and you look up something and it gives you some shopping recommendations and shows you some products you might want to buy and some ads. You know, we’re going to start seeing that in our chat bots and stuff.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I think it’s going to be important for people that have WooCommerce stores, they want their products to show up there, and they want their ads to show up there, and they want to make sure that people who are using AI to get product recommendations, which my wife does all the time, that they’re going to show up there. So I think that’s the other half of it.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Do you know it’s really curious, the whole, what we might have called SEO, which is fast giving way, I think, to AI. It’s kind of curious. I think there’s like a whole section where the discovery of the website is going to be everything. So an example might be apparel. I don’t suppose anybody’s just going to buy a blouse or a shirt based upon some text that they saw in a chat bot, but getting to that page and saying, find me, locally to me, find me a place which sells, I don’t know, affordable shirts for work, or something along those lines. And have a recommendation, which gets you to the WooCommerce store.
\n\n\n\nBut for more utilitarian things, just the stuff that you don’t really care about like, I want to buy a bunch of nuts and bolts, or hammers, or spanners, or whatever it may be, I feel like there’ll be a point where the store itself, obviously all of that commerce will take place in the store, but it will be invisible to you as a user. You’ll just tell the AI, buy these things, I need 50, or even just repeat the order from last month for these things, and it’ll just magically happen in the background. You’ll get a receipt via email, and WooCommerce will have handled it. The site will have been notified in some way, but you’ll have had no interaction. So it’s kind of scary, but interesting at the same time.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:23] Brian Coords: I think one of the thing, I think Google’s the best example because I think WordPress and Google have this really symbiotic relationship because we make the websites and they provide the traffic. And I think it’s been good for both of them. They want a bunch of websites to send people to, and we want them sending people to our websites. And so I think Google’s a great example.
\n\n\n\nBut they’ve had product recommendations that you can connect to your WooCommerce store, you know, for a while now. It’s kind of in some ways not really that different from just Googling something. Google shows you some products and then you click through and you buy it.
\n\n\n\nIf it becomes that seamless where you don’t even have to realise you’re going to a website, which I think is possible, I also wonder, will people want to do that? Will they feel as trustworthy? Maybe, maybe not. But either way, that is probably going to be the case.
\n\n\n\nAnd so that’s going to require a lot of these, the discussion’s already happening. They have these payment protocols and things, and we’re starting to see the very beginning of it. So it’s kind of interesting to be inside of WooCommerce because the companies that do all this stuff, the Stripes and the PayPals and the Googles and stuff, these are partners that they work closely with. And you get to see a little behind the scenes of them trying to figure this out in real time, you know?
\n\n\n\n[00:35:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it kind of speaks to trust really, doesn’t it? So the repeat order thing through a ChatGPT style interface or whatever that looks like in the future, be it voice or speaking to a camera or whatever it may be, I could totally see myself ordering the, I don’t know, the groceries or the toothpaste or whatever it is that, I really don’t need to see that thing. I don’t need to go to a shopping checkout. I just need to know that my next pack of toothpaste is going to arrive reliably tomorrow morning. That’s all I need to know. I feel like there is, there’s a there there, if you know what I mean? Despite the fact that we’re so wedded to this interface of, go to the website, look at the pictures, click the cart number, click how many you want, go to the cart, proceed with the checkout, dah, dah, dah. Most of that is going to be obsolete for the utilitarian stuff, I think. I don’t know. We’ll see.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:15] Brian Coords: I feel like Amazon’s been trying that for a while, but I still have to check it because I feel like we return 30% of the things we buy at Amazon. It comes, it’s the wrong size, it doesn’t look anything like the picture, all that sort of stuff. Hopefully those problems still get solved, before we get to the point where I’m not even going to look at what I ordered. I think we still have a lot of time there.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:33] Nathan Wrigley: Well, so even if that interface isn’t quite as radical as I just suggested, but even if there’s like a back and forth between the AI and the website. I don’t know, I ask for a particular thing, and then the chat interface or whatever it may be shows me a picture from the website or something along those lines. This whole scraping of the website and surfacing the content of the website, and then I can make those decisions based upon what I see. Maybe it’ll be a bit more back and forward, and far less of the AI, and more of the AI meets human kind of interface.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:01] Brian Coords: Yeah, and I think a lot of it is, it’ll feel like magic to the end user with an AI, but really it’s just going to be a ton of code and protocols and extensions and things. Under the hood, that’s going to be a ton of manual work, getting all that stuff there. But I think with WooCommerce especially, most of the Woo stores I come across, they’re very weird, I guess is the best way to put it. They’re unique products, you know? They’re often not selling the toothpaste and that sort of stuff. Or if they are, they’re selling the very interesting toothpaste that you can only buy from this one company.
\n\n\n\nSo I think that’s what’s fun about it, is I think it’ll really be for people looking for those weird, unique products, and the kind of stuff you’re not going to get on Amazon or you’re not going to get on a basic walmart.com or something. So yeah, I think it’ll be interesting to see where this goes.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:44] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know if Automattic, or WordPress more generally, do you know if it’s investing anything in its own AI? Everything at the moment, all the oxygen seems to be being consumed by the, let’s say, four big players that we’ve all heard of. We don’t need to name the names, we all know who they are. But it’d be curious as to whether a company obviously deeply rooted in tech, like Automattic is inventing, creating those kind of things. That’d be a curious shift.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:07] Brian Coords: Yeah, I mean you can see it already. Telex is a product that’s come out from Automattic. It lets you build blocks. They have a AI site builder. If you go to wordpress.com, a good amount of people are actually, the first thing they do is use this AI site builder that gets you kind of from zero to like a pretty decent starting site. And then you can go in and the block editor and customise everything.
\n\n\n\nIs Automattic training their own models and stuff? I don’t think so, or at least I don’t know. But, I mean there’s a bunch of stuff happening, that’s the public facing stuff, which is building websites. There’s stuff around WooCommerce, there’s stuff around support. Our support is very heavily leaned into AI and it’s actually very good. There’s all sorts of these other places.
\n\n\n\nAnd then there’s a ton of stuff internally in the company that we have because, you know, when you work with a thousand people, there’s a lot of information there. And so we have internal stuff that’s kind of like search through all of our, you know, internal dialogue and find this conversation and summarise it for me. And so it’s all there. It’ll be interesting to see which ones end up becoming good products.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:05] Nathan Wrigley: Well, it sounds like exciting times. It sounds like you’ve landed in the right part of Automattic for you at least anyway. Yeah, fascinating times. The year 2026 for e-commerce, and WooCommerce more specifically, looks very, very bright.
\n\n\n\nCan we just ask you, before we go, where would be the best place to find you if anybody wants to reach out and say hi?
\n\n\n\n[00:39:23] Brian Coords: Yeah, definitely. So if you are interested in WooCommerce, you can go to developer.woo.com. That’s kind of our developer blog and it has, it’ll take you to like the docs, it’ll take you to the community Slack, it’ll take you to our email newsletter and all that sort of stuff. That’s developer.woo.com.
\n\n\n\nFor me, it’s my name, briancoords.com, and I’m mostly active on Twitter and YouTube these days. I tried all the other social networks, but everyone in WordPress stays on Twitter, so that’s where I’ll be for the foreseeable future.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:47] Nathan Wrigley: So Brian is, as you would imagine it’s spelled, but Coords has two O’s. So it’s C-O-O-R-D-S. I’ll put all of the links in the show notes so that anything that Brian mentioned can be found there, wptavern.com. Search for Brian’s name and you will be able to find that episode. So Brian Coords, thank you so much for chatting to me today.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:05] Brian Coords: Yeah. Thank you.
\nOn the podcast today we have Brian Coords.
\n\n\n\nBrian has been active in the WordPress space for over a decade, starting out in agencies building and managing websites, and is now a developer advocate at WooCommerce, bridging the gap between Woo\u2019s internal engineers and the wider developer community. His journey includes being a high school teacher, working for nonprofits, and writing for the WP Tavern, before landing his role at Automattic.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re interested in where WooCommerce, and WordPress itself, are headed, this episode will help, as Brian shares insights on WordPress\u2019s evolving focus, the importance of embracing AI, and how a slower pace of change can be a strength in any open source ecosystem.
\n\n\n\nHe talks about the massive rebrand at WooCommerce, the challenges and opportunities in competing with SaaS giants, and the unique developer relations role that balances his technical experience with communication skills.
\n\n\n\nWe get into how the team Brian works with supports developers and agencies with documentation, office hours, and feedback loops, and how WooCommerce\u2019s global reach makes for a complex but thriving ecosystem. There\u2019s discussion about recent marketing efforts, the realities of open source support, and the surprising diversity of WooCommerce users worldwide.
\n\n\n\nTowards the end, we look ahead to what\u2019s coming for WooCommerce, which is greater integration with block-based editing in WordPress Core, major investments in AI to streamline store management, and the future landscape of online shopping.
\n\n\n\nIf you want to hear how WooCommerce and WordPress are responding to a rapidly changing tech environment, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\n\u200aWooCommerce Community Slack
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "content_text": "Transcript\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, WooCommerce’s challenges and innovations in a changing WordPress landscape.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Brian Coords.\n\n\n\nBrian has been active in the WordPress space for over a decade, starting out in agencies, building and managing websites, and is now a developer advocate at WooCommerce, bridging the gap between woo’s internal engineers and the wider developer community. His journey includes being a high school teacher, working for nonprofits, and writing for the WP Tavern before landing his role at Automatic.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in where WooCommerce and WordPress itself are headed, this episode will help as Brian shares insights on WordPress’s evolving focus, the importance of embracing AI, and how a slower pace of change can be a strength in any open source ecosystem.\n\n\n\nHe talks about the massive rebrand at WooCommerce, the challenges and opportunities in competing with SaaS giants, and the unique developer relations role that balances his technical experience with communication skills.\n\n\n\nWe get into how the team Brian works with supports developers and agencies with documentation, office hours, and feedback loops, and how WooCommerce’s global Reach makes for a complex but thriving ecosystem.\n\n\n\nThere’s discussion about recent marketing efforts, the realities of open source support, and the surprising diversity of WooCommerce users worldwide.\n\n\n\nTowards the end, we look ahead to what’s coming for WooCommerce, which is greater integration with block based editing in WordPress Core, major investments in AI to streamline store management, and the future landscape of online shopping.\n\n\n\nIf you want to hear how WooCommerce and WordPress are responding to a rapidly changing tech environment, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Brian Coords.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Brian Cords. Hello Brian.\n\n\n\n[00:03:09] Brian Coords: Hey, thank you for having me.\n\n\n\n[00:03:11] Nathan Wrigley: You’re very welcome. I have a lot of respect for Brian. I’m hoping that by the end of this podcast you also have a lot of respect for Brian.\n\n\n\nBrian has been kind of part of my browsing on the internet and WordPress journey, I want to say, for five or six years, something along those lines, I’ve known about you and followed your stuff. Pretty much everything that you’ve done. I’m really pleased that you’ve come on the podcast to talk to me today about WooCommerce.\n\n\n\nThose people that don’t know Brian, I’m going to give you an opportunity just to introduce yourself. So would you mind, I know it’s a banal question, but little potted bio, couple of minutes about your WordPress journey, or you can talk about the guitars in the background if you prefer.\n\n\n\n[00:03:47] Brian Coords: Yeah, nobody wants to hear me talk about or play a guitar.\n\n\n\nYeah, so I’m Brian. I’m a developer advocate at WooCommerce, so I work on sort of the community side, bridging the gap between the community of developers that build on top of WooCommerce or build stores with WooCommerce, and then our internal engineers and make sure that communication channel stays open.\n\n\n\nBut before that, I spent probably 10 years working at a WordPress agency. So building sites, managing team of developers, doing all the kind of work that a WordPress agency does and sort of lived through that time from early page builders all the way until the last few years in the rise of the block editor. So I kind of have that personal experience of what it’s like just selling WordPress websites for a living.\n\n\n\nAnd before that, my career went through a whole bunch of different places. Was a high school teacher, worked at nonprofit, all sorts of different things. So happy to be at Automattic, where I get to sort of teach, sort of build websites and just hang out with people.\n\n\n\n[00:04:44] Nathan Wrigley: I had no idea that you were a high school teacher. I have enormous respect for anybody who takes on a role in public education. So that’s interesting.\n\n\n\nSo I’m going to segue a little bit. This question’s just occurred to me from everything that you’ve just said, given that you’ve been in the space of WordPress for the last 10 years, more.\n\n\n\nSo it’s a bit of a peculiar one, but are you as excited about it as a project as you were, let’s say, 10 years ago? Do you still think that it’s got the future that you probably thought it had a decade ago?\n\n\n\n[00:05:13] Brian Coords: Yeah, I mean that’s a good question. I would say overall, yes, I am excited about it. I think that if there’s any concerns about WordPress or things to be not excited or scared about, it has nothing to do with WordPress and has everything to do with the internet as we know it, and AI and everything changing and economics and all these other sorts of things.\n\n\n\nThe project itself, it seems to, I would say over the last year, really narrowed its focus on what it thinks its role is. And I think it’s adopted the AI change really well, and that’s made me very excited. I think it understands, you know, I think some of the things about WordPress is sometimes the day to day, you feel like the decisions are a little confusing, but if you look at it over the long term, it’s half the internet. So clearly the decisions tend to work out in the long run. So I think I still have faith in the project.\n\n\n\n[00:06:01] Nathan Wrigley: I find that the slow pace of change is actually one of its greatest strengths, but it takes an awful lot of mulling it over and sitting down and being calm with yourself to think, why hasn’t it got all these features? Why is it not keeping track of this, that, and the other thing that’s going on on the internet? But broadly, when you look back at any 2, 3, 4, 5 year period, I think usually that was the right decision, although it feels like it might not have been the right decision when that moment is passing.\n\n\n\n[00:06:32] Brian Coords: Yeah, there’s a lot of people who look at a lot of decisions, like say the block editor and they say, well, why didn’t they just take Elementor and stick that in Core and stuff, you know? Regardless of the fact that Elementor is a successful business that probably doesn’t want their software stolen and taken into Core. But I think if you look at it now you, a lot of those decisions would’ve seemed a little crazy.\n\n\n\nAnd the fact that it doesn’t throw everything and that it just throws the kind of basic foundational layer, and then it allows something like Elementor or any of these other page builders to be successful businesses and do their thing. The fact that it empowers that to exist, or it empowers all the other builders to exist, or it empowers WooCommerce or all these other plugins to exist, is a testament to the fact that it didn’t try to be everything to everyone, and it just kind of stayed in its lane as a foundational layer. And so I think it’s, it doesn’t feel like it’s doing that much, but it’s working out well for everyone in the ecosystem.\n\n\n\n[00:07:24] Nathan Wrigley: We don’t want to get into this, in fact, I’m going to insist that we don’t get into this. But I think it is a really interesting time with the tsunami of things that are going on with AI to see how a CMS can cope with the future with AI as a possible tool to do everything. To do every single thing that would be required in building a website. It’ll be interesting to see how the project goes.\n\n\n\nAnd, you know, there’s a lot going on there, and I think this is one of those moments where we have to just sort of sit down and be calm and see what the teams are doing and just have faith. I think at least that’s my position anyway. So you don’t have to respond to that if you don’t want to.\n\n\n\n[00:08:00] Brian Coords: Yeah, I’m just overwhelmed by AI sometimes on my day-to-day work. And so I do have to remind myself the only thing you can do is sit and go slow and just see what happens, because I don’t think we can predict it.\n\n\n\n[00:08:11] Nathan Wrigley: No, I think you would be right. So when you joined Automattic, how long ago was that now? Roughly.\n\n\n\n[00:08:16] Brian Coords: Almost a year. Early this year.\n\n\n\n[00:08:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Did you have intuitions at that point that WooCommerce was where you were going to end up? Was that where you were heading or is that just sort of serendipity?\n\n\n\n[00:08:26] Brian Coords: No, well, not really. When I first started, I kind of was all over the place. I was here at WP Tavern for a few weeks as part of that trial writing project. I did some work with wordpress.com and kind of got to see behind the scenes of that, and I had friends at all different parts of the company.\n\n\n\nWhat I knew that I wanted to do was developer advocacy or what some people call developer relations. I knew that that’s where the role that I wanted, but I don’t think I would’ve thought of Woo. But then when the opportunity came up, there was a lot that I really liked about WooCommerce that I thought it had such a strong idea of what the product is, who the customers are. They had just done that rebrand where they had the new logo and the new colours and the new design. It felt like the whole company was kind of just doing really cool things.\n\n\n\nSo once the opportunity came up, I’ll be honest, I didn’t build a lot of WooCommerce stores before I joined. So other than being kind of afraid of learning all of this stuff it was, definitely it made sense once the opportunity came up.\n\n\n\n[00:09:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. With the sort of WooCommerce side of things, are you happy with that move? You know, you’ve got your feet onto the table now and you feel that’s where you’re going to stay, I guess, for the near future.\n\n\n\n[00:09:32] Brian Coords: Yeah, definitely. What’s interesting about Automattic is over the last year, since I joined it’s been kind of a turbulent year at the company, but one of the things they’ve been really trying to do is centralise things and be more consistent.\n\n\n\nSo in WooCommerce, there’s a lot of stuff that WooCommerce would go off and do, and it would be kind of different from say, Core WordPress or wordpress.com or WordPress VIP, or all these different kind of parts of WordPress inside of Automattic.\n\n\n\nAnd over the last year, they’ve tried to kind of centralise and say, why do we have three different plugins that are doing similar things. Or why can’t we streamline all of this or have everybody working on the same stuff. So WooCommerce has been doing a lot of work really towards Core WordPress, and making the Core WordPress experience better so that WooCommerce can use those tools instead of doing it.\n\n\n\nSo in a weird way, I’ve actually gotten to collaborate a lot more with some of the other sides of the company and people who do this job but are not in WooCommerce. There’s a whole team that has people like, let’s see, Ryan Welcher, Justin Tadlock, Jonathan Bossenger, that whole group. So it’s kind of nice. We’re in our little Woo bubble too, but then I get to work with them and learn from them, and work on Core WordPress too. So it’s kind of, it’s been nice. We’ve kind of brought everyone a little closer, I think.\n\n\n\n[00:10:42] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of interesting over the last 18 months or so, having spoken to quite a few Automatticians, it does feel like the landscape inside the company has changed. I don’t think we need to go into that, but it is interesting you saying that, because feels there was some realignment and moving around, and decisions about which teams were going to collaborate more with which teams. And that seems like what you are saying as well, so there we go.\n\n\n\nSo on the WooCommerce side of things, you mentioned that you are a developer, well, you said developer advocate, developer relations, kind of the same term really. For anybody listening to this who doesn’t know what that is, basically, what is the job contract that you’ve got there? What is your role?\n\n\n\n[00:11:19] Brian Coords: Yeah, so we cover a few different things. From a high level, it really is, we’re there to help developers inside the company know what developers outside the company are doing and vice versa. So if you’re building stores with WooCommerce or you’re building extensions to sell in the marketplace, you know, like plugins that add-on to WooCommerce, or you’re working at one of our partner companies like Stripe and Google and Snapchat and Reddit and all these companies that integrate with WooCommerce, our job is to make sure that you have access to good documentation and good examples.\n\n\n\nWe make sure that when a new version of WooCommerce comes out, which is every five weeks, that we publish all the release notes, and make sure that that information is, you know what’s coming, what’s changing, what’s different. We do some video content, we do some office hours hangouts in a community Slack, we keep an eye on the repo for community contributions. So it’s a lot of different things, but it’s really just, at the end of the day like, hey, does this help developers on either side of the wall move forward basically?\n\n\n\n[00:12:19] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have to be technical in order to carry out your role, or would there be any scope for somebody in your position to be non-technical? Let’s say, you’re a marketing person or something like that. Is there any aspect of that to it? Or is everybody doing your kind of role a technical person with a background in coding and what have you?\n\n\n\n[00:12:37] Brian Coords: It’s a unique role and it’s kind of a long debate inside of the developer relations community is, does this team go in an engineering department or does it go in the marketing department?\n\n\n\nSo for example, at Automattic there is another developer relations team that handles a lot of that WordPress Core stuff that I was talking about, and they’re kind of a little more attached to engineering.\n\n\n\nFor our team, we’re part of the WooCommerce marketing department. So of course that’s going to change a little bit of what we work on, how our decisions are made, that sort of stuff. I don’t think it changes that much, and in some ways it gives us access to a lot of cool stuff like their design team, which is really nice to have.\n\n\n\nSo it goes both ways, but you really have to be a unique person where you have to be a good communicator, and you have to have some amount of technical experience. You kind of really need both, because at the end of the day we look at a new version of WooCommerce and it’s, oh, we changed this API and it’s going to affect developers in this way. It’s like, I need to be able to communicate that. I need to be able to understand it. I need to be able to know what the implications of that are. So it’s kind of both.\n\n\n\n[00:13:35] Nathan Wrigley: Do you produce this content in multiple languages or is it kind of English first and then it gets translated in some other department, or indeed does it get translated into another language, do you know?\n\n\n\n[00:13:45] Brian Coords: No, I think pretty much English first. There is a lot of stuff that is translated for, I would say on the, what we call like the merchant side, sort of like the user side. So if you’re looking for extensions in the marketplace, that’s available in a lot of different languages. The software itself is translated, but the developer stuff is pretty much English only. Because we’re a really small team. Like when we look at, there’s only, at any time, three or four of us working on this for software that’s on whatever, 8% of the internet, so English only for now.\n\n\n\n[00:14:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the reason I ask, maybe you were present at State of the Word where Matt went through a bunch of statistics. And it was curious to see, for the first time, so WordPress more broadly, not WooCommerce specifically, but WordPress more broadly is now used on non-English websites more than it is on English websites. And so if we’d have had this interview a week ago, that question probably would not have arisen.\n\n\n\nBut I’m guessing that WooCommerce goes along for the ride there. I’m guessing it’s not just on English speaking websites, I’m guessing WooCommerce is just literally in more or less every part of the world, in every locale and every jurisdiction. There are people who are using your code, but probably not speaking English.\n\n\n\n[00:14:52] Brian Coords: That’s definitely the case. So we have a free Slack, that’s the WooCommerce Community Slack, and it’s more than 30,000 people in there. It’s all over. You can definitely tell that people are coming from all over the world.\n\n\n\nOne of the weird things about e-commerce is it’s very geographically based because the currency matters. The payment provider that handles the payments matters. The shipping options matter. So there are certain places where you can only use WooCommerce because you want to use the custom bank payment provider that’s only in this one country, that sort of stuff.\n\n\n\nSo because of how diverse the types of integrations you would need, yeah, WooCommerce is very global. That was one of the things that really surprised me was finding out that, oh yeah, there’s payment providers you’ve never heard of, and banks you’ve never heard of, and shipping companies you’ve never heard of and they need to integrate.\n\n\n\n[00:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: And tax. So much tax, I’m sure.\n\n\n\n[00:15:43] Brian Coords: Oh my, yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:15:45] Nathan Wrigley: I’m sure it gets brutal. I don’t know exactly when the time was, but it feels like about, I’m going to say 18 months or something, when Woo underwent a fairly significant rebranding. So from a marketing point of view, the logo changed, the colour palette changed, the website changed.\n\n\n\nI didn’t really notice until that moment when it did change that it needed to have changed, if you know what I mean? It just always looked fine to me. But the moment it changed, I kind of got a sense that, oh, okay, this is real now. We’ve kind of identified that there are these SaaS players, so you know, we don’t need to name them, we all know who they are, where you pay your monthly fee and you get a shop and yada, yada, yada. But I don’t know if that’s a part of the roadmap.\n\n\n\nAnd summing it up as more serious, obviously that’s trivial and a bit, really not the right term, but do you know what I mean? It feels like WooCommerce has, I don’t know, grown up a little bit over the last 18 months and realises the, I don’t want to use the word fight, but I’m going to, the fight that it’s in with the SaaS players.\n\n\n\n[00:16:41] Brian Coords: Yeah, I think that was the intention of that rebrand. So I think the goal was to go from saying, hey, we’re a WordPress plugin that lets you sell things. To saying, we’re an e-commerce solution, and we happen to run on WordPress. It’s kind of just a different framing.\n\n\n\nBut one of the big things is a huge investment in marketing. And so the marketing team has gotten really big. We have a pretty killer CMO. There’s a ton of investment into different types of ads and demand generation and leads and all this stuff that I kind of don’t understand, a lot of like acronyms that are thrown around that I don’t fully track. But it’s a huge investment to basically reposition WooCommerce as something that feels a bit more modern and, not a SaaS, but kind of can sit there next to the SaaS. So when a company is looking at the options and they’re saying, oh, do we want to use Magento or BigCommerce or Shopify or WooCommerce, we look like we belong there, and it looks like it’s an option.\n\n\n\n[00:17:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of curious that there’s, real money has to be spent on this endeavor because, I was in London just a few weeks ago and I walked onto the Tube, you know, the underground train network. And the platform that I was on, the first thing that I saw when I walked onto the platform was this huge ad for Shopify. And then I looked left and I looked right and it was Shopify ads all the way down. They’d obviously, I mean I can only imagine how expensive that real estate is.\n\n\n\nBut the same thing would be true on radio, on TV, online, on print. These companies have gigantic, I mean truly eye watering budgets. And I don’t know if the WooCommerce side has to be a bit more guerrilla or if you also have a fairly gigantic budget. I don’t know if you’re able to peel any of that back. It sounds like marketing’s not really your thing, but maybe there’s bit of interest there.\n\n\n\n[00:18:25] Brian Coords: Yeah, I mean since we’re in the team, we see a lot of it. We did an event earlier this year where our marketing team walked through some of this stuff, so I can maybe give you a link to put in the show notes. We kind of wrote it, did a write up about that very concept. Because we get asked that a lot, why am I seeing Squarespace and Shopify ads everywhere? And it’s, you know, obviously if you look at the size of the companies, it’s a fact, like a whole factor difference, like we’re not anywhere near the size of those companies.\n\n\n\nAnd part of the issue is that you don’t just go to woocommerce.com and hand us money, you know? The Core plugin is free so the way we monetise is a lot different. You can run it anywhere. You can, a lot of people that run WooCommerce, they’re not paying us in any way because they’re using their own payment providers and those sorts of things.\n\n\n\nSo it is definitely more of a challenge. But this past year, that’s why the rebrand started, that’s why they’ve been investing in it. And it’s been kind of cool. There’s a lot of podcast ads that we’ve been running and LinkedIn ads and all these sorts of things. And part of the issue too is that our target market is just much more narrowly defined, and so WooCommerce is much more customisable. It’s extensible. You can do whatever you want with it. And that’s just a different value proposition then you would say to somebody who just wants the easy SaaS solution.\n\n\n\nSo it’s a lot of things, but it’s kind of just knowing who we want and targeting directly to them. And so you probably won’t see ads on the Tube at any time, but for certain areas you’re going to start seeing really targeted ads for people at the places that would actually really benefit from having WooCommerce.\n\n\n\n[00:19:51] Nathan Wrigley: That was the thought that I had about seeing the Shopify, in this case, ad on the London underground was just how much the audience, the eyeballs that were actually staring at that had no interest in it at all. And so almost like the bottomless pit of money that they must have to throw at these things. And obviously it sounds like you are targeting people.\n\n\n\nAre you kind of like riding on the coattails of WordPress in general? In other words, are you targeting existing WordPress users in the hope that they’ll think, okay, yeah, we’ve got a WordPress site, now it’s time to upgrade to WooCommerce, or is it a bit more scatter gone, you need a website, you need e-commerce, we’re your solution?\n\n\n\n[00:20:26] Brian Coords: Yeah, I mean that’s an interesting question because I think when WordPress was growing, it was a lot easier to target inside of WordPress, and I think now we’re seeing all the big companies reevaluate that. So I would say the ads that I see a lot are, you know, Hostinger, Elementor, wordpress.com. And I think a lot of them are realising now, you know, we need to target outside.\n\n\n\nSo for example, WooCommerce this year, we go to all the WordCamps, but we started going to e-commerce expos that are trade shows that are not anything to do with WordPress. It’s just for people in the commerce industry and partnering with companies that are in the marketing and commerce side. And so, yeah, it really is about branching out and finding those new areas.\n\n\n\nI think all WordPress companies are going to kind of have to start facing that as well because WordPress is 43% of the web. It’s like, how much bigger realistically can you get, once we pass 50%? I mean that’s, it’s pretty hard to grow at that point.\n\n\n\n[00:21:19] Nathan Wrigley: Did you attend any of those events? The sort of expos for e-commerce more generally?\n\n\n\n[00:21:23] Brian Coords: No.\n\n\n\n[00:21:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was going to follow up with a question about whether or not there was brand recognition. At those events, if you’ve got a WooCommerce stall, I was curious as to know what proportion of the public would walk past a WooCommerce sign and go, yeah, yeah, I know what that is, I’ve got complete familiarity with it. I feel like some of the SaaS ones, maybe they’ve done that job so well that that brand recognition is there, but maybe that work still needs to be done on the Woo side, I’m not sure.\n\n\n\n[00:21:49] Brian Coords: There’s definitely not going to be the same level of brand awareness. I think, like you said, like guerrilla marketing is definitely part of it. One of the things they do at these is they’ll find a local store that uses Woo and use them for swag. So they’ll get really good swag. They did like homemade, like embroidery things and all this sort of stuff. And so they end up getting very popular because of how cool the swag is, and how meaningful it is, and it supports a local merchant. But yeah, it’s a big battle, you know, to raise that brand awareness.\n\n\n\n[00:22:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, let’s just turn a bit more to your Dev Rel stuff. And you were saying that, well, I don’t need to repeat what you said. You said a little while ago, who it is that you are interfacing with out in the real world.\n\n\n\nHow does that work? Like, do you just sort of put content out there and tutorials out there and videos out there and change logs out there, and kind of hope that the people that need it get to see it somehow? Or is there more of an endeavor of, I don’t know, providing the bat phone, for want of a better word, to agencies and people so that they can communicate directly with you? How does that whole thing work?\n\n\n\n[00:22:48] Brian Coords: Yeah, so it’s interesting because there’s definitely different audiences that we have. So we have developers who are building extensions and are, you know, they’re selling WooCommerce plugins basically. And so we have them that we need to communicate with. And then we have the agencies and the agencies are building WooCommerce stores for people. So they’re setting up WooCommerce.\n\n\n\nAnd those two audiences, they both need some of the same information, but they also need a lot of different information. And so we’ve kind of seen a lot of change over the last year.\n\n\n\nAutomattic has launched a program called Automattic for Agencies. I’m not sure if you’ve seen this. It’s kind of like an agency program where you sign up and you get access to extensions, you can get affiliate fees, you can get kickbacks on payments, volume, all that sort of stuff.\n\n\n\nSo that side has really, sort of owned the agency space. And so what’s nice is we can go to them with any new information. We could say, hey, just pass this along to your audience in your next newsletter, that sort of thing. But really, if we want to have the conversations, I would say the Slack is the most common and we never lack for feedback. We get plenty of feedback. We do a monthly office hours in Slack or sometimes on Zoom, where developers will come and share their questions, that sort of thing. So we get tons of feedback. But yeah, it’s really just about being present there, being present on Twitter. We’re ramping up YouTube, because YouTube’s really important right now. And we’re just, like I said, small team and trying to hit all of those different content areas.\n\n\n\n[00:24:13] Nathan Wrigley: My sort of follow up question there really was going to be something about shouting into the void and I wondered if that, it was in fact what was happening. But it sounds from what you are saying is if, no, there is an actual loop there. You put stuff out and you get feedback. I mean I’m guessing, from the sounds of it, there’s maybe more feedback than you can actually cope with, which is intriguing. I had an intuition that would be the other way around.\n\n\n\n[00:24:32] Brian Coords: Yeah, I mean it definitely depends on, sometimes you get feedback that’s kind of the same. We know what people want, and we’re trying to work as fast as we can to make the changes that developers and the community want. And sometimes you put out a feature and it doesn’t resonate.\n\n\n\nBut generally when we do calls for testing of a new feature we’ll post, all right, we have a new feature coming, it’s in experimental mode, here’s how to turn it on and then let us know if it’s working for you, if it’s working with your plugin and stuff. We definitely have a pretty healthy group that will take the time to contribute back, let us know if things are working. I mean it’s an open source project. We get community pull requests. We get people, they need a feature, they build it and submit it and, you know, hopefully we merge it. And so the feedback loop is definitely there.\n\n\n\nBut if you’re, the thing that I’ve learned about WordPress is that I think it’s like an iceberg and like 90% of the WordPress community, they’re not really listening to WordPress content, and they’re not listening, they’re not even tracking WordPress in general. And so I think there’s probably a much broader community that we’re not getting access to, and they’re just living their daily lives and just building stores and stuff. And so I would love to find more of those groups. I think Facebook is probably a place that we haven’t even touched yet, and I’m sure a lot of them are there. There’s definitely work to be done there.\n\n\n\n[00:25:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that was maybe the piece that I was thinking. Is that Woo is the biggest solution out there. If memory serves, Woo is the biggest e-commerce platform out there. It kind of dwarfs all the others. I don’t even know if WooCommerce is bigger than the rest of them combined but, you know, it’s on that kind of level.\n\n\n\nAnd yet, if you were to have a, I don’t know, a Shopify store or something, there is probably like a little submit feedback button in the UI somewhere, and you can talk to the support representatives, and they’ll have the answer specifically because they know exactly what the platform does.\n\n\n\nBut the jigsaw puzzle over on the Woo side is, yeah, it must be much more messy, much more kind of difficult to wrangle everything. You know, you’ve got people, end users who are using WooCommerce. You’ve got developers who are building plugins. You’ve got agencies who are building on behalf of clients. You’ve got people who are building rival things so you’re in direct competition with people in the plugin space who are building rivals to WooCommerce. It’s just, well, messy. But that’s open source, right?\n\n\n\n[00:26:44] Brian Coords: I mean that’s exactly what it is. You know, we have, you have WooCommerce support, right? And our support team is really great. Every time I go to a conference and one of our support engineers is there, I’m always pointing to them to answer all the questions because they know the product so deeply.\n\n\n\nBut if you imagine the, you know, most WooCommerce stores will come to us for support, but there’s no financial relationship. If they’re not using our hosting company or they’re not using Woo Payments, or they’re not using extensions that they bought in the marketplace, maybe they bought their extensions just off the internet or something, there’s a good chance they might not be paying us any money at all. And yet, you know, we’re going to support them and make sure that they’re having a good experience, because that’s kind of the goal of it. So it’s definitely a bit of the Wild West out there.\n\n\n\n[00:27:28] Nathan Wrigley: There must be some kind of strange tension there as well. I mean, you’ve described it very eloquently and I think you’ve stepped around that beautifully, but that is a peculiar thing, isn’t it, that you would not have to deal with elsewhere? The fact that you may very well be dealing with rivals. You may well be dealing with people who are using up your time, but like you said, they have no relationship with you financially at all, but they built something, third party thing on top of the WooCommerce ecosystem, and I guess that’s just the broader philanthropic goal of something like WooCommerce. You’ve just got to step up and be there.\n\n\n\n[00:28:00] Brian Coords: Yeah, I mean I think wordpress.com probably has a lot of the same things because if you Google WordPress, you know, you’re probably going to end up on wordpress.com, even if you’re not their customer.\n\n\n\nOn the flip side though, you know, the benefit of being open source is that, like I said, we get community contributions. We get a lot of eyes on the software. A lot of people, they give us feedback, they give us code, they give us all sorts of things. So it is a bit of a trade off.\n\n\n\nBut I think it’s kind of worth it for the software to just exist freely and for everybody who runs on it, to always kind of know deep down that they own their store and they can do whatever they want with it, and they can put it wherever they want, and Automattic or WordPress or WooCommerce is never really going to take that away from them or take them down, you know?\n\n\n\n[00:28:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’d be curious to know what proportion of Woo kind of props up the broader WordPress project, if you know what I mean? I don’t think we need to go into that, and I don’t know if there’s any data out there anywhere, but there must be a lot of money sloshing around inside the WooCommerce ecosystem. It’d be interesting to know what proportion the broader WordPress ecosystem was was made up of just Woo stuff. That’d be an interesting thing to dig into.\n\n\n\n[00:29:01] Brian Coords: When I worked at an agency, the kind of rule was if you wanted to make money making websites, you did websites that made money. So e-commerce was a big part. People, you know, their website’s more critical to their business, so they’re going to be buying more plugins, they’re going to be paying more developers, they’re going to be using more tools. So I think that’s part of it. E-commerce isn’t the only way websites make money. There’s definitely a lot of other things, big publishers and that sort of stuff. But yeah, it’s definitely a big part of the community.\n\n\n\n[00:29:26] Nathan Wrigley: Well, big and not going anywhere. Speaking of going places though, what’s coming up in the near future? So when we’re recording this, it’s kind of the middle of December. I imagine this episode will hit in the beginning of 2026 at some point. Roughly around that kind of time, what’s the thinking? What are the, some of the top level items that people may not know about? What’s the stuff that you’re working on? Roadmap stuff, I guess.\n\n\n\n[00:29:46] Brian Coords: Yeah, I would say the big things that I’ve seen that are really the big focus right now is, number one is really making WooCommerce closer to WordPress Core, which means making WordPress Core a little better. So WooCommerce has been pretty ahead of the curve of transitioning to blocks, using block templates and block based everything. So, I mean you can do your whole WooCommerce store in the block editor, which gives you a lot of kind of design freedom. But that means if we need something better in the block editor, we’ve got to commit that up to the block editor and make Gutenberg better. So there’s a lot of work to improve a lot of stuff inside of Gutenberg so that your WooCommerce experience is better.\n\n\n\nSo that’s been a lot of the focus. And so we’re, there’s a lot of cool stuff coming around just new blocks, new block designs, patterns, things you can do to really customise the visual aspects of your store. And then the second big thing, I think that is taking up everybody’s mental space is AI. You can’t not talk about it. So it’s, that’s the other piece.\n\n\n\n[00:30:42] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, despite the fact that it consumes all the air in the room, it is so fascinating. Do you have any insight into some of the things that may be on the agenda for a WooCommerce store owner in the near future? The kind of things that you are thinking of. Even if they’re just aspirational for a WooCommerce store owner. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on that.\n\n\n\n[00:31:01] Brian Coords: Yeah, I think there’s two different aspects of it that are really going to be important. One is managing your store. So we have right now in beta what’s called an MCP server in Woo. And what it basically lets you do is open up, you know, ChatGPT or Claude or something and say, log into my WooCommerce store and update all my products, put them on sale, change out the pictures, write better copy for them. It kind of lets AI log into your store and do things for you.\n\n\n\nAnd so that’s in beta right now, and it’s pretty cool. I’ve been using it. It’s pretty neat. I’ve been setting up some demo stores for people, and I just go, all right, log in and make me, you know, 50 fake sweaters with a nice description in different colours. And it does it. It’s kind of mind blowing.\n\n\n\n[00:31:43] Nathan Wrigley: Do you trust it at this point? And I don’t mean, you know, the broader kind of debate about AI and whether it’s trustworthy. I mean, in terms of the store, you know, do you trust it to update all of the particular product lines and what have you, or update the images? Do you feel that if you’ve given that prompt, you can sort of sit back and go, okay, that is definitely being done?\n\n\n\n[00:32:02] Brian Coords: I haven’t done it on a live site, I will say. The nice thing too is you can have it ask you for permission every single time, and you can kind of see what it’s going to do. That obviously kind of ruins the whole efficiency part of it, but it can do that. So I think it’s early days.\n\n\n\nBut I do think, once you start interacting where you don’t have to actually log in and click a bunch of buttons, and you can just tell your computer what you want it to do, I think it’s going to be hard to come back from that. I think people are going to start expecting it. But I, yeah that’s, I mean we’re not doing that on the live, on any live sites, I hope not.\n\n\n\n[00:32:32] Nathan Wrigley: So that was half of it by the sounds of it. That was one of the threads. What was the other one?\n\n\n\n[00:32:35] Brian Coords: The other one, I think is about how people are going to be shopping in the future. And I think showing up, obviously all these chat companies, they need to make money, and we know that they’re going to start showing ads and they’re going to start wanting to do the same thing when you go to Google, and you look up something and it gives you some shopping recommendations and shows you some products you might want to buy and some ads. You know, we’re going to start seeing that in our chat bots and stuff.\n\n\n\nAnd so I think it’s going to be important for people that have WooCommerce stores, they want their products to show up there, and they want their ads to show up there, and they want to make sure that people who are using AI to get product recommendations, which my wife does all the time, that they’re going to show up there. So I think that’s the other half of it.\n\n\n\n[00:33:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Do you know it’s really curious, the whole, what we might have called SEO, which is fast giving way, I think, to AI. It’s kind of curious. I think there’s like a whole section where the discovery of the website is going to be everything. So an example might be apparel. I don’t suppose anybody’s just going to buy a blouse or a shirt based upon some text that they saw in a chat bot, but getting to that page and saying, find me, locally to me, find me a place which sells, I don’t know, affordable shirts for work, or something along those lines. And have a recommendation, which gets you to the WooCommerce store.\n\n\n\nBut for more utilitarian things, just the stuff that you don’t really care about like, I want to buy a bunch of nuts and bolts, or hammers, or spanners, or whatever it may be, I feel like there’ll be a point where the store itself, obviously all of that commerce will take place in the store, but it will be invisible to you as a user. You’ll just tell the AI, buy these things, I need 50, or even just repeat the order from last month for these things, and it’ll just magically happen in the background. You’ll get a receipt via email, and WooCommerce will have handled it. The site will have been notified in some way, but you’ll have had no interaction. So it’s kind of scary, but interesting at the same time.\n\n\n\n[00:34:23] Brian Coords: I think one of the thing, I think Google’s the best example because I think WordPress and Google have this really symbiotic relationship because we make the websites and they provide the traffic. And I think it’s been good for both of them. They want a bunch of websites to send people to, and we want them sending people to our websites. And so I think Google’s a great example.\n\n\n\nBut they’ve had product recommendations that you can connect to your WooCommerce store, you know, for a while now. It’s kind of in some ways not really that different from just Googling something. Google shows you some products and then you click through and you buy it.\n\n\n\nIf it becomes that seamless where you don’t even have to realise you’re going to a website, which I think is possible, I also wonder, will people want to do that? Will they feel as trustworthy? Maybe, maybe not. But either way, that is probably going to be the case.\n\n\n\nAnd so that’s going to require a lot of these, the discussion’s already happening. They have these payment protocols and things, and we’re starting to see the very beginning of it. So it’s kind of interesting to be inside of WooCommerce because the companies that do all this stuff, the Stripes and the PayPals and the Googles and stuff, these are partners that they work closely with. And you get to see a little behind the scenes of them trying to figure this out in real time, you know?\n\n\n\n[00:35:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it kind of speaks to trust really, doesn’t it? So the repeat order thing through a ChatGPT style interface or whatever that looks like in the future, be it voice or speaking to a camera or whatever it may be, I could totally see myself ordering the, I don’t know, the groceries or the toothpaste or whatever it is that, I really don’t need to see that thing. I don’t need to go to a shopping checkout. I just need to know that my next pack of toothpaste is going to arrive reliably tomorrow morning. That’s all I need to know. I feel like there is, there’s a there there, if you know what I mean? Despite the fact that we’re so wedded to this interface of, go to the website, look at the pictures, click the cart number, click how many you want, go to the cart, proceed with the checkout, dah, dah, dah. Most of that is going to be obsolete for the utilitarian stuff, I think. I don’t know. We’ll see.\n\n\n\n[00:36:15] Brian Coords: I feel like Amazon’s been trying that for a while, but I still have to check it because I feel like we return 30% of the things we buy at Amazon. It comes, it’s the wrong size, it doesn’t look anything like the picture, all that sort of stuff. Hopefully those problems still get solved, before we get to the point where I’m not even going to look at what I ordered. I think we still have a lot of time there.\n\n\n\n[00:36:33] Nathan Wrigley: Well, so even if that interface isn’t quite as radical as I just suggested, but even if there’s like a back and forth between the AI and the website. I don’t know, I ask for a particular thing, and then the chat interface or whatever it may be shows me a picture from the website or something along those lines. This whole scraping of the website and surfacing the content of the website, and then I can make those decisions based upon what I see. Maybe it’ll be a bit more back and forward, and far less of the AI, and more of the AI meets human kind of interface.\n\n\n\n[00:37:01] Brian Coords: Yeah, and I think a lot of it is, it’ll feel like magic to the end user with an AI, but really it’s just going to be a ton of code and protocols and extensions and things. Under the hood, that’s going to be a ton of manual work, getting all that stuff there. But I think with WooCommerce especially, most of the Woo stores I come across, they’re very weird, I guess is the best way to put it. They’re unique products, you know? They’re often not selling the toothpaste and that sort of stuff. Or if they are, they’re selling the very interesting toothpaste that you can only buy from this one company.\n\n\n\nSo I think that’s what’s fun about it, is I think it’ll really be for people looking for those weird, unique products, and the kind of stuff you’re not going to get on Amazon or you’re not going to get on a basic walmart.com or something. So yeah, I think it’ll be interesting to see where this goes.\n\n\n\n[00:37:44] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know if Automattic, or WordPress more generally, do you know if it’s investing anything in its own AI? Everything at the moment, all the oxygen seems to be being consumed by the, let’s say, four big players that we’ve all heard of. We don’t need to name the names, we all know who they are. But it’d be curious as to whether a company obviously deeply rooted in tech, like Automattic is inventing, creating those kind of things. That’d be a curious shift.\n\n\n\n[00:38:07] Brian Coords: Yeah, I mean you can see it already. Telex is a product that’s come out from Automattic. It lets you build blocks. They have a AI site builder. If you go to wordpress.com, a good amount of people are actually, the first thing they do is use this AI site builder that gets you kind of from zero to like a pretty decent starting site. And then you can go in and the block editor and customise everything.\n\n\n\nIs Automattic training their own models and stuff? I don’t think so, or at least I don’t know. But, I mean there’s a bunch of stuff happening, that’s the public facing stuff, which is building websites. There’s stuff around WooCommerce, there’s stuff around support. Our support is very heavily leaned into AI and it’s actually very good. There’s all sorts of these other places.\n\n\n\nAnd then there’s a ton of stuff internally in the company that we have because, you know, when you work with a thousand people, there’s a lot of information there. And so we have internal stuff that’s kind of like search through all of our, you know, internal dialogue and find this conversation and summarise it for me. And so it’s all there. It’ll be interesting to see which ones end up becoming good products.\n\n\n\n[00:39:05] Nathan Wrigley: Well, it sounds like exciting times. It sounds like you’ve landed in the right part of Automattic for you at least anyway. Yeah, fascinating times. The year 2026 for e-commerce, and WooCommerce more specifically, looks very, very bright.\n\n\n\nCan we just ask you, before we go, where would be the best place to find you if anybody wants to reach out and say hi?\n\n\n\n[00:39:23] Brian Coords: Yeah, definitely. So if you are interested in WooCommerce, you can go to developer.woo.com. That’s kind of our developer blog and it has, it’ll take you to like the docs, it’ll take you to the community Slack, it’ll take you to our email newsletter and all that sort of stuff. That’s developer.woo.com.\n\n\n\nFor me, it’s my name, briancoords.com, and I’m mostly active on Twitter and YouTube these days. I tried all the other social networks, but everyone in WordPress stays on Twitter, so that’s where I’ll be for the foreseeable future.\n\n\n\n[00:39:47] Nathan Wrigley: So Brian is, as you would imagine it’s spelled, but Coords has two O’s. So it’s C-O-O-R-D-S. I’ll put all of the links in the show notes so that anything that Brian mentioned can be found there, wptavern.com. Search for Brian’s name and you will be able to find that episode. So Brian Coords, thank you so much for chatting to me today.\n\n\n\n[00:40:05] Brian Coords: Yeah. Thank you.\n\n\n\n\nOn the podcast today we have Brian Coords.\n\n\n\nBrian has been active in the WordPress space for over a decade, starting out in agencies building and managing websites, and is now a developer advocate at WooCommerce, bridging the gap between Woo\u2019s internal engineers and the wider developer community. His journey includes being a high school teacher, working for nonprofits, and writing for the WP Tavern, before landing his role at Automattic.\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re interested in where WooCommerce, and WordPress itself, are headed, this episode will help, as Brian shares insights on WordPress\u2019s evolving focus, the importance of embracing AI, and how a slower pace of change can be a strength in any open source ecosystem.\n\n\n\nHe talks about the massive rebrand at WooCommerce, the challenges and opportunities in competing with SaaS giants, and the unique developer relations role that balances his technical experience with communication skills.\n\n\n\nWe get into how the team Brian works with supports developers and agencies with documentation, office hours, and feedback loops, and how WooCommerce\u2019s global reach makes for a complex but thriving ecosystem. There\u2019s discussion about recent marketing efforts, the realities of open source support, and the surprising diversity of WooCommerce users worldwide.\n\n\n\nTowards the end, we look ahead to what\u2019s coming for WooCommerce, which is greater integration with block-based editing in WordPress Core, major investments in AI to streamline store management, and the future landscape of online shopping.\n\n\n\nIf you want to hear how WooCommerce and WordPress are responding to a rapidly changing tech environment, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\n\u200abriancoords.com\u200a\n\n\n\nWooCommerce\n\n\n\n\u200aState of the Word 2025\n\n\n\n\u200aWooCommerce Community Slack\n\n\n\nAutomattic for Agencies\n\n\n\nWooPayments\n\n\n\n\u200aTelex\n\n\n\nWoo Developer Blog", "date_published": "2026-01-07T10:09:35-05:00", "date_modified": "2026-01-07T10:09:38-05:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/199-Brian-Coords-on-WooCommerces-Challenges-and-Innovations-in-a-Changing-WordPress-Landscape.jpg", "tags": [ "Dev Rel", "podcast", "woocommerce" ], "summary": "In this episode, Nathan Wrigley interviews Brian Coords, Developer Advocate at WooCommerce, about his career path, WooCommerce\u2019s recent rebranding, and its approach to developer relations. They discuss how WooCommerce balances its open source ethos, support challenges, and global reach, as well as the platform\u2019s growing focus on AI and enhanced integration with WordPress Core. Brian also shares insights into upcoming features and the evolving landscape of e-commerce, emphasising WooCommerce\u2019s adaptability and strong community connections. If you want to hear how WooCommerce and WordPress are responding to a rapidly changing tech environment, this episode is for you.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2317097/c1e-41krkb1p2oos817q6-qd1r1n1pcv87-e0sjof.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=201777", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/198-muntasir-sakib-on-bridging-the-gap-between-wordpress-plugin-development-and-marketing-success", "title": "#198 \u2013 Muntasir Sakib on Bridging the Gap Between WordPress Plugin Development and Marketing Success", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, build it and they might come, bridging the gap between WordPress plugin development and marketing success.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Muntasir Sakib. Muntasir, has been active in the WordPress space since 2018, working with well-known plugins and companies such as Tutor, LMS, Droip and more. He’s played a key role scaling products from their early days helping them achieve wider adoption.
\n\n\n\nHe’s also been active in the WordPress community more broadly at events such as WordCamp Asia and Word Camp Sylhet.
\n\n\n\nThe focus of today’s episode is a crucial, yet often overlooked topic, especially if you’re a plugin developer. It’s a chat about the moment when plugin development ends and the real success can begin. In a WordPress marketplace that’s more crowded and competitive than ever, simply build it and they will come, does not mean that users will. Muntasir wants to bust the myth by digging into why marketing is essential from day one, and not an afterthought left until launch day.
\n\n\n\nWe start by learning about Muntasir’s journey through the WordPress ecosystem, and his approach to balancing development and marketing for plugins. He explains the key differences between marketing in the WordPress ecosystem versus the SaaS world. In WordPress, you don’t control the full stack and your users expect openness and interoperability, making community focus and support critical.
\n\n\n\nThe discussion then turns to the practicalities of launching and growing a plugin. Why throwing new features at a product isn’t enough, and why listening to users and building community relationships is often more valuable than racing to add features no one has asked for.
\n\n\n\nWe talk about the dos and don’ts gained from Muntasir’s experience, including the pitfalls of relying on lifetime deals for early revenue, and why a recurring revenue model is key for long-term sustainability.
\n\n\n\nWe also talk through the role of community, partnerships, and events like WordCamps, not just as marketing opportunities, but as places to build the relationships and collaborations that can help plugins thrive.
\n\n\n\nif you’re a WordPress plugin developer wondering how to turn a finished product into real success, or you’re trying to figure out where marketing fits into your roadmap, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Muntasir Sakib.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Muntasir Sakib. Hello.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:47] Muntasir Sakib: Hello, Nathan. How are you doing?
\n\n\n\n[00:03:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Very nice to connect with you. We’ve had a long chat prior to hitting the record button. And we really touched on all sorts of things in life. But that’s not the purpose of the podcast today. We’re going to keep it firmly on the WordPress side of things, and particularly about marketing, I guess maybe a good way to sum it up, which is a topic that we don’t often get into.
\n\n\n\nBefore we get into that, Muntasir, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind just introducing yourself. Just tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do. How come you’re connected to the WordPress community? Whatever you think fits the bill.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:18] Muntasir Sakib: Thank you, Nathan, for giving me the opportunity to talk about myself a bit, and it’s nice being with you here.
\n\n\n\nWell, I’m Muntasir, I’m Muntasir Sakib and I have been with WordPress since 2018. So you can say over half a decade. And throughout my career, I worked for some really, really amazing plugins and companies such as Tutor LMS, Droip, EasyCommerce, Core Designer, ThumbPress.
\n\n\n\nSo when I joined JoomShaper, like premium, back in the days, I was talking about 2019, we had Tutor LMS and Tutor LMS had probably 15,000 or less active installations back in the time. And then within three and a half years, with the help of the amazing team we had back then, we all worked together day and night, and with our beautiful clients and customers all around the globe we achieved 100,000 plus active installations within three and a half years. And that was a phenomenal number to mention in the WordPress industry, in the WordPress ecosystem.
\n\n\n\nAnd then there’s Droip, the first ever true no-code website builder for WordPress, and that was born. It got a traction that we ever expected it to be that much. So we were overwhelmed about it as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd then during my tenure so far, I, along with my team, represented Tutor LMS and Droip at WordCamp Asia 2023, WordCamp Sylhet 2023 and some other WordPress meetups as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd why did we join WordCamps? That could be a question. It’s because we sponsored those events to show our gratitude to the WordPress community and the ecosystem. Because there’s a thing in WordPress, which we say Five for the Future, as per Matt. So every product companies and every business that do business in the WordPress industry should contribute in the WordPress ecosystem, contributes in the open source market so that it get better every day.
\n\n\n\nBecause we are working in the ecosystem, we bring some real value for our clients. So what if our foundation is not strong enough to get those clients, to get those correct tractions? Because in the SaaS market nowadays, there are lots of, plethora of SaaS products, but we have to bring something together, stronger and better than SaaS, so that people believe in us and they come together to work with us and use our products.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. So you’ve been working with a variety of different clients in the WordPress space. And when I put out a message saying, I’d like to chat with a variety of people on this podcast, you reached out and you mentioned that you wanted to talk about essentially the gap where development finishes and success begins. Because I think it’s fair to say that if you were to rewind the clock, I don’t know, maybe 15 years or something like that, maybe 10 years, it was much more straightforward to build a product as a developer, put it out into the marketplace, and because you were potentially the prime mover, the first person to have such a thing, you might succeed just off the basis of build it and they will come. That old chestnut.
\n\n\n\nWhereas now the marketplace is much more mature, much more saturated. And so the idea of build it and they will come. Oh, really, I mean unless you are incredibly fortunate, or maybe you’ve already had some success and so have, I don’t know, your company has notoriety or what have you, that really isn’t the case anymore. When development finishes there needs to be this whole marketing piece that swings into action to alert the community.
\n\n\n\nSo how would you differentiate between the plugin marketplace, in terms of marketing, and the SaaS marketplace? What makes those two things different?
\n\n\n\n[00:07:59] Muntasir Sakib: Well, that’s a pretty important question that we mostly overlook. Nathan, thank you for bringing that out. We need to be very specific. When it’s about WordPress product marketing, it’s more like ecosystem driven than SaaS. When we’re talking about SaaS, you control the entire environment, your onboarding journey, your analytics, your pricing model, your customer journey. Everything is under the one umbrella.
\n\n\n\nBut when it’s about WordPress, then you are selling inside an open ecosystem where users make dozens of plugins together. So you cannot give your customer some boundaries that if you use my product or my plugin, you cannot use others. It doesn’t make any sense.
\n\n\n\nSo they’re going to use as many plugins as they want to, and you have to be compatible with every one of those. So you don’t control hosting, themes, PHP versions or the user’s technical setup, all of which impact your product experience, right?
\n\n\n\nAnd in wp.org, wp.org acts as a distribution channel. So you need to think about it. It’s more of like app store, which influence reviews, support expectations, and growth. In most cases, all the products start from wp.org, which provides a free version of every plugin.
\n\n\n\nSo the founders and the marketers mostly overlook the thing that free plugin often becomes your biggest acquisition engine. So your marketing depends heavily on the documentation, the on point documentation, and the onboarding journey inside your WordPress dashboard. Your operation, the smoother it is, the better it’ll be to get the traction of the pro customers and the continuous updates, and your community presence. If you have no community presence in the ecosystem in your WordPress community, then you are just gone.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:50] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so curious, when you sort of say it like that, the idea of logging into the WordPress backend, if you’re a plugin developer or a regular user of WordPress, you’ll be really familiar with this. If you go into a website, there’s often dozens of different things. And maybe a lot of them are kind of overlapping, so there might be things which integrate with other things. And as a plugin developer, that kind of overhead is something that you just don’t really need to worry about with SaaS, because you just build the thing, and you make sure that it works and everybody logs in, and it works because it’s yours and you control the infrastructure and the hardware that it’s on and the servers and all of that kind of stuff.
\n\n\n\nWhereas the WordPress thing, it’s just so much more complicated and you’ve really got to be thinking all the time about sticking to coding standards to make sure that at least you know your thing is doing it right. And if there’s a conflict and something breaks, well, you can be fairly sure that it wasn’t your fault, it might be somebody else’s fault. So it is much, much more complicated.
\n\n\n\nAnd then throw into it all of the other bits and pieces that you’ve just mentioned, community and all of that kind of stuff. I mean, it really is a very complicated picture, and I think getting more and more complicated year by year.
\n\n\n\nSo have you, in your previous work, have you kind of identified this moment where the development cycle ends and the marketing cycle begins, if you like, but the plugin developer has basically made no preparation for the marketing piece? They’ve just built things and then have an expectation that, oh, it’ll just sell itself. Do you see that? Is that a real thing?
\n\n\n\n[00:11:22] Muntasir Sakib: Yeah, that’s definitely a real thing. And the thing is, I don’t give the blame to the developers actually, because they were supposed to build the product, they were supposed to follow the compliance issues, and they’re supposed to build fresh code so that the thing cannot break when people are using it massively.
\n\n\n\nBut it’s mostly from our and from the marketers end that we need to tell them beforehand, like what to do and how can we get the KPIs? What are the things that we need to sell to our customers that going to help them to solve their problems?
\n\n\n\nBecause the fun fact is, in most cases, when our founders or a developers is planning to build a product, a plugin, they were thinking from their end like, okay, fine, I want to build a product so that the product going to be that much good that everyone going to use it. But it’s not the case, because we have almost like 59,000 plugins right now in WordPress directory. So in every category, in every niche, there’s a plethora of products, plethora of competitors. So there were some big competitors and there are some upcoming competitors who are small.
\n\n\n\nSo how they compete with someone who has already hundred thousand or a million of active installations, millions of happy users. We cannot compete them with just everything they have. Whether if we come with some specific niche, like some specific problems that they’re facing from our competitors, and we can add value to them, to our clients, they would be happy enough to try our product.
\n\n\n\nSo you need to give something to the customers first so that they can rely on you. And if you have a good reputation beforehand, like if you are not new in this industry, you have some other plugins beforehand, and if have a good reputation and you are coming with another solution, they’re surely going to try it. And there’s the catch.
\n\n\n\nWhen people start using your product, they give you the feedback, and those feedbacks are gold mines. So you need to talk with your customers. You need to talk with the developers. You need to connect with them on regular basis. And that’s the job of us. That’s the real job of us, like the support system, the marketers, content creators. The documentations all need to come along and they need to figure out the problems, what they’re facing, and what the customers are asking for. What are the bugs they’re having? It can be a bug based on their environment, like everyone has their different environment, right?
\n\n\n\nBut the thing is, when we speak to the customers, when we talk to them and when we try to figure out their issues and try to solve their problems, they’re going to do the best marketing you can ever imagine, the word of mouth. And WordPress is doing the exact same thing. WordPress is depending on word of mouth. Your 10 happy customers is way more important and valuable to you than a hundred thousand dollars.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:08] Nathan Wrigley: And I think that kind of speaks to what I would imagine, or at least what I would hope to be the case. When I look back at my time in WordPress and I go right back to the beginning of it, it felt like a really good, solid playground for hobbyists. There were an awful lot of people who were doing things for a hobby, and then now it’s become much more professional. In fact, when I joined the WordPress community, that whole thing was just beginning to open up. There were a few companies who were making a great deal of success for themselves, selling things into the marketplace, you know, they had a free version and a pro version. But it was still, it still felt like the beginning of that, the wild west of that.
\n\n\n\nAnd I think that still there’s a little bit of that hobbyist mentality still out there where, you know, you attend events, you hang out with like-minded people. You can see that this individual over here, they had success, I could do the same. But there’s that whole thing that you’ve got to have prior to building anything, and it sounds to me like you’re making a real difference between the marketing people and the development people.
\n\n\n\nAnd, okay, maybe you are this unique person that can do both. Maybe you are brilliant at developing and you are going to be an amazing marketer. I think it’s fair to say that most people are not that. They don’t have the time, they’ve got other things to do, their skillset is developing, their skillset is marketing, they’re kind of different entities.
\n\n\n\nBut it feels like for many people, that realisation hasn’t been made yet, that you need to, before launching, so maybe even at the moment you think, I am going to build this thing, maybe that’s the moment where you think, okay, two thirds of my budget is going to go into development and one third into marketing, or 50 50 or 70 30, or whatever it may be. I think that’s what you’re saying is that you need to be thinking about this right from the beginning, not leaving it until the last minute if you want it to be a success.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:57] Muntasir Sakib: Exactly, exactly. You have to have a plan from day one when you started developing a product. How and where should I go? Who are my primary audiences? Whom to reach out. Which influencers should we work with? And when should I give them the beta version to test? I can give a beta version to like hundreds of peoples, who are willingly giving it a try. Tell us some beautiful insights, some valuable insights so that we can develop the product even more before going to the market. So that’s the thing.
\n\n\n\nIn most cases, what developers are thinking, what mostly the founders who are mostly developers, they’re thinking like, well, I can develop the product like 80% and then for the rest 20%, we can start working with the marketing team. I can think of how to go to the market and how to have some early traction. Early traction is easy, but it’s not the kicker. Early traction is easy because if you have a freemium plan, you can definitely go for wp.org. There’s a free version so everyone can use it.
\n\n\n\nThere’s a term, founder led marketing. So when you are a founder, yeah, you can just announce on your socials, like, yeah, I have a plugin. I developed it and I launched it on wp.org so you can try it. Everyone going to try it. No problem on that. But the thing is, there might be a hundred plus active installations on day one, but on day three it could go way below 10, 10 to 15.
\n\n\n\nSo where are the rest of the people went? They just came here to try the product, you didn’t ask for anything. You didn’t know how to contact with them. You didn’t know how to collect the data, how to collect the information that you don’t have in your mind, in your head. What’s the fuss about? What’s the problem they’re having? So they didn’t even bother to share?
\n\n\n\nYou need to ask first. Be the first person to ask the questions like, what are the problems you are having using my product? I eagerly want to know. I want to solve your problem. So when I am talking with each and every person, each and every client, as he’s valuable, we bring value to their life, they’re going to bring something for me too.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think the curious thing about a lot of the developers that I know who’ve brought a plugin to the market is that they’ve been focused a lot on the features. They’ve got this laundry list of features and they get really wrapped up in the features and they execute that, they build the features. And then maybe somewhere along the line they realise, oh, there’s this other feature that would be quite nice to have. Yeah, let’s do that. And then before you know it, the idea of launching the product just gets pushed back and back and back because, oh, there’s another feature and, oh, I’ve thought of another feature. And on it goes.
\n\n\n\nAnd the whole time you haven’t been doing exactly what you said, kind of trying to figure out how to build up an audience, trying to figure out how to get influencers involved, how to put it out on, in this case, wordpress.org or whatever it may be. And that whole puzzle, that whole jigsaw piece, inside that puzzle needs to be thought out, I think for many people, at a much earlier date.
\n\n\n\nI get quite a lot of email from people who would like to have some product or service distributed through something like a podcast. On some level, it’s amazing that the people would like me to help them, but also when you go to the property that they’ve got, you can see that the thing that they’ve built is amazing, but also the marketing side of things hasn’t really been taken care of. So the website is nowhere near the standard that the plugin is. Everything about it, you know, the documentation is nowhere near the standard that the plugin is and so on. So there’s this sort of real disconnect.
\n\n\n\nSo do you have any like do’s and don’ts? Have you got any, like a list of things that you highly recommend people do if they want to market a plugin? But also some things which you think, actually no, stay away from that, that’s snake oil, people have tried that and it doesn’t seem to work. Any order of any of those things.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:35] Muntasir Sakib: Absolutely. If you’re talking about like developing features and releasing it every alternate week, these are the most common picture when we are thinking about WordPress ecosystem, or any other products. 80% people are doing that. But the problem occurs when, feature first development means you keep building what you want, not what your customers actually struggle with, right?
\n\n\n\nSo when you release a product, you have the roadmap. You make it public. You show the customers like, well, these features are coming next, but people don’t bother about what features are coming next, they’re mostly bothered about what you have right now, and are those working properly or not? You might have, like when you were thinking of any e-commerce, you might have 20 or 30 payment gateway integrations with it. But I don’t need all the payment gateway integrations, right? I need specifically like one or two, like maybe I need PayPal integrations or Stripe integrations or Wise or some other integrations like Klarna.
\n\n\n\nThe rest of the integrations you have are useless to me, so I don’t even bother whether they’re coming or not. I do bother about my product and I do bother about whether, as I am using your product, so even giving me the value of my requirements, like the PayPal is working fine, in the next update the PayPal is working still fine and it’s secured. When I click the update button, or if I enabled auto update, with an update the PayPal is not working. My business will go through the loss.
\n\n\n\nSo it’s your responsibility to take care of my business because I’m using your product. So you have to make sure that every specific niche I am giving the solution for, are working properly after every updates and everything.
\n\n\n\nI often see companies who are trying to develop the update version, who are trying to give updates regular basis. They often consider giving it the quality assurance, the QA. The QA team mostly were doing nothing. They were just going through on the surface level. They bring the update, and then the people updated it, and the site crashed. And then they figured out, well, it might be your environment issues. It might be from your end because we are doing nothing. It’s working fine from our end. So let me see. Give me your backend credentials so that I can see what’s going on here. It’s a big no. It’s a big no for me. If you are talking about me, like it’s a big no. Why would I give my credentials to you? It’s your responsibility to take care of your product so that it’s working fine from my end.
\n\n\n\nThese are the common things, and apart from that, when we are talking about feature first development, this leads to slower performance. The more the features, the slower the performance is, and it’s non-negotiable. The higher support workload and our roadmap, as I said, a roadmap that is reactive, not strategic. So strategic roadmap is important. Reactive roadmap means you are actually way far behind from your competitors. So many founders think that features is equal to value, but features are not equal to value. In reality, clarity, reliability, and use case fit, drive adoption and revenue.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:49] Nathan Wrigley: So the really interesting thing about this is that there’s really two completely different worlds in collision here. So if you are the developer, you are basically sat in a chair looking at a screen, wrangling code. And it’s this, you’ve got this small window on the universe. You’re just sort of staring into this thing. You’ve got complete control over it. And it’s clean and it’s, I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s all just right in front of you.
\n\n\n\nWhereas the other side, the marketing side is the exact opposite. It’s like, turn away from the computer and look at the entire planet. Every single human being in it, all of the messiness of that, trying to find them, trying to figure out how you’re going to talk with them, trying to figure out how you’re going to let them know that you exist. Trying to figure out how you’re going to let them know that your product is exactly what they need. Trying to figure out how to do the SEO piece, and we could go on and on.
\n\n\n\nThere really are two very different universes colliding there. And I feel that in many cases, a really different personality type fits those things. Like, you know, the developer sitting in the chair concentrating on that code is a really different kind of personality type, if you know what I mean, than the person who can turn around, look at the world, cope with that messiness and figure all of that out. I’m not saying that they’re not possible by two people, I’m just saying they are very, very different things. One, much messier and harder to figure out than the other.
\n\n\n\nBut from what you are saying as a developer, you have to do both. You have to turn around and look at the world in all of its messiness because your users are going to kind of, you know, they’re the people that are going to tell you whether or not what you’re building is a good thing or what they need.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:26] Muntasir Sakib: No, no, I think we got it wrong because I didn’t say that developers need to do both of the work, they need to code fresh and they need to look around all the users, what they’re saying and how their product is performing. It’s not their job.
\n\n\n\nWe need to be very specific. If I’m a developer, my only responsibility should be to do fresh code and to make sure that my product is working fine on every environment. And it’s the marketer’s duty to talk to the customers, to talk to the world, and if as a founder, I don’t need to jeopardise my business, my company, then I need to align with everything, with every team possible. Like there’s sales team, there’s marketing team, there’s support team, content team, developer team.
\n\n\n\nThe thing is, market research should be done by the marketers. Market research should be done, the customers should be talked with the marketers, with the salespeople. They need to come along with the ideas that, well, fine, these are the opportunities we have right now. So if we want to build a product, if we want to develop a product, we need to bring these three or four features before releasing the product in the market because these are the things people are having problem with. So I am giving you this list of features, or this list of things that you need to have in your product, and then it can go to the design team. The design team come up with a very beautiful design and then the developers start developing it.
\n\n\n\nAnd then we need to figure out the fact that, well, the product is almost 80% done, so we need to reach to the influencers, we need to reach to some YouTube influencers who have great audience so that they can use it. So we can give them the beta version. They can use it, they can bring some beautiful solutions, some beautiful suggestions to make the product even more mature before going to the market. And we can share the thought with the developers so that they can update accordingly.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:22] Nathan Wrigley: Right, I got it. Yeah, so I get the piece there. So really when I was talking about, you know, the developer facing one way and then facing the other way, the computer and the world, you are introducing then, in the middle, the developer turns around and instead of talking to the world, talks to the marketer.
\n\n\n\nAnd then the marketer absorbs those messages, whatever it is that the developer thinks, okay, it’s ready, it’s nearly ready, here’s the features. They communicate with the marketing people, the marketing people turn that into real world action. And then they themselves turn around and look at that bigger world and figure out how to do that.
\n\n\n\nI think the curious thing is, in our community, there’s so many of the solo developers who, when that thing that you’ve just suggested, gets suggested. That some of the budget goes to a marketer, it’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no, I can do it all. I’ll be fine, because we know it can work in some rare cases. But it’s not going to be as effective as getting somebody else on board.
\n\n\n\nBut I think in our community, there is a, I don’t really know how to encapsulate this, but there’s a little bit of a divide between the marketing side of things, the sort of sponsorship side of things, the affiliate side of things, all of those bits, and the developers. And it’s not always an easy conversation to have.
\n\n\n\nI suppose, in the end it comes down to things like money and things like that, which our community is maybe not as comfortable talking about as other different communities.
\n\n\n\nSo is there anything that you think is a bad idea? I remember in the show notes that you sent to me, there were a few things where you thought, for example, you mentioned things like the one-time revenue trap of lifetime deals and things like that. Do you want to mention some of the gotchas, some of the things in the past that you’ve thought, nope, don’t do that, that’s a bad idea?
\n\n\n\n[00:28:00] Muntasir Sakib: Yeah. You were talking about the solo developer. There are a lot of solo developers, I might say. I must say because they are a one person team, and every project they build, every line of code they write, it’s like their children. So it’s always normal to be biased to your product. Like, yes, my product is the best because I have developed it with all my passion, with all my hard work. Why aren’t people using it?
\n\n\n\nAnd you might have a tight budget because when you are solo developer, the budget’s going to be tight. So you might not have that much money to spend on marketing before going to the market. And that’s fine. Welcome the community because the WordPress community is so helpful that even if you go to the community people and you tell them like, well, I am working on a product all by myself, and I want someone to come up with me and test the product and give me some valuable insights about what I can do better, before going to the market. And they’re always helpful. There are like hundreds and thousands of people who can help you, making your product even better by testing your beta versions, by testing your RC versions.
\n\n\n\nThe thing is you have to be vocal. You have to talk to the poeple. You have to ask for help because you are helpless, you are working day and night on your product, and you cannot let people know, you cannot talk to people. You are very shy to ask for help, to ask for a hand. So how do I know that you are building a very beautiful product? I am here to help you, you just need to ask me. You want to give it a try? Sure thing. I will definitely give it a try and have some suggestions for you if you may allow me. That’s it.
\n\n\n\nAnd about the question is one time revenue, you think? Yeah. And whether it’s a trap or not. It’s a trap. It’s a trap. Nathan, I can say to you, like many WordPress founders rely on lifetime deals, one time license and large seasonal discounts. I mean Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the year end sales. Might going to create some cash upfront, but that doesn’t bring sustainability.
\n\n\n\nSustainability is something way more different than cashflow. Because sustainability comes with recurring revenue. Your support is recurring, but if you have only lifetime deals, then your revenue is not. So how can you go along with your support team year after year, when you are running just once from a customer?
\n\n\n\nBecause once a customer has got something lifetime from your end, you have to give him support. You have to provide him top-notch support for the rest of your lives, for the rest of products life. And then every year, fixed cost goes up. Teams, servers, your support team will go along. Your team will be bigger than the last year, along with your product. So your fixed cost will always go up. And lifetime buyers often create the highest support load while paying the least.
\n\n\n\nSo you have to have that in your mind that when I am working for a easy traction and I am giving them the lifetime deals, and I want to onboard thousands of customers, lifetime customers, you need to think that you need to give them support, you need to develop the product for these thousand customers who will not ever going to pay a single penny to you anymore. So this is a big burden for you.
\n\n\n\nSo real WordPress companies that scale, focus on renewals, annual plans, and clear upgrade perks. So here are the things, you might have like three to four pricing plans for one site, for ten sites and for unlimited sites. And I bought the one site license. And then I fell in love with your product, and I want to upgrade to ten site plans. So there should be a very, like one click upgradation plan, upgradation system where I can just go from one site to ten sites. And if you can’t give me that opportunity, and if you going to tell me like, okay, fine, buy the ten site license, give me the one site license key, and I’m going to dispatch that. I’m going to deactivate that and activate your license manually, that doesn’t make sense because that’s a hassle to me. I’m your customer, so you need to give me the smoother way. This is the thing.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:09] Nathan Wrigley: When you’ve been working for some of the, I don’t know, agencies or companies where there’s obviously a marketing team which has been a part of the success. Do you know roughly, I mean, maybe it’s just a ballpark figure, do you know roughly how much of the wider team so, you know, think of Company X, which is a development company, but they’ve got in-house marketing as well. Do you know how much of the company, in terms of personnel or revenue, is given over to marketing as opposed to everything else? So, you know, is it typically like in the sort of 20%, 30%, 50%? What’s your rough estimate for those?
\n\n\n\n[00:32:43] Muntasir Sakib: My rough estimate is your marketing budget should always be at least 30% of your total estimation cost. Because marketers need to talk to people, they need to reach out to the people, and they need to collaborate with most of the influencers who going to work for you, and you have to give them the honorarium to do the work for you.
\n\n\n\nSo if the budget is not standard enough, then they have the boundaries to not do their works. So you need to give them the free hand, explore the sides to work with the other WordPress companies, to collaborate with better partners, to collaborate with other companies and to onboard their clients as well, so that your client base will increase day by day.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:24] Nathan Wrigley: And in the old way, when I was talking about sort of 15 years ago, it felt like most things were driven by interaction with the WordPress community. Do you think that’s still like a viable way of doing things or, you know, in the case of, I don’t know, let’s say that you’ve got an LMS plugin or something like that. Your market really isn’t other WordPressers, your market is the entire world, you know, educators and what have you.
\n\n\n\nSo do you put much stock in sort of turning up to events, and sponsoring WordPress stuff, or do you sort of advise, focusing on your customers? I’m just trying to figure out where the community bit might fit into all that.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:59] Muntasir Sakib: Well, the thing is, let’s talk about the sponsorship first because in WordCamps you need to be sponsored under your product. If we are talking about any LMS plugin that we have. We want to let the WordPress community know that, yeah, we exist and we sponsor to this event. And the most important thing is only in the WordCamps or the WordPress meetups you’re going to get along with other companies in person, so that you can connect with them, you can talk to them. You can figure out an opportunity to work with other companies. If I am an LMS company, I have an LMS plugin, my customer’s going to need some hosting plan. They might need some security plugins. They might need some SEO plugins.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:39] Nathan Wrigley: It’s more of a sort of partnership opportunity.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:42] Muntasir Sakib: Exactly.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:42] Nathan Wrigley: Figuring out who, in some curious case that you may not yet have imagined, how you could collaborate in the future. So like you said, you know, hosting or whatever it may be, or maybe there’s a form plugin out there, which you kind of get the intuition that, oh, we could use bits of your form to onboard people to our platform, or whatever it may be. So it’s very much not about marketing to the end user. It’s more about figuring out partnerships and things like that. But also being a good custodian of an open source project, I guess, as well.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:11] Muntasir Sakib: Of course, yeah. That’s true. Because in every other companies who are doing great in WordPress ecosystem, they have a very strong relationship with the other companies. They have the mutual connections with all the people, with all the companies their customers might going to need. And the partnerships, affiliates are the best way to do the marketing to grow, to scale your product in WordPress market. Because as I said at first, word of mouth is something that brings the most valuable customers in your back.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, you only have to look on Facebook and LinkedIn and things like that to realise that there’s a lot of people in the WordPress community who attend these events and hang out with other people at these events and make great friendships and partnerships and those kind of things. I presume they’re doing it because, A, it’s fun, but also there’s a real value to it, you know? I know all these people and so I know where to go when I’ve got a particular problem, or I just have an intuition that I want to spin my company off in a slightly different direction. I’ve now got some people that I know, some contacts that I’ve already made who might be able to help me with that.
\n\n\n\nOkay. What about the, sort of last one, and it’s actually alluding to your, one of the questions that you wrote here. Is there anything about the sort of psychology of this, the sort of mindset? Because I think with the best will in the world, a lot of people in our space, they kind of see marketing as a bit of a, an icky thing. Something that they really don’t feel comfortable doing.
\n\n\n\nIs there any kind of psychology here that you could recommend or some kind of mind shift that somebody like me, for example, who is terrible at marketing, that I might be able to undergo, some magic wand that you can wave to help me out?
\n\n\n\n[00:36:41] Muntasir Sakib: We all are learners. We learn every day. I’m still a learner, and most of the world famous marketers are learners, even the passionate developers. You still learn how to develop well, how to write fresh code in even a better way.
\n\n\n\nBut the most important thing is there are some mindset differences. There are someone who is a builder, and there are someone who is a business owner. So the thin line between builders and business owners are builders think about features. They think about features, what to come along with next, what to give to our customers, whether they like it or not. But founders think, I build outcomes and value. I bring value to the customers.
\n\n\n\nAnother mindset, if we talk about like the short term revenue and the long-term sustainability. So when we are selling lifetime deals, one time license, that’s the short term revenue that give me an early traction, a good traction within a few months. But it’ll never going to be sustainable. If you want to be sustainable, you need to have a recurring plan, you need to have recurring customers, you need to onboard more customers, but your recurring customers should be like around 70 to 80% or even more than that, so that you can sustain all along.
\n\n\n\nThen if I’m talking about another mindset that it can be the focus on the product versus focus on the user. Failing founders, like those who cannot scale, they think that what feature should we add next? But the scaling founders, if you talk to them, they’re going to think where my users are getting stuck, so I need to solve the problem first. I need to bring value to their life so that they come along with me. They’re going to be my best audience and they’re going to do the marketing for me.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:24] Nathan Wrigley: This stuff is so intuitive to you because obviously it’s something that you’ve spent a long time thinking about. I’ve got to say, for me, a lot of this stuff is kind of intuitive, but not at the same time. I’m definitely more on the kind of builder side than on the marketing side. I don’t know what it is about marketing, I just struggle to do those kind of things.
\n\n\n\nAnd you’ve written a lot of your thoughts up in three articles, which you’ve published on LinkedIn. I don’t know if they’ve been published elsewhere, but they’re definitely on LinkedIn. And they describe all of the different scenarios of, you know, what founders need to do, how plugins can have success, where the community lies, how you can get yourself involved in different things. But also quite a lot of work you’ve put into what not to do. So example, lifetime deals, which you don’t think are a particularly great idea.
\n\n\n\nI’m going to link to all of those different bits and pieces in the show notes so that people can go and read those, and then hopefully having been armed with all of that knowledge, they’ll understand better what it is that we’ve been talking about.
\n\n\n\nWhere do we find you, Muntasir? Where do we go online? Apart from LinkedIn, obviously, where could we find you?
\n\n\n\n[00:39:28] Muntasir Sakib: I’m always available on Facebook, on Twitter. And I am always available on LinkedIn as well. These are the platforms you are going to find me.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:36] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I will link to the LinkedIn posts and I will endeavor to dig out your Twitter handle as well. So hopefully people can find you and if they’ve got questions, you are open to suggestions.
\n\n\n\nSo thank you so much for chatting to me today. A subject of great interest to me because, well, as I said, there’s just great interest for me. I won’t say more than that. But thank you very much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:56] Muntasir Sakib: Thank you, Nathan. Thank you for talking to me. And it’s great talking to you and sharing my knowledge and expertise with you.
\nSo on the podcast today we have Muntasir Sakib.
\n\n\n\nMuntasir has been active in the WordPress space since 2018, working with well-known plugins and companies such as Tutor LMS, Droip and more. He\u2019s played a key role scaling products from their early days, helping them achieve wider adoption. He\u2019s also been active in the WordPress community more broadly at events such as WordCamp Asia and WordCamp Sylhet.
\n\n\n\nThe focus of today\u2019s episode is a crucial yet often overlooked topic, especially if you\u2019re a plugin developer. It\u2019s a chat about the moment when plugin development ends and real success can begin. In a WordPress marketplace that\u2019s more crowded and competitive than ever, simply \u2018build it and they will come\u2019 does not mean users will. Muntasir wants to bust the myth by digging into why marketing is essential from day one, and not an afterthought left until launch day.
\n\n\n\nWe start by learning about Muntasir\u2019s journey through the WordPress ecosystem, and his approach to balancing development and marketing for plugins. He explains the key differences between marketing in the WordPress ecosystem versus the SaaS world. In WordPress, you don\u2019t control the full stack and your users expect openness and interoperability, making community focus and support critical.
\n\n\n\nThe discussion then turns to the practicalities of launching and growing a plugin. Why throwing new features at a product isn\u2019t enough, and why listening to users and building community relationships is often more valuable than racing to add features no one has asked for.
\n\n\n\nWe talk about the do\u2019s and don\u2019ts gained from Muntasir\u2019s experience, including the pitfalls of relying on lifetime deals for early revenue, and why a recurring revenue model is key for long-term sustainability.
\n\n\n\nWe also talk through the role of community, partnerships, and events like WordCamps, not just as marketing opportunities, but as places to build the relationships and collaborations that can help plugins thrive.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re a WordPress plugin developer wondering how to turn a finished product into a real success, or you\u2019re trying to figure out where marketing fits into your roadmap, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nProject / Events which Muntasir has been involved with:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u200aWordCamp Asia 2023
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThree of Muntasir’s articles on LinkedIn:
\n\n\n\nWhy Marketing Is Still the Missing Piece for Most WordPress Product Companies
\n\n\n\nThe Hidden Cost of Lifetime Deals: What Plugin Owners Don’t Realize Until It’s Too Late
\n\n\n\nAfter 5 Years and 10+ Plugins: Here\u2019s Why Most WordPress Products Fail to Scale
\n", "content_text": "Transcript\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, build it and they might come, bridging the gap between WordPress plugin development and marketing success.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Muntasir Sakib. Muntasir, has been active in the WordPress space since 2018, working with well-known plugins and companies such as Tutor, LMS, Droip and more. He’s played a key role scaling products from their early days helping them achieve wider adoption.\n\n\n\nHe’s also been active in the WordPress community more broadly at events such as WordCamp Asia and Word Camp Sylhet.\n\n\n\nThe focus of today’s episode is a crucial, yet often overlooked topic, especially if you’re a plugin developer. It’s a chat about the moment when plugin development ends and the real success can begin. In a WordPress marketplace that’s more crowded and competitive than ever, simply build it and they will come, does not mean that users will. Muntasir wants to bust the myth by digging into why marketing is essential from day one, and not an afterthought left until launch day.\n\n\n\nWe start by learning about Muntasir’s journey through the WordPress ecosystem, and his approach to balancing development and marketing for plugins. He explains the key differences between marketing in the WordPress ecosystem versus the SaaS world. In WordPress, you don’t control the full stack and your users expect openness and interoperability, making community focus and support critical.\n\n\n\nThe discussion then turns to the practicalities of launching and growing a plugin. Why throwing new features at a product isn’t enough, and why listening to users and building community relationships is often more valuable than racing to add features no one has asked for.\n\n\n\nWe talk about the dos and don’ts gained from Muntasir’s experience, including the pitfalls of relying on lifetime deals for early revenue, and why a recurring revenue model is key for long-term sustainability.\n\n\n\nWe also talk through the role of community, partnerships, and events like WordCamps, not just as marketing opportunities, but as places to build the relationships and collaborations that can help plugins thrive.\n\n\n\nif you’re a WordPress plugin developer wondering how to turn a finished product into real success, or you’re trying to figure out where marketing fits into your roadmap, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Muntasir Sakib.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Muntasir Sakib. Hello.\n\n\n\n[00:03:47] Muntasir Sakib: Hello, Nathan. How are you doing?\n\n\n\n[00:03:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Very nice to connect with you. We’ve had a long chat prior to hitting the record button. And we really touched on all sorts of things in life. But that’s not the purpose of the podcast today. We’re going to keep it firmly on the WordPress side of things, and particularly about marketing, I guess maybe a good way to sum it up, which is a topic that we don’t often get into.\n\n\n\nBefore we get into that, Muntasir, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind just introducing yourself. Just tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do. How come you’re connected to the WordPress community? Whatever you think fits the bill.\n\n\n\n[00:04:18] Muntasir Sakib: Thank you, Nathan, for giving me the opportunity to talk about myself a bit, and it’s nice being with you here.\n\n\n\nWell, I’m Muntasir, I’m Muntasir Sakib and I have been with WordPress since 2018. So you can say over half a decade. And throughout my career, I worked for some really, really amazing plugins and companies such as Tutor LMS, Droip, EasyCommerce, Core Designer, ThumbPress.\n\n\n\nSo when I joined JoomShaper, like premium, back in the days, I was talking about 2019, we had Tutor LMS and Tutor LMS had probably 15,000 or less active installations back in the time. And then within three and a half years, with the help of the amazing team we had back then, we all worked together day and night, and with our beautiful clients and customers all around the globe we achieved 100,000 plus active installations within three and a half years. And that was a phenomenal number to mention in the WordPress industry, in the WordPress ecosystem.\n\n\n\nAnd then there’s Droip, the first ever true no-code website builder for WordPress, and that was born. It got a traction that we ever expected it to be that much. So we were overwhelmed about it as well.\n\n\n\nAnd then during my tenure so far, I, along with my team, represented Tutor LMS and Droip at WordCamp Asia 2023, WordCamp Sylhet 2023 and some other WordPress meetups as well.\n\n\n\nAnd why did we join WordCamps? That could be a question. It’s because we sponsored those events to show our gratitude to the WordPress community and the ecosystem. Because there’s a thing in WordPress, which we say Five for the Future, as per Matt. So every product companies and every business that do business in the WordPress industry should contribute in the WordPress ecosystem, contributes in the open source market so that it get better every day.\n\n\n\nBecause we are working in the ecosystem, we bring some real value for our clients. So what if our foundation is not strong enough to get those clients, to get those correct tractions? Because in the SaaS market nowadays, there are lots of, plethora of SaaS products, but we have to bring something together, stronger and better than SaaS, so that people believe in us and they come together to work with us and use our products.\n\n\n\n[00:06:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. So you’ve been working with a variety of different clients in the WordPress space. And when I put out a message saying, I’d like to chat with a variety of people on this podcast, you reached out and you mentioned that you wanted to talk about essentially the gap where development finishes and success begins. Because I think it’s fair to say that if you were to rewind the clock, I don’t know, maybe 15 years or something like that, maybe 10 years, it was much more straightforward to build a product as a developer, put it out into the marketplace, and because you were potentially the prime mover, the first person to have such a thing, you might succeed just off the basis of build it and they will come. That old chestnut.\n\n\n\nWhereas now the marketplace is much more mature, much more saturated. And so the idea of build it and they will come. Oh, really, I mean unless you are incredibly fortunate, or maybe you’ve already had some success and so have, I don’t know, your company has notoriety or what have you, that really isn’t the case anymore. When development finishes there needs to be this whole marketing piece that swings into action to alert the community.\n\n\n\nSo how would you differentiate between the plugin marketplace, in terms of marketing, and the SaaS marketplace? What makes those two things different?\n\n\n\n[00:07:59] Muntasir Sakib: Well, that’s a pretty important question that we mostly overlook. Nathan, thank you for bringing that out. We need to be very specific. When it’s about WordPress product marketing, it’s more like ecosystem driven than SaaS. When we’re talking about SaaS, you control the entire environment, your onboarding journey, your analytics, your pricing model, your customer journey. Everything is under the one umbrella.\n\n\n\nBut when it’s about WordPress, then you are selling inside an open ecosystem where users make dozens of plugins together. So you cannot give your customer some boundaries that if you use my product or my plugin, you cannot use others. It doesn’t make any sense.\n\n\n\nSo they’re going to use as many plugins as they want to, and you have to be compatible with every one of those. So you don’t control hosting, themes, PHP versions or the user’s technical setup, all of which impact your product experience, right?\n\n\n\nAnd in wp.org, wp.org acts as a distribution channel. So you need to think about it. It’s more of like app store, which influence reviews, support expectations, and growth. In most cases, all the products start from wp.org, which provides a free version of every plugin.\n\n\n\nSo the founders and the marketers mostly overlook the thing that free plugin often becomes your biggest acquisition engine. So your marketing depends heavily on the documentation, the on point documentation, and the onboarding journey inside your WordPress dashboard. Your operation, the smoother it is, the better it’ll be to get the traction of the pro customers and the continuous updates, and your community presence. If you have no community presence in the ecosystem in your WordPress community, then you are just gone.\n\n\n\n[00:09:50] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so curious, when you sort of say it like that, the idea of logging into the WordPress backend, if you’re a plugin developer or a regular user of WordPress, you’ll be really familiar with this. If you go into a website, there’s often dozens of different things. And maybe a lot of them are kind of overlapping, so there might be things which integrate with other things. And as a plugin developer, that kind of overhead is something that you just don’t really need to worry about with SaaS, because you just build the thing, and you make sure that it works and everybody logs in, and it works because it’s yours and you control the infrastructure and the hardware that it’s on and the servers and all of that kind of stuff.\n\n\n\nWhereas the WordPress thing, it’s just so much more complicated and you’ve really got to be thinking all the time about sticking to coding standards to make sure that at least you know your thing is doing it right. And if there’s a conflict and something breaks, well, you can be fairly sure that it wasn’t your fault, it might be somebody else’s fault. So it is much, much more complicated.\n\n\n\nAnd then throw into it all of the other bits and pieces that you’ve just mentioned, community and all of that kind of stuff. I mean, it really is a very complicated picture, and I think getting more and more complicated year by year.\n\n\n\nSo have you, in your previous work, have you kind of identified this moment where the development cycle ends and the marketing cycle begins, if you like, but the plugin developer has basically made no preparation for the marketing piece? They’ve just built things and then have an expectation that, oh, it’ll just sell itself. Do you see that? Is that a real thing?\n\n\n\n[00:11:22] Muntasir Sakib: Yeah, that’s definitely a real thing. And the thing is, I don’t give the blame to the developers actually, because they were supposed to build the product, they were supposed to follow the compliance issues, and they’re supposed to build fresh code so that the thing cannot break when people are using it massively.\n\n\n\nBut it’s mostly from our and from the marketers end that we need to tell them beforehand, like what to do and how can we get the KPIs? What are the things that we need to sell to our customers that going to help them to solve their problems?\n\n\n\nBecause the fun fact is, in most cases, when our founders or a developers is planning to build a product, a plugin, they were thinking from their end like, okay, fine, I want to build a product so that the product going to be that much good that everyone going to use it. But it’s not the case, because we have almost like 59,000 plugins right now in WordPress directory. So in every category, in every niche, there’s a plethora of products, plethora of competitors. So there were some big competitors and there are some upcoming competitors who are small.\n\n\n\nSo how they compete with someone who has already hundred thousand or a million of active installations, millions of happy users. We cannot compete them with just everything they have. Whether if we come with some specific niche, like some specific problems that they’re facing from our competitors, and we can add value to them, to our clients, they would be happy enough to try our product.\n\n\n\nSo you need to give something to the customers first so that they can rely on you. And if you have a good reputation beforehand, like if you are not new in this industry, you have some other plugins beforehand, and if have a good reputation and you are coming with another solution, they’re surely going to try it. And there’s the catch.\n\n\n\nWhen people start using your product, they give you the feedback, and those feedbacks are gold mines. So you need to talk with your customers. You need to talk with the developers. You need to connect with them on regular basis. And that’s the job of us. That’s the real job of us, like the support system, the marketers, content creators. The documentations all need to come along and they need to figure out the problems, what they’re facing, and what the customers are asking for. What are the bugs they’re having? It can be a bug based on their environment, like everyone has their different environment, right?\n\n\n\nBut the thing is, when we speak to the customers, when we talk to them and when we try to figure out their issues and try to solve their problems, they’re going to do the best marketing you can ever imagine, the word of mouth. And WordPress is doing the exact same thing. WordPress is depending on word of mouth. Your 10 happy customers is way more important and valuable to you than a hundred thousand dollars.\n\n\n\n[00:14:08] Nathan Wrigley: And I think that kind of speaks to what I would imagine, or at least what I would hope to be the case. When I look back at my time in WordPress and I go right back to the beginning of it, it felt like a really good, solid playground for hobbyists. There were an awful lot of people who were doing things for a hobby, and then now it’s become much more professional. In fact, when I joined the WordPress community, that whole thing was just beginning to open up. There were a few companies who were making a great deal of success for themselves, selling things into the marketplace, you know, they had a free version and a pro version. But it was still, it still felt like the beginning of that, the wild west of that.\n\n\n\nAnd I think that still there’s a little bit of that hobbyist mentality still out there where, you know, you attend events, you hang out with like-minded people. You can see that this individual over here, they had success, I could do the same. But there’s that whole thing that you’ve got to have prior to building anything, and it sounds to me like you’re making a real difference between the marketing people and the development people.\n\n\n\nAnd, okay, maybe you are this unique person that can do both. Maybe you are brilliant at developing and you are going to be an amazing marketer. I think it’s fair to say that most people are not that. They don’t have the time, they’ve got other things to do, their skillset is developing, their skillset is marketing, they’re kind of different entities.\n\n\n\nBut it feels like for many people, that realisation hasn’t been made yet, that you need to, before launching, so maybe even at the moment you think, I am going to build this thing, maybe that’s the moment where you think, okay, two thirds of my budget is going to go into development and one third into marketing, or 50 50 or 70 30, or whatever it may be. I think that’s what you’re saying is that you need to be thinking about this right from the beginning, not leaving it until the last minute if you want it to be a success.\n\n\n\n[00:15:57] Muntasir Sakib: Exactly, exactly. You have to have a plan from day one when you started developing a product. How and where should I go? Who are my primary audiences? Whom to reach out. Which influencers should we work with? And when should I give them the beta version to test? I can give a beta version to like hundreds of peoples, who are willingly giving it a try. Tell us some beautiful insights, some valuable insights so that we can develop the product even more before going to the market. So that’s the thing.\n\n\n\nIn most cases, what developers are thinking, what mostly the founders who are mostly developers, they’re thinking like, well, I can develop the product like 80% and then for the rest 20%, we can start working with the marketing team. I can think of how to go to the market and how to have some early traction. Early traction is easy, but it’s not the kicker. Early traction is easy because if you have a freemium plan, you can definitely go for wp.org. There’s a free version so everyone can use it.\n\n\n\nThere’s a term, founder led marketing. So when you are a founder, yeah, you can just announce on your socials, like, yeah, I have a plugin. I developed it and I launched it on wp.org so you can try it. Everyone going to try it. No problem on that. But the thing is, there might be a hundred plus active installations on day one, but on day three it could go way below 10, 10 to 15.\n\n\n\nSo where are the rest of the people went? They just came here to try the product, you didn’t ask for anything. You didn’t know how to contact with them. You didn’t know how to collect the data, how to collect the information that you don’t have in your mind, in your head. What’s the fuss about? What’s the problem they’re having? So they didn’t even bother to share?\n\n\n\nYou need to ask first. Be the first person to ask the questions like, what are the problems you are having using my product? I eagerly want to know. I want to solve your problem. So when I am talking with each and every person, each and every client, as he’s valuable, we bring value to their life, they’re going to bring something for me too.\n\n\n\n[00:18:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think the curious thing about a lot of the developers that I know who’ve brought a plugin to the market is that they’ve been focused a lot on the features. They’ve got this laundry list of features and they get really wrapped up in the features and they execute that, they build the features. And then maybe somewhere along the line they realise, oh, there’s this other feature that would be quite nice to have. Yeah, let’s do that. And then before you know it, the idea of launching the product just gets pushed back and back and back because, oh, there’s another feature and, oh, I’ve thought of another feature. And on it goes.\n\n\n\nAnd the whole time you haven’t been doing exactly what you said, kind of trying to figure out how to build up an audience, trying to figure out how to get influencers involved, how to put it out on, in this case, wordpress.org or whatever it may be. And that whole puzzle, that whole jigsaw piece, inside that puzzle needs to be thought out, I think for many people, at a much earlier date.\n\n\n\nI get quite a lot of email from people who would like to have some product or service distributed through something like a podcast. On some level, it’s amazing that the people would like me to help them, but also when you go to the property that they’ve got, you can see that the thing that they’ve built is amazing, but also the marketing side of things hasn’t really been taken care of. So the website is nowhere near the standard that the plugin is. Everything about it, you know, the documentation is nowhere near the standard that the plugin is and so on. So there’s this sort of real disconnect.\n\n\n\nSo do you have any like do’s and don’ts? Have you got any, like a list of things that you highly recommend people do if they want to market a plugin? But also some things which you think, actually no, stay away from that, that’s snake oil, people have tried that and it doesn’t seem to work. Any order of any of those things.\n\n\n\n[00:19:35] Muntasir Sakib: Absolutely. If you’re talking about like developing features and releasing it every alternate week, these are the most common picture when we are thinking about WordPress ecosystem, or any other products. 80% people are doing that. But the problem occurs when, feature first development means you keep building what you want, not what your customers actually struggle with, right?\n\n\n\nSo when you release a product, you have the roadmap. You make it public. You show the customers like, well, these features are coming next, but people don’t bother about what features are coming next, they’re mostly bothered about what you have right now, and are those working properly or not? You might have, like when you were thinking of any e-commerce, you might have 20 or 30 payment gateway integrations with it. But I don’t need all the payment gateway integrations, right? I need specifically like one or two, like maybe I need PayPal integrations or Stripe integrations or Wise or some other integrations like Klarna.\n\n\n\nThe rest of the integrations you have are useless to me, so I don’t even bother whether they’re coming or not. I do bother about my product and I do bother about whether, as I am using your product, so even giving me the value of my requirements, like the PayPal is working fine, in the next update the PayPal is working still fine and it’s secured. When I click the update button, or if I enabled auto update, with an update the PayPal is not working. My business will go through the loss.\n\n\n\nSo it’s your responsibility to take care of my business because I’m using your product. So you have to make sure that every specific niche I am giving the solution for, are working properly after every updates and everything.\n\n\n\nI often see companies who are trying to develop the update version, who are trying to give updates regular basis. They often consider giving it the quality assurance, the QA. The QA team mostly were doing nothing. They were just going through on the surface level. They bring the update, and then the people updated it, and the site crashed. And then they figured out, well, it might be your environment issues. It might be from your end because we are doing nothing. It’s working fine from our end. So let me see. Give me your backend credentials so that I can see what’s going on here. It’s a big no. It’s a big no for me. If you are talking about me, like it’s a big no. Why would I give my credentials to you? It’s your responsibility to take care of your product so that it’s working fine from my end.\n\n\n\nThese are the common things, and apart from that, when we are talking about feature first development, this leads to slower performance. The more the features, the slower the performance is, and it’s non-negotiable. The higher support workload and our roadmap, as I said, a roadmap that is reactive, not strategic. So strategic roadmap is important. Reactive roadmap means you are actually way far behind from your competitors. So many founders think that features is equal to value, but features are not equal to value. In reality, clarity, reliability, and use case fit, drive adoption and revenue.\n\n\n\n[00:22:49] Nathan Wrigley: So the really interesting thing about this is that there’s really two completely different worlds in collision here. So if you are the developer, you are basically sat in a chair looking at a screen, wrangling code. And it’s this, you’ve got this small window on the universe. You’re just sort of staring into this thing. You’ve got complete control over it. And it’s clean and it’s, I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s all just right in front of you.\n\n\n\nWhereas the other side, the marketing side is the exact opposite. It’s like, turn away from the computer and look at the entire planet. Every single human being in it, all of the messiness of that, trying to find them, trying to figure out how you’re going to talk with them, trying to figure out how you’re going to let them know that you exist. Trying to figure out how you’re going to let them know that your product is exactly what they need. Trying to figure out how to do the SEO piece, and we could go on and on.\n\n\n\nThere really are two very different universes colliding there. And I feel that in many cases, a really different personality type fits those things. Like, you know, the developer sitting in the chair concentrating on that code is a really different kind of personality type, if you know what I mean, than the person who can turn around, look at the world, cope with that messiness and figure all of that out. I’m not saying that they’re not possible by two people, I’m just saying they are very, very different things. One, much messier and harder to figure out than the other.\n\n\n\nBut from what you are saying as a developer, you have to do both. You have to turn around and look at the world in all of its messiness because your users are going to kind of, you know, they’re the people that are going to tell you whether or not what you’re building is a good thing or what they need.\n\n\n\n[00:24:26] Muntasir Sakib: No, no, I think we got it wrong because I didn’t say that developers need to do both of the work, they need to code fresh and they need to look around all the users, what they’re saying and how their product is performing. It’s not their job.\n\n\n\nWe need to be very specific. If I’m a developer, my only responsibility should be to do fresh code and to make sure that my product is working fine on every environment. And it’s the marketer’s duty to talk to the customers, to talk to the world, and if as a founder, I don’t need to jeopardise my business, my company, then I need to align with everything, with every team possible. Like there’s sales team, there’s marketing team, there’s support team, content team, developer team.\n\n\n\nThe thing is, market research should be done by the marketers. Market research should be done, the customers should be talked with the marketers, with the salespeople. They need to come along with the ideas that, well, fine, these are the opportunities we have right now. So if we want to build a product, if we want to develop a product, we need to bring these three or four features before releasing the product in the market because these are the things people are having problem with. So I am giving you this list of features, or this list of things that you need to have in your product, and then it can go to the design team. The design team come up with a very beautiful design and then the developers start developing it.\n\n\n\nAnd then we need to figure out the fact that, well, the product is almost 80% done, so we need to reach to the influencers, we need to reach to some YouTube influencers who have great audience so that they can use it. So we can give them the beta version. They can use it, they can bring some beautiful solutions, some beautiful suggestions to make the product even more mature before going to the market. And we can share the thought with the developers so that they can update accordingly.\n\n\n\n[00:26:22] Nathan Wrigley: Right, I got it. Yeah, so I get the piece there. So really when I was talking about, you know, the developer facing one way and then facing the other way, the computer and the world, you are introducing then, in the middle, the developer turns around and instead of talking to the world, talks to the marketer.\n\n\n\nAnd then the marketer absorbs those messages, whatever it is that the developer thinks, okay, it’s ready, it’s nearly ready, here’s the features. They communicate with the marketing people, the marketing people turn that into real world action. And then they themselves turn around and look at that bigger world and figure out how to do that.\n\n\n\nI think the curious thing is, in our community, there’s so many of the solo developers who, when that thing that you’ve just suggested, gets suggested. That some of the budget goes to a marketer, it’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no, I can do it all. I’ll be fine, because we know it can work in some rare cases. But it’s not going to be as effective as getting somebody else on board.\n\n\n\nBut I think in our community, there is a, I don’t really know how to encapsulate this, but there’s a little bit of a divide between the marketing side of things, the sort of sponsorship side of things, the affiliate side of things, all of those bits, and the developers. And it’s not always an easy conversation to have.\n\n\n\nI suppose, in the end it comes down to things like money and things like that, which our community is maybe not as comfortable talking about as other different communities.\n\n\n\nSo is there anything that you think is a bad idea? I remember in the show notes that you sent to me, there were a few things where you thought, for example, you mentioned things like the one-time revenue trap of lifetime deals and things like that. Do you want to mention some of the gotchas, some of the things in the past that you’ve thought, nope, don’t do that, that’s a bad idea?\n\n\n\n[00:28:00] Muntasir Sakib: Yeah. You were talking about the solo developer. There are a lot of solo developers, I might say. I must say because they are a one person team, and every project they build, every line of code they write, it’s like their children. So it’s always normal to be biased to your product. Like, yes, my product is the best because I have developed it with all my passion, with all my hard work. Why aren’t people using it?\n\n\n\nAnd you might have a tight budget because when you are solo developer, the budget’s going to be tight. So you might not have that much money to spend on marketing before going to the market. And that’s fine. Welcome the community because the WordPress community is so helpful that even if you go to the community people and you tell them like, well, I am working on a product all by myself, and I want someone to come up with me and test the product and give me some valuable insights about what I can do better, before going to the market. And they’re always helpful. There are like hundreds and thousands of people who can help you, making your product even better by testing your beta versions, by testing your RC versions.\n\n\n\nThe thing is you have to be vocal. You have to talk to the poeple. You have to ask for help because you are helpless, you are working day and night on your product, and you cannot let people know, you cannot talk to people. You are very shy to ask for help, to ask for a hand. So how do I know that you are building a very beautiful product? I am here to help you, you just need to ask me. You want to give it a try? Sure thing. I will definitely give it a try and have some suggestions for you if you may allow me. That’s it.\n\n\n\nAnd about the question is one time revenue, you think? Yeah. And whether it’s a trap or not. It’s a trap. It’s a trap. Nathan, I can say to you, like many WordPress founders rely on lifetime deals, one time license and large seasonal discounts. I mean Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the year end sales. Might going to create some cash upfront, but that doesn’t bring sustainability.\n\n\n\nSustainability is something way more different than cashflow. Because sustainability comes with recurring revenue. Your support is recurring, but if you have only lifetime deals, then your revenue is not. So how can you go along with your support team year after year, when you are running just once from a customer?\n\n\n\nBecause once a customer has got something lifetime from your end, you have to give him support. You have to provide him top-notch support for the rest of your lives, for the rest of products life. And then every year, fixed cost goes up. Teams, servers, your support team will go along. Your team will be bigger than the last year, along with your product. So your fixed cost will always go up. And lifetime buyers often create the highest support load while paying the least.\n\n\n\nSo you have to have that in your mind that when I am working for a easy traction and I am giving them the lifetime deals, and I want to onboard thousands of customers, lifetime customers, you need to think that you need to give them support, you need to develop the product for these thousand customers who will not ever going to pay a single penny to you anymore. So this is a big burden for you.\n\n\n\nSo real WordPress companies that scale, focus on renewals, annual plans, and clear upgrade perks. So here are the things, you might have like three to four pricing plans for one site, for ten sites and for unlimited sites. And I bought the one site license. And then I fell in love with your product, and I want to upgrade to ten site plans. So there should be a very, like one click upgradation plan, upgradation system where I can just go from one site to ten sites. And if you can’t give me that opportunity, and if you going to tell me like, okay, fine, buy the ten site license, give me the one site license key, and I’m going to dispatch that. I’m going to deactivate that and activate your license manually, that doesn’t make sense because that’s a hassle to me. I’m your customer, so you need to give me the smoother way. This is the thing.\n\n\n\n[00:32:09] Nathan Wrigley: When you’ve been working for some of the, I don’t know, agencies or companies where there’s obviously a marketing team which has been a part of the success. Do you know roughly, I mean, maybe it’s just a ballpark figure, do you know roughly how much of the wider team so, you know, think of Company X, which is a development company, but they’ve got in-house marketing as well. Do you know how much of the company, in terms of personnel or revenue, is given over to marketing as opposed to everything else? So, you know, is it typically like in the sort of 20%, 30%, 50%? What’s your rough estimate for those?\n\n\n\n[00:32:43] Muntasir Sakib: My rough estimate is your marketing budget should always be at least 30% of your total estimation cost. Because marketers need to talk to people, they need to reach out to the people, and they need to collaborate with most of the influencers who going to work for you, and you have to give them the honorarium to do the work for you.\n\n\n\nSo if the budget is not standard enough, then they have the boundaries to not do their works. So you need to give them the free hand, explore the sides to work with the other WordPress companies, to collaborate with better partners, to collaborate with other companies and to onboard their clients as well, so that your client base will increase day by day.\n\n\n\n[00:33:24] Nathan Wrigley: And in the old way, when I was talking about sort of 15 years ago, it felt like most things were driven by interaction with the WordPress community. Do you think that’s still like a viable way of doing things or, you know, in the case of, I don’t know, let’s say that you’ve got an LMS plugin or something like that. Your market really isn’t other WordPressers, your market is the entire world, you know, educators and what have you.\n\n\n\nSo do you put much stock in sort of turning up to events, and sponsoring WordPress stuff, or do you sort of advise, focusing on your customers? I’m just trying to figure out where the community bit might fit into all that.\n\n\n\n[00:33:59] Muntasir Sakib: Well, the thing is, let’s talk about the sponsorship first because in WordCamps you need to be sponsored under your product. If we are talking about any LMS plugin that we have. We want to let the WordPress community know that, yeah, we exist and we sponsor to this event. And the most important thing is only in the WordCamps or the WordPress meetups you’re going to get along with other companies in person, so that you can connect with them, you can talk to them. You can figure out an opportunity to work with other companies. If I am an LMS company, I have an LMS plugin, my customer’s going to need some hosting plan. They might need some security plugins. They might need some SEO plugins.\n\n\n\n[00:34:39] Nathan Wrigley: It’s more of a sort of partnership opportunity.\n\n\n\n[00:34:42] Muntasir Sakib: Exactly.\n\n\n\n[00:34:42] Nathan Wrigley: Figuring out who, in some curious case that you may not yet have imagined, how you could collaborate in the future. So like you said, you know, hosting or whatever it may be, or maybe there’s a form plugin out there, which you kind of get the intuition that, oh, we could use bits of your form to onboard people to our platform, or whatever it may be. So it’s very much not about marketing to the end user. It’s more about figuring out partnerships and things like that. But also being a good custodian of an open source project, I guess, as well.\n\n\n\n[00:35:11] Muntasir Sakib: Of course, yeah. That’s true. Because in every other companies who are doing great in WordPress ecosystem, they have a very strong relationship with the other companies. They have the mutual connections with all the people, with all the companies their customers might going to need. And the partnerships, affiliates are the best way to do the marketing to grow, to scale your product in WordPress market. Because as I said at first, word of mouth is something that brings the most valuable customers in your back.\n\n\n\n[00:35:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, you only have to look on Facebook and LinkedIn and things like that to realise that there’s a lot of people in the WordPress community who attend these events and hang out with other people at these events and make great friendships and partnerships and those kind of things. I presume they’re doing it because, A, it’s fun, but also there’s a real value to it, you know? I know all these people and so I know where to go when I’ve got a particular problem, or I just have an intuition that I want to spin my company off in a slightly different direction. I’ve now got some people that I know, some contacts that I’ve already made who might be able to help me with that.\n\n\n\nOkay. What about the, sort of last one, and it’s actually alluding to your, one of the questions that you wrote here. Is there anything about the sort of psychology of this, the sort of mindset? Because I think with the best will in the world, a lot of people in our space, they kind of see marketing as a bit of a, an icky thing. Something that they really don’t feel comfortable doing.\n\n\n\nIs there any kind of psychology here that you could recommend or some kind of mind shift that somebody like me, for example, who is terrible at marketing, that I might be able to undergo, some magic wand that you can wave to help me out?\n\n\n\n[00:36:41] Muntasir Sakib: We all are learners. We learn every day. I’m still a learner, and most of the world famous marketers are learners, even the passionate developers. You still learn how to develop well, how to write fresh code in even a better way.\n\n\n\nBut the most important thing is there are some mindset differences. There are someone who is a builder, and there are someone who is a business owner. So the thin line between builders and business owners are builders think about features. They think about features, what to come along with next, what to give to our customers, whether they like it or not. But founders think, I build outcomes and value. I bring value to the customers.\n\n\n\nAnother mindset, if we talk about like the short term revenue and the long-term sustainability. So when we are selling lifetime deals, one time license, that’s the short term revenue that give me an early traction, a good traction within a few months. But it’ll never going to be sustainable. If you want to be sustainable, you need to have a recurring plan, you need to have recurring customers, you need to onboard more customers, but your recurring customers should be like around 70 to 80% or even more than that, so that you can sustain all along.\n\n\n\nThen if I’m talking about another mindset that it can be the focus on the product versus focus on the user. Failing founders, like those who cannot scale, they think that what feature should we add next? But the scaling founders, if you talk to them, they’re going to think where my users are getting stuck, so I need to solve the problem first. I need to bring value to their life so that they come along with me. They’re going to be my best audience and they’re going to do the marketing for me.\n\n\n\n[00:38:24] Nathan Wrigley: This stuff is so intuitive to you because obviously it’s something that you’ve spent a long time thinking about. I’ve got to say, for me, a lot of this stuff is kind of intuitive, but not at the same time. I’m definitely more on the kind of builder side than on the marketing side. I don’t know what it is about marketing, I just struggle to do those kind of things.\n\n\n\nAnd you’ve written a lot of your thoughts up in three articles, which you’ve published on LinkedIn. I don’t know if they’ve been published elsewhere, but they’re definitely on LinkedIn. And they describe all of the different scenarios of, you know, what founders need to do, how plugins can have success, where the community lies, how you can get yourself involved in different things. But also quite a lot of work you’ve put into what not to do. So example, lifetime deals, which you don’t think are a particularly great idea.\n\n\n\nI’m going to link to all of those different bits and pieces in the show notes so that people can go and read those, and then hopefully having been armed with all of that knowledge, they’ll understand better what it is that we’ve been talking about.\n\n\n\nWhere do we find you, Muntasir? Where do we go online? Apart from LinkedIn, obviously, where could we find you?\n\n\n\n[00:39:28] Muntasir Sakib: I’m always available on Facebook, on Twitter. And I am always available on LinkedIn as well. These are the platforms you are going to find me.\n\n\n\n[00:39:36] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I will link to the LinkedIn posts and I will endeavor to dig out your Twitter handle as well. So hopefully people can find you and if they’ve got questions, you are open to suggestions.\n\n\n\nSo thank you so much for chatting to me today. A subject of great interest to me because, well, as I said, there’s just great interest for me. I won’t say more than that. But thank you very much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.\n\n\n\n[00:39:56] Muntasir Sakib: Thank you, Nathan. Thank you for talking to me. And it’s great talking to you and sharing my knowledge and expertise with you.\n\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Muntasir Sakib.\n\n\n\nMuntasir has been active in the WordPress space since 2018, working with well-known plugins and companies such as Tutor LMS, Droip and more. He\u2019s played a key role scaling products from their early days, helping them achieve wider adoption. He\u2019s also been active in the WordPress community more broadly at events such as WordCamp Asia and WordCamp Sylhet.\n\n\n\nThe focus of today\u2019s episode is a crucial yet often overlooked topic, especially if you\u2019re a plugin developer. It\u2019s a chat about the moment when plugin development ends and real success can begin. In a WordPress marketplace that\u2019s more crowded and competitive than ever, simply \u2018build it and they will come\u2019 does not mean users will. Muntasir wants to bust the myth by digging into why marketing is essential from day one, and not an afterthought left until launch day.\n\n\n\nWe start by learning about Muntasir\u2019s journey through the WordPress ecosystem, and his approach to balancing development and marketing for plugins. He explains the key differences between marketing in the WordPress ecosystem versus the SaaS world. In WordPress, you don\u2019t control the full stack and your users expect openness and interoperability, making community focus and support critical.\n\n\n\nThe discussion then turns to the practicalities of launching and growing a plugin. Why throwing new features at a product isn\u2019t enough, and why listening to users and building community relationships is often more valuable than racing to add features no one has asked for.\n\n\n\nWe talk about the do\u2019s and don\u2019ts gained from Muntasir\u2019s experience, including the pitfalls of relying on lifetime deals for early revenue, and why a recurring revenue model is key for long-term sustainability.\n\n\n\nWe also talk through the role of community, partnerships, and events like WordCamps, not just as marketing opportunities, but as places to build the relationships and collaborations that can help plugins thrive.\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re a WordPress plugin developer wondering how to turn a finished product into a real success, or you\u2019re trying to figure out where marketing fits into your roadmap, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\nProject / Events which Muntasir has been involved with:\n\n\n\n\u200aTutor LMS\n\n\n\nDroip\n\n\n\nEasyCommerce\n\n\n\nThumbPress\n\n\n\n\u200aJoomShaper\n\n\n\n\u200aWordCamp Asia 2023\n\n\n\nWordCamp Sylhet 2023\n\n\n\nThree of Muntasir’s articles on LinkedIn:\n\n\n\nWhy Marketing Is Still the Missing Piece for Most WordPress Product Companies\n\n\n\nThe Hidden Cost of Lifetime Deals: What Plugin Owners Don’t Realize Until It’s Too Late\n\n\n\nAfter 5 Years and 10+ Plugins: Here\u2019s Why Most WordPress Products Fail to Scale", "date_published": "2025-12-17T10:00:00-05:00", "date_modified": "2025-12-17T09:05:29-05:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/198-Muntasir-Sakib-on-Bridging-the-Gap-Between-WordPress-Plugin-Development-and-Marketing-Success.jpg", "tags": [ "community", "marketing", "podcast" ], "summary": "In this episode of WP Tavern, Nathan Wrigley talks with Muntasir Sakib about the crucial importance of marketing in the WordPress plugin ecosystem. Muntasir shares insights from his experience growing popular plugins and discusses how product success today depends not just on great development, but on early, strategic marketing, ongoing community engagement, partnerships, and prioritising recurring revenue over quick wins like lifetime deals. The episode offers practical advice for developers and founders hoping to stand out and succeed in a saturated marketplace.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2293155/c1e-n4n3nudrr31hq8o61-gp98rp5nfrwo-sraecc.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=201629", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/197-johanne-courtright-on-enhancing-gutenberg-agency-driven-block-editor-innovations", "title": "#197 \u2013 Johanne Courtright on Enhancing Gutenberg: Agency-Driven Block Editor Innovations", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, enhancing Gutenberg with agency driven block editor innovations.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. . Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Johanne Courtright. Johanne started working with WordPress back in 2011, moving over from a background in marketing agencies, Dreamweaver and Static HTML sites. Over the years, she’s become a skill developer, focusing on extending WordPress through custom queries, forms, integrations with APIs, and increasingly harnessing the power of the block editor and React.
\n\n\n\nJohanne talks about her journey from the classic world of agency WordPress development to embracing Gutenberg, and the challenges and wins along the way. She shares her experience in building custom blocks, and enhancing existing ones to better serve agencies. Things like improving break points, color palettes, responsive designs, and navigation, all of which aren’t offered in Core yet. These features come together in her growing open source project Groundworx.
\n\n\n\nWe talk about the shifting landscape from classic themes to block-based themes, and why even in 2025, a lot of agencies and users are still hesitant to make the leap fully. Johanne explains where the block editor falls short for her use, and how Groundworx aims to plug these perceived gaps with a foundation of flexible, performant, agency focus blocks and templates.
\n\n\n\nYou will hear about her approach to building modular themes with theme.json, the realities of client work and scope creep, and how the 80 20 rule shapes what belongs in Core, and what’s best handled by plugins.
\n\n\n\nWe also get into the challenge of discovery in the WordPress plugin ecosystem, her wishlist for block editor improvements, and her take on the future of block-based businesses in WordPress.
\n\n\n\nWhether you’re a developer eager to modernize your workflow, or just curious about extending Gutenberg for real world use, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Johanne Courtright.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Johanne Courtright. Hello, Johanne.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:21] Johanne Courtright: Hi. Nice to be here.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, very nice to have you with us. I put a tweet out not that long ago, seeing if anybody wanted to come on the WP Tavern Jukebox podcast, and Johanne was very kind and reached out to me. And we had a little bit of toing and froing. Not a lot, but a little bit. And I thought that the topic of conversation that she suggested was extremely curious.
\n\n\n\nAs you’ll discover in a moment, Johanne has been working hard trying to make the block editor, well, I’m going to use the word improved. Trying to add things to the block editor to make it more usable.
\n\n\n\nThat conversation though, probably would benefit from us knowing exactly who you are, and what your background is. Maybe if we stick to the WordPress bits and pieces, but would you mind just giving us a little biography? Tell us a bit about you.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:00] Johanne Courtright: Sure. I got into WordPress in 2011, working for a marketing agency. It solved a big problem at the time coming from Dreamweaver, HTML static pages. My writing to that was a lot of convincing, but it was a very welcome change. WordPress made a huge impact on a lot of agencies.
\n\n\n\nAnd so we used it for, primarily for home builders, and it was great. Discovered Advanced Custom Fields, tapped into that. Custom post types. It was a lot of fun for many years and I’ve worked for other agencies after that too, and my specialty has always been around extending as far as I can. Custom queries and forms, tapping into CRM and with APIs and all sorts of things. Anything that can be done with WordPress I was doing it, pretty much.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:55] Nathan Wrigley: Are you self-taught then, or have you learned on the job? Or did you go through like a university program or something like that?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:00] Johanne Courtright: Just learned on the job. Just looking for solution, and WordPress felt like it was a great fit. A lot of support online, a lot of documentation, just a lot of people providing enough documentation to be able to explore was very helpful. And there was Joomla and Drupal that was also contenders, but I didn’t like Drupal’s interface, and I wasn’t a fan of how unstable Joomla was from updating versions to versions. So for me, it was a pretty fast decision to go with WordPress.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:35] Nathan Wrigley: I think WordPress is a really great thing to hang your coat on if you are learning, because there’s so much, like you said, documentation. So much of it is prebuilt, so you can just download a version of WordPress and dig in basically, and see how somebody else over many years, in the case of WordPress, 22 years, how that has been built.
\n\n\n\nWhereas I always found when I was digging in, so this is prior to me using any CMS, I had those PHP books, paper books, where you try to learn. And you’d always learn from nothing and you’d have to start building up and anything that you did wrong, you kind of really didn’t know what was going on.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I quickly moved into the CMS space, and probably a little bit like you, WordPress was able to scaffold my learning. And quite a lot of the things that I thought I wouldn’t be interested in, I could skip over. I don’t know, things like permissions and stuff. WordPress already did that, so I didn’t really have to worry about how all of that was taken care of. So it enabled me to learn more quickly. And then of course, there’s the whole community behind it, and knowledge bases and articles and that whole thing. So I well understand your story.
\n\n\n\nHowever, you’ve gone in a much more developer direction, I think, than I ever did. Looking at the bits and pieces that you are doing now, I think it’s fair to say that you have become a really competent developer, not just with things like PHP and JavaScript, but also I think more recently with things like React as well. How are you finding all of that, the new React based WordPress? Is it still maintaining the interest or are you banging your head on the wall a lot?
\n\n\n\n[00:06:58] Johanne Courtright: I started Gutenberg, I started to use it pretty much around the time it came out. I had a bit of a struggle because I had to learn React for it. I didn’t want to be left behind, so I really tried hard, took a course online to accelerate a bit of my learning. And then I faced a time where it was just too much work to be done.
\n\n\n\nBut the last agency I worked at, I started I think like four or five years ago, they were open. They wanted to tackle it. And so we’re a team of three to start, and we made like a core foundation of blocks that we needed over time, building off projects and versions.
\n\n\n\nAnd so it was a lot of fun, but in the same time we were still stuck in the old world with ACF for some of it. And I wasn’t quite pleased on some of it, but I understand sometimes like the budget, because I’m allowed to be fully a hundred percent Gutenberg. So when I decided to start something on my own to solve those things, I went a hundred percent Gutenberg, Interactivity API, no jQuery as much as possible. I decided to dive in completely, a hundred percent, because I believed in it. I knew how to solve those issues.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, all of those things that you’ve mentioned, you know, things like custom fields and things like that, they’re really curious, aren’t they? I mean, they’re really interesting stuff that you can do there, and it’s very much time saving, but it does feel like in the future there are utterly different possibilities there. And blocks, and all of the different bits and pieces that we’ll get into that you are working on, afford the chance to build custom solutions for every single project, without necessarily relying on downloading a plugin. You know, writing a bit of code, which will achieve a bit of functionality for this particular block or that particular block.
\n\n\n\nHowever, all of that stuff being said, and the sort of rainbow version that we’ve painted of Gutenberg, it’s pretty obvious to me that during the last few years, there must be parts of the block editor that you’ve found to be lacking. Because as we’re going to discover, you’ve got a project called Groundworx, which is an endeavor in lots of different ways to bring features into the block editor which you feel probably, I’m guessing you feel, should have been shipped a long time ago.
\n\n\n\nAnd I think it’s fair to say that your endeavor here is not to create a new suite of blocks, which you would download and replace core blocks. You are trying to enhance the paragraph block or the whatever block it may be. So you’re taking the core block, adding functionality into it. Have I got that right? Is that the endeavor?
\n\n\n\n[00:09:34] Johanne Courtright: I have some extra blocks, but I did enhance quite a bit of what was already there, but not too much that it would interfere if they were to ever support. I mean, I have to be cautious on what I’m adding. But essentially, if you take WordPress as is, it’s good enough for somebody who’s starting, but it’s not good enough for an agency.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:57] Nathan Wrigley: What are the bits that you think are missing? And honestly, feel free to just dig deep here. I know for me what I found lacking, but it only maps to the things that I have had to do. But I’m curious what a different person having worked for agencies and built a suite of blocks, what are the, I don’t know, four, five different things that you really feel are missing?
\n\n\n\n[00:10:15] Johanne Courtright: You have to be pixel perfect with agencies, and they work with break points, and in containers and whatnot. And so you have to really kind of like stretch it further. And you have to also provide user experience efficiencies, for example, colour palettes and things like that. So you have to make it easier. So having presets of colours that already predetermined based on their branding, is ideal. So they can choose those presets, it already applies all the colours and your set. And then they can still override each components, which is amazing. That was something very important.
\n\n\n\nSo efficiencies and ease of use was great. So a combination of some custom blocks, but a lot of pre-made templates that you can make for them, and colour palettes. So the more you embrace Gutenberg, the more you can make it happen. But if you have those solutions that are not quite fully Gutenberg, it becomes a little bit complex because you’re fighting Gutenberg.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:13] Nathan Wrigley: Did you build your suite of blocks? And we’ll get into what that means in a minute, and we can highlight the different bits and pieces that you’ve got. But did you build that out of frustration or were there, I don’t know, particular things that a particular project needed that was pretty edge case that you thought you’d build? Or is this more a case of, okay, everybody needs these things, it’s curious that they’re missing in Core? What’s the approach? Is it kind of edge case stuff or is it more, everybody could benefit from these?
\n\n\n\n[00:11:42] Johanne Courtright: It’s a little bit of everything. Most of the time, agencies would need those extra features I brought in. The problem is, I didn’t want to overwhelm normal users as well with so many options. And I think that’s where Gutenberg is shining essentially.
\n\n\n\nThe padding system, for example. It’s got increments, but it doesn’t have an overwhelming amount of like, this is the padding for this break point, this is the padding for this break point. But you can still tap into it by using clamp on your padding to adjust based on your screen resolution. So you can solve that problem without having to specify all those extra padding for each break point.
\n\n\n\nSo there’s a lot of different ways to set up your theme.json to compensate for the lack of extra features per breakpoint. And that’s what I’ve been doing. And my goal is to set up enough blocks and provide, I’ll have a theme.json that I want to share, so it’ll be easy for people to have a starting theme to start with. And I’m planning to release that for free. I was just, there’s a lot to be done and provide documentation. There’s just a lot. It’s hard to get everything done fast.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no kidding. I mean, have you built your own themes then from the ground up, or do you tend to rely on, I don’t know, a default theme and then modify that?
\n\n\n\n[00:13:06] Johanne Courtright: I actually prefer to use my own theme. In fact, coming from the old world, you would put everything in a theme. You would put just all your functionality. And then you learn over time that it’s probably better to have a plugin, but then you still had the crossover of the two dependencies. You have to be cautious to not crash your site if one wasn’t, like if you switched a theme or if you switch a plugin.
\n\n\n\nAnd then Gutenberg made it easier to create that separation because you can set up, if you set up your theme properly, you can have essentially 90% of your theme set up in a way where it’s accent one for colour, accent two for colour base, and contrast. So if you label your things, your keys properly, all you have to do is change the values. Don’t change the key names. And just create labels that are meaningful. You can create another theme super easy from that initial theme by just changing those labels and those values, and leave the keys alone. Sure, you’ll have probably more colours on certain other themes, but your foundation will help you get there faster.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:19] Nathan Wrigley: I know that many years ago when Full Site Editing, as it was called back then dropped, and so block themes became a thing. I know that there was a hope that it would, over a fairly short period of time, that it would replace what we’re now calling Classic Themes. There was this period of time where, you know, both were still massively in development. And I think the hope was that over time, Classic Themes would become more obsolete, and then block-based themes would become the default.
\n\n\n\nIt feels from where I’m standing now, so we’re recording this in December, 2025, it feels as if that kind of hasn’t really happened. That promise is still, we’re still somewhere in limbo. There’s a few people out there in the WordPress space who are promoting Full Site Editing and all of the things that that can do, but I also feel there’s a lot of people who are not willing to make that leap.
\n\n\n\nAnd I guess part of the problem maybe is that it’s easy for somebody like you because you’re in it day in, day out. You know where every menu is. You know where to put the mouse to achieve the exact thing you want at the exact moment that you want. But I feel that for a novice user, maybe somebody who’s got the job of, I don’t know, finishing off a website or somebody who’s got the job of just tweaking a website once it’s been handed over, I think it’s really hard, and a lot of the interface is kind of counterintuitive.
\n\n\n\nAnd when you stand over the shoulder, as I have done, of people who’ve never used WordPress before, and you watch them, you see them flailing around trying to figure out how it works, and you see the constant butting up against a UX problem. I don’t know when that moment’s going to be, where everything is all tied off and perfect, but it doesn’t seem like in the year 2025, the few weeks that we’ve got left, or anytime soon in 2026, as if the Classic Themes are going to go away.
\n\n\n\nAnd I don’t know if that concerns you at all, because obviously you’ve really invested in all these blocks and theming and all of that kind of stuff. Does it bother you that this is still a problem that we haven’t solved?
\n\n\n\n[00:16:18] Johanne Courtright: I think what’s out there right now, the third party, what they’re doing, I mean, they’re solving some issues, but they’re adding a whole new platform on another existing platform, and that’s why I don’t choose those solutions. I prefer embracing the Core vision and try to expand what’s already there.
\n\n\n\nOne of my struggles I have is that, let’s just pick Elementor. You have a lot of great options. I mean, for somebody who knows what they’re doing, it does a lot, but it also comes with a lot of extra bloat of divs and CSS that’s not quite built how I would’ve done it. You have to fight the styling. And WordPress does it so different now. With Gutenberg, it’s the opposite. It does very little, and it allows you to override all the classes. The way it’s built, it’s allowing you to override easily without having to use the important on the styling to override it.
\n\n\n\nAnd I think that’s a major change of how you think, and how you approach theming in general. This is the way. This is the way how it should be done. And once I stopped fighting how the new way was, and understanding where they were heading with that, something clicked and it just like, yes, this is what I want, this is what I want. And I made that call that I’m not going back.
\n\n\n\nNo normal users want to touch Divi or Elementor. Somebody who doesn’t have the knowledge of basic CSS even, they don’t want to touch that. It’s overwhelming. They don’t know how to touch it. And in fact, they’re scared. And when you present them with Gutenberg, you give them an hour training over Zoom session, they are in love with it. They make edits themselves. They’re just happy. They rarely come back with more questions. They just know how to use it.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:12] Nathan Wrigley: I think we’re fast approaching a period in WordPress when a lot of the admin UI is about to change. So there’s a lot of foundational work being put in at the moment to really modify it. So maybe some of that dissonance that users might face in the near future will go away. And maybe those kind of block-based themes, and Gutenberg use in general will spike. There certainly seems to be a lot of work being done in that regard anyway.
\n\n\n\nLet’s just move on to some of the bits and pieces that you have been doing though. Because obviously there must be, well, dissatisfaction is the wrong word, but there’s obviously bits of the block editor where you feel that work could have been done differently.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I’m going to point people in the direction of your work. So if you go to groundworx.dev, and worx is spelt with an X at the end. So it’s the word ground, and then WOR and then the letter X, dot dev. If you go there, you’ll be able to find the product menu. And if you hover over the product menu, you’ll be able to see a bunch of things called Groundworx core and things like that, Groundworx navigation.
\n\n\n\nAnd I want to dwell on Groundworx core. So this is your endeavor to improve the blocks that WordPress offers, and offer some new ones and modifications to existing ones. Tell us what the philosophy behind this is then.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:29] Johanne Courtright: So some of the more fun blocks where they have like animation and all that are custom blocks. But they’re flexible in the way they’re easy to set up, intuitive. But I think for me, offering the capability to someone who wants those type of things that are not offered, it’s not necessarily a frustration for those because it’s just in addition to, it’s nice to have, it’s not a must have, essentially. They’re really nice, already pre-made blocks with the inner blocks and content that you can change.
\n\n\n\nOne of the ones that are, I think, lacking, I know we have the accordion block that came in recently. Mine is different, where I can have an accordion, but I can also have a tab. A tab that can turn into an accordion based on a specific break point. So it won’t go from accordion, to tab, to accordion, back to tab at several different break points, but it will have one point where you’ll tell it to break.
\n\n\n\nSo you can have a tab that can turn into accordion, which is nice to have because, I mean, tabs are not very friendly, but you still want them. You still want them. They’re useful visually at larger desktops, but you don’t necessarily want to deal with tabs at a mobile, unless they’re very small text and very few. So you need something to shift that. And you want to keep consistency. With accordions that you already have, so it looks good altogether. So that’s what I created. I have an accordion, and a tab, but the tab can fall into an accordion as well. And when they do fall into an accordion, they all look consistent and the same.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:13] Nathan Wrigley: So currently if you, I’ll put the link in the show notes by the way. So if you go to wptavern.com and you search for the episode with Johanne in, then you’ll find all of the show notes. It’s probably easier than me reading out URLs and what have you.
\n\n\n\nYour kind of block suite falls into two main categories, as far as I’m concerned anyway. So you’ve got your purpose built 11 kind of custom blocks where you are doing something that Core didn’t do. Although we might discuss how Core might tackle some of those things in the near future.
\n\n\n\nBut then also, the bit that I find really interesting is the whole section where you’ve got extension to Core blocks. So as an example, I’ll give you some examples of things which, dear listener, if you don’t use Gutenberg, you may be surprised to know that the block editor currently does not do these things.
\n\n\n\nSo for example, you have the capacity to reverse the order of a stack, which is really nice. So you might want to just, I don’t know, put an image above something on a desktop. And then on mobile, you might just want to flip that, or you might just want to flip it because you are doing, I don’t know, copy and pasting rows, but you want the image left, image right, image left, image right, that kind of thing.
\n\n\n\nYou’ve also added in break points for certain widths. So for example, a tablet break point might be in there. You’ve got a full height sticky for the group block, which is nice and interesting as well. Three breakpoints for WordPress headings and paragraphs. That’s nice. So you could, I don’t know, change the font size or something like that depending on what you’re looking at.
\n\n\n\nColumn counts. So you’ve got the ability to have different breakpoints in the Core list block as well.
\n\n\n\nYou’ve got a whole thing about performance optimisation for the video block, and then you’ve got a responsive setting for any break point that you may set. I probably butchered all of that, but you get the idea. You’ve got a ton of stuff that you’ve built on top of Core WordPress blocks.
\n\n\n\nWhy do you, because I mean, all of that I guess is given away to everybody, but there’s got to be an expectation, I suppose, that some of this stuff will ship in Core. Does that bit worry you? Does it worry you that you put in all this hard work and then somebody maybe in the Core project thinks, oh, that’s a good idea, let’s add that to the roadmap and what have you.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:16] Johanne Courtright: I mean, it’s always a worry when you release something for WordPress because everything is GPL, but it’s just part of the ecosystem. I mean, I reverse engineered their blocks to learn what I know now.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:28] Johanne Courtright: And if they think it’s great idea then, you know, as long as they give me credit, I guess it’s fine.
\n\n\n\nBut I say, not everyone will need break points. I mean, this is really more like, I’d say agency type things that usually you want those things, those features. They’re nice to have, but break points are not necessarily, I have to have it kind of thing if you are just a normal user. It’s more, if you want fine tuning for, like if you’re a designer and you really want those fine tunings, then they’re there.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:03] Nathan Wrigley: Does it kind of surprise you though that we are now, oh goodness knows how many years we’re into the Gutenberg project, but it’s many, many years. It’s more than you can count on one hand. Does it surprise you that this stuff is still missing? That somebody like you needs to build this functionality and, well, needs is maybe the wrong word, but desires to build this functionality. Does it surprise you that this kind of thing wasn’t in it when it shipped, that a layout system with all the break points taken care of and all of that completely customisable, does it still shock you that that isn’t there?
\n\n\n\n[00:24:34] Johanne Courtright: I have not done a whole lot of research, but based on what I’ve read so far is there was no intention to support it. So that’s why I decided to do it because I was like, I’m not going to wait for them to do it because they’re not going to do it.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So it was never something that was intended that was missing. It was just, it was never, literally never intended. So somebody needed to ship it. It’s kind of like that WordPress 80 20 rule. That’s the other curious thing about WordPress usage. Somebody like you and somebody like me who is constantly in there and fiddling the entire time, you kind of have this expectation that a lot of this stuff, oh, everybody would need this because I need it.
\n\n\n\nBut the reality is, I guess most people are just logging in, changing a piece of text, maybe uploading an image, writing a blog post, clicking publish, and they’re done. And they’re relying on their agencies who’ve got the CSS, JavaScript, all of that React expertise that can build all of the different bits and pieces for them. So maybe it’s just me obsessing about these things because I’m in there all the time and I can see how they’re missing.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:36] Johanne Courtright: I think the way I build themes these days is like extremely light. It’s like, there’s a theme.json, there’s very little CSS and very, very little JavaScript. Everything is moved towards plugins. It’s really meant for colours, font types, branding type things. I have very little things in my themes these days because I believe that somebody who has a website and tomorrow they want a different theme, even for Christmas, and they decide, oh, I want a Christmas theme, should be able to do it easily by just swapping the theme.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:13] Nathan Wrigley: Clicking a button and it should all work, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:14] Johanne Courtright: Click a button, and all of a sudden it’s the new font, it’s the new palette colour, and it just works with minimal effort to just change anything or tweak anything. That’s how I see it. You shouldn’t have things that are baked in your theme where if you change your theme, now all of a sudden it’s not available for that theme. Don’t lock your clients into essentially a theme with features, and then they’re stuck with your theme.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that’s an interesting way of kind of spinning my question around in a sense. That whole thing that we have with clients where we have scope creep, you offer something, they agree to it, and then there’s this whole thing after you’ve built what they wanted, where they say, oh, but can we have, and then can we have, and what about this? We’ve got this idea as well. But that’s not the intention. The project was what we said it was going to be.
\n\n\n\nAnd so in a sense, the WordPress project is a little bit like that. You know, it’s not trying to be every feature for every human being who ever thought a thing could be achieved. It’s more, here’s the foundational stuff, and if you really want those things, well, either build it yourself or go and find somebody who has built that for you.
\n\n\n\nThat kind of makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? You know, if you’ve got this foundational platform, and I know the 80 20 rule, like I said, applies within WordPress. If 80% of the people need it, then it comes onto the scope of Core, and if it doesn’t reach that then it really doesn’t belong in Core. That’s kind of interesting because that reframes the whole thing and makes what you are saying true.
\n\n\n\nMost of the things that you’ve got, that you’ve built on top of Core, and again, I’ll direct people to the URL on the WP Tavern website. They probably aren’t for 80% of the people, they probably are for the 20%, the people like you, the developers, the designers who are building websites. The inexperienced people, the 80%, maybe they don’t need this stuff. That’s an interesting reframing of it.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:07] Johanne Courtright: Yeah, most people will probably be satisfied with just the basic theme that comes with WordPress. It’s got enough patterns at this point to have a good starting foundation. We need to get away from overbuilding our blocks in such a way where they’re rigid, this is the only thing it can do.
\n\n\n\nSo when I build my blocks, I build in such a way the HTML can be moved around with grid system CSS, where I can move things because I built it in such a way that it’s very flexible. So all you have to do after that is just you create like some styling to accommodate that other different behavior that you want.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:51] Nathan Wrigley: So we’ve spoken just then about the bits and pieces that, you’ve extended WordPress Core and we described all of those. But there’s obviously bits that you felt were entirely missing that you thought might be useful to have. As I said a moment ago, some of these maybe are things that, I don’t know, maybe you’ll drop in the near future, or perhaps you’ll tweak in different ways because you did say that your accordion block behaves differently. But I know that the accordion block is coming to Core and what have you.
\n\n\n\nBut you’ve got things like an Accordion Block, you’ve got an Accordion Panel Block, a Tabs Block, Tabs Panel Block, Media Section Block, Media Content Split Block, that’s interesting. Card block, Card Reveal Block and many others. This is, I guess, is this you sort of dogfooding projects that you’ve had in the past where a client has wanted a particular thing and you’ve thought, oh yeah, I’ve now built that, let’s see if we can sort of make it more generic and add it into your suite of blocks?
\n\n\n\n[00:29:43] Johanne Courtright: Those are pretty much blocks that keeps happening and being reused over and over and over. And they kind of become your basic foundation, if that makes sense. And they usually solve 90%, 95% of what you need for a site is essentially what’s part of the Core, is how I solved it. Another one that I solved that is very similar to what WordPress does was the Core Navigation.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:09] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you’ve got a whole other thing there, haven’t you? Yeah, that’s interesting.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:12] Johanne Courtright: Yeah, this one is completely free, so I mean, my navigation falls very similarly what WordPress does, where I have a custom post type, I have blocks in it, and essentially it will use those menus that I can reuse in different parts of navigations. And the major difference is that WordPress is only this big modal and then you have very little customisation. It can go left or right, I think center.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:43] Nathan Wrigley: That’s more or less it really, isn’t it?
\n\n\n\n[00:30:45] Johanne Courtright: Yes. And it is annoying because if you choose left or right, well, it also affects your desktop versus modal, I didn’t like that. But I did like the idea of having the blocks sitting into a custom post type. So mine in that way does that too. But I didn’t want to interfere with what WordPress had done, so I created my own custom post type for it. But I’m still following the same principle where I have my blocks sitting in that custom post types be shared so I can reuse them.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:18] Nathan Wrigley: So you can use Core navigation blocks containing the pages and the posts and things like that. How do you build them up?
\n\n\n\n[00:31:25] Johanne Courtright: Well, I essentially copied over the link and the sub menu and I brought over some of their features, because I did like how they were, but I changed the HTML in it and what it’s capable of doing. Had a couple different things. That allowed me the flexibility to create accordions, and all sorts of different things without having to worry about having, you know how some sites will have a mobile menu, but they’ll have the same menu for the desktop, but it’s like a clone, but you don’t see it. I didn’t want that. Everything had to be done from the same HTML structure, and all it had to do is just essentially fall back gracefully into that other mode. And what was important also for me was that it was all Interactivity API.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:20] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. Okay, you’ve been leveraging that.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:23] Johanne Courtright: Yeah. So they’re all leveraging that. I was inspired also by Gutenberg Times website to do the vertical menu.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yeah, they’ve got the, I don’t know which theme they’re using, but that I think was a default theme. Was it 2020?
\n\n\n\n[00:32:37] Johanne Courtright: I was like, this is different. I want one like that. So I did support it too.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I see that. So on your navigation block, one of the options is to have this kind of full height column, which you can invoke and the menu, I guess slides out, but it then collapses back into that full size column. Have you had much feedback on that? Because it, I always worry that that’s going to consume quite a bit of the real estate when it’s not being invoked. Whereas, you know, a little hamburger icon, which is sitting at the top of the screen is obviously not consuming anything once you’ve scrolled past the navigation menu. Does it stay there all the time? If you’re not using the menu at that moment, does it live there all the time or, how does it work?
\n\n\n\n[00:33:14] Johanne Courtright: The bar stays there all the time. It’s up to you to add links that are useful in terms of what you’re doing. But, yes, it does stay there. It takes a little bit of the space, but it’s fine. You can choose also at what break point it will be sitting at the top instead.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:34] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. Got it. Right. There is an option to remove it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:38] Johanne Courtright: Yeah. So you’re not, let’s just say you wanted to stop doing that at laptop or something, or tablet, then you just choose the option and it will just break to the other one at the top instead.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And you’ve built a suite of blocks, so six at the moment that work in concert together to build that. So you’ve got the Navigation Block, which I’m guessing is kind of the wrapper for that, I’m not sure. But then you’ve got the Branding Block, which I presume holds logos and things like that. The Menu Block, which is the responsive bit where you can display stack menu items and things like that. Sub Menus, which I guess allows you to create those accordions where there’s a parent item, but things hidden underneath. A Link Block where you can just add a single thing, which I guess isn’t inside any other navigation anywhere. And then a spacer block, just something to create a bit of breathing room to separate one thing from another. And those six things, you just build in your custom post type, and once you’ve built them there, you can then invoke it and construct it entirely in the block editor.
\n\n\n\nYou see this kind of stuff is really cool and really clever. Just the idea that you can build that in a, in this GUI, the block editor. Build it, style it, do all of the bits and pieces that you need to make it look nice inside the settings panel. It’s so great. The promise of Gutenberg delivered, really. This is the kind of stuff that it was always supposed to do, but people only seem to be getting to it now.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:57] Johanne Courtright: You know, you did ask me a few times if there was a feature I wish was in WordPress, and I do have one right now. Theme.json, you can specify specific colours for your buttons and your texts, your background, but I wish there was a way for us to set up other variables or some other things to specify more colours. So for example, my navigation, I have a lot more colours than two. I wish there was a way for me to set those up instead of using CSS and then the variable name and then manually injecting those.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:34] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Overriding things. Yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:36] Johanne Courtright: Allow me to have custom keys or something where I can just say, oh, put your colours here, and then it will just generate whatever it needs to do. So if there was a way for me to have a block and specify, say, this is going to be the selector, this is the selector and this is the key. And then in the theme.json, all the person has to do is set up the key and the colour and it just applies it. That would be a nice feature.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s curious, you know, if for example, I was to go to, I don’t know, Squarespace or something like that and build my website with their technology, I guess there’s an expectation that what you get is what you get. This is it. You know, you pay your $20 a month or whatever it may be, I have no idea, and the features that you have are what you have. Maybe you can put in a support request somewhere and ask for another feature, but basically it’s very unlikely, I imagine, to happen.
\n\n\n\nWhereas just about everybody on the developer side of things, fiddling with WordPress, is constantly coming up with new ideas and different ways it can be adapted. And so there’s always this sense of, oh, I could build this thing into it, or I could do, and so it kind of breeds, not dissatisfaction, that’s the wrong word, but a curiosity for what it could do.
\n\n\n\nSo you’ve just given a perfect example there. You’ve got this use case, which I don’t think I would probably make much use of. I think I’m probably happy with the two colours, but clearly in your scenarios that’s a way that you would like to adapt it.
\n\n\n\nAnd that’s why the platform is so cool. Maybe at some point somebody will listen to that request and will implement that for you in Core. If not, you maybe have to suffer the CSS load that you’ve got in the meantime. But that is really what separates it. You know, we’ve got this idea that, if you contribute, and you put your ideas in and you show up and you, you know, you offer your time, then that kind of stuff can be changed.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:28] Johanne Courtright: I have to say, I know that it creates a lot of friction at the moment and how they’re guarding and guiding very specifically. And they’re clear in their vision and they want to follow that vision, and it creates some frustration for some people who want things done differently. But I appreciate that they’re doing that because it was a long term project. The frustration probably comes from, I wish it was there, what it is today, many years ago, when it came out. But I do appreciate that there’s somebody with a vision who stick to their vision because I think it’s the right way.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and interestingly, everybody else’s vision can also be lived. So, you know, there’s a variety of different page builders, and I know that’s not your thing, but it is the thing of many millions of people. They love that, and that’s their preferred way of doing it. You can’t do that on these other proprietary platforms. There isn’t a different entire UX and UI that you can inject into it, but we have that, you know? And if you want to use a page builder, or you want to use whatever it is that you want to use, that’s the way it is.
\n\n\n\nI suppose the only thing we’ve got to be mindful of is the flame was that sometimes occur. You know, people saying, well, my tool is the best tool. Anybody else that’s using anything else is missing out or what have you, or maybe stronger language than that. And just recognise that, well, the reason that you can do that is because there’s this foundational stuff, the WordPress Core.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:00] Johanne Courtright: They’re allowing it.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and it’s allowing you to have that, and you don’t have to use Gutenberg. But it does feel, it really does feel as if in the latter part of 2025, it does feel as if there’s a little bit more excitement around the Block Editor and the different bits and pieces. I don’t know if you’ve picked up on that, but there seems to be more stories. There seems to be more people shipping products that latch onto the block editor. Yours obviously is an example of that.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:24] Johanne Courtright: The biggest hurdle is to learn it’s a different mindset, different language, it’s different in so many ways. There’s just too much to learn to jump from old way to new way. And it’s very overwhelming for a lot of people. It’s very, very overwhelming.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:45] Nathan Wrigley: Genuinely don’t know how we bridge that gap, to be honest, because I think you’re right. If you’ve been familiar with using WordPress in its classic form, then it is, it’s seismic. But more or less, every developer that I know has at least some curiosity in Gutenberg and things like that, so probably.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:00] Johanne Courtright: Once people fully decide to embrace it and take the time to reverse engineer and understand it, they’re like, oh, wow. All the cool stuff I can do. Yes. You know? And they change their mind completely. It’s a bit challenging because I mean, even like, let’s just say Tailwind, which is the CSS framework. I mean, it’s great. Tailwind is amazing, but when you start trying to use it with WordPress, that’s another one that fights WordPress. I stopped using it. I’m just going with SCSS and I build my own stuff. Now I have very little CSS into my blocks and it’s just, there’s no real point to have CSS framework in WordPress. You don’t need that.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:44] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to pivot the subject a little bit, and it’s because of a tweet that I saw yesterday, I believe it was. A friend of mine tweeted that he’s yet to see a block solution. So I don’t think that those were the words that he used, but he’s yet to see an out and out successful business built on top of blocks. So the example might be that, for example, on WordPress Core, you’ve got all of these really successful products. So you’ve got things like Gravity Forms and things like that, that have made real, they’ve got a real stable business going on. And he was questioning, have we seen that with blocks yet?
\n\n\n\nSo you are trying to make that happen. You are trying to sell a commercial product. I know that there’s, free versions and things like that, but you’re trying to sell a commercial product. How is that? What is the landscape for that at the moment? Because I’m guessing it’s not like you are printing money at the moment. I don’t know how difficult that is and whether or not it’s been the fountain of cash that maybe you’d hoped it would be.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:44] Johanne Courtright: I don’t expect it to be a fountain of cash. I love what I do. I do it for myself first, and if other people happen to enjoy it, then But if they don’t, that’s fine, I’m using it.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:59] Nathan Wrigley: That’s very sanguine approach. I think his thought when he made that tweet is that maybe we’re on the cusp of something. Because it feels like there’s a certain speed that the flywheel needs to achieve before people become really interested in it. I’m not sure that that has yet happened. But give it some more time, give it some more interesting products, some more attention, some more marketing and what have you. And definitely a lot of the stuff shipping in 6.9, which is actually coming out today. And then 7 next year, and all of the AI bits and pieces that are going to be put in as well. You never know. Maybe with a fair wind, we’ll be printing money for you.
\n\n\n\n[00:42:38] Johanne Courtright: I do have a message for Matt if he listens. He needs to work on his plugin and themes website. It’s not usable at the moment. It doesn’t leave room for new development, new plugins to be seen. It needs to be feeling more like a community.
\n\n\n\nI come from a background where I did a lot of desktop customisation. We had featured skins and themes and wallpapers and there was, people were excited. There was somebody reviewing. Think about it about how Apple does their Apple store, where they had like featured apps. Somebody went and tested a few of those plugins and featured them. They pick them. We need more, something like that.
\n\n\n\nWe also need to have a better search. Search is awful. It’s all stuffed keywords. And if you’ve been around for a while, if you’re new, there’s no way for you to rank for anything. There needs to be true categories and easier ways to find what you’re looking for.
\n\n\n\n[00:43:37] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know, that’s a whole interesting other conversation, isn’t it? Maybe we’ll have that one time. But I get what you mean. When the iPhone came out, don’t know if you sort of remember or go back that far, but when the iPhone came out, it was this curious but beautiful object that had a lovely screen and could play songs and things. But the moment the app store came along for the iPhone, that’s I think when it became really interesting.
\n\n\n\nAnd it does feel with the advent of blocks, like there’s an opportunity similar to that in that WordPress is no longer just these plugins and themes. We’ve got this whole other thing now, these blocks, these mini applications if you like, which really in many ways have full capabilities like plugins would do. And being able to surface those and find a block or a.
\n\n\n\n[00:44:26] Johanne Courtright: You should be able to set, are you supporting Gutenberg? Is it using jQuery? Is it using those basic little things like check, check, check? And if some people are looking for those things, they should be able to find you.
\n\n\n\nRight now it’s useless. It’s very useless, even for me looking for a plugin. Most of the plugins I found these days are because I use Google or AI, or there’s other means, but it’s very hard to find. I don’t even rank in the first 40 some pages for my navigation, so it’s ridiculous. Look for navigation, you won’t find me.
\n\n\n\n[00:45:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so maybe that’s work to be done in 2026. But hopefully somebody has heard your plea there and you never know. If they have and they want to reach out to you, well, obviously we know that you’ve got the Groundworx with an X, .dev website. Is there another place where you hang out online that people could find you if they wanted to have a chat?
\n\n\n\n[00:45:23] Johanne Courtright: I’ve been hanging out a lot on X these days. I get a lot more response there. It seems to be WordPress community hangs out there a lot, so I think that’s going to be my platform of choice for a while.
\n\n\n\n[00:45:36] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. In which case, into the show notes, along with the links to all of the bits and pieces that we mentioned, I will bury the link to Johanne’s X profile as well, so you can go and connect there.
\n\n\n\nThank you so much for chatting to me today. It’s really interesting getting your insight into all of the bits and pieces that you’ve done extending Gutenberg, but also all of the bits and pieces that you’ve done with new stuff as well. Go check it out. It’s Groundworx.dev. Johanne, thank you so much for chatting to me today.
\n\n\n\n[00:46:01] Johanne Courtright: Thank you for inviting me. Thank you so much. It was great.
\nOn the podcast today we have Johanne Courtright.
\n\n\n\nJohanne started working with WordPress back in 2011, moving over from a background in marketing agencies, Dreamweaver, and static HTML sites. Over the years, she\u2019s become a skilled developer, focusing on extending WordPress through custom queries, forms, integrations with APIs, and increasingly, harnessing the power of the block editor and React.
\n\n\n\nJohanne talks about her journey from the classic world of agency WordPress development to embracing Gutenberg, and the challenges and wins along the way. She shares her experience in building custom blocks and enhancing existing ones to better serve agencies, things like improved breakpoints, color palettes, responsive designs, and navigation, all of which aren\u2019t offered in Core yet. These features come together in her growing open-source project, Groundworx.
\n\n\n\nWe talk about the shifting landscape from classic themes to block-based themes, and why, even in 2025, a lot of agencies and users are still hesitant to make the leap fully. Johanne explains where the block editor falls short for her use, and how Groundworx aims to plug these perceived gaps with a foundation of flexible, performant, agency-focused blocks and templates.
\n\n\n\nYou\u2019ll hear about her approach to building modular themes with theme.json, the realities of client work and scope creep, and how the 80/20 rule shapes what belongs in Core and what\u2019s best handled by plugins.
\n\n\n\nWe also get into the challenge of discovery in the WordPress plugin ecosystem, her wishlist for Block Editor improvements, and her take on the future of block-based businesses in WordPress.
\n\n\n\nWhether you\u2019re a developer eager to modernise your workflow, or just curious about extending Gutenberg for real-world use, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how public contributions can shape careers in WordPress.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Topher DeRosia. Topher is a web developer with over 30 years of experience, and he’s been deeply involved in the WordPress community for the past 15 years. He’s attended nearly 80 WordCamps around the world, contributed to projects like HeroPress, and has made it his mission to highlight the power and value of open source and remote work, especially in the WordPress ecosystem.
\n\n\n\nIn this episode, Topher joins me to talk about the value of working in public, and how sharing your work openly can create unexpected and lasting opportunities. Whether that’s boosting your career, finding a sense of purpose, or building connections across the globe.
\n\n\n\nWe start with Topher’s personal journey, discovering the WordPress community and the profound impact it has had on his life and family. The conversation explores what makes open source communities, like WordPress, so unique, and while working transparently can lead to moments of serendipity and even job offers from people who have seen your contributions many years before.
\n\n\n\nTopher shares stories about giving back, the motivation that comes from helping others, and the long-term satisfaction that comes from being generous with your time and expertise.
\n\n\n\nWe also discussed the tension between the philanthropic and commercial aspects of WordPress, and how individuals and companies navigate that balance.
\n\n\n\nTowards the end, Topher reflects on building a body of work over time, trusting in the slow and organic process instead of seeking instant influencer success. He explains why he still chooses to create and share resources for free, motivated by the hope of helping the next person just starting out.
\n\n\n\nIf you’ve ever wondered about the power of sharing your work, finding meaning in open communities, or how to make a difference over the long term, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Topher DeRosia.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Topher DeRosia. Hello.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:19] Topher DeRosia: Hello there.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:20] Nathan Wrigley: It’s very nice to chat to Topher. We’ve done this before. We’ve had many chats online, but I just want to pay a special thanks to Topher for reasons I won’t bore the audience with, Topher has sort of joined me at extremely late notice, like minutes of notice.
\n\n\n\nWe had a bit of back and forth yesterday about topics that we may cover, and the one that’s going to be covered today is the one that we decided. But he wasn’t expecting this, and so he’s arrived and I’m extremely grateful. So firstly, my deepest thanks for carving out a bit of your day unexpectedly.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:50] Topher DeRosia: You’re very welcome. This is always fun, and fit my day perfectly.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. Thank you. So what we decided to talk about was, and I’ll encapsulate it in a sentence that Topher wrote to me, and then we’ll just sort of get into it and see where we go. Topher said, he’d like to talk about the value of doing things in public, and how this can come back to you later as a way of potentially, I don’t know, boosting your career or just offering some guiding light to the community and what have you.
\n\n\n\nSo first of all, in order to give us some idea, I’m sure that there are people who know you, having listened to the things that you’ve done or consumed the HeroPress website or what have you. Will you just give us a little potted bio of yourself related to, I guess the WordPress community, makes most sense in this context?
\n\n\n\n[00:04:30] Topher DeRosia: Sure. I have been a web developer for 30 years, which is old, but I got into WordPress about 15 years ago and I did not know there was a community for several years. And Brian Richards said to me, hey, we should do a WordCamp. And I said, what’s a WordCamp? And then of course, my life changed forever after.
\n\n\n\nOh, you know what? We started with a meetup, but like 2 weeks later he said we should do a WordCamp. And he said, we should do it this summer. And we were talking, like we were talking in June. So we went from never hearing of it before, to having a WordCamp suddenly. And I’ve been in, all in on the community ever since. I’ve been to nearly 80 WordCamps, all over the world. I’ve been making stuff, building stuff, meeting people ever since.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:12] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:13] Topher DeRosia: It’s pretty great.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, 80. Gosh, that’s profound. I mean, I don’t consider myself to have a high attendee account, but 80, that really is remarkable.
\n\n\n\nSo I think it’s fair to say that the profundity of the effect of discovering that community is pretty important in your life. You know, it’s had a material impact in every way.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:31] Topher DeRosia: Hugely. My wife got into the community. My children, both my kids have spoken at WordCamp US. My wife has spoken. My kids have friends in other countries that I don’t know because of the WordPress community. Every parent has that fear of, what if something happened to us? What would happen to the kids? And we have family that would take care of them, you know? It’s nice to know we also have that backup where there are people all over the world who would say, hey, we got room, come on.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. I joined the WordPress community, so I’d been involved in lots of open source projects, things like Magento and Drupal and things like that. And I know that Drupal has, there’s definitely stuff in the Drupal space that you can attend. But I never did.
\n\n\n\nAnd to be honest with you, I didn’t know that that stuff existed until after the fact. And then in about 2014, something like that, I discovered WordPress. And just like you, I had no conception that it was more than some downloadable bit of software. Honestly didn’t even know that it was done by volunteers. I just had probably some assumption that there was an organization or a company behind it that in some way monetised it and made it free and what have you.
\n\n\n\nAnd then just got this intuition, I guess, with social networks, the way that they were at that time, you could find groups and discover that there were all these ancillary groups of people doing things with WordPress, you know, groups focusing around page builders and groups focusing around plugins.
\n\n\n\nAnd then for me to discover that there were actual events that you could attend was, just like you, really remarkable. And I attended the first one and I kind of thought, oh, we’ll just see how this goes. I’m a bit of an awkward character in person, so I sort of stood around at the back. But it didn’t take me long to sort of be welcomed in. And just like you, completely changed my life. And ever since then, a sizable proportion of my free time has been devoted to curious WordPress things. It’s amazing.
\n\n\n\nI can’t quite work out what it is about a project like WordPress that inculcates that, fosters that, makes that possible. Because I imagine if you attended, I don’t know, a Cisco networking conference or something like that, it’s not going to have the same feel. So I don’t know if you want to speak to that for a little bit, why you think the community works.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:36] Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I have two thoughts about it. One is that I think it’s absolutely because of the people. And it may be chance that the right people found WordPress and got together at the same time. But to that point, that it’s the people, I recently went to two non WordPress conferences in one week.
\n\n\n\nI went to one for higher education in technology. The people who attended were from universities and colleges, and they were looking for ways to manage web stuff on their entire campus. So do you offer a blog to all 24,000 students, you know? That kind of thing. It was my first time there, but I saw a number of people who were greeting each other and not having seen each other since last year, and the year before, and the year before. And it was very much like a WordCamp. And people talked about how this group is so wonderful and they wait all year long to come back here. And I thought, oh, okay, so this is WordCamp.
\n\n\n\nAnd then while I was there, I met somebody who worked at Umbraco, which is an open source .net based CMS. And they’ve been around for 20, more than 20 years, but it’s a very small community, like 0.01% of the market share. And I told her, you know, who I am, what I do, and she’s like, oh, we would love to have you come to our conference this weekend in Chicago. Can I pay you to come? I was like, oh wow, sure.
\n\n\n\nSo I went and it was about a hundred people and it was WordCamp. Everybody there loved the software, loved the community, everybody was friends. It was the same. And expanding just a little more, HeroPress says it’s about people leveraging WordPress to make their lives better. But in actuality, what it is, is open source and remote work combined. It allows people in Malaysia to pick up software and compete on a relatively equal basis with somebody in New York. And in our world, that’s WordPress. But it’s exactly the same with every open source remote work option, Drupal, Umbraco, anything.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:45] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe open source then is, forgive me, the secret sauce. Maybe that’s the component, the bit that binds those communities together in a way that perhaps, I don’t know, something where a proprietary thing or something was locked down, or profit was the whole point, maybe that is the bit. The fact that there’s a bunch of people gathering together in a kind of philanthropic way. You know, there’s no expectation that my attendance will definitely lead to finance, let’s put it that way.
\n\n\n\nLike I said, I don’t really have much experience outside the WordPress world, and so my assumption was that there was something a little bit unique. But from what you’ve said, this same exact thing is happening probably a thousand times over throughout the globe, but your expectation there is that the open source component is the bit, the bit that unlocks it.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:32] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, I agree. WordPress has the advantage of a very large user base, which is good and bad. There are certainly more wonderful people in it than if there were fewer. But at that scale, you are just as likely to have really terrible people. I know people that have left the WordPress community because they’ve been treated horrendously, abused, and it breaks my heart. And I want to say, oh, WordPress is different, you won’t find that here, but you will. It’s too big a community to not have that.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:01] Nathan Wrigley: I wonder what it is then about that sort of spirit of giving back that creates some kind of, I don’t know, hive mind, for want of a better word. You know, there’s just this ethic that you’re all combined on this slightly higher purpose. So in the case of WordPress, and you mentioned Drupal and you mentioned the other CMS with the small market share, the principle there is that you’re working on something, and I guess publishing is the point. You are enabling people who may or may not have a voice to get on the internet and do something, publish something, write something, put images, videos or what have you.
\n\n\n\nThere is some kind of higher calling there. It’s very hard to sort of grasp that, and to really understand it. But do you know what I mean? You’re doing something which, at the end of your days, you can look back and say, there was something there. There was something meaningful, there was something significant and important. And that feeling, that thing, whatever that thing is, is important, and enough to propel people to give up hours and weeks of their lives to do this.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:04] Topher DeRosia: I think most people enjoy making other people, I don’t know, so many things, more successful, happier, more stable. And there are open source projects that will shrivel up and die because no one ever says thank you. People work on a project for years and years and they think, you know what? Nobody cares. I’m going to go play Frisbee.
\n\n\n\nBut I think the WordPress community is large enough, and we have these events that everybody goes to, that you run into people who have been impacted by the work you do.
\n\n\n\nThere’s a, boy, can’t remember his first name. Heisel. He’s Dutch but lived in England and now he lives in Malta or something. Anyway, I met him for the first time at WordCamp London and he walked up to me and said, hey, I need to shake your hand. I said, okay. He said, a few years ago I lost my job and I didn’t know what I was going to do and I needed to support my family, and I got on OS Training and learned WordPress from your videos, and now I support my family with WordPress. I about broke down in tears right there.
\n\n\n\nAnd that kind of thing happens to lots and lots of people. People who say, you know what? This plugin you wrote, it changed my life. I make a living with this now. I support my family.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:19] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know what’s kind of interesting there is that, I guess you did none of it with the expectation of that person wandering up. You know, it’s not like, Topher, you sat down and thought, the more thanks I get, the more I’m going to do. There isn’t that kind of expectation. But it certainly helps, doesn’t it? When somebody does come up and express those thoughts to you. I bet you that carried you through the next days, weeks, or months. You know, the capacity to drag that out of your brain.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:42] Topher DeRosia: It still is. That was years ago.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. Isn’t that interesting?
\n\n\n\n[00:13:45] Topher DeRosia: I do think though that you don’t do it for the thanks, but it’s a lot easier to do if you think it matters. When people say thank you, it feels good, but it lets you know that what I’m doing matters. It’s making a difference. It’s making somebody’s life better. It’s making the world better. That’s a huge motivator.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:04] Nathan Wrigley: That’s the big thing. So this is a curious question, right? And it’s not really related to WordPress. Did you have those same intuitions at an early age? Was there some part of you can remember even as, I don’t know, let’s say a 15-year-old or 17-year-old or something like that. Where you had already made the leap that life is better when you are being helpful? Or did you learn that later?
\n\n\n\nBecause I kind of have the intuition that quite a few people in our community probably figured that out at some point fairly early on. And it enables them, I’m obviously not suggesting that people who didn’t make that intuition early on can’t join the community or what have you. But I’m surrounded by people who seem to have this almost bottomless capacity to give. And I’m always struck by how did that begin for them? Where did that start for them? So because I’ve got you on the line, I’m asking you directly.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:58] Topher DeRosia: When I was in college, I just randomly became interested in motivations. What makes people do things? What makes somebody mean all the time? What makes somebody happy all the time? What makes somebody be kind?
\n\n\n\nAnd I thought through the process of how gratitude is an influencer. If you say to somebody, thank you for what you’re doing, it makes them feel good. It makes them want to do it more. If they’re, you know, working at a food pantry and you say, hey, thank you for what you’re doing, it’s changing lives, just feeding children. It makes them want to do that more. If that person at a food pantry were faced every day with angry people who abused them verbally and stuff like that, they’d be a lot less inclined to do that.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I listened to a podcast not that long ago, and I actually can’t remember which one it was because I listened to several in this line. But essentially it was trying to peel back the latest studies in what causes some people to be happy. And I am not going to explain this and have the expectation that everything I say is true, nor that this is the limit of that. But a fairly reliable indicator of happiness, whatever that means, but on a fairly profound level, happiness can be boiled down to these two things, apparently.
\n\n\n\nOne of them is that you are giving of your time. So it may be that you are, as you say, working in a soup kitchen. Or that you are doing something in the community. Or you are just putting into your children or what have you. There is a real connection apparently between the capacity to give something from which you expect nothing in return. Humans apparently find great, deep satisfaction from that.
\n\n\n\nAnd the other one is friendship. If you have people that you regard as friends, on a deep level. So obviously acquaintances, we can all have many, many thousands of those, especially online nowadays. But it’s that core little group of really impactful, meaningful people who in the time of crisis, you know are going to have your back.
\n\n\n\nThose two things apparently are a real predictor of one’s happiness. And both of them seem to stray into our community, you know? Although it’s an online thing, you’re still giving your time, and you know that in a fairly ephemeral way that you maybe can never grasp, people will be benefiting from that. And also you make friends. So there you go, it’s the root to happiness.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:19] Topher DeRosia: It is.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: So all of that, having said all of that, you have this wealth of experience in the community. You’ve done so many projects in the community. And as I said at the top of the show, the thing that you wanted to talk about was, not just the mere fact of doing things in the community, but about the fact that you are doing things in the community in a sort of public way, and how that can sort of impact in the future. So just tell us a little bit about why you wanted to get into that, or maybe some anecdotal evidence of how that’s helped you.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:50] Topher DeRosia: Very little of it in my life has been deliberate. I’ve done some things and then later thought, oh, wow, I didn’t realise that this would be the consequence. I made videos for OS Training for a lot of years, they’re behind a paywall, they paid me by the video. I wasn’t thinking, oh, I’m going to go teach the world. It was a client, I made videos.
\n\n\n\nAnd years later, Brin Wilson from WinningWP got a hold of me on Post Status and said, hey, I want to start a YouTube channel. Would you make videos for me? I said, sure, but why me? He said, well, I’ve seen your work. You’ve done this, you have given evidence to the world that you know what you’re doing. And that was a good contract. And I got it because I had previously done something else.
\n\n\n\nWith HeroPress, I didn’t set out to become a relatively known person. I was just doing it. But I remember the first time I talked to a stranger from India and introduced myself and they said, oh, of course we know you. I said, what do you mean of course? You live 5,000 miles away from me. How on earth would you know me? And, boy, it is just stuff like that.
\n\n\n\nI have some plugins on wordpress.org. I think cumulatively they have 12 installs. They’re not big plugins, but they’re there. And people look and say, oh, Topher knows how to make plugins.
\n\n\n\nI contribute to the photos project. And people who aren’t necessarily contributors don’t necessarily understand the different kinds of contribution. They just see my name on the contributor list like, oh, Topher builds WordPress because I take a lot of photos or something. But just the fact that I’m out there doing that makes a difference.
\n\n\n\nI’ve been blogging for years. I did blogs in the GoDaddy Garage back in the day, I wrote on OS Training, I wrote all over the place. And recently I thought, boy, I wish I had had all that on my own site.
\n\n\n\nAnd then it occurred to me that WordPress does a lot of RSS, and so does YouTube. And so I built a site called topher.how. Found everything I’ve ever done and just used WP All Import and pulled it all into one place. So now at topher.how you can see stuff I’ve done decades ago, and it’s nice. It’s a place to say, look, here’s stuff I did. But I have gotten, no, you know, I’m not going to say I’ve gotten jobs, I’ve gotten consideration, interviews, interest because people who know who I am, because I did something once long ago.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess the interview phase, to get yourself over the line, you’ve still got to sort of show your metal, haven’t you? But that whole thing of just being represented by your past, it’s really curious. We live in a world which is so dominated by, I don’t know, the financial motivation for this, that, and the other.
\n\n\n\nIt is curious when nowadays you can have a legacy which is not the CV, it’s not the line items on the CV. It can be much more ephemeral stuff. Things that you did, videos that you made, blogs that you contributed to.
\n\n\n\nThe people out there making the decisions about who’s going to get those jobs, well, you have proved that that kind of history of being online definitely works, and in unexpected ways. It’s not like there’s always a through line between, okay, I’m going to make these YouTube videos so that in a few years time I’ll have this credible body of evidence that will make it so that anybody can employ me. It’s much more ephemeral than that. It’s more, I’m doing this video because I think itll be helpful, and then serendipitously that then leads to something in the future.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:14] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, very much so. Before we started recording, you mentioned my background here. It’s a piece of fabric on a photo stand. And I bought it just the other day because, you know, I’ve been making videos for years, I’ve never appeared on camera. Always been a screencast. And I recently got a client that said, well, we want you on camera. And so I got this thing.
\n\n\n\nBut the interesting part is that the client is a company in Bangladesh. And I know them quite well, they know me quite well because of stuff we’ve done together in the past in the WordPress community. And when they needed videos, they came to me, because they know me and they know that’s what I do. That wouldn’t happen if I hadn’t been out doing stuff years ago. What are the chances I would know somebody, me in Michigan, I would know somebody in Bangladesh?
\n\n\n\n[00:22:01] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Right, I mean, the world of 50 years ago, it’s tending to zero basically, you know, unless you’d been on plane or somebody had been on a plane in the opposite direction and you’d met where you are. The opportunities afforded are amazing, and it’s that kind of long tail that you’ve got as well. That I suppose is going to be hard for somebody that’s younger to listen to because, you know, they kind of see this mountain that they’ve got to climb and this great body of work that they’ve got to build up over decades. I guess that’s, it’s not all about that either, it’s about sort of just chipping away at it and doing things piecemeal.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:31] Topher DeRosia: I have a funny story about that. Early in my WordPress career, I got to know Pippen Williamson. You may remember him.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I do.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:39] Topher DeRosia: And he was very well known in the WordPress community. I got to know a few people who were very well known. I was like, man, that’s cool, everybody knows these people. Wonder if people will ever know me? We were talking about it, he and I, and he quickly urged me, do not seek to be known because that will only lead to tears. If you’re doing it for the wrong reason, then it will just turn out badly.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I thought, well, you know, maybe in 10 years. Well, here we are. And I didn’t set out to be known. I’ve never bought a banner ad saying, look at Topher. I just went to WordCamp and spoke. I wrote blog posts, I made videos. I shook a lot of hands. I listened to a lot of stories.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:18] Nathan Wrigley: It’s about sort of spreading the network organically really, isn’t it? Which I suppose in a sense leads to, okay, rather than the word fame, I’m going to use the word notoriety because I think they’ve got two very different endpoints. But the idea of seeking fame is tied up with, you know, you just want random people to know you because they know you, and that’s the kind of end game, you know? Oh, you are famous because you’re famous, that sort of flavor to it.
\n\n\n\nWhereas notoriety for me has much more, there’s a body, a corpus of work behind you that leads to that understanding that, okay, that’s Topher. I know Topher because he did this, this, this, and this. It’s not famous because they’re famous. It’s more, there’s the guy who made those videos that I watched. Or there’s the guy that wrote that blog that I read all the time. That kind of thing. And so it’s not fame for fame sake, it’s accidental fame more, if you know what I mean?
\n\n\n\n[00:24:10] Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I heard the term not too long ago that I like called community known.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:14] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That’s nice.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:15] Topher DeRosia: Within a community, you you could say famous, very well known. Outside that community, people do not care and have no idea who you are.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:22] Nathan Wrigley: That’s right. Yeah, it’s curious, inside of our community, there’s this one person whose name kind of precedes all others, and it would be Matt Mullenweg. But I’m willing to bet that if Matt was walking down the street, more or less anywhere, that his life is just the same as yours and mine. Nobody’s going to know who he is unless randomly they happen to be a WordPresser. But he’s fairly thin on the ground. You know, it’s not like he’s Scarlett Johansson or George Clooney or something like that, where that fame is probably quite an oppressive thing in their life. You know, the capacity to just walk down the street.
\n\n\n\nSo yeah, anyway, the point being that you’ve done stuff over time without the intention of it being this fame for being famous. It’s more about being community known, as you said. But that has had amazing consequences.
\n\n\n\nAnd that kind of leads me to this next thing. I wonder, this question comes up all the time, but I do wonder if it’s more material now than it ever has been. I wonder if the community can always cope with the commercial pressure that is being born by the community?
\n\n\n\nSo for example, you know, you up to events and there’s a lot of people trying to sell you things. And maybe WordCamps from 15 years ago would’ve felt very much more a room full of like-minded individuals. Whereas now if you go to WordCamps, maybe there’s more of a feeling of, okay, that bit over there is more commercial, that bit over there is less commercial. But there’s always that kind of commercial angle.
\n\n\n\nI don’t really know where I’m going with that, but the commercial side of things, I don’t know if you’ve got a feeling on, or a intuition on that?
\n\n\n\n[00:25:54] Topher DeRosia: Sort of. Something I’ve noticed over the years is that it’s entirely possible to write a plugin, start selling it, have it be successful, build a business, hire people, maybe get a relatively large business, maybe hundreds of employees. And it feels good, it looks good, it’s great, it’s wonderful until it starts going, or getting hard. And then people who never thought this would happen start having to make difficult decisions that hurt people.
\n\n\n\nIf things aren’t going well, we need to let some people go. Maybe we need to let a lot of people go. Maybe we need to reorganise, whatever. And people look at this golden company, the pinnacle of WordPress, open source, love, family, peace, blah, blah, blah, and they’re letting people go. And you think, what? They’re just another business. They were just in it for the money. And they’re not, but it can feel that way when you’ve been let go.
\n\n\n\nAnd at some point it has to be about the money. If you’re building a plugin because you love it and you’re selling it because people need it, that’s cool. If you’re running a business and people are depending on you for their livelihoods, you have to make the decisions. You have to do some hard things sometimes. And it’s never going to be comfortable. And at some point it’s going to look like you’re just another company. I’ve never been in this position, but I think it can be incredibly difficult to maintain a culture that we associate with the stereotype of WordPress community, in a full on company.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do know exactly what you mean. I think we, let’s say for example, let’s go back to Cisco. I used that example a minute ago. Let’s say that I work for Cisco. It’s pretty obvious what the goal there is. The goal is to ship loads of units of networking hardware all over the world, and then next year ship more than we ship this year and innovate more and.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:45] Topher DeRosia: And you have investors that are going to hold your feet to the fire.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:47] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Okay, so make money, make the investors happy, make the shareholders happy, and so on. That is so straightforward a bargain. But we in our community have this extra layer underpinning it of this philanthropic bit, which forms the basis of it. It’s literally the bedrock of it.
\n\n\n\nAnd so that whole thing is propping everything else up on top of it, which I genuinely don’t know how the shifting sands of that all work. We’ve managed to get through 22 years plus, of that building up slowly over time, there being arguments here, there and everywhere. Minor arguments, some bigger arguments. We’ve somehow worked it through.
\n\n\n\nBut I don’t suppose that will ever get perfectly resolved. It’s going to be just part of the understanding that if you’re in open source, there’s a commercial bit. And if you can’t cope with that, well, that’s something you’re going to have to think about and look at. But also there’s going to be this whole philanthropic side, and that has to carry on and has to be funded, and figured out, and made important and advertised and all of that. I don’t have the brain to figure all that out, but it’s part of the jigsaw puzzle.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:52] Topher DeRosia: Yeah. It’s truly something I’ve never had to deal with, and I hope I don’t, the scales of money. I had a job once when I was very young. We’re at home, we were newly married and money was tight, and we were talking about where to get $20 for groceries and things like that.
\n\n\n\nAnd at work I was allocating hardware for new employees and, oh, let’s pick up two or three extra computers at $4,000 each because we might need them. That scale of money is, it’s something I’ve tried to be aware of.
\n\n\n\nI look at a WordPress plugin company that has employees and I think, oh man, you have so much more money than I do, so much more. And maybe they do, but they also have so many more bills than I do. Just because they have several employees, and they’re doing well and things look great on Black Friday, doesn’t mean that they’re super wealthy or anything.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I genuinely struggle with this component. I don’t think I’ll ever resolve it. I’m just aware that it exists. I’m aware that there’s people who are very polemic about it. There are people on the far this side, and there’s people on the opposite side who maybe are kind of struggling to shout across the gap. But then there’s people sitting in the middle who are somehow managing to figure it all out, or at least be sanguine about it, and not worrying too much about it. Time will tell. In the year 2026, I’m sure that it won’t get figured out, but it will probably carry on.
\n\n\n\nI’ve got every hope that WordPress is exciting enough to carry on and that people will continue to use it. So I don’t worry too much about that. It’s just more whether or not the two sides of the argument, in an increasingly polemic world, whether the commercial side of WordPress and the non-commercial side of WordPress can figure out some way to walk upon the same path.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:28] Topher DeRosia: There’s an element to WordPress that I think will carry on, even if it looks like WordPress is starting to fail. And that’s going to be the earliest people, the smallest contributors. Things have been really shaken up in WordPress in the last year or two, and I have friends who’ve left the community. And business is getting bigger and WordPress itself is changing. Gutenberg is a big thing now and AI is moving in and all that. So much is changing.
\n\n\n\nAnd I have people say, why do you stay? Why do you keep doing WordPress? Specifically, why do I keep doing HeroPress? And I think my experience tells me that there will always be a 17-year-old picking up a computer at the library for the first time and discovering WordPress and starting a new life. And I want to be there for that person.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So it’s going back to the 17-year-old you as well. You know, that bit that we had earlier where you figured out you had this intuition that there were some things in life which mattered more.
\n\n\n\nOne of the things that I think is really, like it’s so difficult to square this argument though, the whole thing where you see incredible wealth being generated by WordPress and you see incredible endeavors being put into WordPress by people who are really struggling to make ends meet. And I simply don’t have the capacity to figure out the solution to that. I cannot square that circle. But that is such a bit of cognitive dissonance that so much wealth is generated, on the one hand, and yet so much of the foundational work is created by people who may be struggling to put food on the table and what have you. And that is really challenging.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:12] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, it is challenging. I don’t think it’ll ever be solved. I think it’s a universal problem of humanity. But similar to other areas, I think WordPress does better than other communities. There have been a bunch of discussions in the past about inclusivity, diversity in the WordPress community. And even people who point out the problems and say, look, we messed up here, this is bad, we need to change it, will say WordPress is probably the best of the IT world. There are problems. It’s bad. There are things we need to change, but we’re way ahead.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that’s a really, sorry to interrupt. I got really caught up in what you just said then. I wasn’t expecting that to hit me quite as hard as it did. That was really interesting. That sort of sanguine approach to it. It’s never going to be perfect. We’re probably going to have division and factional fighting, I’m going to do air quotes around the word fighting, but you know what I mean, like infighting and what have you. But we do all right. Given how it could be, it’s okay. These things are just a part of the evolution of it. It’s a journey, not a destination. Yeah, that was interesting.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:18] Topher DeRosia: We do have to take care though to not rest on our laurels, as it were. To say, oh, you know what? It’s okay, we’re better than everybody else, and so we don’t need to work on it. As soon as we do that, then we will not be better than everybody else.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:30] Nathan Wrigley: And it’s curious because I think the people that I end up talking to when I attend things like WordCamps have that intuition. I think some, on some innate level, they get the bit that you just said. They know that it’s not perfect. And they know that work needs to be done. And they’re there for that thing. They want to fight the good fight, and make it so that this platform is available to the 17-year-old that you just described, so that they can pick this stuff up and publish their own stuff online, and have their own voice, and create their own identity and all of that. And it’s, yeah, really interesting.
\n\n\n\nI think I have one more question. So we were talking about the impact of you doing stuff in the open. You obviously did all of that stuff in the open. You did everything, you put everything online, you got HeroPress and all of that kind of stuff. Would you still advocate that in the year 2025, 2026? Do you still think that’s probably the best way forward?
\n\n\n\nThe reason I’m asking that is because we see so much out there in the world, beguiling stuff. TikTok, YouTube, all these people getting YouTube famous, making giant amounts of money and all of that kind stuff. They’re doing it kind of purposefully in order to gain wealth. So it’s less that philanthropic side.
\n\n\n\nIf you could replay your life, would you do that? Is there any part of you which thinks you’d go down that route of being the kind of influencer, or are you happy that your life would replay in, if you were the youngster that you were many, many years ago and you were now that youngster, would you still do it the same way, do you think?
\n\n\n\n[00:35:00] Topher DeRosia: I think I would. A couple years ago I did a video tip of the week on HeroPress. It was a video on YouTube. And people would say to me, you know what? It’s good that you offer this free stuff. You should put something behind a paywall and make money off it. And I think, oh, you know, that’d be cool. I could make money and pay the bills. But then I think, anything I put behind a paywall is not going to be able to help a 17-year-old who’s making a dollar a week. And that’s where my heart is. And I struggle.
\n\n\n\nI’m doing a project right now that I would love to tell you about. Over the years, I’ve done support a lot. And I, early on, made a rule, if I get asked a question more than three times, I’m making documentation. And so I can just say, oh, here, go check this out. And over the years I’ve had many clients come back to me three months after I built a site and say, you know, you taught me how to use the WordPress admin and I don’t remember, can you show me again?
\n\n\n\nSo, I don’t know, a year ago I thought, I’m going to make a course for beginners, and it’s going to have videos that are one minute long about how to make a link, how to put in a picture, how to edit your form. Stuff that we all take for granted every day. But somebody who just got a website three months ago and used it once, they don’t remember.
\n\n\n\nSo I started down that road. I got MemberPress, I set up a site, and I made a list of videos to make. I was going to sell it to my clients as part of, you know, you bought a website, for an extra X dollars, here’s all this documentation you can have. A WordPresser at that educational conference said to me, I want to sponsor you to make those videos. You pick the topic, but do it on our hosting platform, just so that our name is there.
\n\n\n\nAnd she gave me some money to do it. And she said, I want you to put them on your own YouTube channel. I didn’t have one. All these years, I didn’t have my own YouTube channel for my own videos. I want you to put them on your own YouTube channel, and once you get 2000 subscribers, I will pay you for every video you make. Just to put them on my own YouTube channel. I get to pick the topics. It’s just to get their name out. And I thought, wow, okay.
\n\n\n\nSo I pivoted, rather than make a course behind a paywall, I am doing this thing, but they’re all going on YouTube. And I started three weeks ago, and I’m putting up a video Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I have 57 subscribers.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:19] Nathan Wrigley: There’s a little road to go. That’s so nice.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:23] Topher DeRosia: But this goes back to doing stuff in public so that it’s more significant later. Maybe in a year or two or five, I’ll have thousands of subscribers. And life experience has shown me that I need to not assume that I’m going to have thousands of subscribers within a month. That’s not how this works. You do stuff now, you build your foundation and you grow it. And eventually it gets big.
\n\n\n\nHeroPress happened that way. You know, I did a few essays, and I did a few more and I did a few more. And then one day I thought, oh, I have 200 essays, and now I have 300. I never set a goal of how many or anything like that. I just did one at a time, and then suddenly there’s this big site full of stuff.
\n\n\n\nAnd so that’s my current project is to make these videos, helping people figure out how to use WordPress. It’s not going to be just the beginners, it’s going to be, well, have a heart for beginners in any area, so I’m going to do some beginning programming stuff. I’ve built some cool stuff like WP Podcasts, aggregates podcasts. It wasn’t hard. It’s WP All Import, pulling them into the posts type. It’s not that big a deal. But I can make a 10 minute video on how I did that, and some developer’s going to go, wow, I never realised you can do this kind of stuff. So I’m pretty excited about it.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, your life seems to represent that kind of long term approach, and I can completely empathise with that. Obviously my thing is podcasting, and I have the same sort of story that I just began it and kept doing it and kept doing it, and people obviously, you know, found that there was something there for them, or they didn’t.
\n\n\n\nBut there was something that kept that propelled. And now I look back and there’s a few episodes that I can look back to and, it’s pretty amazing what that brought in its train. Most of it completely unexpected, most of it never intended, and now podcasting in the WordPress space is kind of what I do.
\n\n\n\nAnd it just goes to show, if you do things with the right intention, and you do things for the long game, there is a way to make it work. You know, obviously you’ve got to keep the wolf from the door, and if you live in a part of the world where it’s incredibly important that you earn lots of money in order to just meet the bare essentials, then you’ve obviously got to take care of that at the beginning. But then after that, there’s these opportunities on top of that to sort of grow who you are, grow the community that we’re in. And maybe in the long term, over 2, 3, 5, 10, in your case, probably approaching 20 years in the WordPress space, it has an impact. It’s slowly but surely. Slow and steady wins the game, as they say.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:57] Topher DeRosia: It does, yep.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:58] Nathan Wrigley: In which case, I will say thank you for that conversation. It was very unexpected and really, really powerful in some regard there. You really made me think on a couple of occasions as we were chatting there, and I really appreciate that.
\n\n\n\nSo, Topher, where can we find you if somebody wants to see some of the stuff? You’ve already mentioned one. It’s probably topher.how. I don’t know if that’s the one you want to drop again.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:17] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, let’s say topher.how. But if you search Google for Topher1Kenobi, you’ll find me pretty much everywhere.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:24] Nathan Wrigley: Love that.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:25] Topher DeRosia: I’ve never found anyone else use that name.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:26] Nathan Wrigley: And it’s the number one, like the numeral one.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:29] Topher DeRosia: Yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:30] Nathan Wrigley: Not the wan.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:31] Topher DeRosia: My personal blog is at topher1kenobi.com. There’s HeroPress. I did an episode the other day with Christos Paloukas, and he said, hey, send me your links.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:40] Nathan Wrigley: An essay.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:40] Topher DeRosia: I sent him 15 links.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:44] Nathan Wrigley: Do that to me as well. Whatever you do send me, then I will put them into the show notes. wptavern.com, search for the episode with Topher. It’s T-O-P-H-E-R. If you just look for that, you’ll probably find it. And thank you so much for chatting to me today. It was very pleasurable. Thank you.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:59] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, I had a really good time too. Thanks.
\nOn the podcast today we have Topher DeRosia.
\n\n\n\nTopher is a web developer with over 30 years of experience, and he\u2019s been deeply involved in the WordPress community for the past 15 years. He\u2019s attended nearly 80 WordCamps around the world, contributed to projects like HeroPress, and has made it his mission to highlight the power and value of open source and remote work, especially in the WordPress ecosystem.
\n\n\n\nIn this episode, Topher joins me to talk about the value of working in public, and how sharing your work openly can create unexpected and lasting opportunities, whether that\u2019s boosting your career, finding a sense of purpose, or building connections across the globe.
\n\n\n\nWe start with Topher\u2019s personal journey, discovering the WordPress community and the profound impact it had on his life and family. The conversation explores what makes open source communities, like WordPress, so unique, and why working transparently can lead to moments of serendipity, and even job offers from people who have seen your contributions many years before.
\n\n\n\nTopher shares stories about giving back, the motivation that comes from helping others, and the long-term satisfaction that comes from being generous with your time and expertise.
\n\n\n\nWe also discuss the tension between the philanthropic and commercial aspects of WordPress, and how individuals and companies navigate that balance.
\n\n\n\nTowards the end, Topher reflects on building a body of work over time, trusting in the slow and organic process instead of seeking instant \u2018influencer\u2019 success. He explains why he still chooses to create and share resources for free, motivated by the hope of helping the next person just starting out.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019ve ever wondered about the power of sharing your work, finding meaning in open communities, or how to make a difference over the long term, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how CloudFlare outages impact the web, and WordPress performance solutions.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Saumya Majumder. Saumya is the lead software engineer at BigScoots with a deep specialization in high performance WordPress engineering and advanced CloudFlare powered architectures. Throughout his career Saumya has built large scale systems ranging from custom caching engines, to migration tools, worker based automations, and edge computing solutions. He’s played a pivotal role at BigScoots overseeing enterprise customers, and developing scalable developer friendly solutions that push the boundaries of hosting for WordPress.
\n\n\n\nWe begin our conversation with a timely discussion about a major CloudFlare outage that recently rippled across the internet. Saumya explains what happened behind the scenes, the nature of these kind of global infrastructure hiccups, and why, even with the most robust systems in place, some downtime is simply inevitable. He offers valuable insights into how BigScoots is able to mitigate these issues for their customers, even automating rapid failovers to keep sites online during outages.
\n\n\n\nWe then move on to explore some of the innovations that the team at BigScoots have been working on. They focus upon site speed and reliability. This includes CDN level page caching, and their close integration with CloudFlare Enterprise. Saumya breaks down how this caching differs from traditional server based caching, and how it ensures that users around the world get fast, local access to website content.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re curious about how hosting companies manage such advanced caching strategies and how CloudFlare might fit into the hosting jigsaw, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Saumya Majumder.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Saumya. Hello, how are you doing?
\n\n\n\n[00:03:04] Saumya Majumder: Hey, I’m doing well. How are you doing?
\n\n\n\n[00:03:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, very well, thank you. So this is going to be an interesting conversation. I got put in touch with Saumya via Tammy Lister, who has been communicating with Saumya over the last period of time. I don’t know exactly for how long. But the idea is that we’re going to talk about what they’re doing over at BigScoots and the interesting innovations that they’ve got.
\n\n\n\nBy pure coincidence, the day before we recorded this, the Cloudflare, I’m going to call it fun, the fun that Cloudflare had with the entire internet happened. And so I think we’ll digress for a bit at the beginning of the podcast and talk a little bit about that as well, which was unexpected. But given that you are working heavily based upon Cloudflare, it’ll be interesting to talk that through.
\n\n\n\nWould you mind just spending a moment though, just introducing yourself. Just tell us who you are, what it is that you do at your current role, that kind of thing, and then we’ll get stuck into our conversation.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:55] Saumya Majumder: I’m Saumya. I work as a lead software engineer at BigScoots, specialising in high performance WordPress engineering and advanced Cloudflare powered architectures.
\n\n\n\nI also build large scale systems from custom cache engine to migration tools, worker based automations, edge computing and whatnot.
\n\n\n\nI also look after our enterprise customers, all of our internal WordPress projects and plugins and IPs. And I also build scalable, developer friendly solutions for our clients to ensure that they are getting the best service product out of it.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:29] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much indeed. Now, I’m just going to dwell on that for a little bit. A lot of that seems extremely technical, but also it kind of feels like that you went very much down a particular road very early on.
\n\n\n\nHow is it that you ended up doing all of that interesting, but quite specific stuff? How is it that that happened? Is it something that you pursued out of college or something like that? How is it that you went down that path?
\n\n\n\n[00:04:51] Saumya Majumder: It’s an interesting question actually. So I remember, back in my second year of college, I started doing projects, like outside projects. So I started dabbling with PHP, like at the very early days of WordPress. So I get into the WordPress and I was like doing coding, changing things, pushing things to the core, tinkering with the WordPress. That was like way back in the days of the WordPress ecosystem.
\n\n\n\nFrom that, I was dabbling with PHP and other stuff. So that was like back in the days when I started, and then slowly I started seeing problems and how to solve the solution. So for example, a lot of the companies today, like CDN page based page caching, in today’s 2025 it’s like a very, pretty much common thing across the world. If you go to any premium hosting or any premium package, you kind of expect like CDN based page caching.
\n\n\n\nYou know that that wasn’t the case, even like a few years back. It’s like this level page caching or RAM level page caching, like it’s all on the server. So me and one of my friends, whom we met online due to the WordPress coding things, we actually invented the CDN level page caching. So it wasn’t a thing before that. So there was a plugin that we created called Super Page Cache for Cloudflare that got later acquired by a different company called Optimal.
\n\n\n\nIn that plugin we actually looked at like, okay, all the current solutions, like if you break down how the request is happening or how internet works, like you make a request from wherever in the world, that request then travels through across optical fiber cable, blah, blah, blah, to the ISP data center. Then from there it goes to the data center, well, then it reaches the server from there on. If you don’t have cache, then the server has to populate the entire thing, get the response, give it back to you, if you have the cache.
\n\n\n\nSo we were saying that, you know, this is adding like a huge amount of latency, especially if you are, like the distance between the server and you is larger. Back then there was like MaxCDN, KeyCDN, and all of this provider who are like focusing on static files being served from the CDN.
\n\n\n\nSo that was like already a thing, but we were like, okay fine. But like if static files coming from CDN, that’s great, but the main leap frog forward is if we can move the page. Like, literally serving the page HTML from the CDN itself. So if you are in Australia, the request doesn’t have to come to the US. Like, if it’s cached, it’s literally coming from your neighborhood.
\n\n\n\nSo caching was one of the most complex problems that I kind of always loved solving because it was one of those unsolvable problems in the computer engineering world. So that’s how I like get into it, and then started. I broke a lot of things and fixed them and it’s like a journey. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like a journey of a lot of failure and a little of success, I guess.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I can imagine. Do you ever get the sense that you are approaching the destination or is this whole thing just, I’ll do this and then I know that in a week’s time, there’ll be something else that I can optimise. Is there ever a moment where you’ve thought to yourself, okay, that’s it, we cracked it for now? Or is it always just, no, there’s another thing?
\n\n\n\n[00:07:55] Saumya Majumder: It’s always a process, right? The technology is evolving. There’s way, way more to dig deeper. So one of the things we recently released was end DB protection caching. I’m going to talk about it in a moment and also login user caching. Both of these things were in my bucket list for years, and I have done like R and Ds, and R and Ds, and R and Ds to figure out exactly the way to do things. So again, you know, like it’s a process, right? And it takes time.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s lovely. Like you say, we’ll get into those bits and pieces. But as I said at the top of the show, by pure coincidence, we had this, let’s just call it a real collapse in a sense of what Cloudflare provides to the internet as a whole. And I think, depending on where you were and when you were awake in the world, I think for Europeans and maybe the part of the world where you are, it hit us right at the time when we’re all awake. I think maybe if you’re in North America, especially on the West Coast, you might have missed much of it.
\n\n\n\nBut for most of the day here, everything on Cloudflare just declined to work. And it was really interesting how profound that was. And we’ve all heard this problem before. We’ve seen the little drawing of the great big tower built of Lego bricks, and there’s the one little brick at the bottom holding the whole thing up, and it’s called Cloudflare, or it’s called AWS or what have you.
\n\n\n\nCan you explain to us what the heck happened yesterday? Are you able to sort of get into, do you understand it at this point?
\n\n\n\n[00:09:15] Saumya Majumder: Yeah. So internet is a magical thing. It works by magic. If I get into explaining how it works, it’s going to be another thing. But the way it works is, and especially in case of Cloudflare, right? Like, a lot of people look at Cloudflare, that it is a CDN provider, like MaxCDN or Akamai or like any of these providers. But CDN is just one bit of Cloudflare. Cloudflare is like a, such a gigantic service that is like built on top of it.
\n\n\n\nSo as a result, what happens is, when you have such a big system working together, there are lots of critical dependencies that happens. You have all these boxes, but all these boxes are depending on one of these config file, or one of these things that is coming from the layer below that, right?
\n\n\n\nAnd if anything happens in that one thing, the things at the top are working fine, but it cannot work because the one thing that is below it is gone.
\n\n\n\nI would also like to say there is no such thing in the world of internet that just works. Everything is supposed to break at some point in time. There’s no such thing. Be it Google, be it Azure, be it AWS, Cloudflare, anything it is. Even if you have your own data center and everything like that, like we have, there’s no way that, like a lot of things can happen even after you are prepared to mitigate all of those things, like you have follower, and a follower, of follower and all this backup system, still things can go wrong. Maybe that didn’t turn out, maybe that didn’t happen.
\n\n\n\nI saw a lot of memes yesterday on Twitter, like a lot of people was posting like, hey, I just joined as an internet Cloudflare. I pushed a code and that happened. And I understand that it’s funny, but when you look deeper into it, it is actually not funny. It is really like a code red scenario. And trust me, no one, no company wants to get into that code red scenario. Because you have to understand, all of these companies also dealing with a lot of enterprise customers to whom they have promised like 100% percent SLA or 99.99% SLA. And so when they don’t meet that, they have to pay a hefty amount of credit back to them.
\n\n\n\nSo it’s not just the downtime and bad reputation and marketing and all that, it’s literal money being bled out of the company because of that. And it’s like all of those systems.
\n\n\n\nBut at the same point in time, the way technology works, things can mess up. You can do multiple tiers of review of the code, you’re still going to miss a certain edge case scenario, which will only occur if this happened and that happened. And the probability of that happening is probably 0.00001%. But that 0.00001%, it’s not zero. It can happen.
\n\n\n\nIn the world of engineering, we call certain things that are super low priority, like it’s never going to happen. I’m not saying that it cannot happen, it can happen, but the probability of that is so low that spending engineering hours on that at this moment, where we have much more critical things to do, it doesn’t come up, right?
\n\n\n\nBut sometimes things happen. And as a senior engineer, it happens like this. And in case of Cloudflare, what happened is as this is like a such a big system, even if they identified the root cause, let’s say that takes some amount of time for the engineers to figure out, and they push that. And you have to understand, a lot of people are sending requests, requests are going down, and they figured out the root cause. They’re pushing the fix and then like a boatload of requests is coming to Cloudflare.
\n\n\n\nSo it takes time for everything to stabilise, you know? So it is bad. It is bad, but anyone who is thinking like, oh, Cloudflare is bad, if I move from Cloudflare to, I don’t know, X, Y, or Z, or something like that, it won’t happen. I haven’t seen, like a Tweet yesterday where somebody said, send cold emails to people saying, Cloudflare is down. But we don’t use Cloudflare, we use our own VPS and dedicated server for that. And I was like laughing out loud. I’m like, I understand that, you know, your data center did not go down, but that does not mean that it can never go down.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:06] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of guaranteed. I think one of the interesting things that I saw was in the mitigation, the sort of summing up posts that Cloudflare created, there was this whole thing about this unexpected file which kind of doubled in size. It was supposed to be this size, but it doubled in size, and that got propagated. And then for a period of time, the ripple effect of that was that it looked like a DDoS attack. For a period of time it looked as if it may have been malicious actors.
\n\n\n\nAnd so the Cloudflare engineers, I think kind of went off, as it turned out, wrong headedly. They went off in the wrong direction, searching for the problem, which probably added a number of hours to the mitigation, and then kind of figured out what was going on. And then, like you said, the whole ripple effect is, it’s not like you turn off a computer, switch the computer back on, and Cloudflare is restored. There’s this whole propagation thing where you find the problem, mend the problem, the problem mitigates, and that is presumably going to take hours and hours and hours. And then you could just see the sort of downtime reports slowly repairing themselves over the internet.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:08] Saumya Majumder: And you have to understand that, as I said, Cloudflare, people think of Cloudflare as a, either a security company or a CDN company. But Cloudflare is way, way, way more than that, right? The CDN backbone that they have, it’s literally their backbone, the powerhouse on top of which Cloudflare builds their own thing.
\n\n\n\nSo anytime they find a fix of which they call their control plan, you know, pushed the fix to their control plan, that has to get propagated across all of their end edges. And Cloudflare has the highest number of CDN PoPs, you know? So it has to get pushed across all of these places, rebooted and all of these crazy things has to happen in order for everything to go properly. And then all the burst of traffic that is coming on that it has to handle that. It is a crazy thing.
\n\n\n\nBut one of the things that I liked about Cloudflare is that, it’s not that this is the first time Cloudflare had a global outage. They had global outage before as well. There are two things I really love about Cloudflare.
\n\n\n\nNumber one is that they’re super transparent. So anytime things go wrong or situation like this happens, they always push like a detailed blog article explaining exactly what happened, what they did to fix it, and how they’re making sure that this does not happen again in the future. And it never happens in the future.
\n\n\n\nSo if you look at the previous global outage that they had, I think back in June, it was caused because there’s a thing called Cloudflare KV, which had a dependency on GCP. So when GCP went down, so KV went down and as a result the system went down. And from there on, they’re now working on to remove that dependency, building things internally in house to make sure that doesn’t happen.
\n\n\n\nPreviously, there was another, I think last year or something like that, another global outage where the entire main data center went down. There was like multiple failover but the generator didn’t start and then this didn’t start and that didn’t start. And that caused like a huge failover scenario, I think, if you remember that, right?
\n\n\n\nAnd from there on, they make sure that, okay, we now have to make sure that we have multiple, that scenario is never going to come back. So they always work towards to make sure everything that happening never happens the second time. And it really does that. But at the end of the day, in the world of technology, things can go wrong. It’s just how it is.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:11] Nathan Wrigley: What’s kind of curious though, from an end user’s perspective, and you are going to explain to us some of the complexities of the inner workings of BigScoots and how it combines with Cloudflare in a minute, and that’ll be really interesting. But from a non-technical user’s point of view, it just feels like the sky is falling in because so much of the internet has collapsed, so many things that they’re familiar with.
\n\n\n\nSo just a couple of examples which many people would be familiar with. So for example, if you were a user of the social network X, that completely failed. There must be a dependency on Cloudflare at some point there. Also ChatGPT, which is now becoming almost, it’s just a thing which almost everybody at some point of the day is plugged into, that went away.
\n\n\n\nBut then it just rippled out across so many other things. News organisations go down. The ability to log into a variety of things went down. So it may be that your platform itself worked, but you might have had the the Turnstile sort of capture system, which Cloudflare run, enabled, and nobody could log into the proprietary platform that you got because the Cloudflare portion, the Turnstile wasn’t working and so on.
\n\n\n\nSo it just had this enormous effect. And the sort of chilling effect of that is that people then, erroneously I think, sort of view Cloudflare in some way as a bit of a, I don’t know, a giant that needs to be brought to heal in some way. You know, we can never let this happen again, there’s too much dependencies on these small group of massive organisations and what have you.
\n\n\n\nBut by today, everybody’s forgotten that, you know, they kind of moved on with their lives and we’re back to what it was like on Monday. And so there’s no question in there, but I think there’s some insight that I’m sharing.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:41] Saumya Majumder: Oh yeah, absolutely. So there are a couple of very important things to understand here, right? So first of all, as you said, the people who talks about these kind of things on the social media, trust me, either they’re not engineers, senior engineers, or they don’t understand the problem.
\n\n\n\nAnd so these are the people who talks about this exact same thing where a few weeks back AWS went down, and then a couple of months back, GCP went down. And then they were like, well, Facebook went down, they literally just use this exact same word every single time something goes down. But things can go down. That’s like, you have to accept that and move on.
\n\n\n\nAnd that’s why when you get onto these enterprise deals with these big companies, they have this SLA agreement, like where they say, we grant to you, as I told you about earlier, right? So all of these companies, GCP, AWS, Cloudflare, if you are like a big enterprise customers of them, you have like an SLA agreement with them. Where they say, okay, we are going to guarantee that we’re going to give you 100% uptime, or 99.999999% uptime. And anytime they miss that mark, they have to pay back a huge sum of money as a credit to the customers saying, okay, we missed on our contract, so this is that credit back to you.
\n\n\n\nSo you have to understand that anytime situation like this happen, it is not only a bad thing on the companies, on the marketing front of it, but it is also a bad thing on the financial side of things. Because you have to understand like all of these big companies, there are these smaller clients who are dealing with companies like, there are smaller clients and there are like giant clients, the enterprise customer who companies are really worried about. And for these giant clients, they have to pay huge amount of money back as credit because things didn’t come back within time. So it is not something that they are not worried about to fix immediately. They’re literally trying as hard as possible to fix that.
\n\n\n\nSo that being said, now talk about the other points that you brought up, the turnstile, the WAF and the other things, right?
\n\n\n\nSo as I said, Cloudflare is not just a security company. It’s like a huge thing. Cloudflare has a thing called Developer Platform where you can literally deploy your own APIs, your AI workload, your workflows, your entire React or entire application on Cloudflare, which is amazing. I use it. I love that platform.
\n\n\n\nAnd then that is one side of using Cloudflare, and then there’s another side of using Cloudflare like, for example, using BigScoots. You have let’s say a WordPress website that is hosted on BigScoots, but it is being proxied via Cloudflare to leverage their CDN, their security and all of those features.
\n\n\n\nSo in a scenario like a WordPress site where you are not using Cloudflare as your host, so your Cloudflare is just there as a proxy, making sure that your origin IP is not there, your site is super protected and performance and CDN and whatnot. In that scenario, anytime this kind of problem happens, you can kind of, when this outage was there, the API was still working and we actually, for all of our customers, we leveraged our API to make sure that any request does not proxy via Cloudflare, but instead it just goes directly to our server just for the moment in time until Cloudflare is back in the game.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so you could turn the proxy off via the API.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:45] Saumya Majumder: Via the API, yes.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:46] Nathan Wrigley: Right. So the fact that the rest of us couldn’t log in because Turnstile was down, we couldn’t authenticate into the Cloudflare network on the web. The API was still available, so you could turn the proxy off for a variety of your customers, and the domains and the websites that they had.
\n\n\n\nOh, that’s really interesting. So they had a few minutes of downtime. Okay, that’s fascinating.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:04] Saumya Majumder: So what we did is when we saw this outage happening, anytime requests are coming in, it was a code red scenario on our end as well. All hands on deck. So anytime requests are coming in, like people are having problem, we immediately turned on the proxying API to make sure that this site is up and online.
\n\n\n\nSo that way the request is not going via Cloudflare anymore, it’s coming directly to us for the moment, until CloudFare is back on track. And that helped us to mitigate the downtime as much as possible for the customer, even though Cloudflare was technically down.
\n\n\n\nBut if you would have been hosting your Nuxt or React or Next.js kind of application on Cloudflare, where you are using Cloudflare workers and things like that as your host, in that scenario, you couldn’t push anything.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the API is not going to help you.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:51] Saumya Majumder: Yes, yeah. It was bad but it’s going to happen. It can happen.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that’s kind of the message, you know? Nothing that humans create is immutable. Everything has a moment of breaking. But, you know, if you were to cast your mind back until, well, just Monday when everything was, you know, just plain sailing, Cloudflare was working as normal, then everybody was entirely happy. We had this period of time, it was maybe something like 8 hours where everybody’s kind of throwing their arms in the air and, you know, moaning on whatever social networks are still working.
\n\n\n\nBut now we’re onto Wednesday, that whole thing is long behind us. That ship sailed, whatever, move on. Confidence, I think basically what you’re saying is you can be confident in Cloudflare. They’re going to have hiccups because they’re like any other company, things will go wrong.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:33] Saumya Majumder: Everything can have hiccups. So it’s not just, so you have to understand this, right? Again, I’m saying that Cloudflare is not just a CDN provider, but if you look at Cloudflare and all the things that they do, the complexity of it is like mindbogglingly crazy, you know? Like it’s immense, immensely complex. It makes things super easy for you. Okay, you just toggle this on and it’s done. But if look at under the hood, and all the things and chains it has to go through, and that happens in a blink of milliseconds, it’s crazy complicated.
\n\n\n\nAs I said, right, like I’m not saying that Cloudflare is bad. I think Cloudflare is amazing because two things, they have super transparency, so anytime anything happens, the blog article that you are like referencing here, they didn’t hide behind anything like, oh, it was not my problem, like not doing the blame game thing. No, no, no. Like, it was our problem. This is the problem.
\n\n\n\nFor example, in that blog article, they could have completely, don’t talk about the DDoS thingy, right? They could have just said, oh, this was the configuration file problem. We fix this, it’s done. But no, they actually literally walk you through how exactly they process the problem, which is really great. And then they actually learns from their mistakes to make sure that particular mistake never happens again, while they are like growing rapidly and building things, pushing things like crazy, like always pushing new things, which is like amazing to me.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:50] Nathan Wrigley: I think the article even started, if it wasn’t the first set of words, it was definitely in the first couple of sentences. It was something like, we let you down. It was full ownership, I think. So bravo to them.
\n\n\n\nAnd you’re right, the complexity behind it, you know, like you said earlier, the internet, the fact that anything works on the internet is an utter miracle of engineering, of computer engineering.
\n\n\n\nYou know, the fact that we’re on a platform that we are staring at each other. I can see your image, you can see my image, you can hear my audio, I can hear your audio. You are on the, a different side of the planet, but it’s happening like you’re stood next to me. And the millions of packets of information that have flown during the course of this conversation, it’s insane. And Cloudflare add a whole layer of other stuff on top of that, which makes it even more insane.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:33] Saumya Majumder: Yeah. And you have to ask the question, like, why all these big companies are using Cloudflare like if it is so bad. Because they are doing things that nobody else even think about doing at a scale. And it’s like mindblogglingly crazy. It’s crazy.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah, it really is. So we’ll leave that for another day. But obviously over at BigScoots, you’ve really attached your wagon, if you like, to Cloudflare. And when you agreed to come on the podcast to talk to me, it became obvious to me that the pay grade that you are at is very different to the pay grade that I’m able to keep up with.
\n\n\n\nSo we’re going to talk about what you’re doing over at BigScoots. I’m going to try to keep up, but if I misunderstand something, or I have to ask you to repeat something, I hope that’s okay with you. But I’m just curious because Tammie Lister, like I said at the beginning of this episode, she’s somebody whose opinion I respect a lot, and she said that you are doing some really innovative, interesting things with your connections to Cloudflare at BigScoots. So just lay out some of the interesting engineering work that you’ve been doing. I’ll try to hold on.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:30] Saumya Majumder: First I’m to Tammie is great. Tammie is amazing. But yeah, I mean, I think BigScoots have been one of the first to utilise Cloudflare Enterprise in the hosting world. I know we didn’t do any kind of huge marketing like other hosts, but we have been the first to leverage Cloudflare Enterprise in our hosting ecosystem. And it was such early days, like back then, all of these things, this market wasn’t there. So we were building things that people didn’t even test it out.
\n\n\n\nSo as I said in the beginning, like I, along with one of my colleagues, we invented the CDN level page caching. This is way before APU and all of that. So all of those things actually build upon the architecture systems as we build on, including APU and the workers and stuff.
\n\n\n\nSo at BigScoots, the Cloudflare thing, especially the Cloudflare Enterprise thing opens up a whole new door for us because it now allowed us to provide CDN level page caching for every single user at a super high cache hit ratio. I mean it’s like, every time you hit a page, chances of that getting, coming out of cache is much higher, compared to if you are, or like a free plan or any other plan, right?
\n\n\n\nSo that was the beginning. And on top of that, we build our own proprietary plugin called BigScoots Cache, which allows you to not only leverage and take advantage of the Cloudflare page caching, but giving you the ability to fine tune every aspect of page caching that you would like on webpage.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:56] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to pause you right there. Firstly, because I’m sure that almost everybody in the audience, because their WordPress aligned, is going to understand what a cache is. They’re going to understand this process of kind of, okay, let’s remember something for next time so that when we need it next time, it’s kind of ready. But they may not understand how Cloudflare does this on their Enterprise plan.
\n\n\n\nSo what is it that’s different? Because we may be familiar with, I don’t know, a WordPress plugin and we’ve got some idea that there’s a cache. It’s sitting on the server somewhere in a file, it’s an HTML file or something like that. You are describing something not in one location, but like really just spread globally so it’s ready at the point of least distance from wherever somebody is. So tell us a bit more about that.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:35] Saumya Majumder: So let me explain that with like an analogy, right? So before CDN level page caching, I think pretty much everybody would remember, like we used to have caching plugins. I’m not going to name anything, but they were caching plugins. So when you turn them on, what they essentially did was they would create like an advanced-cache.php. You have everything of that file inside your WordPress installation.
\n\n\n\nWhat that used to do is, when you send a request, let’s say you are in Australia, right, and your server is in US, so you want to open example.com, and that requests flows through under the ocean, it goes to the data center, it goes to the server, the server receives the request, it started processing that, run all the database queries and all of that, and then it got the HTML to show it to you.
\n\n\n\nBack then what it used to do is then, advanced-cache.php would kick in, it would create a copy of the HTML, store that locally on the server so the next time if someone requests for that page, instead of asking the server, hey, please process the PHP and database and all of that, it would require much less amount of server resources because it’s just like, WordPress is like warming up. The request goes to advanced-cache.php, then it says oh, I have that cache file, sends that cache response back to you.
\n\n\n\nBut even in this scenario, if you are making this request from Australia and your server is in US, you have to understand that the latency is very high, because the request has to go from Australia to US and then whatever gets there is, you know, response from there and come back from US to Australia. So the traversing time is pretty high.
\n\n\n\nFrom there on, and back then we are thinking about MaxCDN, you know, KeyCDN and like putting static files on the CDN so that, yes, the page is being generated by the server, but the static files are being served literally where you are. Like, if you are in Australia, in Sydney, so maybe the CDN PoP in Sydney is like, when you make a request for that, the static file is coming from Sydney.
\n\n\n\nThat’s where we thought about, what if we can put this page HTML, instead of in the server, we can put it on the CDN? There were two benefit out of this. First, it is in insanely fast. Because if this page HTML is across the world, so if you are in Sydney making the request and the request is like, oh, okay, I have this page cache to me, here you go, the response, you get that in like less than 100ms, you know?
\n\n\n\nSame thing happens for someone sitting in India and Germany and some other places of the world, because it’s cached across the globe. So it’s not just coming from a single place. And anytime it is not cached, the request goes to the server, HTML processed, and by the time the response is sent out, it got cached. It’s cached across the world.
\n\n\n\nNow, that was the page caching part of it, right? And then there’s other things, the object cache and OPcache, that’s like whole another different level. But I’m not going to get into that. I’m just going to stay with, because then it’s going to get way too long.
\n\n\n\nSo that’s where this object caching and Cloudflare Enterprise came into play, right? Cloudflare Enterprise then allowed us to make sure that we can cache all these pages across the globe with a very high cache hit rate. Cache hit rate means, when something gets cached somewhere, let’s say someone makes a request to that file and that cache is expired from there and it’s not there. So the request, again, has to go to the origin and get processed and come back to you.
\n\n\n\nSo that is generally the case with the lower tier plans with Cloudflare. So with Cloudflare Enterprise you get a very high cache hit ratio. So when it’s getting the cache, it stays on the cache for a very long time. On top of that, we got tiered cache and regional tiered cache and all of those crazy things.
\n\n\n\nWhich that means is, we have tiering systems. So when you make a request, the request first gets cached in the upper tier. And when a lower tier, so let’s say, how can I explain this to you? So let’s say you are in Phoenix, okay? And in Phoenix there’s a data center, or a PoP that is called, in case of CDN, a PoP is there in Phoenix but the upper tier PoP is Chicago.
\n\n\n\nSo let’s say someone made a request from Chicago, the page was cached in Chicago data center, okay? Now, as we have this tiered cache system, when you, from Phoenix, is making the request, instead of that PoP directly sending the request to the origin, it would first internally within the intranet of Cloudflare, not the internet, okay? The intranet of Cloudflare. The internal network like, hey, does anyone in the upper tier has this page cached to you? And if they say yes, they would fetch it from the upper tier, which is like crazy fast because there’s no traffic, and it’s like a internal network of Cloudflare.
\n\n\n\nAnd if it does not, then it pass on the request to the upper tier, because the upper tier is the only one who has the power to pull the request from origins. It goes to the upper tier. Upper tier pulls it from the origin, creates a copy, and it’s upper tier, and then send it back to the lower tier. So in that way, in the tiered architecture, it makes sure that the cache hit ratio is insanely high.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:24] Nathan Wrigley: Let me just sort of read that back to you just to make sure I’ve understood. And I’m imagining that, the simplest way my head is understanding that is a bunch of concentric circles. So in the center is me, and I wish to find something on, let’s say, the outer circle. So the first thing I’m going to do is go to my inner circle, and if the inner circle doesn’t have it, we need to go to the next circle out, and the next circle out, and the next circle out.
\n\n\n\nNow in the old world, if you like, or the non-enterprise version of Cloudflare, at some point we have to go further out of the circles in order to find what it is that we’re looking for. But what I think you are saying is that on the enterprise level, that outer circle is constantly pushing things towards the inner circle on a much more local basis. So rather than having to go out circle, another one, another one, another one, it can just hop one circle out, get what it needs, and then hop right back. In other words, every single thing is always closer, geographically, than it would be in any other setup.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:22] Saumya Majumder: Yes, and on top of that, if you look at the opposite architecture of this, right? So imagine you are in Phoenix, Phoenix doesn’t have it in cache. Phoenix sends a request to origin, now someone from Mississippi makes a request, they don’t have it in cache, their PoP makes a request too.. So all these PoPs are making requests to the origin because they don’t have it in their own local cache, which is bad because that would then mean the request to the origin would increase dramatically, which we are trying to reduce.
\n\n\n\nBut in this sense we have, imagine like a fixed set of upper tier data center, then we have like a middle tier and then the lower tier, right? So if lower tier doesn’t have it, it asks the middle tier, middle tier checks if any of the middle tier across the world have it. If they do, immediately send it. And that’s happening within the internal network of Cloudflare and not on the open internet, okay? It’s like crazy fast.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:11] Nathan Wrigley: Right, okay. So again, forgive me, I’m going to make a leap of faith here, I could have this wrong. I’m guessing that on the Cloudflare side, they have their own bespoke hardware to route all of this stuff. So like you said, you described it as an, it’s like an internet intranet, almost, the scale that they’re on. But they’ve got their own hardware, which will be able to route that information presumably more quickly, and with less, I don’t know, less latency than you and I might have.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:36] Saumya Majumder: Yeah, it’s a intranet, it’s not internet. It’s a private channel, right? So no one talking there except for Cloudflare. And the best part of that is, so imagine let’s say you are making a request from Mississippi, and there is like a upper tier data center in Mumbai, India, right? So what happens is, even though it’s not cached in US, it’s going to see that, okay, I have it cached in Mumbai, let’s take it from there instead of making a call to the origin, reducing the call origin, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that bit I didn’t understand. So the entire network is aware of where the closest thing is even before it needs to have it. I got it. Okay. That’s fascinating. And do they own the cables? Do Cloudflare own the cables connecting these things?
\n\n\n\n[00:35:18] Saumya Majumder: Yes. Yes, they have their own data center, their own backbone, all of that. And on top of that, like at BigScoots we even have direct physical connections to Cloudflare service. That’s called CNI. That’s like a next step. So again, let me kind of paint a picture. This is you as a user, right? This is Cloudflare sitting in the middle, acting as a reverse proxy, and this is origin, okay?
\n\n\n\nSo the way it works is you make a request, right? So let’s say you, a request is received by this in a reverse proxy Cloudflare. Then it process that thing, whether it has to show you a WAF page, whatever the logic is, right? Does it have it in cache and all of that? You know, if it is not being blocked or challenged, do I need to show it in cache? Do I have it in cache? You’re talking to the internal network, all of that. And that’s happening in this middle tier, right?
\n\n\n\nAnd this middle tier is now connected to their entire Cloudflare chain, right? So if, let’s say Mumbai has it, and it pulls from Mumbai, give it back to you. So the request never goes to the origin, right?
\n\n\n\nNow, for whatever reason, you make a request to Cloudflare, Cloudflare checks it’s internal network, it doesn’t have it itself, so it has to make a request to the origin, right?
\n\n\n\nThere’s the interesting part. This bit of connection that is you and the Cloudflare, that’s happening over the open internet, right? Because like you making and the request goes by the open internet and lands to Cloudflare, right? And then this is your origin, so your Cloudflare to origin, right, that also generally happens by open internet. Cloudflare then makes a request, and that request goes by the internet and, you know, lands on the data center.
\n\n\n\nBut here’s the magical part that we have done. As we run and own our own data center, what we have done is we have connected a physical cable, like literally optic fibre cable with super insanely high bandwidth with the Cloudflare servers, with our servers. So what happens is, anytime Cloudflare has to fetch something from our origin, instead of sending that request by the open internet, which could be slow, there could be congestion and whatnot, it then sends via that private network that we have created, that private optical fiber cable and lands directly to our origin. Like, oh, this is hosted on BigScoots. We need to talk to BigScoots. Okay, send via this channel, which is not part of the open internet. And boom, it gets there, comes back, it’s like insanely fast.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. How did that happen? Like, is that some sort of agreement that you have struck up directly with Cloudflare so that you can tap, you know, in a sense it feels like you’ve become a third party piece of their network infrastructure almost.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:47] Saumya Majumder: Think of like, if Cloudflare is like a one gigantic network, our systems are also plugged into their network so that they can use the intranet system to fetch data directly from us, instead of using the open internet, which is much slower, there could be congestion and whatnot. To making that request between the Cloudflare, the proxy and the origin, making that instantly fast.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:10] Nathan Wrigley: So how did that whole thing come about? How is it that you fell into this agreement? Because I don’t know if many other organisations do this, you know, outside of the web hosting space, maybe this is a typical thing where you could follow a roadmap from another company that had done it. I’ve not heard of this, so that’s kind of interesting. How did that relationship come about?
\n\n\n\n[00:38:26] Saumya Majumder: If you don’t run your own data center, it is very hard to do this.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do not.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:30] Saumya Majumder: Yeah, because you have to literally connect your servers and routers and everything to the Cloudflare network, you know? So most of the hosting companies out there, they don’t run their own data center on their own space. They actually lease, what I call lease their hardwares and services from other cloud providers. Whereas we run our, you know, our private cloud, our private system, our own data centers, you know?
\n\n\n\nSo like, for example, some company could use AWS or GCP or Azure and then create their own flavor of it and run Cloudflare through it. So they actually don’t have physical access to those data center’s other servers. Whereas we do. If we see something, we can literally pull up the drive, we can do things at our data center, we can change things, we can attach those things physically, which pretty much none of the hosting provider that I know of has access to.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:19] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so interesting. Honestly, we could go on about this for absolutely ages. But basically, the long and the short of it is, you’re making things as fast as it’s possible for electrons to be. In a distributed network where some things don’t know things, and other things do know things. It’s all an enterprise in trying to figure out how to make it so that everything knows everything as fast as it is possible for electrons to fly around through the optical cables that there are spread throughout the world.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:47] Saumya Majumder: I haven’t even described the servers.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:47] Nathan Wrigley: I’m nowhere near finished because I want to get into what it’s like for somebody using, we’re a WordPress podcast, so I guess at some point we need to sort of grind it into that. So how would it benefit just some normal human being who’s got a WordPress website? What does all of this clever technology that you’ve created and that you’ve combined with Cloudflare over at BigScoots, what does it bring?
\n\n\n\n[00:40:09] Saumya Majumder: It brings insanely fast speed. Insanely fast speed, super improved Core Web Vitals, and super DDoS products and all of that. It brings all of that. And I don’t want to talk about this kind of things, which I know the audience might not be interested about. I want to talk about more other interested things that the users can use.
\n\n\n\nSo I was talking about BigScoots cache, which is our own IP, right? So we created our BigScoots cache plugin, top two are manage this entire Cloudflare caching system to work with that. And not just that, it gives you, if you are an advanced user, it literally gives you the ability to fine tune and manage every aspect of caching system that you want, every aspect of it.
\n\n\n\nSo let’s say for example, we by default set the cache TTL, CDN cache TTL to let’s say X, but you have like a bunch of pages where you want, I want the TTL to be lower. There’s a hooks for that. You can use that.
\n\n\n\nOr maybe, let’s say whenever we have intelligent cache purging systems. So whenever you push up to create a post or update a post or something like that, what happens is anytime you push that button, like publish or update, behind the scenes the BigScoots cache plugin intelligently, not only clearing cache for that particular page, but it also knows all the other important pages like taxonomy pages, like archive pages and all that, like author pages that are linked to that article, and then clearing cache for those as well.
\n\n\n\nSo you can also use other hooks. So let’s say you have some fake archive pages that we have seen a lot. Let’s say you are using a theme where you are showing list of articles on a page, which is like technically a page where you are using like a short code, which is not like a real archive page. So the system doesn’t recognise it as an archive page, but you want to clear that page cache whenever something of this tag or this category is published. There’s a hook for that. You don’t have to do that yourself. If you come to us and tell us like, this is our problem, this is the problem, we can actually write the code for you and do it for you. Like, we can literally just set that up for you. We provide like fully managed system.
\n\n\n\n[00:42:10] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m guessing that the level that you’re at there is you’ve got to have a fairly deep understanding of the sort of caching infrastructure, or would what you are offering be available, not necessarily to deploy, but could anybody understand this with a rifle through your documentation or is it fairly, propeller hat, tinfoil hat stuff?
\n\n\n\n[00:42:28] Saumya Majumder: We have like a proper documentation for every single hook there is. At the very top we talk about, like this is for the advanced audience. And if you don’t know what hooks are and things like that, it is going to be hard for you to understand what’s going on. But if you know, if you are familiar with actions and filters and things like that, it is going to be pretty straightforward for you.
\n\n\n\nSo that’s why I said, if you don’t know, but you have a problem, and that happens a lot of time, people come to us, we just literally just write a snippet and just make that happen for them.
\n\n\n\nSo you don’t have to know all of that crazy things, you know? It’s there if you are an advanced user, the documentation is there, but if you are not, it’s also there. On top of that, BigScoots cache has its own REST API, which you can use to clear cache, like you can literally use BigScoots cache REST API to clear cache. Imagine you have built like a Laravel system, or some backend system where you are adding something to your e-commerce site and you want to clear cache. When that happens, you can literally leverage BigScoots cache REST API to do that. So that’s like the, on the end of BigScoots cache. Then inside our BigScoots portal.
\n\n\n\n[00:43:34] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, that was where I was going next actually. Go on, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:43:36] Saumya Majumder: Yeah. We have, I think we have the most advanced and fine grain control to Cloudflare Enterprise that no one else in the industry provides. So I don’t know if you got a chance to look at our enterprise settings page. We really allow users to fine tune things exactly the way they want. So for example, let’s say you, do you want to protect your login pages from bad bots and actors, so that they can’t DDoS that? There’s a toggle for that. Turn that on, it’s done.
\n\n\n\nYou want to enable our own advanced hardening production, which is not using Cloudflare hardening production, it’s using our own proprietary algorithm for that. You want to use that, feel free. Turn on, that toggle is there.
\n\n\n\nYou want to change your image optimisation settings, do that. You want to enable Rocket Loader to every single thing starting from cache settings, speed optimisation settings, there are like bunch of things that you can play around with. You want to block AI bots, do that. You want to block bad bots, like manage, challenge bad blocks altogether, just turn a toggle, it’s done.
\n\n\n\nSo we have so many settings there. I think, if you go take a look at just that settings, you would be blown away. Like, all the things that we allow our customers to customise and fine tune.
\n\n\n\nLet’s say, for example, you want to block requests from certain countries or continents, and now settings is there. Just choose the countries or continents, requests are blocked. You want to manage, challenge, you don’t want to block, you want to challenge the request from certain countries and countries, you can just go to the settings inside our portal, choose the contains and countries from where you want to challenge. So you could have a combination. So you want to block requests from these countries and continents, challenge from these continents and countries and don’t do anything for the rest of them. So you can play around with this to a whole new level, like you can just do anything you want.
\n\n\n\n[00:45:19] Nathan Wrigley: It’s absolutely fascinating. And it kind of makes me feel that your target audience would not be really the bricks and the mortars shop, the mom and the pop website?
\n\n\n\n[00:45:27] Saumya Majumder: There actually are. Yeah, like you you won’t believe how many times we have got a request like, hey, you know what? In our analytics, we are seeing that we are getting a lot of requests from Thailand, and that’s like broken our tools like that, so I want to either challenge or block that. So we are like, you go to the settings, choose the Thailand, click save, it’s done. So it’s like as simple as that.
\n\n\n\n[00:45:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’m kind of imagining though, that you are kind of ideal customer, for want of a better word, maybe that’s the wrong wording, but would be kind of agencies, WordPress agencies, that kind of thing, who could obviously make use of this. They’ve probably got teams of people who can dedicate time to figuring out how BigScoots works, and maybe having a constant conversation with you to optimise the websites that they’ve got and, you know, maybe some of their clients are what we might call enterprise clients and things like that.
\n\n\n\nIf that’s the case, there’s always this merry dance of agencies trying to find the perfect host and kind of figure out, okay, which company do we want to go with this year? And all of that. Do you make it straightforward for people to sort of come to you and say, okay, we’ve got 150 websites, it’s really important that we don’t have any downtime? Do you have some sort of onboarding, migration, something along those lines?
\n\n\n\n[00:46:30] Saumya Majumder: So we have a lot of enterprise customers, and for every single one of them we have a proper systematic onboarding flow. So that’s making sure that they do, we do migrations with zero downtime, have multiple peer reviews. Then if they have taken our performance optimisation packages and things like that, we would actually optimise their performance and speed metrics for them. And then if they have taken our engineering and services projects, then we would actually do all the, like if they have any technical problems, we would actually go on write code for them, solve their problems.
\n\n\n\nSo we go very hand in hand with our enterprise customers doing onboarding call, making sure they’re happy from end to end. And whether that’s agencies or just normal enterprise customers, it’s for all of them.
\n\n\n\nAnd I also want to talk about the settings that you just talked about. So we build all of these things, keeping in mind that they are dead simple to use for anyone. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to do it. A lot of the times customers comes to us and like, hey, we want to do this. As we provide managed support, we actually go into the exact same settings and do that. And that actually solves the problem a lot because now anybody can go to the settings and just do this. Be it our own team or, because it doesn’t have to be escalated, it doesn’t have to come to a specific team. Anybody can do that. And we are constantly growing the more things that people can do to leverage that out. And yes, agencies and enterprise are taking huge advantage of that.
\n\n\n\n[00:47:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, honestly, it’s absolutely fascinating. You never know, hopefully you and I, our paths will cross at some point in the year 2026. Maybe I’ll see you in Mumbai or something like that.
\n\n\n\nBut what I’m going to do is I’m just going to say, if you’re curious about any of this, I will provide links to everything that we talked about. So if you head over to wptavern.com and you search for the episode with Saumya, so S-A-U-M-Y-A, you’ll be able to find it over there. Honestly, I feel like we’ve just scratched the surface. I feel like there’s another 8 hours in the pair of us, really could get into the weeds of it.
\n\n\n\nBut thank you so much for peeling back the curtain a little bit on what you’re doing and how it all works with Cloudflare. Thank you so much.
\n\n\n\n[00:48:28] Saumya Majumder: No problem. Thanks for having me.
\nOn the podcast today we have Saumya Majumder.
\n\n\n\nSaumya Majumder is the lead software engineer at BigScoots, with a deep specialisation in high-performance WordPress engineering and advanced Cloudflare-powered architectures. Throughout his career, Saumya has built large-scale systems ranging from custom caching engines to migration tools, worker-based automations, and edge computing solutions. He\u2019s played a pivotal role at BigScoots, overseeing enterprise customers and developing scalable, developer-friendly solutions that push the boundaries of hosting for WordPress.
\n\n\n\nWe begin our conversation with a timely discussion about a major Cloudflare outage that recently rippled across the Internet. Saumya explains what happened behind the scenes, the nature of these kinds of global infrastructure hiccups, and why, even with the most robust systems in place, some downtime is simply inevitable. He offers valuable insights into how BigScoots is able to mitigate these issues for their customers, even automating rapid failovers to keep sites online during outages.
\n\n\n\nWe then move on to explore some of the innovations that the team at BigScoots have been working on. They focus upon site speed and reliability. This includes CDN-level page caching, and their close integration with Cloudflare Enterprise. Saumya breaks down how this caching differs from traditional server-based caching, and how it ensures that users around the world get fast, local access to website content.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re curious about how hosting companies manage such advanced caching strategies, and how Cloudflare might fit into the hosting jigsaw, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nBlog post about recent outage, 18th November 2025
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "content_text": "Transcript\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how CloudFlare outages impact the web, and WordPress performance solutions.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Saumya Majumder. Saumya is the lead software engineer at BigScoots with a deep specialization in high performance WordPress engineering and advanced CloudFlare powered architectures. Throughout his career Saumya has built large scale systems ranging from custom caching engines, to migration tools, worker based automations, and edge computing solutions. He’s played a pivotal role at BigScoots overseeing enterprise customers, and developing scalable developer friendly solutions that push the boundaries of hosting for WordPress.\n\n\n\nWe begin our conversation with a timely discussion about a major CloudFlare outage that recently rippled across the internet. Saumya explains what happened behind the scenes, the nature of these kind of global infrastructure hiccups, and why, even with the most robust systems in place, some downtime is simply inevitable. He offers valuable insights into how BigScoots is able to mitigate these issues for their customers, even automating rapid failovers to keep sites online during outages.\n\n\n\nWe then move on to explore some of the innovations that the team at BigScoots have been working on. They focus upon site speed and reliability. This includes CDN level page caching, and their close integration with CloudFlare Enterprise. Saumya breaks down how this caching differs from traditional server based caching, and how it ensures that users around the world get fast, local access to website content.\n\n\n\nIf you’re curious about how hosting companies manage such advanced caching strategies and how CloudFlare might fit into the hosting jigsaw, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Saumya Majumder.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Saumya. Hello, how are you doing?\n\n\n\n[00:03:04] Saumya Majumder: Hey, I’m doing well. How are you doing?\n\n\n\n[00:03:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, very well, thank you. So this is going to be an interesting conversation. I got put in touch with Saumya via Tammy Lister, who has been communicating with Saumya over the last period of time. I don’t know exactly for how long. But the idea is that we’re going to talk about what they’re doing over at BigScoots and the interesting innovations that they’ve got.\n\n\n\nBy pure coincidence, the day before we recorded this, the Cloudflare, I’m going to call it fun, the fun that Cloudflare had with the entire internet happened. And so I think we’ll digress for a bit at the beginning of the podcast and talk a little bit about that as well, which was unexpected. But given that you are working heavily based upon Cloudflare, it’ll be interesting to talk that through.\n\n\n\nWould you mind just spending a moment though, just introducing yourself. Just tell us who you are, what it is that you do at your current role, that kind of thing, and then we’ll get stuck into our conversation.\n\n\n\n[00:03:55] Saumya Majumder: I’m Saumya. I work as a lead software engineer at BigScoots, specialising in high performance WordPress engineering and advanced Cloudflare powered architectures.\n\n\n\nI also build large scale systems from custom cache engine to migration tools, worker based automations, edge computing and whatnot.\n\n\n\nI also look after our enterprise customers, all of our internal WordPress projects and plugins and IPs. And I also build scalable, developer friendly solutions for our clients to ensure that they are getting the best service product out of it.\n\n\n\n[00:04:29] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much indeed. Now, I’m just going to dwell on that for a little bit. A lot of that seems extremely technical, but also it kind of feels like that you went very much down a particular road very early on.\n\n\n\nHow is it that you ended up doing all of that interesting, but quite specific stuff? How is it that that happened? Is it something that you pursued out of college or something like that? How is it that you went down that path?\n\n\n\n[00:04:51] Saumya Majumder: It’s an interesting question actually. So I remember, back in my second year of college, I started doing projects, like outside projects. So I started dabbling with PHP, like at the very early days of WordPress. So I get into the WordPress and I was like doing coding, changing things, pushing things to the core, tinkering with the WordPress. That was like way back in the days of the WordPress ecosystem.\n\n\n\nFrom that, I was dabbling with PHP and other stuff. So that was like back in the days when I started, and then slowly I started seeing problems and how to solve the solution. So for example, a lot of the companies today, like CDN page based page caching, in today’s 2025 it’s like a very, pretty much common thing across the world. If you go to any premium hosting or any premium package, you kind of expect like CDN based page caching.\n\n\n\nYou know that that wasn’t the case, even like a few years back. It’s like this level page caching or RAM level page caching, like it’s all on the server. So me and one of my friends, whom we met online due to the WordPress coding things, we actually invented the CDN level page caching. So it wasn’t a thing before that. So there was a plugin that we created called Super Page Cache for Cloudflare that got later acquired by a different company called Optimal.\n\n\n\nIn that plugin we actually looked at like, okay, all the current solutions, like if you break down how the request is happening or how internet works, like you make a request from wherever in the world, that request then travels through across optical fiber cable, blah, blah, blah, to the ISP data center. Then from there it goes to the data center, well, then it reaches the server from there on. If you don’t have cache, then the server has to populate the entire thing, get the response, give it back to you, if you have the cache.\n\n\n\nSo we were saying that, you know, this is adding like a huge amount of latency, especially if you are, like the distance between the server and you is larger. Back then there was like MaxCDN, KeyCDN, and all of this provider who are like focusing on static files being served from the CDN.\n\n\n\nSo that was like already a thing, but we were like, okay fine. But like if static files coming from CDN, that’s great, but the main leap frog forward is if we can move the page. Like, literally serving the page HTML from the CDN itself. So if you are in Australia, the request doesn’t have to come to the US. Like, if it’s cached, it’s literally coming from your neighborhood.\n\n\n\nSo caching was one of the most complex problems that I kind of always loved solving because it was one of those unsolvable problems in the computer engineering world. So that’s how I like get into it, and then started. I broke a lot of things and fixed them and it’s like a journey. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like a journey of a lot of failure and a little of success, I guess.\n\n\n\n[00:07:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I can imagine. Do you ever get the sense that you are approaching the destination or is this whole thing just, I’ll do this and then I know that in a week’s time, there’ll be something else that I can optimise. Is there ever a moment where you’ve thought to yourself, okay, that’s it, we cracked it for now? Or is it always just, no, there’s another thing?\n\n\n\n[00:07:55] Saumya Majumder: It’s always a process, right? The technology is evolving. There’s way, way more to dig deeper. So one of the things we recently released was end DB protection caching. I’m going to talk about it in a moment and also login user caching. Both of these things were in my bucket list for years, and I have done like R and Ds, and R and Ds, and R and Ds to figure out exactly the way to do things. So again, you know, like it’s a process, right? And it takes time.\n\n\n\n[00:08:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s lovely. Like you say, we’ll get into those bits and pieces. But as I said at the top of the show, by pure coincidence, we had this, let’s just call it a real collapse in a sense of what Cloudflare provides to the internet as a whole. And I think, depending on where you were and when you were awake in the world, I think for Europeans and maybe the part of the world where you are, it hit us right at the time when we’re all awake. I think maybe if you’re in North America, especially on the West Coast, you might have missed much of it.\n\n\n\nBut for most of the day here, everything on Cloudflare just declined to work. And it was really interesting how profound that was. And we’ve all heard this problem before. We’ve seen the little drawing of the great big tower built of Lego bricks, and there’s the one little brick at the bottom holding the whole thing up, and it’s called Cloudflare, or it’s called AWS or what have you.\n\n\n\nCan you explain to us what the heck happened yesterday? Are you able to sort of get into, do you understand it at this point?\n\n\n\n[00:09:15] Saumya Majumder: Yeah. So internet is a magical thing. It works by magic. If I get into explaining how it works, it’s going to be another thing. But the way it works is, and especially in case of Cloudflare, right? Like, a lot of people look at Cloudflare, that it is a CDN provider, like MaxCDN or Akamai or like any of these providers. But CDN is just one bit of Cloudflare. Cloudflare is like a, such a gigantic service that is like built on top of it.\n\n\n\nSo as a result, what happens is, when you have such a big system working together, there are lots of critical dependencies that happens. You have all these boxes, but all these boxes are depending on one of these config file, or one of these things that is coming from the layer below that, right?\n\n\n\nAnd if anything happens in that one thing, the things at the top are working fine, but it cannot work because the one thing that is below it is gone.\n\n\n\nI would also like to say there is no such thing in the world of internet that just works. Everything is supposed to break at some point in time. There’s no such thing. Be it Google, be it Azure, be it AWS, Cloudflare, anything it is. Even if you have your own data center and everything like that, like we have, there’s no way that, like a lot of things can happen even after you are prepared to mitigate all of those things, like you have follower, and a follower, of follower and all this backup system, still things can go wrong. Maybe that didn’t turn out, maybe that didn’t happen.\n\n\n\nI saw a lot of memes yesterday on Twitter, like a lot of people was posting like, hey, I just joined as an internet Cloudflare. I pushed a code and that happened. And I understand that it’s funny, but when you look deeper into it, it is actually not funny. It is really like a code red scenario. And trust me, no one, no company wants to get into that code red scenario. Because you have to understand, all of these companies also dealing with a lot of enterprise customers to whom they have promised like 100% percent SLA or 99.99% SLA. And so when they don’t meet that, they have to pay a hefty amount of credit back to them.\n\n\n\nSo it’s not just the downtime and bad reputation and marketing and all that, it’s literal money being bled out of the company because of that. And it’s like all of those systems.\n\n\n\nBut at the same point in time, the way technology works, things can mess up. You can do multiple tiers of review of the code, you’re still going to miss a certain edge case scenario, which will only occur if this happened and that happened. And the probability of that happening is probably 0.00001%. But that 0.00001%, it’s not zero. It can happen.\n\n\n\nIn the world of engineering, we call certain things that are super low priority, like it’s never going to happen. I’m not saying that it cannot happen, it can happen, but the probability of that is so low that spending engineering hours on that at this moment, where we have much more critical things to do, it doesn’t come up, right?\n\n\n\nBut sometimes things happen. And as a senior engineer, it happens like this. And in case of Cloudflare, what happened is as this is like a such a big system, even if they identified the root cause, let’s say that takes some amount of time for the engineers to figure out, and they push that. And you have to understand, a lot of people are sending requests, requests are going down, and they figured out the root cause. They’re pushing the fix and then like a boatload of requests is coming to Cloudflare.\n\n\n\nSo it takes time for everything to stabilise, you know? So it is bad. It is bad, but anyone who is thinking like, oh, Cloudflare is bad, if I move from Cloudflare to, I don’t know, X, Y, or Z, or something like that, it won’t happen. I haven’t seen, like a Tweet yesterday where somebody said, send cold emails to people saying, Cloudflare is down. But we don’t use Cloudflare, we use our own VPS and dedicated server for that. And I was like laughing out loud. I’m like, I understand that, you know, your data center did not go down, but that does not mean that it can never go down.\n\n\n\n[00:13:06] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of guaranteed. I think one of the interesting things that I saw was in the mitigation, the sort of summing up posts that Cloudflare created, there was this whole thing about this unexpected file which kind of doubled in size. It was supposed to be this size, but it doubled in size, and that got propagated. And then for a period of time, the ripple effect of that was that it looked like a DDoS attack. For a period of time it looked as if it may have been malicious actors.\n\n\n\nAnd so the Cloudflare engineers, I think kind of went off, as it turned out, wrong headedly. They went off in the wrong direction, searching for the problem, which probably added a number of hours to the mitigation, and then kind of figured out what was going on. And then, like you said, the whole ripple effect is, it’s not like you turn off a computer, switch the computer back on, and Cloudflare is restored. There’s this whole propagation thing where you find the problem, mend the problem, the problem mitigates, and that is presumably going to take hours and hours and hours. And then you could just see the sort of downtime reports slowly repairing themselves over the internet.\n\n\n\n[00:14:08] Saumya Majumder: And you have to understand that, as I said, Cloudflare, people think of Cloudflare as a, either a security company or a CDN company. But Cloudflare is way, way, way more than that, right? The CDN backbone that they have, it’s literally their backbone, the powerhouse on top of which Cloudflare builds their own thing.\n\n\n\nSo anytime they find a fix of which they call their control plan, you know, pushed the fix to their control plan, that has to get propagated across all of their end edges. And Cloudflare has the highest number of CDN PoPs, you know? So it has to get pushed across all of these places, rebooted and all of these crazy things has to happen in order for everything to go properly. And then all the burst of traffic that is coming on that it has to handle that. It is a crazy thing.\n\n\n\nBut one of the things that I liked about Cloudflare is that, it’s not that this is the first time Cloudflare had a global outage. They had global outage before as well. There are two things I really love about Cloudflare.\n\n\n\nNumber one is that they’re super transparent. So anytime things go wrong or situation like this happens, they always push like a detailed blog article explaining exactly what happened, what they did to fix it, and how they’re making sure that this does not happen again in the future. And it never happens in the future.\n\n\n\nSo if you look at the previous global outage that they had, I think back in June, it was caused because there’s a thing called Cloudflare KV, which had a dependency on GCP. So when GCP went down, so KV went down and as a result the system went down. And from there on, they’re now working on to remove that dependency, building things internally in house to make sure that doesn’t happen.\n\n\n\nPreviously, there was another, I think last year or something like that, another global outage where the entire main data center went down. There was like multiple failover but the generator didn’t start and then this didn’t start and that didn’t start. And that caused like a huge failover scenario, I think, if you remember that, right?\n\n\n\nAnd from there on, they make sure that, okay, we now have to make sure that we have multiple, that scenario is never going to come back. So they always work towards to make sure everything that happening never happens the second time. And it really does that. But at the end of the day, in the world of technology, things can go wrong. It’s just how it is.\n\n\n\n[00:16:11] Nathan Wrigley: What’s kind of curious though, from an end user’s perspective, and you are going to explain to us some of the complexities of the inner workings of BigScoots and how it combines with Cloudflare in a minute, and that’ll be really interesting. But from a non-technical user’s point of view, it just feels like the sky is falling in because so much of the internet has collapsed, so many things that they’re familiar with.\n\n\n\nSo just a couple of examples which many people would be familiar with. So for example, if you were a user of the social network X, that completely failed. There must be a dependency on Cloudflare at some point there. Also ChatGPT, which is now becoming almost, it’s just a thing which almost everybody at some point of the day is plugged into, that went away.\n\n\n\nBut then it just rippled out across so many other things. News organisations go down. The ability to log into a variety of things went down. So it may be that your platform itself worked, but you might have had the the Turnstile sort of capture system, which Cloudflare run, enabled, and nobody could log into the proprietary platform that you got because the Cloudflare portion, the Turnstile wasn’t working and so on.\n\n\n\nSo it just had this enormous effect. And the sort of chilling effect of that is that people then, erroneously I think, sort of view Cloudflare in some way as a bit of a, I don’t know, a giant that needs to be brought to heal in some way. You know, we can never let this happen again, there’s too much dependencies on these small group of massive organisations and what have you.\n\n\n\nBut by today, everybody’s forgotten that, you know, they kind of moved on with their lives and we’re back to what it was like on Monday. And so there’s no question in there, but I think there’s some insight that I’m sharing.\n\n\n\n[00:17:41] Saumya Majumder: Oh yeah, absolutely. So there are a couple of very important things to understand here, right? So first of all, as you said, the people who talks about these kind of things on the social media, trust me, either they’re not engineers, senior engineers, or they don’t understand the problem.\n\n\n\nAnd so these are the people who talks about this exact same thing where a few weeks back AWS went down, and then a couple of months back, GCP went down. And then they were like, well, Facebook went down, they literally just use this exact same word every single time something goes down. But things can go down. That’s like, you have to accept that and move on.\n\n\n\nAnd that’s why when you get onto these enterprise deals with these big companies, they have this SLA agreement, like where they say, we grant to you, as I told you about earlier, right? So all of these companies, GCP, AWS, Cloudflare, if you are like a big enterprise customers of them, you have like an SLA agreement with them. Where they say, okay, we are going to guarantee that we’re going to give you 100% uptime, or 99.999999% uptime. And anytime they miss that mark, they have to pay back a huge sum of money as a credit to the customers saying, okay, we missed on our contract, so this is that credit back to you.\n\n\n\nSo you have to understand that anytime situation like this happen, it is not only a bad thing on the companies, on the marketing front of it, but it is also a bad thing on the financial side of things. Because you have to understand like all of these big companies, there are these smaller clients who are dealing with companies like, there are smaller clients and there are like giant clients, the enterprise customer who companies are really worried about. And for these giant clients, they have to pay huge amount of money back as credit because things didn’t come back within time. So it is not something that they are not worried about to fix immediately. They’re literally trying as hard as possible to fix that.\n\n\n\nSo that being said, now talk about the other points that you brought up, the turnstile, the WAF and the other things, right?\n\n\n\nSo as I said, Cloudflare is not just a security company. It’s like a huge thing. Cloudflare has a thing called Developer Platform where you can literally deploy your own APIs, your AI workload, your workflows, your entire React or entire application on Cloudflare, which is amazing. I use it. I love that platform.\n\n\n\nAnd then that is one side of using Cloudflare, and then there’s another side of using Cloudflare like, for example, using BigScoots. You have let’s say a WordPress website that is hosted on BigScoots, but it is being proxied via Cloudflare to leverage their CDN, their security and all of those features.\n\n\n\nSo in a scenario like a WordPress site where you are not using Cloudflare as your host, so your Cloudflare is just there as a proxy, making sure that your origin IP is not there, your site is super protected and performance and CDN and whatnot. In that scenario, anytime this kind of problem happens, you can kind of, when this outage was there, the API was still working and we actually, for all of our customers, we leveraged our API to make sure that any request does not proxy via Cloudflare, but instead it just goes directly to our server just for the moment in time until Cloudflare is back in the game.\n\n\n\n[00:20:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so you could turn the proxy off via the API.\n\n\n\n[00:20:45] Saumya Majumder: Via the API, yes.\n\n\n\n[00:20:46] Nathan Wrigley: Right. So the fact that the rest of us couldn’t log in because Turnstile was down, we couldn’t authenticate into the Cloudflare network on the web. The API was still available, so you could turn the proxy off for a variety of your customers, and the domains and the websites that they had.\n\n\n\nOh, that’s really interesting. So they had a few minutes of downtime. Okay, that’s fascinating.\n\n\n\n[00:21:04] Saumya Majumder: So what we did is when we saw this outage happening, anytime requests are coming in, it was a code red scenario on our end as well. All hands on deck. So anytime requests are coming in, like people are having problem, we immediately turned on the proxying API to make sure that this site is up and online.\n\n\n\nSo that way the request is not going via Cloudflare anymore, it’s coming directly to us for the moment, until CloudFare is back on track. And that helped us to mitigate the downtime as much as possible for the customer, even though Cloudflare was technically down.\n\n\n\nBut if you would have been hosting your Nuxt or React or Next.js kind of application on Cloudflare, where you are using Cloudflare workers and things like that as your host, in that scenario, you couldn’t push anything.\n\n\n\n[00:21:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the API is not going to help you.\n\n\n\n[00:21:51] Saumya Majumder: Yes, yeah. It was bad but it’s going to happen. It can happen.\n\n\n\n[00:21:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that’s kind of the message, you know? Nothing that humans create is immutable. Everything has a moment of breaking. But, you know, if you were to cast your mind back until, well, just Monday when everything was, you know, just plain sailing, Cloudflare was working as normal, then everybody was entirely happy. We had this period of time, it was maybe something like 8 hours where everybody’s kind of throwing their arms in the air and, you know, moaning on whatever social networks are still working.\n\n\n\nBut now we’re onto Wednesday, that whole thing is long behind us. That ship sailed, whatever, move on. Confidence, I think basically what you’re saying is you can be confident in Cloudflare. They’re going to have hiccups because they’re like any other company, things will go wrong.\n\n\n\n[00:22:33] Saumya Majumder: Everything can have hiccups. So it’s not just, so you have to understand this, right? Again, I’m saying that Cloudflare is not just a CDN provider, but if you look at Cloudflare and all the things that they do, the complexity of it is like mindbogglingly crazy, you know? Like it’s immense, immensely complex. It makes things super easy for you. Okay, you just toggle this on and it’s done. But if look at under the hood, and all the things and chains it has to go through, and that happens in a blink of milliseconds, it’s crazy complicated.\n\n\n\nAs I said, right, like I’m not saying that Cloudflare is bad. I think Cloudflare is amazing because two things, they have super transparency, so anytime anything happens, the blog article that you are like referencing here, they didn’t hide behind anything like, oh, it was not my problem, like not doing the blame game thing. No, no, no. Like, it was our problem. This is the problem.\n\n\n\nFor example, in that blog article, they could have completely, don’t talk about the DDoS thingy, right? They could have just said, oh, this was the configuration file problem. We fix this, it’s done. But no, they actually literally walk you through how exactly they process the problem, which is really great. And then they actually learns from their mistakes to make sure that particular mistake never happens again, while they are like growing rapidly and building things, pushing things like crazy, like always pushing new things, which is like amazing to me.\n\n\n\n[00:23:50] Nathan Wrigley: I think the article even started, if it wasn’t the first set of words, it was definitely in the first couple of sentences. It was something like, we let you down. It was full ownership, I think. So bravo to them.\n\n\n\nAnd you’re right, the complexity behind it, you know, like you said earlier, the internet, the fact that anything works on the internet is an utter miracle of engineering, of computer engineering.\n\n\n\nYou know, the fact that we’re on a platform that we are staring at each other. I can see your image, you can see my image, you can hear my audio, I can hear your audio. You are on the, a different side of the planet, but it’s happening like you’re stood next to me. And the millions of packets of information that have flown during the course of this conversation, it’s insane. And Cloudflare add a whole layer of other stuff on top of that, which makes it even more insane.\n\n\n\n[00:24:33] Saumya Majumder: Yeah. And you have to ask the question, like, why all these big companies are using Cloudflare like if it is so bad. Because they are doing things that nobody else even think about doing at a scale. And it’s like mindblogglingly crazy. It’s crazy.\n\n\n\n[00:24:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah, it really is. So we’ll leave that for another day. But obviously over at BigScoots, you’ve really attached your wagon, if you like, to Cloudflare. And when you agreed to come on the podcast to talk to me, it became obvious to me that the pay grade that you are at is very different to the pay grade that I’m able to keep up with.\n\n\n\nSo we’re going to talk about what you’re doing over at BigScoots. I’m going to try to keep up, but if I misunderstand something, or I have to ask you to repeat something, I hope that’s okay with you. But I’m just curious because Tammie Lister, like I said at the beginning of this episode, she’s somebody whose opinion I respect a lot, and she said that you are doing some really innovative, interesting things with your connections to Cloudflare at BigScoots. So just lay out some of the interesting engineering work that you’ve been doing. I’ll try to hold on.\n\n\n\n[00:25:30] Saumya Majumder: First I’m to Tammie is great. Tammie is amazing. But yeah, I mean, I think BigScoots have been one of the first to utilise Cloudflare Enterprise in the hosting world. I know we didn’t do any kind of huge marketing like other hosts, but we have been the first to leverage Cloudflare Enterprise in our hosting ecosystem. And it was such early days, like back then, all of these things, this market wasn’t there. So we were building things that people didn’t even test it out.\n\n\n\nSo as I said in the beginning, like I, along with one of my colleagues, we invented the CDN level page caching. This is way before APU and all of that. So all of those things actually build upon the architecture systems as we build on, including APU and the workers and stuff.\n\n\n\nSo at BigScoots, the Cloudflare thing, especially the Cloudflare Enterprise thing opens up a whole new door for us because it now allowed us to provide CDN level page caching for every single user at a super high cache hit ratio. I mean it’s like, every time you hit a page, chances of that getting, coming out of cache is much higher, compared to if you are, or like a free plan or any other plan, right?\n\n\n\nSo that was the beginning. And on top of that, we build our own proprietary plugin called BigScoots Cache, which allows you to not only leverage and take advantage of the Cloudflare page caching, but giving you the ability to fine tune every aspect of page caching that you would like on webpage.\n\n\n\n[00:26:56] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to pause you right there. Firstly, because I’m sure that almost everybody in the audience, because their WordPress aligned, is going to understand what a cache is. They’re going to understand this process of kind of, okay, let’s remember something for next time so that when we need it next time, it’s kind of ready. But they may not understand how Cloudflare does this on their Enterprise plan.\n\n\n\nSo what is it that’s different? Because we may be familiar with, I don’t know, a WordPress plugin and we’ve got some idea that there’s a cache. It’s sitting on the server somewhere in a file, it’s an HTML file or something like that. You are describing something not in one location, but like really just spread globally so it’s ready at the point of least distance from wherever somebody is. So tell us a bit more about that.\n\n\n\n[00:27:35] Saumya Majumder: So let me explain that with like an analogy, right? So before CDN level page caching, I think pretty much everybody would remember, like we used to have caching plugins. I’m not going to name anything, but they were caching plugins. So when you turn them on, what they essentially did was they would create like an advanced-cache.php. You have everything of that file inside your WordPress installation.\n\n\n\nWhat that used to do is, when you send a request, let’s say you are in Australia, right, and your server is in US, so you want to open example.com, and that requests flows through under the ocean, it goes to the data center, it goes to the server, the server receives the request, it started processing that, run all the database queries and all of that, and then it got the HTML to show it to you.\n\n\n\nBack then what it used to do is then, advanced-cache.php would kick in, it would create a copy of the HTML, store that locally on the server so the next time if someone requests for that page, instead of asking the server, hey, please process the PHP and database and all of that, it would require much less amount of server resources because it’s just like, WordPress is like warming up. The request goes to advanced-cache.php, then it says oh, I have that cache file, sends that cache response back to you.\n\n\n\nBut even in this scenario, if you are making this request from Australia and your server is in US, you have to understand that the latency is very high, because the request has to go from Australia to US and then whatever gets there is, you know, response from there and come back from US to Australia. So the traversing time is pretty high.\n\n\n\nFrom there on, and back then we are thinking about MaxCDN, you know, KeyCDN and like putting static files on the CDN so that, yes, the page is being generated by the server, but the static files are being served literally where you are. Like, if you are in Australia, in Sydney, so maybe the CDN PoP in Sydney is like, when you make a request for that, the static file is coming from Sydney.\n\n\n\nThat’s where we thought about, what if we can put this page HTML, instead of in the server, we can put it on the CDN? There were two benefit out of this. First, it is in insanely fast. Because if this page HTML is across the world, so if you are in Sydney making the request and the request is like, oh, okay, I have this page cache to me, here you go, the response, you get that in like less than 100ms, you know?\n\n\n\nSame thing happens for someone sitting in India and Germany and some other places of the world, because it’s cached across the globe. So it’s not just coming from a single place. And anytime it is not cached, the request goes to the server, HTML processed, and by the time the response is sent out, it got cached. It’s cached across the world.\n\n\n\nNow, that was the page caching part of it, right? And then there’s other things, the object cache and OPcache, that’s like whole another different level. But I’m not going to get into that. I’m just going to stay with, because then it’s going to get way too long.\n\n\n\nSo that’s where this object caching and Cloudflare Enterprise came into play, right? Cloudflare Enterprise then allowed us to make sure that we can cache all these pages across the globe with a very high cache hit rate. Cache hit rate means, when something gets cached somewhere, let’s say someone makes a request to that file and that cache is expired from there and it’s not there. So the request, again, has to go to the origin and get processed and come back to you.\n\n\n\nSo that is generally the case with the lower tier plans with Cloudflare. So with Cloudflare Enterprise you get a very high cache hit ratio. So when it’s getting the cache, it stays on the cache for a very long time. On top of that, we got tiered cache and regional tiered cache and all of those crazy things.\n\n\n\nWhich that means is, we have tiering systems. So when you make a request, the request first gets cached in the upper tier. And when a lower tier, so let’s say, how can I explain this to you? So let’s say you are in Phoenix, okay? And in Phoenix there’s a data center, or a PoP that is called, in case of CDN, a PoP is there in Phoenix but the upper tier PoP is Chicago.\n\n\n\nSo let’s say someone made a request from Chicago, the page was cached in Chicago data center, okay? Now, as we have this tiered cache system, when you, from Phoenix, is making the request, instead of that PoP directly sending the request to the origin, it would first internally within the intranet of Cloudflare, not the internet, okay? The intranet of Cloudflare. The internal network like, hey, does anyone in the upper tier has this page cached to you? And if they say yes, they would fetch it from the upper tier, which is like crazy fast because there’s no traffic, and it’s like a internal network of Cloudflare.\n\n\n\nAnd if it does not, then it pass on the request to the upper tier, because the upper tier is the only one who has the power to pull the request from origins. It goes to the upper tier. Upper tier pulls it from the origin, creates a copy, and it’s upper tier, and then send it back to the lower tier. So in that way, in the tiered architecture, it makes sure that the cache hit ratio is insanely high.\n\n\n\n[00:32:24] Nathan Wrigley: Let me just sort of read that back to you just to make sure I’ve understood. And I’m imagining that, the simplest way my head is understanding that is a bunch of concentric circles. So in the center is me, and I wish to find something on, let’s say, the outer circle. So the first thing I’m going to do is go to my inner circle, and if the inner circle doesn’t have it, we need to go to the next circle out, and the next circle out, and the next circle out.\n\n\n\nNow in the old world, if you like, or the non-enterprise version of Cloudflare, at some point we have to go further out of the circles in order to find what it is that we’re looking for. But what I think you are saying is that on the enterprise level, that outer circle is constantly pushing things towards the inner circle on a much more local basis. So rather than having to go out circle, another one, another one, another one, it can just hop one circle out, get what it needs, and then hop right back. In other words, every single thing is always closer, geographically, than it would be in any other setup.\n\n\n\n[00:33:22] Saumya Majumder: Yes, and on top of that, if you look at the opposite architecture of this, right? So imagine you are in Phoenix, Phoenix doesn’t have it in cache. Phoenix sends a request to origin, now someone from Mississippi makes a request, they don’t have it in cache, their PoP makes a request too.. So all these PoPs are making requests to the origin because they don’t have it in their own local cache, which is bad because that would then mean the request to the origin would increase dramatically, which we are trying to reduce.\n\n\n\nBut in this sense we have, imagine like a fixed set of upper tier data center, then we have like a middle tier and then the lower tier, right? So if lower tier doesn’t have it, it asks the middle tier, middle tier checks if any of the middle tier across the world have it. If they do, immediately send it. And that’s happening within the internal network of Cloudflare and not on the open internet, okay? It’s like crazy fast.\n\n\n\n[00:34:11] Nathan Wrigley: Right, okay. So again, forgive me, I’m going to make a leap of faith here, I could have this wrong. I’m guessing that on the Cloudflare side, they have their own bespoke hardware to route all of this stuff. So like you said, you described it as an, it’s like an internet intranet, almost, the scale that they’re on. But they’ve got their own hardware, which will be able to route that information presumably more quickly, and with less, I don’t know, less latency than you and I might have.\n\n\n\n[00:34:36] Saumya Majumder: Yeah, it’s a intranet, it’s not internet. It’s a private channel, right? So no one talking there except for Cloudflare. And the best part of that is, so imagine let’s say you are making a request from Mississippi, and there is like a upper tier data center in Mumbai, India, right? So what happens is, even though it’s not cached in US, it’s going to see that, okay, I have it cached in Mumbai, let’s take it from there instead of making a call to the origin, reducing the call origin, yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:35:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that bit I didn’t understand. So the entire network is aware of where the closest thing is even before it needs to have it. I got it. Okay. That’s fascinating. And do they own the cables? Do Cloudflare own the cables connecting these things?\n\n\n\n[00:35:18] Saumya Majumder: Yes. Yes, they have their own data center, their own backbone, all of that. And on top of that, like at BigScoots we even have direct physical connections to Cloudflare service. That’s called CNI. That’s like a next step. So again, let me kind of paint a picture. This is you as a user, right? This is Cloudflare sitting in the middle, acting as a reverse proxy, and this is origin, okay?\n\n\n\nSo the way it works is you make a request, right? So let’s say you, a request is received by this in a reverse proxy Cloudflare. Then it process that thing, whether it has to show you a WAF page, whatever the logic is, right? Does it have it in cache and all of that? You know, if it is not being blocked or challenged, do I need to show it in cache? Do I have it in cache? You’re talking to the internal network, all of that. And that’s happening in this middle tier, right?\n\n\n\nAnd this middle tier is now connected to their entire Cloudflare chain, right? So if, let’s say Mumbai has it, and it pulls from Mumbai, give it back to you. So the request never goes to the origin, right?\n\n\n\nNow, for whatever reason, you make a request to Cloudflare, Cloudflare checks it’s internal network, it doesn’t have it itself, so it has to make a request to the origin, right?\n\n\n\nThere’s the interesting part. This bit of connection that is you and the Cloudflare, that’s happening over the open internet, right? Because like you making and the request goes by the open internet and lands to Cloudflare, right? And then this is your origin, so your Cloudflare to origin, right, that also generally happens by open internet. Cloudflare then makes a request, and that request goes by the internet and, you know, lands on the data center.\n\n\n\nBut here’s the magical part that we have done. As we run and own our own data center, what we have done is we have connected a physical cable, like literally optic fibre cable with super insanely high bandwidth with the Cloudflare servers, with our servers. So what happens is, anytime Cloudflare has to fetch something from our origin, instead of sending that request by the open internet, which could be slow, there could be congestion and whatnot, it then sends via that private network that we have created, that private optical fiber cable and lands directly to our origin. Like, oh, this is hosted on BigScoots. We need to talk to BigScoots. Okay, send via this channel, which is not part of the open internet. And boom, it gets there, comes back, it’s like insanely fast.\n\n\n\n[00:37:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. How did that happen? Like, is that some sort of agreement that you have struck up directly with Cloudflare so that you can tap, you know, in a sense it feels like you’ve become a third party piece of their network infrastructure almost.\n\n\n\n[00:37:47] Saumya Majumder: Think of like, if Cloudflare is like a one gigantic network, our systems are also plugged into their network so that they can use the intranet system to fetch data directly from us, instead of using the open internet, which is much slower, there could be congestion and whatnot. To making that request between the Cloudflare, the proxy and the origin, making that instantly fast.\n\n\n\n[00:38:10] Nathan Wrigley: So how did that whole thing come about? How is it that you fell into this agreement? Because I don’t know if many other organisations do this, you know, outside of the web hosting space, maybe this is a typical thing where you could follow a roadmap from another company that had done it. I’ve not heard of this, so that’s kind of interesting. How did that relationship come about?\n\n\n\n[00:38:26] Saumya Majumder: If you don’t run your own data center, it is very hard to do this.\n\n\n\n[00:38:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do not.\n\n\n\n[00:38:30] Saumya Majumder: Yeah, because you have to literally connect your servers and routers and everything to the Cloudflare network, you know? So most of the hosting companies out there, they don’t run their own data center on their own space. They actually lease, what I call lease their hardwares and services from other cloud providers. Whereas we run our, you know, our private cloud, our private system, our own data centers, you know?\n\n\n\nSo like, for example, some company could use AWS or GCP or Azure and then create their own flavor of it and run Cloudflare through it. So they actually don’t have physical access to those data center’s other servers. Whereas we do. If we see something, we can literally pull up the drive, we can do things at our data center, we can change things, we can attach those things physically, which pretty much none of the hosting provider that I know of has access to.\n\n\n\n[00:39:19] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so interesting. Honestly, we could go on about this for absolutely ages. But basically, the long and the short of it is, you’re making things as fast as it’s possible for electrons to be. In a distributed network where some things don’t know things, and other things do know things. It’s all an enterprise in trying to figure out how to make it so that everything knows everything as fast as it is possible for electrons to fly around through the optical cables that there are spread throughout the world.\n\n\n\n[00:39:47] Saumya Majumder: I haven’t even described the servers.\n\n\n\n[00:39:47] Nathan Wrigley: I’m nowhere near finished because I want to get into what it’s like for somebody using, we’re a WordPress podcast, so I guess at some point we need to sort of grind it into that. So how would it benefit just some normal human being who’s got a WordPress website? What does all of this clever technology that you’ve created and that you’ve combined with Cloudflare over at BigScoots, what does it bring?\n\n\n\n[00:40:09] Saumya Majumder: It brings insanely fast speed. Insanely fast speed, super improved Core Web Vitals, and super DDoS products and all of that. It brings all of that. And I don’t want to talk about this kind of things, which I know the audience might not be interested about. I want to talk about more other interested things that the users can use.\n\n\n\nSo I was talking about BigScoots cache, which is our own IP, right? So we created our BigScoots cache plugin, top two are manage this entire Cloudflare caching system to work with that. And not just that, it gives you, if you are an advanced user, it literally gives you the ability to fine tune and manage every aspect of caching system that you want, every aspect of it.\n\n\n\nSo let’s say for example, we by default set the cache TTL, CDN cache TTL to let’s say X, but you have like a bunch of pages where you want, I want the TTL to be lower. There’s a hooks for that. You can use that.\n\n\n\nOr maybe, let’s say whenever we have intelligent cache purging systems. So whenever you push up to create a post or update a post or something like that, what happens is anytime you push that button, like publish or update, behind the scenes the BigScoots cache plugin intelligently, not only clearing cache for that particular page, but it also knows all the other important pages like taxonomy pages, like archive pages and all that, like author pages that are linked to that article, and then clearing cache for those as well.\n\n\n\nSo you can also use other hooks. So let’s say you have some fake archive pages that we have seen a lot. Let’s say you are using a theme where you are showing list of articles on a page, which is like technically a page where you are using like a short code, which is not like a real archive page. So the system doesn’t recognise it as an archive page, but you want to clear that page cache whenever something of this tag or this category is published. There’s a hook for that. You don’t have to do that yourself. If you come to us and tell us like, this is our problem, this is the problem, we can actually write the code for you and do it for you. Like, we can literally just set that up for you. We provide like fully managed system.\n\n\n\n[00:42:10] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m guessing that the level that you’re at there is you’ve got to have a fairly deep understanding of the sort of caching infrastructure, or would what you are offering be available, not necessarily to deploy, but could anybody understand this with a rifle through your documentation or is it fairly, propeller hat, tinfoil hat stuff?\n\n\n\n[00:42:28] Saumya Majumder: We have like a proper documentation for every single hook there is. At the very top we talk about, like this is for the advanced audience. And if you don’t know what hooks are and things like that, it is going to be hard for you to understand what’s going on. But if you know, if you are familiar with actions and filters and things like that, it is going to be pretty straightforward for you.\n\n\n\nSo that’s why I said, if you don’t know, but you have a problem, and that happens a lot of time, people come to us, we just literally just write a snippet and just make that happen for them.\n\n\n\nSo you don’t have to know all of that crazy things, you know? It’s there if you are an advanced user, the documentation is there, but if you are not, it’s also there. On top of that, BigScoots cache has its own REST API, which you can use to clear cache, like you can literally use BigScoots cache REST API to clear cache. Imagine you have built like a Laravel system, or some backend system where you are adding something to your e-commerce site and you want to clear cache. When that happens, you can literally leverage BigScoots cache REST API to do that. So that’s like the, on the end of BigScoots cache. Then inside our BigScoots portal.\n\n\n\n[00:43:34] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, that was where I was going next actually. Go on, yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:43:36] Saumya Majumder: Yeah. We have, I think we have the most advanced and fine grain control to Cloudflare Enterprise that no one else in the industry provides. So I don’t know if you got a chance to look at our enterprise settings page. We really allow users to fine tune things exactly the way they want. So for example, let’s say you, do you want to protect your login pages from bad bots and actors, so that they can’t DDoS that? There’s a toggle for that. Turn that on, it’s done.\n\n\n\nYou want to enable our own advanced hardening production, which is not using Cloudflare hardening production, it’s using our own proprietary algorithm for that. You want to use that, feel free. Turn on, that toggle is there.\n\n\n\nYou want to change your image optimisation settings, do that. You want to enable Rocket Loader to every single thing starting from cache settings, speed optimisation settings, there are like bunch of things that you can play around with. You want to block AI bots, do that. You want to block bad bots, like manage, challenge bad blocks altogether, just turn a toggle, it’s done.\n\n\n\nSo we have so many settings there. I think, if you go take a look at just that settings, you would be blown away. Like, all the things that we allow our customers to customise and fine tune.\n\n\n\nLet’s say, for example, you want to block requests from certain countries or continents, and now settings is there. Just choose the countries or continents, requests are blocked. You want to manage, challenge, you don’t want to block, you want to challenge the request from certain countries and countries, you can just go to the settings inside our portal, choose the contains and countries from where you want to challenge. So you could have a combination. So you want to block requests from these countries and continents, challenge from these continents and countries and don’t do anything for the rest of them. So you can play around with this to a whole new level, like you can just do anything you want.\n\n\n\n[00:45:19] Nathan Wrigley: It’s absolutely fascinating. And it kind of makes me feel that your target audience would not be really the bricks and the mortars shop, the mom and the pop website?\n\n\n\n[00:45:27] Saumya Majumder: There actually are. Yeah, like you you won’t believe how many times we have got a request like, hey, you know what? In our analytics, we are seeing that we are getting a lot of requests from Thailand, and that’s like broken our tools like that, so I want to either challenge or block that. So we are like, you go to the settings, choose the Thailand, click save, it’s done. So it’s like as simple as that.\n\n\n\n[00:45:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’m kind of imagining though, that you are kind of ideal customer, for want of a better word, maybe that’s the wrong wording, but would be kind of agencies, WordPress agencies, that kind of thing, who could obviously make use of this. They’ve probably got teams of people who can dedicate time to figuring out how BigScoots works, and maybe having a constant conversation with you to optimise the websites that they’ve got and, you know, maybe some of their clients are what we might call enterprise clients and things like that.\n\n\n\nIf that’s the case, there’s always this merry dance of agencies trying to find the perfect host and kind of figure out, okay, which company do we want to go with this year? And all of that. Do you make it straightforward for people to sort of come to you and say, okay, we’ve got 150 websites, it’s really important that we don’t have any downtime? Do you have some sort of onboarding, migration, something along those lines?\n\n\n\n[00:46:30] Saumya Majumder: So we have a lot of enterprise customers, and for every single one of them we have a proper systematic onboarding flow. So that’s making sure that they do, we do migrations with zero downtime, have multiple peer reviews. Then if they have taken our performance optimisation packages and things like that, we would actually optimise their performance and speed metrics for them. And then if they have taken our engineering and services projects, then we would actually do all the, like if they have any technical problems, we would actually go on write code for them, solve their problems.\n\n\n\nSo we go very hand in hand with our enterprise customers doing onboarding call, making sure they’re happy from end to end. And whether that’s agencies or just normal enterprise customers, it’s for all of them.\n\n\n\nAnd I also want to talk about the settings that you just talked about. So we build all of these things, keeping in mind that they are dead simple to use for anyone. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to do it. A lot of the times customers comes to us and like, hey, we want to do this. As we provide managed support, we actually go into the exact same settings and do that. And that actually solves the problem a lot because now anybody can go to the settings and just do this. Be it our own team or, because it doesn’t have to be escalated, it doesn’t have to come to a specific team. Anybody can do that. And we are constantly growing the more things that people can do to leverage that out. And yes, agencies and enterprise are taking huge advantage of that.\n\n\n\n[00:47:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, honestly, it’s absolutely fascinating. You never know, hopefully you and I, our paths will cross at some point in the year 2026. Maybe I’ll see you in Mumbai or something like that.\n\n\n\nBut what I’m going to do is I’m just going to say, if you’re curious about any of this, I will provide links to everything that we talked about. So if you head over to wptavern.com and you search for the episode with Saumya, so S-A-U-M-Y-A, you’ll be able to find it over there. Honestly, I feel like we’ve just scratched the surface. I feel like there’s another 8 hours in the pair of us, really could get into the weeds of it.\n\n\n\nBut thank you so much for peeling back the curtain a little bit on what you’re doing and how it all works with Cloudflare. Thank you so much.\n\n\n\n[00:48:28] Saumya Majumder: No problem. Thanks for having me.\n\n\n\n\nOn the podcast today we have Saumya Majumder.\n\n\n\nSaumya Majumder is the lead software engineer at BigScoots, with a deep specialisation in high-performance WordPress engineering and advanced Cloudflare-powered architectures. Throughout his career, Saumya has built large-scale systems ranging from custom caching engines to migration tools, worker-based automations, and edge computing solutions. He\u2019s played a pivotal role at BigScoots, overseeing enterprise customers and developing scalable, developer-friendly solutions that push the boundaries of hosting for WordPress.\n\n\n\nWe begin our conversation with a timely discussion about a major Cloudflare outage that recently rippled across the Internet. Saumya explains what happened behind the scenes, the nature of these kinds of global infrastructure hiccups, and why, even with the most robust systems in place, some downtime is simply inevitable. He offers valuable insights into how BigScoots is able to mitigate these issues for their customers, even automating rapid failovers to keep sites online during outages.\n\n\n\nWe then move on to explore some of the innovations that the team at BigScoots have been working on. They focus upon site speed and reliability. This includes CDN-level page caching, and their close integration with Cloudflare Enterprise. Saumya breaks down how this caching differs from traditional server-based caching, and how it ensures that users around the world get fast, local access to website content.\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re curious about how hosting companies manage such advanced caching strategies, and how Cloudflare might fit into the hosting jigsaw, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\nBigScoots\n\n\n\nCloudflare\n\n\n\n\u200aSuper Page Cache plugin\n\n\n\nBlog post about recent outage, 18th November 2025\n\n\n\nCloudflare for Enterprise\n\n\n\nIntroducing BigScoots Cache", "date_published": "2025-11-26T10:00:00-05:00", "date_modified": "2025-11-26T07:46:28-05:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/195-Saumya-Majumder-on-How-Cloudflare-Outages-Impact-the-Web-and-WordPress-Performance-Solutions.jpg", "tags": [ "bigscoots", "cloudflare", "hosting", "podcast" ], "summary": "In this episode, Saumya Majumder joins Nathan Wrigley to discuss innovations at BigScoots, focusing on high-performance WordPress hosting and Cloudflare-powered architecture. They unpack the recent global Cloudflare outage, the complexities of internet infrastructure, and Cloudflare\u2019s transparency in response. Saumya explains advanced caching technologies, BigScoots\u2019 direct physical connection with Cloudflare, and their custom cache plugin, highlighting how these developments offer speed, security, and fine-grained control for WordPress users, agencies, and enterprise clients. If you\u2019re curious about how hosting companies manage such advanced caching strategies, and how Cloudflare might fit into the hosting jigsaw, this episode is for you.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2245590/c1e-3gd9dikod8kiwqowr-kpnqogvxizq2-tlwggv.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=200819", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/194-devin-walker-on-leading-jetpack-challenges-vision-and-the-future", "title": "#194 \u2013 Devin Walker on Leading Jetpack: Challenges, Vision, and the Future", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, leading Jetpack, the past, the challenges, the vision, and the future.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Devin Walker. Devin’s journey in the WordPress ecosystem spans many years, with experience in development, design, marketing, and customer support. He is best known as the co-founder of GiveWP, which he built and scaled before it was acquired. During his time there, he touched a variety of prominent WordPress brands, including iThemes, Kadence, LearnDash, and The Events Calendar.
\n\n\n\nToday Devon is starting a new role leading the Jetpack suite of services at Automattic. It’s a position with hefty responsibilities as Jetpack powers millions of WordPress sites, and integrates deeply across
\n\n\n\nI talk with Devon about why he took on this challenge. The divisiveness and complexity surrounding Jetpack, and his vision for refocusing the plugin and simplifying its user experience.
\n\n\n\nWe start by hearing about Devon’s extensive WordPress background, and the choices he weighed up when deciding to join Automattic.
\n\n\n\nThe conversation quickly moves to the scope of Jetpack, its evolution, the struggle to be a jack of all trades master of none, and the recent efforts to bring greater focus and polish to key features like forms and SEO
\n\n\n\nDevin gets into the organizational changes at Automattic. How Jetpack’s development teams now collaborate more fluidly with other product teams, such as WooCommerce, and the balancing act of shipping improvements to a 4 million strong user base without breaking things.
\n\n\n\nAI emerges as a massive new frontier, and Devin shares behind the scenes insights into Jetpack’s current, and future, aI capabilities, giving us a glimpse at content creation, block building, and how AI might reshape user and developer expectations in WordPress.
\n\n\n\nThroughout we hear about Devin’s approach to product marketing, and the need for more of it, the importance of listening to user feedback, and his plans for a more coherent and compelling Jetpack experience.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re a WordPress user wondering where Jetpack is headed, what’s working, or how AI fits into the future of site building, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you can find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Devin Walker.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Devin Walker. Hello, Devin.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:34] Devin Walker: Hello.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:35] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. Devin has a shiny new job. Up until a few weeks ago, Devin was not an Automattician, or at least I don’t think you were maybe at any point in your past. But you are now an Automattition, and you are doing what?
\n\n\n\n[00:03:47] Devin Walker: My official title is Artistic Director of Jetpack, but basically product owner, or head of Jetpack. Whatever you want to call it.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:55] Nathan Wrigley: So when it comes to Jetpack, the buck stops with you. I guess that’s a pretty important role in the WordPress space over at Automattic. And if anybody hasn’t heard of you, I suppose it would be important to just lay the groundwork, who you are, what you’ve done in the past.
\n\n\n\nI know you’ve got a long and storied history, but just maybe a one minute little short bio telling us who you are and what you’ve done.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:14] Devin Walker: Yeah, sure. I’ve been using WordPress for all sorts of things, development, design, blogging for 16 years now. Really made my name known, I guess you would say, with Matt Cromwell. We co-founded GiveWP together, and we grew it for seven years, from late 2014, all the way through 2021, which then we were acquired by Liquid Web and was there for a little more than four years, and touched a lot of brands from there, from the iThemes rebrand to SolidWP, to Kadence, to LearnDash, Events Calendar, and of course GiveWP as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd left there in early August of this year, 2025. I also built WP Rollback throughout the years, that has quite a few active installs. So yeah, that’s a bit about me. Developer, design background, definitely well-rounded with marketing and supporting customer success.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:05] Nathan Wrigley: So you’ve had a lot of experience working with WordPress products, which I guess is what you are doing over at Automattic, because let’s just call it head of Jetpack, just to make it easy. It’s a curious title, by the way. Artistic Director is kind of a really.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:17] Devin Walker: You know Automattic loves that title.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, they love that, don’t they? But head of Jetpack, and obviously you’ve got a long and storied history kind of growing products and making sure that they succeed and customer support and all of that kind of thing.
\n\n\n\nAnd I feel like Jetpack, no matter what time you dropped in on Jetpack in the last, let’s say decade, I feel that half of the community felt like it needed a lot of love.
\n\n\n\nAnd I’m just wondering when you were interviewing for this position or when this position was offered to you, I don’t know how that process went, but what the kind of broad brush strokes are in what you’re hoping to do over there?
\n\n\n\nWe’ll get into the weeds very much, but roughly speaking, what’s the scope of the new job? What is it that you are hoping to do in the next three, six months, years, something like that?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:57] Devin Walker: Yeah, so when I left Liquid Web, I wrote a long, well, not long, but wrote a blog post about closing that chapter of my career and really being open to what’s coming next for me. I knew that I wanted to stay in WordPress and I was having fun building on just my own products at the time, and having full control of everything, the whole lifecycle of a product.
\n\n\n\nAnd I did some work with Matt in the past on some of his nonprofit sites with Give and the VIP team and the concierge at Automattic. And so Matt called me up one day, you know, we stayed loosely in contact over the years, and said, we have some interesting opportunities here at Automattic, and one of them that I think you’d be great at is Jetpack. And in my mind I’m like, Jetpack, this is a doozy.
\n\n\n\nBut, you know, he said, give it some thought, work on your own pace and give me a call back whenever. And so I thought about it for a week and, maybe two weeks, talked to my wife about it. And really it comes down to, I was either going to start my own business again, and try to grind again and strike lightning twice, like GiveWP, and see if I could grow something and eventually sell it in five to seven years, which takes a lot of hard effort, sacrifice, money. A lot of your own money, and almost no guarantee. And the WordPress marketplace has changed so much that it’s not immediate impact right away, and you’re really out on your own.
\n\n\n\nIt worked well once, but I was in my early thirties, just turning 30, and now I’m 40. So life’s changed quite a bit for me. And Jetpack, it is a very divisive product, we can get more into that in the future, but really it came down to having that impact. Being at Automattic, a company that I’ve respected since I came into WordPress, and always wanted to go behind the scenes and work as an Automattician, so going full circle from where my career began to the opportunity and the challenge.
\n\n\n\nIf I succeed at this, it can really open some other doors at Automattic. I’m head of this product, which touches almost everything on Automattic as far as the WordPress business goes. I just thought about it long and hard, talked to Matt about it, and made sure I would have the levers for success also. And that’s what made me choose to say yes and come aboard.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:08] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of curious because if you just discount all of the stuff you just said about, you know, wanting to fight and build your own product up, I can well imagine how grinding that can be, and there’s no guarantee of success. It could be a real failure.
\n\n\n\nBut stepping into a huge product, I’m going to put my neck out on the line a little bit here and say, I actually can’t think of a product or a plugin, let’s go with that, in the WordPress space that tries to cover as many bases. Covered by any organisation, whether that’s a third party development team or what have you, I can’t think of one named product that tries to cover as many bases.
\n\n\n\nAnd the fact that it’s divisive and I’m sure you’ll get into this, but there’s lots of room for improvement, I’m sure you’ll agree. You are walking into something exactly as you say, where there is a chance of great success here. If you pull this off, and you pull the right levers, and in six months time, a year’s time, two years time, the arc is going in the right direction, there’ll be measurable success. So really interesting.
\n\n\n\nSo what was the bit, when you had that, oh, moment, what was the bit about Jetpack which made you think long and hard about it over two weeks, as opposed to immediately saying, yeah, I’ll do it? There must have bits about the project, Jetpack as a plugin, whatever it may be. What were the bits that concerned you?
\n\n\n\n[00:09:18] Devin Walker: Well, I’ve used it over the years on and off. I wouldn’t call myself a power user at all, but I come from the community, 15 years of being in the community. I’ve gone to, I don’t even know how many WordCamps and always kept tabs on it, especially when, I don’t know when it was. I think it was pre 2020, when they did like a bit of marketing push that Jetpack does donations now, accept donations with Jetpack. And it was through Jetpack forms. I didn’t know that at the time, so I installed Jetpack. I was like, where’s donations? You’ve got to find your way through this tangled web. Oh, it’s part of forms. Okay, let’s go into forms. Oh, it’s like a template now and you have to, the connect flow was terrible. The whole flow was not a great experience.
\n\n\n\nAnd the donation form itself, I was like, oh, we have a pretty serious competitor now with Give, we’ve got to like step our game up. But then I left that, I was like, okay, don’t worry about it guys, we’ll be fine now, nobody’s going to use this. That’s where that, oh, moment comes from where like, jack of all trades, master of none type of thing.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think probably encapsulates it perfectly. It’s kind of jack of all trades and master of none. So I’m just going to rattle off some of the things that I know it does. I’m probably missing quite a lot here. So for example, you know, it does stats, think something like Google Analytics, it will offer that for you. Backups. It will do protection. It will do speed and optimisation things on your website. Social sharing. It will do forms. There’s VideoPress thrown in there as well. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that I’ve missed out there, but it really is encapsulating a lot.
\n\n\n\nAnd the jack of all trades, master of none, bit kind of fits because when Jetpack came out, I’m imagining it was a really, it was probably at the forefront of many of those things. The things that it did, it probably did as well as everybody else. But now, 10, 15, whatever years later, there’s now been real amazing products delivered by third party developers that have become the standard of forms, of backups, of speed and optimisation services and what have you. And so Jetpack now has to kind of compare itself to the very, very best. And I think that’s hard. You know, for one plugin to try and be the best at everything. Nigh on impossible, I would imagine.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:16] Devin Walker: You’re right. Like, we can’t compete. I’ve been preaching focus for the last, since 2016 when our mentors said, what the heck are you doing all these other plugins? Sell them off or sunset them and only focus on Give. And that’s when our business started taking off. Now, what I’m trying to do is bring focus back into Jetpack.
\n\n\n\nWe do some things very well, and we need to make sure that, I’m not going to say we’re going to compete on the level of a Gravity Forms for our form solution. It’s going to come very close. And for 98% of the users out there that need forms on their website, I think it’ll fulfill that need.
\n\n\n\nFor that special 2% that need like calculation fields, they need super customised form capabilities, then it might not get to that level. But we really want Jetpack to be your go-to solution so that you can have these products work well together as well.
\n\n\n\nIt’s very generous too, the free version. You get a free CDN, you get VideoPress for free, and bringing people in the door and showing them that. Some folks are seeing the light of that, of what it can actually do and do pretty well. But for instance, like SEO. Yeah, Jetpack does SEO, but it’s the most rudimentary, basic version. I want to make that a bit better there. But also things that it doesn’t do well. Either get rid of those, if they’re just going to sit on a shelf and grow with age, what’s the point of it?
\n\n\n\nSo yeah, a lot of realignment with that and understanding that teams that are fully focused on one specific part of what Jetpack does, it’s really hard for us to compete with that.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:46] Nathan Wrigley: Do you envisage a future for Jetpack now that you are at the helm, if you like ? And I don’t know how the structure of the people that are working on Jetpack works. In other words, do you have a forms dedicated crew where you’ve got, I don’t know, a bunch of people who just work on forms? You’ve got a bunch of people working on VideoPress and VaultPress and all of these different bits and pieces. Or is it, you work with Jetpack and you kind of move from team to team? I’m just curious as to what it looks like inside of Automattic and the different bits that make up Jetpack.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:14] Devin Walker: Yeah, so this is really an interesting time at Automattic, where they’re going from that functional organisation where it’s product focus. Where Jetpack did, a year ago, have a dedicated development team, designer team, and the person that was in my role before, it was just like a classic company structure in a way, within Automattic.
\n\n\n\nNow it’s shifting to more of a matrix organisation where there’s one architecture team. They handle .com, they handle Jetpack, they handle a bunch of other products like WooCommerce within that. And the designers as a product are outside of that.
\n\n\n\nAnd so what that means is we, as the product team, we have a shared roadmap where, if you ever use .com, a lot of what brings that special sauce to it, what makes it unique outside of the self installed WordPress is Jetpack. So for instance, forms is getting a massive upgrade. And the 15.2 that just came out, it has quite a big upgrade. 15.3, we’re going to have even more. So there’s a dedicated team right now that’s, some of the best engineers, I’ve been really blown away with the level of engineering at Automattic, are working on bringing forms up. And I’m leading that initiative, putting myself into that place where I can then shape forms in the future.
\n\n\n\nBut that does mean that some other elements of Jetpack aren’t getting taken care of right now. AI’s going to become a big thing. We have to pick and choose based on our resources, what are the most important things for our shared initiative? But what that means is they work better together. I think you’re going to see in the future a lot more benefit of running WooCommerce and Jetpack together.
\n\n\n\nNow, we’re not going to force you to log into wordpress.com to use WooCommerce, but to get some of that benefit, you will need to OAuth in to using Jetpack. And that is a requirement, because a lot of the Jetpack, what you get for free and the secret sauce is based on our cloud servers. You basically are starting to use our infrastructure for free. And Automattic is huge on privacy. And so I don’t quite understand that whole conflict of folks that don’t like that. There’s just some people out there that will never really like Automattic and they will not OAuth in or double sign in to use Jetpack, you know what I mean?
\n\n\n\n[00:15:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of curious. So if I’m parsing it right, it sounds like what you were saying was that in a recent restructuring of Automattic and over the last 18 months or so, I think there’s been a lot of that. It sounds like Jetpack is more of an amorphous thing. It’s not like these particular people are dedicated to Jetpack Forms and these ones are for VaultPress or whatever it may be. It’s more liquid than that. We’re going to do a dedicated sprint on Forms, for example. It sounds like that’s getting an update. So probably has had people on the seats having a look at that.
\n\n\n\nAnd then once that’s put away and tidied up, then move to something else. But also, I guess an interesting thing that you mentioned there is that because it’s in this wider organisation of which WooCommerce, it’s pretty big, that you can also communicate with those folks. So there may be some overlap between what Forms can do in Jetpack and something that you might wish to do with WooCommerce, those kind of things.
\n\n\n\nSo have I got that right? It’s not like dedicated people doing dedicated products within Jetpack, it’s much more liquid and amorphous than that.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:23] Devin Walker: Absolutely. Rather than having silos we have one large organisation that works better together. And our vision is really that all the WordPress products should be very similar to Apple and how when you’re using iOS or MacOS, there’s a lot of similar fields and they work well together and they tag team off of each other.
\n\n\n\nAnd prior to this reorg, that wasn’t happening so much. And we experienced this at Stellar as well. They purchased a bunch of plugins, brought them all in, the vision was for them to all work well together. We went from functional organisation to this matrix type of organisation. And so this isn’t my first rodeo doing it, I know it can work. But it does take a concerted effort, and it’s still ongoing right now. It hasn’t been 18 months, it’s been like six months. And we’re still trying to figure things out. So me stepping in at this time, I’m really trying to figure it out.
\n\n\n\nI have a blog post called, or a P2 post called Connecting the Dots, where I’m just trying to find which experts and which products on Jetpack they know better. I’ve been having so many one-on-ones just to try to get to know these folks, understand their history with Jetpack and put it in this kind of glossary of what I have here, and keep that updated as my time progresses here.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:35] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of hard to get a grip on what Jetpack is. Because it’s trying to do all these different things, I think it is quite hard for people to understand what they’re installing. So they install Jetpack, okay, I’ve heard that Jetpack’s a thing, I’ll go and install it. There’s loads of free stuff available. And then all of a sudden there’s bits which do work, there are bits which you can extend and upgrade and, you know, you might have to log in with .com to make that bit combine with this bit.
\n\n\n\nAnd then there are bits where, you know, it feels like the classic themes work well in some areas, and then if you’ve got a block-based theme, other things don’t work quite so well. I’m thinking like social sharing and things like that. And it’s bit of a, mess is the wrong word, but it’s incredibly confusing, I think, to a novice user. And so I’m, I’m going to put words into your mouth, I’m guessing this is one of the challenges that you are going to try and tackle to take that confusion away. Because, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter how many times I log into Jetpack, there’s always a bit of a surprise. Oh, okay, it works that way. That’s curious. I wasn’t expecting it to do that. And I’ve been doing this for absolutely ages, and I’m still surprised by the way things work.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:33] Devin Walker: You’re not alone. So one of the things that Matt’s been saying since I’ve come on board is we don’t really need to build much more new things. We need to focus and improve what’s already there, especially in Jetpack and .com. And simplifying it and making it make more sense to the end users. And Jetpack is a prime candidate for a really fresh look at how that can happen.
\n\n\n\nWe’ve been doing exercises as the product team for a framework called Jobs to Be Done. You put yourself in the shoes of that customer and you experience it through fresh eyes, based on what they are looking to get out of it.
\n\n\n\nFor instance, the classic, I guess, analogy is, folks don’t, they don’t want a quarter inch drill bit, they want a quarter inch hole, and that’s just the tool they use to get that quarter inch.
\n\n\n\nAnd it’s the same thing with Jetpack or any other software product, and it’s a reforming in thinking. It’s only my fifth week here, but it’s been really a refreshing way to think about how we build product, and how I can then work with the designers to then smooth out those wrinkles of which there are many.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting that you say that, because pretty much everything that Jetpack has, well, there’s one notable exception, which is of course AI, which we’ll come to in a minute. But more or less everything that’s in Jetpack has been available in some form or other for a decade or more. You know, forms is, it’s not a new thing. There’s some interesting ideas that people have come up with that maybe we’d want to integrate, but backups, it’s not a new thing.
\n\n\n\nSo the idea of not having new, well, features is probably the wrong word, but not having a new product and just finessing what you’ve already got, I think that would be music to any subscriber to Jetpack. One of the paid plans that you got, I think they would absolutely love that. Just finesse what you’ve already got. We’ve already got this thing, we know what we’ve got, we know how it works, but finesse it, give us a few more features here and there in the bit, like for example, forms or what have you. That seems like music to my ears.
\n\n\n\nBut I’ve said it. The cat is out the bag in this episode now, AI. AI is smuggled into Jetpack in the most, it’s kind of hidden. It’s almost entirely hidden, and yet incredibly profound. I don’t know if, dear listener, you’ve experienced Jetpack and it’s AI features, but if you switch it on and you just go, I don’t know, make a blog post or something like that, when you go to publish, it will just helpfully write your excerpt and your featured image, it will create that for you on the fly. It all happens in the background. It’s really incredible. How did that get under the radar? And is that going to be a big feature?
\n\n\n\n[00:21:02] Devin Walker: That is going to be a huge feature. I just came back from New York with our AI engineering team led by James LaPage, who’s one of the brightest, young stars, I want to say, in WordPress. And he’s one of the reasons that I’m so excited for what AI can become with Jetpack, and where it’s going to go from here. It’s really great that you are already like what’s there? But that’s just scratching the surface from what we’re going to be doing in the near future.
\n\n\n\nWe’ve got quite a large team working on this. This is a 50 plus engineering team. It’s a huge focus of Automattic. And Jetpack’s the way we’re going to bring a lot of what we’re bringing to .com to self-hosted users. And it’s not going to cost you really much at all and it’s gonna be done in the WordPress way.
\n\n\n\nRight now it tries to be your content companion, is kind of how I call it, but it’s going to do that a lot better, and it’s going to reach outside of the post editor and do a lot more helpful items for you in the WP admin. And not only in the WP admin, also provide some tools for you in the future for your visitors and how you can convert them, how you can get them to sign up on your newsletter, or you can get them to ask presales questions, or fill out forms or what have you. It’ll be very moldable and shapeable.
\n\n\n\nSo I delightfully was at several demo presentations at this meetup where I was just blown away. Sat down with Matias, James, a lot of the key stakeholders and players here at .com on how and when we can start bringing this into Jetpack.
\n\n\n\nAnd what’s there right now is good. It’s almost going to be entirely rewritten and thrown away for what the foundation now is going to become. And so that’s one of the more exciting, more immediate, roadmap items that I’ll be really working on the next 8 to 12 months. You’ll see a huge change.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:54] Nathan Wrigley: I feel like at the moment the AI implementation in Jetpack is about content, the content that you’re creating right at this moment. We’re creating, I don’t know, SEO fields and we’re creating excerpts and things like that and featured images and what have you. But if you haven’t had a play, again, I’ll link this in the show notes, Automattic’s Telex, which is the capability to, you write a simple prompt and it will create a block for you. I feel that something like Jetpack with something like Telex, just hidden in the sidebar of a WordPress blog post would be really kind of interesting. You know, the idea that, I need a block for this.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:26] Devin Walker: Are you reading my DMs? Because, exactly. You’ve already sort of got a crystal ball right there. And with Telex, that’s a huge opportunity for site building, for imagining anything that WordPress could be, and having it created there.
\n\n\n\nRight now it’s great. It creates separate plugins, you can download and install them, you can’t sync them per site. It’s kind of annoying how there’s all these plugins there. There’s not much management updating over time. Jetpack can be that bridge for you, and that’s really an exciting future where it needs to go.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because at the moment, if you are an inexperienced WordPress user, if you’re not technical, let’s put it that way, then you are constrained entirely by what’s there or what the developer has built for you or the range of plugins that you’ve installed. And I feel like in the near future, you reach that point of frustration and you suddenly realise that, oh, there is no block that does that thing. Well, why don’t I just make one?
\n\n\n\nAnd you’ll write a small prompt, I don’t know, I need a real estate block, or I don’t know, I need a block because it’s coming up to Christmas. I need a block which is going to show snowflakes falling on this particular post. Please don’t do this by the way, but you get the point. I’m just going to go ahead and make it, and it’ll be this entirely disposable thing. And when I’m finished with it, I’ll probably just throw it in the trash or maybe keep it until next year.
\n\n\n\nBut the point is, your WordPress becomes like this, how to describe it, it’s almost like the scaffolding for an infinite arrangement of possibilities. Whereas before, WordPress felt a bit like a box. If it wasn’t in the box, it couldn’t be done. But now the box got opened and there’s all this scaffolding everywhere and it can do a million more things. And as Matt Mullenweg said, you know, it’s becoming like the OS for the web or something like that.
\n\n\n\nAnd the fact that AI is binding to the abilities inside of WordPress, so with the Abilities API and things like that, it knows everything that your WordPress website can do. You know, create users, create posts, delete posts, all of these kind of things. And Jetpack seems really aligned to doing that. I don’t know how it would fit into the bigger Jetpack picture, but, yeah, interesting.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:27] Devin Walker: Yeah, well, I think AI can be the glue that binds a lot of these individual products together and really paint the picture on how they work well together, and work within your WordPress Core to make it the Jetpack that is supercharged, right? I mean the WordPress that has a Jetpack strapped to it.
\n\n\n\nThere is a great number of, kind of mission statements and taglines over the years for Jetpack. None of which I think have been fully fulfilled. So I really want to revisit that, revise that, and you’ll see a lot of updates coming to the website soon, soon-ish. Telling and bringing people along this journey.
\n\n\n\nIf you look at the website and a lot of the marketing right now, it’s kind of on idle. So that’s another big part of what I’m being focused on, and that will help change the perception in the community and outside of it, of what Jetpack is and what it can do for you is, pulling up the curtain, if you will, on all the cool stuff we’re doing here.
\n\n\n\nYou could read P2s all day here and many of them are so impressive and I feel like a lot of them should be public. There’s so much good content here that is really impressive. For somebody like me who’s been in the community for 15 years, like, oh my gosh, we have the best engineers, the best designers, and it’s all in this P2. Like, let’s get some of this published.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well, that’s curious. So I was reading your mind a minute ago, you’ve just read my mind, because the next little bit was going to be all about marketing. Because it doesn’t matter, with the best will in the world, the best product in the world will probably fail, if not marketed correctly.
\n\n\n\nAnd it feels as if, when Jetpack began, because it was kind of the thing, a long, long time ago it was the thing, it had that success kind of built into it. You know, it was an Automattic thing, it was a WordPress thing, it became popular because it did so many things that nothing else could do.
\n\n\n\nFast forward till today, it feels like the wheels have come off the marketing a little bit, or the train has completely pulled into the station and not moving at all. You know, I can’t remember the last time I saw something engaging, like a YouTube video or somebody experimenting on their YouTube channel with a Jetpack thing.
\n\n\n\nWhereas with third party plugins, it’s happening all the time, you know? And so it feels like that’s going to be a very big part of where you are, you know, you’ll build hopefully some amazing things, but then trying to turn the tide and get people to be engaged and interested and see the utility of it. I’m guessing that’s going to be a part of the job which is separate to the technological part.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:46] Devin Walker: It will, absolutely. I think for quite some time it was almost build it and they will come here. And for many, many years they did come. And now it’s harder because the marketplace has expanded quite a bit. There’s a lot of other folks out there doing really cool things with WordPress and have a lot more focused marketing efforts behind them.
\n\n\n\nI mean, point and case was GiveWP, we were just, people weren’t turning to Woo or Gravity Forms because we made it that it was the number one solution you had to go do it. We just hammered that point through WordCamps, through videos, through podcasts, whatever it was, that was our mission.
\n\n\n\nAnd for Jetpack, we really need to refocus on that and do that a lot more. It’s very engineering led organisation. I think marketing to some point is built into their roles and they’re not doing that part as much as I would like.
\n\n\n\nAnd on another aspect, I think we definitely just need more marketers. I’m not going to say the exact numbers, but it was a surprisingly low number of marketers to the size of the organisation when I came in. I’m used to a much better ratio.
\n\n\n\nSo I’m going to be hammering that point a little bit more home as I get through the door, but it’s something that I’ve mentioned a bit already in my 5 weeks here.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:02] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t know what the install base is specifically. It’s a lot, right? Jetpack has a lot of installs and so presumably you’ve.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:08] Devin Walker: The core is 4 million.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:09] Nathan Wrigley: 4 million. Okay, so, wow, gosh. So presumably that means anything that you do do, you’ve really got to tread carefully. So for a start, you can’t break things. You can’t just ship a brand new UI in let’s say the forms aspect of it overnight. And I presume that’s kind of like a bit of a noose around your neck in that, you know, you want to move fast and break things in some respects, but with 4 million installs, which is really right at the very top in the WordPress ecosystem, that’s big, big numbers. You are going to constrained in what you can do and how fast you can move things and how quickly you can break things.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:40] Devin Walker: Somewhat. Somewhat I agree with that. Right now we are on a monthly release cycle and there’s definitely a lot of caution around that. And Jetpack touches a lot of .com too, so there’s that extra added user base, which is humongous. So there is that bit of treading carefully.
\n\n\n\nBut I want to balance that with being aggressive. We just shipped, prior to me coming on board, a new onboarding for getting connected. It’s just through the connection segment, getting connected to .com, and that really had positive results and saw an uptick in connected successful sites. I think we can take that to the next level and explain what Jetpack is, what they need it for, and really optimise it for the best use case based on what that particular site wants or needs.
\n\n\n\nGoing beyond onboarding is then getting into the product UI itself, making the navigation much more clear and understandable.
\n\n\n\nYou know, there’s three different areas in Jetpack right now where you can toggle on and off different modules or products.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I’ve discovered many them.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:41] Devin Walker: Yeah. So I think we need to consolidate that at least. And there’s more Easter eggs. I don’t even want to call them Easter, I don’t know what you’d call that, but interesting quirks that we can clean up.
\n\n\n\nAnd for the most part I think we do have to be a bit careful because it’s such a massive user base. Breaking things, just look at some of the Jetpack reviews. Breaking them and lack of support. Those are the two main cause of one star reviews. And with that many, I really want to get that review base above 4.0 stars. But with 3000 or whatever reviews it is, it takes a long shift to get that. And we’re not going to do that by continually breaking things, so it’s a balance.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:19] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting that me, a relatively inexperienced user of Jetpack, I was able to discover many of the quirks that you’ve just mentioned almost immediately. You know, just being curious. And I’m the kind of person that when I download anything, I go and look at every single menu item and kind of think, well, what does that do? How would that work? It really didn’t take me long to discover, well, hang on, that is somewhere else. If I engage that, does that mean it conflicts with this thing over here?
\n\n\n\nAnd I saw this over and over again. And so I think that, as you imagine, would be some of the very, very brilliant low hanging fruit. To just have a UI which does, you know, there’s one place for one thing, it works as expected that you don’t, I’m sure you know where I’m going with this, basically, just simplify things, make it elegant in the same way that we’ve seen with so many third party plugins.
\n\n\n\nBecause at the moment it kind of feels like a whole range of different things that have been slammed together and forcefully told to get along with each other, as opposed to like a happy family that, just everything works and everybody’s happy and there’s bliss and rainbows everywhere. It feels a little bit like that, if you know what I mean?
\n\n\n\n[00:32:21] Devin Walker: Oh, I completely agree. I think we used in the pre-show and it’s a bit of a Frankenstein. We need to change it from that. If I had a nickel for every toggle in Jetpack, I don’t know if I’d need to work anymore. There are quite a few toggle on, toggle offs in just a row. You can imagine how this interface could be much more elegantly put together.
\n\n\n\nAnd we’re going to use user feedback for a lot of this and ask, hey, what do you guys think of this? Because we can’t do it successfully in a bubble.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:52] Nathan Wrigley: Well, and the other thing is, given the perfect UI, it does so much stuff. If you just had Jetpack, if you had a vanilla version of WordPress and you installed Jetpack and everything was easy to navigate and worked as expected first time and maybe there was no dependency on having a .com account or what have you. It does all the things. It would take you from like zero success to broadly speaking, okay, you’ve got a credible website. Maybe there’s going to be some interesting cases where you want a little bit more SEO finesse or something like that.
\n\n\n\nIt would get you to the races, you know, it would get you to put your horse in the race and have a good go. And there’s not much like that out there. There really is nothing that I can think of in the WordPress space. But it’s a leviathan and it’s got many heads. We need it just to have the one head, I think.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:35] Devin Walker: Very much so, and that’s the challenge that I’m in here to work with this entire team and put a lot of thought behind it.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it’s all on you. So if Jetpack is a success in two years time, we know who to thank for that. And it does genuinely seem, for somebody with your obvious interest and capabilities, it does seem really, really enjoyable. I’m sure it’ll keep you awake, but an enjoyable challenge. Something that you get your teeth into. Something where the success can be measured fairly quickly. You know, does the discontent diminish? Does the UI improve? Tick, tick, tick. We did a good job.
\n\n\n\nAnd also, there’s loads of room for improvement. So you’ve entered on a, you’ve definitely got yourself into a position where you’ve taken on a project where the improvements are evident everywhere. I hope that you managed to grab hold of them and wrestle this to the ground.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:21] Devin Walker: Well, I really appreciate that, Nathan, and why don’t we have a check in in 12 months and see where we’re at on this journey. I think that would be a good way to keep us honest, follow along in this journey along the way, we’ll see how far we’ve gotten.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, well, for now then, go and install Jetpack. If you’re listening to this, we’ll be back in 12 months time, so go and have a play with Jetpack as it is now and see.
\n\n\n\nIt sounds to me that Devin is like all ears. If you’ve got some quirks and you found something that’s curious or unexpected or dissatisfying or just downright annoying, where do we get in touch with you? Oh, also, I suspect Devin’s more than happy to receive positive commentary as well.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:01] Devin Walker: Yeah, I mean the positive stuff’s great too. Right now feedback@jetpack.com is a good place, but we’re going to make this a lot more public in the near future. You can also just tweet at me @innerwebs, I-N-N-E-R-W-E-B-S, or go to my website devin.org. But jetpack.com, jetpack.com/feedback is also a great place. So that’s a bit about me and where you can find the Jetpack information.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:27] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. So definitely a challenge out in the public for Devin to get his teeth into WordPress’ Jetpack, and see if he can figure it out and make it better. Let’s check back in 12 months time and see how we’re going. Devin Walker, thanks for chatting to me today.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:38] Devin Walker: Thank you.
\nOn the podcast today we have Devin Walker.
\n\n\n\nDevin\u2019s journey in the WordPress ecosystem spans many years, with experience in development, design, marketing, and customer support. He\u2019s best known as the co-founder of GiveWP, which he built and scaled before it was acquired. During his time there, he touched a variety of prominent WordPress brands including iThemes, Kadence, LearnDash, and The Events Calendar.
\n\n\n\nToday, Devin is starting a new role leading the Jetpack suite of services at Automattic. It\u2019s a position with hefty responsibilities as Jetpack powers millions of WordPress sites, and integrates deeply across Automattic\u2019s product portfolio.
\n\n\n\nI talk with Devin about why he took on this challenge, the divisiveness and complexity surrounding Jetpack, and his vision for refocusing the plugin and simplifying its user experience.
\n\n\n\nWe start by hearing about Devin\u2019s extensive WordPress background and the choices he weighed up when deciding to join Automattic. The conversation quickly moves to the scope of Jetpack, its evolution, the struggle to be a \u201cjack of all trades, master of none\u201d, and the recent efforts to bring greater focus and polish to key features like forms and SEO.
\n\n\n\nDevin gets into the organisational changes at Automattic, how Jetpack\u2019s development teams now collaborate more fluidly with other product teams (such as WooCommerce), and the balancing act of shipping improvements to a 4 million strong user base without breaking things.
\n\n\n\nAI emerges as a massive new frontier, and Devin shares behind-the-scenes insights into Jetpack\u2019s current and future AI capabilities, giving us a glimpse at content creation, block-building, and how AI might reshape user and developer expectations in WordPress.
\n\n\n\nThroughout, we hear about Devin\u2019s approach to product marketing (and the need for more of it), the importance of listening to user feedback, and his plans for a more coherent and compelling Jetpack experience.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re a WordPress user wondering where Jetpack is headed, what\u2019s working, or how AI fits into the future of site building, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nAutomattic AI team announcement post
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "content_text": "Transcript\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, leading Jetpack, the past, the challenges, the vision, and the future.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Devin Walker. Devin’s journey in the WordPress ecosystem spans many years, with experience in development, design, marketing, and customer support. He is best known as the co-founder of GiveWP, which he built and scaled before it was acquired. During his time there, he touched a variety of prominent WordPress brands, including iThemes, Kadence, LearnDash, and The Events Calendar.\n\n\n\nToday Devon is starting a new role leading the Jetpack suite of services at Automattic. It’s a position with hefty responsibilities as Jetpack powers millions of WordPress sites, and integrates deeply across\n\n\n\nI talk with Devon about why he took on this challenge. The divisiveness and complexity surrounding Jetpack, and his vision for refocusing the plugin and simplifying its user experience.\n\n\n\nWe start by hearing about Devon’s extensive WordPress background, and the choices he weighed up when deciding to join Automattic.\n\n\n\nThe conversation quickly moves to the scope of Jetpack, its evolution, the struggle to be a jack of all trades master of none, and the recent efforts to bring greater focus and polish to key features like forms and SEO\n\n\n\nDevin gets into the organizational changes at Automattic. How Jetpack’s development teams now collaborate more fluidly with other product teams, such as WooCommerce, and the balancing act of shipping improvements to a 4 million strong user base without breaking things.\n\n\n\nAI emerges as a massive new frontier, and Devin shares behind the scenes insights into Jetpack’s current, and future, aI capabilities, giving us a glimpse at content creation, block building, and how AI might reshape user and developer expectations in WordPress.\n\n\n\nThroughout we hear about Devin’s approach to product marketing, and the need for more of it, the importance of listening to user feedback, and his plans for a more coherent and compelling Jetpack experience.\n\n\n\nIf you’re a WordPress user wondering where Jetpack is headed, what’s working, or how AI fits into the future of site building, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you can find all the other episodes as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Devin Walker.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Devin Walker. Hello, Devin.\n\n\n\n[00:03:34] Devin Walker: Hello.\n\n\n\n[00:03:35] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. Devin has a shiny new job. Up until a few weeks ago, Devin was not an Automattician, or at least I don’t think you were maybe at any point in your past. But you are now an Automattition, and you are doing what?\n\n\n\n[00:03:47] Devin Walker: My official title is Artistic Director of Jetpack, but basically product owner, or head of Jetpack. Whatever you want to call it.\n\n\n\n[00:03:55] Nathan Wrigley: So when it comes to Jetpack, the buck stops with you. I guess that’s a pretty important role in the WordPress space over at Automattic. And if anybody hasn’t heard of you, I suppose it would be important to just lay the groundwork, who you are, what you’ve done in the past.\n\n\n\nI know you’ve got a long and storied history, but just maybe a one minute little short bio telling us who you are and what you’ve done.\n\n\n\n[00:04:14] Devin Walker: Yeah, sure. I’ve been using WordPress for all sorts of things, development, design, blogging for 16 years now. Really made my name known, I guess you would say, with Matt Cromwell. We co-founded GiveWP together, and we grew it for seven years, from late 2014, all the way through 2021, which then we were acquired by Liquid Web and was there for a little more than four years, and touched a lot of brands from there, from the iThemes rebrand to SolidWP, to Kadence, to LearnDash, Events Calendar, and of course GiveWP as well.\n\n\n\nAnd left there in early August of this year, 2025. I also built WP Rollback throughout the years, that has quite a few active installs. So yeah, that’s a bit about me. Developer, design background, definitely well-rounded with marketing and supporting customer success.\n\n\n\n[00:05:05] Nathan Wrigley: So you’ve had a lot of experience working with WordPress products, which I guess is what you are doing over at Automattic, because let’s just call it head of Jetpack, just to make it easy. It’s a curious title, by the way. Artistic Director is kind of a really.\n\n\n\n[00:05:17] Devin Walker: You know Automattic loves that title.\n\n\n\n[00:05:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, they love that, don’t they? But head of Jetpack, and obviously you’ve got a long and storied history kind of growing products and making sure that they succeed and customer support and all of that kind of thing.\n\n\n\nAnd I feel like Jetpack, no matter what time you dropped in on Jetpack in the last, let’s say decade, I feel that half of the community felt like it needed a lot of love.\n\n\n\nAnd I’m just wondering when you were interviewing for this position or when this position was offered to you, I don’t know how that process went, but what the kind of broad brush strokes are in what you’re hoping to do over there?\n\n\n\nWe’ll get into the weeds very much, but roughly speaking, what’s the scope of the new job? What is it that you are hoping to do in the next three, six months, years, something like that?\n\n\n\n[00:05:57] Devin Walker: Yeah, so when I left Liquid Web, I wrote a long, well, not long, but wrote a blog post about closing that chapter of my career and really being open to what’s coming next for me. I knew that I wanted to stay in WordPress and I was having fun building on just my own products at the time, and having full control of everything, the whole lifecycle of a product.\n\n\n\nAnd I did some work with Matt in the past on some of his nonprofit sites with Give and the VIP team and the concierge at Automattic. And so Matt called me up one day, you know, we stayed loosely in contact over the years, and said, we have some interesting opportunities here at Automattic, and one of them that I think you’d be great at is Jetpack. And in my mind I’m like, Jetpack, this is a doozy.\n\n\n\nBut, you know, he said, give it some thought, work on your own pace and give me a call back whenever. And so I thought about it for a week and, maybe two weeks, talked to my wife about it. And really it comes down to, I was either going to start my own business again, and try to grind again and strike lightning twice, like GiveWP, and see if I could grow something and eventually sell it in five to seven years, which takes a lot of hard effort, sacrifice, money. A lot of your own money, and almost no guarantee. And the WordPress marketplace has changed so much that it’s not immediate impact right away, and you’re really out on your own.\n\n\n\nIt worked well once, but I was in my early thirties, just turning 30, and now I’m 40. So life’s changed quite a bit for me. And Jetpack, it is a very divisive product, we can get more into that in the future, but really it came down to having that impact. Being at Automattic, a company that I’ve respected since I came into WordPress, and always wanted to go behind the scenes and work as an Automattician, so going full circle from where my career began to the opportunity and the challenge.\n\n\n\nIf I succeed at this, it can really open some other doors at Automattic. I’m head of this product, which touches almost everything on Automattic as far as the WordPress business goes. I just thought about it long and hard, talked to Matt about it, and made sure I would have the levers for success also. And that’s what made me choose to say yes and come aboard.\n\n\n\n[00:08:08] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of curious because if you just discount all of the stuff you just said about, you know, wanting to fight and build your own product up, I can well imagine how grinding that can be, and there’s no guarantee of success. It could be a real failure.\n\n\n\nBut stepping into a huge product, I’m going to put my neck out on the line a little bit here and say, I actually can’t think of a product or a plugin, let’s go with that, in the WordPress space that tries to cover as many bases. Covered by any organisation, whether that’s a third party development team or what have you, I can’t think of one named product that tries to cover as many bases.\n\n\n\nAnd the fact that it’s divisive and I’m sure you’ll get into this, but there’s lots of room for improvement, I’m sure you’ll agree. You are walking into something exactly as you say, where there is a chance of great success here. If you pull this off, and you pull the right levers, and in six months time, a year’s time, two years time, the arc is going in the right direction, there’ll be measurable success. So really interesting.\n\n\n\nSo what was the bit, when you had that, oh, moment, what was the bit about Jetpack which made you think long and hard about it over two weeks, as opposed to immediately saying, yeah, I’ll do it? There must have bits about the project, Jetpack as a plugin, whatever it may be. What were the bits that concerned you?\n\n\n\n[00:09:18] Devin Walker: Well, I’ve used it over the years on and off. I wouldn’t call myself a power user at all, but I come from the community, 15 years of being in the community. I’ve gone to, I don’t even know how many WordCamps and always kept tabs on it, especially when, I don’t know when it was. I think it was pre 2020, when they did like a bit of marketing push that Jetpack does donations now, accept donations with Jetpack. And it was through Jetpack forms. I didn’t know that at the time, so I installed Jetpack. I was like, where’s donations? You’ve got to find your way through this tangled web. Oh, it’s part of forms. Okay, let’s go into forms. Oh, it’s like a template now and you have to, the connect flow was terrible. The whole flow was not a great experience.\n\n\n\nAnd the donation form itself, I was like, oh, we have a pretty serious competitor now with Give, we’ve got to like step our game up. But then I left that, I was like, okay, don’t worry about it guys, we’ll be fine now, nobody’s going to use this. That’s where that, oh, moment comes from where like, jack of all trades, master of none type of thing.\n\n\n\n[00:10:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think probably encapsulates it perfectly. It’s kind of jack of all trades and master of none. So I’m just going to rattle off some of the things that I know it does. I’m probably missing quite a lot here. So for example, you know, it does stats, think something like Google Analytics, it will offer that for you. Backups. It will do protection. It will do speed and optimisation things on your website. Social sharing. It will do forms. There’s VideoPress thrown in there as well. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that I’ve missed out there, but it really is encapsulating a lot.\n\n\n\nAnd the jack of all trades, master of none, bit kind of fits because when Jetpack came out, I’m imagining it was a really, it was probably at the forefront of many of those things. The things that it did, it probably did as well as everybody else. But now, 10, 15, whatever years later, there’s now been real amazing products delivered by third party developers that have become the standard of forms, of backups, of speed and optimisation services and what have you. And so Jetpack now has to kind of compare itself to the very, very best. And I think that’s hard. You know, for one plugin to try and be the best at everything. Nigh on impossible, I would imagine.\n\n\n\n[00:11:16] Devin Walker: You’re right. Like, we can’t compete. I’ve been preaching focus for the last, since 2016 when our mentors said, what the heck are you doing all these other plugins? Sell them off or sunset them and only focus on Give. And that’s when our business started taking off. Now, what I’m trying to do is bring focus back into Jetpack.\n\n\n\nWe do some things very well, and we need to make sure that, I’m not going to say we’re going to compete on the level of a Gravity Forms for our form solution. It’s going to come very close. And for 98% of the users out there that need forms on their website, I think it’ll fulfill that need.\n\n\n\nFor that special 2% that need like calculation fields, they need super customised form capabilities, then it might not get to that level. But we really want Jetpack to be your go-to solution so that you can have these products work well together as well.\n\n\n\nIt’s very generous too, the free version. You get a free CDN, you get VideoPress for free, and bringing people in the door and showing them that. Some folks are seeing the light of that, of what it can actually do and do pretty well. But for instance, like SEO. Yeah, Jetpack does SEO, but it’s the most rudimentary, basic version. I want to make that a bit better there. But also things that it doesn’t do well. Either get rid of those, if they’re just going to sit on a shelf and grow with age, what’s the point of it?\n\n\n\nSo yeah, a lot of realignment with that and understanding that teams that are fully focused on one specific part of what Jetpack does, it’s really hard for us to compete with that.\n\n\n\n[00:12:46] Nathan Wrigley: Do you envisage a future for Jetpack now that you are at the helm, if you like ? And I don’t know how the structure of the people that are working on Jetpack works. In other words, do you have a forms dedicated crew where you’ve got, I don’t know, a bunch of people who just work on forms? You’ve got a bunch of people working on VideoPress and VaultPress and all of these different bits and pieces. Or is it, you work with Jetpack and you kind of move from team to team? I’m just curious as to what it looks like inside of Automattic and the different bits that make up Jetpack.\n\n\n\n[00:13:14] Devin Walker: Yeah, so this is really an interesting time at Automattic, where they’re going from that functional organisation where it’s product focus. Where Jetpack did, a year ago, have a dedicated development team, designer team, and the person that was in my role before, it was just like a classic company structure in a way, within Automattic.\n\n\n\nNow it’s shifting to more of a matrix organisation where there’s one architecture team. They handle .com, they handle Jetpack, they handle a bunch of other products like WooCommerce within that. And the designers as a product are outside of that.\n\n\n\nAnd so what that means is we, as the product team, we have a shared roadmap where, if you ever use .com, a lot of what brings that special sauce to it, what makes it unique outside of the self installed WordPress is Jetpack. So for instance, forms is getting a massive upgrade. And the 15.2 that just came out, it has quite a big upgrade. 15.3, we’re going to have even more. So there’s a dedicated team right now that’s, some of the best engineers, I’ve been really blown away with the level of engineering at Automattic, are working on bringing forms up. And I’m leading that initiative, putting myself into that place where I can then shape forms in the future.\n\n\n\nBut that does mean that some other elements of Jetpack aren’t getting taken care of right now. AI’s going to become a big thing. We have to pick and choose based on our resources, what are the most important things for our shared initiative? But what that means is they work better together. I think you’re going to see in the future a lot more benefit of running WooCommerce and Jetpack together.\n\n\n\nNow, we’re not going to force you to log into wordpress.com to use WooCommerce, but to get some of that benefit, you will need to OAuth in to using Jetpack. And that is a requirement, because a lot of the Jetpack, what you get for free and the secret sauce is based on our cloud servers. You basically are starting to use our infrastructure for free. And Automattic is huge on privacy. And so I don’t quite understand that whole conflict of folks that don’t like that. There’s just some people out there that will never really like Automattic and they will not OAuth in or double sign in to use Jetpack, you know what I mean?\n\n\n\n[00:15:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of curious. So if I’m parsing it right, it sounds like what you were saying was that in a recent restructuring of Automattic and over the last 18 months or so, I think there’s been a lot of that. It sounds like Jetpack is more of an amorphous thing. It’s not like these particular people are dedicated to Jetpack Forms and these ones are for VaultPress or whatever it may be. It’s more liquid than that. We’re going to do a dedicated sprint on Forms, for example. It sounds like that’s getting an update. So probably has had people on the seats having a look at that.\n\n\n\nAnd then once that’s put away and tidied up, then move to something else. But also, I guess an interesting thing that you mentioned there is that because it’s in this wider organisation of which WooCommerce, it’s pretty big, that you can also communicate with those folks. So there may be some overlap between what Forms can do in Jetpack and something that you might wish to do with WooCommerce, those kind of things.\n\n\n\nSo have I got that right? It’s not like dedicated people doing dedicated products within Jetpack, it’s much more liquid and amorphous than that.\n\n\n\n[00:16:23] Devin Walker: Absolutely. Rather than having silos we have one large organisation that works better together. And our vision is really that all the WordPress products should be very similar to Apple and how when you’re using iOS or MacOS, there’s a lot of similar fields and they work well together and they tag team off of each other.\n\n\n\nAnd prior to this reorg, that wasn’t happening so much. And we experienced this at Stellar as well. They purchased a bunch of plugins, brought them all in, the vision was for them to all work well together. We went from functional organisation to this matrix type of organisation. And so this isn’t my first rodeo doing it, I know it can work. But it does take a concerted effort, and it’s still ongoing right now. It hasn’t been 18 months, it’s been like six months. And we’re still trying to figure things out. So me stepping in at this time, I’m really trying to figure it out.\n\n\n\nI have a blog post called, or a P2 post called Connecting the Dots, where I’m just trying to find which experts and which products on Jetpack they know better. I’ve been having so many one-on-ones just to try to get to know these folks, understand their history with Jetpack and put it in this kind of glossary of what I have here, and keep that updated as my time progresses here.\n\n\n\n[00:17:35] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of hard to get a grip on what Jetpack is. Because it’s trying to do all these different things, I think it is quite hard for people to understand what they’re installing. So they install Jetpack, okay, I’ve heard that Jetpack’s a thing, I’ll go and install it. There’s loads of free stuff available. And then all of a sudden there’s bits which do work, there are bits which you can extend and upgrade and, you know, you might have to log in with .com to make that bit combine with this bit.\n\n\n\nAnd then there are bits where, you know, it feels like the classic themes work well in some areas, and then if you’ve got a block-based theme, other things don’t work quite so well. I’m thinking like social sharing and things like that. And it’s bit of a, mess is the wrong word, but it’s incredibly confusing, I think, to a novice user. And so I’m, I’m going to put words into your mouth, I’m guessing this is one of the challenges that you are going to try and tackle to take that confusion away. Because, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter how many times I log into Jetpack, there’s always a bit of a surprise. Oh, okay, it works that way. That’s curious. I wasn’t expecting it to do that. And I’ve been doing this for absolutely ages, and I’m still surprised by the way things work.\n\n\n\n[00:18:33] Devin Walker: You’re not alone. So one of the things that Matt’s been saying since I’ve come on board is we don’t really need to build much more new things. We need to focus and improve what’s already there, especially in Jetpack and .com. And simplifying it and making it make more sense to the end users. And Jetpack is a prime candidate for a really fresh look at how that can happen.\n\n\n\nWe’ve been doing exercises as the product team for a framework called Jobs to Be Done. You put yourself in the shoes of that customer and you experience it through fresh eyes, based on what they are looking to get out of it.\n\n\n\nFor instance, the classic, I guess, analogy is, folks don’t, they don’t want a quarter inch drill bit, they want a quarter inch hole, and that’s just the tool they use to get that quarter inch.\n\n\n\nAnd it’s the same thing with Jetpack or any other software product, and it’s a reforming in thinking. It’s only my fifth week here, but it’s been really a refreshing way to think about how we build product, and how I can then work with the designers to then smooth out those wrinkles of which there are many.\n\n\n\n[00:19:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting that you say that, because pretty much everything that Jetpack has, well, there’s one notable exception, which is of course AI, which we’ll come to in a minute. But more or less everything that’s in Jetpack has been available in some form or other for a decade or more. You know, forms is, it’s not a new thing. There’s some interesting ideas that people have come up with that maybe we’d want to integrate, but backups, it’s not a new thing.\n\n\n\nSo the idea of not having new, well, features is probably the wrong word, but not having a new product and just finessing what you’ve already got, I think that would be music to any subscriber to Jetpack. One of the paid plans that you got, I think they would absolutely love that. Just finesse what you’ve already got. We’ve already got this thing, we know what we’ve got, we know how it works, but finesse it, give us a few more features here and there in the bit, like for example, forms or what have you. That seems like music to my ears.\n\n\n\nBut I’ve said it. The cat is out the bag in this episode now, AI. AI is smuggled into Jetpack in the most, it’s kind of hidden. It’s almost entirely hidden, and yet incredibly profound. I don’t know if, dear listener, you’ve experienced Jetpack and it’s AI features, but if you switch it on and you just go, I don’t know, make a blog post or something like that, when you go to publish, it will just helpfully write your excerpt and your featured image, it will create that for you on the fly. It all happens in the background. It’s really incredible. How did that get under the radar? And is that going to be a big feature?\n\n\n\n[00:21:02] Devin Walker: That is going to be a huge feature. I just came back from New York with our AI engineering team led by James LaPage, who’s one of the brightest, young stars, I want to say, in WordPress. And he’s one of the reasons that I’m so excited for what AI can become with Jetpack, and where it’s going to go from here. It’s really great that you are already like what’s there? But that’s just scratching the surface from what we’re going to be doing in the near future.\n\n\n\nWe’ve got quite a large team working on this. This is a 50 plus engineering team. It’s a huge focus of Automattic. And Jetpack’s the way we’re going to bring a lot of what we’re bringing to .com to self-hosted users. And it’s not going to cost you really much at all and it’s gonna be done in the WordPress way.\n\n\n\nRight now it tries to be your content companion, is kind of how I call it, but it’s going to do that a lot better, and it’s going to reach outside of the post editor and do a lot more helpful items for you in the WP admin. And not only in the WP admin, also provide some tools for you in the future for your visitors and how you can convert them, how you can get them to sign up on your newsletter, or you can get them to ask presales questions, or fill out forms or what have you. It’ll be very moldable and shapeable.\n\n\n\nSo I delightfully was at several demo presentations at this meetup where I was just blown away. Sat down with Matias, James, a lot of the key stakeholders and players here at .com on how and when we can start bringing this into Jetpack.\n\n\n\nAnd what’s there right now is good. It’s almost going to be entirely rewritten and thrown away for what the foundation now is going to become. And so that’s one of the more exciting, more immediate, roadmap items that I’ll be really working on the next 8 to 12 months. You’ll see a huge change.\n\n\n\n[00:22:54] Nathan Wrigley: I feel like at the moment the AI implementation in Jetpack is about content, the content that you’re creating right at this moment. We’re creating, I don’t know, SEO fields and we’re creating excerpts and things like that and featured images and what have you. But if you haven’t had a play, again, I’ll link this in the show notes, Automattic’s Telex, which is the capability to, you write a simple prompt and it will create a block for you. I feel that something like Jetpack with something like Telex, just hidden in the sidebar of a WordPress blog post would be really kind of interesting. You know, the idea that, I need a block for this.\n\n\n\n[00:23:26] Devin Walker: Are you reading my DMs? Because, exactly. You’ve already sort of got a crystal ball right there. And with Telex, that’s a huge opportunity for site building, for imagining anything that WordPress could be, and having it created there.\n\n\n\nRight now it’s great. It creates separate plugins, you can download and install them, you can’t sync them per site. It’s kind of annoying how there’s all these plugins there. There’s not much management updating over time. Jetpack can be that bridge for you, and that’s really an exciting future where it needs to go.\n\n\n\n[00:23:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because at the moment, if you are an inexperienced WordPress user, if you’re not technical, let’s put it that way, then you are constrained entirely by what’s there or what the developer has built for you or the range of plugins that you’ve installed. And I feel like in the near future, you reach that point of frustration and you suddenly realise that, oh, there is no block that does that thing. Well, why don’t I just make one?\n\n\n\nAnd you’ll write a small prompt, I don’t know, I need a real estate block, or I don’t know, I need a block because it’s coming up to Christmas. I need a block which is going to show snowflakes falling on this particular post. Please don’t do this by the way, but you get the point. I’m just going to go ahead and make it, and it’ll be this entirely disposable thing. And when I’m finished with it, I’ll probably just throw it in the trash or maybe keep it until next year.\n\n\n\nBut the point is, your WordPress becomes like this, how to describe it, it’s almost like the scaffolding for an infinite arrangement of possibilities. Whereas before, WordPress felt a bit like a box. If it wasn’t in the box, it couldn’t be done. But now the box got opened and there’s all this scaffolding everywhere and it can do a million more things. And as Matt Mullenweg said, you know, it’s becoming like the OS for the web or something like that.\n\n\n\nAnd the fact that AI is binding to the abilities inside of WordPress, so with the Abilities API and things like that, it knows everything that your WordPress website can do. You know, create users, create posts, delete posts, all of these kind of things. And Jetpack seems really aligned to doing that. I don’t know how it would fit into the bigger Jetpack picture, but, yeah, interesting.\n\n\n\n[00:25:27] Devin Walker: Yeah, well, I think AI can be the glue that binds a lot of these individual products together and really paint the picture on how they work well together, and work within your WordPress Core to make it the Jetpack that is supercharged, right? I mean the WordPress that has a Jetpack strapped to it.\n\n\n\nThere is a great number of, kind of mission statements and taglines over the years for Jetpack. None of which I think have been fully fulfilled. So I really want to revisit that, revise that, and you’ll see a lot of updates coming to the website soon, soon-ish. Telling and bringing people along this journey.\n\n\n\nIf you look at the website and a lot of the marketing right now, it’s kind of on idle. So that’s another big part of what I’m being focused on, and that will help change the perception in the community and outside of it, of what Jetpack is and what it can do for you is, pulling up the curtain, if you will, on all the cool stuff we’re doing here.\n\n\n\nYou could read P2s all day here and many of them are so impressive and I feel like a lot of them should be public. There’s so much good content here that is really impressive. For somebody like me who’s been in the community for 15 years, like, oh my gosh, we have the best engineers, the best designers, and it’s all in this P2. Like, let’s get some of this published.\n\n\n\n[00:26:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well, that’s curious. So I was reading your mind a minute ago, you’ve just read my mind, because the next little bit was going to be all about marketing. Because it doesn’t matter, with the best will in the world, the best product in the world will probably fail, if not marketed correctly.\n\n\n\nAnd it feels as if, when Jetpack began, because it was kind of the thing, a long, long time ago it was the thing, it had that success kind of built into it. You know, it was an Automattic thing, it was a WordPress thing, it became popular because it did so many things that nothing else could do.\n\n\n\nFast forward till today, it feels like the wheels have come off the marketing a little bit, or the train has completely pulled into the station and not moving at all. You know, I can’t remember the last time I saw something engaging, like a YouTube video or somebody experimenting on their YouTube channel with a Jetpack thing.\n\n\n\nWhereas with third party plugins, it’s happening all the time, you know? And so it feels like that’s going to be a very big part of where you are, you know, you’ll build hopefully some amazing things, but then trying to turn the tide and get people to be engaged and interested and see the utility of it. I’m guessing that’s going to be a part of the job which is separate to the technological part.\n\n\n\n[00:27:46] Devin Walker: It will, absolutely. I think for quite some time it was almost build it and they will come here. And for many, many years they did come. And now it’s harder because the marketplace has expanded quite a bit. There’s a lot of other folks out there doing really cool things with WordPress and have a lot more focused marketing efforts behind them.\n\n\n\nI mean, point and case was GiveWP, we were just, people weren’t turning to Woo or Gravity Forms because we made it that it was the number one solution you had to go do it. We just hammered that point through WordCamps, through videos, through podcasts, whatever it was, that was our mission.\n\n\n\nAnd for Jetpack, we really need to refocus on that and do that a lot more. It’s very engineering led organisation. I think marketing to some point is built into their roles and they’re not doing that part as much as I would like.\n\n\n\nAnd on another aspect, I think we definitely just need more marketers. I’m not going to say the exact numbers, but it was a surprisingly low number of marketers to the size of the organisation when I came in. I’m used to a much better ratio.\n\n\n\nSo I’m going to be hammering that point a little bit more home as I get through the door, but it’s something that I’ve mentioned a bit already in my 5 weeks here.\n\n\n\n[00:29:02] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t know what the install base is specifically. It’s a lot, right? Jetpack has a lot of installs and so presumably you’ve.\n\n\n\n[00:29:08] Devin Walker: The core is 4 million.\n\n\n\n[00:29:09] Nathan Wrigley: 4 million. Okay, so, wow, gosh. So presumably that means anything that you do do, you’ve really got to tread carefully. So for a start, you can’t break things. You can’t just ship a brand new UI in let’s say the forms aspect of it overnight. And I presume that’s kind of like a bit of a noose around your neck in that, you know, you want to move fast and break things in some respects, but with 4 million installs, which is really right at the very top in the WordPress ecosystem, that’s big, big numbers. You are going to constrained in what you can do and how fast you can move things and how quickly you can break things.\n\n\n\n[00:29:40] Devin Walker: Somewhat. Somewhat I agree with that. Right now we are on a monthly release cycle and there’s definitely a lot of caution around that. And Jetpack touches a lot of .com too, so there’s that extra added user base, which is humongous. So there is that bit of treading carefully.\n\n\n\nBut I want to balance that with being aggressive. We just shipped, prior to me coming on board, a new onboarding for getting connected. It’s just through the connection segment, getting connected to .com, and that really had positive results and saw an uptick in connected successful sites. I think we can take that to the next level and explain what Jetpack is, what they need it for, and really optimise it for the best use case based on what that particular site wants or needs.\n\n\n\nGoing beyond onboarding is then getting into the product UI itself, making the navigation much more clear and understandable.\n\n\n\nYou know, there’s three different areas in Jetpack right now where you can toggle on and off different modules or products.\n\n\n\n[00:30:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I’ve discovered many them.\n\n\n\n[00:30:41] Devin Walker: Yeah. So I think we need to consolidate that at least. And there’s more Easter eggs. I don’t even want to call them Easter, I don’t know what you’d call that, but interesting quirks that we can clean up.\n\n\n\nAnd for the most part I think we do have to be a bit careful because it’s such a massive user base. Breaking things, just look at some of the Jetpack reviews. Breaking them and lack of support. Those are the two main cause of one star reviews. And with that many, I really want to get that review base above 4.0 stars. But with 3000 or whatever reviews it is, it takes a long shift to get that. And we’re not going to do that by continually breaking things, so it’s a balance.\n\n\n\n[00:31:19] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting that me, a relatively inexperienced user of Jetpack, I was able to discover many of the quirks that you’ve just mentioned almost immediately. You know, just being curious. And I’m the kind of person that when I download anything, I go and look at every single menu item and kind of think, well, what does that do? How would that work? It really didn’t take me long to discover, well, hang on, that is somewhere else. If I engage that, does that mean it conflicts with this thing over here?\n\n\n\nAnd I saw this over and over again. And so I think that, as you imagine, would be some of the very, very brilliant low hanging fruit. To just have a UI which does, you know, there’s one place for one thing, it works as expected that you don’t, I’m sure you know where I’m going with this, basically, just simplify things, make it elegant in the same way that we’ve seen with so many third party plugins.\n\n\n\nBecause at the moment it kind of feels like a whole range of different things that have been slammed together and forcefully told to get along with each other, as opposed to like a happy family that, just everything works and everybody’s happy and there’s bliss and rainbows everywhere. It feels a little bit like that, if you know what I mean?\n\n\n\n[00:32:21] Devin Walker: Oh, I completely agree. I think we used in the pre-show and it’s a bit of a Frankenstein. We need to change it from that. If I had a nickel for every toggle in Jetpack, I don’t know if I’d need to work anymore. There are quite a few toggle on, toggle offs in just a row. You can imagine how this interface could be much more elegantly put together.\n\n\n\nAnd we’re going to use user feedback for a lot of this and ask, hey, what do you guys think of this? Because we can’t do it successfully in a bubble.\n\n\n\n[00:32:52] Nathan Wrigley: Well, and the other thing is, given the perfect UI, it does so much stuff. If you just had Jetpack, if you had a vanilla version of WordPress and you installed Jetpack and everything was easy to navigate and worked as expected first time and maybe there was no dependency on having a .com account or what have you. It does all the things. It would take you from like zero success to broadly speaking, okay, you’ve got a credible website. Maybe there’s going to be some interesting cases where you want a little bit more SEO finesse or something like that.\n\n\n\nIt would get you to the races, you know, it would get you to put your horse in the race and have a good go. And there’s not much like that out there. There really is nothing that I can think of in the WordPress space. But it’s a leviathan and it’s got many heads. We need it just to have the one head, I think.\n\n\n\n[00:33:35] Devin Walker: Very much so, and that’s the challenge that I’m in here to work with this entire team and put a lot of thought behind it.\n\n\n\n[00:33:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it’s all on you. So if Jetpack is a success in two years time, we know who to thank for that. And it does genuinely seem, for somebody with your obvious interest and capabilities, it does seem really, really enjoyable. I’m sure it’ll keep you awake, but an enjoyable challenge. Something that you get your teeth into. Something where the success can be measured fairly quickly. You know, does the discontent diminish? Does the UI improve? Tick, tick, tick. We did a good job.\n\n\n\nAnd also, there’s loads of room for improvement. So you’ve entered on a, you’ve definitely got yourself into a position where you’ve taken on a project where the improvements are evident everywhere. I hope that you managed to grab hold of them and wrestle this to the ground.\n\n\n\n[00:34:21] Devin Walker: Well, I really appreciate that, Nathan, and why don’t we have a check in in 12 months and see where we’re at on this journey. I think that would be a good way to keep us honest, follow along in this journey along the way, we’ll see how far we’ve gotten.\n\n\n\n[00:34:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, well, for now then, go and install Jetpack. If you’re listening to this, we’ll be back in 12 months time, so go and have a play with Jetpack as it is now and see.\n\n\n\nIt sounds to me that Devin is like all ears. If you’ve got some quirks and you found something that’s curious or unexpected or dissatisfying or just downright annoying, where do we get in touch with you? Oh, also, I suspect Devin’s more than happy to receive positive commentary as well.\n\n\n\n[00:35:01] Devin Walker: Yeah, I mean the positive stuff’s great too. Right now feedback@jetpack.com is a good place, but we’re going to make this a lot more public in the near future. You can also just tweet at me @innerwebs, I-N-N-E-R-W-E-B-S, or go to my website devin.org. But jetpack.com, jetpack.com/feedback is also a great place. So that’s a bit about me and where you can find the Jetpack information.\n\n\n\n[00:35:27] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. So definitely a challenge out in the public for Devin to get his teeth into WordPress’ Jetpack, and see if he can figure it out and make it better. Let’s check back in 12 months time and see how we’re going. Devin Walker, thanks for chatting to me today.\n\n\n\n[00:35:38] Devin Walker: Thank you.\n\n\n\n\nOn the podcast today we have Devin Walker.\n\n\n\nDevin\u2019s journey in the WordPress ecosystem spans many years, with experience in development, design, marketing, and customer support. He\u2019s best known as the co-founder of GiveWP, which he built and scaled before it was acquired. During his time there, he touched a variety of prominent WordPress brands including iThemes, Kadence, LearnDash, and The Events Calendar.\n\n\n\nToday, Devin is starting a new role leading the Jetpack suite of services at Automattic. It\u2019s a position with hefty responsibilities as Jetpack powers millions of WordPress sites, and integrates deeply across Automattic\u2019s product portfolio.\n\n\n\nI talk with Devin about why he took on this challenge, the divisiveness and complexity surrounding Jetpack, and his vision for refocusing the plugin and simplifying its user experience.\n\n\n\nWe start by hearing about Devin\u2019s extensive WordPress background and the choices he weighed up when deciding to join Automattic. The conversation quickly moves to the scope of Jetpack, its evolution, the struggle to be a \u201cjack of all trades, master of none\u201d, and the recent efforts to bring greater focus and polish to key features like forms and SEO.\n\n\n\nDevin gets into the organisational changes at Automattic, how Jetpack\u2019s development teams now collaborate more fluidly with other product teams (such as WooCommerce), and the balancing act of shipping improvements to a 4 million strong user base without breaking things.\n\n\n\nAI emerges as a massive new frontier, and Devin shares behind-the-scenes insights into Jetpack\u2019s current and future AI capabilities, giving us a glimpse at content creation, block-building, and how AI might reshape user and developer expectations in WordPress.\n\n\n\nThroughout, we hear about Devin\u2019s approach to product marketing (and the need for more of it), the importance of listening to user feedback, and his plans for a more coherent and compelling Jetpack experience.\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re a WordPress user wondering where Jetpack is headed, what\u2019s working, or how AI fits into the future of site building, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\nJetpack\n\n\n\nJetpack feedback form\n\n\n\nGiveWP\n\n\n\n\u200aWP Rollback\n\n\n\nAutomattic AI team announcement post\n\n\n\nTelex\n\n\n\nDevin’s website", "date_published": "2025-11-19T10:00:00-05:00", "date_modified": "2025-11-19T07:42:40-05:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/194-Devin-Walker-on-Leading-Jetpack-Challenges-Vision-and-the-Future.jpg", "tags": [ "jetpack", "podcast" ], "summary": "In this episode, Nathan Wrigley talks with Devin Walker, the new Artistic Director (Head) of Jetpack at Automattic. Devin shares his background in WordPress, the challenges and opportunities of leading Jetpack, and his plans to bring focus, simplify the experience, and improve both functionality and marketing. They discuss Jetpack\u2019s strengths, weaknesses, upcoming AI features, organisational changes at Automattic, and the importance of listening to user feedback to enhance Jetpack over the next year. If you\u2019re a WordPress user wondering where Jetpack is headed, what\u2019s working, or how AI fits into the future of site building, this episode is for you.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2232432/c1e-vzdjdu74206udrod9-v6p35zdmar69-rtyonu.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=200658", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/193-roger-williams-on-how-we-might-reimagine-sponsoring-wordpress-contributions", "title": "#193 \u2013 Roger Williams on How We Might Reimagine Sponsoring WordPress Contributions", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how we might reimagine sponsoring WordPress contributions.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wp tavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Roger Williams. Roger leads community and partner engagement at Kinsta, a company specializing in offering managed hosting for WordPress. His role involves bridging the gap between Kinsta and the wider WordPress community, working closely with agency partners, technology collaborators, and open source initiatives.
\n\n\n\nThroughout his career, Roger has been deeply involved in community efforts and has recently played a key part in Kinsta’s implementation of a sponsored contributions program, helping to funnel time and resources back into WordPress and other open source projects.
\n\n\n\nMany longstanding members of the WordPress community have contributed out of passion and a spirit of philanthropy, but as the project has grown to power over 40% of the web, the need for sustainable funding and sponsorship has become more pronounced.
\n\n\n\nRoger joins us today to explore this shift. He shares insights from his WordCamp US presentation titled Figuring Out Sponsored Contribution. Discussing how companies can start funding contributors, why that matters, and how to balance the business need for a return on investment with the grassroots spirit of open source.
\n\n\n\nWe begin with Roger’s background, his work at Kinsta, and how he became involved in WordPress community sponsorship.
\n\n\n\nThe conversation then gets into the ever evolving dynamics of sponsored contributions. How businesses can approach funding contributors. Ways to surface and support valuable work, and strategies for aligning company goals with broader project needs.
\n\n\n\nRoger breaks down the practical arguments companies can use to get internal buy-in, and the importance of clear processes for both organizations looking to sponsor, and individuals seeking support.
\n\n\n\nTowards the end, Roger reflects on the challenges and opportunities of connecting those both from the philanthropic and commercial sides of WordPress, and he shares advice for anyone hoping to get their organization involved in similar programs.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in how WordPress sponsorships work, how business and community might collaborate, or you’re seeking practical advice as a contributor or company, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to find out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Roger Williams.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Roger Williams. Hello, Roger.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:46] Roger Williams: Hey Nathan, how are you?
\n\n\n\n[00:03:47] Nathan Wrigley: I’m very good. We could pretend that we’re recording this at WordCamp US because that was the plan, but it never happened for one reason or another. So we took it offline. And several weeks ago, WordCamp US finished, but the intention was very much to talk about what you were presenting at WordCamp US. So we’ll get into that in a moment.
\n\n\n\nBefore we do that though, Roger, would you mind just telling us a little bit about who you are, who you work for, what your role involves, all to do with WordPress, I guess.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:14] Roger Williams: Yeah, no, absolutely. So my name’s Roger Williams. I work at Kinsta, managed hosting provider for WordPress. Currently my position is partnership and community manager for North America. Very long title. What does that mean? My job is to interface with the public, with the WordPress community, with our agency partners and various technology partners, and just make sure that we’re all on the same page, and that whatever’s going on outside of Kinsta is getting communicated inside of Kinsta, and whatever’s happening inside of Kinsta is getting communicated outside. So I’m basically boiling the ocean. So a very easy thing. No problem at all.
\n\n\n\nTruth be said, it’s one of the, this is like the highlight of my career, I have to say. I get to travel, I get to meet a lot of neat and interesting people, I get to make amazing friends, and I get to talk about technology, the web, WordPress and Kinsta hosting, which are all things that I’m very passionate about and enjoy talking about this ad nauseam. You can ask my wife, that I am probably too much, need to turn it off a little bit.
\n\n\n\nBut specifically talking about community and WordPress, gosh, it was January of this year, 2025, that we implemented our sponsored contributions program, and I played a role in that. I played a role in getting the conversation happening around that inside of Kinsta. And then once we got budget approval, actually figuring out, hey, who do we want to sponsor? What projects outside of WordPress? Because we also sponsor various open source projects that affect us directly and indirectly.
\n\n\n\nAnd so that has been a whole new aspect of my career that has really opened up new doors and opportunities and discussions and friendships that I’m still feeling like a bit of an interlocutor. I’m an outsider trying to understand how to best do this, and play a part in helping the projects that we all depend on to do all of our work.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:17] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Thank you. Yeah, there’s a lot in there to unpack, isn’t there? It sounds like a full and varied role, but also you kind of sound a little bit like you’re figuring this out over the course of 2025 and into 2026 and who you are sponsoring and what have you. And that was very much the tenor of the talk.
\n\n\n\nSo the title was very simple. The presentation that you gave was simply called figuring out sponsored contribution. But I’ll just read into the record the blurb, not all of it, but much of it because it will give everybody who’s listening an idea of where you were going with that. So it says, open source software runs on passion, but passion doesn’t pay the bills. WordPress powers over 40% of the web, yet many people maintaining it aren’t funded. That’s starting to change and your company can be part of it. In this talk, we’ll explore how sponsored contribution works, why it matters, and how companies big and small can participate. We’ll walk through my experience, AKA your experience, working with companies to sponsor contributors from promoting the idea internally, identifying key areas of the WordPress project to support, finding and interviewing contributors, and building an internal framework for long-term sponsorship. And there’s a little bit more, but that basically sums it up.
\n\n\n\nSo basically, I guess my first question is, what exactly are you trying to do here? Are you kind of regarding this as a sort of philanthropic thing? What I’m really kind of asking is, do you kind of expect things in return? So if Kinsta, for example, sponsor somebody, do you have like a tick list of things that we need to see that you’ve done? Or is it more, you are a trusted person, we’ve seen you interacting in the WordPress space for many years, here’s a bunch of cash, go off and just do whatever you like?
\n\n\n\n[00:07:53] Roger Williams: Yeah, excellent question. And thanks for reading that blurb. I don’t think I’ve read that blurb in quite a few months and it sounds really good.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:59] Nathan Wrigley: It was a great talk.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:00] Roger Williams: Somebody really put something together here. Really interesting question and I think this kind of gets to the core of what I was trying to talk about in this talk, in the exploration that I’m trying to figure out in my own head, figure out inside of Kinsta, and possibly figure out in the larger community.
\n\n\n\nThere’s a lot of humility involved in this Nathan, I hope you can appreciate. I feel a lot of the times very, the imposter syndrome, right? Wow, I’m coming into a project that’s over 22 years old. Many, many thousands of people have been involved. Many, many companies have been involved in this. Here’s this new guy, you know, I mean I’ve been around for a little while, but relatively new guy on the scene just coming in trying to tell people how all this is done. And I really hope that it doesn’t come across that way. I’m really trying to explore this topic and understand it better for a few reasons.
\n\n\n\nThe first one is the most immediate. How can I get Kinsta involved in contributing and sponsoring WordPress and other open source projects? And so there’s a combination of things happening there, right? And you brought it up in terms of, are there tangible things that we’re looking for here? Or is this simply just philanthropic, hey, we’re giving money away and everything will work out?
\n\n\n\nAnd I think that there’s a spectrum. And we’re playing on the spectrum with it. Traditionally, and this is something that I talk about a lot in the talk is, traditionally in open source the argument has been that I’ve seen, hey, you’re using this software, you should give back to the software and to the project.
\n\n\n\nBut then you have on the other side the business that is very much, hey, we need to generate revenue from our activities so that we can remain a business.
\n\n\n\nAnd so they’re a little bit at odds in some ways, right? But it doesn’t have to be that way. And I think that’s what I’m exploring in this talk, and I’m exploring in this conversation, and as many conversations as I can have with people is, how do we play on that spectrum of finding a happy medium where for a company, a lot of times you go to the executives and you’re like, hey, we need to be giving back to this thing that we get for free? And you get a very perplexed look. And so I think we need to adjust that conversation.
\n\n\n\nI think that the people that are inside of the project, it’s very obvious. Hey, we put a ton of time and effort into making this happen. Whether you give back in terms of time and actually help us work on the project, or give us money so we can sponsor people and pay for hosting costs and different things involved in it, to make the project happen. I think it’s very obvious for people inside of the project how that works.
\n\n\n\nIt’s less obvious, and I kind of see there’s three groups in all, right? You have the people inside of the project, very obvious. There’s very little argument needs to be made.
\n\n\n\nYou have the second group, which is somewhere like, a Kinsta will fall into, or someone like myself, who I’ve used open source software for many years, but I don’t necessarily see exactly how to contribute back, or the immediate benefits, or the need, right? Hey, this thing’s already here. I can go to the website, click download, and I’ve got it. There’s that group that kind of see it but they need a little nudging.
\n\n\n\nAnd then there’s the general public or people that just don’t really interface with open source software directly and just have no idea. They’re just like, whoa, what is going on over there? People are just working on stuff for free and giving it away for free. That’s crazy. And so there’s another conversation that needs to happen there.
\n\n\n\nI think with this specific talk, the group I’m trying to get to is that second group. The people that are just right there, it’s just in a little bit of nudging of like, hey, you’re really close to understanding the benefits of sponsoring and contributing back to the project. What are we missing in the conversation to really get them to understand it? So the answer I’m proposing is we need to talk more about return on investment and ROI, and how do we frame that?
\n\n\n\nSo really long-winded answer here, but I think that there’s a mixture of what are the things we’re trying to achieve by giving back? How can we bring that back in a business sense to show executives, hey, look, the money that we’re putting out here is benefiting us in certain ways?
\n\n\n\nBut then also being like, hey, there’s also just kind of this nebulous aspect to it of, if you help contribute to it, it will give you some benefit. So how do we balance and how do we find the spectrum here to land on? I hope that that made some sort of sense.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it does. And it’s interesting because where you got to about a third of the way through the answer, I think you said the word tension or conflict or something like that. But I think that’s a really interesting part, because if we were to rewind the clock to, let’s say 19 years ago when WordPress was still relatively new. I wasn’t around in the WordPress space, but I was involved in other open source projects at the same time. And philanthropy was the word.
\n\n\n\nThere were just people donating loads of time because it was more or less this hobby thing. And then in some cases the hobby thing collapsed and nobody ever heard of it again. And in the case of some software projects, WordPress most notably, it took off. It just absolutely skyrocketed and became the underpinning of, as you say in the presentation notes that you made, kind of 40% of the web. It became this critical piece of the puzzle.
\n\n\n\nAnd so during the last 18, 20, 22 years, whatever it may be, the project has evolved. It’s become critical. Like it or dislike it, companies both big and small are now relying upon it. They require it as part of their business, Kinsta being one of those companies. And so this tension exists. How do the companies do their bit and how do the individuals do their bit?
\n\n\n\nAnd the tension that I feel is, on the one hand, the people who’ve got that heritage of the more philanthropic side sort of saying, can’t we just go back to how it was? Can we never talk about finance? Can we not think about money at all?
\n\n\n\nAnd then on the other hand, you’ve got places like where you work, who are, with the best will in the world, it’s about making some revenue, and making money, and paying the bills and all of that. You’ve got to figure out, how the heck do you make contributions? How do you justify that to your bosses? How do they communicate what they’ve done effectively?
\n\n\n\nAnd presumably part of your talk as well is about finding people that you would like to just give some money to as a helping hand to say, okay, off you go. You’re not a part of the Kinsta organisation, but we would like to help you. And in return, presumably there’s a bit of mutual back rubbing. We’ll pat your back, you pat ours, and so on and so forth. So hopefully I’ve parsed that about right?
\n\n\n\n[00:14:39] Roger Williams: Yeah, no, I think you’re laying it out very much as I’m going through in the talk is, we need to talk business. And I know that for a lot of people inside of open source, this can be cringey and not pleasant and not what we want to do. And my argument is we have to get over that phase. We have to learn to start talking business and thinking business, thinking about return on investment.
\n\n\n\nAnd so to me it’s becoming practical, right? We have this optimistic idea of like, well, people will just come to their senses and realise that if they sponsor and contribute to the project, it’s going to help them. And we need to be much more strategic and more practical about it. And I break it down into three reasons to start kind of looking at when you’re talking to executives, you’re talking to businesses. And so there’s strategic, operational and second order benefits.
\n\n\n\nSo when I’m talking about strategic benefits, I mean this is where it’s just obvious, right? For a hosting company that does WordPress, it just makes sense. Like, if WordPress isn’t working well, then we’re going to have trouble with our product. So strategically, it makes sense if WordPress works well, if it’s performing, if it’s secure, this is going to lower our cost as a hosting company. So those are arguments to be putting forward there.
\n\n\n\nFrom an operational perspective, you can start talking about technical debt, right? And this is where the CTO’s eyes should light up, because technical debt is a real problem for any company that builds software. As you’re building software, you now have to maintain that software. Well, if you’re able to offload part of that software into the open source project, it now becomes something that the open source project maintains. It’s the technical debt of the project.
\n\n\n\nThat now creates a vicious cycle, or not even vicious, but just a cycle of, you now need to contribute to the project to help maintain that technical debt. But you’re now, as an organisation, offloading that to a larger organisation and having more people being able to help maintain that software. So I think from an operational perspective, those are arguments that you can hit people with.
\n\n\n\nAnd then finally, the second order benefits, and this is really where it kind of encompasses the arguments that have been traditionally the philanthropic argument, the just maker taker argument and stuff like that. With second order benefits, you start seeing these additional benefits that maybe you can’t exactly measure.
\n\n\n\nThis is where networking is happening. People are meeting and talking to each other. Maybe your developers are talking to their developers, or in the case of sponsoring contributors, those contributors can come into your organisation and help the organisation maybe understand how to use WordPress better and these different benefits.
\n\n\n\nAnd so breaking it down into these practical arguments, these practical reasons for contributing can really help people who are not necessarily as well versed with open source or don’t directly see the benefits, see that a little bit better.
\n\n\n\nAnd then getting into what you’re also talking about, finding contributors who, maybe they align with your values, making sure that they’re working on the stuff that you need them to be working on. The parts of the project that could use attention as far as your organisation is seeing.
\n\n\n\nAnd then also, you know, one of the big things I look for is contributors who are mentors and are helping other contributors get into the project and help to grow the project’s contributions overall.
\n\n\n\nThere’s direct, tangible things. Hey, there’s this ticket, could you go work on this ticket? I’ll be honest, I’m not that in depth yet. I’ve had contributors be like, hey, usually organisations are that pointed. And I’m like, okay, well there’s a goal for me to achieve at some point.
\n\n\n\nBut for me it’s more like, hey, are you doing good work? What are other people saying about you in the project? And then, are you mentoring people and helping other people do their first bug squash, and do their first push and commit and things like that? And I’m butchering the language of course here but, you know, I hope that that kind of helps answer some of those questions.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting because I fear that there’s a possibility that the community kind of bifurcates along these lines at the moment. So you get the people, and I was using the word philanthropic, so the people that have been contributing their time for gratis, just because they saw that as a useful thing to do for humanity, let’s put it that way.
\n\n\n\nSo there’s that on the one hand. And then on the other hand, you’ve got people such as yourself who are talking about the necessary things in order for your job and your institution to function, the money. And I suppose I’m kind of worried that we will have these two sides that kind of can’t figure out a way to communicate with each other, that can’t see across the chasm that has been created. And so figuring out ways to make those work to sort of have a happy balance so that the two sides can communicate, that they can be back in touch with each other.
\n\n\n\nSo that’s kind of a concern that I have, this sort of two tier system. The fear more broadly is that, if the money side of things becomes more prevalent, and people find that intolerable, that ultimately will push people away who have been philanthropic and amazing in the use of their time and pushing the project forward. They’ll see this as something that they can’t cope with in the future, and they’ll wish to step away, not contribute to it. That would be a shame.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:52] Roger Williams: So I can absolutely empathise and understand the argument that you’re putting forth there. I think the way I would counter that is to say, hey, currently if we’re only going to talk in a philanthropic sense, are we just going to exclude everybody from what you’re talking about, the second tier, right? The more money focused. So we’re just not even having a conversation in that case.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:15] Nathan Wrigley: Right. That’s the concern, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:17] Roger Williams: So what I’m trying to argue is, hey, by bringing in more people into the project and maybe starting to talk in these practical ROI business terms, were now at least having a conversation that before wasn’t even happening. Because just to kind of back up a second, the way I’m looking at it is, if the only argument is, hey, this is philanthropic, you’re doing it for the good of the project, kumbaya, then we’re just going to exclude a lot of the business community who’s going to go, well, yeah, I volunteer time on the weekend at my church, or do different things, but I need to do business during the week so I can buy groceries and pay the rent.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I think what I’m trying to suggest is, hey, if we expand the conversation beyond just philanthropic, beyond just the second order benefits, and we talk about operational and strategic benefits in addition, we’re now adding more people to the conversation that weren’t in the conversation before.
\n\n\n\nAnd eventually we’re bringing them into the second order conversation, but we have to start by bringing them in with the strategic and the operational, because that’s where their mindset is in the nine to five. And so to me, I think this is the opportunity to actually expand the pie and expand the amount of people in the project and talking about the project.
\n\n\n\nThe concern I see that is a fair argument and concern is, are we going to turn open source projects into just commercial enterprises? That is definitely a concern. I don’t see that happening because you still have the core people in the project. They’re doing it because they believe in what the project is and they have passion for it. And if they are able to expand and have these conversations, these larger conversations, or additional conversations, about strategic and operational benefits, we’re going to bring more people in and hopefully help to influence those people to see the second order benefits, and hopefully eventually it’s all just philanthropic, right?
\n\n\n\nBut I think right now, the argument that has been put forth by different people in open source and in the WordPress community, is that we don’t have enough people contributing. We don’t have enough sponsorship money coming in, and so we need to figure out how to bridge that gap. And my suggestion is the way to do that is to expand the conversation beyond just the philanthropic, beyond just the second order, and talking about strategic and operational in addition to those.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:40] Nathan Wrigley: I have so many thoughts about this. So the first thing that comes into my head is trying to bridge a gap between the people out there at the moment who have been contributing. But you go around on Twitter, X, I guess, and you see people, don’t you? You see it all the time. They even sometimes change their Twitter handle to, you know, seeking sponsorship or something like that.
\n\n\n\nBut periodically you’ll see somebody who you know has been in the WordPress space for many years and, I don’t know, maybe they have been contributing in some way, shape, or form, but it’s pretty clear that they would like to be sponsored for this particular rabbit hole that they’ve gone down. And so building a bridge to them is something I think really useful about what you’re saying.
\n\n\n\nBecause maybe there is no way of these two sides talking to each other. Maybe there is no kind of like a la carte menu, if you like. If you are one of these philanthropic contributors, and you’ve never sought sponsorship before, but you’d like the idea of, well, wouldn’t it be nice if, for these two days a week that I typically contribute my time, wouldn’t it be nice to get some finance? I’ll do the exact same thing, but I’ll actually receive some money for that.
\n\n\n\nBut I don’t have the time to go out to a hundred different companies with my, I’m going to use the word begging bowl. That is probably the wrong term, but you get the point. To these a hundred different companies saying, look, I’ve been doing this for ages. Can you help me out?
\n\n\n\nThat kind of feels, there’s something quite icky about that, isn’t there? I think we can all identify that going out and sort of saying to companies repeatedly, please can I have some money? And then getting the inevitable 99% pushback. No, we haven’t got any money for you.
\n\n\n\nBut I think what you are saying is you are going to build a system where that kind of stuff will be more obvious. Where you’ll say, these are the kind of things that we’re looking for. Here’s the application form if you want to sponsor. This is the kind of process that we’re going to go through. These are the interview questions that we’re typically going to answer. This is the pot of money that we’ve got available. This is how many people we want, and so on and so forth.
\n\n\n\nSo it’s kind of bridging the gap, so that the people who have been contributing, who are maybe nervous or don’t see a way forward, can suddenly step into something more obvious, more a la carte, more straightforward and easy to kind of cherry pick.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:46] Roger Williams: Yeah. I think that, you know, this is getting to the heart of it, right? How do you individually sponsor people? How do individuals find sponsorship? And how do we make this all work? And backing up just for a second , there’s two ways to look at contributing to open source projects.
\n\n\n\nWe’re talking a lot about sponsoring individual contributors, which I would argue is the best way for an organisation to get started, because it’s the easiest way in some sense, right? There’s an established person who’s working in the project. You are giving them cash to do that work.
\n\n\n\nThe other way to contribute to the project is to actually spend time working on the project, right? So maybe you’ve got engineers inside of the company and you’re like, okay, 10% of your time is, or 5% of your time you’re going to actually work on this project. That’s a much bigger ask, right? Because usually when you hire an employee, you have a very specific set of tasks that you need to work on them for the company.
\n\n\n\nAnd so asking the manager to figure out, hey, how can this person give 5% of their time to something that’s outside of the company? That’s a bigger ask. So I think, for companies and organizations that are starting to dip their toe into contributing to open source, sponsored contributions is a great place to start.
\n\n\n\nSo that was a long way to get around to the question that you’re posing here, is how do you actually do that? There’s a chicken and the egg kind of situation that you’re bringing up, right? At what point does an individual contributor know that, hey, Kinsta is a company to reach out to, and ask for sponsored contribution. And then on the flip side, how does Kinsta know who to reach out to to sponsor?
\n\n\n\nAnd so my suggestion is to create a couple of different systems. So first, from the organisational perspective, really understanding, what are the priorities for the organisation? What would benefit them the most by sponsoring individual contributors?
\n\n\n\nMy argument is it’s a pretty wide swath. A lot of people get focused on core contributors and, actually working on tickets and things like that. I think it’s a much broader effect. I think sponsoring people that are on the Polyglots team, Kinsta, over half of our customers don’t speak English. So having WordPress in non-English versions is huge for us. So sponsoring the Polyglots team.
\n\n\n\nThe documentation team is huge, right? People need to be able to use WordPress . So are they going to contact Kinsta support for how to use WordPress, or can they just go to the WordPress site and look at documentation?
\n\n\n\nSo as an organization, you can get really strategic on this, but my argument would be, don’t overthink it at the beginning. Just get started. And I think that’s how I kind of end my talk is, my biggest piece of advice is don’t wait. Just get started. Set aside some budget that you’re comfortable with, that your executives are comfortable with, and then go and find some contributors.
\n\n\n\nAnd then have kind of a process, right? Have an intake form. You mentioned having an intake form. Have an intake form. Ask them questions about, what do they currently work on? What have they worked on in the past? What are their hopes and goals and aspirations on the project?
\n\n\n\nAnd then, you know, some very practical questions. Hey, would you be open to doing a blog post about your work and how Kinsta has helped with this? Very low level asks, right? We’re not trying to ask people to get a tattoo of the logo on their forehead or something insane. It’s very low effort, and my argument to companies is be very cautious. Step lightly into the marketing aspect of all of this. That should not be your primary focus.
\n\n\n\nThe primary focus is contributing to the open source project, not getting all this marketing benefit out of it. And so, you know, make sure to frame it that way.
\n\n\n\nFrom the individual contributors thing, one thing I do point out is, up until recently, I’ve never actually been formally approached by somebody asking for sponsorship to contribute. You kind of talked about, hey, if someone needed to spend a time reaching out to a hundred different companies, you don’t need to go that crazy. Just reach out to like the major hosting companies to start.
\n\n\n\nBut my argument is you need to do more than just say, hey, I work on WordPress, you need to sponsor me. You need to put together a little bit more of a pitch of, hey, I work on X, it accomplishes Y. I see this benefiting your organisation in these specific ways. And if you’re approaching it that way, that’s going to catch someone’s attention much better.
\n\n\n\nYou know, and then just ask also just simple questions. Hey, do you have a formal sponsorship contribution project for WordPress? And if they say no, maybe, hey, would you like me to help you set that up? If they say yes, then it’s, hey, what’s the process for getting involved in that?
\n\n\n\nThese are just very simple questions. It’s just a conversation, right? I say this, I’ve been in sales for decades now. It’s second nature to me. I understand that for a lot of people, this isn’t second nature for them. And that’s also what I’m trying to help with in this conversation is, it’s not just the organisations I’m trying to educate, but it’s also the contributors and the people that are in the project. Helping them to understand how to speak business a little bit more, so that they can get the businesses to really understand the benefits of this.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:58] Nathan Wrigley: There was a few things that you said a few moments ago where the implication was basically just get started. So put aside some cash, decide that you’re going to do it, so this is from the business side, and then just begin and see what happens. I don’t suppose you’re going to be able to simulate the perfect system first time around. It’ll be an iterative process, but just commit to it.
\n\n\n\nBut the ROI thing was also kind of interesting because you know, if you are senior management in Kinsta or whichever hosting company you want to imagine, there’s got to be I suppose some aspect of that in the back of your mind. Okay, we’re going to give away, I don’t know, a hundred thousand dollars this year, but we’re not going to ask anybody at all, at any point to sort of mention our company name. That’s probably unrealistic, but I like what you said there about the gentle approach to it, the write a blog post about it.
\n\n\n\nBut there’s something to be explored there because there’s got to be a way of surfacing good work. So it doesn’t have to necessarily be a big clarion call. Look, I did this because Kinsta paid for it. More tangentially, I did this great work and I did this, and WordPress benefited as a result of this, and I would just like to thank Kinsta for making that possible.
\n\n\n\nI guess we’ve just got to figure out what that piece looks like because, you know, you can’t give away money for free. There does need to be some ROI, but we have to figure out how gentle that approach is, and how gung ho it can be or not. That’s going to be interesting to figure out.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:22] Roger Williams: Just to kind of elaborate on that for a second. So the way I would say to companies to approach looking at this is, this is branding, right? And so when you’re doing brand marketing, it’s very nebulous, right? You’re kind of putting stuff out there and there’s a little bit of goodwill to it, I guess, you know, the philanthropy part plays into it a little bit. This definitely, I would say, falls under your branding budget. And so you should treat it as such.
\n\n\n\nI think that there’s a few different ways that the marketing, and I’m using air quotes around marketing here, because I understand that for people in open source this can be a little bit of kryptonite, a little bit repellent to talk about it this way. So I’m trying to be cautious or gentle here.
\n\n\n\nBut I think the marketing benefits are, there’s a ton of indirect benefits, right? So if I’m sponsoring a contributor, and they’re working on the project, it means they’re interacting with other contributors of the project. They’re going to mention, oh, hey, by the way, Kinsta is sponsoring me, in conversation.
\n\n\n\nAnd now you’ve got that one-on-one marketing, as it were, happening where that’s getting put into the project and that gets noticed. And I think that’s my big urge to companies who really want to step on the pedal of ROI. Like, hey, we need to really maximise the ROI here. Is it’s like, hey, the community notices as soon as you do something, good, bad, or indifferent. But as soon as you start sponsoring people, it gets noticed inside of the community right away, whether you immediately see it or not.
\n\n\n\nSo allow that to happen, for sure. I think from like the blog posts and things like that, there’s two ways I approach it. I love it if a sponsored contributor writes a blog post on their blog and mentions Kinsta. That’s amazing. I’m not expecting that. So instead what I’ll do is I’ll invite them onto the Kinsta Talks podcast and, hey, let’s spend 20 minutes and just talk about what you’re doing on the project.
\n\n\n\nI mentioned Kinsta at the beginning of it, in the fact that that’s where I work. Other than that, I don’t talk about Kinsta at all. It’s all about this individual and what they’re doing on the project, what they’re excited about, how they would suggest people get involved in the project. And so using that as a promotion, and again, the indirect branding benefits. My fingers are crossed, I’m sure my CMO’s watching this and going, either he is loving it or he is gritting his teeth. I get the sense everybody’s very happy. Hey Matt, how are you?
\n\n\n\nThe way I am approaching this is very much as an outsider and I’m trying to be very respectful of the fact that this community’s been around for a very long time. I am sure this is not the first time that these conversations have happened. I’m not the first person to bring these things up. I just see it as, I’m here as a unique person in this point in time and I see a need and I’m, we’ve gotten our organisation to help, start helping. And what I’m trying to promote is getting other organisations to also realise this, and also start promoting and sponsoring and contributing to the project.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:13] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the things that will be really interesting is if, let’s say that you become the fulcrum for all of this, and so Roger Williams is known at Kinsta. He’s the person to go and speak to. Having that clarity is going to be really beneficial. So you don’t have to go through those email hoops of, okay, you just use the contact form on the website and then get put through nine different people who all say, actually it’s not me. Knowing who you’ve got to speak to, and having that clear process, that contact form, whatever that may be, that intake form that we talked about earlier, that’s really interesting.
\n\n\n\nI’m just going to pivot it slightly, and I’m wondering what the kind of contributions that might fall into scope for you at Kinsta. So obviously the software itself, the core project, WordPress Core would I’m sure be in view.
\n\n\n\nBut what about other things like, oh, I don’t know, people who write documentation, you mentioned Polyglots? There’s obviously people who do event organising. There are people who do content creation, podcasts, YouTube channels, those kind of things. Do you have any constraints around the kind of contribution that you’d be interested in looking at, or will you listen to anybody?
\n\n\n\n[00:35:16] Roger Williams: Excellent question. And before I dive into that, I want to make sure that I’m not the only person taking credit for this at Kinsta. I have two amazing colleagues on the front lines with me. Marcel Bootsman, as you’re very familiar with, I think he’s been on your show before, he handles for Europe. And then Alex Michaelson, who is in APAC region. These are both amazing individuals who, we all three of us are on the front line, talking with contributors, sponsoring them, figuring all of this stuff out. So I definitely don’t want to take all of the credit here and make it seem that way.
\n\n\n\nAs far as figuring out who to sponsor and who to contribute, this is the big question. The amazing thing is that this point in time, my bosses, our bosses at Kinsta have given us amazing leeway to really choose who we want to be sponsoring, and who we want to be working with.
\n\n\n\nAnd so there’s a bit of objective focus for who we’re sponsoring. Core contributors obviously, like they’re directly impacting the project by actually changing the code and adding features and fixing bugs. So that’s obviously very important.
\n\n\n\nBut just as important is these other groups that are making sure that when a new person wants to use WordPress, there’s documentation that explains how to use the WordPress. When they want to go to a WordCamp and meet somebody, I mean Aaron Jorbin has a great story about meeting someone at one of the first contributor days that he went to. And they then became a core contributor within a short amount of time. And so that contributor day didn’t just happen, right? Like, people had to make that event happen, and organise it and have coffee and treats and lights and all of the things that go into that.
\n\n\n\nSo I think that there’s a lot of levels here. Whether it’s directly sponsoring a contributor inside of the open source project. It’s sponsoring WordCamps, it’s sponsoring amazing podcasts that help to spread the word and market WordPress.
\n\n\n\nThere’s people that have brought up that WordPress has kind of a marketing issue because it is this open source project that has just benefited from just a ton of people realising, wow, this is amazing software to build websites with. And they just started doing that, and 40% of the internet runs on WordPress.
\n\n\n\nThat’s happened very, very organically. And I think though that we’re now at an inflection of the internet and the web where we maybe need to start becoming a little bit more intentional about the marketing and the promotion of WordPress.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:44] Nathan Wrigley: What I’m gathering from this is that, certainly from Kinsta’s point of view, you just want to make this whole bi-directional thing just clearer. Kinsta’s got some intention to sponsor, and we know who the people are, we know the kind of things that they want to sponsor. Maybe there’s going to be some sort of landing page for that or some intake form. And so hopefully people who have it in mind that they wish to be sponsored, they’ll be clearer on what kind of things are in scope, what kind of things are out of scope. How many people they need to jump through the hoops to get that sponsorship sorted out. So that kind of thing is really interesting.
\n\n\n\nWhat do you think about the idea of, so we haven’t discussed this, I’m just going to throw this in there. Do you think this is a company by company thing? So in other words, is Kinsta always going to be siloed in its approach to sponsoring? Or is there any kind of, I don’t know how this would work, but some kind of more overarching approach that may be required? So let’s say for example that, I don’t know, Kinsta do, they sponsor person X, person Y, person Z, as we say in the UK, but obviously that leaves all these other myriad people without sponsorship. Is there a way that you could communicate to other organisations?
\n\n\n\nLook, this person, they came to us, it was very close, but we didn’t manage to get them on the sponsorship roster this year. But we feel that they were really credible. Here’s somebody else that you can go and talk to. Do you know what I mean? Something just a little bit, a bigger umbrella organisation above Kinsta, maybe. Organisation, substitute that word for any kind of structure or governance as you like.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:12] Roger Williams: Yeah, there is a lot of stuff already around this. Courtney Robertson has WPCC.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:18] Nathan Wrigley: WP Community Collective.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:20] Roger Williams: Thank you. And so the idea with that group is kind of to create an organisation that handles the mechanism aspect of distributing funds and finding people to sponsor and contribute. I could see a consortium of hosting companies coming together and somehow working on this, but that adds additional complexities, right? You have now more organisations, you have more bodies deciding things and making decisions.
\n\n\n\nAnd again, going back to what I propose at the very end of the project is, don’t wait, just get started. My worry about having consortiums and larger organisations is it’s going to slow the process down, it’s going to complicate the process.
\n\n\n\nThat’s mostly just because I have a big phobia of organisations and meetings. This is a personal kind of thing rather than, you know, I’m sure there’s ways to figure this out more. I have a job, right? I have to balance all of these things between working on what I need to actually work on inside of the company. Working on sponsoring contributors and focusing on the open source. So there’s a lot of balancing that goes on. I am open to having these discussions with people and organisations and seeing what can come of it.
\n\n\n\nAgain, going back to feeling like an outsider and knowing that there’s already a ton of people and a ton of organisations involved in doing all of this work. I’ve reached out to many of them. They’ve given me great advice. They’ve really helped me get our program organised the way it is. They help me with my presentation and kind of figuring out what to talk about in here. And so I want to remain mindful that I don’t have all the answers, I’m not the only person that’s doing all of this, and I welcome people to come to me with suggestions and ideas, and I’m always open to talking.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:03] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t think there’s one size fits all really, is there? Because the WPCC feels like a really great initiative. It has more of a kind of escrow kind of service feel to it. In other words, Kinsta, you put in your X amount of dollars and then the WPCC will figure out where that might go. But it may be that, you know, you guys at Kinsta would like to have more of a kind of one-to-one relationship with the people that you are sponsoring. And so that’s fine.
\n\n\n\nMaybe you will have back channels to the people who do similar work at different companies. And so it will be more kind of laissez-faire than something a little bit more organised. Maybe it’ll just be more back channel kind of thing.
\n\n\n\nBut that’s really interesting. Honestly, the time has got away with us. We’re at 45 minutes so far, so I think we’re fast approaching the amount of time that we’ve got available for us. Is there anything in this that we missed out? Was there any kernel, any little nugget somewhere that we failed to mention, or do you think we’ve covered the whole thing off?
\n\n\n\n[00:41:57] Roger Williams: You know, I think the one thing that maybe we skipped through a little bit is how to get your organisation bought into this. We’ve talked about the reasoning. We’ve talked about how to sell it from the outside. We’ve talked about how to deal with the individual contributors. Inside of your organisation there’s, again, three ways that I approach this. I like the number three, I guess.
\n\n\n\nSo when you’re making your internal pitch, this is all in the slide deck as well, understanding your organisational goals. So understand like, hey, we’re a hosting company, what’s important for a hosting company? Well, performance and security are pretty top things. So maybe that’s where you want to focus.
\n\n\n\nAgain, also we have a ton of customers that are non-English speaking, so Polyglots makes a lot of sense. Understand the organisational goals so that when you go to your executives, you go to your leadership, whoever’s got the money, you’re framing this out in terms of how it benefits your organisation.
\n\n\n\nThe second one is being patient, but being ready. So I started this conversation, I want to say late 2023, inside of Kinsta. And then about a year later, suddenly, out of the blue, hey, here’s your budget, go get to work. And so I needed to be ready. So we all needed to be ready. And we were. The good news is Marcel and Alex and myself, were already out in the community talking with people. We already were having some conversations about, ooh, who would we like to sponsor, who could use the sponsorship?
\n\n\n\nAnd so as soon as the budget was given to us, we were ready to go. And the reason that I recommend being ready is, these can be fleeting, right? Just because the executive has approved it this month doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to be there the next month.
\n\n\n\n[00:43:37] Nathan Wrigley: And also the contributor might not be, you know, I’ve got two weeks now, I can do something right away.
\n\n\n\n[00:43:42] Roger Williams: Yeah, so be ready because they’re going to want to see results. And the results should be, the way you framed it, the results should just be, hey, we’re sponsoring contributor X, they’re doing Y and Z, oh, and I had them on a Kinsta Talk, and here’s actual proof of we’re doing stuff. So have all of that ready to go. Have a spreadsheet that tracks everything so you can track where the money’s going and it’s all clear.
\n\n\n\nUnderstand how your organisation wants to handle these things, right? Is it going to be as simple as, hey, here’s a credit card and here’s a GitHub sponsorship page? Is that going to be okay? Or does it need to be a little bit more, I say complicated, involved, right? Do you need to have a non disparaging contract, right? So that it’s understood, hey, we’re sponsoring you, it’d be best if you didn’t say bad things about us, please. Get that cleared, like figure that stuff out.
\n\n\n\nAnd then be ready for common objections, right? So they’re going to immediately come to you with, hey, why would we spend money on this? It’s something that we get for free. And be ready with that strategic and the operational and the second order benefits conversations. And know which of those is going to land with which manager, executive best. So getting that internal pitch ready and really creating the project so it’s ready for success from day one is really important.
\n\n\n\n[00:45:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really interesting because a lot of it, most of what we talked about in this conversation didn’t really dwell on that. It was more about the nuts and the bolts of trying to connect the two different sides. But you’ve obviously laid out the groundwork inside Kinsta to have this ready. And then the minute that the CEO or the CMO or whoever it is, says, right, Roger, here’s some money, you’re off, you’re ready to actually go and start seeking this stuff out.
\n\n\n\nI very much doubt that this conversation is going to have a perfect outcome. I don’t suppose there is a perfect system, but I appreciate the fact that you’re giving it a lot of thought over there, and you’re trying to figure out how to make these two sides collide in a way that is mutually beneficial. Because it certainly seems that with WordPress at 40% of the web, the money question is not going away, the philanthropic side of things is not going away, and we do have to have ways for these two sides to communicate successfully with each other.
\n\n\n\nSo, okay, I will put links to anything that we have mentioned in the show notes. So if you go to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Roger Williams, you’ll be able to find everything there.
\n\n\n\nJust one last thing, Roger. Where can we find you apart from kinsta.com? Is there a place where you hang out online if somebody wants to pick this conversation up and run with it?
\n\n\n\n[00:46:11] Roger Williams: Yeah, absolutely. I am a big user of LinkedIn. I post there pretty regularly. If you interact with me in the comments, I will love you forever, you’re my best friend. I love it when people ask me questions, or challenge me in the comments like, let’s have conversations there. Feel free to reach out to me and let’s talk, I wanna figure this stuff out.
\n\n\n\n[00:46:30] Nathan Wrigley: Roger Williams, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.
\n\n\n\n[00:46:34] Roger Williams: Thank you very much, Nathan. I appreciate everything that you do for the community and thank you for the time and letting me be on.
\nOn the podcast today we have Roger Williams.
\n\n\n\nRoger Williams leads community and partner engagement at Kinsta, a company specialising in offering managed hosting for WordPress. His role involves bridging the gap between Kinsta and the wider WordPress community, working closely with agency partners, technology collaborators, and open source initiatives. Throughout his career, Roger has been deeply involved in community efforts and has recently played a key part in Kinsta\u2019s implementation of a sponsored contributions program, helping to funnel time and resources back into WordPress and other open source projects.
\n\n\n\nMany long-standing members of the WordPress community have contributed out of passion and a spirit of philanthropy, but as the project has grown to power over 40% of the web, the need for sustainable funding and sponsorship has become more pronounced. Roger joins us today to explore this shift, he shares insights from his WordCamp US presentation titled \u2018Figuring Out Sponsored Contribution\u2019, discussing how companies can start funding contributors, why that matters, and how to balance the business need for a return on investment with the grassroots spirit of open source.
\n\n\n\nWe begin with Roger\u2019s background, his work at Kinsta, and how he became involved in WordPress community sponsorship. The conversation then gets into the ever evolving dynamics of sponsored contributions: how businesses can approach funding contributors, ways to surface and support valuable work, and strategies for aligning company goals with broader project needs.
\n\n\n\nRoger breaks down the practical arguments companies can use to get internal buy-in, and the importance of clear processes, for both organisations looking to sponsor, and individuals seeking support.
\n\n\n\nTowards the end, Roger reflects on the challenges and opportunities of connecting those from both the philanthropic and commercial sides of WordPress, and he shares advice for anyone hoping to get their organisation involved in similar programs.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re interested in how WordPress sponsorships work, how business and community might collaborate, or you\u2019re seeking practical advice as a contributor or company, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nFiguring Out Sponsored Contribution – Roger’s presentation at WordCamp US 2025
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKinsta Talks Podcast on YouTube
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRoger on LinkedIn
\n", "content_text": "Transcription\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how we might reimagine sponsoring WordPress contributions.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wp tavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Roger Williams. Roger leads community and partner engagement at Kinsta, a company specializing in offering managed hosting for WordPress. His role involves bridging the gap between Kinsta and the wider WordPress community, working closely with agency partners, technology collaborators, and open source initiatives.\n\n\n\nThroughout his career, Roger has been deeply involved in community efforts and has recently played a key part in Kinsta’s implementation of a sponsored contributions program, helping to funnel time and resources back into WordPress and other open source projects.\n\n\n\nMany longstanding members of the WordPress community have contributed out of passion and a spirit of philanthropy, but as the project has grown to power over 40% of the web, the need for sustainable funding and sponsorship has become more pronounced.\n\n\n\nRoger joins us today to explore this shift. He shares insights from his WordCamp US presentation titled Figuring Out Sponsored Contribution. Discussing how companies can start funding contributors, why that matters, and how to balance the business need for a return on investment with the grassroots spirit of open source.\n\n\n\nWe begin with Roger’s background, his work at Kinsta, and how he became involved in WordPress community sponsorship.\n\n\n\nThe conversation then gets into the ever evolving dynamics of sponsored contributions. How businesses can approach funding contributors. Ways to surface and support valuable work, and strategies for aligning company goals with broader project needs.\n\n\n\nRoger breaks down the practical arguments companies can use to get internal buy-in, and the importance of clear processes for both organizations looking to sponsor, and individuals seeking support.\n\n\n\nTowards the end, Roger reflects on the challenges and opportunities of connecting those both from the philanthropic and commercial sides of WordPress, and he shares advice for anyone hoping to get their organization involved in similar programs.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in how WordPress sponsorships work, how business and community might collaborate, or you’re seeking practical advice as a contributor or company, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to find out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Roger Williams.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Roger Williams. Hello, Roger.\n\n\n\n[00:03:46] Roger Williams: Hey Nathan, how are you?\n\n\n\n[00:03:47] Nathan Wrigley: I’m very good. We could pretend that we’re recording this at WordCamp US because that was the plan, but it never happened for one reason or another. So we took it offline. And several weeks ago, WordCamp US finished, but the intention was very much to talk about what you were presenting at WordCamp US. So we’ll get into that in a moment.\n\n\n\nBefore we do that though, Roger, would you mind just telling us a little bit about who you are, who you work for, what your role involves, all to do with WordPress, I guess.\n\n\n\n[00:04:14] Roger Williams: Yeah, no, absolutely. So my name’s Roger Williams. I work at Kinsta, managed hosting provider for WordPress. Currently my position is partnership and community manager for North America. Very long title. What does that mean? My job is to interface with the public, with the WordPress community, with our agency partners and various technology partners, and just make sure that we’re all on the same page, and that whatever’s going on outside of Kinsta is getting communicated inside of Kinsta, and whatever’s happening inside of Kinsta is getting communicated outside. So I’m basically boiling the ocean. So a very easy thing. No problem at all.\n\n\n\nTruth be said, it’s one of the, this is like the highlight of my career, I have to say. I get to travel, I get to meet a lot of neat and interesting people, I get to make amazing friends, and I get to talk about technology, the web, WordPress and Kinsta hosting, which are all things that I’m very passionate about and enjoy talking about this ad nauseam. You can ask my wife, that I am probably too much, need to turn it off a little bit.\n\n\n\nBut specifically talking about community and WordPress, gosh, it was January of this year, 2025, that we implemented our sponsored contributions program, and I played a role in that. I played a role in getting the conversation happening around that inside of Kinsta. And then once we got budget approval, actually figuring out, hey, who do we want to sponsor? What projects outside of WordPress? Because we also sponsor various open source projects that affect us directly and indirectly.\n\n\n\nAnd so that has been a whole new aspect of my career that has really opened up new doors and opportunities and discussions and friendships that I’m still feeling like a bit of an interlocutor. I’m an outsider trying to understand how to best do this, and play a part in helping the projects that we all depend on to do all of our work.\n\n\n\n[00:06:17] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Thank you. Yeah, there’s a lot in there to unpack, isn’t there? It sounds like a full and varied role, but also you kind of sound a little bit like you’re figuring this out over the course of 2025 and into 2026 and who you are sponsoring and what have you. And that was very much the tenor of the talk.\n\n\n\nSo the title was very simple. The presentation that you gave was simply called figuring out sponsored contribution. But I’ll just read into the record the blurb, not all of it, but much of it because it will give everybody who’s listening an idea of where you were going with that. So it says, open source software runs on passion, but passion doesn’t pay the bills. WordPress powers over 40% of the web, yet many people maintaining it aren’t funded. That’s starting to change and your company can be part of it. In this talk, we’ll explore how sponsored contribution works, why it matters, and how companies big and small can participate. We’ll walk through my experience, AKA your experience, working with companies to sponsor contributors from promoting the idea internally, identifying key areas of the WordPress project to support, finding and interviewing contributors, and building an internal framework for long-term sponsorship. And there’s a little bit more, but that basically sums it up.\n\n\n\nSo basically, I guess my first question is, what exactly are you trying to do here? Are you kind of regarding this as a sort of philanthropic thing? What I’m really kind of asking is, do you kind of expect things in return? So if Kinsta, for example, sponsor somebody, do you have like a tick list of things that we need to see that you’ve done? Or is it more, you are a trusted person, we’ve seen you interacting in the WordPress space for many years, here’s a bunch of cash, go off and just do whatever you like?\n\n\n\n[00:07:53] Roger Williams: Yeah, excellent question. And thanks for reading that blurb. I don’t think I’ve read that blurb in quite a few months and it sounds really good.\n\n\n\n[00:07:59] Nathan Wrigley: It was a great talk.\n\n\n\n[00:08:00] Roger Williams: Somebody really put something together here. Really interesting question and I think this kind of gets to the core of what I was trying to talk about in this talk, in the exploration that I’m trying to figure out in my own head, figure out inside of Kinsta, and possibly figure out in the larger community.\n\n\n\nThere’s a lot of humility involved in this Nathan, I hope you can appreciate. I feel a lot of the times very, the imposter syndrome, right? Wow, I’m coming into a project that’s over 22 years old. Many, many thousands of people have been involved. Many, many companies have been involved in this. Here’s this new guy, you know, I mean I’ve been around for a little while, but relatively new guy on the scene just coming in trying to tell people how all this is done. And I really hope that it doesn’t come across that way. I’m really trying to explore this topic and understand it better for a few reasons.\n\n\n\nThe first one is the most immediate. How can I get Kinsta involved in contributing and sponsoring WordPress and other open source projects? And so there’s a combination of things happening there, right? And you brought it up in terms of, are there tangible things that we’re looking for here? Or is this simply just philanthropic, hey, we’re giving money away and everything will work out?\n\n\n\nAnd I think that there’s a spectrum. And we’re playing on the spectrum with it. Traditionally, and this is something that I talk about a lot in the talk is, traditionally in open source the argument has been that I’ve seen, hey, you’re using this software, you should give back to the software and to the project.\n\n\n\nBut then you have on the other side the business that is very much, hey, we need to generate revenue from our activities so that we can remain a business.\n\n\n\nAnd so they’re a little bit at odds in some ways, right? But it doesn’t have to be that way. And I think that’s what I’m exploring in this talk, and I’m exploring in this conversation, and as many conversations as I can have with people is, how do we play on that spectrum of finding a happy medium where for a company, a lot of times you go to the executives and you’re like, hey, we need to be giving back to this thing that we get for free? And you get a very perplexed look. And so I think we need to adjust that conversation.\n\n\n\nI think that the people that are inside of the project, it’s very obvious. Hey, we put a ton of time and effort into making this happen. Whether you give back in terms of time and actually help us work on the project, or give us money so we can sponsor people and pay for hosting costs and different things involved in it, to make the project happen. I think it’s very obvious for people inside of the project how that works.\n\n\n\nIt’s less obvious, and I kind of see there’s three groups in all, right? You have the people inside of the project, very obvious. There’s very little argument needs to be made.\n\n\n\nYou have the second group, which is somewhere like, a Kinsta will fall into, or someone like myself, who I’ve used open source software for many years, but I don’t necessarily see exactly how to contribute back, or the immediate benefits, or the need, right? Hey, this thing’s already here. I can go to the website, click download, and I’ve got it. There’s that group that kind of see it but they need a little nudging.\n\n\n\nAnd then there’s the general public or people that just don’t really interface with open source software directly and just have no idea. They’re just like, whoa, what is going on over there? People are just working on stuff for free and giving it away for free. That’s crazy. And so there’s another conversation that needs to happen there.\n\n\n\nI think with this specific talk, the group I’m trying to get to is that second group. The people that are just right there, it’s just in a little bit of nudging of like, hey, you’re really close to understanding the benefits of sponsoring and contributing back to the project. What are we missing in the conversation to really get them to understand it? So the answer I’m proposing is we need to talk more about return on investment and ROI, and how do we frame that?\n\n\n\nSo really long-winded answer here, but I think that there’s a mixture of what are the things we’re trying to achieve by giving back? How can we bring that back in a business sense to show executives, hey, look, the money that we’re putting out here is benefiting us in certain ways?\n\n\n\nBut then also being like, hey, there’s also just kind of this nebulous aspect to it of, if you help contribute to it, it will give you some benefit. So how do we balance and how do we find the spectrum here to land on? I hope that that made some sort of sense.\n\n\n\n[00:12:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it does. And it’s interesting because where you got to about a third of the way through the answer, I think you said the word tension or conflict or something like that. But I think that’s a really interesting part, because if we were to rewind the clock to, let’s say 19 years ago when WordPress was still relatively new. I wasn’t around in the WordPress space, but I was involved in other open source projects at the same time. And philanthropy was the word.\n\n\n\nThere were just people donating loads of time because it was more or less this hobby thing. And then in some cases the hobby thing collapsed and nobody ever heard of it again. And in the case of some software projects, WordPress most notably, it took off. It just absolutely skyrocketed and became the underpinning of, as you say in the presentation notes that you made, kind of 40% of the web. It became this critical piece of the puzzle.\n\n\n\nAnd so during the last 18, 20, 22 years, whatever it may be, the project has evolved. It’s become critical. Like it or dislike it, companies both big and small are now relying upon it. They require it as part of their business, Kinsta being one of those companies. And so this tension exists. How do the companies do their bit and how do the individuals do their bit?\n\n\n\nAnd the tension that I feel is, on the one hand, the people who’ve got that heritage of the more philanthropic side sort of saying, can’t we just go back to how it was? Can we never talk about finance? Can we not think about money at all?\n\n\n\nAnd then on the other hand, you’ve got places like where you work, who are, with the best will in the world, it’s about making some revenue, and making money, and paying the bills and all of that. You’ve got to figure out, how the heck do you make contributions? How do you justify that to your bosses? How do they communicate what they’ve done effectively?\n\n\n\nAnd presumably part of your talk as well is about finding people that you would like to just give some money to as a helping hand to say, okay, off you go. You’re not a part of the Kinsta organisation, but we would like to help you. And in return, presumably there’s a bit of mutual back rubbing. We’ll pat your back, you pat ours, and so on and so forth. So hopefully I’ve parsed that about right?\n\n\n\n[00:14:39] Roger Williams: Yeah, no, I think you’re laying it out very much as I’m going through in the talk is, we need to talk business. And I know that for a lot of people inside of open source, this can be cringey and not pleasant and not what we want to do. And my argument is we have to get over that phase. We have to learn to start talking business and thinking business, thinking about return on investment.\n\n\n\nAnd so to me it’s becoming practical, right? We have this optimistic idea of like, well, people will just come to their senses and realise that if they sponsor and contribute to the project, it’s going to help them. And we need to be much more strategic and more practical about it. And I break it down into three reasons to start kind of looking at when you’re talking to executives, you’re talking to businesses. And so there’s strategic, operational and second order benefits.\n\n\n\nSo when I’m talking about strategic benefits, I mean this is where it’s just obvious, right? For a hosting company that does WordPress, it just makes sense. Like, if WordPress isn’t working well, then we’re going to have trouble with our product. So strategically, it makes sense if WordPress works well, if it’s performing, if it’s secure, this is going to lower our cost as a hosting company. So those are arguments to be putting forward there.\n\n\n\nFrom an operational perspective, you can start talking about technical debt, right? And this is where the CTO’s eyes should light up, because technical debt is a real problem for any company that builds software. As you’re building software, you now have to maintain that software. Well, if you’re able to offload part of that software into the open source project, it now becomes something that the open source project maintains. It’s the technical debt of the project.\n\n\n\nThat now creates a vicious cycle, or not even vicious, but just a cycle of, you now need to contribute to the project to help maintain that technical debt. But you’re now, as an organisation, offloading that to a larger organisation and having more people being able to help maintain that software. So I think from an operational perspective, those are arguments that you can hit people with.\n\n\n\nAnd then finally, the second order benefits, and this is really where it kind of encompasses the arguments that have been traditionally the philanthropic argument, the just maker taker argument and stuff like that. With second order benefits, you start seeing these additional benefits that maybe you can’t exactly measure.\n\n\n\nThis is where networking is happening. People are meeting and talking to each other. Maybe your developers are talking to their developers, or in the case of sponsoring contributors, those contributors can come into your organisation and help the organisation maybe understand how to use WordPress better and these different benefits.\n\n\n\nAnd so breaking it down into these practical arguments, these practical reasons for contributing can really help people who are not necessarily as well versed with open source or don’t directly see the benefits, see that a little bit better.\n\n\n\nAnd then getting into what you’re also talking about, finding contributors who, maybe they align with your values, making sure that they’re working on the stuff that you need them to be working on. The parts of the project that could use attention as far as your organisation is seeing.\n\n\n\nAnd then also, you know, one of the big things I look for is contributors who are mentors and are helping other contributors get into the project and help to grow the project’s contributions overall.\n\n\n\nThere’s direct, tangible things. Hey, there’s this ticket, could you go work on this ticket? I’ll be honest, I’m not that in depth yet. I’ve had contributors be like, hey, usually organisations are that pointed. And I’m like, okay, well there’s a goal for me to achieve at some point.\n\n\n\nBut for me it’s more like, hey, are you doing good work? What are other people saying about you in the project? And then, are you mentoring people and helping other people do their first bug squash, and do their first push and commit and things like that? And I’m butchering the language of course here but, you know, I hope that that kind of helps answer some of those questions.\n\n\n\n[00:18:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting because I fear that there’s a possibility that the community kind of bifurcates along these lines at the moment. So you get the people, and I was using the word philanthropic, so the people that have been contributing their time for gratis, just because they saw that as a useful thing to do for humanity, let’s put it that way.\n\n\n\nSo there’s that on the one hand. And then on the other hand, you’ve got people such as yourself who are talking about the necessary things in order for your job and your institution to function, the money. And I suppose I’m kind of worried that we will have these two sides that kind of can’t figure out a way to communicate with each other, that can’t see across the chasm that has been created. And so figuring out ways to make those work to sort of have a happy balance so that the two sides can communicate, that they can be back in touch with each other.\n\n\n\nSo that’s kind of a concern that I have, this sort of two tier system. The fear more broadly is that, if the money side of things becomes more prevalent, and people find that intolerable, that ultimately will push people away who have been philanthropic and amazing in the use of their time and pushing the project forward. They’ll see this as something that they can’t cope with in the future, and they’ll wish to step away, not contribute to it. That would be a shame.\n\n\n\n[00:19:52] Roger Williams: So I can absolutely empathise and understand the argument that you’re putting forth there. I think the way I would counter that is to say, hey, currently if we’re only going to talk in a philanthropic sense, are we just going to exclude everybody from what you’re talking about, the second tier, right? The more money focused. So we’re just not even having a conversation in that case.\n\n\n\n[00:20:15] Nathan Wrigley: Right. That’s the concern, yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:20:17] Roger Williams: So what I’m trying to argue is, hey, by bringing in more people into the project and maybe starting to talk in these practical ROI business terms, were now at least having a conversation that before wasn’t even happening. Because just to kind of back up a second, the way I’m looking at it is, if the only argument is, hey, this is philanthropic, you’re doing it for the good of the project, kumbaya, then we’re just going to exclude a lot of the business community who’s going to go, well, yeah, I volunteer time on the weekend at my church, or do different things, but I need to do business during the week so I can buy groceries and pay the rent.\n\n\n\nAnd so I think what I’m trying to suggest is, hey, if we expand the conversation beyond just philanthropic, beyond just the second order benefits, and we talk about operational and strategic benefits in addition, we’re now adding more people to the conversation that weren’t in the conversation before.\n\n\n\nAnd eventually we’re bringing them into the second order conversation, but we have to start by bringing them in with the strategic and the operational, because that’s where their mindset is in the nine to five. And so to me, I think this is the opportunity to actually expand the pie and expand the amount of people in the project and talking about the project.\n\n\n\nThe concern I see that is a fair argument and concern is, are we going to turn open source projects into just commercial enterprises? That is definitely a concern. I don’t see that happening because you still have the core people in the project. They’re doing it because they believe in what the project is and they have passion for it. And if they are able to expand and have these conversations, these larger conversations, or additional conversations, about strategic and operational benefits, we’re going to bring more people in and hopefully help to influence those people to see the second order benefits, and hopefully eventually it’s all just philanthropic, right?\n\n\n\nBut I think right now, the argument that has been put forth by different people in open source and in the WordPress community, is that we don’t have enough people contributing. We don’t have enough sponsorship money coming in, and so we need to figure out how to bridge that gap. And my suggestion is the way to do that is to expand the conversation beyond just the philanthropic, beyond just the second order, and talking about strategic and operational in addition to those.\n\n\n\n[00:22:40] Nathan Wrigley: I have so many thoughts about this. So the first thing that comes into my head is trying to bridge a gap between the people out there at the moment who have been contributing. But you go around on Twitter, X, I guess, and you see people, don’t you? You see it all the time. They even sometimes change their Twitter handle to, you know, seeking sponsorship or something like that.\n\n\n\nBut periodically you’ll see somebody who you know has been in the WordPress space for many years and, I don’t know, maybe they have been contributing in some way, shape, or form, but it’s pretty clear that they would like to be sponsored for this particular rabbit hole that they’ve gone down. And so building a bridge to them is something I think really useful about what you’re saying.\n\n\n\nBecause maybe there is no way of these two sides talking to each other. Maybe there is no kind of like a la carte menu, if you like. If you are one of these philanthropic contributors, and you’ve never sought sponsorship before, but you’d like the idea of, well, wouldn’t it be nice if, for these two days a week that I typically contribute my time, wouldn’t it be nice to get some finance? I’ll do the exact same thing, but I’ll actually receive some money for that.\n\n\n\nBut I don’t have the time to go out to a hundred different companies with my, I’m going to use the word begging bowl. That is probably the wrong term, but you get the point. To these a hundred different companies saying, look, I’ve been doing this for ages. Can you help me out?\n\n\n\nThat kind of feels, there’s something quite icky about that, isn’t there? I think we can all identify that going out and sort of saying to companies repeatedly, please can I have some money? And then getting the inevitable 99% pushback. No, we haven’t got any money for you.\n\n\n\nBut I think what you are saying is you are going to build a system where that kind of stuff will be more obvious. Where you’ll say, these are the kind of things that we’re looking for. Here’s the application form if you want to sponsor. This is the kind of process that we’re going to go through. These are the interview questions that we’re typically going to answer. This is the pot of money that we’ve got available. This is how many people we want, and so on and so forth.\n\n\n\nSo it’s kind of bridging the gap, so that the people who have been contributing, who are maybe nervous or don’t see a way forward, can suddenly step into something more obvious, more a la carte, more straightforward and easy to kind of cherry pick.\n\n\n\n[00:24:46] Roger Williams: Yeah. I think that, you know, this is getting to the heart of it, right? How do you individually sponsor people? How do individuals find sponsorship? And how do we make this all work? And backing up just for a second , there’s two ways to look at contributing to open source projects.\n\n\n\nWe’re talking a lot about sponsoring individual contributors, which I would argue is the best way for an organisation to get started, because it’s the easiest way in some sense, right? There’s an established person who’s working in the project. You are giving them cash to do that work.\n\n\n\nThe other way to contribute to the project is to actually spend time working on the project, right? So maybe you’ve got engineers inside of the company and you’re like, okay, 10% of your time is, or 5% of your time you’re going to actually work on this project. That’s a much bigger ask, right? Because usually when you hire an employee, you have a very specific set of tasks that you need to work on them for the company.\n\n\n\nAnd so asking the manager to figure out, hey, how can this person give 5% of their time to something that’s outside of the company? That’s a bigger ask. So I think, for companies and organizations that are starting to dip their toe into contributing to open source, sponsored contributions is a great place to start.\n\n\n\nSo that was a long way to get around to the question that you’re posing here, is how do you actually do that? There’s a chicken and the egg kind of situation that you’re bringing up, right? At what point does an individual contributor know that, hey, Kinsta is a company to reach out to, and ask for sponsored contribution. And then on the flip side, how does Kinsta know who to reach out to to sponsor?\n\n\n\nAnd so my suggestion is to create a couple of different systems. So first, from the organisational perspective, really understanding, what are the priorities for the organisation? What would benefit them the most by sponsoring individual contributors?\n\n\n\nMy argument is it’s a pretty wide swath. A lot of people get focused on core contributors and, actually working on tickets and things like that. I think it’s a much broader effect. I think sponsoring people that are on the Polyglots team, Kinsta, over half of our customers don’t speak English. So having WordPress in non-English versions is huge for us. So sponsoring the Polyglots team.\n\n\n\nThe documentation team is huge, right? People need to be able to use WordPress . So are they going to contact Kinsta support for how to use WordPress, or can they just go to the WordPress site and look at documentation?\n\n\n\nSo as an organization, you can get really strategic on this, but my argument would be, don’t overthink it at the beginning. Just get started. And I think that’s how I kind of end my talk is, my biggest piece of advice is don’t wait. Just get started. Set aside some budget that you’re comfortable with, that your executives are comfortable with, and then go and find some contributors.\n\n\n\nAnd then have kind of a process, right? Have an intake form. You mentioned having an intake form. Have an intake form. Ask them questions about, what do they currently work on? What have they worked on in the past? What are their hopes and goals and aspirations on the project?\n\n\n\nAnd then, you know, some very practical questions. Hey, would you be open to doing a blog post about your work and how Kinsta has helped with this? Very low level asks, right? We’re not trying to ask people to get a tattoo of the logo on their forehead or something insane. It’s very low effort, and my argument to companies is be very cautious. Step lightly into the marketing aspect of all of this. That should not be your primary focus.\n\n\n\nThe primary focus is contributing to the open source project, not getting all this marketing benefit out of it. And so, you know, make sure to frame it that way.\n\n\n\nFrom the individual contributors thing, one thing I do point out is, up until recently, I’ve never actually been formally approached by somebody asking for sponsorship to contribute. You kind of talked about, hey, if someone needed to spend a time reaching out to a hundred different companies, you don’t need to go that crazy. Just reach out to like the major hosting companies to start.\n\n\n\nBut my argument is you need to do more than just say, hey, I work on WordPress, you need to sponsor me. You need to put together a little bit more of a pitch of, hey, I work on X, it accomplishes Y. I see this benefiting your organisation in these specific ways. And if you’re approaching it that way, that’s going to catch someone’s attention much better.\n\n\n\nYou know, and then just ask also just simple questions. Hey, do you have a formal sponsorship contribution project for WordPress? And if they say no, maybe, hey, would you like me to help you set that up? If they say yes, then it’s, hey, what’s the process for getting involved in that?\n\n\n\nThese are just very simple questions. It’s just a conversation, right? I say this, I’ve been in sales for decades now. It’s second nature to me. I understand that for a lot of people, this isn’t second nature for them. And that’s also what I’m trying to help with in this conversation is, it’s not just the organisations I’m trying to educate, but it’s also the contributors and the people that are in the project. Helping them to understand how to speak business a little bit more, so that they can get the businesses to really understand the benefits of this.\n\n\n\n[00:29:58] Nathan Wrigley: There was a few things that you said a few moments ago where the implication was basically just get started. So put aside some cash, decide that you’re going to do it, so this is from the business side, and then just begin and see what happens. I don’t suppose you’re going to be able to simulate the perfect system first time around. It’ll be an iterative process, but just commit to it.\n\n\n\nBut the ROI thing was also kind of interesting because you know, if you are senior management in Kinsta or whichever hosting company you want to imagine, there’s got to be I suppose some aspect of that in the back of your mind. Okay, we’re going to give away, I don’t know, a hundred thousand dollars this year, but we’re not going to ask anybody at all, at any point to sort of mention our company name. That’s probably unrealistic, but I like what you said there about the gentle approach to it, the write a blog post about it.\n\n\n\nBut there’s something to be explored there because there’s got to be a way of surfacing good work. So it doesn’t have to necessarily be a big clarion call. Look, I did this because Kinsta paid for it. More tangentially, I did this great work and I did this, and WordPress benefited as a result of this, and I would just like to thank Kinsta for making that possible.\n\n\n\nI guess we’ve just got to figure out what that piece looks like because, you know, you can’t give away money for free. There does need to be some ROI, but we have to figure out how gentle that approach is, and how gung ho it can be or not. That’s going to be interesting to figure out.\n\n\n\n[00:31:22] Roger Williams: Just to kind of elaborate on that for a second. So the way I would say to companies to approach looking at this is, this is branding, right? And so when you’re doing brand marketing, it’s very nebulous, right? You’re kind of putting stuff out there and there’s a little bit of goodwill to it, I guess, you know, the philanthropy part plays into it a little bit. This definitely, I would say, falls under your branding budget. And so you should treat it as such.\n\n\n\nI think that there’s a few different ways that the marketing, and I’m using air quotes around marketing here, because I understand that for people in open source this can be a little bit of kryptonite, a little bit repellent to talk about it this way. So I’m trying to be cautious or gentle here.\n\n\n\nBut I think the marketing benefits are, there’s a ton of indirect benefits, right? So if I’m sponsoring a contributor, and they’re working on the project, it means they’re interacting with other contributors of the project. They’re going to mention, oh, hey, by the way, Kinsta is sponsoring me, in conversation.\n\n\n\nAnd now you’ve got that one-on-one marketing, as it were, happening where that’s getting put into the project and that gets noticed. And I think that’s my big urge to companies who really want to step on the pedal of ROI. Like, hey, we need to really maximise the ROI here. Is it’s like, hey, the community notices as soon as you do something, good, bad, or indifferent. But as soon as you start sponsoring people, it gets noticed inside of the community right away, whether you immediately see it or not.\n\n\n\nSo allow that to happen, for sure. I think from like the blog posts and things like that, there’s two ways I approach it. I love it if a sponsored contributor writes a blog post on their blog and mentions Kinsta. That’s amazing. I’m not expecting that. So instead what I’ll do is I’ll invite them onto the Kinsta Talks podcast and, hey, let’s spend 20 minutes and just talk about what you’re doing on the project.\n\n\n\nI mentioned Kinsta at the beginning of it, in the fact that that’s where I work. Other than that, I don’t talk about Kinsta at all. It’s all about this individual and what they’re doing on the project, what they’re excited about, how they would suggest people get involved in the project. And so using that as a promotion, and again, the indirect branding benefits. My fingers are crossed, I’m sure my CMO’s watching this and going, either he is loving it or he is gritting his teeth. I get the sense everybody’s very happy. Hey Matt, how are you?\n\n\n\nThe way I am approaching this is very much as an outsider and I’m trying to be very respectful of the fact that this community’s been around for a very long time. I am sure this is not the first time that these conversations have happened. I’m not the first person to bring these things up. I just see it as, I’m here as a unique person in this point in time and I see a need and I’m, we’ve gotten our organisation to help, start helping. And what I’m trying to promote is getting other organisations to also realise this, and also start promoting and sponsoring and contributing to the project.\n\n\n\n[00:34:13] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the things that will be really interesting is if, let’s say that you become the fulcrum for all of this, and so Roger Williams is known at Kinsta. He’s the person to go and speak to. Having that clarity is going to be really beneficial. So you don’t have to go through those email hoops of, okay, you just use the contact form on the website and then get put through nine different people who all say, actually it’s not me. Knowing who you’ve got to speak to, and having that clear process, that contact form, whatever that may be, that intake form that we talked about earlier, that’s really interesting.\n\n\n\nI’m just going to pivot it slightly, and I’m wondering what the kind of contributions that might fall into scope for you at Kinsta. So obviously the software itself, the core project, WordPress Core would I’m sure be in view.\n\n\n\nBut what about other things like, oh, I don’t know, people who write documentation, you mentioned Polyglots? There’s obviously people who do event organising. There are people who do content creation, podcasts, YouTube channels, those kind of things. Do you have any constraints around the kind of contribution that you’d be interested in looking at, or will you listen to anybody?\n\n\n\n[00:35:16] Roger Williams: Excellent question. And before I dive into that, I want to make sure that I’m not the only person taking credit for this at Kinsta. I have two amazing colleagues on the front lines with me. Marcel Bootsman, as you’re very familiar with, I think he’s been on your show before, he handles for Europe. And then Alex Michaelson, who is in APAC region. These are both amazing individuals who, we all three of us are on the front line, talking with contributors, sponsoring them, figuring all of this stuff out. So I definitely don’t want to take all of the credit here and make it seem that way.\n\n\n\nAs far as figuring out who to sponsor and who to contribute, this is the big question. The amazing thing is that this point in time, my bosses, our bosses at Kinsta have given us amazing leeway to really choose who we want to be sponsoring, and who we want to be working with.\n\n\n\nAnd so there’s a bit of objective focus for who we’re sponsoring. Core contributors obviously, like they’re directly impacting the project by actually changing the code and adding features and fixing bugs. So that’s obviously very important.\n\n\n\nBut just as important is these other groups that are making sure that when a new person wants to use WordPress, there’s documentation that explains how to use the WordPress. When they want to go to a WordCamp and meet somebody, I mean Aaron Jorbin has a great story about meeting someone at one of the first contributor days that he went to. And they then became a core contributor within a short amount of time. And so that contributor day didn’t just happen, right? Like, people had to make that event happen, and organise it and have coffee and treats and lights and all of the things that go into that.\n\n\n\nSo I think that there’s a lot of levels here. Whether it’s directly sponsoring a contributor inside of the open source project. It’s sponsoring WordCamps, it’s sponsoring amazing podcasts that help to spread the word and market WordPress.\n\n\n\nThere’s people that have brought up that WordPress has kind of a marketing issue because it is this open source project that has just benefited from just a ton of people realising, wow, this is amazing software to build websites with. And they just started doing that, and 40% of the internet runs on WordPress.\n\n\n\nThat’s happened very, very organically. And I think though that we’re now at an inflection of the internet and the web where we maybe need to start becoming a little bit more intentional about the marketing and the promotion of WordPress.\n\n\n\n[00:37:44] Nathan Wrigley: What I’m gathering from this is that, certainly from Kinsta’s point of view, you just want to make this whole bi-directional thing just clearer. Kinsta’s got some intention to sponsor, and we know who the people are, we know the kind of things that they want to sponsor. Maybe there’s going to be some sort of landing page for that or some intake form. And so hopefully people who have it in mind that they wish to be sponsored, they’ll be clearer on what kind of things are in scope, what kind of things are out of scope. How many people they need to jump through the hoops to get that sponsorship sorted out. So that kind of thing is really interesting.\n\n\n\nWhat do you think about the idea of, so we haven’t discussed this, I’m just going to throw this in there. Do you think this is a company by company thing? So in other words, is Kinsta always going to be siloed in its approach to sponsoring? Or is there any kind of, I don’t know how this would work, but some kind of more overarching approach that may be required? So let’s say for example that, I don’t know, Kinsta do, they sponsor person X, person Y, person Z, as we say in the UK, but obviously that leaves all these other myriad people without sponsorship. Is there a way that you could communicate to other organisations?\n\n\n\nLook, this person, they came to us, it was very close, but we didn’t manage to get them on the sponsorship roster this year. But we feel that they were really credible. Here’s somebody else that you can go and talk to. Do you know what I mean? Something just a little bit, a bigger umbrella organisation above Kinsta, maybe. Organisation, substitute that word for any kind of structure or governance as you like.\n\n\n\n[00:39:12] Roger Williams: Yeah, there is a lot of stuff already around this. Courtney Robertson has WPCC.\n\n\n\n[00:39:18] Nathan Wrigley: WP Community Collective.\n\n\n\n[00:39:20] Roger Williams: Thank you. And so the idea with that group is kind of to create an organisation that handles the mechanism aspect of distributing funds and finding people to sponsor and contribute. I could see a consortium of hosting companies coming together and somehow working on this, but that adds additional complexities, right? You have now more organisations, you have more bodies deciding things and making decisions.\n\n\n\nAnd again, going back to what I propose at the very end of the project is, don’t wait, just get started. My worry about having consortiums and larger organisations is it’s going to slow the process down, it’s going to complicate the process.\n\n\n\nThat’s mostly just because I have a big phobia of organisations and meetings. This is a personal kind of thing rather than, you know, I’m sure there’s ways to figure this out more. I have a job, right? I have to balance all of these things between working on what I need to actually work on inside of the company. Working on sponsoring contributors and focusing on the open source. So there’s a lot of balancing that goes on. I am open to having these discussions with people and organisations and seeing what can come of it.\n\n\n\nAgain, going back to feeling like an outsider and knowing that there’s already a ton of people and a ton of organisations involved in doing all of this work. I’ve reached out to many of them. They’ve given me great advice. They’ve really helped me get our program organised the way it is. They help me with my presentation and kind of figuring out what to talk about in here. And so I want to remain mindful that I don’t have all the answers, I’m not the only person that’s doing all of this, and I welcome people to come to me with suggestions and ideas, and I’m always open to talking.\n\n\n\n[00:41:03] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t think there’s one size fits all really, is there? Because the WPCC feels like a really great initiative. It has more of a kind of escrow kind of service feel to it. In other words, Kinsta, you put in your X amount of dollars and then the WPCC will figure out where that might go. But it may be that, you know, you guys at Kinsta would like to have more of a kind of one-to-one relationship with the people that you are sponsoring. And so that’s fine.\n\n\n\nMaybe you will have back channels to the people who do similar work at different companies. And so it will be more kind of laissez-faire than something a little bit more organised. Maybe it’ll just be more back channel kind of thing.\n\n\n\nBut that’s really interesting. Honestly, the time has got away with us. We’re at 45 minutes so far, so I think we’re fast approaching the amount of time that we’ve got available for us. Is there anything in this that we missed out? Was there any kernel, any little nugget somewhere that we failed to mention, or do you think we’ve covered the whole thing off?\n\n\n\n[00:41:57] Roger Williams: You know, I think the one thing that maybe we skipped through a little bit is how to get your organisation bought into this. We’ve talked about the reasoning. We’ve talked about how to sell it from the outside. We’ve talked about how to deal with the individual contributors. Inside of your organisation there’s, again, three ways that I approach this. I like the number three, I guess.\n\n\n\nSo when you’re making your internal pitch, this is all in the slide deck as well, understanding your organisational goals. So understand like, hey, we’re a hosting company, what’s important for a hosting company? Well, performance and security are pretty top things. So maybe that’s where you want to focus.\n\n\n\nAgain, also we have a ton of customers that are non-English speaking, so Polyglots makes a lot of sense. Understand the organisational goals so that when you go to your executives, you go to your leadership, whoever’s got the money, you’re framing this out in terms of how it benefits your organisation.\n\n\n\nThe second one is being patient, but being ready. So I started this conversation, I want to say late 2023, inside of Kinsta. And then about a year later, suddenly, out of the blue, hey, here’s your budget, go get to work. And so I needed to be ready. So we all needed to be ready. And we were. The good news is Marcel and Alex and myself, were already out in the community talking with people. We already were having some conversations about, ooh, who would we like to sponsor, who could use the sponsorship?\n\n\n\nAnd so as soon as the budget was given to us, we were ready to go. And the reason that I recommend being ready is, these can be fleeting, right? Just because the executive has approved it this month doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to be there the next month.\n\n\n\n[00:43:37] Nathan Wrigley: And also the contributor might not be, you know, I’ve got two weeks now, I can do something right away.\n\n\n\n[00:43:42] Roger Williams: Yeah, so be ready because they’re going to want to see results. And the results should be, the way you framed it, the results should just be, hey, we’re sponsoring contributor X, they’re doing Y and Z, oh, and I had them on a Kinsta Talk, and here’s actual proof of we’re doing stuff. So have all of that ready to go. Have a spreadsheet that tracks everything so you can track where the money’s going and it’s all clear.\n\n\n\nUnderstand how your organisation wants to handle these things, right? Is it going to be as simple as, hey, here’s a credit card and here’s a GitHub sponsorship page? Is that going to be okay? Or does it need to be a little bit more, I say complicated, involved, right? Do you need to have a non disparaging contract, right? So that it’s understood, hey, we’re sponsoring you, it’d be best if you didn’t say bad things about us, please. Get that cleared, like figure that stuff out.\n\n\n\nAnd then be ready for common objections, right? So they’re going to immediately come to you with, hey, why would we spend money on this? It’s something that we get for free. And be ready with that strategic and the operational and the second order benefits conversations. And know which of those is going to land with which manager, executive best. So getting that internal pitch ready and really creating the project so it’s ready for success from day one is really important.\n\n\n\n[00:45:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really interesting because a lot of it, most of what we talked about in this conversation didn’t really dwell on that. It was more about the nuts and the bolts of trying to connect the two different sides. But you’ve obviously laid out the groundwork inside Kinsta to have this ready. And then the minute that the CEO or the CMO or whoever it is, says, right, Roger, here’s some money, you’re off, you’re ready to actually go and start seeking this stuff out.\n\n\n\nI very much doubt that this conversation is going to have a perfect outcome. I don’t suppose there is a perfect system, but I appreciate the fact that you’re giving it a lot of thought over there, and you’re trying to figure out how to make these two sides collide in a way that is mutually beneficial. Because it certainly seems that with WordPress at 40% of the web, the money question is not going away, the philanthropic side of things is not going away, and we do have to have ways for these two sides to communicate successfully with each other.\n\n\n\nSo, okay, I will put links to anything that we have mentioned in the show notes. So if you go to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Roger Williams, you’ll be able to find everything there.\n\n\n\nJust one last thing, Roger. Where can we find you apart from kinsta.com? Is there a place where you hang out online if somebody wants to pick this conversation up and run with it?\n\n\n\n[00:46:11] Roger Williams: Yeah, absolutely. I am a big user of LinkedIn. I post there pretty regularly. If you interact with me in the comments, I will love you forever, you’re my best friend. I love it when people ask me questions, or challenge me in the comments like, let’s have conversations there. Feel free to reach out to me and let’s talk, I wanna figure this stuff out.\n\n\n\n[00:46:30] Nathan Wrigley: Roger Williams, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.\n\n\n\n[00:46:34] Roger Williams: Thank you very much, Nathan. I appreciate everything that you do for the community and thank you for the time and letting me be on.\n\n\n\n\nOn the podcast today we have Roger Williams.\n\n\n\nRoger Williams leads community and partner engagement at Kinsta, a company specialising in offering managed hosting for WordPress. His role involves bridging the gap between Kinsta and the wider WordPress community, working closely with agency partners, technology collaborators, and open source initiatives. Throughout his career, Roger has been deeply involved in community efforts and has recently played a key part in Kinsta\u2019s implementation of a sponsored contributions program, helping to funnel time and resources back into WordPress and other open source projects.\n\n\n\nMany long-standing members of the WordPress community have contributed out of passion and a spirit of philanthropy, but as the project has grown to power over 40% of the web, the need for sustainable funding and sponsorship has become more pronounced. Roger joins us today to explore this shift, he shares insights from his WordCamp US presentation titled \u2018Figuring Out Sponsored Contribution\u2019, discussing how companies can start funding contributors, why that matters, and how to balance the business need for a return on investment with the grassroots spirit of open source.\n\n\n\nWe begin with Roger\u2019s background, his work at Kinsta, and how he became involved in WordPress community sponsorship. The conversation then gets into the ever evolving dynamics of sponsored contributions: how businesses can approach funding contributors, ways to surface and support valuable work, and strategies for aligning company goals with broader project needs.\n\n\n\nRoger breaks down the practical arguments companies can use to get internal buy-in, and the importance of clear processes, for both organisations looking to sponsor, and individuals seeking support.\n\n\n\nTowards the end, Roger reflects on the challenges and opportunities of connecting those from both the philanthropic and commercial sides of WordPress, and he shares advice for anyone hoping to get their organisation involved in similar programs.\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re interested in how WordPress sponsorships work, how business and community might collaborate, or you\u2019re seeking practical advice as a contributor or company, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\nKinsta\n\n\n\nFiguring Out Sponsored Contribution – Roger’s presentation at WordCamp US 2025\n\n\n\nPolyglots team\n\n\n\nWordPress Documentation\n\n\n\nKinsta Talks Podcast on YouTube\n\n\n\nWPCC\n\n\n\nRoger on LinkedIn", "date_published": "2025-11-12T10:00:00-05:00", "date_modified": "2025-11-11T09:51:13-05:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/193-Roger-Williams-on-How-We-Might-Reimagine-Sponsoring-WordPress-Contributions.jpg", "tags": [ "contribution", "podcast", "sponsorship" ], "summary": "In this episode, Roger Williams joins Nathan Wrigley to discuss the complexities and evolution of sponsored contributions in the WordPress community. They explore how companies like Kinsta can support WordPress and other open source projects, balancing philanthropic goals with business realities. The conversation covers practical strategies for sponsorship, bridging gaps between individuals and organisations, and the challenges of aligning community-driven and financial motivations to ensure WordPress continues to thrive. If you\u2019re interested in how WordPress sponsorships work, how business and community might collaborate, or you\u2019re seeking practical advice as a contributor or company, this episode is for you.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2202652/c1e-o3m9mi21nw9fdxj6w-8dodgnkztppp-jxtujm.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=200562", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/192-joshua-bryant-on-how-dow-jones-is-supercharging-wordpress-editorial-workflows", "title": "#192 \u2013 Joshua Bryant on How Dow Jones Is Supercharging WordPress Editorial Workflows", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how Dow Jones is supercharging WordPress editorial workflows.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Joshua Bryant. Joshua works at Dow Jones, helping power some of the world’s largest publishing sites, including the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and MarketWatch, all on a WordPress Multisite platform.
\n\n\n\nHis background with WordPress started, as it does for so many, by inheriting a site and slowly peeling back the layers of what the CMS can do, from page building to infrastructure and custom workflows.
\n\n\n\nAt Word Camp US, he delivered a presentation called Reimagining WordPress Editing: How We Embedded Gutenberg Into Our Product Ecosystem, which digs into how his team decoupled the Gutenberg block editor from WP Admin. And embedded it in a standalone React application, all while keeping content stored in a traditional WordPress database.
\n\n\n\nThis episode is a journey into why time, down to the second, matters in the publishing world, and how headless solutions can address those needs.
\n\n\n\nJoshua explains how editorial workflows were rebuilt so that breaking news can be published, or updated, with lightning fast speeds, removing distractions and page reloads for editors, while retaining the full power and extensibility of WordPress behind the scenes.
\n\n\n\nWe talk through the technical architecture, planning, editing, and rendering are split into separate applications with Gutenberg customized down to just two or three essential blocks, living outside the typical WordPress environment.
\n\n\n\nJoshua talks about the challenge of simulating the global WP object, keeping business logic and proprietary plugins intact, and interacting with the rest API for Instantaneous content publishing.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in headless WordPress, editorial workflows at scale, or how Enterprise newsrooms leverage open source tech for real world speed, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Joshua Bryant.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Joshua Bryant. Hello.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:25] Joshua Bryant: Hi.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:26] Nathan Wrigley: Nice to meet you. This is the first time that we’ve ever met. We’re going to be talking today about, well, the Dow Jones website, but also about headless, I guess is probably the best way to sum it up. So strap in. This is going to be a tinfoil hat episode. I am also going to say at the beginning that this is an episode for which I am supremely unqualified. So I hope that you are going to be able to shepherd me and call me out when I ask a silly question. So let’s hope for the best.
\n\n\n\nThe reason that I’ve got you on is because headless is an interesting subject, there’s that, but also the fact that it’s Dow Jones that you are dealing with, and the profound importance of that. The fact that, of all the websites I can imagine, there’s not many which have that requirement to be alive a hundred percent of the time. So that whole piece is going to fit in as well.
\n\n\n\nBefore we get into that, would you mind just telling us a bit about you? I mean, we know where you work now, but other than that, tell us about your experience with WordPress and so on.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:18] Joshua Bryant: Right. So, I mean, I started, I think like most WordPress people started, I inherited a WordPress website knowing nothing about web development at all. And so I struggled my way through Googling, what is DNS? What does that even mean?
\n\n\n\nAnd the WordPress offered me the opportunity to grow, and there’s always something new to learn. So from day one, I started learning about building pages, and then themes, and then plugins. And then I got a job where I was building themes and plugins. And then I got a job where I was really working on the infrastructure behind it.
\n\n\n\nAs I continue to grow, I keep learning that there’s always another layer to WordPress. And I think I’m getting close to the bottom, but that’s what I thought every layer. So I did a little bit of contributing last year when I was here at WordCamp, and I’m just excited to keep growing and keep learning more about the power that we have in that WordPress environment.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:18] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for that. So you’re at WordCamp US, obviously, you’re talking to me, we’re in the same room. Presentation that you did or doing?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:26] Joshua Bryant: Did.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:26] Nathan Wrigley: Did. We’ll get to that in a minute. It was called Reimagining WordPress Editing: How We Embedded Gutenberg Into Our Product Ecosystem. I might read some of the blurb in a little bit, but first of all, how did it go?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:37] Joshua Bryant: I think it went well.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:38] Nathan Wrigley: Good.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:39] Joshua Bryant: Yeah. I told the story in the presentation that I teach teenagers a lot. And it was a couple years ago, I’m in the middle of a lesson and I looked down and nobody’s paying attention to me because one of the students had gotten so bored, he had started ripping apart his styrofoam cup and he had been eating it. He was halfway through eating the cup. Halfway through my presentation, I look and nobody had done anything sort of like that. So I felt like the presentation went well, people were paying attention. That’s kind of my benchmark.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:08] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a good one.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:08] Joshua Bryant: I think I’ve gotten better.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:10] Nathan Wrigley: So here’s the blurb. And I won’t do it all, I’ll get maybe through the first paragraph and hopefully, dear listener, it’ll give you some context for what’s going to come in the next 40 minutes, half an hour or so.
\n\n\n\nWhat happens when you take the Gutenberg editor out of WordPress? This talk explores how we decouple the block editor from WP Admin and the Loop, embedding it in a standalone React application to power custom editorial workflows, while still saving to a traditional WordPress database.
\n\n\n\nNow there’s a lot in there. And I think that subject would be curious if it was just, you know, the mom and pop website, but the fact that you are actually dealing with, forgive me if I get this wrong, dowjones.com. I don’t know if it is dowjones.com, but it’s certainly the Dow Jones.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:50] Joshua Bryant: So Dow Jones as an entity, a fun fact, they no longer own the Dow Jones market. They sold it. But they do own a lot of publishing websites. So they own websites like the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Mansion Global. We’ve purchased more, I don’t know if I can say any of the other names right now, but we own all of those entities and so they are on a Multisite.
\n\n\n\nAnd so right now our publishing system, all of our editors publish from those websites in our WordPress Multisite environment. And all of that, we can talk about headless, but all of that actually goes into this all knowing database in the sky, where our front end systems pick them up. So WordPress itself doesn’t render wsj.com. We have a mobile team that does that. One way, we have a web team that does it a different way, and they all read from this all knowing database.
\n\n\n\nBut we use WordPress and our editors use it, we call it NewsPress, and we use it to publish all of our content. Our editors find it easy to use, and we like all of the features that WordPress offers. So we’ve leveraged the power of WordPress to do those things.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:03] Nathan Wrigley: Some of those names were really enormous entities. Did you say the Wall Street Journal, or?
\n\n\n\n[00:08:08] Joshua Bryant: Yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, these are ones that I’ve heard of and I don’t live in this country, so that’s pretty profound. So I guess they’ve got an incredible appetite for traffic, but also an incredible need to be there a hundred percent. Not this 99.8% of the time. This is 100% of the time, I’m guessing.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:26] Joshua Bryant: Right. And the topic that we’re going to talk about today, and it applies to all news, but when there’s breaking news, being first to market matters. Being 10 seconds ahead of your competitor when Taylor Swift gets engaged is an important amount of time when you’re sending out a push notification. Or in the case of MarketWatch, when there are going to be fluctuations in the market and we have editors listening in on board meetings, being able to send that information out and get that to our readers as soon as possible is the most important thing to our publications.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:59] Nathan Wrigley: So is this a project, or an infrastructure, let’s go with that, that you inherited or were you bought in to build this?
\n\n\n\n[00:09:06] Joshua Bryant: Both. In the most simple terms, I can explain it, we’ll say we have three systems. We have a React based planning tool. We have a WordPress editing tool, where we actually write the articles, save the content, control user permissions, lock and unlock posts. And then we have the front end that then takes what they publish and display it in any way that they need across all of our publications. So we have planning, editing and rendering. And those are three completely separate buckets that have been there for quite some time.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:43] Nathan Wrigley: So we’re at a WordPress event and we’re surrounded by WordPressers, so it is kind of a bit of a bubble that we’re in at the minute. Everybody in this hall, in this place, kind of would understand what you’ve just described. However, dear listener, hopefully I’m not besmirching you, but there’s going to be a bunch of people listening to this who, what you just said went completely over their head.
\n\n\n\nThey download WordPress, they pay a few dollars a month to pop it on a host that they believe is reliable, and they know there’s a database somewhere but they’re kind of using the front end. And that’s all that they need to concern themselves about. Just explain in more detail what you just said. This React, this editing and this front end. What even is that?
\n\n\n\n[00:10:20] Joshua Bryant: Right. I mean you can think of them as three separate applications on your phone. You might use one app, like your calendar, to plan things out. That’s what our planning tool is. It essentially lets us coordinate with each other and say, hey, we need to have a steady stream of stories. And we also want to attach, our photographers are going to put some images in those stories, so we might add that to the calendar invite description. Those are the kind of things we do in the planning tool.
\n\n\n\nAnd then in the WordPress tool, it’s a lot like what anybody does in WordPress. We’re writing posts, we’re adding images, and in the case of the newsroom, they might do a couple things around SEO, and add some metadata that we want to show up on Google. And I think everybody should be familiar with creating posts.
\n\n\n\nAnd then a completely different system picks it up and says, okay, I’m going to show everybody what it looks like. And that part is not really important because that’s the headless part. But you don’t really need to understand that there’s another system that does this thing differently, to understand what we’re going to talk about as far as, we moved our editor into, let’s say, a very simplified tool.
\n\n\n\nOne example that I like to think about is, when we have done this project, we did it very specifically for the newsroom’s needs. So we tailored it very, very specifically. But I like to think of the applications of, I like to collect people who have great quotes. When I hear a great quote, I’m like, oh, I need to write that down. I don’t want to forget it. I like to think of it as, I want to pull up something like Twitter or Bluesky, and I want to just type in a field, hit send, and then it publishes a post on my WordPress dashboard. It’s a custom post that says, here’s a notable tweet. And it posted it.
\n\n\n\nThat way I don’t lose that and I can have it in my WordPress, which is where I keep most of like, I keep my recipes, and my notes, and my blogs, and everything that I want to remember. It’s like my personal online notebook. But now we’ve created a mechanism where we can kind of take that and extend it anywhere we want outside of just the WP Editor, and be able to pull something up and say, hey, there’s a different application. You type it in, you hit send, and then it all runs through WordPress itself.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:48] Nathan Wrigley: What are the reasons why that needed to be done? So just sort of going backwards a bit, really. Obviously that is what is possible, but why is just a default version of WordPress on red hot hosting not something that is suitable in this situation? What affordances does it get you? What performance does it buy you? What UI does it allow you to create that makes this possible? And I think you said you built your own proprietary system. What did you call it, press news or news?
\n\n\n\n[00:13:15] Joshua Bryant: NewsPress.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:15] Nathan Wrigley: NewsPress, sorry. Wrong way around. So, why? What are the limitations in WordPress that were unignorable that required this?
\n\n\n\n[00:13:22] Joshua Bryant: I don’t think there were necessarily limitations. We are talking about shaving seconds off the editor process. And so there are a lot of things in our WordPress system that we want editors to do before they publish a normal article. We want them to have certain SEO titles listed. We want them to have fallback images for headline videos. We are okay with the way everything operates inside of WordPress, but we’re talking about shaving seconds off by putting it, first of all, in a tool that the editors are already in. They’re planning their day, they’re planning their month in the planning tool. And it’s a single page application. There’s no page reload. It’s all in React. There’s no calling a database that we have to worry about.
\n\n\n\nWe’re literally just pulling up the Gutenberg editor, typing out a breaking news or a market watch, we call them pulse, some update that we need to get to our readers. And if there’s a bunch of information that comes in, we need to be able to hit 10 posts with as limited information as possible and get it to publish all the way to the front end, and do 10 in a row as quickly as possible.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:37] Nathan Wrigley: So the raison d’etre there then is time. It’s all about shaving seconds off because in the industry that you are in, if you’re five seconds late, you might as well not publish.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:46] Joshua Bryant: Right. It’s time, and it’s also distraction for our editors. They don’t have the full editor experience anymore. They don’t have the sidebar, and all the tabs because we have a lot of stuff in our editor.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so in this three step process where you’ve got the React, and we’ll talk about ripping out Gutenberg and pushing it to this React app in a minute. But we’ve got the React app where the planning is done, then presumably when the planning is finished, and I’m going to use the word publish, maybe it’s not publish, but you hit a button, presumably that pushes it down the funnel towards the WordPress install, which then pushes it to the front end. So there’s this kind of like one way cycle.
\n\n\n\nBut the idea of the React, Gutenberg bit is that it’s fast, really fast and distraction free. There’s just no clutter. It’s just, you’re familiar with that interface. Because with the best one in the world, WordPress, there’s a lot of things going on. When you click publish, quite a lot can happen at that moment. You don’t want any of that. You just want publish. Boom. Done.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:39] Joshua Bryant: Right.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So you’ve pulled the Gutenberg editor out of WordPress. And, okay, I think it’s important at this point to say, Gutenberg is an open source project. We’re mostly familiar with it sitting inside of WordPress, but it doesn’t belong there. And you’ve put it inside of this React app. How have you customised it to get it there, and what have you stripped out, what have you added in?
\n\n\n\n[00:16:01] Joshua Bryant: Yeah, great question because part of the reason we decided to continue to use Gutenberg instead of some other React tool is that we’ve already invested so much time and effort into the business logic around our custom plugins and around the workflow, and we’ve put so much into our WordPress environment that we asked ourselves, how can we maintain all the equity we have in WordPress and leverage the power of WordPress, but put it in a slightly different place where we can take care of all of our editor’s needs? And so that was really the driving factor behind, okay, we’re going to move it here, but we still want all the things we have there.
\n\n\n\nAnd so what we did is we limited the number of blocks. While we might have most of the Core blocks in our regular editor, we have the paragraph and list block in our planning.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:01] Nathan Wrigley: That’s it?
\n\n\n\n[00:17:01] Joshua Bryant: Yeah, because that’s all we needed. That’s all we needed. And we have a couple custom plugins that we’ve moved into our planning tool. For instance, in MarketWatch, if you’re writing a story about Target, you’re going to want to tag the Target company, and we call it tickers, the stock tickers. And that lets our front end know, hey, this is a story about Target, let’s put the real time stock ticker information into this article, so it’s not like, when I wrote it a week ago, this is what the the stock ticker looked like.
\n\n\n\nIt’s, when I’m looking at it right now, this is the real time stock ticker data. We put a lot of time and effort into building that plugin for WordPress, and so we wanted to find a way to not have to rewrite any of that code, not have to redo any of that work, but take what we’ve already done and just move it to the planning tool and have it work in both locations in the same code base.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:55] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m just trying to understand what that looks like. So let’s say that I’m in this planning tool. Somehow I get to that planning tool. I don’t know where it lives, whether I’m on a desktop or a website, or an application which lives on Mac OS. I don’t know. I probably don’t need to know, but I’m in it. And it looks like Gutenberg, yeah? I mean it is Gutenberg. Everything’s the same, except you’ve got this tiny limited arrangement of blocks. So paragraph, list, and then a couple of others, bespoke ones which you obviously need.
\n\n\n\nSo what happens then when I’m doing that planning and then I click, I’m going to use publish again, I don’t know if you’ve overhauled the UI to make it something else, but let’s click publish. What happens at that moment? Where does that go? And how does it fit into the whole flow that we talked about?
\n\n\n\n[00:18:36] Joshua Bryant: Right. So everything that you do in a normal WordPress editor, you can also do using this thing called the REST API. And they’re just endpoints that exist that you can call to do things like lock a post, save a post, publish a post. And so when we do anything like that inside of our planning tool and we hit publish, it just hits this backend location that says, hey, post number 1, 2, 3, I want you to do what you normally do WordPress, and publish that post for me. And it doesn’t have to load anything inside of WordPress, it just hits that endpoint and WordPress says, well, I know how to publish. Okay, I’m going to publish.
\n\n\n\nAnd we didn’t have to load the page, we didn’t have to hit the WP Admin. It just skips all those steps and says, okay, I’ll publish for you. And then that sends it off downstream and they all do their thing. So it’s essentially the same, we just skip some steps.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So again, just to emphasise, the whole point of that was to save time.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:39] Joshua Bryant: Yes.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:39] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating. That’s fascinating that time is such an important commodity. I’ve never come across a scenario, I mean I just don’t live in that world. I don’t have a scenario in my head where the amount of time it takes to hit publish and wait for WordPress to do its checks and balances and what have you, or load it up and all of that. But those few moments is important enough.
\n\n\n\nSo you build the React app, it looks like Gutenberg, you hit publish via the REST API, it goes to WordPress, but it misses out all the intermediary things that may happen, and we can get into that in a minute. And then it just hits, it just publishes it immediately.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:15] Joshua Bryant: Right.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:15] Nathan Wrigley: That is fascinating.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:16] Joshua Bryant: And the great thing about keeping WordPress in the loop there is that if there’s a breaking news article, we do as rapidly as we can. We’re going to publish that article. But now it exists in the WordPress database, and we can go back to it and do all of the things that we normally do, but it’s already published.
\n\n\n\nSo it’s out there, but now we can go and, just like the regular WordPress editor, we can add images, we can add SEO data, we can do all of those things we’d normally do. We can post updates, but the post is already out there. So we’re no longer in a rush, but we still are going to make that story more robust.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:53] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m just trying to be clear, because in your, the blurb for your presentation, you used this phrase, which was custom editorial workflows. I think we just went through that. So React app, WordPress, it gets published, we’re on the front end. But then at that moment, any modifications, let’s say, I don’t know, there’s an update, somebody has to modify something about it. At this point, you’re in the middle step. You’re going to the regular WordPress site and you’re updating it in there. Have I got that right? You’re not back the first step.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:20] Joshua Bryant: Right. We’re doing all of that in the planning tool. And then if you’ve been to some of our websites or I think any news website, you’ll see, last updated, and it’ll give you a timestamp. That’s when you get that notification that, hey, this has been updated. It’s because we’ve gone back into WordPress and we’ve added more information that our readers are going to find interesting or important. And we sent it down and there it goes again. Version two is out.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:45] Nathan Wrigley: Is this kind of standard practice in the journalism industry to have something akin to this because time’s so important? Or is it something of an affordance that you can have because those publications are already so successful?
\n\n\n\nBecause I’m imagining it’s not all that cheap to put that together and maintain. Presumably there’s got to be developers surrounding it all the time and making sure it’s updated and kept alive. So I was just curious as to whether or not this is typical or something that you think is pretty unique.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:13] Joshua Bryant: Well, I’ll tell you this. This is the first time ever in my career that I have tried to Google things and got zero results. So I don’t think that it happens a lot. I think it’s pretty unique. I know our parent company, they own a bunch of other publishing corporations and none of them have done anything like this either. I think this is something that we pioneered and that it’s great, it was very unfortunate for me to try to figure it out.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:38] Nathan Wrigley: Were there headaches along the way? Was it really quite a challenge? Have you learned things which other people listening to this podcast, they may think, okay, I need to talk to Joshua. I have a similar crisis on my hands. Was there a lot of learning along the way?
\n\n\n\n[00:22:51] Joshua Bryant: I think the main thing that I learned was that WordPress has a lot of really good documentation for using it the way that it should be used.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:01] Nathan Wrigley: The normal way.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:02] Joshua Bryant: Yes. And so if you want to learn how to use WordPress, the documentation’s great. If you want to learn how to misuse WordPress, there is not a lot of good documentation out there. And you’re going to have to read a lot of Trac tickets and GitHub issues and Slack threads and, you know, read through the code.
\n\n\n\nAnd so, yeah, I will say that, pro, WordPress, great at documenting, but if you’re going to do something out of the box like this, you’re going to have to find those alternate sources of documentation, which is just, and how they built it. That was a good lesson and a good learning curve. And I learned a lot about the contributor process through that.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh yeah, I’m sure you did. Did it deliver, or does it deliver in the way that was anticipated at the planning state? So when the stakeholders were sat down and the green light was given to this project, did it come out exactly as expected, or were there things where suddenly you figured, oh, we cannot do this particular thing? Maybe it worked out better than you had originally intended.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:00] Joshua Bryant: Yeah, so actually, we rolled it out for MarketWatch first and it worked, and they have not complained, at least to me about it. But it was so good that they rolled it out to wsj.com next, and we developed it in such a way that it would be very extendable. And when they rolled it out to wsj, I didn’t know about it. So it really was a seamless transition. Now we have two of our biggest newsrooms using it, and I think we’re going to roll it out to Baron’s next. I don’t anticipate having to do any work for that either.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:32] Nathan Wrigley: I find this so curious. I think you maybe made yourself fairly indispensable.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:37] Joshua Bryant: I wouldn’t go that far.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:38] Nathan Wrigley: It certainly sounds it. So let’s get into the sort of technical bits and pieces about it, because I’m reading, cribbing from my notes here. You mentioned in the talk, simulating the global WP Object. And whilst that sounds interesting and is no doubt complicated, what are the critical components of the doing that? How did you replicate it? What was the biggest challenge? Stripping out the editor and making it work somewhere else.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:59] Joshua Bryant: Well, that’s one of the great things that I learned about the way WordPress works behind the scenes. When you’re building plugins, you import a lot of WordPress packages that do very specific things. And my assumption was always, when I build my code, it’s putting all of those packages into the code in one file and then ships it to my website. And that’s how it works.
\n\n\n\nThat’s not exactly how it works. The bundle process for WordPress actually pulls all of those scripts out for speed and efficiency. You don’t want 20 plugins to have 20 different versions of the same code. And so they’ve pulled all of that out and it just uses one version of that code. Whatever version of WordPress you’re on, if I’m on six three, it’s going to run the six three version of all of the scripts.
\n\n\n\nAnd so when we moved our code over into the planning tool, there is no six three in React. It doesn’t know that these scripts are supposed to be there, and so it was referencing this global object, this Global WP. And if you’re familiar with doing things in the console, it’s, you type wp.data.select Core Editor, and you get a bunch of stuff back, right? It doesn’t exist in React or in Gutenberg. And so that was our first hurdle.
\n\n\n\nWhat WordPress is doing for us, building this object that all the code runs through, we’re going to have to manually do in React. We’re going to have to import those packages and set them at the global namespace level just so that the WordPress code will run.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:38] Nathan Wrigley: And how challenging was that?
\n\n\n\n[00:26:40] Joshua Bryant: Well, discovering it was the challenge. Implementing it was the easy part. We went through many iterations of, why is it not working? How will it not communicate? Before we realised that WordPress is doing this for us. And then once we had that realisation, the implementation was rather simple.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:59] Nathan Wrigley: To me, that would’ve been quite a frustrating process. Going backwards and forwards there. Why isn’t it working? Why isn’t it working? And then sort of suddenly realise, oh, it’s not working because, as you’ve just described. Yeah, that’s really interesting.
\n\n\n\nBut you are happy that you went through that process. There’s no bit at which you thought, okay, we’re backing out. We’re not going to use WordPress. We’re going to use some sort of custom CMS that you can buy off the shelf, any of that.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:22] Joshua Bryant: Right. Oh yeah. I mean, if you had asked me a week into my back and forth, I would’ve said no. And it gives me a deeper understanding of WordPress too, and a deeper appreciation for the decisions that the contributors made when they built it to make it efficient. I never thought about how the WP build process helps developers build efficient websites, even if they don’t really know what’s going on. You type in WP scripts build, and then a lot of things happen. But the developers don’t need to know everything that happens. It just happens. And that’s great for developers.
\n\n\n\nBut when I went that step further and I’m like, why is this happening? I went down the rabbit trail of figuring out what does WP scripts build do, and how can I break it? I want to do something else with it. And then coming all the way back to realising, no, they’re doing it the right way, the good way. And now that I understand what it does, I can design our system to be in alignment with that.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it sounds like you kind of went full circle there.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:28] Joshua Bryant: Oh, I did.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really interesting.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:30] Joshua Bryant: Circle, spiral.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah, I’m sure there was a few spirals. So without giving anything away, how do your stakeholders that need to be a part of the first stage, the planning tool, how do they get to that? Can they access that with their phones? Can they access that with their desktop? How do they interact with that?
\n\n\n\n[00:28:46] Joshua Bryant: Yes, two things are important for us. We want to be able to access it in the office, on a desktop, plan out things. But we also want our reporters to be able to give us breaking news in the field, wherever they are.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:01] Nathan Wrigley: Right. That was where I was going with that, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:03] Joshua Bryant: Right. And so that is one driving factor for the decisions that we make when we make these design decisions, and make these application decisions. We need to remove as many barriers from our editors to publishing.
\n\n\n\nAnd sometimes that’s, how can we reduce the number of clicks to get a full fledged story out the door? Or it’s, how do we make this work with as few distractions as possible on a mobile phone when somebody’s sitting in the back of a boardroom?
\n\n\n\n[00:29:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So available on everything, everywhere. Where there’s an internet connection, you can get to this.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:37] Joshua Bryant: Yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. One of the curious things, and again, we’re going to go into the technical details here, so forgive me if this question is misplaced, because you specifically mentioned replacing Core / Editor with Core / Block Editor. I’m not really familiar with what that distinction is, but the fact that you mentioned that kind of gave me an intuition that there was something there. So why was that important? And you are going to have to go slightly gently on me cause I don’t really understand.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:01] Joshua Bryant: I will gently wade into the weeds here. When we’re building custom blocks in our process here, a lot of times we use the data stores. And there’s an editor data store, and a block editor data store. What does that look like in the WP admin? When you pull up a post the block inserter, when you hit the plus on the top left, or you hit add, all of the blocks that show up, that’s one part of the Gutenberg editor.
\n\n\n\nThe big chunk in the middle is the second part where you do all your typing, you put your post, you add your images. And then the sidebar on the right, where you make adjustments, is the third part. All three of those components are the Block Editor. Everything that exists outside of that is the broader editor. Think of that as like a giant wrapper around the entire thing. That has like the save button, the publish button. It has information about the post and all of its attributes.
\n\n\n\nAnd so it has much more information. The Block Editor just needs to know what blocks exist on the page. The Editor needs to know about a much broader context inside of WordPress. When we moved the Editor, we moved the Block Editor. So the save button isn’t there. We’re not using that. We wrote our own save button that hits the API.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:23] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just pause you there? So when you say the Block Editor, you are describing the three things. The panel on the left, the central area where you create the content, and the sidebar on the right, if you like, where the settings for those might be. But not the wrapper.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:36] Joshua Bryant: Right. And we actually went one step further and said, we don’t need the left or the right. We just need the part in the middle. We want to make it as distraction free as possible and move it over. So we have the option to put the sidebar there, and the sidebar works, but we have chosen as a business decision, we don’t want it.
\n\n\n\nAnd since we’re headless, whether they change the font or the colour, none of that actually affects our front end. We don’t want editors to be able to bold and italicise and make all the text red that they think is important because they would go crazy. They think all my text is important.
\n\n\n\nSo yeah, we moved all of just that middle piece, just that Block Editor is what we moved over. And we have a save button, and a publish button that don’t interact with the WordPress Editor, they interact with the WordPress API.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:28] Nathan Wrigley: The REST API pushing it to the regular WordPress site. Okay, and again, just harking back to what you mentioned a moment ago, when we began this conversation, I was imagining a different thing. I was imagining that you pulled the Block Editor in its entirety out. So I’ve learned something there. So this is just that content creation area.
\n\n\n\nAnd by stripping out the left, and the right, and the publish and all of those things, that’s where the time saving comes, is it? Is that where the few seconds can be shaved off because it’s the bare bones of what it requires to create some text on a screen.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:00] Joshua Bryant: Yes, exactly. Because a lot of times it’s headline, paragraph, send. That’s it for the first iteration of that article.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:07] Nathan Wrigley: So one of the questions that I had, which now appears to be not necessary, but I’m going to ask it anyway. I was asking about things like, for example, manually editing the content that you would make in the React app, undoing things, history, and so on. That’s not really what’s going on. You’re doing it this one time in the React app, then everything after that is happening in the WordPress website.
\n\n\n\nSo the history and everything is stored in the regular way, the bolding, the italicising, the, I want to make it red, that’s all done posthumously after the fact, once it’s been published, or at least shunted via the REST API to the WordPress, you know, the database, the regular WordPress website. So that all happens there. The amendments happen there.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:49] Joshua Bryant: Right. And we still have access to all of the toolbar options. So if you want to add a link, you would do it the exact same way that you add a link in your WordPress post. So we have some of that available to us, but we’ve locked it down. Not because it won’t work, but because we don’t want it to be a distraction for our editors.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:09] Nathan Wrigley: So is there any type of content that, I’m trying to imagine a scenario where, presumably not everybody needs the React app. So for example, if I’m writing a piece about, I don’t know, gardening or something, you know, it’s really not time sensitive. I could write this next year and it’s just as important, or a recipe or something like that. Do I need to be in the React app? Or is that just for the kind of, the journalists out in the field who need things quick? So have you got like this two tier system of editing, the, I need it extra, specially quick, you are in React, but the gardening post is just done as a regular post?
\n\n\n\n[00:34:41] Joshua Bryant: Yes. And that’s the majority of our posts, are all regular posts, and they’ve had time to plan it out and gather their assets, which they do in the planning tool, and all of that information syncs over to WordPress. But they don’t do any editing other than our breaking news.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. It’s the breaking news React app then basically.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:01] Joshua Bryant: Yes.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s curious. Sorry, this is sort of sidestepping slightly. So they just create text. They create text and lists and that’s it. Paragraphs and lists. That’s all they’ve got. And when they hit the REST API, does it publish automatically or do they hit some other editorial workflow where somebody more senior gets to look at it? Because I’m guessing in this scenario where Taylor Swift got married, you just want to go straight to front end.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:28] Joshua Bryant: Yeah. It goes straight to the front end. They have a paragraph and list, that’s for the core, but they also have some of our proprietary plugins that, like we have a correction, and we have a ticker inserter, and there are a couple ones that we moved over, like our byline. We have a author database, and so they can say, hey, I wrote this. And so that’s a block that we wrote, and it works in WordPress and it also works in the planning tool, but it’s very limited what they can do because that’s all they needed. So we said we’ll strip everything else out.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:00] Nathan Wrigley: Is it a common workflow then where the same author who’s written this really time sensitive piece will hit publish over there, it goes from React app, REST API, to WordPress, to the front end? They would then almost immediately, do they at that point let go of it or do they then almost immediately go back to the WordPress website and think, actually, do you know what, I do want that bit bold, I would like to underline that? So yeah, I’m just curious what that workflow looks like.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:26] Joshua Bryant: I think it depends on the situation. And so in one case, while it is a breaking news story, as long as we don’t convert it to a full article, we can make updates in the planning tool. So he can go back, we can edit that and say, well, I wanted it bold, I’m going to do it in the planning tool. But if you wanted to, you could also do it in the WordPress environment. When we say convert to an article, we mean, this was breaking news, but I’m going to click a button and that’s going to let other editors know, we’re about to make this a full fledged article.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:56] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:57] Joshua Bryant: Yeah. Because a lot of times we have multiple editors working on the same article. And so we need to be in coordination, especially around breaking news. Hey, this is happening right now. I’ve pushed it out. I’m going to pass this off to you. Can you go in? Hopefully there are no typos, but fix any typos, or change the headline, or add SEO data. So they really work as a team, especially around breaking news and then pass that off to other editors.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess because you’re in the weeds of this, it’s so self-evident what this workflow is. It’s just for me, it’s so curious that there’s all these interesting little steps, and behind it all is this desire to save seconds. And it really is absolutely, this is nothing like a WordPress site that I’ve come across in the past. Hope you’ll forgive my ignorance for keeping asking the same kind of question. But I find that really fascinating.
\n\n\n\nSo the gardening post is done on the website, the important timely post is done in the React app, and yet there’s a convert to, I don’t know, regular content or something like that, button that an editor can go in and, yeah, it’s wheels within wheels. It’s absolutely fascinating.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:01] Joshua Bryant: Yes. This is why I said earlier, there were so many business rules and so much time spent into building our WordPress system that we didn’t consider another tool very seriously. Because we have so much invested in there, and there’s so much power in the WordPress system that we’ve, first of all out of the box, but second, what we’ve built on top of it that we said, we need to leverage this in this use case here.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Honestly, I think we could probably spend all day talking about this, but we probably should move on.
\n\n\n\nI’m curious as to whether any of this knowledge that you’ve acquired building this, because I know that in the WordPress community, most people don’t do headless, but there is a hardcore of people like you who just love this stuff.
\n\n\n\nAnd I’m just curious as to whether the knowledge that you’ve gained in the building of this, whether or not any of that gets put back into the open source project, whether there’s a commitment on your side, on the Dow Jones side to make this available, to open up a repo, to give away the content, the way that you’ve done it, the knowledge that you’ve acquired along the way?
\n\n\n\n[00:39:02] Joshua Bryant: Yeah, I think that is ultimately my goal. I started a repo just to show how we moved Gutenberg. There’s a lot of proprietary stuff that I had to take out of there. This is just my repo at this point. It’s lacking a lot of the, how do you get a custom block to work over there, at this point? I want to continue to add to that, but I think I’m also considering what, does this do for the broader WordPress community? How can this be applied to help Core, or to help contractors, or to help people who have a lot of clients.
\n\n\n\nOne thing I’ve thought about is, if we have clients who may be difficult, right? I think we’ve all run into people at one point or another that said, I don’t like WordPress. I’ve heard the word React. I want React. People say, React is cool, right? Or I want a Vue project, or I want it to look like this. I don’t want to go to WordPress backend.
\n\n\n\nThis is opening up a whole different set of opportunities where we can say, okay, I’m going to throw together, I’m going to vibe code, which I hate, but I want to vibe code a one page React application, and rely on the WordPress API to give me database, to give me user management, post saves, revision history. You can use WordPress as its own complete system and then just slap React on top of it, and have the full Gutenberg editing experience and save all of your information and still do all the things that you know how to do in WordPress, and your client’s happy and they don’t know anything about it.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:38] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of like WordPress without the WordPress. It’s the look and feel of WordPress without the overhead of WordPress.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:43] Joshua Bryant: It’s the power of WordPress. And what I say is the power of WordPress at the speed of breaking news. But it’s the power of WordPress at whatever the client wants. And so if they want one thing, you can give it to them there. And if you have a lot of clients and you have people spinning up different interfaces, maybe it’s React, it’s Vue. You have eight different clients, you can put them all into one Multisite and you can use WordPress as the backend for all of them. And each application looks completely different, tailored to those needs, and it all just goes through the same old WordPress functionality.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess that the way the interface looks is kind of the key bit there. You could make it look like Gutenberg, you could make it look nothing like Gutenberg. It could be anything that you liked. Simple, complicated, whatever.
\n\n\n\nI’m guessing this is really enterprise stuff, though. I don’t think we’re ever going to be straying into, I don’t know, I’ve got a dog walking service and I would like to offer that in my town of 3,000 people. We’re not for that. This is kind of enterprise, publishing, big pharma, that kind of thing.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:46] Joshua Bryant: Enterprise or people who deal with a lot of particular clients. Or people who want to build something cool for themselves, like I want to collect quotes when I hear them. I might build that application so that I can just pull up my phone, send out something like a tweet. I can say, Nathan Wrigley said this. It was really cool. Send. And now it’s a custom post type on my website called notable quotes, and it’s just your quote attribution.
\n\n\n\n[00:42:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. I guess the beauty of the open source project, and thank you for honoring the commitment there, hopefully we’ll get the knowledge distributed, is that the first time around you doing it, it would’ve been very expensive because you’re a developer, your time is valuable. So presumably all of that got wrapped into this project. The company that you are working for could afford that. But maybe now it’s going to be a slightly easier bridge to cross. And I guess communicating with you might make that a little bit easier. I don’t mean to open up your calendar or anything, but would you potentially make yourself available through email or Slack or whatever? And if that’s the case, where would people find you?
\n\n\n\n[00:42:54] Joshua Bryant: Of course. I would say that I would love to pass this off. I try to tell myself, when I do something new, I always say, this is going to be the worst it ever is. And so when I’m looking at this, I see a lot of potential, but I also realise that this state that we’re in right now is the worst this idea is ever going to be. And I would love for people to come and make it better, and tell me what I did wrong and tell me what I can do better. And to say, but what if we did this instead? And that’s the beauty of open source. We want to see it grow. We want to see all of the possibilities that we can do with this.
\n\n\n\nAnd so please, first of all, take it, run with it, make it better. And second of all, yes, I’d be glad to meet and talk with anybody about it. And if I could save somebody the two week spiral, or the two week loop, I would love to do that as well. So yeah, I will absolutely make myself available.
\n\n\n\n[00:43:47] Nathan Wrigley: Where can you be found? What’s the best place to find you?
\n\n\n\n[00:43:50] Joshua Bryant: The best place to find me would probably be at my personal email address, which is j b r y a 0 2 9 at gmail dot com. And that is a carryover from my college years, so it’s a little weird, but it’ll work.
\n\n\n\n[00:44:06] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll make sure not to put that into the text on the WP Tavern website, but it’s in the audio now, so hopefully people can find it. Anything that we’ve talked about, if I can find a link to it, I will put that in. So listeners, head over to wptavern.com, search for the episode of Joshua Bryant. That’s Joshua, J-O-S-H-U-A and Bryant, B-R-Y-A-N-T. Search over there and you will find all of the bits and pieces.
\n\n\n\nI’ll link to the presentation that Joshua gave at WordCamp US, and maybe that’ll be on WordPress TV by the time you come to consume this. Anything else that Joshua wants to send me, I’ll put on there as well. So, Joshua Bryant, thank you for shepherding me through something that was much harder to understand than I’m capable of. So thank you so much.
\n\n\n\n[00:44:49] Joshua Bryant: No, thank you. You ask great questions and I appreciate it.
\nSo on the podcast today we have Joshua Bryant.
\n\n\n\nJoshua works at Dow Jones, helping power some of the world\u2019s largest publishing sites, including the Wall Street Journal, Barron\u2019s, and MarketWatch, all on a WordPress multisite platform. His background with WordPress started, as it does for many, by inheriting a site and slowly peeling back the layers of what the CMS can do, from page building to infrastructure and custom workflows.
\n\n\n\nAt WordCamp US, he delivered a presentation called \u201cReimagining WordPress Editing: How We Embedded Gutenberg Into Our Product Ecosystem\u201d which digs into how his team decoupled the Gutenberg block editor from WP Admin and embedded it in a standalone React application, all while keeping content stored in a traditional WordPress database.
\n\n\n\nThis episode is a journey into why time, down to the second, matters in the publishing world, and how \u201cheadless\u201d solutions can address those needs. Joshua explains how editorial workflows were rebuilt so that breaking news can be published or updated with lightning fast speeds, removing distractions and page reloads for editors while retaining the full power and extensibility of WordPress behind the scenes.
\n\n\n\nWe talk through the technical architecture: planning, editing, and rendering are split into separate applications, with Gutenberg, customised down to just two or three essential blocks, living outside the typical WordPress environment. Joshua talks about the challenge of simulating the global WP object, keeping business logic and proprietary plugins intact, and interacting with the REST API for instantaneous content publishing.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re interested in headless WordPress, editorial workflows at scale, or how enterprise newsrooms leverage open-source tech for real-world speed, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nReimagining WordPress Editing: How We Embedded Gutenberg Into Our Product Ecosystem – Joshua’s presentation at WordCamp US 2025
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "content_text": "Transcription\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how Dow Jones is supercharging WordPress editorial workflows.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Joshua Bryant. Joshua works at Dow Jones, helping power some of the world’s largest publishing sites, including the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and MarketWatch, all on a WordPress Multisite platform.\n\n\n\nHis background with WordPress started, as it does for so many, by inheriting a site and slowly peeling back the layers of what the CMS can do, from page building to infrastructure and custom workflows.\n\n\n\nAt Word Camp US, he delivered a presentation called Reimagining WordPress Editing: How We Embedded Gutenberg Into Our Product Ecosystem, which digs into how his team decoupled the Gutenberg block editor from WP Admin. And embedded it in a standalone React application, all while keeping content stored in a traditional WordPress database.\n\n\n\nThis episode is a journey into why time, down to the second, matters in the publishing world, and how headless solutions can address those needs.\n\n\n\nJoshua explains how editorial workflows were rebuilt so that breaking news can be published, or updated, with lightning fast speeds, removing distractions and page reloads for editors, while retaining the full power and extensibility of WordPress behind the scenes.\n\n\n\nWe talk through the technical architecture, planning, editing, and rendering are split into separate applications with Gutenberg customized down to just two or three essential blocks, living outside the typical WordPress environment.\n\n\n\nJoshua talks about the challenge of simulating the global WP object, keeping business logic and proprietary plugins intact, and interacting with the rest API for Instantaneous content publishing.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in headless WordPress, editorial workflows at scale, or how Enterprise newsrooms leverage open source tech for real world speed, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Joshua Bryant.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Joshua Bryant. Hello.\n\n\n\n[00:03:25] Joshua Bryant: Hi.\n\n\n\n[00:03:26] Nathan Wrigley: Nice to meet you. This is the first time that we’ve ever met. We’re going to be talking today about, well, the Dow Jones website, but also about headless, I guess is probably the best way to sum it up. So strap in. This is going to be a tinfoil hat episode. I am also going to say at the beginning that this is an episode for which I am supremely unqualified. So I hope that you are going to be able to shepherd me and call me out when I ask a silly question. So let’s hope for the best.\n\n\n\nThe reason that I’ve got you on is because headless is an interesting subject, there’s that, but also the fact that it’s Dow Jones that you are dealing with, and the profound importance of that. The fact that, of all the websites I can imagine, there’s not many which have that requirement to be alive a hundred percent of the time. So that whole piece is going to fit in as well.\n\n\n\nBefore we get into that, would you mind just telling us a bit about you? I mean, we know where you work now, but other than that, tell us about your experience with WordPress and so on.\n\n\n\n[00:04:18] Joshua Bryant: Right. So, I mean, I started, I think like most WordPress people started, I inherited a WordPress website knowing nothing about web development at all. And so I struggled my way through Googling, what is DNS? What does that even mean?\n\n\n\nAnd the WordPress offered me the opportunity to grow, and there’s always something new to learn. So from day one, I started learning about building pages, and then themes, and then plugins. And then I got a job where I was building themes and plugins. And then I got a job where I was really working on the infrastructure behind it.\n\n\n\nAs I continue to grow, I keep learning that there’s always another layer to WordPress. And I think I’m getting close to the bottom, but that’s what I thought every layer. So I did a little bit of contributing last year when I was here at WordCamp, and I’m just excited to keep growing and keep learning more about the power that we have in that WordPress environment.\n\n\n\n[00:05:18] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for that. So you’re at WordCamp US, obviously, you’re talking to me, we’re in the same room. Presentation that you did or doing?\n\n\n\n[00:05:26] Joshua Bryant: Did.\n\n\n\n[00:05:26] Nathan Wrigley: Did. We’ll get to that in a minute. It was called Reimagining WordPress Editing: How We Embedded Gutenberg Into Our Product Ecosystem. I might read some of the blurb in a little bit, but first of all, how did it go?\n\n\n\n[00:05:37] Joshua Bryant: I think it went well.\n\n\n\n[00:05:38] Nathan Wrigley: Good.\n\n\n\n[00:05:39] Joshua Bryant: Yeah. I told the story in the presentation that I teach teenagers a lot. And it was a couple years ago, I’m in the middle of a lesson and I looked down and nobody’s paying attention to me because one of the students had gotten so bored, he had started ripping apart his styrofoam cup and he had been eating it. He was halfway through eating the cup. Halfway through my presentation, I look and nobody had done anything sort of like that. So I felt like the presentation went well, people were paying attention. That’s kind of my benchmark.\n\n\n\n[00:06:08] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a good one.\n\n\n\n[00:06:08] Joshua Bryant: I think I’ve gotten better.\n\n\n\n[00:06:10] Nathan Wrigley: So here’s the blurb. And I won’t do it all, I’ll get maybe through the first paragraph and hopefully, dear listener, it’ll give you some context for what’s going to come in the next 40 minutes, half an hour or so.\n\n\n\nWhat happens when you take the Gutenberg editor out of WordPress? This talk explores how we decouple the block editor from WP Admin and the Loop, embedding it in a standalone React application to power custom editorial workflows, while still saving to a traditional WordPress database.\n\n\n\nNow there’s a lot in there. And I think that subject would be curious if it was just, you know, the mom and pop website, but the fact that you are actually dealing with, forgive me if I get this wrong, dowjones.com. I don’t know if it is dowjones.com, but it’s certainly the Dow Jones.\n\n\n\n[00:06:50] Joshua Bryant: So Dow Jones as an entity, a fun fact, they no longer own the Dow Jones market. They sold it. But they do own a lot of publishing websites. So they own websites like the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Mansion Global. We’ve purchased more, I don’t know if I can say any of the other names right now, but we own all of those entities and so they are on a Multisite.\n\n\n\nAnd so right now our publishing system, all of our editors publish from those websites in our WordPress Multisite environment. And all of that, we can talk about headless, but all of that actually goes into this all knowing database in the sky, where our front end systems pick them up. So WordPress itself doesn’t render wsj.com. We have a mobile team that does that. One way, we have a web team that does it a different way, and they all read from this all knowing database.\n\n\n\nBut we use WordPress and our editors use it, we call it NewsPress, and we use it to publish all of our content. Our editors find it easy to use, and we like all of the features that WordPress offers. So we’ve leveraged the power of WordPress to do those things.\n\n\n\n[00:08:03] Nathan Wrigley: Some of those names were really enormous entities. Did you say the Wall Street Journal, or?\n\n\n\n[00:08:08] Joshua Bryant: Yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:08:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, these are ones that I’ve heard of and I don’t live in this country, so that’s pretty profound. So I guess they’ve got an incredible appetite for traffic, but also an incredible need to be there a hundred percent. Not this 99.8% of the time. This is 100% of the time, I’m guessing.\n\n\n\n[00:08:26] Joshua Bryant: Right. And the topic that we’re going to talk about today, and it applies to all news, but when there’s breaking news, being first to market matters. Being 10 seconds ahead of your competitor when Taylor Swift gets engaged is an important amount of time when you’re sending out a push notification. Or in the case of MarketWatch, when there are going to be fluctuations in the market and we have editors listening in on board meetings, being able to send that information out and get that to our readers as soon as possible is the most important thing to our publications.\n\n\n\n[00:08:59] Nathan Wrigley: So is this a project, or an infrastructure, let’s go with that, that you inherited or were you bought in to build this?\n\n\n\n[00:09:06] Joshua Bryant: Both. In the most simple terms, I can explain it, we’ll say we have three systems. We have a React based planning tool. We have a WordPress editing tool, where we actually write the articles, save the content, control user permissions, lock and unlock posts. And then we have the front end that then takes what they publish and display it in any way that they need across all of our publications. So we have planning, editing and rendering. And those are three completely separate buckets that have been there for quite some time.\n\n\n\n[00:09:43] Nathan Wrigley: So we’re at a WordPress event and we’re surrounded by WordPressers, so it is kind of a bit of a bubble that we’re in at the minute. Everybody in this hall, in this place, kind of would understand what you’ve just described. However, dear listener, hopefully I’m not besmirching you, but there’s going to be a bunch of people listening to this who, what you just said went completely over their head.\n\n\n\nThey download WordPress, they pay a few dollars a month to pop it on a host that they believe is reliable, and they know there’s a database somewhere but they’re kind of using the front end. And that’s all that they need to concern themselves about. Just explain in more detail what you just said. This React, this editing and this front end. What even is that?\n\n\n\n[00:10:20] Joshua Bryant: Right. I mean you can think of them as three separate applications on your phone. You might use one app, like your calendar, to plan things out. That’s what our planning tool is. It essentially lets us coordinate with each other and say, hey, we need to have a steady stream of stories. And we also want to attach, our photographers are going to put some images in those stories, so we might add that to the calendar invite description. Those are the kind of things we do in the planning tool.\n\n\n\nAnd then in the WordPress tool, it’s a lot like what anybody does in WordPress. We’re writing posts, we’re adding images, and in the case of the newsroom, they might do a couple things around SEO, and add some metadata that we want to show up on Google. And I think everybody should be familiar with creating posts.\n\n\n\nAnd then a completely different system picks it up and says, okay, I’m going to show everybody what it looks like. And that part is not really important because that’s the headless part. But you don’t really need to understand that there’s another system that does this thing differently, to understand what we’re going to talk about as far as, we moved our editor into, let’s say, a very simplified tool.\n\n\n\nOne example that I like to think about is, when we have done this project, we did it very specifically for the newsroom’s needs. So we tailored it very, very specifically. But I like to think of the applications of, I like to collect people who have great quotes. When I hear a great quote, I’m like, oh, I need to write that down. I don’t want to forget it. I like to think of it as, I want to pull up something like Twitter or Bluesky, and I want to just type in a field, hit send, and then it publishes a post on my WordPress dashboard. It’s a custom post that says, here’s a notable tweet. And it posted it.\n\n\n\nThat way I don’t lose that and I can have it in my WordPress, which is where I keep most of like, I keep my recipes, and my notes, and my blogs, and everything that I want to remember. It’s like my personal online notebook. But now we’ve created a mechanism where we can kind of take that and extend it anywhere we want outside of just the WP Editor, and be able to pull something up and say, hey, there’s a different application. You type it in, you hit send, and then it all runs through WordPress itself.\n\n\n\n[00:12:48] Nathan Wrigley: What are the reasons why that needed to be done? So just sort of going backwards a bit, really. Obviously that is what is possible, but why is just a default version of WordPress on red hot hosting not something that is suitable in this situation? What affordances does it get you? What performance does it buy you? What UI does it allow you to create that makes this possible? And I think you said you built your own proprietary system. What did you call it, press news or news?\n\n\n\n[00:13:15] Joshua Bryant: NewsPress.\n\n\n\n[00:13:15] Nathan Wrigley: NewsPress, sorry. Wrong way around. So, why? What are the limitations in WordPress that were unignorable that required this?\n\n\n\n[00:13:22] Joshua Bryant: I don’t think there were necessarily limitations. We are talking about shaving seconds off the editor process. And so there are a lot of things in our WordPress system that we want editors to do before they publish a normal article. We want them to have certain SEO titles listed. We want them to have fallback images for headline videos. We are okay with the way everything operates inside of WordPress, but we’re talking about shaving seconds off by putting it, first of all, in a tool that the editors are already in. They’re planning their day, they’re planning their month in the planning tool. And it’s a single page application. There’s no page reload. It’s all in React. There’s no calling a database that we have to worry about.\n\n\n\nWe’re literally just pulling up the Gutenberg editor, typing out a breaking news or a market watch, we call them pulse, some update that we need to get to our readers. And if there’s a bunch of information that comes in, we need to be able to hit 10 posts with as limited information as possible and get it to publish all the way to the front end, and do 10 in a row as quickly as possible.\n\n\n\n[00:14:37] Nathan Wrigley: So the raison d’etre there then is time. It’s all about shaving seconds off because in the industry that you are in, if you’re five seconds late, you might as well not publish.\n\n\n\n[00:14:46] Joshua Bryant: Right. It’s time, and it’s also distraction for our editors. They don’t have the full editor experience anymore. They don’t have the sidebar, and all the tabs because we have a lot of stuff in our editor.\n\n\n\n[00:14:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so in this three step process where you’ve got the React, and we’ll talk about ripping out Gutenberg and pushing it to this React app in a minute. But we’ve got the React app where the planning is done, then presumably when the planning is finished, and I’m going to use the word publish, maybe it’s not publish, but you hit a button, presumably that pushes it down the funnel towards the WordPress install, which then pushes it to the front end. So there’s this kind of like one way cycle.\n\n\n\nBut the idea of the React, Gutenberg bit is that it’s fast, really fast and distraction free. There’s just no clutter. It’s just, you’re familiar with that interface. Because with the best one in the world, WordPress, there’s a lot of things going on. When you click publish, quite a lot can happen at that moment. You don’t want any of that. You just want publish. Boom. Done.\n\n\n\n[00:15:39] Joshua Bryant: Right.\n\n\n\n[00:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So you’ve pulled the Gutenberg editor out of WordPress. And, okay, I think it’s important at this point to say, Gutenberg is an open source project. We’re mostly familiar with it sitting inside of WordPress, but it doesn’t belong there. And you’ve put it inside of this React app. How have you customised it to get it there, and what have you stripped out, what have you added in?\n\n\n\n[00:16:01] Joshua Bryant: Yeah, great question because part of the reason we decided to continue to use Gutenberg instead of some other React tool is that we’ve already invested so much time and effort into the business logic around our custom plugins and around the workflow, and we’ve put so much into our WordPress environment that we asked ourselves, how can we maintain all the equity we have in WordPress and leverage the power of WordPress, but put it in a slightly different place where we can take care of all of our editor’s needs? And so that was really the driving factor behind, okay, we’re going to move it here, but we still want all the things we have there.\n\n\n\nAnd so what we did is we limited the number of blocks. While we might have most of the Core blocks in our regular editor, we have the paragraph and list block in our planning.\n\n\n\n[00:17:01] Nathan Wrigley: That’s it?\n\n\n\n[00:17:01] Joshua Bryant: Yeah, because that’s all we needed. That’s all we needed. And we have a couple custom plugins that we’ve moved into our planning tool. For instance, in MarketWatch, if you’re writing a story about Target, you’re going to want to tag the Target company, and we call it tickers, the stock tickers. And that lets our front end know, hey, this is a story about Target, let’s put the real time stock ticker information into this article, so it’s not like, when I wrote it a week ago, this is what the the stock ticker looked like.\n\n\n\nIt’s, when I’m looking at it right now, this is the real time stock ticker data. We put a lot of time and effort into building that plugin for WordPress, and so we wanted to find a way to not have to rewrite any of that code, not have to redo any of that work, but take what we’ve already done and just move it to the planning tool and have it work in both locations in the same code base.\n\n\n\n[00:17:55] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m just trying to understand what that looks like. So let’s say that I’m in this planning tool. Somehow I get to that planning tool. I don’t know where it lives, whether I’m on a desktop or a website, or an application which lives on Mac OS. I don’t know. I probably don’t need to know, but I’m in it. And it looks like Gutenberg, yeah? I mean it is Gutenberg. Everything’s the same, except you’ve got this tiny limited arrangement of blocks. So paragraph, list, and then a couple of others, bespoke ones which you obviously need.\n\n\n\nSo what happens then when I’m doing that planning and then I click, I’m going to use publish again, I don’t know if you’ve overhauled the UI to make it something else, but let’s click publish. What happens at that moment? Where does that go? And how does it fit into the whole flow that we talked about?\n\n\n\n[00:18:36] Joshua Bryant: Right. So everything that you do in a normal WordPress editor, you can also do using this thing called the REST API. And they’re just endpoints that exist that you can call to do things like lock a post, save a post, publish a post. And so when we do anything like that inside of our planning tool and we hit publish, it just hits this backend location that says, hey, post number 1, 2, 3, I want you to do what you normally do WordPress, and publish that post for me. And it doesn’t have to load anything inside of WordPress, it just hits that endpoint and WordPress says, well, I know how to publish. Okay, I’m going to publish.\n\n\n\nAnd we didn’t have to load the page, we didn’t have to hit the WP Admin. It just skips all those steps and says, okay, I’ll publish for you. And then that sends it off downstream and they all do their thing. So it’s essentially the same, we just skip some steps.\n\n\n\n[00:19:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So again, just to emphasise, the whole point of that was to save time.\n\n\n\n[00:19:39] Joshua Bryant: Yes.\n\n\n\n[00:19:39] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating. That’s fascinating that time is such an important commodity. I’ve never come across a scenario, I mean I just don’t live in that world. I don’t have a scenario in my head where the amount of time it takes to hit publish and wait for WordPress to do its checks and balances and what have you, or load it up and all of that. But those few moments is important enough.\n\n\n\nSo you build the React app, it looks like Gutenberg, you hit publish via the REST API, it goes to WordPress, but it misses out all the intermediary things that may happen, and we can get into that in a minute. And then it just hits, it just publishes it immediately.\n\n\n\n[00:20:15] Joshua Bryant: Right.\n\n\n\n[00:20:15] Nathan Wrigley: That is fascinating.\n\n\n\n[00:20:16] Joshua Bryant: And the great thing about keeping WordPress in the loop there is that if there’s a breaking news article, we do as rapidly as we can. We’re going to publish that article. But now it exists in the WordPress database, and we can go back to it and do all of the things that we normally do, but it’s already published.\n\n\n\nSo it’s out there, but now we can go and, just like the regular WordPress editor, we can add images, we can add SEO data, we can do all of those things we’d normally do. We can post updates, but the post is already out there. So we’re no longer in a rush, but we still are going to make that story more robust.\n\n\n\n[00:20:53] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m just trying to be clear, because in your, the blurb for your presentation, you used this phrase, which was custom editorial workflows. I think we just went through that. So React app, WordPress, it gets published, we’re on the front end. But then at that moment, any modifications, let’s say, I don’t know, there’s an update, somebody has to modify something about it. At this point, you’re in the middle step. You’re going to the regular WordPress site and you’re updating it in there. Have I got that right? You’re not back the first step.\n\n\n\n[00:21:20] Joshua Bryant: Right. We’re doing all of that in the planning tool. And then if you’ve been to some of our websites or I think any news website, you’ll see, last updated, and it’ll give you a timestamp. That’s when you get that notification that, hey, this has been updated. It’s because we’ve gone back into WordPress and we’ve added more information that our readers are going to find interesting or important. And we sent it down and there it goes again. Version two is out.\n\n\n\n[00:21:45] Nathan Wrigley: Is this kind of standard practice in the journalism industry to have something akin to this because time’s so important? Or is it something of an affordance that you can have because those publications are already so successful?\n\n\n\nBecause I’m imagining it’s not all that cheap to put that together and maintain. Presumably there’s got to be developers surrounding it all the time and making sure it’s updated and kept alive. So I was just curious as to whether or not this is typical or something that you think is pretty unique.\n\n\n\n[00:22:13] Joshua Bryant: Well, I’ll tell you this. This is the first time ever in my career that I have tried to Google things and got zero results. So I don’t think that it happens a lot. I think it’s pretty unique. I know our parent company, they own a bunch of other publishing corporations and none of them have done anything like this either. I think this is something that we pioneered and that it’s great, it was very unfortunate for me to try to figure it out.\n\n\n\n[00:22:38] Nathan Wrigley: Were there headaches along the way? Was it really quite a challenge? Have you learned things which other people listening to this podcast, they may think, okay, I need to talk to Joshua. I have a similar crisis on my hands. Was there a lot of learning along the way?\n\n\n\n[00:22:51] Joshua Bryant: I think the main thing that I learned was that WordPress has a lot of really good documentation for using it the way that it should be used.\n\n\n\n[00:23:01] Nathan Wrigley: The normal way.\n\n\n\n[00:23:02] Joshua Bryant: Yes. And so if you want to learn how to use WordPress, the documentation’s great. If you want to learn how to misuse WordPress, there is not a lot of good documentation out there. And you’re going to have to read a lot of Trac tickets and GitHub issues and Slack threads and, you know, read through the code.\n\n\n\nAnd so, yeah, I will say that, pro, WordPress, great at documenting, but if you’re going to do something out of the box like this, you’re going to have to find those alternate sources of documentation, which is just, and how they built it. That was a good lesson and a good learning curve. And I learned a lot about the contributor process through that.\n\n\n\n[00:23:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh yeah, I’m sure you did. Did it deliver, or does it deliver in the way that was anticipated at the planning state? So when the stakeholders were sat down and the green light was given to this project, did it come out exactly as expected, or were there things where suddenly you figured, oh, we cannot do this particular thing? Maybe it worked out better than you had originally intended.\n\n\n\n[00:24:00] Joshua Bryant: Yeah, so actually, we rolled it out for MarketWatch first and it worked, and they have not complained, at least to me about it. But it was so good that they rolled it out to wsj.com next, and we developed it in such a way that it would be very extendable. And when they rolled it out to wsj, I didn’t know about it. So it really was a seamless transition. Now we have two of our biggest newsrooms using it, and I think we’re going to roll it out to Baron’s next. I don’t anticipate having to do any work for that either.\n\n\n\n[00:24:32] Nathan Wrigley: I find this so curious. I think you maybe made yourself fairly indispensable.\n\n\n\n[00:24:37] Joshua Bryant: I wouldn’t go that far.\n\n\n\n[00:24:38] Nathan Wrigley: It certainly sounds it. So let’s get into the sort of technical bits and pieces about it, because I’m reading, cribbing from my notes here. You mentioned in the talk, simulating the global WP Object. And whilst that sounds interesting and is no doubt complicated, what are the critical components of the doing that? How did you replicate it? What was the biggest challenge? Stripping out the editor and making it work somewhere else.\n\n\n\n[00:24:59] Joshua Bryant: Well, that’s one of the great things that I learned about the way WordPress works behind the scenes. When you’re building plugins, you import a lot of WordPress packages that do very specific things. And my assumption was always, when I build my code, it’s putting all of those packages into the code in one file and then ships it to my website. And that’s how it works.\n\n\n\nThat’s not exactly how it works. The bundle process for WordPress actually pulls all of those scripts out for speed and efficiency. You don’t want 20 plugins to have 20 different versions of the same code. And so they’ve pulled all of that out and it just uses one version of that code. Whatever version of WordPress you’re on, if I’m on six three, it’s going to run the six three version of all of the scripts.\n\n\n\nAnd so when we moved our code over into the planning tool, there is no six three in React. It doesn’t know that these scripts are supposed to be there, and so it was referencing this global object, this Global WP. And if you’re familiar with doing things in the console, it’s, you type wp.data.select Core Editor, and you get a bunch of stuff back, right? It doesn’t exist in React or in Gutenberg. And so that was our first hurdle.\n\n\n\nWhat WordPress is doing for us, building this object that all the code runs through, we’re going to have to manually do in React. We’re going to have to import those packages and set them at the global namespace level just so that the WordPress code will run.\n\n\n\n[00:26:38] Nathan Wrigley: And how challenging was that?\n\n\n\n[00:26:40] Joshua Bryant: Well, discovering it was the challenge. Implementing it was the easy part. We went through many iterations of, why is it not working? How will it not communicate? Before we realised that WordPress is doing this for us. And then once we had that realisation, the implementation was rather simple.\n\n\n\n[00:26:59] Nathan Wrigley: To me, that would’ve been quite a frustrating process. Going backwards and forwards there. Why isn’t it working? Why isn’t it working? And then sort of suddenly realise, oh, it’s not working because, as you’ve just described. Yeah, that’s really interesting.\n\n\n\nBut you are happy that you went through that process. There’s no bit at which you thought, okay, we’re backing out. We’re not going to use WordPress. We’re going to use some sort of custom CMS that you can buy off the shelf, any of that.\n\n\n\n[00:27:22] Joshua Bryant: Right. Oh yeah. I mean, if you had asked me a week into my back and forth, I would’ve said no. And it gives me a deeper understanding of WordPress too, and a deeper appreciation for the decisions that the contributors made when they built it to make it efficient. I never thought about how the WP build process helps developers build efficient websites, even if they don’t really know what’s going on. You type in WP scripts build, and then a lot of things happen. But the developers don’t need to know everything that happens. It just happens. And that’s great for developers.\n\n\n\nBut when I went that step further and I’m like, why is this happening? I went down the rabbit trail of figuring out what does WP scripts build do, and how can I break it? I want to do something else with it. And then coming all the way back to realising, no, they’re doing it the right way, the good way. And now that I understand what it does, I can design our system to be in alignment with that.\n\n\n\n[00:28:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it sounds like you kind of went full circle there.\n\n\n\n[00:28:28] Joshua Bryant: Oh, I did.\n\n\n\n[00:28:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really interesting.\n\n\n\n[00:28:30] Joshua Bryant: Circle, spiral.\n\n\n\n[00:28:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah, I’m sure there was a few spirals. So without giving anything away, how do your stakeholders that need to be a part of the first stage, the planning tool, how do they get to that? Can they access that with their phones? Can they access that with their desktop? How do they interact with that?\n\n\n\n[00:28:46] Joshua Bryant: Yes, two things are important for us. We want to be able to access it in the office, on a desktop, plan out things. But we also want our reporters to be able to give us breaking news in the field, wherever they are.\n\n\n\n[00:29:01] Nathan Wrigley: Right. That was where I was going with that, yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:29:03] Joshua Bryant: Right. And so that is one driving factor for the decisions that we make when we make these design decisions, and make these application decisions. We need to remove as many barriers from our editors to publishing.\n\n\n\nAnd sometimes that’s, how can we reduce the number of clicks to get a full fledged story out the door? Or it’s, how do we make this work with as few distractions as possible on a mobile phone when somebody’s sitting in the back of a boardroom?\n\n\n\n[00:29:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So available on everything, everywhere. Where there’s an internet connection, you can get to this.\n\n\n\n[00:29:37] Joshua Bryant: Yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:29:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. One of the curious things, and again, we’re going to go into the technical details here, so forgive me if this question is misplaced, because you specifically mentioned replacing Core / Editor with Core / Block Editor. I’m not really familiar with what that distinction is, but the fact that you mentioned that kind of gave me an intuition that there was something there. So why was that important? And you are going to have to go slightly gently on me cause I don’t really understand.\n\n\n\n[00:30:01] Joshua Bryant: I will gently wade into the weeds here. When we’re building custom blocks in our process here, a lot of times we use the data stores. And there’s an editor data store, and a block editor data store. What does that look like in the WP admin? When you pull up a post the block inserter, when you hit the plus on the top left, or you hit add, all of the blocks that show up, that’s one part of the Gutenberg editor.\n\n\n\nThe big chunk in the middle is the second part where you do all your typing, you put your post, you add your images. And then the sidebar on the right, where you make adjustments, is the third part. All three of those components are the Block Editor. Everything that exists outside of that is the broader editor. Think of that as like a giant wrapper around the entire thing. That has like the save button, the publish button. It has information about the post and all of its attributes.\n\n\n\nAnd so it has much more information. The Block Editor just needs to know what blocks exist on the page. The Editor needs to know about a much broader context inside of WordPress. When we moved the Editor, we moved the Block Editor. So the save button isn’t there. We’re not using that. We wrote our own save button that hits the API.\n\n\n\n[00:31:23] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just pause you there? So when you say the Block Editor, you are describing the three things. The panel on the left, the central area where you create the content, and the sidebar on the right, if you like, where the settings for those might be. But not the wrapper.\n\n\n\n[00:31:36] Joshua Bryant: Right. And we actually went one step further and said, we don’t need the left or the right. We just need the part in the middle. We want to make it as distraction free as possible and move it over. So we have the option to put the sidebar there, and the sidebar works, but we have chosen as a business decision, we don’t want it.\n\n\n\nAnd since we’re headless, whether they change the font or the colour, none of that actually affects our front end. We don’t want editors to be able to bold and italicise and make all the text red that they think is important because they would go crazy. They think all my text is important.\n\n\n\nSo yeah, we moved all of just that middle piece, just that Block Editor is what we moved over. And we have a save button, and a publish button that don’t interact with the WordPress Editor, they interact with the WordPress API.\n\n\n\n[00:32:28] Nathan Wrigley: The REST API pushing it to the regular WordPress site. Okay, and again, just harking back to what you mentioned a moment ago, when we began this conversation, I was imagining a different thing. I was imagining that you pulled the Block Editor in its entirety out. So I’ve learned something there. So this is just that content creation area.\n\n\n\nAnd by stripping out the left, and the right, and the publish and all of those things, that’s where the time saving comes, is it? Is that where the few seconds can be shaved off because it’s the bare bones of what it requires to create some text on a screen.\n\n\n\n[00:33:00] Joshua Bryant: Yes, exactly. Because a lot of times it’s headline, paragraph, send. That’s it for the first iteration of that article.\n\n\n\n[00:33:07] Nathan Wrigley: So one of the questions that I had, which now appears to be not necessary, but I’m going to ask it anyway. I was asking about things like, for example, manually editing the content that you would make in the React app, undoing things, history, and so on. That’s not really what’s going on. You’re doing it this one time in the React app, then everything after that is happening in the WordPress website.\n\n\n\nSo the history and everything is stored in the regular way, the bolding, the italicising, the, I want to make it red, that’s all done posthumously after the fact, once it’s been published, or at least shunted via the REST API to the WordPress, you know, the database, the regular WordPress website. So that all happens there. The amendments happen there.\n\n\n\n[00:33:49] Joshua Bryant: Right. And we still have access to all of the toolbar options. So if you want to add a link, you would do it the exact same way that you add a link in your WordPress post. So we have some of that available to us, but we’ve locked it down. Not because it won’t work, but because we don’t want it to be a distraction for our editors.\n\n\n\n[00:34:09] Nathan Wrigley: So is there any type of content that, I’m trying to imagine a scenario where, presumably not everybody needs the React app. So for example, if I’m writing a piece about, I don’t know, gardening or something, you know, it’s really not time sensitive. I could write this next year and it’s just as important, or a recipe or something like that. Do I need to be in the React app? Or is that just for the kind of, the journalists out in the field who need things quick? So have you got like this two tier system of editing, the, I need it extra, specially quick, you are in React, but the gardening post is just done as a regular post?\n\n\n\n[00:34:41] Joshua Bryant: Yes. And that’s the majority of our posts, are all regular posts, and they’ve had time to plan it out and gather their assets, which they do in the planning tool, and all of that information syncs over to WordPress. But they don’t do any editing other than our breaking news.\n\n\n\n[00:34:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. It’s the breaking news React app then basically.\n\n\n\n[00:35:01] Joshua Bryant: Yes.\n\n\n\n[00:35:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s curious. Sorry, this is sort of sidestepping slightly. So they just create text. They create text and lists and that’s it. Paragraphs and lists. That’s all they’ve got. And when they hit the REST API, does it publish automatically or do they hit some other editorial workflow where somebody more senior gets to look at it? Because I’m guessing in this scenario where Taylor Swift got married, you just want to go straight to front end.\n\n\n\n[00:35:28] Joshua Bryant: Yeah. It goes straight to the front end. They have a paragraph and list, that’s for the core, but they also have some of our proprietary plugins that, like we have a correction, and we have a ticker inserter, and there are a couple ones that we moved over, like our byline. We have a author database, and so they can say, hey, I wrote this. And so that’s a block that we wrote, and it works in WordPress and it also works in the planning tool, but it’s very limited what they can do because that’s all they needed. So we said we’ll strip everything else out.\n\n\n\n[00:36:00] Nathan Wrigley: Is it a common workflow then where the same author who’s written this really time sensitive piece will hit publish over there, it goes from React app, REST API, to WordPress, to the front end? They would then almost immediately, do they at that point let go of it or do they then almost immediately go back to the WordPress website and think, actually, do you know what, I do want that bit bold, I would like to underline that? So yeah, I’m just curious what that workflow looks like.\n\n\n\n[00:36:26] Joshua Bryant: I think it depends on the situation. And so in one case, while it is a breaking news story, as long as we don’t convert it to a full article, we can make updates in the planning tool. So he can go back, we can edit that and say, well, I wanted it bold, I’m going to do it in the planning tool. But if you wanted to, you could also do it in the WordPress environment. When we say convert to an article, we mean, this was breaking news, but I’m going to click a button and that’s going to let other editors know, we’re about to make this a full fledged article.\n\n\n\n[00:36:56] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see.\n\n\n\n[00:36:57] Joshua Bryant: Yeah. Because a lot of times we have multiple editors working on the same article. And so we need to be in coordination, especially around breaking news. Hey, this is happening right now. I’ve pushed it out. I’m going to pass this off to you. Can you go in? Hopefully there are no typos, but fix any typos, or change the headline, or add SEO data. So they really work as a team, especially around breaking news and then pass that off to other editors.\n\n\n\n[00:37:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess because you’re in the weeds of this, it’s so self-evident what this workflow is. It’s just for me, it’s so curious that there’s all these interesting little steps, and behind it all is this desire to save seconds. And it really is absolutely, this is nothing like a WordPress site that I’ve come across in the past. Hope you’ll forgive my ignorance for keeping asking the same kind of question. But I find that really fascinating.\n\n\n\nSo the gardening post is done on the website, the important timely post is done in the React app, and yet there’s a convert to, I don’t know, regular content or something like that, button that an editor can go in and, yeah, it’s wheels within wheels. It’s absolutely fascinating.\n\n\n\n[00:38:01] Joshua Bryant: Yes. This is why I said earlier, there were so many business rules and so much time spent into building our WordPress system that we didn’t consider another tool very seriously. Because we have so much invested in there, and there’s so much power in the WordPress system that we’ve, first of all out of the box, but second, what we’ve built on top of it that we said, we need to leverage this in this use case here.\n\n\n\n[00:38:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Honestly, I think we could probably spend all day talking about this, but we probably should move on.\n\n\n\nI’m curious as to whether any of this knowledge that you’ve acquired building this, because I know that in the WordPress community, most people don’t do headless, but there is a hardcore of people like you who just love this stuff.\n\n\n\nAnd I’m just curious as to whether the knowledge that you’ve gained in the building of this, whether or not any of that gets put back into the open source project, whether there’s a commitment on your side, on the Dow Jones side to make this available, to open up a repo, to give away the content, the way that you’ve done it, the knowledge that you’ve acquired along the way?\n\n\n\n[00:39:02] Joshua Bryant: Yeah, I think that is ultimately my goal. I started a repo just to show how we moved Gutenberg. There’s a lot of proprietary stuff that I had to take out of there. This is just my repo at this point. It’s lacking a lot of the, how do you get a custom block to work over there, at this point? I want to continue to add to that, but I think I’m also considering what, does this do for the broader WordPress community? How can this be applied to help Core, or to help contractors, or to help people who have a lot of clients.\n\n\n\nOne thing I’ve thought about is, if we have clients who may be difficult, right? I think we’ve all run into people at one point or another that said, I don’t like WordPress. I’ve heard the word React. I want React. People say, React is cool, right? Or I want a Vue project, or I want it to look like this. I don’t want to go to WordPress backend.\n\n\n\nThis is opening up a whole different set of opportunities where we can say, okay, I’m going to throw together, I’m going to vibe code, which I hate, but I want to vibe code a one page React application, and rely on the WordPress API to give me database, to give me user management, post saves, revision history. You can use WordPress as its own complete system and then just slap React on top of it, and have the full Gutenberg editing experience and save all of your information and still do all the things that you know how to do in WordPress, and your client’s happy and they don’t know anything about it.\n\n\n\n[00:40:38] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of like WordPress without the WordPress. It’s the look and feel of WordPress without the overhead of WordPress.\n\n\n\n[00:40:43] Joshua Bryant: It’s the power of WordPress. And what I say is the power of WordPress at the speed of breaking news. But it’s the power of WordPress at whatever the client wants. And so if they want one thing, you can give it to them there. And if you have a lot of clients and you have people spinning up different interfaces, maybe it’s React, it’s Vue. You have eight different clients, you can put them all into one Multisite and you can use WordPress as the backend for all of them. And each application looks completely different, tailored to those needs, and it all just goes through the same old WordPress functionality.\n\n\n\n[00:41:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess that the way the interface looks is kind of the key bit there. You could make it look like Gutenberg, you could make it look nothing like Gutenberg. It could be anything that you liked. Simple, complicated, whatever.\n\n\n\nI’m guessing this is really enterprise stuff, though. I don’t think we’re ever going to be straying into, I don’t know, I’ve got a dog walking service and I would like to offer that in my town of 3,000 people. We’re not for that. This is kind of enterprise, publishing, big pharma, that kind of thing.\n\n\n\n[00:41:46] Joshua Bryant: Enterprise or people who deal with a lot of particular clients. Or people who want to build something cool for themselves, like I want to collect quotes when I hear them. I might build that application so that I can just pull up my phone, send out something like a tweet. I can say, Nathan Wrigley said this. It was really cool. Send. And now it’s a custom post type on my website called notable quotes, and it’s just your quote attribution.\n\n\n\n[00:42:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. I guess the beauty of the open source project, and thank you for honoring the commitment there, hopefully we’ll get the knowledge distributed, is that the first time around you doing it, it would’ve been very expensive because you’re a developer, your time is valuable. So presumably all of that got wrapped into this project. The company that you are working for could afford that. But maybe now it’s going to be a slightly easier bridge to cross. And I guess communicating with you might make that a little bit easier. I don’t mean to open up your calendar or anything, but would you potentially make yourself available through email or Slack or whatever? And if that’s the case, where would people find you?\n\n\n\n[00:42:54] Joshua Bryant: Of course. I would say that I would love to pass this off. I try to tell myself, when I do something new, I always say, this is going to be the worst it ever is. And so when I’m looking at this, I see a lot of potential, but I also realise that this state that we’re in right now is the worst this idea is ever going to be. And I would love for people to come and make it better, and tell me what I did wrong and tell me what I can do better. And to say, but what if we did this instead? And that’s the beauty of open source. We want to see it grow. We want to see all of the possibilities that we can do with this.\n\n\n\nAnd so please, first of all, take it, run with it, make it better. And second of all, yes, I’d be glad to meet and talk with anybody about it. And if I could save somebody the two week spiral, or the two week loop, I would love to do that as well. So yeah, I will absolutely make myself available.\n\n\n\n[00:43:47] Nathan Wrigley: Where can you be found? What’s the best place to find you?\n\n\n\n[00:43:50] Joshua Bryant: The best place to find me would probably be at my personal email address, which is j b r y a 0 2 9 at gmail dot com. And that is a carryover from my college years, so it’s a little weird, but it’ll work.\n\n\n\n[00:44:06] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll make sure not to put that into the text on the WP Tavern website, but it’s in the audio now, so hopefully people can find it. Anything that we’ve talked about, if I can find a link to it, I will put that in. So listeners, head over to wptavern.com, search for the episode of Joshua Bryant. That’s Joshua, J-O-S-H-U-A and Bryant, B-R-Y-A-N-T. Search over there and you will find all of the bits and pieces.\n\n\n\nI’ll link to the presentation that Joshua gave at WordCamp US, and maybe that’ll be on WordPress TV by the time you come to consume this. Anything else that Joshua wants to send me, I’ll put on there as well. So, Joshua Bryant, thank you for shepherding me through something that was much harder to understand than I’m capable of. So thank you so much.\n\n\n\n[00:44:49] Joshua Bryant: No, thank you. You ask great questions and I appreciate it.\n\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Joshua Bryant.\n\n\n\nJoshua works at Dow Jones, helping power some of the world\u2019s largest publishing sites, including the Wall Street Journal, Barron\u2019s, and MarketWatch, all on a WordPress multisite platform. His background with WordPress started, as it does for many, by inheriting a site and slowly peeling back the layers of what the CMS can do, from page building to infrastructure and custom workflows.\n\n\n\nAt WordCamp US, he delivered a presentation called \u201cReimagining WordPress Editing: How We Embedded Gutenberg Into Our Product Ecosystem\u201d which digs into how his team decoupled the Gutenberg block editor from WP Admin and embedded it in a standalone React application, all while keeping content stored in a traditional WordPress database.\n\n\n\nThis episode is a journey into why time, down to the second, matters in the publishing world, and how \u201cheadless\u201d solutions can address those needs. Joshua explains how editorial workflows were rebuilt so that breaking news can be published or updated with lightning fast speeds, removing distractions and page reloads for editors while retaining the full power and extensibility of WordPress behind the scenes.\n\n\n\nWe talk through the technical architecture: planning, editing, and rendering are split into separate applications, with Gutenberg, customised down to just two or three essential blocks, living outside the typical WordPress environment. Joshua talks about the challenge of simulating the global WP object, keeping business logic and proprietary plugins intact, and interacting with the REST API for instantaneous content publishing.\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re interested in headless WordPress, editorial workflows at scale, or how enterprise newsrooms leverage open-source tech for real-world speed, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\nReimagining WordPress Editing: How We Embedded Gutenberg Into Our Product Ecosystem – Joshua’s presentation at WordCamp US 2025\n\n\n\nDow Jones\n\n\n\nWall Street Journal\n\n\n\nMarketWatch\n\n\n\nBarron’s\n\n\n\nMansion Global", "date_published": "2025-11-05T10:00:00-05:00", "date_modified": "2025-11-05T07:51:06-05:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/192-Joshua-Bryant-on-How-Dow-Jones-Is-Supercharging-WordPress-Editorial-Workflows.jpg", "tags": [ "headless", "podcast", "react", "rest api" ], "summary": "In this WP Tavern Jukebox podcast episode, Nathan Wrigley talks with Joshua Bryant about how Dow Jones uses WordPress in a headless setup to power major news sites like the Wall Street Journal. Joshua shares how his team decoupled the Gutenberg editor, embedding it in a React application for super-fast, distraction-free publishing, crucial for breaking news. He explains the technical process, challenges faced, and the benefits for editorial workflows, highlighting the importance of time-saving and adaptability for large-scale, enterprise publishing environments. If you\u2019re interested in headless WordPress, editorial workflows at scale, or how enterprise newsrooms leverage open-source tech for real-world speed, this episode is for you.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2193360/c1e-vzdjdu7gz36bdpwq8-okj012q0b7k7-8wwlb5.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=200324", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/191-arnas-donauskas-on-ai-powered-troubleshooting-for-websites", "title": "#191 \u2013 Arnas Donauskas on AI-Powered Troubleshooting for Websites", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how AI is taking on the burden of troubleshooting website issues, and making suggestions for improvements.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Arnas Donauskas. Arnas is a product manager at Hostinger, with over five years of experience in the web hosting industry. His journey began during college while working on his bachelor’s degree, when he needed to create a website and discovered WordPress as a beginner.
\n\n\n\nHis first foray into website building sparked his interest in the industry, eventually leading him to a career where he now develops products that help others launch their own online presence. Recently he’s been working with a team tasked with delivering tools and improvements to WordPress users to ease their journey on starting and maintaining websites.
\n\n\n\nIn this episode, Arnas shares insights from his presentation at WordCamp US in Portland, Oregon, where he discussed the future of fixing and optimizing websites with AI. For many WordPress users, managing site performance and troubleshooting errors can be time consuming and complex. Arnas and his team have been developing AI based solutions that not only help onboard new clients by automating website creation, but also proactively monitor and remediate website issues as they happen.
\n\n\n\nWe get into the details of how Hostinger’s AI tools identify, and automatically fix, critical website errors such as HTTP response issues, and how they’re pushing site optimizations through automated performance enhancements.
\n\n\n\nArnas explains the engineering challenges involved, the current state of success with automated fixes, and how user feedback is shaping the roadmap for new features like SEO analysis and accessibility improvements. He provides a behind the scenes look at how Hostinger tests and iterates on AI models, what kind of data is fed to those systems, and how the team balances automation with user control.
\n\n\n\nIf you are curious about how artificial intelligence is transforming WordPress hosting and site management, and what this means for the future of the web, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Arnas Donauskas.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Arnas Donauskas Hello.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:41] Arnas Donauskas: Hello. Thanks for having me today.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:43] Nathan Wrigley: You are so welcome. We’re here at WordCamp US in Portland, Oregon. It is day two of the, kind of the conference, but it’s the first day of presentations and things like that. You are one of the presenters, and during the presentation you are going to be talking about fixing and optimising websites with AI.
\n\n\n\nI wonder if we begin the podcast with an introduction to you. So I’d love to find out more about what you do, what your role is at Hostinger, and how you’ve got yourself in the whole AI space.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:12] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah, would be glad to give a short overview. As Nathan introduced me, I’m Arnas Donauskas and I’m a product manager at Hostinger. And the whole web hosting industry, creating a website, I’ve been for more than five years. Well, I think my first interaction with WordPress was actually in my college when I was writing my bachelor’s degree. I needed a website at that point of time and I thought, okay, what should I do? What should I use? And I was very green back in the day. Everyone has to start somewhere.
\n\n\n\nAnd the WordPress came in as one of the first results that I searched on Google. I gave it a go. At first there were some challenges, interesting cases, what should I do with it? But then website got up and running. I finished my bachelors degree, so that was nice.
\n\n\n\nAnd at Hostinger I have a team, a squad, where we build various tools for clients who are using WordPress to make their journey smoother, to make their websites management easier, to make a whole, interacting with the online presence easier. So they would have tools that could assist them, you know, on day to day basis, how to get things done and how, you know, to get their first website started and running as fast as possible.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:24] Nathan Wrigley: So it seems like the hosting space, this is a really perfect fit for AI, because you presumably are onboarding clients and they have no website. I mean, in many cases maybe they have and they’re migrating something from one place to another. But I imagine a lot of your clients are brand new, they’re starting a new project, a new business, or whatever it may be, and they want to get a leg up in building something quickly.
\n\n\n\nAnd five years ago, no chance. You had to hire somebody, everything had to be done by a human being. And nowadays we’re seeing the rise of AI in these kind of onboarding processes where you go through some kind of wizard, and at the end it will spit out some approximation of a website which is suitable for your niche or what have you. And then you go in and you tinker and you make sure it’s exactly what you want.
\n\n\n\nIs that the kind of tooling that you are doing, or are you doing something slightly different to that over at Hostinger?
\n\n\n\n[00:06:12] Arnas Donauskas: Yes, we do have tools that are able to, and capable of, creating a website with AI prompt. You would tell what your website would like to be, and we have like a WordPress AI website builder that will build you a blog, an e-commerce based on a given prompt. So this is already a really head start of all of the things.
\n\n\n\nBut also looking from another perspective, it’s totally understandable to see people who don’t want to build the website with AI, but would like to get guidance how things get done. From one perspective, you can get guidance, how to build the website itself. From another, do I need to make any DNS zone changes on my website? And at this point of stage, AI can help all the way through. You just simply ask what you would like to do, what are the settings you want to tweak? And AI can give you a really, really detailed step, you know, how to change those things.
\n\n\n\nOne of the really nice examples I have, at Hostinger we have a Kodee, it’s a chat interface assistant that helps clients with various questions, and it does have information about the client itself and, you know, what actions it can do. And what trend I started to notice that clients know it’s an AI, and they start asking specific questions. Like, hey, here’s bulk text, can you edit that for me? Or can you give me more detailed steps how to do this and this? And the AI just gives those steps and clients just like, thumbs up, thanks. Have a nice day. And they just go on their thing.
\n\n\n\nSo I see this trend, and it’s really nice that the users like utilising these tools, because at the end of the day, it helps save time, maybe additional money and, you know, it’s a win for the user.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:44] Nathan Wrigley: So I’ll just read the first sentence of the blurb. So the title of your presentation here is fixing and optimising websites with AI. And then the first sentence goes like this, and it encapsulates exactly what you’ve just said. This talk explores how AI can be used to automatically fix detected website errors and boost overall site performance.
\n\n\n\nSo we’ve got this whole side of AI, which is the onboarding, we’ll help you build the site. But then it sounds like you’ve also now got tooling to, okay, you’ve got a website, let’s fix it up. Let’s make the improvements and adjustments along the way.
\n\n\n\nSo, okay, then if we are allowing AI to crawl our website in some way, how does that actually work? What is going on? What is your platform doing to find the errors? I realise that’s a very broad question, but I’m going leave it like that.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:31] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah. So actually why this idea to create such tool came into the light, it was actually one of the feedback points we gathered from one of the WordCamps. Maybe it was Europe. But then to add up to it, we saw the problem when clients, let’s say a website starts receiving an error, or it starts to load slowly, they are not sure where to start troubleshooting this. And we have thought, why not make this process automatic and remove this hassle step for the client?
\n\n\n\nSo how this tool, for troubleshooting the error, how it works. So at all times we are tracking all of our clients’ HTTP status. So basically, if there is no error, it’s 200, in most of the cases. There can be a permanent redirect HTTP status. But at all times we are tracking if it changed to an error code or no. If it did, then we are promptly informing the client, hey, we found an error on your website. It could be a 403 forbidden access, or 500, or a critical error. And we start informing the client, hey, an error was found, you can use our AI troubleshooter to automatically fix it.
\n\n\n\nSo when the client lands to the interface itself, we already gathered all of the logs, we removed all of the information that should not land for the AI, that he’s not using it to troubleshoot the error itself. And then AI has a list of actions it can do, whether it’s troubleshooting or optimising.
\n\n\n\nAnd then based on the logs and our AI custom given prompt, it determines, this is the most likely action that will fix the site’s error. Or when it comes to optimising, here are like the listed settings you need to tweak to make that website go faster. And then at the end of the day, the client gets the error fixed or the website optimised.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:21] Nathan Wrigley: So that’s really interesting. So here we’re talking about some sort of critical error. So your tooling is going out, in the same way that an uptime monitor would’ve done in the past. But the difference here though is that the uptime monitor traditionally just tells you the problem. You might get an email or a phone call or something, but then you’re kind of on your own. You do the troubleshooting.
\n\n\n\nSo the difference here is the AI then, it determines there’s a problem and then it offers suggestions. So you log into your control panel and it’s saying, okay, this is the most likely cause, here’s some things that you can do to remediate that problem.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:53] Arnas Donauskas: Yes, but those suggestions are also being applied automatically because it’s totally normal, you could just go to ChatGPT, you say, here I have this error, what could I do to fix it? And the AI troubleshooter however, it does not suggest, it gives the action that can be applied on the spot. So if you had a one o’clock, 403 error, at one o’clock, five minutes, you could have it resolved without your actual manual input. So the tool itself automatically applies those fixes and does that for you.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s really curious because traditionally, I mean, obviously, I guess website hosting companies have had tooling around uptime monitoring and things like that in the past, but because your identifying piece, and the remediation piece, can access server logs and all of the infrastructure that you’ve got, it can identify the problem, figure out if that’s true, and then just crack on and do it.
\n\n\n\nSo you can implement it, well, without implementing it. You just wake up at eight in the morning, maybe get an email to say, well, at one o’clock this thing happened and then we did this so you were able to have another seven hours sleep, that’s fine. Yeah, that’s really interesting.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:02] Arnas Donauskas: So one thing that we are also constantly working on is what automatic fixes we are capable to do. Because those are the ones where, you know, our developers work and make them so AI would have more, let’s call it options to pick from, based on the data it has, what went wrong. And this is, you know, where we have a mini roadmap, what we want to implement further, so we could increase the success rate of the fixed websites automatically.
\n\n\n\nBecause this is something we also track about. And I will mention this in my speech. So at this point of day, we have 70% success rate on fixing the website. And how it’s being calculated, that when a first fix was applied, it was an actual success and that error got resolved. So at this point of day it’s 70%, and roughly, in absolute numbers, we are fixing per month 16,000 of the websites.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s the nicest part for me is that for 16,000 of websites some time was saved. Clients did not have to dig through a lot of information, and they got the problem resolved on the spot. Because imagine you have like a working business running, or you expect clients to come in and you get an error. What is the first thing you do? Like, it takes time. So this tool, you know, can prevent these problems and shorten the fixing journey.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, not just time, but it presumably stops you losing revenue, and the sort of slightly unquantifiable emotional distress that comes with having a website which isn’t working. And obviously if that’s your industry and your business is, I don’t know, e-commerce or something, it’s very important that comes up.
\n\n\n\nSo 70% sounds good, but obviously it means that 30%, there’s not the ideal outcome. What do you do in those scenarios where the thing was not solved? Do you log that and presumably your team then look at that and figure out over time, okay, how can we get that 30 to 20 to 10 and so on? And do you kind of roll back the remediation so that the thing which didn’t work, we unpick that and we just go back to where you were when the error occurred?
\n\n\n\n[00:14:00] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah, so very good follow up question on this. So with the 30% that we do, we still run additional fixes. So when we do the first fix, we tracked what changed, and then the further success rate can happen, that the fact the was fixed either on the third try or like the fourth try, so that 30% lowers.
\n\n\n\nBut there are cases that none of the fixes helped, and it’s totally normal. Bigger website could be more complex problems, things like that happen. So then we proactively forward the user to our success specialist team who will assist on the spot. And they have all of the logs, what happened, what was tried, and what fixes were applied on the website on the spot.
\n\n\n\nIn any case, there are backups that can be reverted without any of the fixes applied. So those 10 to 15% that nothing helped at the end of the day, gets a direct help from our success team so we could still solve, or help solve, the problem for the user.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:03] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of incredible that if we were to just rewind the clock five years, the stuff that you’ve just mentioned was nonsense. It could not happen. And yet we’ve got to the point now where you’re saying there’s a 70% success rate. I’m quite surprised it’s as high as that, so that’s amazing. And presumably, the ambition is to drive that up to 80 and 90 and what have you.
\n\n\n\nBut just the mere fact that it’s possible is pretty remarkable, that there’s a technology which, it’s kind of got your back, it’s this agent running in the background whose job it is to figure this stuff out and you don’t have to think about it.
\n\n\n\nAnd I guess for your industry, you know, hosting in general, I presume a lot of the other companies are doing these kind of things. Over time, this will become the norm. It will just become a laundry list, one of the ticket items on the sales page. It’s, you know, we’ve got your AI agent monitoring the uptime, remediation is guaranteed. Maybe you’ll even get to like 99% of fixes or something like that in time. And it just kind of pushes what we’re going to expect from hosting companies like you. That’s fascinating. Really interesting.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:04] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah. And as you’ve mentioned, five years ago, it could have been a lot of, let’s say problems or issues making this happen, because at that point of time you need to chew up a lot of information and, you know, do the thinking on that received information. But now when AI does have quite a powerful approach on this, and it’s able to handle such high amount of information, that’s when you know the heavy lifting is taken to that part, the end user is now getting the fixes done.
\n\n\n\nAs per norm on all of this fixing, I really would like to see that happen because it just helps out. You can spend your time on expanding, moving your business further, thinking of the new ideas what you could do, instead of maintaining the website. You know, there’s like a saying, it’s more fun to buy new parts to your car than replace the old ones or do the maintenance parts. So this is, I think, the same thing the website itself.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it really does feel like this is going to be the future. And obviously you’ve now got these technologies which can make, well, it’s approximating intelligent decisions. Whereas before it was just sort of, I guess you were going through a binary, is it this? Yes. Okay. Move to the next step. Is it this? No. Okay. Go back to this step. Whereas now there can be this whole load of things that you can throw at it.
\n\n\n\nAnd that brings me to the next question really. So you’ve just talked about all the critical things, so the website collapsing. So we do something to remediate that. What about the more, I don’t know, let’s say soft things.
\n\n\n\nSo for example, maybe it’s SEO. You know, we have gone around your website, we’ve scraped it a little bit like maybe Google Bot might do, and we’ve identified SEO problems. Or it could be accessibility problems, or it could be, goodness, I don’t know, you’ve just used inappropriate language here, we’ve got a better idea for a UVP at the top of the webpage. Does it stray into that as well? Is it more than just critical failure problems?
\n\n\n\n[00:17:50] Arnas Donauskas: At this point of day, it’s more critical problems when the website is just full on down. But like, how I like to view the tools that we are building is whenever you build one tool, you receive clients’ feedback, you receive WordPress community feedback, where you can build more tools on top as a continuation to the first one. This is what I really like about all of this feedback culture.
\n\n\n\nThis is the upcoming thing, and I think it’s only a matter of time when our troubleshooter and the optimiser will appear in the WordPress admin panel, where it will be able to tell you, I see an image has disappeared on your website, just upload it to me, I will fix it to you. Or I see some SEO problems. Or like you’ve mentioned, accessibility problems, or that some of the grammar mistakes were found in some of your posts. Something like that. So this is only a matter of time.
\n\n\n\nAnd why such approach was taken at this point of time is, we want to give users a tool that they could trust and be comfortable on using when it comes to the most critical problem or critical matter with the website related errors. So they know, okay, I can trust and use this tool, and fix my problem right away. And when that’s put on, then we can move to extensive features to the troubleshooter and optimiser as well.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:09] Nathan Wrigley: Would it be fair to say that you are developing solutions like that, though? Is that the kind of thing which is on your product roadmap to get those kind of tools, the SEO, the image fixing, the alt text identifier, the I know, the accessibility identifier, those kind of things. They’re in the background? You are building those? They’re roadmap items are they?
\n\n\n\n[00:19:26] Arnas Donauskas: I would say they are currently planned. Right now, what we have in the more recent backlog is how to reach my personal goal on this is 90% fixed rate. If you already have some plans, how it’ll be done. So a short sneak peek on it. We basically want to build like a way back machine on our AI troubleshooter, so it would know at any given time what happened to each of the file the customer has on their website. And it would be able to tell you, okay, I see that on this specific date, this single file was changed and that’s what led to a 500 error. I have a safe backup copy for it, I will restore it for you. User confirms. We do the restoration.
\n\n\n\nOr AI will be able to determine, I have a fully working website backup of your site, these are the orders that could be potentially missed if that is an e-commerce case. And if you want to, we can go ahead and restore the website to a fully working version and get your site back up and running again.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:26] Nathan Wrigley: We do live in interesting times, that’s for sure. You mentioned in the blurb for the talk, and I read the bit at the beginning, but I’ll just read it again. So your talk explores how AI can be used to automatically fix detected website errors, I think we’ve covered that, and boost overall site performance.
\n\n\n\nNow that’s a different piece, isn’t it? So if we’re now looking at site performance, presumably we’re talking about from slow to fast. Something wrong to fix. So basically, I’m asking the exact same series of questions, but from a performance point of view, not the site has collapsed and there’s an error. What are the things that you’re looking for there?
\n\n\n\n[00:20:59] Arnas Donauskas: To be fair with you, everything. So we look at everything when it comes to website performance. So we do like a benchmark result where we have our starting ground when it comes to optimising the website. And we are using Google Page Speed scores. I think it’s one of the most popular tools to benchmark the website to see what is loading slowly on it, what could be the potential problems with it. And then for each website individually, automatic fixes to images, JS, CSS minification are being applied, and the client then sees the improvement, whether it’s 10%, 20%.
\n\n\n\nSo right now what we currently have from the data itself, I believe it’s been running for two to three months right now, and we’ve been gathering data, how the websites are being optimised. So on average, mobile page speed score is being increased by 20, and the desktop is by 10%.
\n\n\n\nBut there’s a catch to it. These optimisation steps are safe. It means nothing bad will happen to the website after the optimisation steps, and the next step would be introducing risky steps that can affect how the website looks.
\n\n\n\nWhat I have in mind by that is, lazy loading sometimes can mess up one of the images, it appears slowly or after a while. So these things could happen, but this will be like a separate step informing the client, hey, we did the safe part, but we could push this further with some of the risks. No worries, you will be able to revert everything on the spot if something bad happens. So this will be the next step of it, and I’m really intrigued to see how fast the websites can be.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:35] Nathan Wrigley: Can you modify your hosting environment to be specific to my website, if you know what I mean? So if my website, for example, is, I don’t know, a brochure website, I’ve got five pages, you could cache that entirely. Really easy to do. But, okay, this website over here, a different one that I’ve got, it’s a WooCommerce website, there’s a whole different load of caching that might go on, there’s a whole different load of optimisations that go on there. Do you take that burden on, or is it more of a, okay, we’ve got this thing, you tick a box and now we’re going to do the performance thing? Will it figure all that stuff out, or are there tick boxes where I can go, do this but don’t do this, do this but don’t do this? How does it work?
\n\n\n\n[00:23:13] Arnas Donauskas: So each optimisation step to increase the performance is being applied to each website individually. It checks loading slowly. Right now, there is no possibility to customise the optimisation steps that you can do, but we are planning to integrate logic to the AI, or like past information for each type of website type. What caching should be applied on specific pages if the image is a landing one, or is it like a product image? So to give more extensive knowledge to the AI so it would be able to better determine how to approach different website types. But for now, what we check, still settings are unique to each website, but not to such extensive customisation.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:56] Nathan Wrigley: You’ve laid before us a really interesting engineering challenge. These problems exist in terms of performance, we’ve got to put a bunch of engineers on it, and they’re going to figure out this AI way of solving that. But how do you communicate the work that the AI is done to the people that want to know it’s been done?
\n\n\n\nBecause in a way, I kind of want to know that’s happened to my website, but at the same time, I kind of don’t. I don’t want to be getting six emails a day saying, okay, we updated this image, oh, and then another email, we did x, and we did. But you’ve got to let me know that that’s happened. In some way, you have to communicate the value to me that, look at all this fabulous stuff we’re doing. But I kind of want to know, but I kind of don’t want to know. So it’s a difficult tightrope to tread. I’m just wondering how you manage that.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:36] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah, yeah. So at the end of each optimisation, client is getting an impacted result, did it increase, and by how much? And they are getting a full log, what was done on the website. And we are also trying to display that log to as most simple things as possible to understand, because some of those settings could sound, you know, very big words. But there’s actually very simple things that were done on the website. So we’re communicating that part to the users at the end of each optimisation as well.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so you’re kind of making it easier to understand basically. You’re hoping to use normal language to explain something fairly technical. Yeah, okay. And summarising it, not sending an email for every single thing. And presumably over time the email’s become less and less anyway because, let’s say I migrate a website to your platform, the AI gets involved, and I’m imagining there’s more at the beginning, it’s front loaded. Oh, look, there’s this and this and this and this. And then slowly over time, oh, there’s less. We did it. It’s done. But, oh, new plugin, new thing. I’m guessing that you communicate less over time.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:37] Arnas Donauskas: With such optimisation things, yes, via email. I would say it’s less via email, more via interface. And I would say that at this point, it’s enough for a user to grasp the idea of what was done.
\n\n\n\nWhy I say this? Because the amount of time the clients spend in the interface reviewing the optimisations and how many of them interact with it is quite high. I believe with optimisations it’s 70% of the users that actually started the migration, completed, you know, all of the interaction with the interface. And they’re spending approximately like from 10 to 15 minutes with it.
\n\n\n\nSo I would say these are pretty good numbers. But you gave a very good point for the users’ clients who are more advanced. And perhaps it would be a good improvement point to give them an option to download all extensive logs, what was done, to see just what happened actually in depth, not just rephrased wording for some technical parts.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think it’s a really difficult tightrope to tread because every time that your AI does something and it had a beneficial impact on my website, that’s good for me, but it’s also good for you because it builds that relationship, doesn’t it? You know, oh, look what the platform’s done. It’s brilliant. I didn’t have to lift a finger. Just came as part of the package. Fabulous. I’m happy with that.
\n\n\n\nBut you just don’t want to overdo that communication because at some point it’s like, oh, you lose sight of it. And then the critical one will arrive where the website’s collapsed and, yeah, it’s another one, it just goes in the bin. So I guess there’s a tightrope to tread, which is kind of interesting.
\n\n\n\nHow do you actually find these errors then? Do you have something akin to Google Bot, which is going and looking at the front end of the website as a human being would see it, if you like, and sort of scraping around inside the DOM, looking at screenshots and, you know, okay, yeah, we see that image isn’t, I don’t know, so just an open-ended question really.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:28] Arnas Donauskas: Since each of the website that we are troubleshooting are hosted with us, we are able to, you know, detect. Because the primary source that we are using to determine that something bad happened is the HTTP response.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:41] Nathan Wrigley: Right. That’s straightforward. Yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:42] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah. So whenever that changes, we are able to know because each of the website is hosted with us on our infrastructure. So this is the most, the quickest and most straightforward approach we can use to determine that something bad happened. So this is the one we are running with. And quite good accuracy, unless there’s like a, some CDNs in that case. And this could be sometimes a problem because not always the true error will come out. But yeah, this is the method we are using.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:09] Nathan Wrigley: But on the performance side, presumably that’s slightly different because, you know, you mentioned lazy loading images or something, you’ve got to have some metrics and telemetry to say, we’ve got lazy loading images, okay, how do we deal with that?
\n\n\n\n[00:28:20] Arnas Donauskas: So with the performance part, clients are able to, you know, at any given time to initiate the optimisations. We will do the performance test to see if it actually needs an optimisation, because sometimes clients have very perfectly optimised websites, and they’re working like a speed. But we are occasionally running page speed performance tests, on weekly basis, I believe. And if we detect, okay, this website could be improved, then clients are being informed that, hey, you can do some optimisation steps that are automatic and you can go ahead and start the optimisation process.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, got it. Thank you. Curious thing that you are in this game of tennis, I presume, with the AI models. I’m presuming, I could be wrong, but I’m presuming that you are using AIs that we are familiar with. So I’m just going to drop a few names that I know. Things like Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT and things like that. I’m presuming there’s some connection that you’ve got with those. Maybe you have your own, I don’t know.
\n\n\n\nGiven that they seem to change at a breathtaking pace, and in some cases the changes that they seem to ship kind of seem to degrade their capacity to do things. We’ve had a recent ChatGPT 5 update, which I think many people felt perhaps in certain scenarios was a backward step. How do you keep up with this?
\n\n\n\n[00:29:33] Arnas Donauskas: Testing, straightforward testing, but very good point on the whole different models and the providers on it. We simply do tests with each of the models. We scout around, we see, or it looks very promising, we test how it performs, and there are several points. How fast it can grasp the information and return back to us. So how long the request took time. Some of the models took like 10 seconds, some of them took 5. So we want the client to get the faster result as fast as possible.
\n\n\n\nAnd then there’s the second part, it’s the accuracy of the returned information. Because one of the learned lessons I will be sharing in my speech is that, we noticed that when newer models came in, how their accuracy was way better and the time to handle information was very shorter. So since we have like developers who are working on the AI models itself, we just always test to see if there’s something better that we could ship to our users so they would have better outcome on their end as well.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s fairly straightforward, isn’t it? It’s testing, testing, more testing, and go with the thing which provides the best tested answer. But curiously though, you must have applied a ton of engineering time into this endeavor. So there’s a load of people on the ground, that must cost Hostinger quite a bit of money. And then presumably there’s quite a lot of money being sent to these AI agents. But I’m guessing it’s hard to justify a price increase to your end users.
\n\n\n\nSo it must be kind of a fairly difficult business decision. How much of this can you do? Because you could AI forever, you know, and just keep going and going and going and endless cycles. So I’m guessing from a business point of view, there’s a, again, another tightrope to tread. How much can you do? Or is this more a case of, is this stuff a premium thing that you offer? Do you have to pay an additional fee to get access to this stuff?
\n\n\n\n[00:31:21] Arnas Donauskas: No. No additional fee. AI troubleshooter and optimiser is pre included with all of the hosting plans we offer for our clients base. And the price for that did not change because this tool was introduced.
\n\n\n\nYou’re right, it took some time to deliver final versions of the products, approximately seven to eight months. But it was all worth it, I think, because clients can now automatically do things and don’t have to spend time themselves.
\n\n\n\nAnd from a company point of view, we just want to deliver best user experience they could have and, you know, that they could trust us even when the website is down with an error and how we can solve it, and what we can do the quickest or how to, you know, assist user on optimising the site.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:08] Nathan Wrigley: It’s the market at work, isn’t it? Essentially. You’re trying to make your offering different and unique and offer something which adds value, and so you take the hit, I guess.
\n\n\n\nDo you want to get to the point where everything is completely automated? I mean, is that a desirable outcome? Would it be something that you’d like to see where the human is completely out of the loop? Or do you always want to have an option for a confirm button or a roll, not rollback, we always want the rollback.
\n\n\n\nBut it always feels like the light at the end of the tunnel here is that the human doesn’t need to be involved at all. It would be desirable if I could get up and be a hundred percent confident that my website, for all of the things that you did overnight, is better. And I don’t have to involve myself in that at all. But equally, there’s a bit of me which always wants the confirm button. I want to be able to see, well, not that one. Yes, that one. We’ll do that.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:56] Arnas Donauskas: I think confirmable actions will be there all the time, or most of the time. Because at the end of the day, this is the user’s website that the changes are being applied to, and the user is in control. Would you like to do those changes, would you not? One of the thoughts, I believe we discussed with our colleagues, what we have 100% fixed rate? Should we give users an option, just run everything, I trust this completely? It could be an option. But still, at the end of the day, this is the user’s website. It’s their business, it’s their blog, and we want to give best suggestions, but the user is the one who’s saying, yes, I would like to do that, or, no, I don’t want to see this.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:39] Nathan Wrigley: I guess you’re trying to get to the point where the confirmed decision is just really obvious. You want to go in and be entirely confident that, yep, I’m going to confirm it because I have this trust, but equally, there’s an option to not confirm it. That seems to be where the whole AI thing is going. The humans are always in the loop somewhere and it’s always that final confirmation step. And I think if we lose sight of that, we’re probably in a bit of trouble.
\n\n\n\nOne of the questions I have as well is about WordPress, obviously, we’re at WordCamp US, this great big open source thing. And it brings to mind the question about these models, and the fact that they are entirely proprietary, you know, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and all of these things. They’re having a lot of our data, we’re allowing them into the backend of our websites, but they, I don’t know if they have any open source models which are using. Are you shipping data to them? How does it align with the whole open source thing that WordPress is so keen to promote?
\n\n\n\n[00:34:31] Arnas Donauskas: Oh, very good question I can say. And it’s true that different models look like different silos. Different companies, they have different approaches what they do. But I really liked one of the comments, I believe I read on the Reddit, on all of the AI stuff. And it applies also on such websites. So for example, you’re a user who likes to explore things, and you want to try and fix websites with AI and do that automatically. A free model for the ChatGPT or any other AI model will be more than enough to run, as long as you have your prompt.
\n\n\n\nIt will take some experiment times, that’s for sure, but everything could be actually run free on this part. So this is more, you know, into the open source area. But of course, when there are paid models and stuff like that, this could be, you know, one day could be tricky.
\n\n\n\nPerhaps we will have a fully open source that anyone could be willing to use without any additional charges. Time will show on this. But now, a lot of companies, people are creating tools that they allowed to do free trials or free for some time. So I think this is a matter of question on this as well, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean it really does seem like a really exciting time, in tech in general, but also WordPress in general. But it’s kind of really interesting to see the way that WordPress and hosting company’s interfacing through AI. And it does seem like there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening on your side.
\n\n\n\nYeah, it’s been fascinating talking to you today, trying to explore this a little bit more. Where can we find you, Arnas? If we want to reach out and discover more about you or Hostinger, where’s the best place to go?
\n\n\n\n[00:36:05] Arnas Donauskas: So if you want to reach out directly to me, I’m always happy to do that via LinkedIn. I have my full profile set up so we can reach out through there. If you’re a Hostinger client and you have some feedback, just drop it to our support chat. I’m the one who always reads them, and I might even get directly in touch with you via one of the forms because I always keep an eye of our client’s feedback and I try to contact them as often as possible to follow up on some of the feedbacks they share.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:32] Nathan Wrigley: Well, Arnas, thank you so much for chatting to me today and prizing open this subject. I feel that this conversation is going to get more and more in depth, and more complicated as the years go by. But in 2025, good to know where we’re at. Thank you.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:43] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah. Thank you for inviting me. It was an honor.
\nOn the podcast today we have Arnas Donauskas.
\n\n\n\nArnas is a product manager at Hostinger, with over five years of experience in the web hosting industry. His journey began during college while working on his bachelor\u2019s degree, when he needed to create a website and discovered WordPress as a beginner. This first foray into website building sparked his interest in the industry, eventually leading him to a career where he now develops products that help others launch their own online presence. Recently he\u2019s been working with a team tasked with delivering tools and improvements to WordPress users to ease their journey on starting, and maintaining websites.
\n\n\n\nIn this episode, Arnas shares insights from his presentation at WordCamp US in Portland, Oregon, where he discussed the future of fixing and optimising websites with AI. For many WordPress users, managing site performance and troubleshooting errors can be time-consuming and complex. Arnas and his team have been developing AI-based solutions that not only help onboard new clients by automating website creation, but also proactively monitor and remediate website issues as they happen.
\n\n\n\nWe get into the details of how Hostinger\u2019s AI tools identify, and automatically fix, critical website errors, such as HTTP response issues, and how they\u2019re pushing their site optimisations through automated performance enhancements. Arnas explains the engineering challenges involved, the current rate of success with automated fixes, and how user feedback is shaping the roadmap for new features like SEO analysis and accessibility improvements.
\n\n\n\nHe provides a behind-the-scenes look at how Hostinger tests and iterates on AI models, what kind of data is fed to these systems, and how the team balances automation with user control.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re curious about how artificial intelligence is transforming WordPress hosting and site management, and what this means for the future of the web, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nFixing and Optimizing websites with AI – Arnas’ presentation at WordCamp US 2025
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "content_text": "Transcript\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how AI is taking on the burden of troubleshooting website issues, and making suggestions for improvements.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Arnas Donauskas. Arnas is a product manager at Hostinger, with over five years of experience in the web hosting industry. His journey began during college while working on his bachelor’s degree, when he needed to create a website and discovered WordPress as a beginner.\n\n\n\nHis first foray into website building sparked his interest in the industry, eventually leading him to a career where he now develops products that help others launch their own online presence. Recently he’s been working with a team tasked with delivering tools and improvements to WordPress users to ease their journey on starting and maintaining websites.\n\n\n\nIn this episode, Arnas shares insights from his presentation at WordCamp US in Portland, Oregon, where he discussed the future of fixing and optimizing websites with AI. For many WordPress users, managing site performance and troubleshooting errors can be time consuming and complex. Arnas and his team have been developing AI based solutions that not only help onboard new clients by automating website creation, but also proactively monitor and remediate website issues as they happen.\n\n\n\nWe get into the details of how Hostinger’s AI tools identify, and automatically fix, critical website errors such as HTTP response issues, and how they’re pushing site optimizations through automated performance enhancements.\n\n\n\nArnas explains the engineering challenges involved, the current state of success with automated fixes, and how user feedback is shaping the roadmap for new features like SEO analysis and accessibility improvements. He provides a behind the scenes look at how Hostinger tests and iterates on AI models, what kind of data is fed to those systems, and how the team balances automation with user control.\n\n\n\nIf you are curious about how artificial intelligence is transforming WordPress hosting and site management, and what this means for the future of the web, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Arnas Donauskas.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Arnas Donauskas Hello.\n\n\n\n[00:03:41] Arnas Donauskas: Hello. Thanks for having me today.\n\n\n\n[00:03:43] Nathan Wrigley: You are so welcome. We’re here at WordCamp US in Portland, Oregon. It is day two of the, kind of the conference, but it’s the first day of presentations and things like that. You are one of the presenters, and during the presentation you are going to be talking about fixing and optimising websites with AI.\n\n\n\nI wonder if we begin the podcast with an introduction to you. So I’d love to find out more about what you do, what your role is at Hostinger, and how you’ve got yourself in the whole AI space.\n\n\n\n[00:04:12] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah, would be glad to give a short overview. As Nathan introduced me, I’m Arnas Donauskas and I’m a product manager at Hostinger. And the whole web hosting industry, creating a website, I’ve been for more than five years. Well, I think my first interaction with WordPress was actually in my college when I was writing my bachelor’s degree. I needed a website at that point of time and I thought, okay, what should I do? What should I use? And I was very green back in the day. Everyone has to start somewhere.\n\n\n\nAnd the WordPress came in as one of the first results that I searched on Google. I gave it a go. At first there were some challenges, interesting cases, what should I do with it? But then website got up and running. I finished my bachelors degree, so that was nice.\n\n\n\nAnd at Hostinger I have a team, a squad, where we build various tools for clients who are using WordPress to make their journey smoother, to make their websites management easier, to make a whole, interacting with the online presence easier. So they would have tools that could assist them, you know, on day to day basis, how to get things done and how, you know, to get their first website started and running as fast as possible.\n\n\n\n[00:05:24] Nathan Wrigley: So it seems like the hosting space, this is a really perfect fit for AI, because you presumably are onboarding clients and they have no website. I mean, in many cases maybe they have and they’re migrating something from one place to another. But I imagine a lot of your clients are brand new, they’re starting a new project, a new business, or whatever it may be, and they want to get a leg up in building something quickly.\n\n\n\nAnd five years ago, no chance. You had to hire somebody, everything had to be done by a human being. And nowadays we’re seeing the rise of AI in these kind of onboarding processes where you go through some kind of wizard, and at the end it will spit out some approximation of a website which is suitable for your niche or what have you. And then you go in and you tinker and you make sure it’s exactly what you want.\n\n\n\nIs that the kind of tooling that you are doing, or are you doing something slightly different to that over at Hostinger?\n\n\n\n[00:06:12] Arnas Donauskas: Yes, we do have tools that are able to, and capable of, creating a website with AI prompt. You would tell what your website would like to be, and we have like a WordPress AI website builder that will build you a blog, an e-commerce based on a given prompt. So this is already a really head start of all of the things.\n\n\n\nBut also looking from another perspective, it’s totally understandable to see people who don’t want to build the website with AI, but would like to get guidance how things get done. From one perspective, you can get guidance, how to build the website itself. From another, do I need to make any DNS zone changes on my website? And at this point of stage, AI can help all the way through. You just simply ask what you would like to do, what are the settings you want to tweak? And AI can give you a really, really detailed step, you know, how to change those things.\n\n\n\nOne of the really nice examples I have, at Hostinger we have a Kodee, it’s a chat interface assistant that helps clients with various questions, and it does have information about the client itself and, you know, what actions it can do. And what trend I started to notice that clients know it’s an AI, and they start asking specific questions. Like, hey, here’s bulk text, can you edit that for me? Or can you give me more detailed steps how to do this and this? And the AI just gives those steps and clients just like, thumbs up, thanks. Have a nice day. And they just go on their thing.\n\n\n\nSo I see this trend, and it’s really nice that the users like utilising these tools, because at the end of the day, it helps save time, maybe additional money and, you know, it’s a win for the user.\n\n\n\n[00:07:44] Nathan Wrigley: So I’ll just read the first sentence of the blurb. So the title of your presentation here is fixing and optimising websites with AI. And then the first sentence goes like this, and it encapsulates exactly what you’ve just said. This talk explores how AI can be used to automatically fix detected website errors and boost overall site performance.\n\n\n\nSo we’ve got this whole side of AI, which is the onboarding, we’ll help you build the site. But then it sounds like you’ve also now got tooling to, okay, you’ve got a website, let’s fix it up. Let’s make the improvements and adjustments along the way.\n\n\n\nSo, okay, then if we are allowing AI to crawl our website in some way, how does that actually work? What is going on? What is your platform doing to find the errors? I realise that’s a very broad question, but I’m going leave it like that.\n\n\n\n[00:08:31] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah. So actually why this idea to create such tool came into the light, it was actually one of the feedback points we gathered from one of the WordCamps. Maybe it was Europe. But then to add up to it, we saw the problem when clients, let’s say a website starts receiving an error, or it starts to load slowly, they are not sure where to start troubleshooting this. And we have thought, why not make this process automatic and remove this hassle step for the client?\n\n\n\nSo how this tool, for troubleshooting the error, how it works. So at all times we are tracking all of our clients’ HTTP status. So basically, if there is no error, it’s 200, in most of the cases. There can be a permanent redirect HTTP status. But at all times we are tracking if it changed to an error code or no. If it did, then we are promptly informing the client, hey, we found an error on your website. It could be a 403 forbidden access, or 500, or a critical error. And we start informing the client, hey, an error was found, you can use our AI troubleshooter to automatically fix it.\n\n\n\nSo when the client lands to the interface itself, we already gathered all of the logs, we removed all of the information that should not land for the AI, that he’s not using it to troubleshoot the error itself. And then AI has a list of actions it can do, whether it’s troubleshooting or optimising.\n\n\n\nAnd then based on the logs and our AI custom given prompt, it determines, this is the most likely action that will fix the site’s error. Or when it comes to optimising, here are like the listed settings you need to tweak to make that website go faster. And then at the end of the day, the client gets the error fixed or the website optimised.\n\n\n\n[00:10:21] Nathan Wrigley: So that’s really interesting. So here we’re talking about some sort of critical error. So your tooling is going out, in the same way that an uptime monitor would’ve done in the past. But the difference here though is that the uptime monitor traditionally just tells you the problem. You might get an email or a phone call or something, but then you’re kind of on your own. You do the troubleshooting.\n\n\n\nSo the difference here is the AI then, it determines there’s a problem and then it offers suggestions. So you log into your control panel and it’s saying, okay, this is the most likely cause, here’s some things that you can do to remediate that problem.\n\n\n\n[00:10:53] Arnas Donauskas: Yes, but those suggestions are also being applied automatically because it’s totally normal, you could just go to ChatGPT, you say, here I have this error, what could I do to fix it? And the AI troubleshooter however, it does not suggest, it gives the action that can be applied on the spot. So if you had a one o’clock, 403 error, at one o’clock, five minutes, you could have it resolved without your actual manual input. So the tool itself automatically applies those fixes and does that for you.\n\n\n\n[00:11:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s really curious because traditionally, I mean, obviously, I guess website hosting companies have had tooling around uptime monitoring and things like that in the past, but because your identifying piece, and the remediation piece, can access server logs and all of the infrastructure that you’ve got, it can identify the problem, figure out if that’s true, and then just crack on and do it.\n\n\n\nSo you can implement it, well, without implementing it. You just wake up at eight in the morning, maybe get an email to say, well, at one o’clock this thing happened and then we did this so you were able to have another seven hours sleep, that’s fine. Yeah, that’s really interesting.\n\n\n\n[00:12:02] Arnas Donauskas: So one thing that we are also constantly working on is what automatic fixes we are capable to do. Because those are the ones where, you know, our developers work and make them so AI would have more, let’s call it options to pick from, based on the data it has, what went wrong. And this is, you know, where we have a mini roadmap, what we want to implement further, so we could increase the success rate of the fixed websites automatically.\n\n\n\nBecause this is something we also track about. And I will mention this in my speech. So at this point of day, we have 70% success rate on fixing the website. And how it’s being calculated, that when a first fix was applied, it was an actual success and that error got resolved. So at this point of day it’s 70%, and roughly, in absolute numbers, we are fixing per month 16,000 of the websites.\n\n\n\nWhat’s the nicest part for me is that for 16,000 of websites some time was saved. Clients did not have to dig through a lot of information, and they got the problem resolved on the spot. Because imagine you have like a working business running, or you expect clients to come in and you get an error. What is the first thing you do? Like, it takes time. So this tool, you know, can prevent these problems and shorten the fixing journey.\n\n\n\n[00:13:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, not just time, but it presumably stops you losing revenue, and the sort of slightly unquantifiable emotional distress that comes with having a website which isn’t working. And obviously if that’s your industry and your business is, I don’t know, e-commerce or something, it’s very important that comes up.\n\n\n\nSo 70% sounds good, but obviously it means that 30%, there’s not the ideal outcome. What do you do in those scenarios where the thing was not solved? Do you log that and presumably your team then look at that and figure out over time, okay, how can we get that 30 to 20 to 10 and so on? And do you kind of roll back the remediation so that the thing which didn’t work, we unpick that and we just go back to where you were when the error occurred?\n\n\n\n[00:14:00] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah, so very good follow up question on this. So with the 30% that we do, we still run additional fixes. So when we do the first fix, we tracked what changed, and then the further success rate can happen, that the fact the was fixed either on the third try or like the fourth try, so that 30% lowers.\n\n\n\nBut there are cases that none of the fixes helped, and it’s totally normal. Bigger website could be more complex problems, things like that happen. So then we proactively forward the user to our success specialist team who will assist on the spot. And they have all of the logs, what happened, what was tried, and what fixes were applied on the website on the spot.\n\n\n\nIn any case, there are backups that can be reverted without any of the fixes applied. So those 10 to 15% that nothing helped at the end of the day, gets a direct help from our success team so we could still solve, or help solve, the problem for the user.\n\n\n\n[00:15:03] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of incredible that if we were to just rewind the clock five years, the stuff that you’ve just mentioned was nonsense. It could not happen. And yet we’ve got to the point now where you’re saying there’s a 70% success rate. I’m quite surprised it’s as high as that, so that’s amazing. And presumably, the ambition is to drive that up to 80 and 90 and what have you.\n\n\n\nBut just the mere fact that it’s possible is pretty remarkable, that there’s a technology which, it’s kind of got your back, it’s this agent running in the background whose job it is to figure this stuff out and you don’t have to think about it.\n\n\n\nAnd I guess for your industry, you know, hosting in general, I presume a lot of the other companies are doing these kind of things. Over time, this will become the norm. It will just become a laundry list, one of the ticket items on the sales page. It’s, you know, we’ve got your AI agent monitoring the uptime, remediation is guaranteed. Maybe you’ll even get to like 99% of fixes or something like that in time. And it just kind of pushes what we’re going to expect from hosting companies like you. That’s fascinating. Really interesting.\n\n\n\n[00:16:04] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah. And as you’ve mentioned, five years ago, it could have been a lot of, let’s say problems or issues making this happen, because at that point of time you need to chew up a lot of information and, you know, do the thinking on that received information. But now when AI does have quite a powerful approach on this, and it’s able to handle such high amount of information, that’s when you know the heavy lifting is taken to that part, the end user is now getting the fixes done.\n\n\n\nAs per norm on all of this fixing, I really would like to see that happen because it just helps out. You can spend your time on expanding, moving your business further, thinking of the new ideas what you could do, instead of maintaining the website. You know, there’s like a saying, it’s more fun to buy new parts to your car than replace the old ones or do the maintenance parts. So this is, I think, the same thing the website itself.\n\n\n\n[00:16:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it really does feel like this is going to be the future. And obviously you’ve now got these technologies which can make, well, it’s approximating intelligent decisions. Whereas before it was just sort of, I guess you were going through a binary, is it this? Yes. Okay. Move to the next step. Is it this? No. Okay. Go back to this step. Whereas now there can be this whole load of things that you can throw at it.\n\n\n\nAnd that brings me to the next question really. So you’ve just talked about all the critical things, so the website collapsing. So we do something to remediate that. What about the more, I don’t know, let’s say soft things.\n\n\n\nSo for example, maybe it’s SEO. You know, we have gone around your website, we’ve scraped it a little bit like maybe Google Bot might do, and we’ve identified SEO problems. Or it could be accessibility problems, or it could be, goodness, I don’t know, you’ve just used inappropriate language here, we’ve got a better idea for a UVP at the top of the webpage. Does it stray into that as well? Is it more than just critical failure problems?\n\n\n\n[00:17:50] Arnas Donauskas: At this point of day, it’s more critical problems when the website is just full on down. But like, how I like to view the tools that we are building is whenever you build one tool, you receive clients’ feedback, you receive WordPress community feedback, where you can build more tools on top as a continuation to the first one. This is what I really like about all of this feedback culture.\n\n\n\nThis is the upcoming thing, and I think it’s only a matter of time when our troubleshooter and the optimiser will appear in the WordPress admin panel, where it will be able to tell you, I see an image has disappeared on your website, just upload it to me, I will fix it to you. Or I see some SEO problems. Or like you’ve mentioned, accessibility problems, or that some of the grammar mistakes were found in some of your posts. Something like that. So this is only a matter of time.\n\n\n\nAnd why such approach was taken at this point of time is, we want to give users a tool that they could trust and be comfortable on using when it comes to the most critical problem or critical matter with the website related errors. So they know, okay, I can trust and use this tool, and fix my problem right away. And when that’s put on, then we can move to extensive features to the troubleshooter and optimiser as well.\n\n\n\n[00:19:09] Nathan Wrigley: Would it be fair to say that you are developing solutions like that, though? Is that the kind of thing which is on your product roadmap to get those kind of tools, the SEO, the image fixing, the alt text identifier, the I know, the accessibility identifier, those kind of things. They’re in the background? You are building those? They’re roadmap items are they?\n\n\n\n[00:19:26] Arnas Donauskas: I would say they are currently planned. Right now, what we have in the more recent backlog is how to reach my personal goal on this is 90% fixed rate. If you already have some plans, how it’ll be done. So a short sneak peek on it. We basically want to build like a way back machine on our AI troubleshooter, so it would know at any given time what happened to each of the file the customer has on their website. And it would be able to tell you, okay, I see that on this specific date, this single file was changed and that’s what led to a 500 error. I have a safe backup copy for it, I will restore it for you. User confirms. We do the restoration.\n\n\n\nOr AI will be able to determine, I have a fully working website backup of your site, these are the orders that could be potentially missed if that is an e-commerce case. And if you want to, we can go ahead and restore the website to a fully working version and get your site back up and running again.\n\n\n\n[00:20:26] Nathan Wrigley: We do live in interesting times, that’s for sure. You mentioned in the blurb for the talk, and I read the bit at the beginning, but I’ll just read it again. So your talk explores how AI can be used to automatically fix detected website errors, I think we’ve covered that, and boost overall site performance.\n\n\n\nNow that’s a different piece, isn’t it? So if we’re now looking at site performance, presumably we’re talking about from slow to fast. Something wrong to fix. So basically, I’m asking the exact same series of questions, but from a performance point of view, not the site has collapsed and there’s an error. What are the things that you’re looking for there?\n\n\n\n[00:20:59] Arnas Donauskas: To be fair with you, everything. So we look at everything when it comes to website performance. So we do like a benchmark result where we have our starting ground when it comes to optimising the website. And we are using Google Page Speed scores. I think it’s one of the most popular tools to benchmark the website to see what is loading slowly on it, what could be the potential problems with it. And then for each website individually, automatic fixes to images, JS, CSS minification are being applied, and the client then sees the improvement, whether it’s 10%, 20%.\n\n\n\nSo right now what we currently have from the data itself, I believe it’s been running for two to three months right now, and we’ve been gathering data, how the websites are being optimised. So on average, mobile page speed score is being increased by 20, and the desktop is by 10%.\n\n\n\nBut there’s a catch to it. These optimisation steps are safe. It means nothing bad will happen to the website after the optimisation steps, and the next step would be introducing risky steps that can affect how the website looks.\n\n\n\nWhat I have in mind by that is, lazy loading sometimes can mess up one of the images, it appears slowly or after a while. So these things could happen, but this will be like a separate step informing the client, hey, we did the safe part, but we could push this further with some of the risks. No worries, you will be able to revert everything on the spot if something bad happens. So this will be the next step of it, and I’m really intrigued to see how fast the websites can be.\n\n\n\n[00:22:35] Nathan Wrigley: Can you modify your hosting environment to be specific to my website, if you know what I mean? So if my website, for example, is, I don’t know, a brochure website, I’ve got five pages, you could cache that entirely. Really easy to do. But, okay, this website over here, a different one that I’ve got, it’s a WooCommerce website, there’s a whole different load of caching that might go on, there’s a whole different load of optimisations that go on there. Do you take that burden on, or is it more of a, okay, we’ve got this thing, you tick a box and now we’re going to do the performance thing? Will it figure all that stuff out, or are there tick boxes where I can go, do this but don’t do this, do this but don’t do this? How does it work?\n\n\n\n[00:23:13] Arnas Donauskas: So each optimisation step to increase the performance is being applied to each website individually. It checks loading slowly. Right now, there is no possibility to customise the optimisation steps that you can do, but we are planning to integrate logic to the AI, or like past information for each type of website type. What caching should be applied on specific pages if the image is a landing one, or is it like a product image? So to give more extensive knowledge to the AI so it would be able to better determine how to approach different website types. But for now, what we check, still settings are unique to each website, but not to such extensive customisation.\n\n\n\n[00:23:56] Nathan Wrigley: You’ve laid before us a really interesting engineering challenge. These problems exist in terms of performance, we’ve got to put a bunch of engineers on it, and they’re going to figure out this AI way of solving that. But how do you communicate the work that the AI is done to the people that want to know it’s been done?\n\n\n\nBecause in a way, I kind of want to know that’s happened to my website, but at the same time, I kind of don’t. I don’t want to be getting six emails a day saying, okay, we updated this image, oh, and then another email, we did x, and we did. But you’ve got to let me know that that’s happened. In some way, you have to communicate the value to me that, look at all this fabulous stuff we’re doing. But I kind of want to know, but I kind of don’t want to know. So it’s a difficult tightrope to tread. I’m just wondering how you manage that.\n\n\n\n[00:24:36] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah, yeah. So at the end of each optimisation, client is getting an impacted result, did it increase, and by how much? And they are getting a full log, what was done on the website. And we are also trying to display that log to as most simple things as possible to understand, because some of those settings could sound, you know, very big words. But there’s actually very simple things that were done on the website. So we’re communicating that part to the users at the end of each optimisation as well.\n\n\n\n[00:25:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so you’re kind of making it easier to understand basically. You’re hoping to use normal language to explain something fairly technical. Yeah, okay. And summarising it, not sending an email for every single thing. And presumably over time the email’s become less and less anyway because, let’s say I migrate a website to your platform, the AI gets involved, and I’m imagining there’s more at the beginning, it’s front loaded. Oh, look, there’s this and this and this and this. And then slowly over time, oh, there’s less. We did it. It’s done. But, oh, new plugin, new thing. I’m guessing that you communicate less over time.\n\n\n\n[00:25:37] Arnas Donauskas: With such optimisation things, yes, via email. I would say it’s less via email, more via interface. And I would say that at this point, it’s enough for a user to grasp the idea of what was done.\n\n\n\nWhy I say this? Because the amount of time the clients spend in the interface reviewing the optimisations and how many of them interact with it is quite high. I believe with optimisations it’s 70% of the users that actually started the migration, completed, you know, all of the interaction with the interface. And they’re spending approximately like from 10 to 15 minutes with it.\n\n\n\nSo I would say these are pretty good numbers. But you gave a very good point for the users’ clients who are more advanced. And perhaps it would be a good improvement point to give them an option to download all extensive logs, what was done, to see just what happened actually in depth, not just rephrased wording for some technical parts.\n\n\n\n[00:26:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think it’s a really difficult tightrope to tread because every time that your AI does something and it had a beneficial impact on my website, that’s good for me, but it’s also good for you because it builds that relationship, doesn’t it? You know, oh, look what the platform’s done. It’s brilliant. I didn’t have to lift a finger. Just came as part of the package. Fabulous. I’m happy with that.\n\n\n\nBut you just don’t want to overdo that communication because at some point it’s like, oh, you lose sight of it. And then the critical one will arrive where the website’s collapsed and, yeah, it’s another one, it just goes in the bin. So I guess there’s a tightrope to tread, which is kind of interesting.\n\n\n\nHow do you actually find these errors then? Do you have something akin to Google Bot, which is going and looking at the front end of the website as a human being would see it, if you like, and sort of scraping around inside the DOM, looking at screenshots and, you know, okay, yeah, we see that image isn’t, I don’t know, so just an open-ended question really.\n\n\n\n[00:27:28] Arnas Donauskas: Since each of the website that we are troubleshooting are hosted with us, we are able to, you know, detect. Because the primary source that we are using to determine that something bad happened is the HTTP response.\n\n\n\n[00:27:41] Nathan Wrigley: Right. That’s straightforward. Yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:27:42] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah. So whenever that changes, we are able to know because each of the website is hosted with us on our infrastructure. So this is the most, the quickest and most straightforward approach we can use to determine that something bad happened. So this is the one we are running with. And quite good accuracy, unless there’s like a, some CDNs in that case. And this could be sometimes a problem because not always the true error will come out. But yeah, this is the method we are using.\n\n\n\n[00:28:09] Nathan Wrigley: But on the performance side, presumably that’s slightly different because, you know, you mentioned lazy loading images or something, you’ve got to have some metrics and telemetry to say, we’ve got lazy loading images, okay, how do we deal with that?\n\n\n\n[00:28:20] Arnas Donauskas: So with the performance part, clients are able to, you know, at any given time to initiate the optimisations. We will do the performance test to see if it actually needs an optimisation, because sometimes clients have very perfectly optimised websites, and they’re working like a speed. But we are occasionally running page speed performance tests, on weekly basis, I believe. And if we detect, okay, this website could be improved, then clients are being informed that, hey, you can do some optimisation steps that are automatic and you can go ahead and start the optimisation process.\n\n\n\n[00:28:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, got it. Thank you. Curious thing that you are in this game of tennis, I presume, with the AI models. I’m presuming, I could be wrong, but I’m presuming that you are using AIs that we are familiar with. So I’m just going to drop a few names that I know. Things like Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT and things like that. I’m presuming there’s some connection that you’ve got with those. Maybe you have your own, I don’t know.\n\n\n\nGiven that they seem to change at a breathtaking pace, and in some cases the changes that they seem to ship kind of seem to degrade their capacity to do things. We’ve had a recent ChatGPT 5 update, which I think many people felt perhaps in certain scenarios was a backward step. How do you keep up with this?\n\n\n\n[00:29:33] Arnas Donauskas: Testing, straightforward testing, but very good point on the whole different models and the providers on it. We simply do tests with each of the models. We scout around, we see, or it looks very promising, we test how it performs, and there are several points. How fast it can grasp the information and return back to us. So how long the request took time. Some of the models took like 10 seconds, some of them took 5. So we want the client to get the faster result as fast as possible.\n\n\n\nAnd then there’s the second part, it’s the accuracy of the returned information. Because one of the learned lessons I will be sharing in my speech is that, we noticed that when newer models came in, how their accuracy was way better and the time to handle information was very shorter. So since we have like developers who are working on the AI models itself, we just always test to see if there’s something better that we could ship to our users so they would have better outcome on their end as well.\n\n\n\n[00:30:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s fairly straightforward, isn’t it? It’s testing, testing, more testing, and go with the thing which provides the best tested answer. But curiously though, you must have applied a ton of engineering time into this endeavor. So there’s a load of people on the ground, that must cost Hostinger quite a bit of money. And then presumably there’s quite a lot of money being sent to these AI agents. But I’m guessing it’s hard to justify a price increase to your end users.\n\n\n\nSo it must be kind of a fairly difficult business decision. How much of this can you do? Because you could AI forever, you know, and just keep going and going and going and endless cycles. So I’m guessing from a business point of view, there’s a, again, another tightrope to tread. How much can you do? Or is this more a case of, is this stuff a premium thing that you offer? Do you have to pay an additional fee to get access to this stuff?\n\n\n\n[00:31:21] Arnas Donauskas: No. No additional fee. AI troubleshooter and optimiser is pre included with all of the hosting plans we offer for our clients base. And the price for that did not change because this tool was introduced.\n\n\n\nYou’re right, it took some time to deliver final versions of the products, approximately seven to eight months. But it was all worth it, I think, because clients can now automatically do things and don’t have to spend time themselves.\n\n\n\nAnd from a company point of view, we just want to deliver best user experience they could have and, you know, that they could trust us even when the website is down with an error and how we can solve it, and what we can do the quickest or how to, you know, assist user on optimising the site.\n\n\n\n[00:32:08] Nathan Wrigley: It’s the market at work, isn’t it? Essentially. You’re trying to make your offering different and unique and offer something which adds value, and so you take the hit, I guess.\n\n\n\nDo you want to get to the point where everything is completely automated? I mean, is that a desirable outcome? Would it be something that you’d like to see where the human is completely out of the loop? Or do you always want to have an option for a confirm button or a roll, not rollback, we always want the rollback.\n\n\n\nBut it always feels like the light at the end of the tunnel here is that the human doesn’t need to be involved at all. It would be desirable if I could get up and be a hundred percent confident that my website, for all of the things that you did overnight, is better. And I don’t have to involve myself in that at all. But equally, there’s a bit of me which always wants the confirm button. I want to be able to see, well, not that one. Yes, that one. We’ll do that.\n\n\n\n[00:32:56] Arnas Donauskas: I think confirmable actions will be there all the time, or most of the time. Because at the end of the day, this is the user’s website that the changes are being applied to, and the user is in control. Would you like to do those changes, would you not? One of the thoughts, I believe we discussed with our colleagues, what we have 100% fixed rate? Should we give users an option, just run everything, I trust this completely? It could be an option. But still, at the end of the day, this is the user’s website. It’s their business, it’s their blog, and we want to give best suggestions, but the user is the one who’s saying, yes, I would like to do that, or, no, I don’t want to see this.\n\n\n\n[00:33:39] Nathan Wrigley: I guess you’re trying to get to the point where the confirmed decision is just really obvious. You want to go in and be entirely confident that, yep, I’m going to confirm it because I have this trust, but equally, there’s an option to not confirm it. That seems to be where the whole AI thing is going. The humans are always in the loop somewhere and it’s always that final confirmation step. And I think if we lose sight of that, we’re probably in a bit of trouble.\n\n\n\nOne of the questions I have as well is about WordPress, obviously, we’re at WordCamp US, this great big open source thing. And it brings to mind the question about these models, and the fact that they are entirely proprietary, you know, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and all of these things. They’re having a lot of our data, we’re allowing them into the backend of our websites, but they, I don’t know if they have any open source models which are using. Are you shipping data to them? How does it align with the whole open source thing that WordPress is so keen to promote?\n\n\n\n[00:34:31] Arnas Donauskas: Oh, very good question I can say. And it’s true that different models look like different silos. Different companies, they have different approaches what they do. But I really liked one of the comments, I believe I read on the Reddit, on all of the AI stuff. And it applies also on such websites. So for example, you’re a user who likes to explore things, and you want to try and fix websites with AI and do that automatically. A free model for the ChatGPT or any other AI model will be more than enough to run, as long as you have your prompt.\n\n\n\nIt will take some experiment times, that’s for sure, but everything could be actually run free on this part. So this is more, you know, into the open source area. But of course, when there are paid models and stuff like that, this could be, you know, one day could be tricky.\n\n\n\nPerhaps we will have a fully open source that anyone could be willing to use without any additional charges. Time will show on this. But now, a lot of companies, people are creating tools that they allowed to do free trials or free for some time. So I think this is a matter of question on this as well, yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:35:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean it really does seem like a really exciting time, in tech in general, but also WordPress in general. But it’s kind of really interesting to see the way that WordPress and hosting company’s interfacing through AI. And it does seem like there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening on your side.\n\n\n\nYeah, it’s been fascinating talking to you today, trying to explore this a little bit more. Where can we find you, Arnas? If we want to reach out and discover more about you or Hostinger, where’s the best place to go?\n\n\n\n[00:36:05] Arnas Donauskas: So if you want to reach out directly to me, I’m always happy to do that via LinkedIn. I have my full profile set up so we can reach out through there. If you’re a Hostinger client and you have some feedback, just drop it to our support chat. I’m the one who always reads them, and I might even get directly in touch with you via one of the forms because I always keep an eye of our client’s feedback and I try to contact them as often as possible to follow up on some of the feedbacks they share.\n\n\n\n[00:36:32] Nathan Wrigley: Well, Arnas, thank you so much for chatting to me today and prizing open this subject. I feel that this conversation is going to get more and more in depth, and more complicated as the years go by. But in 2025, good to know where we’re at. Thank you.\n\n\n\n[00:36:43] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah. Thank you for inviting me. It was an honor.\n\n\n\n\nOn the podcast today we have Arnas Donauskas.\n\n\n\nArnas is a product manager at Hostinger, with over five years of experience in the web hosting industry. His journey began during college while working on his bachelor\u2019s degree, when he needed to create a website and discovered WordPress as a beginner. This first foray into website building sparked his interest in the industry, eventually leading him to a career where he now develops products that help others launch their own online presence. Recently he\u2019s been working with a team tasked with delivering tools and improvements to WordPress users to ease their journey on starting, and maintaining websites.\n\n\n\nIn this episode, Arnas shares insights from his presentation at WordCamp US in Portland, Oregon, where he discussed the future of fixing and optimising websites with AI. For many WordPress users, managing site performance and troubleshooting errors can be time-consuming and complex. Arnas and his team have been developing AI-based solutions that not only help onboard new clients by automating website creation, but also proactively monitor and remediate website issues as they happen.\n\n\n\nWe get into the details of how Hostinger\u2019s AI tools identify, and automatically fix, critical website errors, such as HTTP response issues, and how they\u2019re pushing their site optimisations through automated performance enhancements. Arnas explains the engineering challenges involved, the current rate of success with automated fixes, and how user feedback is shaping the roadmap for new features like SEO analysis and accessibility improvements.\n\n\n\nHe provides a behind-the-scenes look at how Hostinger tests and iterates on AI models, what kind of data is fed to these systems, and how the team balances automation with user control.\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re curious about how artificial intelligence is transforming WordPress hosting and site management, and what this means for the future of the web, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\nHostinger\n\n\n\nKodee by Hostinger\n\n\n\nFixing and Optimizing websites with AI – Arnas’ presentation at WordCamp US 2025\n\n\n\nGoogle’s PageSpeed tools\n\n\n\nArnas on LinkedIn", "date_published": "2025-10-29T10:00:00-04:00", "date_modified": "2025-10-27T08:04:36-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/191-Arnas-Donauskas-on-AI-Powered-Troubleshooting-for-Websites.jpg", "tags": [ "ai", "hosting", "podcast" ], "summary": "On the podcast today we have Arnas Donauskas from Hostinger. Arnas shares how Hostinger uses AI to help users build, fix, and optimise WordPress sites, automatically detecting errors, applying fixes, and improving performance. He highlights their AI\u2019s 70% success rate in resolving issues, discusses ongoing improvements, and addresses the balance between automation and user control. The conversation also touches on the integration of AI with WordPress\u2019 open source values and what\u2019s next for AI-driven website management. It\u2019s an insightful look into how AI is transforming web hosting. If you\u2019re curious about how artificial intelligence is transforming WordPress hosting and site management, and what this means for the future of the web, this episode is for you.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2172893/c1e-02kxkik18qjc64747-gp990wo8t7pd-lylpky.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=200244", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/190-seth-rubenstein-on-block-composability-in-wordpress-future", "title": "#190 \u2013 Seth Rubenstein on Block Composability in WordPress\u2019 Future", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, block composability, what it is and how it’s shaping WordPress’s future.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Seth Rubenstein. Seth is the head engineer at the Pew Research Center, where he leads a team of developers managing the organization’s WordPress based publishing platform for its news site. Passionate about open source, Seth ensures that everything his team builds not only meets the Pew Research Center’s needs, but also benefits the wider community. By actively contributing to the Gutenberg project, he strives to share their solutions, always asking how their work can be given back to help others in the WordPress ecosystem.
\n\n\n\nSeth shares fascinating stories from the work he’s been doing recently. He breaks down what block composability means, the ability to build modular, reusable, and even interactive blocks that work seamlessly together, empowering both developers and end users to create sophisticated web applications within the familiar WordPress block editor.
\n\n\n\nThe conversation gets into some of WordPress’s newest, and most promising, features including the Block Bindings API, Block Bits, which is still very much in development, and the Interactivity API. Seth explains how these tools open a world of possibilities, like building interactive quizzes, dynamically updating content, or even prefetching data, all using blocks, without having to rely on custom React front ends, or heavy server side processing.
\n\n\n\nSeth also talks about the path forward for democratizing these advanced capabilities, discussing current limitations, the potential for new UI tools, and what’s still missing in the quest for truly responsive device contextual blocks.
\n\n\n\nThroughout the episode, Seth makes a compelling case for why now is a golden opportunity for developers and plugin builders to start experimenting, get involved, and shape the next evolution of WordPress as a cutting edge web application platform.
\n\n\n\nWhether you’re a developer curious about the future of Gutenberg, or an editor dreaming of more drag and drop web app power, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Seth Rubenstein.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Seth Rubenstein. How are you doing, Seth?
\n\n\n\n[00:03:40] Seth Rubenstein: Very good. How about you?
\n\n\n\n[00:03:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Nice to have you back.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:42] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, second time.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:43] Nathan Wrigley: This doesn’t happen too many times. I’ve got to be perfectly honest with you, the audience, I’ve already said this to Seth. Each time I come to WordCamp US, I’m always confounded by how remarkably clever people are, and the depth of the content is sometimes beyond me. I think this is one of those examples.
\n\n\n\nI think there’s a high chance that you are going to have to shepherd me. There’s probably going to be a lot of editing, when I pause and you explain what you are talking about. So let’s get into it. First of all, tell us a little bit about you, where you work, what you do in the WordPress space.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:10] Seth Rubenstein: Sure. So I work for Pew Research Center. I’m the head of engineering there. I manage a team of four other developers, and I like to tell people that we work with and on WordPress every day.
\n\n\n\nWe manage a publishing platform for a small news site in the US, Pew Research, but we also contribute to Gutenberg. Everything that we do, everything that we build day in and day out, we try to do from a perspective of how can we open source this? How can we contribute this back to Gutenberg in some way? What can we build to fulfill our needs that would also fulfill other people’s needs?
\n\n\n\n[00:04:39] Nathan Wrigley: You said a small organisation, the Pew Research Center. I don’t actually know what they do.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:44] Seth Rubenstein: We are a nonprofit, call ourselves a fact tank. What we do is we survey the American public on a variety of issues. Where are they on things like abortion, or religion, or crime, or the economy, or the use of AI, whatever. And we like to kind of say we hold up a mirror to the American public to tell them what they believe back to them.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:04] Nathan Wrigley: And so is the WordPress website that you have with them, is that a mechanism to distribute that data back to the public?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:09] Seth Rubenstein: Yes, yes.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s interesting. So it’s a data heavy industry that you are dealing with.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:13] Seth Rubenstein: It is. It is. We’re very, a kind of academic research institution, but we publish in kind of a news oriented way.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So we figured out a little bit about you, however you are here at WordCamp US to do a presentation. I actually don’t know if you’ve done it
\n\n\n\n[00:05:28] Seth Rubenstein: I have, yeah. I did it the other day.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:29] Nathan Wrigley: How did it go?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:29] Seth Rubenstein: It went okay. I had a problem with my speaker notes, so I had to ad lib a good bit of it. So it might not be as coherent, or clear as it should have been.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:41] Nathan Wrigley: Well we’re here to fix that. You can ad lib all you like here. So it was called, and forgive the pronunciation if I get this wrong, Block Composability: The Past and The Future. I’m actually just going to read the blurb into the record. And I’ll also make sure that there’s a link in the show notes to the page at the WordCamp US website where you can find out about the content. And also if by the time this comes out a WordPress TV episode with your presentation has landed, then I’ll mention that as well.
\n\n\n\nGutenberg excels at crafting beautiful static content, but what if you could empower anyone to build dynamic, interactive web experiences directly within the Block Editor? This session dives into block composability, a powerful concept that enables the creation of rich, interactive content using blocks, making advanced web development accessible to even less technically inclined users, which begs the question, what is block composability?
\n\n\n\n[00:06:31] Seth Rubenstein: Block composability, I guess let’s define composability first. Composability in computer science and in software development is the idea that you can create and assemble web applications with reusable components in a modular way. That’s really all that means.
\n\n\n\nIf you’ve ever used React, if you’ve ever written in React, it means React Component, really. It’s a self-contained modular unit that can act on its own, but when plugged in with other units, it becomes something new, or extend its functionality or changes its functionality in some way.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:01] Nathan Wrigley: When Gutenberg dropped, I had this notion that we were going to see mini apps inside of a block. So for example, I had this notion that right off the bat, so I’m going back to 2018 or something, when Gutenberg was still a, so prior to when it was in Core, let’s go with that. And I had this notion that you would drop in, let’s say a real estate block, and that block would encapsulate all the information about this particular house. And you would drop in the block and it would ask you a bunch of questions about the house and out would come a house custom post type, if you like.
\n\n\n\nHowever, what happened was we got paragraph blocks, and we got an image block, and we got these fairly, well, useful, but they do one thing. They do a paragraph. They do an image, and that seems to be kind of where it ended. Are you trying to draw a line in the sand where it’s possible to go beyond that simple, does one thing, paragraph, image, to more the, we have a real estate block with loads of different facets and capabilities?
\n\n\n\n[00:07:57] Seth Rubenstein: That’s right, yeah. I think where we’re at now is we’ve reached a point where the block editor, Gutenberg, in both its block editor and site editor kind of flavors, is you can build web applications. Blocks can do something now. They’re not just presenting text or an image and they’re kind of static and, you know, maybe you can style them differently from one post to another, but now they can actually do something.
\n\n\n\nAnd more importantly, they can communicate with one another. You know, one block is adjacent to another. It can tell that block what to do when you click on it. If it’s inside of it, it can change its functionality accordingly. So you might imagine, we have a quiz builder. That’s actually one of our, probably our most technical product.
\n\n\n\nAnd the way it works is there’s a results block where you can build out your results page for your quiz, but if you were to drop in a special block for, we have a special quiz that does scoring a very specific way, well, it changes the scoring functionality in the quiz builder. It doesn’t overwrite that. If you take that block out, the scoring functionality returns back to normal.
\n\n\n\nSo now we’re at a point where it’s very much possible to build web applications in the block editor with blocks.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:00] Nathan Wrigley: So this little quiz block that you’ve described, if I was using, so ignore the developer experience and everything that you have built, the technicalities of all that. If I was somebody that was working for the Pew Research Center and I was, I don’t know, an editor and I needed to create a quiz, would that be my process? I drop in the quiz block, and boom, I have a quiz.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:20] Seth Rubenstein: It’s really simple. You would go into, we do kind of store it all in a nice post type. So there’s a quiz post type. And then you open that up, you say, I want to go make a new quiz. And by default, there’s a quiz, we call it the quiz controller block that’s there first. And we have a few templated things in there for you. So like a start page and a question, an answer, and all of those things are block. So a question is a block, and inside of that question goes the answers for that question. That’s a block.
\n\n\n\nGo further than that, we also have these kind of bindings. So you drop an answer in, well, there’s text for the answer, right? What if you want an image in there? What if you want a chart? What if you want a video? What if you want some other interactive piece of content to be corresponding to that answer? Well, you can drop that in too. And you can kind of freely move all these things within an answer, while still having that text bound to the answer block.
\n\n\n\nSo it’s a highly technical product, but for the editors, for the designers, it is literally just drag, drop, drag, drop, drag, drop. Create a page, create a question, type in your answer.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:16] Nathan Wrigley: So in the world of 2018 that I alluded to a moment ago when the block editor launched, it feels like there were big missing pieces that prevented what you’ve just described. And maybe they’re APIs. I think possibly in some scenarios they are. What are the bits more recently, I don’t even know if it’s more recently in all honesty, but what are the bits that have enabled the features that you’ve just described?
\n\n\n\n[00:10:38] Seth Rubenstein: Sure. So I think it’s funny that you bring back to 2018 because we built Quiz Builder in 2019. I think I’ll go on the record here and say, I think it might be the first kind of product in Gutenberg that was drag and drop building web applications. So I think we kind of pushed really early on the idea of composability inside of Gutenberg.
\n\n\n\nAnd I see it as, there are kind of three waves in Gutenberg. First was, okay, Gutenberg is a CSS generator. That’s how I first kind of imagined it. You’re creating content and you have a style system and that outputs some CSS for your site.
\n\n\n\nAnd then we got, I think the kind of HTML part of that a few years later. With the site editor and the theming inside of the block editor and things like that.
\n\n\n\nAnd now we’ve gotten to the JavaScript part of Gutenberg. Where WordPress has the Inactivity API. And so this is a WordPress native JavaScript framework, so blocks can do something on the front end. And I think that is really the key innovation that’s really opened this up in just the last 12, 16 months.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:35] Nathan Wrigley: Are there any APIs that have enabled you to short circuit? So again, in 2018, I would imagine there was quite a lot of heavy lifting that you needed to do order to pull that off, to innovate in that way. Are there any things which have fallen, I think quite recently actually, that have enabled it to be more available to developers who don’t have the time available that you did?
\n\n\n\n[00:11:56] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, I mean, so in 2019 when we did this, you know, all we really had was this ability to kind of scaffolded out these quizzes. The were pretty static in their layout. You drop a question and there were the answers in there, and you could type them in and that was it. No images inside the quiz, nothing like that.
\n\n\n\nNow, thanks to things like block bindings, block bits, which we can go into in a little bit.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we’d need to I think.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:19] Seth Rubenstein: And the Interactivity API, you know, it is, everything is less static. Everything is less set in stone now. With things like the HTML Tag Processor, you can say, oh, this answer has this flag on it so we’re going to change out some of the HTML in it, in kind of real time before it gets to the front end for users. That just really wasn’t possible before, without a lot of work. It wasn’t very performant.
\n\n\n\nNow all those things are in place for developers to really tap into. And the documentation and examples are there too, because that was the problem before, I think, is that a lot of people had to figure out how to do this, and now there are real world examples out there.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:52] Nathan Wrigley: So you mentioned, quickly skirted over three things there. So there was Block Bits, Block Bindings, which I think the full title would be Block Bindings API, and the Interactivity API, which I think is like a child of the HTML API. I’m not entirely sure about that, but.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:07] Seth Rubenstein: It utilises the HTML components.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Let’s just go through what those three things are in whatever order suits the purposes of this podcast best, because I don’t know which one you’d start on.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:16] Seth Rubenstein: Let’s start with Block Bindings API. I would actually imagine a good number of people are familiar with this. This has come up a lot in the last year in the Gutenberg project. What that really lets you do is use Core blocks more effectively.
\n\n\n\nFor example, before, if you wanted to have a button and you wanted to do a very specific thing and look a very specific way, well, good luck. You had to make your own button. Sure there was the Core button and you could style it to some degree, but what it did was it went to a link.
\n\n\n\nNow with things like Block Bindings, you can say, okay, well, I have my Core button and I’m going to style it however I want, but the interior text, you know, what it says, what it does, well, that can be done kind of programmatically on the backend. That’s where the Block Bindings API comes in. It lets you use Core blocks and change them, well, not Core blocks, any blocks, really, and change them to fit your needs.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:07] Nathan Wrigley: Can you give us a concrete example of that? So you’ve just talked about the button, you mentioned a sort of, I was struggling to grasp what you were meaning about changing the text programmatically. How would you do that? What would be an example?
\n\n\n\n[00:14:18] Seth Rubenstein: Let me give you an example of that, Core paragraph. Very useful with block bindings. And I mentioned answers. So we have this answer block, right? And before it just had a text field in it. You would type in the answer and that was it. That was all you saw. And that meant that you couldn’t do anything inside of the answer. You couldn’t provide any other content inside there, because that would then get rolled up as the answer.
\n\n\n\nSo now with Block Bindings, what we have is we have this core paragraph binding that you can drop into the answer, and it is a text field still. You can type into it. It’s storing that on the answer block and then you can put other stuff inside the answer block because we’re not reading what’s in there as the content.
\n\n\n\nWhat that meant for us is that we didn’t have to go make another block called answer text. We have hundreds of these kind of scenarios in our system where, yeah, we need a very specific use case, and it’s usually just some text, right, somewhere. Why would I make another block that’s just a paragraph block, really?
\n\n\n\nSo bindings, it makes blocks way more extensible. So one block can perform multiple functions if you need it to.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:19] Nathan Wrigley: So my takeaway from that, it may be ignorant, it kind of adds a layer where you can add more features into any block, Core or otherwise. So in the example of paragraph, it’s like paragraph plus. It’s extended paragraph if you like, and you then get to decide. And that is the binding bit. You bind things to the block.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:39] Seth Rubenstein: You bind attributes in a block.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: Attributes.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:41] Seth Rubenstein: That’s what it really effectively comes down to, is you bind attributes. So you could say that the text, the content attribute, in Core paragraph, well, that’s not coming from whatever you typed in there. It’s coming from some other programmatic interface somewhere in your system, your plugin, whatever.
\n\n\n\nSo that lets you use Core paragraph as a layout element, put it wherever you’d like, but then what’s inside of it, and perhaps even what happens when you click on it, well, that’s decided elsewhere.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s nice about that is it lessens the number of controls that you need to present to the end user, to the designer, to the editor. For them, they just drop the block in there. The plugin handles the bindings. The plugin handles, okay, the text for this paragraph inside this answer should come from here. They don’t have to think about all that. So it’s less settings for them actually. It’s more just drop blocks in.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:27] Nathan Wrigley: You are very much in the weeds of all this, so I suspect the fact that you’ve done this and done this over and over again renders it fairly straightforward. How available is this? Is the documentation there?
\n\n\n\n[00:16:38] Seth Rubenstein: Oh yeah. The documentation is there. The WordPress Dev Blog has a number of tutorials on Block Bindings. And I think once you get started with it, it’s extremely easy to work with really.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that was Block Bindings. Next one was Block Bits. Now I’ve only heard this phrase a couple of times, so you’re going to have to go 101 on this.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:54] Seth Rubenstein: Sure. So Block Bits is, this is an API that is very much in development. It’s a concept more than anything else right now. So with Block Bindings, we can kind of take over a whole paragraph block and change it all out. Well, what if you just need to change one word inside that paragraph? That’s where Block Bits comes into being.
\n\n\n\nSo this could be you have typed out your sentence, and maybe there’s a name in the sentence. And you need to change that name dynamically based on whatever the user’s choosing in this front end interface. Well, Block Bits, you just select the text, you go to the toolbar, you say, I’m going to bind, quote unquote, this to this thing.
\n\n\n\nAnd Block Bits, the concept is, okay, we’re going to look inside of a block, down to a bit, maybe just a character and do something with that. Change it, make it a button, whatever. That’s really all it is. It’s a fancy name for taking Block Bindings to the next level, which is kind of inside a string of text.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:50] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So it is, again, forgive me if I’ve parsed it incorrectly, but a Block Bit is a binding inside of some other thing. So in the example you gave, swap out this string for a different string, or it could be swap out this image dynamically for a different image, or, I don’t know, insert a dollar sign here instead of a pound sign or.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:15] Seth Rubenstein: Well beyond that, beyond just the switching things out, the other kind of powerful part of the concept, and that’s where I think the API part is really still in development, and this will take a little bit further is, one of the examples used in the Gutenberg project is things like ISBN numbers.
\n\n\n\nSo you can imagine that, you know, maybe you’re running some sort of library like site, you type in an ISBN number. Well, what you want to happen on the front end is maybe a little bit more complex than that. So you type in your ISBN number and the block bit could see that that is an ISBN formatted number, and maybe on the front end it becomes a link with a little popup that goes to the Library of Congress, point to that thing, right?
\n\n\n\nSo it’s very analogous to Block Bindings, but it’s very much very specific small string inside of a larger string. So they give it as sub block bindings. Maybe that’s even a better term for it. Maybe that’s what would be called in the future. But I really think of it as sub block binding.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:10] Nathan Wrigley: And presumably then you can just chain these together inside, well, let’s go with a paragraph. You could just have a one sentence just full of these block bits. So one followed by another, followed by another. Okay, that’s really interesting. So you could have a whole sentence, for example, just made up of bits from all over the place.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:28] Seth Rubenstein: Well, and you could imagine that, beyond just like pulling information, it could be really useful when what we’re using it for currently is templating, right? So you want this string, this sentence to have these parameters. Maybe it’s got the format of your post type, and then maybe it’s got the title in there, and then maybe the date. But maybe that’s all on one line and not three different blocks.
\n\n\n\nOne of the things that drives me crazy right now is, let’s say I want to do a post date, post type, kind of above the post title. I insert a row block, and then I insert my date block, and then I insert my meta block. That’s like a lot of divs, that’s a lot of markup for that. It’s like, why isn’t that just one paragraph line with that bit of information in there? That’s where block bits comes into play.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:08] Nathan Wrigley: So it feels like, again, forgive me, it feels like the kind of thing that we would’ve used custom fields for in past. And we would’ve had, I don’t know, dozens of custom fields, each containing their own discreet bit of data, and we would’ve had to have figured out a way to drop those into this paragraph. Now this is all handled natively.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:25] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, and visually in the editor.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:26] Nathan Wrigley: Visually in the editor. And so it could be anything. It could be markup, it could be text, it could be an image, it could be, I don’t know, XML, anything you like. That’s really powerful.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:36] Seth Rubenstein: It’s exciting. It’s very powerful, and it’s the API that I am most looking forward to seeing completed. I think it will really, without getting too technical, you go a little bit further, Block Bits, Block Bindings. These things I think are kind of critical for responsive blocks. If we’re going to change attributes at kind of a micro level based on certain conditions, like those are the kind of frameworks that we need to be able to do that.
\n\n\n\nSo beyond just like the content and templating stuff, there are deep technical reasons that these APIs continue to be developed out.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, I think I’ve grasped what that is. Just running the clock back a couple of minutes, you imply, no, I think you said that this is in development more so than Block Bindings. So the block bits is ready to use.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:20] Seth Rubenstein: No. There’s very much in a conceptual phase, and I think there’s a lot of other technologies that need to be finished out. There are work on the HTML APIs, even though they’re really well advanced now over the last couple years, there’s more work being done on those. I think those things are kind of blockers to keep pushing forward with the Block Bits. But you can start doing Block Bits today. And I do go over that in the presentation.
\n\n\n\nWhat it really comes down to, fundamentally today is, it’s a rich text custom format, which you can do today. You can go in and make your own kind of custom formats inside the rich text component. You know, that might be bold or italic, a custom format. So it’s really simple as like, okay, well, I have a custom format that adds a class name to something, and then the HTML tag processor, I look for that class name and I change it out. Bingo, bango. So simple.
\n\n\n\nBut of course, like I said, Block Bits is much bigger than that. There’s an idea of kind of like a library of bits and, you know, you can plug it into different data sources and post meta and this and that and the other thing. But right now at least, you can start to experiment with this idea, with templating and kind of getting dynamic bits of content into a string.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:28] Nathan Wrigley: This feels very much to me, like the kind of thing that needs more eyeballs.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:31] Seth Rubenstein: It does.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:31] Nathan Wrigley: It’s one of those things where you let loose a thousand developers and suddenly some curious thing that nobody thought of occurred and it was like, oh, it does that.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:40] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah. I really want to get people to experiment with this concept further, because I think we need to push it further because it’s just so powerful.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really interesting. Okay, so we did Block Bits. We did Block Bindings. I think the final one that we mentioned was the Interactivity API.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:55] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah. So the Interactivity API, that is about, it’s probably about two years old, I think, at this point. I won’t go into all the history of that, but it is effectively a WordPress native, Preact framework. It’s really easy to work with. You kind of just write basic HTML and the JavaScript is very easy to get into.
\n\n\n\nAnd what that allows you to do is really add interactions at an atomic level to blocks. You can write all sorts of functions. So you might imagine you have a form block, and it has an on submit action. Not every form does the same thing, right? So maybe you have another block, could be send to Firebase. You drop that in there and it changes, it can actually hoist up its own on submit function into that blocks interactivity. And so it makes it really easy to kind of swap JavaScript functionality in and out, and extend functionality across all your blocks.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:47] Nathan Wrigley: So it, I guess the easiest way that I parse this was it enables you to have things doing things to other things. That was profound. Things doing things to other things in the same interface.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:59] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:59] Nathan Wrigley: You click a button and, I don’t know, the cart increments by one or something like that. So this kind of thing that really, in the year 2025, given that we’ve had mobile phones in our hands for decades, this sort of stuff feels like it should have been in websites for decades, but it wasn’t.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:12] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah. And the other exciting thing about it is it’s not just about telling blocks what to do. I find it very interesting that it can communicate data across blocks. So I’ll come back to Quiz Builder as a really good example. We just rebuilt that with all of these things, Block Bits, Block Bindings, Interactivity API. That just got completely revamped in the last couple months. Before that, what we were doing is we were building out a custom React front end for every single quiz.
\n\n\n\nSo the users would go in, they would drag and drop, you know, build up these quizzes. And then on top of that, we were recreating all that for a new front end interface. And we had all this service side processing to kind of build up a data model for the quiz and then score the quiz, and we made a performant as we could be, but it wasn’t.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:55] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a lot.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:55] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, it’s a lot. And it’s a lot of like duplicative work and you’re like, what for? With this, it’s now the Interactivity API. Those blocks actually, you know, the answer block just hoists its answer into this larger data model using the Interactivity API.
\n\n\n\nSo now all that happens client side. So now all these things that we were doing server side, we can do client side with the Interactivity API, and that saves us money, that saves us performance. It yields a better experience for the end user.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:19] Nathan Wrigley: So over the last 10 minutes or so, we kind of atomised these three things, Block Bits, Block Bindings, Interactivity. We kind of talked about them as separate things, which I guess they are. But from your experience, I’m guessing that they work in concert really well. In other words, if you understand, if you get into the weeds of those three things, and maybe some other things, you prize open capabilities in WordPress which are pretty profound.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:43] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, well, obviously one of the things that I love most about WordPress is it’s flexibility. Let’s use Block Bits as an example. This kind of pseudo block bits I’ve just described, where you register a custom format and then you use the HTML Tag Processor to switch that out. Well, the way that we’re switching it out is using the Interactivity API.
\n\n\n\nSo all we do is we say, okay, we look for that class name, we use the HTML Tag Processor, and we add the Interactivity API bits that we need to it. We just say, well, the text value should be this, state dot button text, right? That’s really easy. But you could do it with block context too.
\n\n\n\nSo there are all these tools in WordPress, all these different APIs related to blocks that once you start to connect them together, you get composability. I mean, that’s what it really comes down to. This ability for developers to build blocks that can be, one, reusable, that’s really important concept for composability, two, stand on their own, right? A button block should do something if it’s on its own. It should go to a link or something. But if that button block is dropped into another block, it’s nestable, well its configuration changes. Now it submits for the form, right? It doesn’t go to a link.
\n\n\n\nWe’re at this place where just, there’s all these tools available to you when you start plugging them all together, really powerful stuff happens.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And I guess it’s like anything, once you’ve made those connections in your own head and done the hard work to understand them all, suddenly ideas begin occurring to you that maybe in a podcast like this, you get to the very edge of that, but you don’t get into the weeds of that. But once you’ve peeled it back and understood it, suddenly, aha, I didn’t realise WordPress could do all of this.
\n\n\n\nOne of the things that I’m curious about, because I’m no developer, I kind of have a desire for this stuff to become available to non-developers. And at the minute it feels like you would really need to be a developer to build this stuff. Obviously you can surface it in a way that a non-developer can access. So your quiz, for example, I’m guessing I could interact with that almost immediately and understand it. Would there be any utility in building a UI for this so that these kind of things can be accessed?
\n\n\n\n[00:27:36] Seth Rubenstein: I think so. We have our own UI for this. We have an Interactivity API panel that we actually have on all of our blocks that have interactivity enabled. And what it does is it does allow us some interesting things for end users that they don’t have to know about.
\n\n\n\nSo one of those things is you can drop a block into a block that supports interactivity. And the panel shows you all the blocks in the hierarchy that you can connect to. And so you might say, okay, well I want to connect to this, and then I want to pull this action from that interactivity store for this block.
\n\n\n\nSo now we’ve enabled it so that it’s not the developers making all the Interactivity API connections. You know, this does this when it’s in this block. Actually, you can go in there and decide that for yourself if you want.
\n\n\n\nNow obviously that does still require a developer to hook that all up, but what you already see today with Block Bindings is a very similar panel. When you go use a Block Binding today, there’s a little panel called attributes. You click it, it shows you all the attributes you can connect up to a binding. That’s part of Gutenberg and WordPress Core right now.
\n\n\n\nSo I think that interface is already there, and I think as more Block Bindings and plugins start to utilise that, the interface is already there for really people to kind of make these interactivity connections themselves.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:50] Nathan Wrigley: I suppose I’m kind of thinking back to the day when WordPress shipped for the first time, custom post types. I presume lots of people made use of them. It might be analogous to where we are at now with this, you know, people who are experienced can use it. But then somebody, some bright spark, came up with the idea of a custom post type plugin with a UI, and this way of just making it visually appealing and straightforward.
\n\n\n\nAnd when you were talking about this sort of, it felt almost like a flow chart that you were building there, where you’ve got, here’s the options, just sort of clicking on them with a mouse and dragging it so this feature now goes to this feature, and I’m binding this to this, that’s what I was imagining. You know, something really straightforward. Drop dead simple, non developery.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:29] Seth Rubenstein: Well, I will give a plug for my friends at Automattic. Part of my session was also sharing a product that we’ve built called Remote Pivot Table, which lets you kind of make really quick pivot tables out of Google Sheets so the data’s not living inside of WordPress, so that our researchers can really quickly update these data sets, and we don’t have to do a thing to get the updates. Well, that’s built on Automattic’s new Remote Data Blocks. And it actually does exactly what you’re saying.
\n\n\n\nYou go in there, you tell it what your data sources are. Airtable, Google Sheets, Shopify, Custom HTTP endpoints if you want, and it will go create the blocks for you. It will create the bindings for you, and it’ll create the interface for you so that you can select, okay, well, when I’m building out my interface, you know, this text goes to this binding. It should pull from this value from that Google sheet. So that’s actually already out in the wild right now.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:18] Nathan Wrigley: What was it called?
\n\n\n\n[00:30:18] Seth Rubenstein: Remote Data Blocks.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:19] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:20] Seth Rubenstein: It’s on the WordPress plugin repo. I think they just published it this week.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:23] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll remember to put that into the show notes. I will dig that out and make sure that that gets into the show notes.
\n\n\n\nYeah, I kind of feel like, even if we were to build the perfect UI, I still feel for most people this may end up being the domain of, get the developer to do it.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:38] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, it is very much in the domain of the developer. These are all developer APIs for them to build out tools for others. And I think ultimately what these APIs allow is for developers to make products that are easier to use for the end user. Like I said, less settings, less controls, less all these sidebar panels and stuff, and more just, you drag and drop the block in and in the background, through the Interactivity API, through Block Bindings, through Block Bits, you’re configuring how that application should work. So it’s more of just drag and drop for the end user.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:09] Nathan Wrigley: The features exist, you’d need to sort of go and figure out how to make it work. I guess we’ve got all these Block Bindings, we’ve got all these Block Bits, we’ve got this enormous complexity that we could get into. How performant is all of this?
\n\n\n\n[00:31:22] Seth Rubenstein: Extremely.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:23] Nathan Wrigley: So my fear is you just get carried away and you bind everything to every other thing, and where a bit is available, you make a Block Bit. I can’t summon up an example, but you get the point. You just get totally carried away. The performance, I would assume there is some hit, but it sounds like not so much.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:40] Seth Rubenstein: I don’t think so. I think the performance is actually better for a lot of these things. All of our Interactivity API projects, like technical performance is substantially better than if we had just built out a React frontend ourself.
\n\n\n\nBecause think about the weight of that. I mean, React is pretty heavy, one. Preact on the other hand, which the Interactivity API is built on is very lightweight. But additionally you have this, I guess the other element which we really kind of haven’t defined is the HTML Tag Processor. That is what underpins all of these things, all of these APIs, even the Interactivity API, even though that’s JavaScript,
\n\n\n\nWhen you are writing in the Interactivity API, you can write state and context and all these values in HTML, the HTML tag processor that’s reading that, that’s processing it. And it does it so extremely fast. You know, if you’ve worked with a PHP DOM document, it’s slow, it’s very bad. This is not that. This is extraordinarily fast.
\n\n\n\nIn addition, on the technical performance, when you’re using the Interactivity API, you get speed on the front end as well, because what you can do is you can pre hydrate information into your JavaScript application before it even loads, on the server side, which is really exciting.
\n\n\n\nYou can see this today actually. Core query, the query loop, and the pagination. Those use an Interactivity API. When you hover over the two or the next page, what’s happening is there’s an Interactivity API function for prefetch. So you’re prefetching the next page of results. So for the user, boom. They click on it, boom. The results are already there. You go a little bit, further, you can cache that information. So now the user has pre fetched the next page and they’ve cached it for the next person to come to this page. That just really wasn’t possible before.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:18] Nathan Wrigley: No. Is that kind of leaning into sort of core browser technologies as well?
\n\n\n\n[00:33:22] Seth Rubenstein: Oh yes.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’m just thinking of things like.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:25] Seth Rubenstein: Well, the prefetch thing is part of the browser technology. I’ll give you an example. We have this very large religious census we do every decade called the Religious Landscape Study. It’s extremely complex database with a lot of querying, and a lot of SQL logic. If we were to, you go to a page on this database and there’s maybe like 12 charts. Well, if we were to load all those 12 charts on page load, like it would take a couple minutes to load the page. The site would probably crash.
\n\n\n\nBut what we do is, as a user hovers over a chart before they click on it, we prefetch, it and we cache it. So for them, they click it, it’s instantaneous. But also we’ve now done the extra work of waiting for the next person, that’s already waiting there ready for the next person. I cannot state how important this innovation has been for the performance of our site and the Interactivity API.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:12] Nathan Wrigley: That is actually fairly profound, isn’t it? Yeah. Sometimes when you are explaining these things, the penny kind of half drops. And then a moment later, the penny drops fully and that one’s just hit. That’s actually really profound, isn’t it? Especially on a high traffic site where you don’t really want to be doing that thing a thousand times a second, just do it once, more or less.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:34] Seth Rubenstein: I have a philosophy of if I can offload it to the end user, I’m going to. You know, I’m going to use your computer if I can.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:41] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating. Okay, so pivot slightly. Do you think there’s a opportunity here? I expect there’s a bunch of developers listening to this who either haven’t experienced this before, haven’t played with it, and are thinking, okay, I want to wrap a UI around that. I want to build a plugin to make this stuff available. We kind of alluded to this a minute ago. Do you think that there is an opportunity there for developers to kind of neaten this interface up?
\n\n\n\n[00:35:02] Seth Rubenstein: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I would be very excited to see where the future of this lands for the WordPress ecosystem. You think of plugins like Advanced Custom Fields and what that did for WordPress, right? It was obviously possible to register post meta and all this stuff before, but what a hassle. It just was. And it really opened up WordPress as a content management system in a way that no other plugin had really done before.
\n\n\n\nSo some very smart person, some enterprising person out there, there is an opportunity here to kind of build out something that would do that for the Interactivity API and empower less technically inclined people and maybe just not technical people at all to use this.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Because despite the fact that you’ve explained it really clearly, and I’ve got a grip on it, I suspect that I wouldn’t want to go through all of the weeds to connect all of those pieces. And I don’t want to open up a code editor. I want everything to be point, click, type, inside of WordPress, in a really straightforward, well-designed, beautifully thought through interface. Kind of like gold rush territory I think. Maybe there’s an opportunity here for someone, maybe multiple people.
\n\n\n\nYeah, and it’s what you said before about these kind of custom post type plugins, there’s many of them and I think without them, nobody would’ve been using custom post types, well, not nobody, but a tiny proportion of the people would’ve started to use them. And I feel the same a bit here. I feel like the things that you’ve described, they’re fabulous, technically, conceptually brilliant, but if somebody was to come up with a UI that made them not just conceptually brilliant, but drop dead easy to use, we’ve got something really incredible.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:35] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, look, when I first started in WordPress, I didn’t know how to do custom fields, custom post types. You know, ACF helped me out there. And I do them all by hand now, right? I register all my post types and my post meta by hand. But those sort of plugins that make it easier for, well, not even if you’re less technically inclined, you’re busy, you don’t have the time to learn all these new APIs, it really does help out adoption down the road.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:00] Nathan Wrigley: And also you can imagine scenarios where people build out pre-configured versions of a thing. So that you might have templates for, I’m struggling to conceptualise that but, you know, you download this plugin, whatever it may be, and they’ve pre-configured useful scenarios that are repeatable. And you just, okay, click a button, that gets me 90% of what I want to do and then I go from there, kind of thing. Yeah, that’s interesting.
\n\n\n\nIn terms of the bits and pieces that you’ve described, is there anything which you think might be missing? I know that’s a difficult question to answer because I’m asking you to stare into a crystal ball and come up with the future. But is there any kind of concept in here that you’ve thought, you know what, it’d be really handy to have that?
\n\n\n\n[00:37:37] Seth Rubenstein: I think it’s responsive. Responsive blocks, responsive attributes.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:41] Nathan Wrigley: Describe what that is because in my head, as soon as I hear responsive, I think viewport width.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:45] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, and I think that’s exactly what I’m talking about. You know, I think all of the APIs are here. All the bits are in place to make that happen, the work just needs to be done. There’s actually a function in the Gutenberg source code for, I think it’s called update attribute on screen size or something like that, where you can kind of, desktop, tablet, mobile changes attribute to match for that viewport size.
\n\n\n\nI think this has been the Achilles heel for Gutenberg. It’s the constant complaint that I hear out of people. And I think that is really the missing link, the, last thing that would really make Gutenberg perfect.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:19] Nathan Wrigley: So scenarios where you could literally change anything based upon, I don’t know, we’re on a tablet now, so what we had on a desktop is no longer appropriate. Again, I’m struggling to conceptualise what that might be, but again, the same on mobile.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:32] Seth Rubenstein: I’ll give you a good example. We have our own grid block, columns block. We made our own grid block because we do this responsive attribute stuff. You might have three columns that are x width on desktop, and then on tablet, well, you might want that middle column actually to move to the first position to be 100% width, right? That’s a really easy example, but doing that right now is next impossible without having a developer build out that system for you. That’s just one thing I can think of, but there are a myriad of instances like that.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the domino fell a bit there. I understand what you mean. So yeah, it could be width, it could be background colour, it could be font size or content, anything.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:09] Seth Rubenstein: A number of things, yeah. Well, it could be also in the Interactivity API. It could be that, you know, on tablet, actually I want, when you click on this thing, I want it to do something else entirely.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:16] Nathan Wrigley: The button does a different thing.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:17] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. That’s really interesting.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:18] Seth Rubenstein: Well, I’ll give you another example. We do that. Well, not to that degree, but Core social links. We wrap that in another block called Navigator Share Link. So when you’re on mobile and you click on the Facebook button, we’re not taking you to the Facebook share little window. We just open up the little native browser share thing. You just send it off to your app or whatever, friends, your iMessage, whatever you want to do.
\n\n\n\nSo I think that kind of device contextuality is one area where there’s not a lot of guidance or APIs or anything, and that is kind of entirely on the developers to figure out themselves. But I think that’s probably what’s missing most from Gutenberg, is that kind of idea of screen or device contextuality.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:01] Nathan Wrigley: I just think this is all so fascinating. Essentially, during the last 40 minutes or so, you’ve prized open, I think a really different future for WordPress than I had previously thought. I knew all these things existed. I hadn’t really connected the dots. And it feels to me as if suddenly you go from building a bunch of websites to anything. Literally anything. If it’s possible to put in a browser.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:27] Seth Rubenstein: It’s a web application framework.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:28] Nathan Wrigley: Right. There you go. Yeah. A web application. Build anything inside of WordPress, which is not something that I was all that familiar with. Gosh, the future is bright.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:37] Seth Rubenstein: I mean, we have blocks where people are, you know, drag and drop them together and they’re building out little calculators. You know, one of our more popular content types is like, put in your income and where you live, and then we’ll tell you some information about you, you know, about your area or whatever. That’s a web application. That’s not a blog post. That’s not content. That’s a web application that someone just drag and drop built.
\n\n\n\nYeah, we’re at a place, you know, the content management stuff of WordPress, man, that’s rock hard. That’s settled. Now we’re going into another era, a new direction where WordPress is this web development framework, first and foremost. For you, the developer, but also your end users to build web applications with, inside of.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, absolutely fascinating. So my intuition that I alluded to at the beginning of this podcast, in 2018 or whatever it is, that promise has now become reality. The year 2025, we got there. And now it just needs a bunch of developers, hopefully, dear listener, if you’re listening to this, get on board and try to figure this out and make it straightforward so people like me can use it.
\n\n\n\nSeth, I think that’s probably the sweet spot to end it. That’s a very optimistic future you’ve painted there. Where do we find you, if somebody’s listening? I would imagine that there’s a bunch of people listening to this thinking, I need to speak to Seth.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:51] Seth Rubenstein: You can find me at sethrubenstein.info. And you can find me on Twitter or Bluesky. Please find me on Bluesky, though, I hate Twitter.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:57] Nathan Wrigley: We will drop the links into the show notes. So if you head to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Seth Rubenstein, that’s S-T-E-I-N, search for that and then the links will be there for Seth’s socials, plus anything to do with the talk that we’ve been mentioning as well. Seth Rubenstein, thank you so much for chatting to me today.
\n\n\n\n[00:42:15] Seth Rubenstein: Thank you for having me.
\nOn the podcast today we have Seth Rubenstein.
\n\n\n\nSeth is the head of engineering at the Pew Research Center, where he leads a team of developers managing the organisation\u2019s WordPress-based publishing platform for its news site. Passionate about open source, Seth ensures that everything his team builds not only meets the Pew Research Center\u2019s needs, but also benefits the wider community. By actively contributing to the Gutenberg project, he strives to share their solutions, always asking how their work can be given back to help others in the WordPress ecosystem.
\n\n\n\nSeth shares fascinating stories from the work h e\u2019s recently been doing. He breaks down what block composability really means, the ability to build modular, reusable, and even interactive blocks that work seamlessly together, empowering both developers and end users to create sophisticated web applications within the familiar WordPress block editor.
\n\n\n\nThe conversation gets into some of WordPress\u2019s newest and most promising features, including the Block Bindings API, Block Bits (still very much in development), and the Interactivity API. Seth explains how these tools open a world of possibilities, like building interactive quizzes, dynamically updating content, or even prefetching data, all using blocks, without having to rely on custom React front-ends or heavy server-side processing.
\n\n\n\nSeth also talks about the path forward for democratising these advanced capabilities, discussing current limitations, the potential for new UI tools, and what\u2019s still missing in the quest for truly responsive, device-contextual blocks.
\n\n\n\nThroughout the episode, Seth makes a compelling case for why now is a golden opportunity for developers and plugin builders to start experimenting, get involved, and shape the next evolution of WordPress as a cutting-edge web application platform.
\n\n\n\nWhether you\u2019re a developer curious about the future of Gutenberg or an editor dreaming of more drag-and-drop web app power, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nSeth and Max Schmeling’s presentation at WordCamp US 2025 – \u200aBlock Composability: The Past and The Future
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlock Bits – Proposal: Bits as dynamic tokens
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u200aAutomattic’s new Remote Data Blocks
\n\n\n\n\u200aReligious Landscape Study
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "content_text": "Transcript\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, block composability, what it is and how it’s shaping WordPress’s future.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Seth Rubenstein. Seth is the head engineer at the Pew Research Center, where he leads a team of developers managing the organization’s WordPress based publishing platform for its news site. Passionate about open source, Seth ensures that everything his team builds not only meets the Pew Research Center’s needs, but also benefits the wider community. By actively contributing to the Gutenberg project, he strives to share their solutions, always asking how their work can be given back to help others in the WordPress ecosystem.\n\n\n\nSeth shares fascinating stories from the work he’s been doing recently. He breaks down what block composability means, the ability to build modular, reusable, and even interactive blocks that work seamlessly together, empowering both developers and end users to create sophisticated web applications within the familiar WordPress block editor.\n\n\n\nThe conversation gets into some of WordPress’s newest, and most promising, features including the Block Bindings API, Block Bits, which is still very much in development, and the Interactivity API. Seth explains how these tools open a world of possibilities, like building interactive quizzes, dynamically updating content, or even prefetching data, all using blocks, without having to rely on custom React front ends, or heavy server side processing.\n\n\n\nSeth also talks about the path forward for democratizing these advanced capabilities, discussing current limitations, the potential for new UI tools, and what’s still missing in the quest for truly responsive device contextual blocks.\n\n\n\nThroughout the episode, Seth makes a compelling case for why now is a golden opportunity for developers and plugin builders to start experimenting, get involved, and shape the next evolution of WordPress as a cutting edge web application platform.\n\n\n\nWhether you’re a developer curious about the future of Gutenberg, or an editor dreaming of more drag and drop web app power, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Seth Rubenstein.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Seth Rubenstein. How are you doing, Seth?\n\n\n\n[00:03:40] Seth Rubenstein: Very good. How about you?\n\n\n\n[00:03:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Nice to have you back.\n\n\n\n[00:03:42] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, second time.\n\n\n\n[00:03:43] Nathan Wrigley: This doesn’t happen too many times. I’ve got to be perfectly honest with you, the audience, I’ve already said this to Seth. Each time I come to WordCamp US, I’m always confounded by how remarkably clever people are, and the depth of the content is sometimes beyond me. I think this is one of those examples.\n\n\n\nI think there’s a high chance that you are going to have to shepherd me. There’s probably going to be a lot of editing, when I pause and you explain what you are talking about. So let’s get into it. First of all, tell us a little bit about you, where you work, what you do in the WordPress space.\n\n\n\n[00:04:10] Seth Rubenstein: Sure. So I work for Pew Research Center. I’m the head of engineering there. I manage a team of four other developers, and I like to tell people that we work with and on WordPress every day.\n\n\n\nWe manage a publishing platform for a small news site in the US, Pew Research, but we also contribute to Gutenberg. Everything that we do, everything that we build day in and day out, we try to do from a perspective of how can we open source this? How can we contribute this back to Gutenberg in some way? What can we build to fulfill our needs that would also fulfill other people’s needs?\n\n\n\n[00:04:39] Nathan Wrigley: You said a small organisation, the Pew Research Center. I don’t actually know what they do.\n\n\n\n[00:04:44] Seth Rubenstein: We are a nonprofit, call ourselves a fact tank. What we do is we survey the American public on a variety of issues. Where are they on things like abortion, or religion, or crime, or the economy, or the use of AI, whatever. And we like to kind of say we hold up a mirror to the American public to tell them what they believe back to them.\n\n\n\n[00:05:04] Nathan Wrigley: And so is the WordPress website that you have with them, is that a mechanism to distribute that data back to the public?\n\n\n\n[00:05:09] Seth Rubenstein: Yes, yes.\n\n\n\n[00:05:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s interesting. So it’s a data heavy industry that you are dealing with.\n\n\n\n[00:05:13] Seth Rubenstein: It is. It is. We’re very, a kind of academic research institution, but we publish in kind of a news oriented way.\n\n\n\n[00:05:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So we figured out a little bit about you, however you are here at WordCamp US to do a presentation. I actually don’t know if you’ve done it\n\n\n\n[00:05:28] Seth Rubenstein: I have, yeah. I did it the other day.\n\n\n\n[00:05:29] Nathan Wrigley: How did it go?\n\n\n\n[00:05:29] Seth Rubenstein: It went okay. I had a problem with my speaker notes, so I had to ad lib a good bit of it. So it might not be as coherent, or clear as it should have been.\n\n\n\n[00:05:41] Nathan Wrigley: Well we’re here to fix that. You can ad lib all you like here. So it was called, and forgive the pronunciation if I get this wrong, Block Composability: The Past and The Future. I’m actually just going to read the blurb into the record. And I’ll also make sure that there’s a link in the show notes to the page at the WordCamp US website where you can find out about the content. And also if by the time this comes out a WordPress TV episode with your presentation has landed, then I’ll mention that as well.\n\n\n\nGutenberg excels at crafting beautiful static content, but what if you could empower anyone to build dynamic, interactive web experiences directly within the Block Editor? This session dives into block composability, a powerful concept that enables the creation of rich, interactive content using blocks, making advanced web development accessible to even less technically inclined users, which begs the question, what is block composability?\n\n\n\n[00:06:31] Seth Rubenstein: Block composability, I guess let’s define composability first. Composability in computer science and in software development is the idea that you can create and assemble web applications with reusable components in a modular way. That’s really all that means.\n\n\n\nIf you’ve ever used React, if you’ve ever written in React, it means React Component, really. It’s a self-contained modular unit that can act on its own, but when plugged in with other units, it becomes something new, or extend its functionality or changes its functionality in some way.\n\n\n\n[00:07:01] Nathan Wrigley: When Gutenberg dropped, I had this notion that we were going to see mini apps inside of a block. So for example, I had this notion that right off the bat, so I’m going back to 2018 or something, when Gutenberg was still a, so prior to when it was in Core, let’s go with that. And I had this notion that you would drop in, let’s say a real estate block, and that block would encapsulate all the information about this particular house. And you would drop in the block and it would ask you a bunch of questions about the house and out would come a house custom post type, if you like.\n\n\n\nHowever, what happened was we got paragraph blocks, and we got an image block, and we got these fairly, well, useful, but they do one thing. They do a paragraph. They do an image, and that seems to be kind of where it ended. Are you trying to draw a line in the sand where it’s possible to go beyond that simple, does one thing, paragraph, image, to more the, we have a real estate block with loads of different facets and capabilities?\n\n\n\n[00:07:57] Seth Rubenstein: That’s right, yeah. I think where we’re at now is we’ve reached a point where the block editor, Gutenberg, in both its block editor and site editor kind of flavors, is you can build web applications. Blocks can do something now. They’re not just presenting text or an image and they’re kind of static and, you know, maybe you can style them differently from one post to another, but now they can actually do something.\n\n\n\nAnd more importantly, they can communicate with one another. You know, one block is adjacent to another. It can tell that block what to do when you click on it. If it’s inside of it, it can change its functionality accordingly. So you might imagine, we have a quiz builder. That’s actually one of our, probably our most technical product.\n\n\n\nAnd the way it works is there’s a results block where you can build out your results page for your quiz, but if you were to drop in a special block for, we have a special quiz that does scoring a very specific way, well, it changes the scoring functionality in the quiz builder. It doesn’t overwrite that. If you take that block out, the scoring functionality returns back to normal.\n\n\n\nSo now we’re at a point where it’s very much possible to build web applications in the block editor with blocks.\n\n\n\n[00:09:00] Nathan Wrigley: So this little quiz block that you’ve described, if I was using, so ignore the developer experience and everything that you have built, the technicalities of all that. If I was somebody that was working for the Pew Research Center and I was, I don’t know, an editor and I needed to create a quiz, would that be my process? I drop in the quiz block, and boom, I have a quiz.\n\n\n\n[00:09:20] Seth Rubenstein: It’s really simple. You would go into, we do kind of store it all in a nice post type. So there’s a quiz post type. And then you open that up, you say, I want to go make a new quiz. And by default, there’s a quiz, we call it the quiz controller block that’s there first. And we have a few templated things in there for you. So like a start page and a question, an answer, and all of those things are block. So a question is a block, and inside of that question goes the answers for that question. That’s a block.\n\n\n\nGo further than that, we also have these kind of bindings. So you drop an answer in, well, there’s text for the answer, right? What if you want an image in there? What if you want a chart? What if you want a video? What if you want some other interactive piece of content to be corresponding to that answer? Well, you can drop that in too. And you can kind of freely move all these things within an answer, while still having that text bound to the answer block.\n\n\n\nSo it’s a highly technical product, but for the editors, for the designers, it is literally just drag, drop, drag, drop, drag, drop. Create a page, create a question, type in your answer.\n\n\n\n[00:10:16] Nathan Wrigley: So in the world of 2018 that I alluded to a moment ago when the block editor launched, it feels like there were big missing pieces that prevented what you’ve just described. And maybe they’re APIs. I think possibly in some scenarios they are. What are the bits more recently, I don’t even know if it’s more recently in all honesty, but what are the bits that have enabled the features that you’ve just described?\n\n\n\n[00:10:38] Seth Rubenstein: Sure. So I think it’s funny that you bring back to 2018 because we built Quiz Builder in 2019. I think I’ll go on the record here and say, I think it might be the first kind of product in Gutenberg that was drag and drop building web applications. So I think we kind of pushed really early on the idea of composability inside of Gutenberg.\n\n\n\nAnd I see it as, there are kind of three waves in Gutenberg. First was, okay, Gutenberg is a CSS generator. That’s how I first kind of imagined it. You’re creating content and you have a style system and that outputs some CSS for your site.\n\n\n\nAnd then we got, I think the kind of HTML part of that a few years later. With the site editor and the theming inside of the block editor and things like that.\n\n\n\nAnd now we’ve gotten to the JavaScript part of Gutenberg. Where WordPress has the Inactivity API. And so this is a WordPress native JavaScript framework, so blocks can do something on the front end. And I think that is really the key innovation that’s really opened this up in just the last 12, 16 months.\n\n\n\n[00:11:35] Nathan Wrigley: Are there any APIs that have enabled you to short circuit? So again, in 2018, I would imagine there was quite a lot of heavy lifting that you needed to do order to pull that off, to innovate in that way. Are there any things which have fallen, I think quite recently actually, that have enabled it to be more available to developers who don’t have the time available that you did?\n\n\n\n[00:11:56] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, I mean, so in 2019 when we did this, you know, all we really had was this ability to kind of scaffolded out these quizzes. The were pretty static in their layout. You drop a question and there were the answers in there, and you could type them in and that was it. No images inside the quiz, nothing like that.\n\n\n\nNow, thanks to things like block bindings, block bits, which we can go into in a little bit.\n\n\n\n[00:12:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we’d need to I think.\n\n\n\n[00:12:19] Seth Rubenstein: And the Interactivity API, you know, it is, everything is less static. Everything is less set in stone now. With things like the HTML Tag Processor, you can say, oh, this answer has this flag on it so we’re going to change out some of the HTML in it, in kind of real time before it gets to the front end for users. That just really wasn’t possible before, without a lot of work. It wasn’t very performant.\n\n\n\nNow all those things are in place for developers to really tap into. And the documentation and examples are there too, because that was the problem before, I think, is that a lot of people had to figure out how to do this, and now there are real world examples out there.\n\n\n\n[00:12:52] Nathan Wrigley: So you mentioned, quickly skirted over three things there. So there was Block Bits, Block Bindings, which I think the full title would be Block Bindings API, and the Interactivity API, which I think is like a child of the HTML API. I’m not entirely sure about that, but.\n\n\n\n[00:13:07] Seth Rubenstein: It utilises the HTML components.\n\n\n\n[00:13:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Let’s just go through what those three things are in whatever order suits the purposes of this podcast best, because I don’t know which one you’d start on.\n\n\n\n[00:13:16] Seth Rubenstein: Let’s start with Block Bindings API. I would actually imagine a good number of people are familiar with this. This has come up a lot in the last year in the Gutenberg project. What that really lets you do is use Core blocks more effectively.\n\n\n\nFor example, before, if you wanted to have a button and you wanted to do a very specific thing and look a very specific way, well, good luck. You had to make your own button. Sure there was the Core button and you could style it to some degree, but what it did was it went to a link.\n\n\n\nNow with things like Block Bindings, you can say, okay, well, I have my Core button and I’m going to style it however I want, but the interior text, you know, what it says, what it does, well, that can be done kind of programmatically on the backend. That’s where the Block Bindings API comes in. It lets you use Core blocks and change them, well, not Core blocks, any blocks, really, and change them to fit your needs.\n\n\n\n[00:14:07] Nathan Wrigley: Can you give us a concrete example of that? So you’ve just talked about the button, you mentioned a sort of, I was struggling to grasp what you were meaning about changing the text programmatically. How would you do that? What would be an example?\n\n\n\n[00:14:18] Seth Rubenstein: Let me give you an example of that, Core paragraph. Very useful with block bindings. And I mentioned answers. So we have this answer block, right? And before it just had a text field in it. You would type in the answer and that was it. That was all you saw. And that meant that you couldn’t do anything inside of the answer. You couldn’t provide any other content inside there, because that would then get rolled up as the answer.\n\n\n\nSo now with Block Bindings, what we have is we have this core paragraph binding that you can drop into the answer, and it is a text field still. You can type into it. It’s storing that on the answer block and then you can put other stuff inside the answer block because we’re not reading what’s in there as the content.\n\n\n\nWhat that meant for us is that we didn’t have to go make another block called answer text. We have hundreds of these kind of scenarios in our system where, yeah, we need a very specific use case, and it’s usually just some text, right, somewhere. Why would I make another block that’s just a paragraph block, really?\n\n\n\nSo bindings, it makes blocks way more extensible. So one block can perform multiple functions if you need it to.\n\n\n\n[00:15:19] Nathan Wrigley: So my takeaway from that, it may be ignorant, it kind of adds a layer where you can add more features into any block, Core or otherwise. So in the example of paragraph, it’s like paragraph plus. It’s extended paragraph if you like, and you then get to decide. And that is the binding bit. You bind things to the block.\n\n\n\n[00:15:39] Seth Rubenstein: You bind attributes in a block.\n\n\n\n[00:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: Attributes.\n\n\n\n[00:15:41] Seth Rubenstein: That’s what it really effectively comes down to, is you bind attributes. So you could say that the text, the content attribute, in Core paragraph, well, that’s not coming from whatever you typed in there. It’s coming from some other programmatic interface somewhere in your system, your plugin, whatever.\n\n\n\nSo that lets you use Core paragraph as a layout element, put it wherever you’d like, but then what’s inside of it, and perhaps even what happens when you click on it, well, that’s decided elsewhere.\n\n\n\nWhat’s nice about that is it lessens the number of controls that you need to present to the end user, to the designer, to the editor. For them, they just drop the block in there. The plugin handles the bindings. The plugin handles, okay, the text for this paragraph inside this answer should come from here. They don’t have to think about all that. So it’s less settings for them actually. It’s more just drop blocks in.\n\n\n\n[00:16:27] Nathan Wrigley: You are very much in the weeds of all this, so I suspect the fact that you’ve done this and done this over and over again renders it fairly straightforward. How available is this? Is the documentation there?\n\n\n\n[00:16:38] Seth Rubenstein: Oh yeah. The documentation is there. The WordPress Dev Blog has a number of tutorials on Block Bindings. And I think once you get started with it, it’s extremely easy to work with really.\n\n\n\n[00:16:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that was Block Bindings. Next one was Block Bits. Now I’ve only heard this phrase a couple of times, so you’re going to have to go 101 on this.\n\n\n\n[00:16:54] Seth Rubenstein: Sure. So Block Bits is, this is an API that is very much in development. It’s a concept more than anything else right now. So with Block Bindings, we can kind of take over a whole paragraph block and change it all out. Well, what if you just need to change one word inside that paragraph? That’s where Block Bits comes into being.\n\n\n\nSo this could be you have typed out your sentence, and maybe there’s a name in the sentence. And you need to change that name dynamically based on whatever the user’s choosing in this front end interface. Well, Block Bits, you just select the text, you go to the toolbar, you say, I’m going to bind, quote unquote, this to this thing.\n\n\n\nAnd Block Bits, the concept is, okay, we’re going to look inside of a block, down to a bit, maybe just a character and do something with that. Change it, make it a button, whatever. That’s really all it is. It’s a fancy name for taking Block Bindings to the next level, which is kind of inside a string of text.\n\n\n\n[00:17:50] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So it is, again, forgive me if I’ve parsed it incorrectly, but a Block Bit is a binding inside of some other thing. So in the example you gave, swap out this string for a different string, or it could be swap out this image dynamically for a different image, or, I don’t know, insert a dollar sign here instead of a pound sign or.\n\n\n\n[00:18:15] Seth Rubenstein: Well beyond that, beyond just the switching things out, the other kind of powerful part of the concept, and that’s where I think the API part is really still in development, and this will take a little bit further is, one of the examples used in the Gutenberg project is things like ISBN numbers.\n\n\n\nSo you can imagine that, you know, maybe you’re running some sort of library like site, you type in an ISBN number. Well, what you want to happen on the front end is maybe a little bit more complex than that. So you type in your ISBN number and the block bit could see that that is an ISBN formatted number, and maybe on the front end it becomes a link with a little popup that goes to the Library of Congress, point to that thing, right?\n\n\n\nSo it’s very analogous to Block Bindings, but it’s very much very specific small string inside of a larger string. So they give it as sub block bindings. Maybe that’s even a better term for it. Maybe that’s what would be called in the future. But I really think of it as sub block binding.\n\n\n\n[00:19:10] Nathan Wrigley: And presumably then you can just chain these together inside, well, let’s go with a paragraph. You could just have a one sentence just full of these block bits. So one followed by another, followed by another. Okay, that’s really interesting. So you could have a whole sentence, for example, just made up of bits from all over the place.\n\n\n\n[00:19:28] Seth Rubenstein: Well, and you could imagine that, beyond just like pulling information, it could be really useful when what we’re using it for currently is templating, right? So you want this string, this sentence to have these parameters. Maybe it’s got the format of your post type, and then maybe it’s got the title in there, and then maybe the date. But maybe that’s all on one line and not three different blocks.\n\n\n\nOne of the things that drives me crazy right now is, let’s say I want to do a post date, post type, kind of above the post title. I insert a row block, and then I insert my date block, and then I insert my meta block. That’s like a lot of divs, that’s a lot of markup for that. It’s like, why isn’t that just one paragraph line with that bit of information in there? That’s where block bits comes into play.\n\n\n\n[00:20:08] Nathan Wrigley: So it feels like, again, forgive me, it feels like the kind of thing that we would’ve used custom fields for in past. And we would’ve had, I don’t know, dozens of custom fields, each containing their own discreet bit of data, and we would’ve had to have figured out a way to drop those into this paragraph. Now this is all handled natively.\n\n\n\n[00:20:25] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, and visually in the editor.\n\n\n\n[00:20:26] Nathan Wrigley: Visually in the editor. And so it could be anything. It could be markup, it could be text, it could be an image, it could be, I don’t know, XML, anything you like. That’s really powerful.\n\n\n\n[00:20:36] Seth Rubenstein: It’s exciting. It’s very powerful, and it’s the API that I am most looking forward to seeing completed. I think it will really, without getting too technical, you go a little bit further, Block Bits, Block Bindings. These things I think are kind of critical for responsive blocks. If we’re going to change attributes at kind of a micro level based on certain conditions, like those are the kind of frameworks that we need to be able to do that.\n\n\n\nSo beyond just like the content and templating stuff, there are deep technical reasons that these APIs continue to be developed out.\n\n\n\n[00:21:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, I think I’ve grasped what that is. Just running the clock back a couple of minutes, you imply, no, I think you said that this is in development more so than Block Bindings. So the block bits is ready to use.\n\n\n\n[00:21:20] Seth Rubenstein: No. There’s very much in a conceptual phase, and I think there’s a lot of other technologies that need to be finished out. There are work on the HTML APIs, even though they’re really well advanced now over the last couple years, there’s more work being done on those. I think those things are kind of blockers to keep pushing forward with the Block Bits. But you can start doing Block Bits today. And I do go over that in the presentation.\n\n\n\nWhat it really comes down to, fundamentally today is, it’s a rich text custom format, which you can do today. You can go in and make your own kind of custom formats inside the rich text component. You know, that might be bold or italic, a custom format. So it’s really simple as like, okay, well, I have a custom format that adds a class name to something, and then the HTML tag processor, I look for that class name and I change it out. Bingo, bango. So simple.\n\n\n\nBut of course, like I said, Block Bits is much bigger than that. There’s an idea of kind of like a library of bits and, you know, you can plug it into different data sources and post meta and this and that and the other thing. But right now at least, you can start to experiment with this idea, with templating and kind of getting dynamic bits of content into a string.\n\n\n\n[00:22:28] Nathan Wrigley: This feels very much to me, like the kind of thing that needs more eyeballs.\n\n\n\n[00:22:31] Seth Rubenstein: It does.\n\n\n\n[00:22:31] Nathan Wrigley: It’s one of those things where you let loose a thousand developers and suddenly some curious thing that nobody thought of occurred and it was like, oh, it does that.\n\n\n\n[00:22:40] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah. I really want to get people to experiment with this concept further, because I think we need to push it further because it’s just so powerful.\n\n\n\n[00:22:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really interesting. Okay, so we did Block Bits. We did Block Bindings. I think the final one that we mentioned was the Interactivity API.\n\n\n\n[00:22:55] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah. So the Interactivity API, that is about, it’s probably about two years old, I think, at this point. I won’t go into all the history of that, but it is effectively a WordPress native, Preact framework. It’s really easy to work with. You kind of just write basic HTML and the JavaScript is very easy to get into.\n\n\n\nAnd what that allows you to do is really add interactions at an atomic level to blocks. You can write all sorts of functions. So you might imagine you have a form block, and it has an on submit action. Not every form does the same thing, right? So maybe you have another block, could be send to Firebase. You drop that in there and it changes, it can actually hoist up its own on submit function into that blocks interactivity. And so it makes it really easy to kind of swap JavaScript functionality in and out, and extend functionality across all your blocks.\n\n\n\n[00:23:47] Nathan Wrigley: So it, I guess the easiest way that I parse this was it enables you to have things doing things to other things. That was profound. Things doing things to other things in the same interface.\n\n\n\n[00:23:59] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:23:59] Nathan Wrigley: You click a button and, I don’t know, the cart increments by one or something like that. So this kind of thing that really, in the year 2025, given that we’ve had mobile phones in our hands for decades, this sort of stuff feels like it should have been in websites for decades, but it wasn’t.\n\n\n\n[00:24:12] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah. And the other exciting thing about it is it’s not just about telling blocks what to do. I find it very interesting that it can communicate data across blocks. So I’ll come back to Quiz Builder as a really good example. We just rebuilt that with all of these things, Block Bits, Block Bindings, Interactivity API. That just got completely revamped in the last couple months. Before that, what we were doing is we were building out a custom React front end for every single quiz.\n\n\n\nSo the users would go in, they would drag and drop, you know, build up these quizzes. And then on top of that, we were recreating all that for a new front end interface. And we had all this service side processing to kind of build up a data model for the quiz and then score the quiz, and we made a performant as we could be, but it wasn’t.\n\n\n\n[00:24:55] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a lot.\n\n\n\n[00:24:55] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, it’s a lot. And it’s a lot of like duplicative work and you’re like, what for? With this, it’s now the Interactivity API. Those blocks actually, you know, the answer block just hoists its answer into this larger data model using the Interactivity API.\n\n\n\nSo now all that happens client side. So now all these things that we were doing server side, we can do client side with the Interactivity API, and that saves us money, that saves us performance. It yields a better experience for the end user.\n\n\n\n[00:25:19] Nathan Wrigley: So over the last 10 minutes or so, we kind of atomised these three things, Block Bits, Block Bindings, Interactivity. We kind of talked about them as separate things, which I guess they are. But from your experience, I’m guessing that they work in concert really well. In other words, if you understand, if you get into the weeds of those three things, and maybe some other things, you prize open capabilities in WordPress which are pretty profound.\n\n\n\n[00:25:43] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, well, obviously one of the things that I love most about WordPress is it’s flexibility. Let’s use Block Bits as an example. This kind of pseudo block bits I’ve just described, where you register a custom format and then you use the HTML Tag Processor to switch that out. Well, the way that we’re switching it out is using the Interactivity API.\n\n\n\nSo all we do is we say, okay, we look for that class name, we use the HTML Tag Processor, and we add the Interactivity API bits that we need to it. We just say, well, the text value should be this, state dot button text, right? That’s really easy. But you could do it with block context too.\n\n\n\nSo there are all these tools in WordPress, all these different APIs related to blocks that once you start to connect them together, you get composability. I mean, that’s what it really comes down to. This ability for developers to build blocks that can be, one, reusable, that’s really important concept for composability, two, stand on their own, right? A button block should do something if it’s on its own. It should go to a link or something. But if that button block is dropped into another block, it’s nestable, well its configuration changes. Now it submits for the form, right? It doesn’t go to a link.\n\n\n\nWe’re at this place where just, there’s all these tools available to you when you start plugging them all together, really powerful stuff happens.\n\n\n\n[00:26:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And I guess it’s like anything, once you’ve made those connections in your own head and done the hard work to understand them all, suddenly ideas begin occurring to you that maybe in a podcast like this, you get to the very edge of that, but you don’t get into the weeds of that. But once you’ve peeled it back and understood it, suddenly, aha, I didn’t realise WordPress could do all of this.\n\n\n\nOne of the things that I’m curious about, because I’m no developer, I kind of have a desire for this stuff to become available to non-developers. And at the minute it feels like you would really need to be a developer to build this stuff. Obviously you can surface it in a way that a non-developer can access. So your quiz, for example, I’m guessing I could interact with that almost immediately and understand it. Would there be any utility in building a UI for this so that these kind of things can be accessed?\n\n\n\n[00:27:36] Seth Rubenstein: I think so. We have our own UI for this. We have an Interactivity API panel that we actually have on all of our blocks that have interactivity enabled. And what it does is it does allow us some interesting things for end users that they don’t have to know about.\n\n\n\nSo one of those things is you can drop a block into a block that supports interactivity. And the panel shows you all the blocks in the hierarchy that you can connect to. And so you might say, okay, well I want to connect to this, and then I want to pull this action from that interactivity store for this block.\n\n\n\nSo now we’ve enabled it so that it’s not the developers making all the Interactivity API connections. You know, this does this when it’s in this block. Actually, you can go in there and decide that for yourself if you want.\n\n\n\nNow obviously that does still require a developer to hook that all up, but what you already see today with Block Bindings is a very similar panel. When you go use a Block Binding today, there’s a little panel called attributes. You click it, it shows you all the attributes you can connect up to a binding. That’s part of Gutenberg and WordPress Core right now.\n\n\n\nSo I think that interface is already there, and I think as more Block Bindings and plugins start to utilise that, the interface is already there for really people to kind of make these interactivity connections themselves.\n\n\n\n[00:28:50] Nathan Wrigley: I suppose I’m kind of thinking back to the day when WordPress shipped for the first time, custom post types. I presume lots of people made use of them. It might be analogous to where we are at now with this, you know, people who are experienced can use it. But then somebody, some bright spark, came up with the idea of a custom post type plugin with a UI, and this way of just making it visually appealing and straightforward.\n\n\n\nAnd when you were talking about this sort of, it felt almost like a flow chart that you were building there, where you’ve got, here’s the options, just sort of clicking on them with a mouse and dragging it so this feature now goes to this feature, and I’m binding this to this, that’s what I was imagining. You know, something really straightforward. Drop dead simple, non developery.\n\n\n\n[00:29:29] Seth Rubenstein: Well, I will give a plug for my friends at Automattic. Part of my session was also sharing a product that we’ve built called Remote Pivot Table, which lets you kind of make really quick pivot tables out of Google Sheets so the data’s not living inside of WordPress, so that our researchers can really quickly update these data sets, and we don’t have to do a thing to get the updates. Well, that’s built on Automattic’s new Remote Data Blocks. And it actually does exactly what you’re saying.\n\n\n\nYou go in there, you tell it what your data sources are. Airtable, Google Sheets, Shopify, Custom HTTP endpoints if you want, and it will go create the blocks for you. It will create the bindings for you, and it’ll create the interface for you so that you can select, okay, well, when I’m building out my interface, you know, this text goes to this binding. It should pull from this value from that Google sheet. So that’s actually already out in the wild right now.\n\n\n\n[00:30:18] Nathan Wrigley: What was it called?\n\n\n\n[00:30:18] Seth Rubenstein: Remote Data Blocks.\n\n\n\n[00:30:19] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.\n\n\n\n[00:30:20] Seth Rubenstein: It’s on the WordPress plugin repo. I think they just published it this week.\n\n\n\n[00:30:23] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll remember to put that into the show notes. I will dig that out and make sure that that gets into the show notes.\n\n\n\nYeah, I kind of feel like, even if we were to build the perfect UI, I still feel for most people this may end up being the domain of, get the developer to do it.\n\n\n\n[00:30:38] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, it is very much in the domain of the developer. These are all developer APIs for them to build out tools for others. And I think ultimately what these APIs allow is for developers to make products that are easier to use for the end user. Like I said, less settings, less controls, less all these sidebar panels and stuff, and more just, you drag and drop the block in and in the background, through the Interactivity API, through Block Bindings, through Block Bits, you’re configuring how that application should work. So it’s more of just drag and drop for the end user.\n\n\n\n[00:31:09] Nathan Wrigley: The features exist, you’d need to sort of go and figure out how to make it work. I guess we’ve got all these Block Bindings, we’ve got all these Block Bits, we’ve got this enormous complexity that we could get into. How performant is all of this?\n\n\n\n[00:31:22] Seth Rubenstein: Extremely.\n\n\n\n[00:31:23] Nathan Wrigley: So my fear is you just get carried away and you bind everything to every other thing, and where a bit is available, you make a Block Bit. I can’t summon up an example, but you get the point. You just get totally carried away. The performance, I would assume there is some hit, but it sounds like not so much.\n\n\n\n[00:31:40] Seth Rubenstein: I don’t think so. I think the performance is actually better for a lot of these things. All of our Interactivity API projects, like technical performance is substantially better than if we had just built out a React frontend ourself.\n\n\n\nBecause think about the weight of that. I mean, React is pretty heavy, one. Preact on the other hand, which the Interactivity API is built on is very lightweight. But additionally you have this, I guess the other element which we really kind of haven’t defined is the HTML Tag Processor. That is what underpins all of these things, all of these APIs, even the Interactivity API, even though that’s JavaScript,\n\n\n\nWhen you are writing in the Interactivity API, you can write state and context and all these values in HTML, the HTML tag processor that’s reading that, that’s processing it. And it does it so extremely fast. You know, if you’ve worked with a PHP DOM document, it’s slow, it’s very bad. This is not that. This is extraordinarily fast.\n\n\n\nIn addition, on the technical performance, when you’re using the Interactivity API, you get speed on the front end as well, because what you can do is you can pre hydrate information into your JavaScript application before it even loads, on the server side, which is really exciting.\n\n\n\nYou can see this today actually. Core query, the query loop, and the pagination. Those use an Interactivity API. When you hover over the two or the next page, what’s happening is there’s an Interactivity API function for prefetch. So you’re prefetching the next page of results. So for the user, boom. They click on it, boom. The results are already there. You go a little bit, further, you can cache that information. So now the user has pre fetched the next page and they’ve cached it for the next person to come to this page. That just really wasn’t possible before.\n\n\n\n[00:33:18] Nathan Wrigley: No. Is that kind of leaning into sort of core browser technologies as well?\n\n\n\n[00:33:22] Seth Rubenstein: Oh yes.\n\n\n\n[00:33:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’m just thinking of things like.\n\n\n\n[00:33:25] Seth Rubenstein: Well, the prefetch thing is part of the browser technology. I’ll give you an example. We have this very large religious census we do every decade called the Religious Landscape Study. It’s extremely complex database with a lot of querying, and a lot of SQL logic. If we were to, you go to a page on this database and there’s maybe like 12 charts. Well, if we were to load all those 12 charts on page load, like it would take a couple minutes to load the page. The site would probably crash.\n\n\n\nBut what we do is, as a user hovers over a chart before they click on it, we prefetch, it and we cache it. So for them, they click it, it’s instantaneous. But also we’ve now done the extra work of waiting for the next person, that’s already waiting there ready for the next person. I cannot state how important this innovation has been for the performance of our site and the Interactivity API.\n\n\n\n[00:34:12] Nathan Wrigley: That is actually fairly profound, isn’t it? Yeah. Sometimes when you are explaining these things, the penny kind of half drops. And then a moment later, the penny drops fully and that one’s just hit. That’s actually really profound, isn’t it? Especially on a high traffic site where you don’t really want to be doing that thing a thousand times a second, just do it once, more or less.\n\n\n\n[00:34:34] Seth Rubenstein: I have a philosophy of if I can offload it to the end user, I’m going to. You know, I’m going to use your computer if I can.\n\n\n\n[00:34:41] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating. Okay, so pivot slightly. Do you think there’s a opportunity here? I expect there’s a bunch of developers listening to this who either haven’t experienced this before, haven’t played with it, and are thinking, okay, I want to wrap a UI around that. I want to build a plugin to make this stuff available. We kind of alluded to this a minute ago. Do you think that there is an opportunity there for developers to kind of neaten this interface up?\n\n\n\n[00:35:02] Seth Rubenstein: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I would be very excited to see where the future of this lands for the WordPress ecosystem. You think of plugins like Advanced Custom Fields and what that did for WordPress, right? It was obviously possible to register post meta and all this stuff before, but what a hassle. It just was. And it really opened up WordPress as a content management system in a way that no other plugin had really done before.\n\n\n\nSo some very smart person, some enterprising person out there, there is an opportunity here to kind of build out something that would do that for the Interactivity API and empower less technically inclined people and maybe just not technical people at all to use this.\n\n\n\n[00:35:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Because despite the fact that you’ve explained it really clearly, and I’ve got a grip on it, I suspect that I wouldn’t want to go through all of the weeds to connect all of those pieces. And I don’t want to open up a code editor. I want everything to be point, click, type, inside of WordPress, in a really straightforward, well-designed, beautifully thought through interface. Kind of like gold rush territory I think. Maybe there’s an opportunity here for someone, maybe multiple people.\n\n\n\nYeah, and it’s what you said before about these kind of custom post type plugins, there’s many of them and I think without them, nobody would’ve been using custom post types, well, not nobody, but a tiny proportion of the people would’ve started to use them. And I feel the same a bit here. I feel like the things that you’ve described, they’re fabulous, technically, conceptually brilliant, but if somebody was to come up with a UI that made them not just conceptually brilliant, but drop dead easy to use, we’ve got something really incredible.\n\n\n\n[00:36:35] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, look, when I first started in WordPress, I didn’t know how to do custom fields, custom post types. You know, ACF helped me out there. And I do them all by hand now, right? I register all my post types and my post meta by hand. But those sort of plugins that make it easier for, well, not even if you’re less technically inclined, you’re busy, you don’t have the time to learn all these new APIs, it really does help out adoption down the road.\n\n\n\n[00:37:00] Nathan Wrigley: And also you can imagine scenarios where people build out pre-configured versions of a thing. So that you might have templates for, I’m struggling to conceptualise that but, you know, you download this plugin, whatever it may be, and they’ve pre-configured useful scenarios that are repeatable. And you just, okay, click a button, that gets me 90% of what I want to do and then I go from there, kind of thing. Yeah, that’s interesting.\n\n\n\nIn terms of the bits and pieces that you’ve described, is there anything which you think might be missing? I know that’s a difficult question to answer because I’m asking you to stare into a crystal ball and come up with the future. But is there any kind of concept in here that you’ve thought, you know what, it’d be really handy to have that?\n\n\n\n[00:37:37] Seth Rubenstein: I think it’s responsive. Responsive blocks, responsive attributes.\n\n\n\n[00:37:41] Nathan Wrigley: Describe what that is because in my head, as soon as I hear responsive, I think viewport width.\n\n\n\n[00:37:45] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, and I think that’s exactly what I’m talking about. You know, I think all of the APIs are here. All the bits are in place to make that happen, the work just needs to be done. There’s actually a function in the Gutenberg source code for, I think it’s called update attribute on screen size or something like that, where you can kind of, desktop, tablet, mobile changes attribute to match for that viewport size.\n\n\n\nI think this has been the Achilles heel for Gutenberg. It’s the constant complaint that I hear out of people. And I think that is really the missing link, the, last thing that would really make Gutenberg perfect.\n\n\n\n[00:38:19] Nathan Wrigley: So scenarios where you could literally change anything based upon, I don’t know, we’re on a tablet now, so what we had on a desktop is no longer appropriate. Again, I’m struggling to conceptualise what that might be, but again, the same on mobile.\n\n\n\n[00:38:32] Seth Rubenstein: I’ll give you a good example. We have our own grid block, columns block. We made our own grid block because we do this responsive attribute stuff. You might have three columns that are x width on desktop, and then on tablet, well, you might want that middle column actually to move to the first position to be 100% width, right? That’s a really easy example, but doing that right now is next impossible without having a developer build out that system for you. That’s just one thing I can think of, but there are a myriad of instances like that.\n\n\n\n[00:39:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the domino fell a bit there. I understand what you mean. So yeah, it could be width, it could be background colour, it could be font size or content, anything.\n\n\n\n[00:39:09] Seth Rubenstein: A number of things, yeah. Well, it could be also in the Interactivity API. It could be that, you know, on tablet, actually I want, when you click on this thing, I want it to do something else entirely.\n\n\n\n[00:39:16] Nathan Wrigley: The button does a different thing.\n\n\n\n[00:39:17] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:39:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. That’s really interesting.\n\n\n\n[00:39:18] Seth Rubenstein: Well, I’ll give you another example. We do that. Well, not to that degree, but Core social links. We wrap that in another block called Navigator Share Link. So when you’re on mobile and you click on the Facebook button, we’re not taking you to the Facebook share little window. We just open up the little native browser share thing. You just send it off to your app or whatever, friends, your iMessage, whatever you want to do.\n\n\n\nSo I think that kind of device contextuality is one area where there’s not a lot of guidance or APIs or anything, and that is kind of entirely on the developers to figure out themselves. But I think that’s probably what’s missing most from Gutenberg, is that kind of idea of screen or device contextuality.\n\n\n\n[00:40:01] Nathan Wrigley: I just think this is all so fascinating. Essentially, during the last 40 minutes or so, you’ve prized open, I think a really different future for WordPress than I had previously thought. I knew all these things existed. I hadn’t really connected the dots. And it feels to me as if suddenly you go from building a bunch of websites to anything. Literally anything. If it’s possible to put in a browser.\n\n\n\n[00:40:27] Seth Rubenstein: It’s a web application framework.\n\n\n\n[00:40:28] Nathan Wrigley: Right. There you go. Yeah. A web application. Build anything inside of WordPress, which is not something that I was all that familiar with. Gosh, the future is bright.\n\n\n\n[00:40:37] Seth Rubenstein: I mean, we have blocks where people are, you know, drag and drop them together and they’re building out little calculators. You know, one of our more popular content types is like, put in your income and where you live, and then we’ll tell you some information about you, you know, about your area or whatever. That’s a web application. That’s not a blog post. That’s not content. That’s a web application that someone just drag and drop built.\n\n\n\nYeah, we’re at a place, you know, the content management stuff of WordPress, man, that’s rock hard. That’s settled. Now we’re going into another era, a new direction where WordPress is this web development framework, first and foremost. For you, the developer, but also your end users to build web applications with, inside of.\n\n\n\n[00:41:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, absolutely fascinating. So my intuition that I alluded to at the beginning of this podcast, in 2018 or whatever it is, that promise has now become reality. The year 2025, we got there. And now it just needs a bunch of developers, hopefully, dear listener, if you’re listening to this, get on board and try to figure this out and make it straightforward so people like me can use it.\n\n\n\nSeth, I think that’s probably the sweet spot to end it. That’s a very optimistic future you’ve painted there. Where do we find you, if somebody’s listening? I would imagine that there’s a bunch of people listening to this thinking, I need to speak to Seth.\n\n\n\n[00:41:51] Seth Rubenstein: You can find me at sethrubenstein.info. And you can find me on Twitter or Bluesky. Please find me on Bluesky, though, I hate Twitter.\n\n\n\n[00:41:57] Nathan Wrigley: We will drop the links into the show notes. So if you head to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Seth Rubenstein, that’s S-T-E-I-N, search for that and then the links will be there for Seth’s socials, plus anything to do with the talk that we’ve been mentioning as well. Seth Rubenstein, thank you so much for chatting to me today.\n\n\n\n[00:42:15] Seth Rubenstein: Thank you for having me.\n\n\n\n\nOn the podcast today we have Seth Rubenstein.\n\n\n\nSeth is the head of engineering at the Pew Research Center, where he leads a team of developers managing the organisation\u2019s WordPress-based publishing platform for its news site. Passionate about open source, Seth ensures that everything his team builds not only meets the Pew Research Center\u2019s needs, but also benefits the wider community. By actively contributing to the Gutenberg project, he strives to share their solutions, always asking how their work can be given back to help others in the WordPress ecosystem.\n\n\n\nSeth shares fascinating stories from the work h e\u2019s recently been doing. He breaks down what block composability really means, the ability to build modular, reusable, and even interactive blocks that work seamlessly together, empowering both developers and end users to create sophisticated web applications within the familiar WordPress block editor.\n\n\n\nThe conversation gets into some of WordPress\u2019s newest and most promising features, including the Block Bindings API, Block Bits (still very much in development), and the Interactivity API. Seth explains how these tools open a world of possibilities, like building interactive quizzes, dynamically updating content, or even prefetching data, all using blocks, without having to rely on custom React front-ends or heavy server-side processing.\n\n\n\nSeth also talks about the path forward for democratising these advanced capabilities, discussing current limitations, the potential for new UI tools, and what\u2019s still missing in the quest for truly responsive, device-contextual blocks.\n\n\n\nThroughout the episode, Seth makes a compelling case for why now is a golden opportunity for developers and plugin builders to start experimenting, get involved, and shape the next evolution of WordPress as a cutting-edge web application platform.\n\n\n\nWhether you\u2019re a developer curious about the future of Gutenberg or an editor dreaming of more drag-and-drop web app power, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\n\u200aPew Research Center\n\n\n\nSeth and Max Schmeling’s presentation at WordCamp US 2025 – \u200aBlock Composability: The Past and The Future\n\n\n\nInteractivity API\n\n\n\nBlock Bits – Proposal: Bits as dynamic tokens\n\n\n\nBlock Bindings API\n\n\n\nHTML API\n\n\n\n\u200aPreact framework\n\n\n\n\u200aAutomattic’s new Remote Data Blocks\n\n\n\n\u200aReligious Landscape Study\n\n\n\nSeth’s website\n\n\n\nSeth on Bluesky", "date_published": "2025-10-21T10:00:00-04:00", "date_modified": "2025-10-21T07:20:47-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/190-Seth-Rubenstein-on-Block-Composability-in-WordPress-Future.jpg", "tags": [ "Block Bindings", "Block Bits", "Block Composability", "Interactivity API", "podcast" ], "summary": "In this episode of WP Tavern, Seth Rubenstein from Pew Research Center talks with host Nathan Wrigley about advanced WordPress development, focusing on block composability in Gutenberg. Seth explains how new APIs, Block Bindings, Block Bits, and the Interactivity API, are making WordPress more powerful, enabling developers and editors to build dynamic web applications, like complex quizzes, directly in the block editor. They discuss the potential for easier UI interfaces and the promising future of WordPress as a flexible platform for interactive content, while touching on performance improvements and upcoming needs like responsive blocks. Whether you\u2019re a developer curious about the future of Gutenberg or an editor dreaming of more drag-and-drop web app power, this episode is for you.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2169281/c1e-pj4r4t1qv86fqzqqz-1p7kgovja12x-u1kiwd.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=200138", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/189-weston-ruter-on-unlocking-wordpress-performance", "title": "#189 \u2013 Weston Ruter on Unlocking WordPress Performance", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how WordPress Core continues to strive to unlock greater performance.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Weston Ruter. Weston is a longtime WordPress user and contributor. He has been a core committer for 10 years, and he co-led the WordPress 4.9 release. He worked in the WordPress agency space, and has also been sponsored to work on the Core Performance Team. He lives in Portland, which as you will hear, was quite handy for this interview.
\n\n\n\nWe start the conversation by getting into the big picture, why website speed matters more now than ever, and how WordPress performs out of the box. Weston shares details about measuring true performance. Revealing, for example, that achieving a perfect Lighthouse score isn’t the end game, and that real user experience metrics like Core Web Vitals and Largest Contentful Paint should shape how developers and site owners think about optimization.
\n\n\n\nThroughout the episode, you’ll learn about the advances made by the WordPress Performance Team, from lazy loading and new image formats, to speculative loading that shaves precious milliseconds off page transitions. Weston explains how many performance improvements are designed to work automatically, democratizing speed, so that even casual WordPress users benefit without needing to be technical experts.
\n\n\n\nThe conversation also touches on the balance between adding features and avoiding plugin bloat. The hidden impact of browser and device differences, and how large companies, like Google, are working hand in hand with WordPress to raise the bar on speed and usability.
\n\n\n\nWeston offers practical tips, deep technical wisdom, and a glimpse of where WordPress performance is heading next, and it’s sure to inspire you to think differently about how your sites load, how your users engage, and how you can squeeze out every last drop of speed from the platform you love.
\n\n\n\nWhether you’re a developer, designer, site owner, or just someone curious about what keeps the web running smoothly. This episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Weston Ruter.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Weston Ruter. Hello.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:28] Weston Ruter: Thank you for having me.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:29] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. I’m quite jealous of Weston because we’re in Portland, Oregon at WordCamp US. I had to get on a plane, which was no hardship really in the grand scheme of things. Nevertheless, it was a lengthy plane journey. You, on the other hand, had to get on some public transport to get here because you live in Portland. That must be nice
\n\n\n\n[00:03:45] Weston Ruter: I live about five miles to the east of here, and so I jumped on the bus and I got off and walked to coffee shop and over to the conference center.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:53] Nathan Wrigley: And twice, two years in a row as well. You’re very, very lucky.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:56] Weston Ruter: I was very happy when I found out.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So Weston’s here today because of a presentation that he’s giving at WordCamp US. I will read into the record the title of the presentation that you’re giving, The Site Speed Frontier with Performance Lab and Beyond. So it’s all about performance, this episode essentially.
\n\n\n\nThis is one of those subjects where I feel you have to tell us your credentials so that we understand that what you are saying is true. Because I think there’s a lot of snake oil, certainly from my point of view, quite a lot of ignorance. I don’t really understand this topic inside and out. So would you mind, a minute or something like that? Just tell us about you and your history with, well, WordPress, but also performance and so on.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:32] Weston Ruter: Yeah, sure. I have been a WordPress Core committer for 10 years. And I was in the agency space working at XWP, working on enterprise WordPress sites. And then I joined Google and I was a software engineer working on developer programs engineer, then develop a relations engineer working on the AMP project, which is all about making webpages faster using the AMP framework. And from there I transitioned into working on the Core Performance Team for the past couple years. And we are focused on making WordPress fast for everybody.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, great. Thank you so much. So the topic at hand then is going to be about performance. Why are you interested in this? I know obviously there’s a career in it and what have you. Is this something that you lie awake at night thinking about? Do you obsess about this kind of stuff?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:28] Weston Ruter: Yeah, it’s a passion of mine because who likes a slow webpage, right? So it’s fun to eke every bit of performance out of the loading of something. There’s a lot of little technical details and things to know and best practices to observe. And so it’s a fun challenge to be as fast as possible and there’s always room for improvement.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:52] Nathan Wrigley: And it kind of feels as if the mantra over many, many years has basically been that, you know, if you can make your website faster, it will be successful. People will visit it, people are getting weary of page load time or what have you. And so maybe we’ll get into the weeds of all of that.
\n\n\n\nHow does WordPress, if I was just to go, okay, ignore the hosting that it’s on. Let’s just imagine we’ve got a good host, we’ll just use that term. If I was to download a vanilla version of WordPress and use the default theme, currently 2025, and do nothing else with it, I’ve written a few blog posts, maybe that’s it. How does it do out of the box like that?
\n\n\n\n[00:06:25] Weston Ruter: Yeah, it turns out my talk is exactly about this, and it uses the 2025 theme as a test case to show how the performance of WordPress fares out of the box. And if you were to load up a site running 2025, the theme and nothing else, and you run it through Lighthouse, the performance testing tool from Google, you’ll most likely get a 100 score, performance score. And you would think, I’m done, there’s nothing else to do. But if you dig into it, just because you get a good score, that doesn’t mean there’s still not room for improvement. And there’s still head room even after 100.
\n\n\n\nBut yeah, WordPress Core does great out of the box, but there are still many opportunities to make it even faster. And as you had Felix on previously to talk about speculative loading, that’s one example where the performance is improved yet further. And in the performance lab plugin, which the performance team maintains, we have different performance feature plugins that implement additional optimisations that address different scenarios and use cases that WordPress doesn’t do well out of the box.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:40] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting, and I’ve never heard it framed that way. I’ve never heard that there was a ceiling above 100. It kind of feels as if that is the ceiling. If you score 100, all bets are off, game over, you’ve succeeded, hooray, have a party, kind of thing. But no, there’s still room to be squeezing a little bit out here and there.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:57] Weston Ruter: Yeah, if you look at a Lighthouse audit, Lighthouse is an example of a lab metric. It simulates a page load for a user, but it’s not an actual page load for an actual user. It’s just a simulation. And if you really want to know how your site is actually performing, you need to measure those visits from actual users.
\n\n\n\nAnd if you load up a popular site in Google’s page speed insights tool, you’ll see there’s two different sections on the page. At the top, you’ll see what users are experiencing, and then at the bottom you’ll see lab data. And the top is coming from actual site visitors through what’s called the Chrome User Experience Report. And that tells you how the site is performing in terms of the Core Web Vitals that Google has spearheaded.
\n\n\n\nAnd one of those is called the Largest Contentful Paint or LCP, and that measures the time it takes for the largest element that is most likely going to be the main content of the page to be rendered, from the time you start navigating to the page and that element finishes rendering.
\n\n\n\nAnd a good LCP value is considered from 0 to 2.5 seconds. And so you can have, within 2.5 seconds there’s a big range in the user experience. So if it’s just under 2.5 seconds, it’s considered good, but that doesn’t mean a 1.5 second page load is actually way better, and a 0.5 second page load is even better yet, and a 0.05 second page load is great, is perfect. That would be the perfection. And that is what we’re working on.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:36] Nathan Wrigley: There’s gradations of it, okay. So within that 100 there may be room to do, aspects of the 100 can be improved. And in this case, by taking the LCP time down.
\n\n\n\nWe’re at a conference event. There’s over a thousand people. There must be designers, developers, SEO people here. There’s everybody. There’s the whole gamut of people that use WordPress, probably some people that are new to the whole platform as well. Do you think that performance is something that everybody needs to worry about or are you happy to be one of the few that obsess about it? Is it basically better to leave an expert like yourself to worry about it, or is this something that we can all have a little dabble at and be successful about?
\n\n\n\n[00:10:14] Weston Ruter: Well, that’s what we’re concerned about with the Core Performance Team is making it so that the regular WordPress user doesn’t have to worry about this, because nobody’s got time to spend learning like, what is LCP? What is time to first bite? What are these different metrics? And nobody has time to worry about optimising for all these. So WordPress Core should do all this out of the box, and the WordPress ecosystem should implement best practices so that users don’t have to worry about it.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:44] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting. I remember, I’m thinking it was about six years ago, but I don’t really remember the date. But Google kind of informed everybody that in a period of time, a year’s time or what have you, these metrics, LCP and, Core Web Vitals basically were going to come in.
\n\n\n\nAnd it felt like everybody in our industry was running around like a headless chicken, trying to understand something that they knew, there was this sword of Damocles moment, this date in the calendar where the SERPs were going to change. It didn’t feel like a comfortable time. In some senses, it felt like Google was kind of poisoning the water a bit because they were alienating developers who suddenly had to learn this new thing, because they realised their client websites were going to probably tumble in the SERPs.
\n\n\n\nAnd so they had to upskill in this thing that probably they didn’t want to be involved with. So it was a curious time, but the dust seems to have settled. I don’t know too much about, you know, whether they were penalties that really were paid by people because they didn’t have these fabulous Core Web Vital scores. But it definitely put the cat amongst the pigeons for a while anyway.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:38] Weston Ruter: The factors that go into ranking pages and Google search are, I never knew what they are, so the knowledge I have is that the performance of a page contributes to the ranking in some way. And basically, as I understand it, all things being equal, you have two sites with the same content and same relevance to the user, and one has better performance, then in theory that would rank higher.
\n\n\n\nHow much value you get in terms of your ranking is debatable or unknown. I don’t know. But what is important is the user experience and the benefits that you get for your users. And if they have a good experience on your site, then they’re more likely to come back. More likely to result in a conversion or a purchase, or whatever you’re looking to get out of your site. So that’s where I would focus the concerns.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:34] Nathan Wrigley: If this were the Squarespace or Wix podcast, which of course it isn’t, it would be much more straightforward to have a conversation about why your site was quick because, you know, it’s this proprietary platform. There’s constraints about what you can do on that platform, and they run the whole thing, you know, they’ve got their arms around everything.
\n\n\n\nWordPress, you download it from .org in most cases, and start to pile things on top of it. And very quickly we get the problems developing I guess, you know, the more things that you throw into it, the more plugins and what have you. Would your advice simply be circumspect about what you throw in, or can you, for want of a better phrase, can you concentrate on additional tech to mask over any problems that you have?
\n\n\n\nYou know, with the best one in the world, if you’ve got an LMS, it’s probably going to slow your website down because it’s doing a lot. If you’ve got WooCommerce, it’s probably going to slow yourself, the website, down from the vanilla install with using the 2025 theme that you just mentioned.
\n\n\n\nBut there’s this whole marketplace of hosting companies and performance companies who are selling you things that kind of undo the, and I’m doing air quotes, the damage that you did by putting the plugins in.
\n\n\n\nSo I don’t know if you’ve got anything to say to that. You know, the whole thing about bloating the website, slowing it down, unpicking it with different tech.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:49] Weston Ruter: Yeah, well, the WordPress ecosystem has a problem with the kitchen sink issue and a plugin that has more features is somehow valued more highly than a plugin that does one thing and does it really well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so in the Performance Lab plugin in our suite of plugins that we feature, we have the goal that a plugin should do one thing and do it really well. And if you don’t like what the plugin is doing, you deactivate it and switch to another one that is doing that one issue and doing it well.
\n\n\n\nBut if you have plugins that do so many things, then you’re really kind of, your hands are tied and it’s difficult to switch. And maybe that’s a strategy by some plugins to lock you in to their ecosystem, but it’s a difficult problem, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:39] Nathan Wrigley: And we also have a, you know, we have plugins which are performance plugins. I mean, there’s dozens of them. I’m sure we could rattle off, whose job is to fix the problems that you may have created elsewhere in the website. If you’re in the weeds of it, like you are, you’ve probably got some vague understanding about it. You understand whether something is snake oil or not, but for the rest of us, that is a Pandora’s box, and there’s only chaos in there.
\n\n\n\nI don’t know what will slow my website down. If I download, I’m going to use LMS again, if I download an LMS platform, I’m going to hope that the work has been done successfully. But I’m probably also going to be thinking about, okay, now do I need to talk to my host, get a different hosting environment, get it set up so it’s perfect for that? Do I need a performance plugin? Caching layers, putting things on the edge.
\n\n\n\nAnd on and on it goes. It makes WordPress a difficult thing for many, many people to use. And so this idea of democratising publishing sort of goes out the window a little bit because it’s really extraordinarily hard to use.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:34] Weston Ruter: Yeah. And I think that in addition to democratising publishing, WordPress should also be as part of that democratising performance. And again, making it so that users don’t have to worry about that.
\n\n\n\nAnd what we’re doing in Core, we’re doing exactly that where as one of WordPress’s core philosophies is decisions, not options, and things should work out of the box.
\n\n\n\nBut when it comes to the ecosystem, it’s a open source environment and there’s no top down control over what a plugin does. So I think there’s opportunities with projects like the Plugin Check plugin to do more analysis on the performance, in addition to the security and the best practices for being accepted into the directory.
\n\n\n\nBut if there’s also a surfacing of performance issues or additional audits that are done on the impact of installing a plugin, that could be really valuable for site owners to get a sense of, this may cause problems if you install it.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:37] Nathan Wrigley: How long has the Performance Team been a thing? I feel like three years or something like that, but I could be really wrong.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:43] Weston Ruter: About four years I think.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, yeah. And could you just run over the history of that? I was going to say organisation, but let’s go with team. Could you run us through the history of that team and what you’ve been able to do?
\n\n\n\nEach of the little steps, some of them are quite profound. Some of them feel less profound, but very important. But over those four years, a lot of really incredible work has been done actually. Certainly from my perspective, it does seem that without that team we’d be in a very, very different place.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:15] Weston Ruter: I hope that’s true. I think it is. Yeah, well, it started out focusing on, I think lazy loading of images was one of the first things to land through this team. And with that we also then uncovered that actually lazy loading everything, which while great for reducing the weight of a page, because you’re not downloading images that aren’t actually shown. If you lazy load images that are in the initial viewport, that actually hurts the Largest Contentful Paint metric because the browser wastes to start downloading those images until it knows that they’re in the viewport.
\n\n\n\nSo out of that came work to not lazy load images that are in the initial view port, and then also moving on to this attribute called fetch priority, which you can have the value of high, for example. So if you add fetch priority high to an image, then the browser’s going to prioritise loading that first. And so a lot of work was done to add sensible defaults in WordPress Core so that, for example, the featured image of a post gets fetch priority high, so that it gets loaded sooner over images that are not going to be the Largest Contentful Paint, most likely.
\n\n\n\nSo there’s that. And then there was also an issue with like emoji in posts where, on every page load there’s some JavaScript that runs in the head of the page, and it computes whether the browser supports the emoji, like all the emoji. And if the browser doesn’t support all the emoji, then it loads the Twitter emoji library to render them. And that JavaScript was causing a long task in lower performing browsers, or devices, that was hurting the largest contentful paint as well. So that was fixed as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd then work has been done to add support for new image formats, like AVIF and WebP so that site owners can upload those image formats instead of JPEGs, which take longer to download.
\n\n\n\nWe talked about speculative loading, and you talked about that with Felix. So that landed in 6.8, which by default will start prefetching the HTML for a page when you mouse down or tap or click, pointer down on a link to give the browser a bit of a headstart. But then the API allows you to be more aggressive about starting that process, just when you hover over the link, for example, and then not just to prefetch the HTML, but to actually render the whole page.
\n\n\n\nAnd so in my talk, which I gave earlier today, I showed the difference between no speculative loading, speculative loading as in WordPress Core right now, the default, and then moderate prefetch. And then lastly, moderate pre-render.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:57] Nathan Wrigley: Is that done with the plugin? Well, I guess you could do that with code, but there’s an option to, if you download the plugin, you’ve got a UI for that as well.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:04] Weston Ruter: Exactly. There’s a UI in the plugin that allows you to opt into moderate eagerness, or to use pre-render instead of prefetch. And in the example I showed, let’s say your time to first bite is a second. Then in the initial example, like on a slow, or on a fast 4G connection, you’re going to get like 2.27 seconds to load the page. But then with conservative prefetch, that shaves off like 50 milliseconds because the amount of time it takes to mouse down and mouse up is just a little bit of time that it can shave off that’s just a little bit to the loading of the page.
\n\n\n\nBut then when you go to moderate prefetch, then the browser can load the page fully in the background. And so then the time to first bite in that case becomes zero because the whole page is already in the browser’s cache. And that can reduce it to like one second because you totally eliminated the time to first bite.
\n\n\n\nAnd then with the moderate pre rendering, then when you’re hovered over that link, the browser not only downloads the HTML, but also all the images, builds out the layout, runs the JavaScript. And so then when you click on that link, the page can load instantaneously.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:12] Nathan Wrigley: So literally instantaneous.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:14] Weston Ruter: 0.05 seconds.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It’s instantaneous. I mean that’s pretty incredible. All of that is available inside of WordPress, but just to rewind, probably about 50 seconds, the default is not aggressive. The default in WordPress in order to satisfy the kind of 80 20 rule and what have you, the default is to make it so that there has to be some interaction. The mouse has to be invoked. There’s a click involved.
\n\n\n\nThat’s fascinating. So if you really want to get into the weeds of that, you can basically make the next page load almost instantaneously, should you wish to do that.
\n\n\n\nOne thing that I did get into with, I believe it was Adam Silverstein not that long ago when I had a podcast episode with him. And I don’t mean to go deeply into this, but there’s a curious balancing act here, I think with the environment and all of this speculative loading. Because it wouldn’t be desirable to load, I don’t know, there’s 12 navigation links and the mouse happens to go across all of them. And suddenly 12 unnecessary pages were entirely pre-rendered and what have you. So yeah. I don’t know if you’ve got any thoughts on that, whether there’s a balancing act between performance and environmental concerns.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:23] Weston Ruter: Yeah. By default, speculative loading only operates on pages when you’re not logged in. And so when you’re not logged into WordPress, that is most of the time when you’re going to have a page cache that can serve it from the cache. And so as long as you have page caching in place, then the server isn’t going to be overly taxed by those requests.
\n\n\n\nIn the newest version of the Speculative Loading plugin, it has an opt in to speculative loading for logged in users as well. But there’s a warning that shows up if you don’t have a persistent object cache active, for example. So, yeah, it’s important to have good caching in place, good best practices for scaling.
\n\n\n\nHowever, in addition to pre rendering, which the speculative loading plugin enables, there’s a much older technology for instant page loads that browsers all support, and that is the back forward cache.
\n\n\n\nAnd WordPress sites, by default when you’re logged out, will benefit from this most of the time. But as soon as you login or if you’re navigating to like a shopping cart page, or an account page, or checkout page in an e-commerce site. Oftentimes the plugin will invoke this no cash headers function that tells the browser, primarily tells the page cache, hey, don’t hold onto this response because you don’t want to cache the shopping cart for one user and then serve it to another user, because then you would be seeing something embarrassing potentially.
\n\n\n\nAnd so that is one of the benefits of sending that header. But it also has the effect of preventing the browser from holding onto that page as well. So if you navigate back and forward from the shopping cart, then you’ll notice that it doesn’t load very fast. It loads slow, because the browser has to re-fetch it all from the server, and has to rebuild everything from scratch.
\n\n\n\nAnd so there’s a effort underway for 6.9 to stop doing that. To allow the browser to hold onto that in memory. And then to address, one of the issues that turned this off to begin with, allowing the browser to store the pages in the cache. Is if you aren’t logged in, for example, into WordPress. You’re on some sensitive page maybe putting some API key in or something, and you go to log out, with this back, forward cache, you could hit the back button to go back into the WordPress admin as another person, maybe on a shared computer and look at that page, even though the user had logged out.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really not good.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:51] Weston Ruter: Not good. So there’s a ticket for 6.9 which would solve that problem by invalidating those pages from bfcache so that that privacy concern isn’t there. And this issue is not just about, well, these back, forward navigations are very common. So the Chrome team found that one in 10 navigations on desktop are these back, forward navigations?
\n\n\n\n[00:25:15] Nathan Wrigley: A tenth?
\n\n\n\n[00:25:16] Weston Ruter: Yeah. And on mobile, I think it’s one in five. So 20% of the time on mobile, you’re going back and forward using a gesture instead of hitting a link.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:25] Nathan Wrigley: That maps to my life, but I hadn’t thought about it.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:28] Weston Ruter: But the benefit here is not just in that you get a faster page load, but also bfcache, this back, forward cache will preserve the entire state of the page. So in my talk, I showed an example where you, if you have BuddyPress installed, you start typing in an update, a status update, and then you click away to a separate tab, and then if you hit the back button to go back to that initial tab, then you’ll find without this back, forward cache that your update’s gone because that input field was constructed with JavaScript. And when you don’t have back, forward cache, then the entire document object model has to be rebuilt. All the JavaScript has to re-execute. This is also an issue for the block editor. If you navigated away from a page and you didn’t save a draft, then everything gets lost without this back, forward cache.
\n\n\n\nSo back, forward cache not only improves performance, giving you the possibility of these instant page loads, but it also preserves that important state on a page that could be lost otherwise.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:25] Nathan Wrigley: You have a plugin if memory serves, recently in the repo.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:30] Weston Ruter: Yes. And I got some feedback that it’s a terrible name, which I agree.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:32] Nathan Wrigley: What’s the name? I’ve forgotten.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:33] Weston Ruter: It’s called no cache, bfcache.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:36] Nathan Wrigley: That was it, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:37] Weston Ruter: But if I were to rename it, which I probably will now, it would probably be called Instant Back Forward Navigations or something. It’s not so short, but.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:43] Nathan Wrigley: So is the intention to take, are you spearheading that basically? is the intention to roll the learnings from that plugin into Core?
\n\n\n\n[00:26:50] Weston Ruter: Yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:50] Nathan Wrigley: And I’m just going to read this into the record so that everybody understands. You are talking about backwards and forwards by using the buttons, which I guess typically live at the top left of a browser. Those buttons, the arrows that point backwards and forwards.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:03] Weston Ruter: That’s right, or the navigation in like the gesture on Android to go back.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so swipe typically and swipe right. okay. Yeah, that’s really interesting because I do that all the time. It really hadn’t occurred to me that was something that could be cached. And if, as you say it’s 20% on mobile, or 10% on, that’s a lot of time that you’re saving.
\n\n\n\nBecause you do, it’s a journey, isn’t it? And sometimes you get to a dead end, and so you just back three times, because you know that you wanted to go back to that product that you saw a minute ago, but you kind of got lost along the way. So that’s kind of almost like a roadmap item. That’s 6.9, hopefully. Are there any other things coming in 6.9 that are interesting?
\n\n\n\n[00:27:39] Weston Ruter: Well, one of the new features in WordPress Core is this Interactivity API.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:44] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so nice.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:46] Weston Ruter: And one of the great things about the Interactivity API is one of its key design principles is server side rendering. So let’s say you have a navigation block, or you have an image block with a lightbox. All of the HTML and the CSS needed to render those blocks are output on the server. There’s no need for JavaScript to construct the user interface.
\n\n\n\nNevertheless, there’s JavaScript needed because there’s interactivity involved in these interactive blocks. And so with each of these interactive blocks, there’s a script module that gets added to the page, and it’s added in the head of the page. And browsers download those script modules with a high priority. And the impact of that is, well, the browser doesn’t know that these aren’t important. It could be important, it could not be important.
\n\n\n\nBut by loading them with a high priority, they compete with loading of more important critical resources like the Largest Contentful Paint image, for example. So by having these modules in the head, then they cause the LCP metric to degrade. And so there’s a ticket to add fetch priority low to these script tags, which causes the browser to bump them down in priority so that the Largest Contentful Paint image has a chance to load sooner.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It seems like a game of tennis, this whole thing. For example, the Interactivity API, what a fabulous thing that is, but smuggled into that with something, it sounds unexpected that nobody foresaw that one and okay, need to address that. And here we are, 6.9, that gets addressed.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:21] Weston Ruter: Yeah, and one of the great things about the Interactivity API as well is that it has really pushed forward the new Script Modules API in WordPress, where what are also called ESM modules or scripts. And these are a new way of writing JavaScript and they are, by default they don’t block the rendering of the page.
\n\n\n\nWhereas if you have a classic script like jQuery in the head of your page, as you start loading the page, the browser has to stop parsing the HTML, it has to fetch the JavaScript, it has to execute the JavaScript, and then because that JavaScript may be doing something like document.write, where it like adds HTML to the page as it’s executing. Then only after that’s all finished then the parser can continue and continue laying out the page. So it’s very bad for performance to have any external, or even inline sometimes, JavaScript in the head.
\n\n\n\nAnd so one way to solve that issue is to slap a defer attribute on that script tag, or an async attribute, and that causes the script to then not block rendering, and it will be executed once the page has finished loading.
\n\n\n\nAnd a nice feature of script modules is that they’re deferred by default. You can’t have a blocking script. And so the thinking was, oh, they don’t block rendering, so we can just put them in the head. But it turns out that they do impact the network, because there’s other things on the network than just the scripts. And we need to make sure that the critical resources are prioritised, like the LCP image and not just load everything with high priority.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:55] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of curious because the past of WordPress has been about, you know, you click on links and you generate, I don’t know a post, a page or something, but you’ve got this static piece of content, largely. You know, there may be some JavaScript or something, which is doing something fun.
\n\n\n\nBut the interactivity, API suddenly presents a page which, I don’t know, you might be stuck on that page for quite a while doing other things. I don’t know how that leans into the whole performance thing. I don’t know we could search and filter a bunch of houses or real estate or what have you, and update things. And we are on this one URL but everything’s getting changed in front of our eyes. So I don’t know how that whole LCP thing gets bundled into that. It suddenly becomes a much more difficult problem to identify and solve, I guess.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:35] Weston Ruter: Yeah. So with LCP, it is for that initial page load. So as soon as you interact with the page, then whatever is the largest element then going to be.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:47] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that ceases there does it?
\n\n\n\n[00:31:48] Weston Ruter: Yeah, it stops at that point. However, there are other problems with performance that can arise after that Largest Contentful Paint. So one of the newer Core Web Vital metrics is the Interaction to Next Paint, and that is this INP value. And that is all about how much JavaScript is executing on the page. And JavaScript functions can do a lot of work, so much work that they cause the user interface to appear to halt.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:19] Nathan Wrigley: Hang.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:20] Weston Ruter: Yeah, hang. And so that’s called jank. And it can cause animations to stutter, it can cause a user interface to be sluggish, and you click a button and then nothing happens and then all of a sudden it opens up. And so that’s an example of a metric that is still very relevant with the Interactivity API. And there’s been work to establish best practices to make sure that the event handlers for these interactive blocks are using the best practices. Like, it’s called scheduler.yield, and it allows you to break up a long running task to give the browser a chance to catch its breath so that it doesn’t cause those long tasks.
\n\n\n\nAnd then another important metric, which continues to matter even after the page is loaded is called the Cumulative Layout Shift or CLS. And that is a very common issue with, where you have ads or something that will just expand as you’re scrolling down and you lose your place in the page and that hurts your cumulative layout, that CLS score.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You end up with your finger in entirely the wrong place just as you’re about to click on things.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:23] Weston Ruter: That’s exactly right.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:24] Nathan Wrigley: Old TechCrunch website. I don’t know if you’ve ever came across that one. That was a WordPress one, I believe. And I don’t know how many times I click entirely the wrong article because it just shifted just at the moment that my finger was descending.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:33] Weston Ruter: Very aggravating yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really annoying. We’re really in the weeds here and what’s kind of fascinating, obviously you understand it all, I’m just holding on for dear life here. But it feels as if there’s a dance between what we’re expecting the browser to be able to do, and what it actually can do. And I don’t know if that’s the case.
\n\n\n\nYou know, I don’t know if the fact that I’ve got a shiny new Mac means that my experience of the web in the future will be better than my 8-year-old Mac over there. That never used to be something that I worried about. It took time to boot that machine, but once it was up and running, that machine was probably just as good at displaying the web as the shiny new one. But now it feels as if that’s maybe not the case.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:13] Weston Ruter: It’s funny you say that because this emoji issue that I described earlier where it was causing this long task as the page was loading, I only discovered that as a problem because I was using a Chromebook as development device.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, notoriously low on specs.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:27] Weston Ruter: Relatively, that one was even a fast one. But yes, much slower than one of the newer Macs. And so it’s important to always be testing in an average device, and not always just use the latest and greatest. Because you’re going to miss performance issues that are probably impacting a lot of users.
\n\n\n\nAnd one of the issues with emojis is, going back to what I described earlier with this long script in the head, now there’s just an inline script, and even with an inline script, there is still a performance impact where it will stop, because the browser has to stop parsing the page, execute the JavaScript, and then keep going.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I used my new Mac to analyse the performance of that and I didn’t see a problem. But then I tried the CPU throttling in Chrome Dev Tools where you can emulate low end, low tier device. And in that case, then all of a sudden I saw this 100 millisecond long task pop up, I can’t remember how long exactly, but it negatively impacted the LCP because it had to spend that time with this underpowered device.
\n\n\n\nSo, yeah, there’s many opportunities for optimising things that, if you’re using devices that people are actually using.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:41] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t really know what the expectation is from WordPress over the next decade, but it doesn’t feel like it’s going to be limiting itself to websites. It feels like that’s a portion of it, but Matt Mullenweg often has talked about it being almost like the operating system for the web. Whether or not that will transpire, I don’t know.
\n\n\n\nBut certainly for me, a lot of the things that I used to associate with a downloaded app that would run on MacOS or Windows or what have you, I’m now fully expecting that to be in a browser. And so I expect that the same would be true of our websites. We’re going to be doing more with them. They’re going to be requiring more grunt in the background, you know, more interactivity, more filtering, more searching, more database queries. And yeah, I guess WordPress has got to try and keep up with all that.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:29] Weston Ruter: In improving web performance, it’s a top down and a bottom up problem. Browsers are working to get faster. They’re competing with each other, trying to be as fast as possible for all the bragging rights, right? But oftentimes it’s impossible for the browser to know, even if it’s as smart as possible, what to prioritise when loading a page.
\n\n\n\nSo that’s why when I was working at Google, we were prioritising improving the web at scale through WordPress to implement best practices in how WordPress builds pages so that Chrome doesn’t have to figure out everything because it’s impossible for Chrome to figure that out from the top down.
\n\n\n\nSo if you look at the, over time these Core Vital Metrics, they all consistently are going up and improving, even if a CMS isn’t necessarily focused on a performance. They all are inching upward. And that’s because the browser is getting better at performance as well. But when a CMS like WordPress also invests in improving performance, then you can start to see it edging out other CMSs in terms of the relative improvement in performance.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. Let me just parse that. So whether WordPress is at the top or the browser is at the top, you’ve got this top bottom thing, and it’s kind of inching in from the top, coming down. Maybe that’s the browser, and then WordPress at the bottom inching up, if they happily meet in the middle.
\n\n\n\nSo what you’re saying is that even if no performance work was done by a Performance Team in WordPress, there would have been in recent years a performance improvement, But the fact that there’s those two things in symphony with each other means that there’s a greater performance improvement.
\n\n\n\nGiven that WordPress, I don’t know what the number is right now, but the statistic of 43% was always banded around. So it’s a huge proportion of the internet. Does WordPress have a voice toward Mozilla and Chrome? Does it get to say what the future of browsers might look like? It feels like with that market share, It ought to have a big voice, but I don’t know if it does.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:26] Weston Ruter: Well, I remember back when responsive images became a thing, and as I recall that it was WordPress implementing these responsive images that caused browsers to say, okay, we’re going to implement these now as well. So I think Chrome, I can’t remember which browser did at first, but it was kind of a catalyst that caused everything to get going.
\n\n\n\nAnd similarly, recently with the speculative loading, it being adopted by WordPress has, I think, caused other browsers to say, okay, we’re going to implement this as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd yeah, I know that when I was working at Google, and still I’m in contact with people at Google who work on web standards work, there are initiatives that they’re working on that they want feedback from WordPress developers to know like, is this going to work for WordPress? And if WordPress can leverage this, and going back and forth between what works for WordPress and what works for browsers and there’s ongoing conversations, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it is kind of interesting. I was talking to somebody from Google, from the Site Kit team, they obviously put up quite a lot of money to be marquee sponsors, if you like. I don’t know what the word is, you know like a top tier sponsor often at these events. I don’t know if they’re sponsoring this one, but there does seem to be some interest from Google.
\n\n\n\nI know that Mozilla doesn’t have the deep pocket, so we’re not really expecting that. But it’s nice to hear that, even if it’s kind of back channels, and it may not be that WordPress gets asked all the time, that there is some sort of symbiosis there. That’s nice to know.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:55] Weston Ruter: Well, I remember also seeing recently that Site Kit was voted one of the most trusted WordPress plugins.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, 5 Million plus installs in under five years. And I was kind of surprised by that actually. when I did that interview, I didn’t realise the numbers were so big. And then after the interview I went out and asked a bunch of random people whether they’d used it, and a hundred percent of the random selection of 10 people that I asked used it on everything.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:20] Weston Ruter: Yeah. I use it for sure.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. It’s kind of amazing. So just sort of rounding it off a little bit, I’m guessing that if you were to have your performance hat on, I could be wrong about this. You would be advising people to step away from the classic way of doing things in WordPress with, you know, the classic editor, the classic themes and things. I genuinely don’t know if there’s a performance improvement in full site editing, block-based themes, and what have you. Over to you really, it’s an open ended question.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:46] Weston Ruter: Yeah, there definitely is a performance benefit to using block themes, and that is because the way that classic themes load, they load progressively where they will print out the head, head tag in the page and then before they render any of the template, they basically locked in the scripts and styles that the page is going to need even though that doesn’t actually know what’s going to be in the page for sure. It can make some guesses, but it doesn’t know for sure.
\n\n\n\nAnd so for classic themes, you’ll have these massive style sheets that are printed in the head, you’ll have a whole bunch of scripts that you may or may not use. And as we said before, those scripts may be blocking the rendering and causing all kinds of problems in performance.
\n\n\n\nBut with block themes, the way that a template is rendered is completely different, where it actually will render all of the blocks in the content first before it goes about rendering the head, the links, the style sheets and the scripts that go in the head of the HTML. And so because of that, a block theme is able to selectively load just the styles and just the scripts that are relevant to the blocks on that specific page. And so the amount of CSS and JavaScript that’s on a page can be greatly reduced, which greatly improves performance.
\n\n\n\nAnd also, one of the initiatives that we’ve been working on in the Core Performance Team is related to these responsive images that we were talking about. Where a responsive image, it has all of the different intermediate image sizes that are available. When you upload an image, it’ll reference all those different image sizes in the source set attribute. And then there’s the sizes attribute that says which of those intermediate image sizes should be loaded for that image in the page. But because WordPress doesn’t know classically, in the classic themes, how big an element is going to be, it uses by default the image that is the width of the view port.
\n\n\n\nAnd so on a mobile device, that’s often fine because images are often the full width of the content. But on a desktop you often have a center column with margins on either side, and maybe the image is going to be in a column or floated to the right. And so oftentimes on desktop, you’re going to download a much larger image than is relevant to that container on the page.
\n\n\n\nAnd so there’s a, one of the plugins in Performance Lab is called Enhanced Responsive Images. And what it does is it leverages the block structure in block themes to be able to figure out what the width is for the container of a given image. And then it can craft that sizes attribute to be much more accurate compared to the default sizes attribute. And in my talk, I showed that the performance gains from that enhancement alone are one of the largest that you can have, much more than just using AVIF or a modern image format.
\n\n\n\n[00:43:51] Nathan Wrigley: Really?
\n\n\n\n[00:43:51] Weston Ruter: Yeah because, for example, in my test page, I had a jpeg and then I tried it again with an AVIF and the AVIF was 20% smaller, so maybe I could compress it even further. But the Largest Contentful Paint improvement for that was only 2%. But with the Enhanced Responsive Images plugin active, it was able to use a much smaller image size, which is much fewer bites, even as a jpeg compared to the AVIF. And that improved the LCP by I think 45%. So a magnitude and a half higher.
\n\n\n\n[00:44:28] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like this work is never, ever going to come to an end. There’s always going to be little things to tweak and squeeze out here, there and everywhere. And there was a really good example just there.
\n\n\n\nI think somebody listening to this podcast, if they’ve got to this point, it’s kind of really fascinating that most of this stuff would go under the radar for most people.
\n\n\n\nI’m sure almost everything that you’ve mentioned, for the casual WordPress user, they would never know that that happened. Not many people are going to read the change log or delve into the weeds of what the Performance Team are doing. And yet there it all is, laid out in front of us over the last 40 minutes or so. Yeah, absolutely loads and loads of work. and never ending. You’ll be here this time next with new things to say.
\n\n\n\n[00:45:06] Weston Ruter: Hopefully. I don’t want to work myself out of a job.
\n\n\n\n[00:45:07] Nathan Wrigley: That’s absolutely true. Where do you go to find information about this? You know, who are the scholars, or the YouTubers, or the blog post authors? Who are the people that are pushing the boundaries here?
\n\n\n\n[00:45:20] Weston Ruter: Well, I have recently been loving the WordPress newsletters that go out, like the Repository and Remkus de Vries, his WP, I forget the name.
\n\n\n\n[00:45:32] Nathan Wrigley: It’s okay.
\n\n\n\n[00:45:33] Weston Ruter: It’s something in, WP in the name. I think, Within WP, but don’t quote me on that.
\n\n\n\n[00:45:36] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it is, Yeah Remkus, Within WP, you’re right.
\n\n\n\n[00:45:39] Weston Ruter: Yes. So I subscribe to his performance blog. So Jono Alderson, Jono or Jono?
\n\n\n\n[00:45:46] Nathan Wrigley: I think Jono. Yeah, we’ll go with that. And apologies if it’s not.
\n\n\n\n[00:45:49] Weston Ruter: Yes. And so all of his posts are brilliant, so yeah. And then, yeah, following just the newsletters, because I don’t have time to keep up on social media anymore, but I really am thankful for those newsletters because it really saves me a lot of time. It gets me what I need to know.
\n\n\n\n[00:46:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I will, link to the ones, the three that you’ve just mentioned.
\n\n\n\nYeah, that’s amazing. Thank you. Honestly, it seems a bit trite, but I’ve been following what the Performance Team have done for the last four years now, from the capacity that I have to understand it, which is pretty low in all honesty. You know, most of what you’re saying, I can get a purchase on the overarching idea, but as soon as you were to draw back, if you were to show me what you were doing, the code and so on, I would immediately lose my purchase.
\n\n\n\nI’d just like to express how profoundly happy I am that people like you are taking the time to do it. I don’t know how much thanks you get for stuff like this, but for my part, thank you.
\n\n\n\n[00:46:42] Weston Ruter: Well, thank you, but no thanks are required because I enjoy doing it, so.
\n\n\n\n[00:46:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, great. Well thank you. anyway.
\n\n\n\n[00:46:46] Weston Ruter: I’ll do it anyway.
\n\n\n\n[00:46:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well Weston Ruter thank you so much for chatting to me today. It’s been a pleasure.
\n\n\n\n[00:46:51] Weston Ruter: Thank you very much.
\nOn the podcast today we have Weston Ruter.
\n\n\n\nWeston Ruter is a long-time WordPress user and contributor. He has been a core committer for 10 years and he co-led the WordPress 4.9 release. He worked in the WordPress agency space and has also been sponsored to work on the Core Performance Team. He lives in Portland, which, as you will hear, was quite handy for this interview.
\n\n\n\nWe start the conversation by getting into the big picture: why website speed matters more now than ever, and how WordPress performs out of the box. Weston shares details about measuring true performance, revealing, for example, that achieving a perfect Lighthouse score isn\u2019t the end game, and that real user experience metrics like Core Web Vitals and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) should shape how developers and site owners think about optimisation.
\n\n\n\nThroughout the episode, you\u2019ll learn about the advances made by the WordPress Performance Team, from lazy loading and new image formats, to speculative loading that shaves precious milliseconds off page transitions. Weston explains how many performance improvements are designed to work automatically, democratising speed so even casual WordPress users benefit without needing to be technical experts. The conversation also touches on the balance between adding features and avoiding plugin bloat, the hidden impact of browser and device differences, and how large companies like Google are working hand-in-hand with WordPress to raise the bar on speed and usability.
\n\n\n\nWeston offers practical tips, deep technical wisdom, and a glimpse of where WordPress performance is heading next, and it\u2019s sure to inspire you to think differently about how your sites load, how your users engage, and how you can squeeze out every last drop of speed from the platform you love.
\n\n\n\nWhether you\u2019re a developer, designer, site owner, or just someone curious about what keeps the web running smoothly, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nThe Site Speed Frontier with Performance Lab and Beyond – Weston’s presentation at WordCamp US 2025
\n\n\n\nA post about the presentation (above) on Weston’s own website
\n\n\n\nAccelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
\n\n\n\nWordPress Core Performance Team
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPodcast – Felix Arntz on How Speculative Loading Is Speeding Up Your WordPress Website
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCrUX – Chrome User Experience Report
\n\n\n\nLargest Contentful Paint (LCP)
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOptimize resource loading with the Fetch Priority API
\n\n\n\nPodcast – Adam Silverstein Explores Transformative Browser Features Impacting WordPress Sites
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWeston’s Instant Back/Forward plugin (mentioned in the podcast with an older name)
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nInteraction to Next Paint (INP)
\n\n\n\nIntroducing the scheduler.yield origin trial
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEnhanced Responsive Images plugin
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "content_text": "Transcript\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how WordPress Core continues to strive to unlock greater performance.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Weston Ruter. Weston is a longtime WordPress user and contributor. He has been a core committer for 10 years, and he co-led the WordPress 4.9 release. He worked in the WordPress agency space, and has also been sponsored to work on the Core Performance Team. He lives in Portland, which as you will hear, was quite handy for this interview.\n\n\n\nWe start the conversation by getting into the big picture, why website speed matters more now than ever, and how WordPress performs out of the box. Weston shares details about measuring true performance. Revealing, for example, that achieving a perfect Lighthouse score isn’t the end game, and that real user experience metrics like Core Web Vitals and Largest Contentful Paint should shape how developers and site owners think about optimization.\n\n\n\nThroughout the episode, you’ll learn about the advances made by the WordPress Performance Team, from lazy loading and new image formats, to speculative loading that shaves precious milliseconds off page transitions. Weston explains how many performance improvements are designed to work automatically, democratizing speed, so that even casual WordPress users benefit without needing to be technical experts.\n\n\n\nThe conversation also touches on the balance between adding features and avoiding plugin bloat. The hidden impact of browser and device differences, and how large companies, like Google, are working hand in hand with WordPress to raise the bar on speed and usability.\n\n\n\nWeston offers practical tips, deep technical wisdom, and a glimpse of where WordPress performance is heading next, and it’s sure to inspire you to think differently about how your sites load, how your users engage, and how you can squeeze out every last drop of speed from the platform you love.\n\n\n\nWhether you’re a developer, designer, site owner, or just someone curious about what keeps the web running smoothly. This episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Weston Ruter.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Weston Ruter. Hello.\n\n\n\n[00:03:28] Weston Ruter: Thank you for having me.\n\n\n\n[00:03:29] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. I’m quite jealous of Weston because we’re in Portland, Oregon at WordCamp US. I had to get on a plane, which was no hardship really in the grand scheme of things. Nevertheless, it was a lengthy plane journey. You, on the other hand, had to get on some public transport to get here because you live in Portland. That must be nice\n\n\n\n[00:03:45] Weston Ruter: I live about five miles to the east of here, and so I jumped on the bus and I got off and walked to coffee shop and over to the conference center.\n\n\n\n[00:03:53] Nathan Wrigley: And twice, two years in a row as well. You’re very, very lucky.\n\n\n\n[00:03:56] Weston Ruter: I was very happy when I found out.\n\n\n\n[00:03:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So Weston’s here today because of a presentation that he’s giving at WordCamp US. I will read into the record the title of the presentation that you’re giving, The Site Speed Frontier with Performance Lab and Beyond. So it’s all about performance, this episode essentially.\n\n\n\nThis is one of those subjects where I feel you have to tell us your credentials so that we understand that what you are saying is true. Because I think there’s a lot of snake oil, certainly from my point of view, quite a lot of ignorance. I don’t really understand this topic inside and out. So would you mind, a minute or something like that? Just tell us about you and your history with, well, WordPress, but also performance and so on.\n\n\n\n[00:04:32] Weston Ruter: Yeah, sure. I have been a WordPress Core committer for 10 years. And I was in the agency space working at XWP, working on enterprise WordPress sites. And then I joined Google and I was a software engineer working on developer programs engineer, then develop a relations engineer working on the AMP project, which is all about making webpages faster using the AMP framework. And from there I transitioned into working on the Core Performance Team for the past couple years. And we are focused on making WordPress fast for everybody.\n\n\n\n[00:05:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, great. Thank you so much. So the topic at hand then is going to be about performance. Why are you interested in this? I know obviously there’s a career in it and what have you. Is this something that you lie awake at night thinking about? Do you obsess about this kind of stuff?\n\n\n\n[00:05:28] Weston Ruter: Yeah, it’s a passion of mine because who likes a slow webpage, right? So it’s fun to eke every bit of performance out of the loading of something. There’s a lot of little technical details and things to know and best practices to observe. And so it’s a fun challenge to be as fast as possible and there’s always room for improvement.\n\n\n\n[00:05:52] Nathan Wrigley: And it kind of feels as if the mantra over many, many years has basically been that, you know, if you can make your website faster, it will be successful. People will visit it, people are getting weary of page load time or what have you. And so maybe we’ll get into the weeds of all of that.\n\n\n\nHow does WordPress, if I was just to go, okay, ignore the hosting that it’s on. Let’s just imagine we’ve got a good host, we’ll just use that term. If I was to download a vanilla version of WordPress and use the default theme, currently 2025, and do nothing else with it, I’ve written a few blog posts, maybe that’s it. How does it do out of the box like that?\n\n\n\n[00:06:25] Weston Ruter: Yeah, it turns out my talk is exactly about this, and it uses the 2025 theme as a test case to show how the performance of WordPress fares out of the box. And if you were to load up a site running 2025, the theme and nothing else, and you run it through Lighthouse, the performance testing tool from Google, you’ll most likely get a 100 score, performance score. And you would think, I’m done, there’s nothing else to do. But if you dig into it, just because you get a good score, that doesn’t mean there’s still not room for improvement. And there’s still head room even after 100.\n\n\n\nBut yeah, WordPress Core does great out of the box, but there are still many opportunities to make it even faster. And as you had Felix on previously to talk about speculative loading, that’s one example where the performance is improved yet further. And in the performance lab plugin, which the performance team maintains, we have different performance feature plugins that implement additional optimisations that address different scenarios and use cases that WordPress doesn’t do well out of the box.\n\n\n\n[00:07:40] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting, and I’ve never heard it framed that way. I’ve never heard that there was a ceiling above 100. It kind of feels as if that is the ceiling. If you score 100, all bets are off, game over, you’ve succeeded, hooray, have a party, kind of thing. But no, there’s still room to be squeezing a little bit out here and there.\n\n\n\n[00:07:57] Weston Ruter: Yeah, if you look at a Lighthouse audit, Lighthouse is an example of a lab metric. It simulates a page load for a user, but it’s not an actual page load for an actual user. It’s just a simulation. And if you really want to know how your site is actually performing, you need to measure those visits from actual users.\n\n\n\nAnd if you load up a popular site in Google’s page speed insights tool, you’ll see there’s two different sections on the page. At the top, you’ll see what users are experiencing, and then at the bottom you’ll see lab data. And the top is coming from actual site visitors through what’s called the Chrome User Experience Report. And that tells you how the site is performing in terms of the Core Web Vitals that Google has spearheaded.\n\n\n\nAnd one of those is called the Largest Contentful Paint or LCP, and that measures the time it takes for the largest element that is most likely going to be the main content of the page to be rendered, from the time you start navigating to the page and that element finishes rendering.\n\n\n\nAnd a good LCP value is considered from 0 to 2.5 seconds. And so you can have, within 2.5 seconds there’s a big range in the user experience. So if it’s just under 2.5 seconds, it’s considered good, but that doesn’t mean a 1.5 second page load is actually way better, and a 0.5 second page load is even better yet, and a 0.05 second page load is great, is perfect. That would be the perfection. And that is what we’re working on.\n\n\n\n[00:09:36] Nathan Wrigley: There’s gradations of it, okay. So within that 100 there may be room to do, aspects of the 100 can be improved. And in this case, by taking the LCP time down.\n\n\n\nWe’re at a conference event. There’s over a thousand people. There must be designers, developers, SEO people here. There’s everybody. There’s the whole gamut of people that use WordPress, probably some people that are new to the whole platform as well. Do you think that performance is something that everybody needs to worry about or are you happy to be one of the few that obsess about it? Is it basically better to leave an expert like yourself to worry about it, or is this something that we can all have a little dabble at and be successful about?\n\n\n\n[00:10:14] Weston Ruter: Well, that’s what we’re concerned about with the Core Performance Team is making it so that the regular WordPress user doesn’t have to worry about this, because nobody’s got time to spend learning like, what is LCP? What is time to first bite? What are these different metrics? And nobody has time to worry about optimising for all these. So WordPress Core should do all this out of the box, and the WordPress ecosystem should implement best practices so that users don’t have to worry about it.\n\n\n\n[00:10:44] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting. I remember, I’m thinking it was about six years ago, but I don’t really remember the date. But Google kind of informed everybody that in a period of time, a year’s time or what have you, these metrics, LCP and, Core Web Vitals basically were going to come in.\n\n\n\nAnd it felt like everybody in our industry was running around like a headless chicken, trying to understand something that they knew, there was this sword of Damocles moment, this date in the calendar where the SERPs were going to change. It didn’t feel like a comfortable time. In some senses, it felt like Google was kind of poisoning the water a bit because they were alienating developers who suddenly had to learn this new thing, because they realised their client websites were going to probably tumble in the SERPs.\n\n\n\nAnd so they had to upskill in this thing that probably they didn’t want to be involved with. So it was a curious time, but the dust seems to have settled. I don’t know too much about, you know, whether they were penalties that really were paid by people because they didn’t have these fabulous Core Web Vital scores. But it definitely put the cat amongst the pigeons for a while anyway.\n\n\n\n[00:11:38] Weston Ruter: The factors that go into ranking pages and Google search are, I never knew what they are, so the knowledge I have is that the performance of a page contributes to the ranking in some way. And basically, as I understand it, all things being equal, you have two sites with the same content and same relevance to the user, and one has better performance, then in theory that would rank higher.\n\n\n\nHow much value you get in terms of your ranking is debatable or unknown. I don’t know. But what is important is the user experience and the benefits that you get for your users. And if they have a good experience on your site, then they’re more likely to come back. More likely to result in a conversion or a purchase, or whatever you’re looking to get out of your site. So that’s where I would focus the concerns.\n\n\n\n[00:12:34] Nathan Wrigley: If this were the Squarespace or Wix podcast, which of course it isn’t, it would be much more straightforward to have a conversation about why your site was quick because, you know, it’s this proprietary platform. There’s constraints about what you can do on that platform, and they run the whole thing, you know, they’ve got their arms around everything.\n\n\n\nWordPress, you download it from .org in most cases, and start to pile things on top of it. And very quickly we get the problems developing I guess, you know, the more things that you throw into it, the more plugins and what have you. Would your advice simply be circumspect about what you throw in, or can you, for want of a better phrase, can you concentrate on additional tech to mask over any problems that you have?\n\n\n\nYou know, with the best one in the world, if you’ve got an LMS, it’s probably going to slow your website down because it’s doing a lot. If you’ve got WooCommerce, it’s probably going to slow yourself, the website, down from the vanilla install with using the 2025 theme that you just mentioned.\n\n\n\nBut there’s this whole marketplace of hosting companies and performance companies who are selling you things that kind of undo the, and I’m doing air quotes, the damage that you did by putting the plugins in.\n\n\n\nSo I don’t know if you’ve got anything to say to that. You know, the whole thing about bloating the website, slowing it down, unpicking it with different tech.\n\n\n\n[00:13:49] Weston Ruter: Yeah, well, the WordPress ecosystem has a problem with the kitchen sink issue and a plugin that has more features is somehow valued more highly than a plugin that does one thing and does it really well.\n\n\n\nAnd so in the Performance Lab plugin in our suite of plugins that we feature, we have the goal that a plugin should do one thing and do it really well. And if you don’t like what the plugin is doing, you deactivate it and switch to another one that is doing that one issue and doing it well.\n\n\n\nBut if you have plugins that do so many things, then you’re really kind of, your hands are tied and it’s difficult to switch. And maybe that’s a strategy by some plugins to lock you in to their ecosystem, but it’s a difficult problem, yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:14:39] Nathan Wrigley: And we also have a, you know, we have plugins which are performance plugins. I mean, there’s dozens of them. I’m sure we could rattle off, whose job is to fix the problems that you may have created elsewhere in the website. If you’re in the weeds of it, like you are, you’ve probably got some vague understanding about it. You understand whether something is snake oil or not, but for the rest of us, that is a Pandora’s box, and there’s only chaos in there.\n\n\n\nI don’t know what will slow my website down. If I download, I’m going to use LMS again, if I download an LMS platform, I’m going to hope that the work has been done successfully. But I’m probably also going to be thinking about, okay, now do I need to talk to my host, get a different hosting environment, get it set up so it’s perfect for that? Do I need a performance plugin? Caching layers, putting things on the edge.\n\n\n\nAnd on and on it goes. It makes WordPress a difficult thing for many, many people to use. And so this idea of democratising publishing sort of goes out the window a little bit because it’s really extraordinarily hard to use.\n\n\n\n[00:15:34] Weston Ruter: Yeah. And I think that in addition to democratising publishing, WordPress should also be as part of that democratising performance. And again, making it so that users don’t have to worry about that.\n\n\n\nAnd what we’re doing in Core, we’re doing exactly that where as one of WordPress’s core philosophies is decisions, not options, and things should work out of the box.\n\n\n\nBut when it comes to the ecosystem, it’s a open source environment and there’s no top down control over what a plugin does. So I think there’s opportunities with projects like the Plugin Check plugin to do more analysis on the performance, in addition to the security and the best practices for being accepted into the directory.\n\n\n\nBut if there’s also a surfacing of performance issues or additional audits that are done on the impact of installing a plugin, that could be really valuable for site owners to get a sense of, this may cause problems if you install it.\n\n\n\n[00:16:37] Nathan Wrigley: How long has the Performance Team been a thing? I feel like three years or something like that, but I could be really wrong.\n\n\n\n[00:16:43] Weston Ruter: About four years I think.\n\n\n\n[00:16:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, yeah. And could you just run over the history of that? I was going to say organisation, but let’s go with team. Could you run us through the history of that team and what you’ve been able to do?\n\n\n\nEach of the little steps, some of them are quite profound. Some of them feel less profound, but very important. But over those four years, a lot of really incredible work has been done actually. Certainly from my perspective, it does seem that without that team we’d be in a very, very different place.\n\n\n\n[00:17:15] Weston Ruter: I hope that’s true. I think it is. Yeah, well, it started out focusing on, I think lazy loading of images was one of the first things to land through this team. And with that we also then uncovered that actually lazy loading everything, which while great for reducing the weight of a page, because you’re not downloading images that aren’t actually shown. If you lazy load images that are in the initial viewport, that actually hurts the Largest Contentful Paint metric because the browser wastes to start downloading those images until it knows that they’re in the viewport.\n\n\n\nSo out of that came work to not lazy load images that are in the initial view port, and then also moving on to this attribute called fetch priority, which you can have the value of high, for example. So if you add fetch priority high to an image, then the browser’s going to prioritise loading that first. And so a lot of work was done to add sensible defaults in WordPress Core so that, for example, the featured image of a post gets fetch priority high, so that it gets loaded sooner over images that are not going to be the Largest Contentful Paint, most likely.\n\n\n\nSo there’s that. And then there was also an issue with like emoji in posts where, on every page load there’s some JavaScript that runs in the head of the page, and it computes whether the browser supports the emoji, like all the emoji. And if the browser doesn’t support all the emoji, then it loads the Twitter emoji library to render them. And that JavaScript was causing a long task in lower performing browsers, or devices, that was hurting the largest contentful paint as well. So that was fixed as well.\n\n\n\nAnd then work has been done to add support for new image formats, like AVIF and WebP so that site owners can upload those image formats instead of JPEGs, which take longer to download.\n\n\n\nWe talked about speculative loading, and you talked about that with Felix. So that landed in 6.8, which by default will start prefetching the HTML for a page when you mouse down or tap or click, pointer down on a link to give the browser a bit of a headstart. But then the API allows you to be more aggressive about starting that process, just when you hover over the link, for example, and then not just to prefetch the HTML, but to actually render the whole page.\n\n\n\nAnd so in my talk, which I gave earlier today, I showed the difference between no speculative loading, speculative loading as in WordPress Core right now, the default, and then moderate prefetch. And then lastly, moderate pre-render.\n\n\n\n[00:19:57] Nathan Wrigley: Is that done with the plugin? Well, I guess you could do that with code, but there’s an option to, if you download the plugin, you’ve got a UI for that as well.\n\n\n\n[00:20:04] Weston Ruter: Exactly. There’s a UI in the plugin that allows you to opt into moderate eagerness, or to use pre-render instead of prefetch. And in the example I showed, let’s say your time to first bite is a second. Then in the initial example, like on a slow, or on a fast 4G connection, you’re going to get like 2.27 seconds to load the page. But then with conservative prefetch, that shaves off like 50 milliseconds because the amount of time it takes to mouse down and mouse up is just a little bit of time that it can shave off that’s just a little bit to the loading of the page.\n\n\n\nBut then when you go to moderate prefetch, then the browser can load the page fully in the background. And so then the time to first bite in that case becomes zero because the whole page is already in the browser’s cache. And that can reduce it to like one second because you totally eliminated the time to first bite.\n\n\n\nAnd then with the moderate pre rendering, then when you’re hovered over that link, the browser not only downloads the HTML, but also all the images, builds out the layout, runs the JavaScript. And so then when you click on that link, the page can load instantaneously.\n\n\n\n[00:21:12] Nathan Wrigley: So literally instantaneous.\n\n\n\n[00:21:14] Weston Ruter: 0.05 seconds.\n\n\n\n[00:21:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It’s instantaneous. I mean that’s pretty incredible. All of that is available inside of WordPress, but just to rewind, probably about 50 seconds, the default is not aggressive. The default in WordPress in order to satisfy the kind of 80 20 rule and what have you, the default is to make it so that there has to be some interaction. The mouse has to be invoked. There’s a click involved.\n\n\n\nThat’s fascinating. So if you really want to get into the weeds of that, you can basically make the next page load almost instantaneously, should you wish to do that.\n\n\n\nOne thing that I did get into with, I believe it was Adam Silverstein not that long ago when I had a podcast episode with him. And I don’t mean to go deeply into this, but there’s a curious balancing act here, I think with the environment and all of this speculative loading. Because it wouldn’t be desirable to load, I don’t know, there’s 12 navigation links and the mouse happens to go across all of them. And suddenly 12 unnecessary pages were entirely pre-rendered and what have you. So yeah. I don’t know if you’ve got any thoughts on that, whether there’s a balancing act between performance and environmental concerns.\n\n\n\n[00:22:23] Weston Ruter: Yeah. By default, speculative loading only operates on pages when you’re not logged in. And so when you’re not logged into WordPress, that is most of the time when you’re going to have a page cache that can serve it from the cache. And so as long as you have page caching in place, then the server isn’t going to be overly taxed by those requests.\n\n\n\nIn the newest version of the Speculative Loading plugin, it has an opt in to speculative loading for logged in users as well. But there’s a warning that shows up if you don’t have a persistent object cache active, for example. So, yeah, it’s important to have good caching in place, good best practices for scaling.\n\n\n\nHowever, in addition to pre rendering, which the speculative loading plugin enables, there’s a much older technology for instant page loads that browsers all support, and that is the back forward cache.\n\n\n\nAnd WordPress sites, by default when you’re logged out, will benefit from this most of the time. But as soon as you login or if you’re navigating to like a shopping cart page, or an account page, or checkout page in an e-commerce site. Oftentimes the plugin will invoke this no cash headers function that tells the browser, primarily tells the page cache, hey, don’t hold onto this response because you don’t want to cache the shopping cart for one user and then serve it to another user, because then you would be seeing something embarrassing potentially.\n\n\n\nAnd so that is one of the benefits of sending that header. But it also has the effect of preventing the browser from holding onto that page as well. So if you navigate back and forward from the shopping cart, then you’ll notice that it doesn’t load very fast. It loads slow, because the browser has to re-fetch it all from the server, and has to rebuild everything from scratch.\n\n\n\nAnd so there’s a effort underway for 6.9 to stop doing that. To allow the browser to hold onto that in memory. And then to address, one of the issues that turned this off to begin with, allowing the browser to store the pages in the cache. Is if you aren’t logged in, for example, into WordPress. You’re on some sensitive page maybe putting some API key in or something, and you go to log out, with this back, forward cache, you could hit the back button to go back into the WordPress admin as another person, maybe on a shared computer and look at that page, even though the user had logged out.\n\n\n\n[00:24:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really not good.\n\n\n\n[00:24:51] Weston Ruter: Not good. So there’s a ticket for 6.9 which would solve that problem by invalidating those pages from bfcache so that that privacy concern isn’t there. And this issue is not just about, well, these back, forward navigations are very common. So the Chrome team found that one in 10 navigations on desktop are these back, forward navigations?\n\n\n\n[00:25:15] Nathan Wrigley: A tenth?\n\n\n\n[00:25:16] Weston Ruter: Yeah. And on mobile, I think it’s one in five. So 20% of the time on mobile, you’re going back and forward using a gesture instead of hitting a link.\n\n\n\n[00:25:25] Nathan Wrigley: That maps to my life, but I hadn’t thought about it.\n\n\n\n[00:25:28] Weston Ruter: But the benefit here is not just in that you get a faster page load, but also bfcache, this back, forward cache will preserve the entire state of the page. So in my talk, I showed an example where you, if you have BuddyPress installed, you start typing in an update, a status update, and then you click away to a separate tab, and then if you hit the back button to go back to that initial tab, then you’ll find without this back, forward cache that your update’s gone because that input field was constructed with JavaScript. And when you don’t have back, forward cache, then the entire document object model has to be rebuilt. All the JavaScript has to re-execute. This is also an issue for the block editor. If you navigated away from a page and you didn’t save a draft, then everything gets lost without this back, forward cache.\n\n\n\nSo back, forward cache not only improves performance, giving you the possibility of these instant page loads, but it also preserves that important state on a page that could be lost otherwise.\n\n\n\n[00:26:25] Nathan Wrigley: You have a plugin if memory serves, recently in the repo.\n\n\n\n[00:26:30] Weston Ruter: Yes. And I got some feedback that it’s a terrible name, which I agree.\n\n\n\n[00:26:32] Nathan Wrigley: What’s the name? I’ve forgotten.\n\n\n\n[00:26:33] Weston Ruter: It’s called no cache, bfcache.\n\n\n\n[00:26:36] Nathan Wrigley: That was it, yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:26:37] Weston Ruter: But if I were to rename it, which I probably will now, it would probably be called Instant Back Forward Navigations or something. It’s not so short, but.\n\n\n\n[00:26:43] Nathan Wrigley: So is the intention to take, are you spearheading that basically? is the intention to roll the learnings from that plugin into Core?\n\n\n\n[00:26:50] Weston Ruter: Yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:26:50] Nathan Wrigley: And I’m just going to read this into the record so that everybody understands. You are talking about backwards and forwards by using the buttons, which I guess typically live at the top left of a browser. Those buttons, the arrows that point backwards and forwards.\n\n\n\n[00:27:03] Weston Ruter: That’s right, or the navigation in like the gesture on Android to go back.\n\n\n\n[00:27:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so swipe typically and swipe right. okay. Yeah, that’s really interesting because I do that all the time. It really hadn’t occurred to me that was something that could be cached. And if, as you say it’s 20% on mobile, or 10% on, that’s a lot of time that you’re saving.\n\n\n\nBecause you do, it’s a journey, isn’t it? And sometimes you get to a dead end, and so you just back three times, because you know that you wanted to go back to that product that you saw a minute ago, but you kind of got lost along the way. So that’s kind of almost like a roadmap item. That’s 6.9, hopefully. Are there any other things coming in 6.9 that are interesting?\n\n\n\n[00:27:39] Weston Ruter: Well, one of the new features in WordPress Core is this Interactivity API.\n\n\n\n[00:27:44] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so nice.\n\n\n\n[00:27:46] Weston Ruter: And one of the great things about the Interactivity API is one of its key design principles is server side rendering. So let’s say you have a navigation block, or you have an image block with a lightbox. All of the HTML and the CSS needed to render those blocks are output on the server. There’s no need for JavaScript to construct the user interface.\n\n\n\nNevertheless, there’s JavaScript needed because there’s interactivity involved in these interactive blocks. And so with each of these interactive blocks, there’s a script module that gets added to the page, and it’s added in the head of the page. And browsers download those script modules with a high priority. And the impact of that is, well, the browser doesn’t know that these aren’t important. It could be important, it could not be important.\n\n\n\nBut by loading them with a high priority, they compete with loading of more important critical resources like the Largest Contentful Paint image, for example. So by having these modules in the head, then they cause the LCP metric to degrade. And so there’s a ticket to add fetch priority low to these script tags, which causes the browser to bump them down in priority so that the Largest Contentful Paint image has a chance to load sooner.\n\n\n\n[00:29:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It seems like a game of tennis, this whole thing. For example, the Interactivity API, what a fabulous thing that is, but smuggled into that with something, it sounds unexpected that nobody foresaw that one and okay, need to address that. And here we are, 6.9, that gets addressed.\n\n\n\n[00:29:21] Weston Ruter: Yeah, and one of the great things about the Interactivity API as well is that it has really pushed forward the new Script Modules API in WordPress, where what are also called ESM modules or scripts. And these are a new way of writing JavaScript and they are, by default they don’t block the rendering of the page.\n\n\n\nWhereas if you have a classic script like jQuery in the head of your page, as you start loading the page, the browser has to stop parsing the HTML, it has to fetch the JavaScript, it has to execute the JavaScript, and then because that JavaScript may be doing something like document.write, where it like adds HTML to the page as it’s executing. Then only after that’s all finished then the parser can continue and continue laying out the page. So it’s very bad for performance to have any external, or even inline sometimes, JavaScript in the head.\n\n\n\nAnd so one way to solve that issue is to slap a defer attribute on that script tag, or an async attribute, and that causes the script to then not block rendering, and it will be executed once the page has finished loading.\n\n\n\nAnd a nice feature of script modules is that they’re deferred by default. You can’t have a blocking script. And so the thinking was, oh, they don’t block rendering, so we can just put them in the head. But it turns out that they do impact the network, because there’s other things on the network than just the scripts. And we need to make sure that the critical resources are prioritised, like the LCP image and not just load everything with high priority.\n\n\n\n[00:30:55] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of curious because the past of WordPress has been about, you know, you click on links and you generate, I don’t know a post, a page or something, but you’ve got this static piece of content, largely. You know, there may be some JavaScript or something, which is doing something fun.\n\n\n\nBut the interactivity, API suddenly presents a page which, I don’t know, you might be stuck on that page for quite a while doing other things. I don’t know how that leans into the whole performance thing. I don’t know we could search and filter a bunch of houses or real estate or what have you, and update things. And we are on this one URL but everything’s getting changed in front of our eyes. So I don’t know how that whole LCP thing gets bundled into that. It suddenly becomes a much more difficult problem to identify and solve, I guess.\n\n\n\n[00:31:35] Weston Ruter: Yeah. So with LCP, it is for that initial page load. So as soon as you interact with the page, then whatever is the largest element then going to be.\n\n\n\n[00:31:47] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that ceases there does it?\n\n\n\n[00:31:48] Weston Ruter: Yeah, it stops at that point. However, there are other problems with performance that can arise after that Largest Contentful Paint. So one of the newer Core Web Vital metrics is the Interaction to Next Paint, and that is this INP value. And that is all about how much JavaScript is executing on the page. And JavaScript functions can do a lot of work, so much work that they cause the user interface to appear to halt.\n\n\n\n[00:32:19] Nathan Wrigley: Hang.\n\n\n\n[00:32:20] Weston Ruter: Yeah, hang. And so that’s called jank. And it can cause animations to stutter, it can cause a user interface to be sluggish, and you click a button and then nothing happens and then all of a sudden it opens up. And so that’s an example of a metric that is still very relevant with the Interactivity API. And there’s been work to establish best practices to make sure that the event handlers for these interactive blocks are using the best practices. Like, it’s called scheduler.yield, and it allows you to break up a long running task to give the browser a chance to catch its breath so that it doesn’t cause those long tasks.\n\n\n\nAnd then another important metric, which continues to matter even after the page is loaded is called the Cumulative Layout Shift or CLS. And that is a very common issue with, where you have ads or something that will just expand as you’re scrolling down and you lose your place in the page and that hurts your cumulative layout, that CLS score.\n\n\n\n[00:33:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You end up with your finger in entirely the wrong place just as you’re about to click on things.\n\n\n\n[00:33:23] Weston Ruter: That’s exactly right.\n\n\n\n[00:33:24] Nathan Wrigley: Old TechCrunch website. I don’t know if you’ve ever came across that one. That was a WordPress one, I believe. And I don’t know how many times I click entirely the wrong article because it just shifted just at the moment that my finger was descending.\n\n\n\n[00:33:33] Weston Ruter: Very aggravating yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:33:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really annoying. We’re really in the weeds here and what’s kind of fascinating, obviously you understand it all, I’m just holding on for dear life here. But it feels as if there’s a dance between what we’re expecting the browser to be able to do, and what it actually can do. And I don’t know if that’s the case.\n\n\n\nYou know, I don’t know if the fact that I’ve got a shiny new Mac means that my experience of the web in the future will be better than my 8-year-old Mac over there. That never used to be something that I worried about. It took time to boot that machine, but once it was up and running, that machine was probably just as good at displaying the web as the shiny new one. But now it feels as if that’s maybe not the case.\n\n\n\n[00:34:13] Weston Ruter: It’s funny you say that because this emoji issue that I described earlier where it was causing this long task as the page was loading, I only discovered that as a problem because I was using a Chromebook as development device.\n\n\n\n[00:34:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, notoriously low on specs.\n\n\n\n[00:34:27] Weston Ruter: Relatively, that one was even a fast one. But yes, much slower than one of the newer Macs. And so it’s important to always be testing in an average device, and not always just use the latest and greatest. Because you’re going to miss performance issues that are probably impacting a lot of users.\n\n\n\nAnd one of the issues with emojis is, going back to what I described earlier with this long script in the head, now there’s just an inline script, and even with an inline script, there is still a performance impact where it will stop, because the browser has to stop parsing the page, execute the JavaScript, and then keep going.\n\n\n\nAnd so I used my new Mac to analyse the performance of that and I didn’t see a problem. But then I tried the CPU throttling in Chrome Dev Tools where you can emulate low end, low tier device. And in that case, then all of a sudden I saw this 100 millisecond long task pop up, I can’t remember how long exactly, but it negatively impacted the LCP because it had to spend that time with this underpowered device.\n\n\n\nSo, yeah, there’s many opportunities for optimising things that, if you’re using devices that people are actually using.\n\n\n\n[00:35:41] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t really know what the expectation is from WordPress over the next decade, but it doesn’t feel like it’s going to be limiting itself to websites. It feels like that’s a portion of it, but Matt Mullenweg often has talked about it being almost like the operating system for the web. Whether or not that will transpire, I don’t know.\n\n\n\nBut certainly for me, a lot of the things that I used to associate with a downloaded app that would run on MacOS or Windows or what have you, I’m now fully expecting that to be in a browser. And so I expect that the same would be true of our websites. We’re going to be doing more with them. They’re going to be requiring more grunt in the background, you know, more interactivity, more filtering, more searching, more database queries. And yeah, I guess WordPress has got to try and keep up with all that.\n\n\n\n[00:36:29] Weston Ruter: In improving web performance, it’s a top down and a bottom up problem. Browsers are working to get faster. They’re competing with each other, trying to be as fast as possible for all the bragging rights, right? But oftentimes it’s impossible for the browser to know, even if it’s as smart as possible, what to prioritise when loading a page.\n\n\n\nSo that’s why when I was working at Google, we were prioritising improving the web at scale through WordPress to implement best practices in how WordPress builds pages so that Chrome doesn’t have to figure out everything because it’s impossible for Chrome to figure that out from the top down.\n\n\n\nSo if you look at the, over time these Core Vital Metrics, they all consistently are going up and improving, even if a CMS isn’t necessarily focused on a performance. They all are inching upward. And that’s because the browser is getting better at performance as well. But when a CMS like WordPress also invests in improving performance, then you can start to see it edging out other CMSs in terms of the relative improvement in performance.\n\n\n\n[00:37:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. Let me just parse that. So whether WordPress is at the top or the browser is at the top, you’ve got this top bottom thing, and it’s kind of inching in from the top, coming down. Maybe that’s the browser, and then WordPress at the bottom inching up, if they happily meet in the middle.\n\n\n\nSo what you’re saying is that even if no performance work was done by a Performance Team in WordPress, there would have been in recent years a performance improvement, But the fact that there’s those two things in symphony with each other means that there’s a greater performance improvement.\n\n\n\nGiven that WordPress, I don’t know what the number is right now, but the statistic of 43% was always banded around. So it’s a huge proportion of the internet. Does WordPress have a voice toward Mozilla and Chrome? Does it get to say what the future of browsers might look like? It feels like with that market share, It ought to have a big voice, but I don’t know if it does.\n\n\n\n[00:38:26] Weston Ruter: Well, I remember back when responsive images became a thing, and as I recall that it was WordPress implementing these responsive images that caused browsers to say, okay, we’re going to implement these now as well. So I think Chrome, I can’t remember which browser did at first, but it was kind of a catalyst that caused everything to get going.\n\n\n\nAnd similarly, recently with the speculative loading, it being adopted by WordPress has, I think, caused other browsers to say, okay, we’re going to implement this as well.\n\n\n\nAnd yeah, I know that when I was working at Google, and still I’m in contact with people at Google who work on web standards work, there are initiatives that they’re working on that they want feedback from WordPress developers to know like, is this going to work for WordPress? And if WordPress can leverage this, and going back and forth between what works for WordPress and what works for browsers and there’s ongoing conversations, yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:39:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it is kind of interesting. I was talking to somebody from Google, from the Site Kit team, they obviously put up quite a lot of money to be marquee sponsors, if you like. I don’t know what the word is, you know like a top tier sponsor often at these events. I don’t know if they’re sponsoring this one, but there does seem to be some interest from Google.\n\n\n\nI know that Mozilla doesn’t have the deep pocket, so we’re not really expecting that. But it’s nice to hear that, even if it’s kind of back channels, and it may not be that WordPress gets asked all the time, that there is some sort of symbiosis there. That’s nice to know.\n\n\n\n[00:39:55] Weston Ruter: Well, I remember also seeing recently that Site Kit was voted one of the most trusted WordPress plugins.\n\n\n\n[00:40:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, 5 Million plus installs in under five years. And I was kind of surprised by that actually. when I did that interview, I didn’t realise the numbers were so big. And then after the interview I went out and asked a bunch of random people whether they’d used it, and a hundred percent of the random selection of 10 people that I asked used it on everything.\n\n\n\n[00:40:20] Weston Ruter: Yeah. I use it for sure.\n\n\n\n[00:40:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. It’s kind of amazing. So just sort of rounding it off a little bit, I’m guessing that if you were to have your performance hat on, I could be wrong about this. You would be advising people to step away from the classic way of doing things in WordPress with, you know, the classic editor, the classic themes and things. I genuinely don’t know if there’s a performance improvement in full site editing, block-based themes, and what have you. Over to you really, it’s an open ended question.\n\n\n\n[00:40:46] Weston Ruter: Yeah, there definitely is a performance benefit to using block themes, and that is because the way that classic themes load, they load progressively where they will print out the head, head tag in the page and then before they render any of the template, they basically locked in the scripts and styles that the page is going to need even though that doesn’t actually know what’s going to be in the page for sure. It can make some guesses, but it doesn’t know for sure.\n\n\n\nAnd so for classic themes, you’ll have these massive style sheets that are printed in the head, you’ll have a whole bunch of scripts that you may or may not use. And as we said before, those scripts may be blocking the rendering and causing all kinds of problems in performance.\n\n\n\nBut with block themes, the way that a template is rendered is completely different, where it actually will render all of the blocks in the content first before it goes about rendering the head, the links, the style sheets and the scripts that go in the head of the HTML. And so because of that, a block theme is able to selectively load just the styles and just the scripts that are relevant to the blocks on that specific page. And so the amount of CSS and JavaScript that’s on a page can be greatly reduced, which greatly improves performance.\n\n\n\nAnd also, one of the initiatives that we’ve been working on in the Core Performance Team is related to these responsive images that we were talking about. Where a responsive image, it has all of the different intermediate image sizes that are available. When you upload an image, it’ll reference all those different image sizes in the source set attribute. And then there’s the sizes attribute that says which of those intermediate image sizes should be loaded for that image in the page. But because WordPress doesn’t know classically, in the classic themes, how big an element is going to be, it uses by default the image that is the width of the view port.\n\n\n\nAnd so on a mobile device, that’s often fine because images are often the full width of the content. But on a desktop you often have a center column with margins on either side, and maybe the image is going to be in a column or floated to the right. And so oftentimes on desktop, you’re going to download a much larger image than is relevant to that container on the page.\n\n\n\nAnd so there’s a, one of the plugins in Performance Lab is called Enhanced Responsive Images. And what it does is it leverages the block structure in block themes to be able to figure out what the width is for the container of a given image. And then it can craft that sizes attribute to be much more accurate compared to the default sizes attribute. And in my talk, I showed that the performance gains from that enhancement alone are one of the largest that you can have, much more than just using AVIF or a modern image format.\n\n\n\n[00:43:51] Nathan Wrigley: Really?\n\n\n\n[00:43:51] Weston Ruter: Yeah because, for example, in my test page, I had a jpeg and then I tried it again with an AVIF and the AVIF was 20% smaller, so maybe I could compress it even further. But the Largest Contentful Paint improvement for that was only 2%. But with the Enhanced Responsive Images plugin active, it was able to use a much smaller image size, which is much fewer bites, even as a jpeg compared to the AVIF. And that improved the LCP by I think 45%. So a magnitude and a half higher.\n\n\n\n[00:44:28] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like this work is never, ever going to come to an end. There’s always going to be little things to tweak and squeeze out here, there and everywhere. And there was a really good example just there.\n\n\n\nI think somebody listening to this podcast, if they’ve got to this point, it’s kind of really fascinating that most of this stuff would go under the radar for most people.\n\n\n\nI’m sure almost everything that you’ve mentioned, for the casual WordPress user, they would never know that that happened. Not many people are going to read the change log or delve into the weeds of what the Performance Team are doing. And yet there it all is, laid out in front of us over the last 40 minutes or so. Yeah, absolutely loads and loads of work. and never ending. You’ll be here this time next with new things to say.\n\n\n\n[00:45:06] Weston Ruter: Hopefully. I don’t want to work myself out of a job.\n\n\n\n[00:45:07] Nathan Wrigley: That’s absolutely true. Where do you go to find information about this? You know, who are the scholars, or the YouTubers, or the blog post authors? Who are the people that are pushing the boundaries here?\n\n\n\n[00:45:20] Weston Ruter: Well, I have recently been loving the WordPress newsletters that go out, like the Repository and Remkus de Vries, his WP, I forget the name.\n\n\n\n[00:45:32] Nathan Wrigley: It’s okay.\n\n\n\n[00:45:33] Weston Ruter: It’s something in, WP in the name. I think, Within WP, but don’t quote me on that.\n\n\n\n[00:45:36] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it is, Yeah Remkus, Within WP, you’re right.\n\n\n\n[00:45:39] Weston Ruter: Yes. So I subscribe to his performance blog. So Jono Alderson, Jono or Jono?\n\n\n\n[00:45:46] Nathan Wrigley: I think Jono. Yeah, we’ll go with that. And apologies if it’s not.\n\n\n\n[00:45:49] Weston Ruter: Yes. And so all of his posts are brilliant, so yeah. And then, yeah, following just the newsletters, because I don’t have time to keep up on social media anymore, but I really am thankful for those newsletters because it really saves me a lot of time. It gets me what I need to know.\n\n\n\n[00:46:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I will, link to the ones, the three that you’ve just mentioned.\n\n\n\nYeah, that’s amazing. Thank you. Honestly, it seems a bit trite, but I’ve been following what the Performance Team have done for the last four years now, from the capacity that I have to understand it, which is pretty low in all honesty. You know, most of what you’re saying, I can get a purchase on the overarching idea, but as soon as you were to draw back, if you were to show me what you were doing, the code and so on, I would immediately lose my purchase.\n\n\n\nI’d just like to express how profoundly happy I am that people like you are taking the time to do it. I don’t know how much thanks you get for stuff like this, but for my part, thank you.\n\n\n\n[00:46:42] Weston Ruter: Well, thank you, but no thanks are required because I enjoy doing it, so.\n\n\n\n[00:46:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, great. Well thank you. anyway.\n\n\n\n[00:46:46] Weston Ruter: I’ll do it anyway.\n\n\n\n[00:46:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well Weston Ruter thank you so much for chatting to me today. It’s been a pleasure.\n\n\n\n[00:46:51] Weston Ruter: Thank you very much.\n\n\n\n\nOn the podcast today we have Weston Ruter.\n\n\n\nWeston Ruter is a long-time WordPress user and contributor. He has been a core committer for 10 years and he co-led the WordPress 4.9 release. He worked in the WordPress agency space and has also been sponsored to work on the Core Performance Team. He lives in Portland, which, as you will hear, was quite handy for this interview.\n\n\n\nWe start the conversation by getting into the big picture: why website speed matters more now than ever, and how WordPress performs out of the box. Weston shares details about measuring true performance, revealing, for example, that achieving a perfect Lighthouse score isn\u2019t the end game, and that real user experience metrics like Core Web Vitals and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) should shape how developers and site owners think about optimisation.\n\n\n\nThroughout the episode, you\u2019ll learn about the advances made by the WordPress Performance Team, from lazy loading and new image formats, to speculative loading that shaves precious milliseconds off page transitions. Weston explains how many performance improvements are designed to work automatically, democratising speed so even casual WordPress users benefit without needing to be technical experts. The conversation also touches on the balance between adding features and avoiding plugin bloat, the hidden impact of browser and device differences, and how large companies like Google are working hand-in-hand with WordPress to raise the bar on speed and usability.\n\n\n\nWeston offers practical tips, deep technical wisdom, and a glimpse of where WordPress performance is heading next, and it\u2019s sure to inspire you to think differently about how your sites load, how your users engage, and how you can squeeze out every last drop of speed from the platform you love.\n\n\n\nWhether you\u2019re a developer, designer, site owner, or just someone curious about what keeps the web running smoothly, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\nThe Site Speed Frontier with Performance Lab and Beyond – Weston’s presentation at WordCamp US 2025\n\n\n\nA post about the presentation (above) on Weston’s own website\n\n\n\nAccelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)\n\n\n\nWordPress Core Performance Team\n\n\n\nLighthouse\n\n\n\nPodcast – Felix Arntz on How Speculative Loading Is Speeding Up Your WordPress Website\n\n\n\nPerformance Lab plugin\n\n\n\nCrUX – Chrome User Experience Report\n\n\n\nLargest Contentful Paint (LCP)\n\n\n\nPlugin Check (PCP)\n\n\n\nOptimize resource loading with the Fetch Priority API\n\n\n\nPodcast – Adam Silverstein Explores Transformative Browser Features Impacting WordPress Sites\n\n\n\nBack/forward cache\n\n\n\nWeston’s Instant Back/Forward plugin (mentioned in the podcast with an older name)\n\n\n\nInteractivity API Reference\n\n\n\nScript Modules API\n\n\n\nInteraction to Next Paint (INP)\n\n\n\nIntroducing the scheduler.yield origin trial\n\n\n\nCumulative Layout Shift (CLS)\n\n\n\nSite Kit plugin\n\n\n\nEnhanced Responsive Images plugin\n\n\n\nWithin WordPress\n\n\n\nJono Alderson’s website\n\n\n\nThe Repository", "date_published": "2025-10-15T10:00:00-04:00", "date_modified": "2025-10-16T02:43:05-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/189-Weston-Ruter-on-Unlocking-WordPress-Performance.jpg", "tags": [ "performance", "podcast" ], "summary": "In this WP Tavern episode, Nathan Wrigley interviews Weston Ruter at WordCamp US in Portland. Weston shares insights from his presentation on WordPress performance, discussing improvements made by the Core Performance Team, including lazy loading, enhanced responsive images, and speculative loading. They explore the challenges of maintaining speed as plugins increase site complexity, browser and ecosystem collaboration, and upcoming features for WordPress 6.9. Weston talks about making performance effortless for users and highlights resources for staying informed. Whether you\u2019re a developer, designer, site owner, or just someone curious about what keeps the web running smoothly, this episode is for you.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2165663/c1e-wmxjxi3q6mnt8wnz9-ndvoj893uxo4-5noy3d.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=199897", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/188-bud-kraus-on-teaching-and-using-wordpress-with-low-vision", "title": "#188 \u2013 Bud Kraus on Teaching and Using WordPress With Low Vision", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case teaching and using WordPress with low vision.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Bud Kraus. Bud was diagnosed with mascular degeneration, a condition often associated with old age, when he was 37. Affecting both eyes, this gradually eroded his central vision, making it difficult for him to see straight ahead, recognize faces, drive or read.
\n\n\n\nDespite these challenges, Bud’s peripheral vision remained intact, sparing him the need for a cane or guide dog, and allowing him to continue to navigate daily life. Through perseverance and adaptation, Bud continues to live fully, facing the hurdles of vision loss with resilience and optimism.
\n\n\n\nBud opens up the podcast by talking about his experience living with legal blindness, how his central vision loss has shaped everything from everyday activities to his professional routines. He explains the practical ways he adapts his devices and workflow, including tweaks to operating system settings, using screen zoom functions, and relying on pattern recognition to teach coding, write tutorials, and even host his Seriously, Bud? podcast. His unique perspective sheds light on the often overlooked nuances of accessibility, reminding us that every user interacts with technology differently.
\n\n\n\nBud also chats about the broader impact of accessibility in the WordPress space, from frustrations with hard to navigate interfaces, to the importance of not excluding users who may become your audience or customers. His reflections reveal how living with low vision pushed him beyond mere acceptance, helping him discover new opportunities, hone his teaching skills, and even find humour in daily challenges.
\n\n\n\nBud’s story serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of designing with empathy, embracing adaptation, and viewing accessibility, not just as a technical requirement, but as a source of creativity and connection. It’s full of real world tips, personal anecdotes, and a dose of inspiration.
\n\n\n\nWhether you’re a designer, developer, educator, or simply passionate about building a more inclusive web, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Bud Kraus.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Bud Kraus. Hello, Bud.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:35] Bud Kraus: Hello, Nathan. Thanks for having me.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’re very welcome. This is not the first time we’ve spoken, but it is the first time we’ve spoken at an event because we’re both at WordCamp US in Portland, it’s 2025. We’re in a corridor, so I’ve got to say at the very outset, if it ends up being quite noisy, there’s not a lot we can do about that. But we’ve done our best. We’ve found a nice quiet little alcove, and we’re going to be chatting today to Bud about his experience online. Before we do that, Bud, do you mind just telling us a little bit about yourself? Give us your potted bio, if you like.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:01] Bud Kraus: Yeah, sure. So I create WordPress content for WordPress businesses, articles, blog posts, tutorials, videos, and I am the host of the podcast called Seriously, Bud?
\n\n\n\n[00:04:14] Nathan Wrigley: And the talk that you’re doing at WordCamp US, which I guess you haven’t yet done, because we’re on the first day of presentations and it’s fairly early on. You haven’t done it, right?
\n\n\n\n[00:04:23] Bud Kraus: No, I actually, no, I haven’t done it yet, but I’ve done this a couple times, so this is not my first time doing this talk.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:29] Nathan Wrigley: So you know how it’s going to go. It’s called using low vision as my tool to help me teach WordPress. Now, that kind of leads us into the subject at hand really. We’re going to be talking about how it is that your experience of the web may differ from other people.
\n\n\n\nAre you willing to just tell us a little bit about your experience in the offline world as well as the online world? What is it that you are dealing with on a day-to-day basis?
\n\n\n\n[00:04:50] Bud Kraus: Sure. So I have macular degeneration, which is a condition of old age, which I got when I was 37. And it’s the leading cause of legal blindness in the United States. It’s a destruction of your central vision.
\n\n\n\nI have the condition in both eyes, which means I really have it. And it makes it very hard for me to see straight ahead, recognise faces, reading. I can’t drive a car, which is okay. So anything that’s straight ahead.
\n\n\n\nNow, my peripheral vision’s perfectly intact, so that means I don’t need to have a seeing eye dog or a cane, or I don’t bump into things because the peripheral vision’s fine. But the very fine vision that we all use to see straight ahead, like to thread a needle, that’s what I’m missing.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:30] Nathan Wrigley: So are you able to describe what you are seeing in that area. And is it like the central portion of your site?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:38] Bud Kraus: It is the exact central portion of my sight. So I tend to see elliptically, which means I move my eyes around to get a better picture. Like, when I’m looking at you right now, I’m moving my eyes around so I can see better because of the destruction of the centre part of my vision.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:52] Nathan Wrigley: And does that rule out certain tasks? So for example, you mentioned reading there. Obviously I do not have what you have, and so it’s a given to me that when I’m staring as I am doing at the moment at my laptop, my eyes, the bullseye, if you like, of my eyes go straight to the letter looking at. And for me, it’s hard to imagine deploying my peripheral vision to do that, but can you, for example, do things like reading or is that out of the?
\n\n\n\n[00:06:16] Bud Kraus: You can’t, peripheral vision is not a, it’s not even close to being a perfect substitute for central vision. So the answer is no. You cannot read with peripheral vision. You cannot understand. You can see, but you can’t understand. And it just makes things difficult.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So how does that affect your real life? So obviously you mentioned things like being unable to drive a car or things like that. Is there anything else that might give us a frame of reference for just how profound it is?
\n\n\n\n[00:06:44] Bud Kraus: Well, I like to look at it differently. So I have a different approach to this. So when I first was diagnosed with this when I was 37, I thought, oh, this is the worst thing that could ever happen. And that makes sense, but it is not the worst thing that could ever happen.
\n\n\n\nAnd having lived with this for quite a long time now, I look at this not as a curse, but as a blessing. Because what it’s done is allow me to have so many different opportunities, experiences, ideas, thoughts, whatever that I would’ve not otherwise had.
\n\n\n\nSo that process of going, it’s the grief process when you start from, you know, this is the most horrible thing in the world, to acceptance. I’m actually beyond acceptance. It’s like, I like this. This is okay with me. And do I wish it on other people? No, I don’t. But like I said, it’s not the end of the world. There are conditions and diseases that are far worse than this.
\n\n\n\nSo I do think of, and in fact in my talk that I’m giving, at the end I talk about why this is a blessing and not a curse. I mean, like for example, you can get as inebriated as you want at parties because you’re not going to be driving the car home. So there’s lots of that, okay. Or you don’t see your friends get older because you can’t see the detail on their face. When I go in a grocery store, I don’t see all the junk food, so that’s good. Is it inconvenient? Yes. Do I have a hard time finding people at a large event like this? Yes. But I manage.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:09] Nathan Wrigley: So in the wider world, you can obviously deploy your peripheral vision. So we’re sitting in a, I don’t know, it’s maybe this room’s about 10 meters by 10 meters. There’s a lot of space. Whereas the thing that we’re talking about, WordPress, building websites and so on, it’s usually this constrained little, well, let’s say rectangle. It could be something that we’re holding our hands, a mobile phone or a computer, laptop, something like that. How does your situation, how does it get impacted by this then? Are you doing this peripheral vision, glancing left and right and trying to figure out what’s going on? Or do you have other tools, mechanisms, things that you deploy?
\n\n\n\n[00:08:39] Bud Kraus: I do, and that’s what my talk is about. So, for example, I’ve taught WordPress and I taught coding for a long time. And people say, well, how do you do that if you can’t see?
\n\n\n\nWell, one thing is I’m always very prepared. So when I go into a class, I can’t wing it. I just have to know exactly what I’m going to be doing. And in code there’s a lot of patterns and I recognise patterns.
\n\n\n\nAnd, yes, I do use Zoom. I use audio. I use touch. Now, touch is not really relevant here, but I’m able to, with the technology as good as it has become for me, I’m able to Zoom in and out of the screen and I’m able to read things out loud. And then I have to do a fair amount of memory. But that’s okay.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:22] Nathan Wrigley: So do you have adaptations that you make, let’s say for example, you go out today and you purchase a new computer, do you have adaptations that you make on an operating system level?
\n\n\n\n[00:09:30] Bud Kraus: Yeah, I do.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I’m curious to hear about these because I make no modifications when I purchase, so tell me more.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:35] Bud Kraus: Yeah, good question. So one of the things I do, and I’ll be demonstrating, is my resolution is a low resolution, meaning 1024 by 768 would be low today. In the olden days, that would be high. But it makes the screen, it makes it easier for me to see the screen. And then I make all kinds of adjustments to make icons bigger, letters bigger, so that it’s just works for me. And yeah, I don’t have a problem with it.
\n\n\n\nNow, it does cause me to do things maybe a little slower because it’s just harder for me to maybe find something. But I think I mentioned that patterns is a very important thing to me. So if I’m going to a website and they change the UI totally around, that’s going to be a pain in the neck for me, because then I have to relearn where everything is.
\n\n\n\nIt’s sort of like changing the furniture if you were blind, I mean, really blind, which most people aren’t. So I’m legally blind but, you know, I’m not like lights out blind. If you change where things are, then it’s going to make things very difficult for me, whether it’s in the real world or in the virtual world. I have to relearn everything.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:35] Nathan Wrigley: A sort of curious question that’s just occurred to me. When you buy a new computer, is there a process whereby you have to combat the regular default icon size and default tech size, just for a moment in order to wrangle it into the version of the OS that you need?
\n\n\n\n[00:10:50] Bud Kraus: You’re absolutely right. So if you’re booting up for the first time, it’s a hole in the whole process, which is at least the last time I did, which is there’s no audio, there’s no nothing, and you’re seeing like little tiny print to, you know, configure the language and the location and the time and all that stuff that you do when you work with a computer for the first time. That is a real problem, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:11] Nathan Wrigley: You would imagine that there’d be some mechanism to invoke that as the first thing that happens?
\n\n\n\n[00:11:17] Bud Kraus: I think so.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s interesting.
\n\n\n\nOkay, so we’ve talked about the wider world. We’ve talked about a computer that you may modify. Let’s get onto the bit which we are all here for, which is WordPress. Are there any adjustments or tools, or this could extend to the browser, so it may be browser tools, what have you, but for the internet, let’s say, what are the modifications that you are making to make your life possible there?
\n\n\n\n[00:11:37] Bud Kraus: You know, I don’t think there’s anything really any different than anybody else makes. I mean, the biggest thing is I will either zoom in or out of a webpage. And it’s really funny because, if you’re using a certain screen size with a certain resolution, things can get very hard to work with. I don’t think enough companies, like I’m thinking of even LinkedIn, for example, that I was using today. Sorry to call them out, but it’s just like their chat areas were just really, I just had to do all kinds of crazy things to actually see the text. And then the text was really small.
\n\n\n\nI think because I’m a stress case, that they don’t always test down to my level. And I think it’s, I just accept it. But that’s the way it is, I guess. But I think that you don’t want to exclude people from anything really, because they may be your customer. And if I can’t buy something because it’s really hard to do, and that is something, I don’t know if I’ve ever talked to you about it, but other people, that if I am discouraged from buying something because it’s just, the UI is just too hard to work with, I’ll just find an alternative. I will. Or I’ll ask my wife.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:39] Nathan Wrigley: I guess you’re in a curious space as well in that we hear a lot in the accessibility space about things like screen readers and those kind of assistive technologies. I guess you are not deploying those because you have enough sight to not have that as a, something to lean upon.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:54] Bud Kraus: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I have not, and don’t use JAWS or any of those big fancy screen reader technologies. I just use what’s built into the macOS and I just highlight the text and I press a button and it reads. I think it’s called voiceover, or it’s text to speech, or whatever it is. And it’s in the accessibility part of the settings.
\n\n\n\nI don’t use technology beyond what I need it for. It’s just overkill. What do I, those are complicated systems to master, so I stay away from that because they don’t need it.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:22] Nathan Wrigley: So when you are building websites, is there anything unique about the way that you do that? Is there any sort of, again, a tool that you deploy? Or maybe you are relying on other human beings to sort of cast their eye over it a second time after you’ve done the work. I don’t know, just talk us through that whole thing.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:37] Bud Kraus: Well, I don’t make websites. No, I have, okay. I’ve done everything, but I don’t make websites because I don’t like to make websites. It’s not because of my vision. But yes, if I am working, in the past like I have, I would ask people to help me with, particularly with colour because I have a very, I think I have a poor colour palette. And I think that’s either, it’s because of me. So I have to ask, does this go good with this?
\n\n\n\nIt’s just something that I, either I’m not good at, or I’m not interested, or my vision, or whatever it is. So I do have a problem with colour in that regard. But because of the technology and the tools that are built in, it’s not as difficult as one might think.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:15] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. Yeah, okay. We’ll get into that. But you do make a podcast, and there’s lots and lots of different spinning wheels that have to done there. You know, you’ve got to book people onto the show, you’ve got to have calendars, you’ve got to have posts and pages and things like that on the website. Is there anything uniquely interesting about, I understand the process of making a website from my perspective, there anything that would be different to my process than would be for yours?
\n\n\n\n[00:14:36] Bud Kraus: Yes, I think one thing I could think of is like a lot of times I won’t, let’s say in WordPress, you can write into the editor, you could write a page or a post right into the Gutenberg, the block editor. I choose not to do that. What I do is use a notepad, or not notepad, what is it for a Mac? I forgot.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:53] Nathan Wrigley: TextEdit.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:54] Bud Kraus: Yes, TextEdit. Thanks. I’ll use that and I’ll have the font blown up bigger than normal, and I’ll just edit in there, and then I’ll just take that and then I’ll copy that and paste that into WordPress. It’s just easier for me to do it that way. So I just like it that way. You know, everybody has their own little thing. That’s my little thing. And I think it’s because of my vision.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:14] Nathan Wrigley: And in terms of kind of getting the recording software to work and things like that, how do those UIs function for you?
\n\n\n\n[00:15:19] Bud Kraus: Yeah, pretty good. The problem I have with learning something new and complicated is that, I think it’s like everybody, quite frankly, I get confused and try to figure out where’s what. And like I was using, I use Descript, and it just took me quite a while to figure out, how do I do this? How do I do that? But like anything else, once I learn it, it’s pretty solid and it gets easier.
\n\n\n\nNow I do tend to blow things up to make it bigger. And my wife is always telling me, I can’t use your computer because stuff is too big. Now, I don’t think it’s too big, but she does. And when I look at other people’s computers, then I realise, no, it’s bigger than theirs.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so we’re in the era of Gutenberg. It sounds like you’ve been using WordPress for a fairly long time, presumably before Gutenberg. What’s your opinion on whether or not that was a move in the right direction? In other words, is it favorable? Is it more straightforward for you to create a post? I know that you said in the scenario for a podcast, you’re writing it elsewhere and copying and pasting it in. But with other things like, I don’t know, laying out content and writing paragraphs and things, do you think it’s a good experience? Did we go in the right direction there?
\n\n\n\n[00:16:18] Bud Kraus: That’s a very hard question for me to answer. I’ll answer it in a couple of different ways. One, as far as accessibility goes, I’m no expert in this. I am not an accessibility expert. Am I a stakeholder? We all are. But I can’t answer it in that regard.
\n\n\n\nBut from a more technical standpoint, because I write technical articles for Kinsta, Hostinger, others, that I find it to be difficult. I know I was told it’s not supposed to be easy, so it certainly doesn’t match the easy. Yeah, and that has nothing to do with my vision. It’s just, I feel it’s just complicated, even though I’ve learned quite a bit of the technical side of this stuff. I’m not trying to be cute here, but I’m trying to be cute, and I just can’t answer that question that’s going to provide any value so.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:06] Nathan Wrigley: I was kind of wondering if there was a thing which, if you could click your fingers and make it appear in the Block Editor or the Gutenberg interface, which you would, and I don’t know that you’ve got got an answer to that.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:15] Bud Kraus: I, let me think. No, I don’t think so. No. And I use Elementor too. So I think from a logic standpoint, Elementor seems to be easier for me. What I just don’t like is a lot of confusion. Too much information built into a UI is a real problem for me.
\n\n\n\nNathan, the funny thing is I feel like I have a special filter on the world that other people don’t have. This is another one of these blessings, that gives me the ability to understand what works and what doesn’t work without having to ask somebody because it’s just built in.
\n\n\n\nNow, the thing about disability or this field in general, which is huge, it’s very idiosyncratic. So my setup is good for me, but it may not work for somebody else. And it’s very hard to, as those who keep accessibility in mind, and hopefully it’s everybody. It’s a very difficult subject because how do we design our systems, our content so that the greatest number of people can access this information, or whatever, on the largest number of devices. I mean, that’s what accessibility to me is about.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:24] Nathan Wrigley: It’s curious that you said, I think you said at the beginning that your condition is one which will deteriorate over time.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:31] Bud Kraus: Well, macular degeneration, generally, can get worse over time. But fortunately, for reasons that we don’t need to get into, since 1992 it’s been very stable, which I’m really fortunate because trust me, I don’t want it to get any worse than this. I don’t need another, that much of a blessing.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was wondering from that, whether or not the accessibility side of WordPress is something that you lean into. Do you attend those kind of, I don’t know, WP Accessibility Day, those kind of events?
\n\n\n\n[00:18:59] Bud Kraus: No, it just doesn’t really interest me. You know, back in like 1999, 2000, I was teaching a course at Pratt Institute in New York called Accessible Web Design. And it was way ahead of its time. And the concepts I was teaching were basically concepts because the browsers and technology just wasn’t there yet. So you’d have to say, well, one day, and one day did happen in large measure.
\n\n\n\nAnd then I started realising, I just didn’t want to like make a career out of teaching this or testing or, you know, I started to meet people in the field and I just said, I don’t really like this. I mean, just because I’m, I have a disability doesn’t mean I have to like the field of accessible design, you know, accessibility.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s interesting. You are wearing a WordCamp Montclair t-shirt, which kind of tells me that not only are you attending this event, WordCamp US, but you’re also attending other ones as well. Is that a big part of your life? If it is, how accessible are things like this event? Do you come here fully expecting of yourself that you’ll have a full experience the same way that everybody else does?
\n\n\n\n[00:19:59] Bud Kraus: Well, I have a good experience, but it is not the same way everybody else does. For example, I can’t see the screens at all. And when they’re doing stuff, the slides, I’m just listening, okay. It’s sort of like, I watch TV a lot that way too. I hear things. Unless I got really close, I’m not going to be able to see what’s on the screen. If I took a picture of something that’s really important, yeah, that’ll help.
\n\n\n\nBut generally speaking, that doesn’t work for me. And then it could be kind of a, yes, I’ve gone to many WordCamps, but they’re all sort of the same in terms of the issues. And I don’t even think of them as issues anymore. I just think of it as like, we’re all different. This is the way I’m different. And talking about this stuff, quite frankly is like talking about being right-handed. Would you do an interview of me being right-handed?
\n\n\n\n[00:20:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, fascinating. I guess, from my perspective, because I just don’t, I can’t prize that open my own life, it’s really intriguing to sort of try to have some sort of understanding of how it differs from my experience to your experience. And I guess for you it’s, this is how I live.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:58] Bud Kraus: Yeah. But Nathan, you know, vision is a spectrum. It’s a continuum. It isn’t just everybody looks at things the same way. No. So I don’t think, alright, I’m like sort of on one end of the spectrum, I get it, but everybody looks at things differently. And I don’t mean that figuratively, I mean that literally. So I don’t think of it anymore much as a handicap, you know, other than the fact that, yeah, that’s a pain in the neck sometimes. And sometimes you find yourself doing some foolish things.
\n\n\n\nAnd I think the hardest thing for me at these events is that I won’t know who I’m talking to until about five minutes after I’m talking to them, and I figured out by looking at their shape, stuff like that, that I can, oh, I’m talking to Nathan Wrigley, or your accent, or something like that.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You’re obviously quite keen on the sort of education side of things though because you’re writing tutorials. I’ll link in the show notes to one that you wrote for Smashing Magazine, which is no mean feat. Getting in there is really rather impressive. So well done for that.
\n\n\n\nBut you’re also obviously turning up two events like this. And it sounds from what you said as if this is content that you’ve done before. So very keen on that, even though it may be talking about, you were describing there, it’s like talking about whether you’re right-handed. You’ve put together this presentation in which you’re going to share these different bits and pieces about how you make amendments and adjustments to WordPress and the operating system and so on. So do you enjoy the education side of it?
\n\n\n\n[00:22:16] Bud Kraus: Oh, absolutely. I’m a teacher at heart. I mean, you know, that’s what I’ve been doing for 25 years. And even in the writings that I do, they’re basically, it’s a different way of teaching. Now the talk that I’m giving though here, the funny thing is, as I’ve said, I’m sort of like cool to the idea to be honest about it. There are other talks I’d rather give than this one, but this is the talk that everybody seems to be interested in. And I get that.
\n\n\n\nAnd when you come up with a topic called using low vision is a tool to help me teach WordPress, that’s a winner because you got two things in there that everybody loves. One, we love disability, and two, we love teaching WordPress. So two weird things got put into one title.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:57] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a hit.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:58] Bud Kraus: It got to be a hit, right.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:59] Nathan Wrigley: What would be the presentation that you would do?
\n\n\n\n[00:23:01] Bud Kraus: Ah. The one that I’m threatening to do instead of this one, because I keep saying, I don’t wanna do this one, let me do another one. There’s two.
\n\n\n\nOne is, burnt out on web design, what your future career could be, which is my story.
\n\n\n\nAnd the other one is, show me the money, how to get sponsors to financially help with your podcast, event, whatever. I like that topic, show me the money.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:24] Nathan Wrigley: Paraphrasing, just a minute, what are the nuggets? Because I’m curious about that one.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:27] Bud Kraus: Oh, come on. You could teach me, okay?
\n\n\n\n[00:23:30] Nathan Wrigley: What are the nuggets in there though?
\n\n\n\n[00:23:32] Bud Kraus: Well, in my case with my podcast, I’ve been sort of lucky in that they came to me and said, we’d like to sponsor you. Which is a shock because when I started the podcast a year and a half ago, or actually the idea was, it’s now two years old, I said, I didn’t care if anybody ever listened, I didn’t care if anybody ever sponsored. And then of course, over time, I did care.
\n\n\n\nBut I never thought of my show ever being sponsored. I said, I’ll just do it. And then I started realising, hey, this takes a lot of time, should get paid for this. And, you know, I feel just, if I have a second or two say how fortunate I am to be a part of all of this because at my advanced age, to be in this community with such smart, brilliant, whatever, people that are friendly. When I talk to people my age who are generally retired or retiring and, their world gets smaller and mine gets bigger.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:24] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that’s interesting.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:25] Bud Kraus: So I’m really, really lucky about that.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I don’t know what your age is, but I am of a certain age, and I’m kind of feeling at the moment that there’s this whole thing which everybody wants to talk about, which is AI. And I’m kind of feeling as if that train has already, you know, that ship has sailed for me. Can’t invest all of the time and what have you to learn all of the different bits and pieces. It’s like there’s another bus coming. I don’t know what you think about that.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:47] Bud Kraus: Well, I’ll tell you what it is, for me, it’s been a career extender, because I am now writing at a level for Kinsta, technical articles that I could not otherwise write. And because of my use of, and if you will, mastery of AI, I’ve been able to code things that I could not do before. So I’ve always had sort of, for the longest time, because I taught great foundation of HTML, CSS, some JavaScript, whatever. So I know this stuff, okay.
\n\n\n\nBut to elevate that knowledge, to create stuff now that is much more complicated, sort of like junior development oriented stuff or maybe a little bit beyond that. That is amazing. And it’s because of AI.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:28] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:30] Bud Kraus: It’s extending what I can do.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you feel like you’ve got a new lease of life there.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:34] Bud Kraus: Yeah, a bit. So I don’t have to keep writing the same things over and over about how to create a post. You know, I’ve done that. I want to be challenged to learn new things, and AI is helping me do that. And we’re teaching AI, and AI is teaching us. So it’s really cool.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:49] Nathan Wrigley: Your presentation, is it today or tomorrow?
\n\n\n\n[00:25:51] Bud Kraus: Well, it’s tomorrow.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:53] Nathan Wrigley: I was going to say, you’re looking very calm for somebody that has a presentation later today.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:56] Bud Kraus: Well, you know, I’ve been around the block. I’m not going to be nervous. Now what I do have to do is I’ve got to do some more memorisation. And that’s what I talked about always being prepared. I just can’t go in there and read the slides. It’s not going to happen. So I have to really know what the slides are, what the order is, and what the words are on the screen. I don’t have to read those words, but I have to know the ideas behind all this.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:16] Nathan Wrigley: So in some sense, you’ve memorised it more or less. Oh, that’s interesting. So you’ve really applied thought to every, more or less, every sentence that comes out of your mouth.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:24] Bud Kraus: Basically.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:25] Nathan Wrigley: But you don’t get nervous.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:26] Bud Kraus: We’re with friends.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:28] Nathan Wrigley: I would get so nervous.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:29] Bud Kraus: At least I like to think so.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No, I agree. Every time I’ve been to a presentation, even when the person delivering it has been quite nervous, there’s always been a very positive sentiment in the room.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:39] Bud Kraus: I’ll tell you why I don’t get nervous, I don’t see their faces.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:42] Bud Kraus: So if you don’t see their faces. There’s so many advantages of vision impairment. I know it sounds crazy, but if you don’t see their faces, then you don’t see their reactions. Now, of course, that’s a negative too. But then you don’t get nervous.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:55] Nathan Wrigley: Absolutely fascinating. Well, I wish you the best of luck with it. It will be out on wordpress.tv at some point. Typically now they come out really soon. These flagship events, they turn them around really quickly.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:06] Bud Kraus: Well, I don’t know when this is coming out, but this is going to be live streamed around the world.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:09] Nathan Wrigley: Is it?
\n\n\n\n[00:27:10] Bud Kraus: Yeah. So one person can watch.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:11] Nathan Wrigley: The point being, dear listener, that if you’ve enjoyed this episode and you want to follow on the talk, the presentation that Bud has given at WordCamp US, by the way, maybe the quickest way to do that is to just Google, either WordCamp US 2025. Or Google, using low vision as my tool to help me teach WordPress. That’s the other short circuit if you like. You’ll be able to see exactly what it is that Bud delivered.
\n\n\n\nI have no further questions, so unless you’ve got something to add, I will say thank you very much for chatting to me.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:40] Bud Kraus: Well, thank you Nathan. And you know I’m a big fan of what you do and thanks for having me on.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:43] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much.
\nOn the podcast today we have Bud Kraus.
\n\n\n\nBud was diagnosed with macular degeneration, a condition often associated with old age, when he was 37. Affecting both eyes, this gradually eroded his central vision, making it difficult for him to see straight ahead, recognize faces, drive or read. Despite these challenges, Bud\u2019s peripheral vision remained intact, sparing him the need for a cane or guide dog, and allowing him to continue to navigate daily life. Through perseverance and adaptation, Bud continues to live fully, facing the hurdles of vision loss with resilience and optimism.
\n\n\n\nBud opens up the podcast by talking about his experience living with legal blindness, how his central vision loss has shaped everything from everyday activities to his professional routines. He explains the practical ways he adapts his devices and workflow, including tweaks to operating system settings, using screen zoom functions, and relying on pattern recognition to teach coding, write tutorials, and even host his Seriously, Bud podcast. His unique perspective sheds light on the often-overlooked nuances of accessibility, reminding us that every user interacts with technology differently.
\n\n\n\nBud also chats about the broader impact of accessibility in the WordPress space, from frustrations with hard-to-navigate interfaces to the importance of not excluding users who may become your audience or customers. His reflections reveal how living with low vision pushed him beyond mere acceptance, helping him discover new opportunities, hone his teaching skills, and even find humour in daily challenges.
\n\n\n\nBud\u2019s story serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of designing with empathy, embracing adaptation, and viewing accessibility not just as a technical requirement, but as a source of creativity and connection. It\u2019s full of real-world tips, personal anecdotes, and a dose of inspiration.
\n\n\n\nWhether you\u2019re a designer, developer, educator, or simply passionate about building a more inclusive web, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nUsing Low Vision As My Tool To Help Me Teach WordPress, Bud’s presentation at WordCamp US 2025
\n\n\n\nJAWS, Job\u00a0Access\u00a0With\u00a0Speech software
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUsing Low Vision As My Tool To Help Me Teach WordPress, Bud’s post on Smashing Magazine
\n", "content_text": "Transcript\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case teaching and using WordPress with low vision.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Bud Kraus. Bud was diagnosed with mascular degeneration, a condition often associated with old age, when he was 37. Affecting both eyes, this gradually eroded his central vision, making it difficult for him to see straight ahead, recognize faces, drive or read.\n\n\n\nDespite these challenges, Bud’s peripheral vision remained intact, sparing him the need for a cane or guide dog, and allowing him to continue to navigate daily life. Through perseverance and adaptation, Bud continues to live fully, facing the hurdles of vision loss with resilience and optimism.\n\n\n\nBud opens up the podcast by talking about his experience living with legal blindness, how his central vision loss has shaped everything from everyday activities to his professional routines. He explains the practical ways he adapts his devices and workflow, including tweaks to operating system settings, using screen zoom functions, and relying on pattern recognition to teach coding, write tutorials, and even host his Seriously, Bud? podcast. His unique perspective sheds light on the often overlooked nuances of accessibility, reminding us that every user interacts with technology differently.\n\n\n\nBud also chats about the broader impact of accessibility in the WordPress space, from frustrations with hard to navigate interfaces, to the importance of not excluding users who may become your audience or customers. His reflections reveal how living with low vision pushed him beyond mere acceptance, helping him discover new opportunities, hone his teaching skills, and even find humour in daily challenges.\n\n\n\nBud’s story serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of designing with empathy, embracing adaptation, and viewing accessibility, not just as a technical requirement, but as a source of creativity and connection. It’s full of real world tips, personal anecdotes, and a dose of inspiration.\n\n\n\nWhether you’re a designer, developer, educator, or simply passionate about building a more inclusive web, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Bud Kraus.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Bud Kraus. Hello, Bud.\n\n\n\n[00:03:35] Bud Kraus: Hello, Nathan. Thanks for having me.\n\n\n\n[00:03:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’re very welcome. This is not the first time we’ve spoken, but it is the first time we’ve spoken at an event because we’re both at WordCamp US in Portland, it’s 2025. We’re in a corridor, so I’ve got to say at the very outset, if it ends up being quite noisy, there’s not a lot we can do about that. But we’ve done our best. We’ve found a nice quiet little alcove, and we’re going to be chatting today to Bud about his experience online. Before we do that, Bud, do you mind just telling us a little bit about yourself? Give us your potted bio, if you like.\n\n\n\n[00:04:01] Bud Kraus: Yeah, sure. So I create WordPress content for WordPress businesses, articles, blog posts, tutorials, videos, and I am the host of the podcast called Seriously, Bud?\n\n\n\n[00:04:14] Nathan Wrigley: And the talk that you’re doing at WordCamp US, which I guess you haven’t yet done, because we’re on the first day of presentations and it’s fairly early on. You haven’t done it, right?\n\n\n\n[00:04:23] Bud Kraus: No, I actually, no, I haven’t done it yet, but I’ve done this a couple times, so this is not my first time doing this talk.\n\n\n\n[00:04:29] Nathan Wrigley: So you know how it’s going to go. It’s called using low vision as my tool to help me teach WordPress. Now, that kind of leads us into the subject at hand really. We’re going to be talking about how it is that your experience of the web may differ from other people.\n\n\n\nAre you willing to just tell us a little bit about your experience in the offline world as well as the online world? What is it that you are dealing with on a day-to-day basis?\n\n\n\n[00:04:50] Bud Kraus: Sure. So I have macular degeneration, which is a condition of old age, which I got when I was 37. And it’s the leading cause of legal blindness in the United States. It’s a destruction of your central vision.\n\n\n\nI have the condition in both eyes, which means I really have it. And it makes it very hard for me to see straight ahead, recognise faces, reading. I can’t drive a car, which is okay. So anything that’s straight ahead.\n\n\n\nNow, my peripheral vision’s perfectly intact, so that means I don’t need to have a seeing eye dog or a cane, or I don’t bump into things because the peripheral vision’s fine. But the very fine vision that we all use to see straight ahead, like to thread a needle, that’s what I’m missing.\n\n\n\n[00:05:30] Nathan Wrigley: So are you able to describe what you are seeing in that area. And is it like the central portion of your site?\n\n\n\n[00:05:38] Bud Kraus: It is the exact central portion of my sight. So I tend to see elliptically, which means I move my eyes around to get a better picture. Like, when I’m looking at you right now, I’m moving my eyes around so I can see better because of the destruction of the centre part of my vision.\n\n\n\n[00:05:52] Nathan Wrigley: And does that rule out certain tasks? So for example, you mentioned reading there. Obviously I do not have what you have, and so it’s a given to me that when I’m staring as I am doing at the moment at my laptop, my eyes, the bullseye, if you like, of my eyes go straight to the letter looking at. And for me, it’s hard to imagine deploying my peripheral vision to do that, but can you, for example, do things like reading or is that out of the?\n\n\n\n[00:06:16] Bud Kraus: You can’t, peripheral vision is not a, it’s not even close to being a perfect substitute for central vision. So the answer is no. You cannot read with peripheral vision. You cannot understand. You can see, but you can’t understand. And it just makes things difficult.\n\n\n\n[00:06:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So how does that affect your real life? So obviously you mentioned things like being unable to drive a car or things like that. Is there anything else that might give us a frame of reference for just how profound it is?\n\n\n\n[00:06:44] Bud Kraus: Well, I like to look at it differently. So I have a different approach to this. So when I first was diagnosed with this when I was 37, I thought, oh, this is the worst thing that could ever happen. And that makes sense, but it is not the worst thing that could ever happen.\n\n\n\nAnd having lived with this for quite a long time now, I look at this not as a curse, but as a blessing. Because what it’s done is allow me to have so many different opportunities, experiences, ideas, thoughts, whatever that I would’ve not otherwise had.\n\n\n\nSo that process of going, it’s the grief process when you start from, you know, this is the most horrible thing in the world, to acceptance. I’m actually beyond acceptance. It’s like, I like this. This is okay with me. And do I wish it on other people? No, I don’t. But like I said, it’s not the end of the world. There are conditions and diseases that are far worse than this.\n\n\n\nSo I do think of, and in fact in my talk that I’m giving, at the end I talk about why this is a blessing and not a curse. I mean, like for example, you can get as inebriated as you want at parties because you’re not going to be driving the car home. So there’s lots of that, okay. Or you don’t see your friends get older because you can’t see the detail on their face. When I go in a grocery store, I don’t see all the junk food, so that’s good. Is it inconvenient? Yes. Do I have a hard time finding people at a large event like this? Yes. But I manage.\n\n\n\n[00:08:09] Nathan Wrigley: So in the wider world, you can obviously deploy your peripheral vision. So we’re sitting in a, I don’t know, it’s maybe this room’s about 10 meters by 10 meters. There’s a lot of space. Whereas the thing that we’re talking about, WordPress, building websites and so on, it’s usually this constrained little, well, let’s say rectangle. It could be something that we’re holding our hands, a mobile phone or a computer, laptop, something like that. How does your situation, how does it get impacted by this then? Are you doing this peripheral vision, glancing left and right and trying to figure out what’s going on? Or do you have other tools, mechanisms, things that you deploy?\n\n\n\n[00:08:39] Bud Kraus: I do, and that’s what my talk is about. So, for example, I’ve taught WordPress and I taught coding for a long time. And people say, well, how do you do that if you can’t see?\n\n\n\nWell, one thing is I’m always very prepared. So when I go into a class, I can’t wing it. I just have to know exactly what I’m going to be doing. And in code there’s a lot of patterns and I recognise patterns.\n\n\n\nAnd, yes, I do use Zoom. I use audio. I use touch. Now, touch is not really relevant here, but I’m able to, with the technology as good as it has become for me, I’m able to Zoom in and out of the screen and I’m able to read things out loud. And then I have to do a fair amount of memory. But that’s okay.\n\n\n\n[00:09:22] Nathan Wrigley: So do you have adaptations that you make, let’s say for example, you go out today and you purchase a new computer, do you have adaptations that you make on an operating system level?\n\n\n\n[00:09:30] Bud Kraus: Yeah, I do.\n\n\n\n[00:09:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I’m curious to hear about these because I make no modifications when I purchase, so tell me more.\n\n\n\n[00:09:35] Bud Kraus: Yeah, good question. So one of the things I do, and I’ll be demonstrating, is my resolution is a low resolution, meaning 1024 by 768 would be low today. In the olden days, that would be high. But it makes the screen, it makes it easier for me to see the screen. And then I make all kinds of adjustments to make icons bigger, letters bigger, so that it’s just works for me. And yeah, I don’t have a problem with it.\n\n\n\nNow, it does cause me to do things maybe a little slower because it’s just harder for me to maybe find something. But I think I mentioned that patterns is a very important thing to me. So if I’m going to a website and they change the UI totally around, that’s going to be a pain in the neck for me, because then I have to relearn where everything is.\n\n\n\nIt’s sort of like changing the furniture if you were blind, I mean, really blind, which most people aren’t. So I’m legally blind but, you know, I’m not like lights out blind. If you change where things are, then it’s going to make things very difficult for me, whether it’s in the real world or in the virtual world. I have to relearn everything.\n\n\n\n[00:10:35] Nathan Wrigley: A sort of curious question that’s just occurred to me. When you buy a new computer, is there a process whereby you have to combat the regular default icon size and default tech size, just for a moment in order to wrangle it into the version of the OS that you need?\n\n\n\n[00:10:50] Bud Kraus: You’re absolutely right. So if you’re booting up for the first time, it’s a hole in the whole process, which is at least the last time I did, which is there’s no audio, there’s no nothing, and you’re seeing like little tiny print to, you know, configure the language and the location and the time and all that stuff that you do when you work with a computer for the first time. That is a real problem, yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:11:11] Nathan Wrigley: You would imagine that there’d be some mechanism to invoke that as the first thing that happens?\n\n\n\n[00:11:17] Bud Kraus: I think so.\n\n\n\n[00:11:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s interesting.\n\n\n\nOkay, so we’ve talked about the wider world. We’ve talked about a computer that you may modify. Let’s get onto the bit which we are all here for, which is WordPress. Are there any adjustments or tools, or this could extend to the browser, so it may be browser tools, what have you, but for the internet, let’s say, what are the modifications that you are making to make your life possible there?\n\n\n\n[00:11:37] Bud Kraus: You know, I don’t think there’s anything really any different than anybody else makes. I mean, the biggest thing is I will either zoom in or out of a webpage. And it’s really funny because, if you’re using a certain screen size with a certain resolution, things can get very hard to work with. I don’t think enough companies, like I’m thinking of even LinkedIn, for example, that I was using today. Sorry to call them out, but it’s just like their chat areas were just really, I just had to do all kinds of crazy things to actually see the text. And then the text was really small.\n\n\n\nI think because I’m a stress case, that they don’t always test down to my level. And I think it’s, I just accept it. But that’s the way it is, I guess. But I think that you don’t want to exclude people from anything really, because they may be your customer. And if I can’t buy something because it’s really hard to do, and that is something, I don’t know if I’ve ever talked to you about it, but other people, that if I am discouraged from buying something because it’s just, the UI is just too hard to work with, I’ll just find an alternative. I will. Or I’ll ask my wife.\n\n\n\n[00:12:39] Nathan Wrigley: I guess you’re in a curious space as well in that we hear a lot in the accessibility space about things like screen readers and those kind of assistive technologies. I guess you are not deploying those because you have enough sight to not have that as a, something to lean upon.\n\n\n\n[00:12:54] Bud Kraus: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I have not, and don’t use JAWS or any of those big fancy screen reader technologies. I just use what’s built into the macOS and I just highlight the text and I press a button and it reads. I think it’s called voiceover, or it’s text to speech, or whatever it is. And it’s in the accessibility part of the settings.\n\n\n\nI don’t use technology beyond what I need it for. It’s just overkill. What do I, those are complicated systems to master, so I stay away from that because they don’t need it.\n\n\n\n[00:13:22] Nathan Wrigley: So when you are building websites, is there anything unique about the way that you do that? Is there any sort of, again, a tool that you deploy? Or maybe you are relying on other human beings to sort of cast their eye over it a second time after you’ve done the work. I don’t know, just talk us through that whole thing.\n\n\n\n[00:13:37] Bud Kraus: Well, I don’t make websites. No, I have, okay. I’ve done everything, but I don’t make websites because I don’t like to make websites. It’s not because of my vision. But yes, if I am working, in the past like I have, I would ask people to help me with, particularly with colour because I have a very, I think I have a poor colour palette. And I think that’s either, it’s because of me. So I have to ask, does this go good with this?\n\n\n\nIt’s just something that I, either I’m not good at, or I’m not interested, or my vision, or whatever it is. So I do have a problem with colour in that regard. But because of the technology and the tools that are built in, it’s not as difficult as one might think.\n\n\n\n[00:14:15] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. Yeah, okay. We’ll get into that. But you do make a podcast, and there’s lots and lots of different spinning wheels that have to done there. You know, you’ve got to book people onto the show, you’ve got to have calendars, you’ve got to have posts and pages and things like that on the website. Is there anything uniquely interesting about, I understand the process of making a website from my perspective, there anything that would be different to my process than would be for yours?\n\n\n\n[00:14:36] Bud Kraus: Yes, I think one thing I could think of is like a lot of times I won’t, let’s say in WordPress, you can write into the editor, you could write a page or a post right into the Gutenberg, the block editor. I choose not to do that. What I do is use a notepad, or not notepad, what is it for a Mac? I forgot.\n\n\n\n[00:14:53] Nathan Wrigley: TextEdit.\n\n\n\n[00:14:54] Bud Kraus: Yes, TextEdit. Thanks. I’ll use that and I’ll have the font blown up bigger than normal, and I’ll just edit in there, and then I’ll just take that and then I’ll copy that and paste that into WordPress. It’s just easier for me to do it that way. So I just like it that way. You know, everybody has their own little thing. That’s my little thing. And I think it’s because of my vision.\n\n\n\n[00:15:14] Nathan Wrigley: And in terms of kind of getting the recording software to work and things like that, how do those UIs function for you?\n\n\n\n[00:15:19] Bud Kraus: Yeah, pretty good. The problem I have with learning something new and complicated is that, I think it’s like everybody, quite frankly, I get confused and try to figure out where’s what. And like I was using, I use Descript, and it just took me quite a while to figure out, how do I do this? How do I do that? But like anything else, once I learn it, it’s pretty solid and it gets easier.\n\n\n\nNow I do tend to blow things up to make it bigger. And my wife is always telling me, I can’t use your computer because stuff is too big. Now, I don’t think it’s too big, but she does. And when I look at other people’s computers, then I realise, no, it’s bigger than theirs.\n\n\n\n[00:15:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so we’re in the era of Gutenberg. It sounds like you’ve been using WordPress for a fairly long time, presumably before Gutenberg. What’s your opinion on whether or not that was a move in the right direction? In other words, is it favorable? Is it more straightforward for you to create a post? I know that you said in the scenario for a podcast, you’re writing it elsewhere and copying and pasting it in. But with other things like, I don’t know, laying out content and writing paragraphs and things, do you think it’s a good experience? Did we go in the right direction there?\n\n\n\n[00:16:18] Bud Kraus: That’s a very hard question for me to answer. I’ll answer it in a couple of different ways. One, as far as accessibility goes, I’m no expert in this. I am not an accessibility expert. Am I a stakeholder? We all are. But I can’t answer it in that regard.\n\n\n\nBut from a more technical standpoint, because I write technical articles for Kinsta, Hostinger, others, that I find it to be difficult. I know I was told it’s not supposed to be easy, so it certainly doesn’t match the easy. Yeah, and that has nothing to do with my vision. It’s just, I feel it’s just complicated, even though I’ve learned quite a bit of the technical side of this stuff. I’m not trying to be cute here, but I’m trying to be cute, and I just can’t answer that question that’s going to provide any value so.\n\n\n\n[00:17:06] Nathan Wrigley: I was kind of wondering if there was a thing which, if you could click your fingers and make it appear in the Block Editor or the Gutenberg interface, which you would, and I don’t know that you’ve got got an answer to that.\n\n\n\n[00:17:15] Bud Kraus: I, let me think. No, I don’t think so. No. And I use Elementor too. So I think from a logic standpoint, Elementor seems to be easier for me. What I just don’t like is a lot of confusion. Too much information built into a UI is a real problem for me.\n\n\n\nNathan, the funny thing is I feel like I have a special filter on the world that other people don’t have. This is another one of these blessings, that gives me the ability to understand what works and what doesn’t work without having to ask somebody because it’s just built in.\n\n\n\nNow, the thing about disability or this field in general, which is huge, it’s very idiosyncratic. So my setup is good for me, but it may not work for somebody else. And it’s very hard to, as those who keep accessibility in mind, and hopefully it’s everybody. It’s a very difficult subject because how do we design our systems, our content so that the greatest number of people can access this information, or whatever, on the largest number of devices. I mean, that’s what accessibility to me is about.\n\n\n\n[00:18:24] Nathan Wrigley: It’s curious that you said, I think you said at the beginning that your condition is one which will deteriorate over time.\n\n\n\n[00:18:31] Bud Kraus: Well, macular degeneration, generally, can get worse over time. But fortunately, for reasons that we don’t need to get into, since 1992 it’s been very stable, which I’m really fortunate because trust me, I don’t want it to get any worse than this. I don’t need another, that much of a blessing.\n\n\n\n[00:18:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was wondering from that, whether or not the accessibility side of WordPress is something that you lean into. Do you attend those kind of, I don’t know, WP Accessibility Day, those kind of events?\n\n\n\n[00:18:59] Bud Kraus: No, it just doesn’t really interest me. You know, back in like 1999, 2000, I was teaching a course at Pratt Institute in New York called Accessible Web Design. And it was way ahead of its time. And the concepts I was teaching were basically concepts because the browsers and technology just wasn’t there yet. So you’d have to say, well, one day, and one day did happen in large measure.\n\n\n\nAnd then I started realising, I just didn’t want to like make a career out of teaching this or testing or, you know, I started to meet people in the field and I just said, I don’t really like this. I mean, just because I’m, I have a disability doesn’t mean I have to like the field of accessible design, you know, accessibility.\n\n\n\n[00:19:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s interesting. You are wearing a WordCamp Montclair t-shirt, which kind of tells me that not only are you attending this event, WordCamp US, but you’re also attending other ones as well. Is that a big part of your life? If it is, how accessible are things like this event? Do you come here fully expecting of yourself that you’ll have a full experience the same way that everybody else does?\n\n\n\n[00:19:59] Bud Kraus: Well, I have a good experience, but it is not the same way everybody else does. For example, I can’t see the screens at all. And when they’re doing stuff, the slides, I’m just listening, okay. It’s sort of like, I watch TV a lot that way too. I hear things. Unless I got really close, I’m not going to be able to see what’s on the screen. If I took a picture of something that’s really important, yeah, that’ll help.\n\n\n\nBut generally speaking, that doesn’t work for me. And then it could be kind of a, yes, I’ve gone to many WordCamps, but they’re all sort of the same in terms of the issues. And I don’t even think of them as issues anymore. I just think of it as like, we’re all different. This is the way I’m different. And talking about this stuff, quite frankly is like talking about being right-handed. Would you do an interview of me being right-handed?\n\n\n\n[00:20:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, fascinating. I guess, from my perspective, because I just don’t, I can’t prize that open my own life, it’s really intriguing to sort of try to have some sort of understanding of how it differs from my experience to your experience. And I guess for you it’s, this is how I live.\n\n\n\n[00:20:58] Bud Kraus: Yeah. But Nathan, you know, vision is a spectrum. It’s a continuum. It isn’t just everybody looks at things the same way. No. So I don’t think, alright, I’m like sort of on one end of the spectrum, I get it, but everybody looks at things differently. And I don’t mean that figuratively, I mean that literally. So I don’t think of it anymore much as a handicap, you know, other than the fact that, yeah, that’s a pain in the neck sometimes. And sometimes you find yourself doing some foolish things.\n\n\n\nAnd I think the hardest thing for me at these events is that I won’t know who I’m talking to until about five minutes after I’m talking to them, and I figured out by looking at their shape, stuff like that, that I can, oh, I’m talking to Nathan Wrigley, or your accent, or something like that.\n\n\n\n[00:21:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You’re obviously quite keen on the sort of education side of things though because you’re writing tutorials. I’ll link in the show notes to one that you wrote for Smashing Magazine, which is no mean feat. Getting in there is really rather impressive. So well done for that.\n\n\n\nBut you’re also obviously turning up two events like this. And it sounds from what you said as if this is content that you’ve done before. So very keen on that, even though it may be talking about, you were describing there, it’s like talking about whether you’re right-handed. You’ve put together this presentation in which you’re going to share these different bits and pieces about how you make amendments and adjustments to WordPress and the operating system and so on. So do you enjoy the education side of it?\n\n\n\n[00:22:16] Bud Kraus: Oh, absolutely. I’m a teacher at heart. I mean, you know, that’s what I’ve been doing for 25 years. And even in the writings that I do, they’re basically, it’s a different way of teaching. Now the talk that I’m giving though here, the funny thing is, as I’ve said, I’m sort of like cool to the idea to be honest about it. There are other talks I’d rather give than this one, but this is the talk that everybody seems to be interested in. And I get that.\n\n\n\nAnd when you come up with a topic called using low vision is a tool to help me teach WordPress, that’s a winner because you got two things in there that everybody loves. One, we love disability, and two, we love teaching WordPress. So two weird things got put into one title.\n\n\n\n[00:22:57] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a hit.\n\n\n\n[00:22:58] Bud Kraus: It got to be a hit, right.\n\n\n\n[00:22:59] Nathan Wrigley: What would be the presentation that you would do?\n\n\n\n[00:23:01] Bud Kraus: Ah. The one that I’m threatening to do instead of this one, because I keep saying, I don’t wanna do this one, let me do another one. There’s two.\n\n\n\nOne is, burnt out on web design, what your future career could be, which is my story.\n\n\n\nAnd the other one is, show me the money, how to get sponsors to financially help with your podcast, event, whatever. I like that topic, show me the money.\n\n\n\n[00:23:24] Nathan Wrigley: Paraphrasing, just a minute, what are the nuggets? Because I’m curious about that one.\n\n\n\n[00:23:27] Bud Kraus: Oh, come on. You could teach me, okay?\n\n\n\n[00:23:30] Nathan Wrigley: What are the nuggets in there though?\n\n\n\n[00:23:32] Bud Kraus: Well, in my case with my podcast, I’ve been sort of lucky in that they came to me and said, we’d like to sponsor you. Which is a shock because when I started the podcast a year and a half ago, or actually the idea was, it’s now two years old, I said, I didn’t care if anybody ever listened, I didn’t care if anybody ever sponsored. And then of course, over time, I did care.\n\n\n\nBut I never thought of my show ever being sponsored. I said, I’ll just do it. And then I started realising, hey, this takes a lot of time, should get paid for this. And, you know, I feel just, if I have a second or two say how fortunate I am to be a part of all of this because at my advanced age, to be in this community with such smart, brilliant, whatever, people that are friendly. When I talk to people my age who are generally retired or retiring and, their world gets smaller and mine gets bigger.\n\n\n\n[00:24:24] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that’s interesting.\n\n\n\n[00:24:25] Bud Kraus: So I’m really, really lucky about that.\n\n\n\n[00:24:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I don’t know what your age is, but I am of a certain age, and I’m kind of feeling at the moment that there’s this whole thing which everybody wants to talk about, which is AI. And I’m kind of feeling as if that train has already, you know, that ship has sailed for me. Can’t invest all of the time and what have you to learn all of the different bits and pieces. It’s like there’s another bus coming. I don’t know what you think about that.\n\n\n\n[00:24:47] Bud Kraus: Well, I’ll tell you what it is, for me, it’s been a career extender, because I am now writing at a level for Kinsta, technical articles that I could not otherwise write. And because of my use of, and if you will, mastery of AI, I’ve been able to code things that I could not do before. So I’ve always had sort of, for the longest time, because I taught great foundation of HTML, CSS, some JavaScript, whatever. So I know this stuff, okay.\n\n\n\nBut to elevate that knowledge, to create stuff now that is much more complicated, sort of like junior development oriented stuff or maybe a little bit beyond that. That is amazing. And it’s because of AI.\n\n\n\n[00:25:28] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating.\n\n\n\n[00:25:30] Bud Kraus: It’s extending what I can do.\n\n\n\n[00:25:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you feel like you’ve got a new lease of life there.\n\n\n\n[00:25:34] Bud Kraus: Yeah, a bit. So I don’t have to keep writing the same things over and over about how to create a post. You know, I’ve done that. I want to be challenged to learn new things, and AI is helping me do that. And we’re teaching AI, and AI is teaching us. So it’s really cool.\n\n\n\n[00:25:49] Nathan Wrigley: Your presentation, is it today or tomorrow?\n\n\n\n[00:25:51] Bud Kraus: Well, it’s tomorrow.\n\n\n\n[00:25:53] Nathan Wrigley: I was going to say, you’re looking very calm for somebody that has a presentation later today.\n\n\n\n[00:25:56] Bud Kraus: Well, you know, I’ve been around the block. I’m not going to be nervous. Now what I do have to do is I’ve got to do some more memorisation. And that’s what I talked about always being prepared. I just can’t go in there and read the slides. It’s not going to happen. So I have to really know what the slides are, what the order is, and what the words are on the screen. I don’t have to read those words, but I have to know the ideas behind all this.\n\n\n\n[00:26:16] Nathan Wrigley: So in some sense, you’ve memorised it more or less. Oh, that’s interesting. So you’ve really applied thought to every, more or less, every sentence that comes out of your mouth.\n\n\n\n[00:26:24] Bud Kraus: Basically.\n\n\n\n[00:26:25] Nathan Wrigley: But you don’t get nervous.\n\n\n\n[00:26:26] Bud Kraus: We’re with friends.\n\n\n\n[00:26:28] Nathan Wrigley: I would get so nervous.\n\n\n\n[00:26:29] Bud Kraus: At least I like to think so.\n\n\n\n[00:26:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No, I agree. Every time I’ve been to a presentation, even when the person delivering it has been quite nervous, there’s always been a very positive sentiment in the room.\n\n\n\n[00:26:39] Bud Kraus: I’ll tell you why I don’t get nervous, I don’t see their faces.\n\n\n\n[00:26:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh.\n\n\n\n[00:26:42] Bud Kraus: So if you don’t see their faces. There’s so many advantages of vision impairment. I know it sounds crazy, but if you don’t see their faces, then you don’t see their reactions. Now, of course, that’s a negative too. But then you don’t get nervous.\n\n\n\n[00:26:55] Nathan Wrigley: Absolutely fascinating. Well, I wish you the best of luck with it. It will be out on wordpress.tv at some point. Typically now they come out really soon. These flagship events, they turn them around really quickly.\n\n\n\n[00:27:06] Bud Kraus: Well, I don’t know when this is coming out, but this is going to be live streamed around the world.\n\n\n\n[00:27:09] Nathan Wrigley: Is it?\n\n\n\n[00:27:10] Bud Kraus: Yeah. So one person can watch.\n\n\n\n[00:27:11] Nathan Wrigley: The point being, dear listener, that if you’ve enjoyed this episode and you want to follow on the talk, the presentation that Bud has given at WordCamp US, by the way, maybe the quickest way to do that is to just Google, either WordCamp US 2025. Or Google, using low vision as my tool to help me teach WordPress. That’s the other short circuit if you like. You’ll be able to see exactly what it is that Bud delivered.\n\n\n\nI have no further questions, so unless you’ve got something to add, I will say thank you very much for chatting to me.\n\n\n\n[00:27:40] Bud Kraus: Well, thank you Nathan. And you know I’m a big fan of what you do and thanks for having me on.\n\n\n\n[00:27:43] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much.\n\n\n\n\nOn the podcast today we have Bud Kraus.\n\n\n\nBud was diagnosed with macular degeneration, a condition often associated with old age, when he was 37. Affecting both eyes, this gradually eroded his central vision, making it difficult for him to see straight ahead, recognize faces, drive or read. Despite these challenges, Bud\u2019s peripheral vision remained intact, sparing him the need for a cane or guide dog, and allowing him to continue to navigate daily life. Through perseverance and adaptation, Bud continues to live fully, facing the hurdles of vision loss with resilience and optimism.\n\n\n\nBud opens up the podcast by talking about his experience living with legal blindness, how his central vision loss has shaped everything from everyday activities to his professional routines. He explains the practical ways he adapts his devices and workflow, including tweaks to operating system settings, using screen zoom functions, and relying on pattern recognition to teach coding, write tutorials, and even host his Seriously, Bud podcast. His unique perspective sheds light on the often-overlooked nuances of accessibility, reminding us that every user interacts with technology differently.\n\n\n\nBud also chats about the broader impact of accessibility in the WordPress space, from frustrations with hard-to-navigate interfaces to the importance of not excluding users who may become your audience or customers. His reflections reveal how living with low vision pushed him beyond mere acceptance, helping him discover new opportunities, hone his teaching skills, and even find humour in daily challenges.\n\n\n\nBud\u2019s story serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of designing with empathy, embracing adaptation, and viewing accessibility not just as a technical requirement, but as a source of creativity and connection. It\u2019s full of real-world tips, personal anecdotes, and a dose of inspiration.\n\n\n\nWhether you\u2019re a designer, developer, educator, or simply passionate about building a more inclusive web, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\nUsing Low Vision As My Tool To Help Me Teach WordPress, Bud’s presentation at WordCamp US 2025\n\n\n\nJAWS, Job\u00a0Access\u00a0With\u00a0Speech software\n\n\n\nPratt Institute\n\n\n\nDescript\n\n\n\nUsing Low Vision As My Tool To Help Me Teach WordPress, Bud’s post on Smashing Magazine", "date_published": "2025-10-08T10:00:00-04:00", "date_modified": "2025-10-06T06:20:40-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/188-Bud-Kraus-on-Teaching-and-Using-WordPress-With-Low-Vision.jpg", "tags": [ "accessibility", "podcast" ], "summary": "In this episode, Nathan Wrigley interviews Bud Kraus at WordCamp US 2025. Bud shares his experience living and working with macular degeneration, a condition affecting his central vision. He discusses the adaptations he makes to use computers and WordPress, his approach to teaching and content creation, and how his low vision has become a unique perspective in his work. Bud reflects on accessibility challenges, technology, and AI as a career extender, as well as the positives and practicalities of navigating both digital and physical worlds with low vision. Whether you\u2019re a designer, developer, educator, or simply passionate about building a more inclusive web, this episode is for you.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2158857/c1e-6wonohop1gnukvn63-8do44gg0too8-quxbhe.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=199767", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/187-june-liu-and-david-denedo-on-making-the-web-accessible-the-mission-behind-wp-accessibility-day", "title": "#187 \u2013 June Liu and David Denedo on Making the Web Accessible: The Mission Behind WP Accessibility Day", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, making the web accessible, and the mission behind WP Accessibility Day.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have June Liu and David Denedo.
\n\n\n\nBoth June and David are key members of the WP Accessibility Day organizing team, a global, volunteer driven, event focused on improving accessibility in the WordPress ecosystem.
\n\n\n\nJune serves as the marketing team co-lead, and works with sponsors, bringing her background in project management to keep the events efforts on track.
\n\n\n\nDavid, a web designer and content creator based in London, contributes to the marketing and post-event teams, with his interest in web accessibility stemming from his personal experience as a visually impaired user.
\n\n\n\nWP Accessibility Day has grown significantly in the past few years, uniting a large international group of volunteers, and organizers, to drive awareness and practical change in web accessibility.
\n\n\n\nThe event is powered by a host of teams, marketing, sponsors, tech and vendor, post-event, translation, speakers, and more, ensuring that everything from live captioning to sign language interpretation is in place.
\n\n\n\nWe begin by learning about June and David’s unique paths to accessibility advocacy. One through direct lived experience, and the other through supporting a loved one with cognitive challenges. Their stories highlight why accessibility can’t be an afterthought, and how events like WP Accessibility Day are raising awareness in this important area.
\n\n\n\nWe discuss what attendees can expect at this year’s event happening from the 15th of October, 2025. It’s free, fully virtual, and runs for 24 hours, making space for a diverse range of speakers and topics.
\n\n\n\nWhether you’re interested in the moral, legal or technical cases for accessibility, there’s something for you here, including sessions on accessible design, risk management for agencies, legal compliance, and demonstrations of assistive technologies.
\n\n\n\nJune and David share how the event format, a combination of prerecorded talks and live chat, mixes polished content with real time engagement. Plus how translation and community involvement are key to its growing impact.
\n\n\n\nIf you want to learn more about how you can make your WordPress sites, and the web in general, more inclusive, or if you’re motivated by global collaboration or personal stories, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you June Liu and David Denedo.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by two fabulous guests. I’ve got June Liu and David Denedo. Hello both. How are you both doing?
\n\n\n\n[00:03:58] June Jiu: Hi there.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:59] David Denedo: Hello. I’m doing all right.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:00] Nathan Wrigley: Well, it’s very nice to have you both with us. The intention of today’s podcast is to draw attention to something which well, I’m sure many of you will know about. If you don’t know about it, I certainly hope that by the end of this, not only do you know about it, but you are highly engaged, and hopefully going to attend and all of those kind of things, maybe even contribute some of your time, you never know.
\n\n\n\nIt’s called WP Accessibility Day, and we’re going to get into that in a moment. Before we do that, I just want to get the little bio, the introduction from both of you, one at a time, just telling us who you are, what your interest is in WordPress and accessibility, I guess.
\n\n\n\nSo we’ll keep it nice and short and sweet. So I’ll go to June first. Just let us know who you are, June.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:39] June Jiu: Thank you, Nathan. I’m June, I serve on the organising team for WP Accessibility Day as the marketing team co-lead, and I also work on the sponsors team.
\n\n\n\nMy background is mostly project management, so my forte right now is helping the team coordinate tasks, and keeping the initiatives on track. Yeah, I coordinate between the sponsors and the marketing team to get the sponsor page prepared. So that’s basically my work with WPAD.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:08] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. That’s great. And David, let’s go to you next. Same question really.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:11] David Denedo: Hi, I’m David. I’m visually impaired, so that’s why I love accessibility. I work in London as a web designer and a content creator, and I’m part of the WP Accessibility Day organising team, as part of the post-event people. But I’m also in the marketing team, just jumping around, and at least trying to put as much as I can into web accessibility.
\n\n\n\nYeah, I got into web accessibility mainly because of some talks I had two years ago from the WP Accessibility Day, and that just encouraged me. And then here we are two years later.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:53] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. So, WP Accessibility Day, one thing that just jumped out at me straight away from what you were both talking about there, you both talked about, I’m on the, and then you mentioned a team. That implies that there’s quite a lot of you in the background.
\n\n\n\nSo just to give credit where credit’s due, I think it’s always important to make sure that we credit not just the two of you, because there’s probably a lot of people behind this as well. I don’t want to go down the route of missing anybody out. So I wonder if it’s possible for us to just mention the kind of teams and things like that. And if there are any people in particular that you’ve been working with that you do wish to name, caveat emptor, dear listener, I apologise on behalf of everybody on this panel. If we miss anybody’s name out, sorry about that. But let’s go for the, how many teams there are and how big an enterprise is this these days?
\n\n\n\n[00:06:39] June Jiu: I don’t think I’ve ever counted how many teams there are, but I’ll list some of them. And David, add yours if I miss any, please.
\n\n\n\nThere is a volunteer team that’s, right now, pivotal. That’s their work right now in preparing the event. The event is on October 15th, so we’re just about a month away. So the volunteer team is very active right now in onboarding the volunteers.
\n\n\n\nThen we have the tech and vendors. And those are also very active. They work closely with the volunteer team to prepare the day of. So they’re the ones that prepare the Zoom platform for us. So making sure that it all runs well.
\n\n\n\nThen we have website, APAC, post event, translation, sponsors, marketing. What else? I feel like there’s a few others that I’m missing. But there is a huge team behind Amber, Bet and Joe, working and making sure that we can make the event as smooth as possible, and take some of the load off of them.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:36] Nathan Wrigley: The Amber, the Bet and the Joe that you just mentioned, we have got Amber Hinds, Bet Hannon and Joe Dolson. So there’s three names. Do you have any recollection whether they were the people that kind of kickstarted the event, whenever that was? Because if that was the case, it sounds like it’s gone gangbusters since then with lots of people joining on, and you two being some examples.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:56] June Jiu: We do have a pretty big team this year. And yes, you’re right, the history is that Joe Dolson did start WP Accessibility Day. I don’t recall all of the specifics, but I think the second year, Bet, I think it might’ve started with Bet and Joe, and then Amber also came on soon after that.
\n\n\n\nBut we’re in our fifth year. It’s very exciting. I joined last year as an organiser and it was a point in my time where I was returning to work. So finding WPAD was kind of a sweet spot for me to test out my skill sets again, get used to being out in the public, so I have a soft spot for them.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:35] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Okay, so there’s a few that we’ve rattled off. David, I don’t know if you can fill in any gaps that might have been left there. If so, go now.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:42] David Denedo: Yeah, I think those are the main ones that were involved. And I would say Amber Hinds, when she came on board, she brought in a lot of organisation because, you know, with Joe, Joe understands the technical bits of things, but he’s not really so organised. So when she came in, that’s why the team grew exponentially from 2022, I believe when she joined. And then the year after, things just kept spiraling. And then now we have a massive team with lots of volunteers, everybody’s happy to help.
\n\n\n\nThe other thing that is quite nice is that there was a nice spread of people who are volunteering. So it’s not just maybe from one region or one country. We are a very nice spread of people, so that’s really nice. So from different parts, from Asia, from Africa, from the Americas and all of that, they’re all wide base.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:33] Nathan Wrigley: That’s amazing. Everybody from all over the place. That’s really lovely.
\n\n\n\nDavid, in your introduction, in your bio, you described that you are kind of eating your own dog food a little bit here in that, I can’t remember the exact phrasing that you had around your eyes. How did you describe the condition that you have, if that’s the right word?
\n\n\n\n[00:09:50] David Denedo: Okay, yeah. So I am visually impaired, so I have very high myopia and high astigmatism. I also struggle to see myself, so that’s one reason why I got really interested when I saw how people are able to make the web more accessible. Because I grew up in a background where we had to adapt to so many stressful things, like there wasn’t really much help for people with accessibility needs.
\n\n\n\nSo I didn’t really know there were ways to help people out. Until I came into the whole system and I realised that, oh wow, so you can actually do this to help somebody else. Because I was always struggling, most times I couldn’t see the screen. So I’m always like relying on other people to tell me what’s in front of me, what’s on the screen, and all of that.
\n\n\n\nBut then when you start to see that, oh yeah, we can use a screen reader, you can use screen magnifier, you can do this, you can do that, you can just improve a little bit on your website, or even on the reality, makes things more accessible. I was like, wow, I’ve been living under the rock basically.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s absolutely fascinating. I’m just wondering, June, if you have a similar story to tell in that, is there anything that you would like to share in that regard?
\n\n\n\n[00:11:01] June Jiu: I do. My mother had a stroke, and from that she had vascular dementia. And being her caregiver for that many years, and seeing the decline in her loss of independence, because she wasn’t able to navigate the medical system by herself anymore. It was kind of, I learned everything in hindsight. I wish I had the knowledge that I have today to have helped her like 8, 10 years ago. But that drew me in.
\n\n\n\nI was telling you how I came back into the workforce, and one of the things that somebody said to me was, hey, there’s this free event. It’s online, you don’t have to leave your house, just try it out. And it was WPAD. And when I was listening to the talks, I was like, yeah, wait a second, you mean that websites can be laid out differently so that it would be easier for somebody to navigate it, even with a mental decline?
\n\n\n\nAnd it’s those simple, to us, it initially could be simple, but in the back end it might not be so simple. But just having her read through an online PDF, you know, it was difficult for her to hit the right area, because the PDF lines were so tiny. And her eye, hand coordination was reduced, so she’s not able to hit those lines to fill in the PDF.
\n\n\n\nSo for me it was the acknowledgement of, oh my gosh, it doesn’t have to be this way going forward. So it’s me trying to learn as much as I can to direct my future clients into a direction that gives better accessibility to all, and not just their one demographic.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:41] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so curious that you’ve both got two stories where the end of it, the target, if you like, is the same, but how you’ve arrived at the things are entirely different.
\n\n\n\nDavid, a very personal story about your own life. And June, well, another personal story, but viewed through the prism of somebody else. Almost like standing over somebody’s shoulder and being able to ascertain, well, this person’s not getting what they could out of the internet.
\n\n\n\nAnd it strikes me that if you rewound the clock, I don’t know, let’s say 30 years ago before the internet was in any way, shape, or form common, but you could describe what would be available in 30 years time. And you could say, well, so many people, they’d have this little device in their hand, and there’d be these machines where there’d be screens on desktops and things like that.
\n\n\n\nAt that moment, you would be thinking to yourself, this is literally the perfect technology to help people who, let’s say for example, are struggling to see. Are unable to get out of the house. There may be an aspect of their body which doesn’t function in the way that your body or my body might function.
\n\n\n\nYou would describe that and you’d think, oh, this is like manna from heaven. This is the perfect thing. But it never turned out that way. The internet went in a way entirely leaving those people behind, I think, which was such a lost opportunity.
\n\n\n\nSo we’re kind of 25 years or whatever it is into the internet, and we’re now going back and filling in all of the gaps that probably, with the benefit of hindsight, should never have been left.
\n\n\n\nI mean, I don’t know that there’s any question in there, but it’s curious that that one technology which could have made the lives of so many people so much more straightforward, really hasn’t serviced those people particularly well until events like this come along and educate the rest of us in how to do it.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:23] June Jiu: I think, Nathan, you hit two big points. Everyone’s journey with accessibility is very personal, and unless you experienced it firsthand, or even secondhand in my case, you don’t really see that impact.
\n\n\n\nAnd the second part is that the second nail that you hit is that a lot of times it becomes an afterthought. Accessibility becomes the afterthought. I think that with an event like WPAD, we want it to become the foundational, so we’re hoping to make that change.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:53] Nathan Wrigley: For example, I’m imagining, again harking back to how the internet could have been, we’ve now got a technology where a small rectangle held in your hand, with a few clicks of a few buttons can enable you to more or less have anything delivered to your front door, in a very short space of time. Which is like, how incredible is that, that that is even possible?
\n\n\n\nAnd so this is the perfect answer to people, let’s say for example, who struggle to get out of the front door, and navigate the shops and what have you.
\n\n\n\nAnd yet we’re faced with a situation where that sublimely cool technology is impenetrable, and unavailable, to many people because it never got baked in as a requirement, and we can come to that later. David, I’m sorry, I think I interrupted.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:36] David Denedo: Oh no. Yeah, what you said is quite right. There is an imbalance in the way things are getting better, but it’s getting better for a certain set of people, but leaving some other people behind. So that is the problem.
\n\n\n\nWith the web, it was improving at a very fast rate in terms of how to build the web, but somewhere along the line, people forgot that the whole essence of worldwide web, the man who created the W3C consortium, who basically created the web, the father of the web, his whole idea was that the web should be accessible to all. That was his vision, his goal from the very start.
\n\n\n\nBut as people are trying to push the boundaries, sometimes they forget, well, it is quite normal that sometimes unless you are experiencing a certain problem, you will not find a solution to it. So now that we are bringing the awareness to people, then they’re now finding out, okay, we forgot this certain set of people, let’s now incorporate them into our thinking, into our design, into everything.
\n\n\n\nSo that is one nice thing about having a conference like WPAD, to help spread awareness to people. Because if you’ve never experienced a certain problem, for example, you’ve never been blind or you’ve never had something with your mobility. You may not really appreciate the struggles of those people. But when they’re able to express it out and explain to you in these conferences, then you can now get that third party understanding, and at least you can incorporate accessibility into your own lifestyle.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I have a question around that, because I am in the position where my eyes, despite the fact I wear glasses, once the glasses are on my nose, my eyes, functionally, I think you would describe them as normal, and I have good ish hearing, and my body functions. And so, David, you’ve basically just described me.
\n\n\n\nIt can be, it has been hard to imagine, what is the lived experience of people who are not in the same boat as I am?
\n\n\n\nAnd I did wonder if a part of WPAD, I did wonder if a part of that was that educational piece? Whether it was explaining to people, web developers, people who may not be accustomed to what the conference is about, and what the summit will, you know, the educational pieces. I wondered if there was a piece where you explained, okay, this is the setup that somebody using a screen reader, this is what it feels like to them when they’re on the internet. This is what it would feel like, for example, I don’t know, if you are using a puff and sip system or something like that.
\n\n\n\nSo I don’t know if you are providing content like that, but I’d be curious to know whether you explain what the lived experience would be for people who may benefit as a result of the tech talks in the conference.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:34] David Denedo: Yeah, so from what we have planned, there are a few of the conference talks that will reflect about accessibility. I think one of them is by Dennis, he’s going to show how a screen reader user will access a website. And then there are also talks about post-production of videos. So some people will incorporate the talks in, or at least talk about the experiences, but it may not be like a full on description.
\n\n\n\nBut yeah, I’ve seen a few of the talks that will be happening and they will be incorporating some of the disabilities that we know, like colorblindness, and then like audio and other things. So that will help people to get an awareness of what disabilities are out there, and how to incorporate that into building a more accessible system.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s really interesting. I suppose the old adage is, you know, a picture says the same as a thousand words or something like that. And being able to perceive what’s going on. I’ve always found that incredibly motivating, because immediately I can see how the internet is a more difficult place than a thousand words could describe and what have you.
\n\n\n\nSo, okay, so that’s interesting. And then moving on to the conference itself, I’m presuming that this is aimed squarely at people already using WordPress as their content management system, their website builder. But it is curious because, I don’t know exactly where you land on this, maybe what I’m about to say doesn’t fit at all, but I’m presuming the conference is designed to enable everybody to get some way along the road of producing an accessible website.
\n\n\n\nBut presumably also the audience is a little bit of, trying to do what I’ve just described, make the case, the moral case, the legal case for needing to do it as well. So it’s the tech side of how to do it, as well as the sort of the moral and the legal obligations that might sort of follow that in train.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:32] June Jiu: Yeah, there is one session that I think you might find interesting along that line, is that it’s talking about accessibility as a risk management for agencies and for business owners. So I think that in particular, I have found it most interesting. With a background in project management, I’ve often had conversations where somebody will say to me, but why do I need to have it assessable? And then you’d have to take that pause and go, okay. But I think that to have the angle of risk management is certainly something that business owners will be able to relate to a little bit better.
\n\n\n\nWe also have another one that is talking about what features you should be on a lookout for so that you can kind of mitigate the legal portion of it. I’m not saying that you can avoid it completely, but at least you’re more aware of it.
\n\n\n\nSo there’s that one and, of course, our keynote speaker is Vitaly Friedman, from Smashing Magazine. He’s going to come at it from the UI, UX portion of it. So it’s not just all on the development, but it’s also on different aspects of website building and different viewpoints on business and ownership of a website.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting because there are many threads there aren’t there. If you were just to take the technical side, you could probably do a conference that lasted many, many weeks about the technicalities of how to do it.
\n\n\n\nBut it’s curious that you’ve also leaned into the things like, well, the compulsion, the kind of maybe the advent of the ambulance chasing lawyer, dare I say it, who has realised, latched onto the fact that the European Accessibility Act over this side of the Atlantic is now a thing. There is no longer just a moral component to doing the accessibility work on your website. There is now increasingly a big legal hammer, which could be deployed.
\n\n\n\nAnd so that alone, I presume will draw a certain audience who, you know, if the only thing that they want to hear about is how to mitigate that problem, well, maybe that’s not the ideal motivation for it, but nevertheless, it is a bit of a carrot and stick, and it will bring some people into the arena, which is good.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:41] June Jiu: And here’s why I’d like to give a shout out to a team that I forgot, the speaker team. They’re the ones that put together the application, and they vetted through all the applications to see what would be more interesting for everybody.
\n\n\n\nThe rating system is, when they go through the rating system, they kind of make it anonymous of who the presenter would be. So it makes it, you are really looking at what the topic is being talked about, rather than who might be presenting. And that gives us an edge in finding topics that might not be as well known and from areas that are less featured.
\n\n\n\nSo we do have a couple of speakers that are coming from the continent of Africa, and those are always very interesting to hear. In the past, because of the location and the technical availability, there had been technical issues. But this year we’re having it so that the sessions are all prerecorded. So that will kind of help with the presentation of it, the clarity. But each of the speakers will be in the chat and they’ll be available to answer questions in the chat.
\n\n\n\nSo I think that’s an interesting fold into this year’s event, to have that feature in there so that the speaker is not just presenting, but they’re in the chat room answering questions. I think that adds another layer to the event.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think what’s really nice about that as well is that if everything’s prerecorded, the speaker will get the chance to create and then re-edit, and then adapt and modify. And what you end up with hopefully is the best version of that talk.
\n\n\n\nWith the best will in the world, some people are not as great as others at doing live things. You know, they go down rabbit holes, and they lose their train of thought or what have you. This completely gets rid of that problem. They can do it as many times as they like and give you the best version.
\n\n\n\nBut also that lovely aspect of, they suddenly become available to have a conversation in the chat, whereas before, they was presenting, you know, and presumably needed to go and have a bit of a lie down afterwards. Whereas in this situation, much more relaxed, you can ask them the questions.
\n\n\n\nI really appreciate that format. I think that’s actually, that’s my preferred way of a summit, kind of like this, the Accessibility Day in this case, being put together. I think that’s very forward thinking. And I hope that you continue doing it that way because I think the presenters probably appreciate it. Your audience will appreciate it, because it will be polished, and also you get to chat with the person involved. Anything on that, David?
\n\n\n\n[00:25:11] David Denedo: Yeah. Another thing we forgot to talk about is the translation team. So as the talks are being presented, there are also some nice volunteers who are translating it into other languages to have as much diversity as possible. Because some people, English is not their first language, so we have a team trying to convert to like French. We have the one for Spanish. There are also some other ones, even like Hebrew and so many other ones. So it’s a very nice feeling to have so many translations and everybody is doing their bit.
\n\n\n\nThat is one thing I love about WP Accessibility, the entire organising team is the fact that everybody’s skill level, it doesn’t matter your skill level, you can always put in something. So that is something great. Whether you are a web designer, you are just a business owner, you can sponsor the event. If you are good with multilingual, you can be part of the translation. You can apply to speak.
\n\n\n\nThe whole talks is not all technical, like you already mentioned. The talks are varied, so we talk about risk management, we talk about designers can give their own bits. People who are in business can give the business case for accessibility. So it’s all, it’s a lovely spread and I really love it.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:30] Nathan Wrigley: There really is a lovely spread. I mean, firstly, one thing that I should have done right top of the show, which I didn’t, and I will mention it because I record a preamble before we actually start talking, one thing I will do is I’ll read into the record the URL. But I’ll do that now as well.
\n\n\n\nSo the URL is fabulous, by the way. It’s just ideal. If you are returning customer, if you like, it’s wpaccessibility.day. Just one more time, wpaccessibility, the regular spelling, no underscores, no hyphens or anything like that, dot day.
\n\n\n\nAnd then as a subdomain you are going to put in the year. So in this case it’s going to be 2 0 2 5, 2025.wpaccessibility.day. And you’re going to find all the different bits and pieces over there.
\n\n\n\nAnd one of the things that I noticed about the getting involved side of things is, yeah, there’s the whole sponsorship thing. So you can become a sponsor if you’d like to do that. But also you can volunteer, you can become a media partner. If you feel philanthropic and you just want to donate some of your money into the project, that is also an option. And then there’s a whole tab for the attendees as well. It’s under community. There’s an attendee section as well.
\n\n\n\nSo it sounds like it’s not just this little event which flicks on for a couple of days and then turns off again. I mean, certainly from your side, it sounds like there’s a whole fun community of things happening in the background.
\n\n\n\nAnd really that’s the glue that binds a successful project together. If it was all very uninteresting and dry and a bit boring and you were all feeling under pressure, it wouldn’t have so many legs, it wouldn’t be able to run for this many years. But I’m guessing that you’ve had nice experiences, right, in the background?
\n\n\n\n[00:28:04] June Jiu: Oh, yes. Yes. We have a lot of fun. But thank you for mentioning those links.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:08] Nathan Wrigley: No, I think that’s wonderful. So again, go and check that out.
\n\n\n\nThe other thing to say though is, let’s talk about how it’s actually happening. Obviously you’ve described that it’s going to be prerecorded videos. How are you making that content available? What’s going to be the platform of choice, or how are you going to get it?
\n\n\n\nIs there a way that you can, I don’t know, for example, download all of the bits and pieces so you can watch them in your own time? Is it an event which is spanning a single day, you know, a 24 hour time?
\n\n\n\n[00:28:35] June Jiu: Yeah, we do say that it is 24 hours, but all the content and the videos, they’re going to be available for replay after we go through the post-event production. Either from each subdomain, as you mentioned, the 2025 will be available on the 2025.wpaccessibility.day.
\n\n\n\nLast year’s event is available on the 2024.wpaccessibility.day. So you can rewatch them. It’s also available through YouTube. So if you need some background noise, I often do it. I just turn on that and let it roll.
\n\n\n\nI have to say, it is a lot of information to absorb, but I do find it to be very resourceful. I know that one of David’s work this year is to put in chapters for these past event videos. So that has been very helpful to me when I find the relevant video from the past. And I said, I remember somebody saying something about that. Now with the chapters there, it’s much easier to navigate and find it. So good work, David. Thank you.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, indeed. Good work. But what’s this, in the show notes that were shared before we actually joined the call, it describes, it says here, and I don’t know which one of you wrote it, but it says, the event will be hosted through Zoom events. And Zoom is capitalised, so I presume it’s the platform Zoom that we’re all familiar with. I don’t know what a Zoom event is. Does that differ from a regular Zoom call? Is there some key difference?
\n\n\n\n[00:29:59] June Jiu: Yes. It’s different from like a Zoom webinar or a Zoom call. It’s a platform that has a lobby. You’re registering on our site, but then on event day you’ll be able to go into the Zoom event.
\n\n\n\nThere’ll be a lobby and there’ll be a chat room, that’s where you can find all the information for the event. So, it’s not like a traditional webinar where there’s just one link in order to go and join it, to join that session, or that sector of sections. So now you can go in and when that hour pops up, that session would pop up.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. Right. So you go to this one central place, and everything’s kind of bound in this one, so as soon as you’re in, you’re in, basically, and you don’t have to keep clicking links in emails to find the latest session, which is going live.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:44] June Jiu: Exactly.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That’s really nice. Dave, anything to add to that?
\n\n\n\n[00:30:47] David Denedo: Yeah. And you also have access to like swag. Everything will be in the event, so you can get some of the sponsor swag, you can chat with the speakers, you can chat with other event members, all within the same platform. So not having to jump from one platform to another platform to chat and then come back. You can lose people that way, but now everything all packaged together.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:12] June Jiu: I wanted to give a shout out to the platform itself. It allows us to do live captioning. A lot of times with webinars, it is just automated caption. We actually do have live captioners typing into Zoom. That is another layer to WP Accessibility Day that is not a feature in other events.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:32] Nathan Wrigley: No kidding, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:33] June Jiu: Yes. And the other big one, expense for us is the American Sign Language interpreters. So they will be also on hand on event day, and there’s a team of them that will be available to us, and they do the ASL.
\n\n\n\nThis year one of our speakers is from Australia and he will be bringing in Australian Sign Language, which is different from American Sign Language. So there’s another layer to the accessibility. We understand either British Sign Language or American Sign Language but, yeah, there’s Australian Sign Language too.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:08] Nathan Wrigley: You drop this as if it’s really straightforward, but when my head starts spinning on the technicalities there, the idea of injecting real time, typed transcriptions, somehow overlaying that into the video, there’s a whole technical piece there.
\n\n\n\nAnd then you’ve got a sign language person. That’s a whole nother layer as well. That all needs, presumably, I don’t know if that’s going to be done live or filmed. Maybe there’s an opportunity.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:33] June Jiu: It’s live.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. So all of that, there are lots and lots of moving parts here.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:37] June Jiu: That’s why we have the technical and vendor team, and the volunteer team. They’re pivotal on event day to have those two teams in place.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask, because I know there’ll be some people that are curious about the, how to describe it, the business status, let’s put it that way. And maybe this is not something that either of you can answer, I don’t know.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s the structure of WP Accessibility Day? So, for example, if I was to donate, in the UK we call these things charities. I think in the US the correct term is non-profit. So if I was to donate, do I have some sort of assurance that the money isn’t going to end up in some, I don’t even want to say the words because I know that nobody’s ethics are this poorly thought through, but I’m going to say it anyway. Just want to make sure that the money doesn’t end in somebody’s back pocket.
\n\n\n\nWhere did the donations end up? How is the structure of this organisation ensuring that everything is out in the open and clear and easy to understand?
\n\n\n\n[00:33:28] June Jiu: Well, this year WordPress Accessibility Day was recognised by IRS as the 501 C3 public charity. So based upon that, a hundred percent of our income that comes in goes right back into the event.
\n\n\n\nOrganisers and volunteers are not paid. Every one of us who are working on this is out of the goodness of our heart, and what time availability that we have.
\n\n\n\nThe one caveat I will say, some of our translators are paid because translation is an income based business. And this is a recent development. In the past we’ve had to ask them to please donate their time to do the translation. But now we have a little bit more security to be able to pay them.
\n\n\n\nPeople who have the ability to speak multiple languages, look into the translation because if you aren’t able to participate as an organiser or a volunteer, donating your time to translate or being paid for be translators for us is a huge difference for us to bring all these sessions available to a greater audience.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:36] Nathan Wrigley: I think everybody would understand that there’s, that is how that industry works, isn’t it? When you go to a WordCamp, for example, and you see the people doing the live captioning, or you see the people standing on the stage and they’re doing the sign language, I think it’s understood that that is what they do for a living.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:51] June Jiu: And I would be remiss not to give credit to our sponsors too. We have many sponsors who are repeat sponsors year after year, and they support us with their sponsorship. We are very appreciative of that.
\n\n\n\nThis year we have some new ones and a lot of repeating ones from every range. Our higher level are of course now closed, but we still have the bronze level, which is at a $500, or a micro sponsor which is at $150. And the difference between that is the Bronze has a webpage, a dedicated webpage for their company, and the micro sponsor has a logo on our sponsor page.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:28] Nathan Wrigley: So as of recording, and maybe that will keep going right up to the deadline, I don’t know, so if what you’ve heard has made you feel that you’d like to be involved on a sponsorship level, bronze is available, that one is $500, and there’s a micro one. And obviously you can go onto the 2025 Accessibility Day website and discover for yourself what’s available in there.
\n\n\n\nSo we found out what’s happening. We found out why it’s being done. We found out some of the people that are being involved. I suppose what we ought to do at this point is drive people toward the schedule.
\n\n\n\nWell, you’ve announced it already, but let’s just make sure we’re doing it again. The date for this event is when?
\n\n\n\n[00:36:03] David Denedo: So it’ll be happening on October 15th to the 16th, and it’ll be 24 hour long event. So it’s going to go right up for 24 hours. We have the speakers all in the schedule, so you can go ahead and check it out. The link will be in the shownotes.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:19] Nathan Wrigley: It will. Yeah, that’s absolutely right. So the 15th of October, it’s a 24 hour event. So I don’t know if you start in the sort of Pacific neck of the woods, that seems to be the traditional way that things are done. So Australia, they’re the sort of first people to receive the content, and then it just goes around the globe. And maybe the people in, on the west coast of the US and Hawaii and what have you, they get the content more towards the end of the day. I assume that’s how it’s working.
\n\n\n\nBut if you go to the URL that we mentioned earlier and just add forward slash schedule to it, you will be able to see through opening remarks from Joe Dolson right at the beginning of the day, right through the keynotes and everything, to the closing remarks, or at least the last presentation, which is happening some 23 or so hours later.
\n\n\n\nI think that’s all the questions that I had. Is there anything that you feel it would’ve been important to say that we didn’t say? If that’s the case, please feel free to use this platform now.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:09] June Jiu: The event is free, but we do ask that you register, so that we do have a good count of how many people are coming. So please sign up at 2025.wpaccessibility.day and you’ll find the registration link there.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:26] Nathan Wrigley: Is that a mere request or is that a requirement? In order to gain access, do you need to have, yeah, okay. So I’m getting a nod of the head there from June. So go and register in order to access the content as well. David, anything we missed?
\n\n\n\n[00:37:38] David Denedo: Yeah, the only thing is that I’m excited for Vitaly Friedman, because he has a very wide following, so he will bring more people into our event, hopefully. And he is going to be talking about accessible designs, which is something quite powerful. Because in this day and age, people always associate accessibility with very boring designs. But he’s coming to show you that you can have very beautiful designs in 2025 and still be accessible. So that’s a very important topic.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:09] Nathan Wrigley: Well, the WP Accessibility Day website is an example of that. It’s actually a really tasteful, beautiful design. I’m going to guess that it’s, you know, the accessibility credentials of it are fairly strong. Let’s just, make that assumption, but it’s beautifully designed.
\n\n\n\nYeah, we didn’t really touch on the names of the speakers or what have you. But yeah, I’ll just go through a few just as I scroll through, just to give you some ideas.
\n\n\n\nSo accessible design patterns is Vitaly. Being a colorblind designer, typography, readability, digital accessibility, building accessibility that works in the global south, hyper accessible web design for the blind, audio accessibility, accessibility lawsuits, gosh, we’re only like six or seven in, and we’ve run the full gamut already. So here we go. Why accessibility matters, video and media your post-production, guide making WordPress events accessible, gosh, that’s fascinating. Auditing WordPress plugin accessibility, demystifying screen readers, technical checklists. That means testing WordPress themes and plugins for accessibility. The future is automated, will it be accessible? Making Gutenberg blocks accessible. I’m going to stop there, but you get the idea. There’s absolutely loads of breadth and depth.
\n\n\n\nIt’s very much the case that if you were to show up, I would guarantee more or less that there’s going to be something which will pique your interest and keep you engaged. The schedule, like I said, is at forward slash schedule.
\n\n\n\nOkay, if that’s the case, I will just say thank you so much for being one of many cogs in this very important wheel. Thank you for doing what is incredibly important work, making the web accessible to far more people. Thank you. That’s quite amazing.
\n\n\n\nSo June and David, thanks for joining us today. Really appreciate it.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:46] June Jiu: Thanks for having us.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:48] David Denedo: Thanks for having us.
\nOn the podcast today we have June Liu and David Denedo.
\n\n\n\nBoth June and David are key members of the WP Accessibility Day organising team, a global, volunteer-driven event focused on improving accessibility in the WordPress ecosystem. June serves as the marketing team co-lead and works with sponsors, bringing her background in project management to keep the event\u2019s efforts on track. David, a web designer and content creator based in London, contributes to the marketing and post-event teams, with his interest in web accessibility stemming from his personal experience as a visually impaired user.
\n\n\n\nWP Accessibility Day has grown significantly in the past few years, uniting a large, international group of volunteers and organisers to drive awareness and practical change in web accessibility. The event is powered by a host of teams, marketing, sponsors, tech and vendor, post-event, translation, speakers, and more, ensuring that everything from live captioning to sign language interpretation is in place.
\n\n\n\nWe begin by learning about June and David\u2019s unique paths to accessibility advocacy, one through direct lived experience, and the other through supporting a loved one with cognitive challenges. Their stories highlight why accessibility can’t be an afterthought and how events like WP Accessibility Day are raising awareness in this important area.
\n\n\n\nWe discuss what attendees can expect at this year\u2019s event, happening from October 15th, 2025. It\u2019s free, fully virtual, and runs for 24 hours, making space for a diverse range of speakers and topics. Whether you\u2019re interested in the moral, legal, or technical cases for accessibility, there\u2019s something for you here, including sessions on accessible design, risk management for agencies, legal compliance, and demonstrations of assistive technologies.
\n\n\n\nJune and David share how the event format, a combination of pre-recorded talks and live chat, mixes polished content with real-time engagement, plus how translation and community involvement are key to its growing impact.
\n\n\n\nIf you want to learn more about how you can make your WordPress sites, and the web in general, more inclusive, or if you\u2019re motivated by global collaboration and personal stories, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nThe WP Accessibility Day Schedule
\n\n\n\nWP Accessibility Day YouTube Channel
\n", "content_text": "Transcript\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, making the web accessible, and the mission behind WP Accessibility Day.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have June Liu and David Denedo.\n\n\n\nBoth June and David are key members of the WP Accessibility Day organizing team, a global, volunteer driven, event focused on improving accessibility in the WordPress ecosystem.\n\n\n\nJune serves as the marketing team co-lead, and works with sponsors, bringing her background in project management to keep the events efforts on track.\n\n\n\nDavid, a web designer and content creator based in London, contributes to the marketing and post-event teams, with his interest in web accessibility stemming from his personal experience as a visually impaired user.\n\n\n\nWP Accessibility Day has grown significantly in the past few years, uniting a large international group of volunteers, and organizers, to drive awareness and practical change in web accessibility.\n\n\n\nThe event is powered by a host of teams, marketing, sponsors, tech and vendor, post-event, translation, speakers, and more, ensuring that everything from live captioning to sign language interpretation is in place.\n\n\n\nWe begin by learning about June and David’s unique paths to accessibility advocacy. One through direct lived experience, and the other through supporting a loved one with cognitive challenges. Their stories highlight why accessibility can’t be an afterthought, and how events like WP Accessibility Day are raising awareness in this important area.\n\n\n\nWe discuss what attendees can expect at this year’s event happening from the 15th of October, 2025. It’s free, fully virtual, and runs for 24 hours, making space for a diverse range of speakers and topics.\n\n\n\nWhether you’re interested in the moral, legal or technical cases for accessibility, there’s something for you here, including sessions on accessible design, risk management for agencies, legal compliance, and demonstrations of assistive technologies.\n\n\n\nJune and David share how the event format, a combination of prerecorded talks and live chat, mixes polished content with real time engagement. Plus how translation and community involvement are key to its growing impact.\n\n\n\nIf you want to learn more about how you can make your WordPress sites, and the web in general, more inclusive, or if you’re motivated by global collaboration or personal stories, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you June Liu and David Denedo.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by two fabulous guests. I’ve got June Liu and David Denedo. Hello both. How are you both doing?\n\n\n\n[00:03:58] June Jiu: Hi there.\n\n\n\n[00:03:59] David Denedo: Hello. I’m doing all right.\n\n\n\n[00:04:00] Nathan Wrigley: Well, it’s very nice to have you both with us. The intention of today’s podcast is to draw attention to something which well, I’m sure many of you will know about. If you don’t know about it, I certainly hope that by the end of this, not only do you know about it, but you are highly engaged, and hopefully going to attend and all of those kind of things, maybe even contribute some of your time, you never know.\n\n\n\nIt’s called WP Accessibility Day, and we’re going to get into that in a moment. Before we do that, I just want to get the little bio, the introduction from both of you, one at a time, just telling us who you are, what your interest is in WordPress and accessibility, I guess.\n\n\n\nSo we’ll keep it nice and short and sweet. So I’ll go to June first. Just let us know who you are, June.\n\n\n\n[00:04:39] June Jiu: Thank you, Nathan. I’m June, I serve on the organising team for WP Accessibility Day as the marketing team co-lead, and I also work on the sponsors team.\n\n\n\nMy background is mostly project management, so my forte right now is helping the team coordinate tasks, and keeping the initiatives on track. Yeah, I coordinate between the sponsors and the marketing team to get the sponsor page prepared. So that’s basically my work with WPAD.\n\n\n\n[00:05:08] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. That’s great. And David, let’s go to you next. Same question really.\n\n\n\n[00:05:11] David Denedo: Hi, I’m David. I’m visually impaired, so that’s why I love accessibility. I work in London as a web designer and a content creator, and I’m part of the WP Accessibility Day organising team, as part of the post-event people. But I’m also in the marketing team, just jumping around, and at least trying to put as much as I can into web accessibility.\n\n\n\nYeah, I got into web accessibility mainly because of some talks I had two years ago from the WP Accessibility Day, and that just encouraged me. And then here we are two years later.\n\n\n\n[00:05:53] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. So, WP Accessibility Day, one thing that just jumped out at me straight away from what you were both talking about there, you both talked about, I’m on the, and then you mentioned a team. That implies that there’s quite a lot of you in the background.\n\n\n\nSo just to give credit where credit’s due, I think it’s always important to make sure that we credit not just the two of you, because there’s probably a lot of people behind this as well. I don’t want to go down the route of missing anybody out. So I wonder if it’s possible for us to just mention the kind of teams and things like that. And if there are any people in particular that you’ve been working with that you do wish to name, caveat emptor, dear listener, I apologise on behalf of everybody on this panel. If we miss anybody’s name out, sorry about that. But let’s go for the, how many teams there are and how big an enterprise is this these days?\n\n\n\n[00:06:39] June Jiu: I don’t think I’ve ever counted how many teams there are, but I’ll list some of them. And David, add yours if I miss any, please.\n\n\n\nThere is a volunteer team that’s, right now, pivotal. That’s their work right now in preparing the event. The event is on October 15th, so we’re just about a month away. So the volunteer team is very active right now in onboarding the volunteers.\n\n\n\nThen we have the tech and vendors. And those are also very active. They work closely with the volunteer team to prepare the day of. So they’re the ones that prepare the Zoom platform for us. So making sure that it all runs well.\n\n\n\nThen we have website, APAC, post event, translation, sponsors, marketing. What else? I feel like there’s a few others that I’m missing. But there is a huge team behind Amber, Bet and Joe, working and making sure that we can make the event as smooth as possible, and take some of the load off of them.\n\n\n\n[00:07:36] Nathan Wrigley: The Amber, the Bet and the Joe that you just mentioned, we have got Amber Hinds, Bet Hannon and Joe Dolson. So there’s three names. Do you have any recollection whether they were the people that kind of kickstarted the event, whenever that was? Because if that was the case, it sounds like it’s gone gangbusters since then with lots of people joining on, and you two being some examples.\n\n\n\n[00:07:56] June Jiu: We do have a pretty big team this year. And yes, you’re right, the history is that Joe Dolson did start WP Accessibility Day. I don’t recall all of the specifics, but I think the second year, Bet, I think it might’ve started with Bet and Joe, and then Amber also came on soon after that.\n\n\n\nBut we’re in our fifth year. It’s very exciting. I joined last year as an organiser and it was a point in my time where I was returning to work. So finding WPAD was kind of a sweet spot for me to test out my skill sets again, get used to being out in the public, so I have a soft spot for them.\n\n\n\n[00:08:35] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Okay, so there’s a few that we’ve rattled off. David, I don’t know if you can fill in any gaps that might have been left there. If so, go now.\n\n\n\n[00:08:42] David Denedo: Yeah, I think those are the main ones that were involved. And I would say Amber Hinds, when she came on board, she brought in a lot of organisation because, you know, with Joe, Joe understands the technical bits of things, but he’s not really so organised. So when she came in, that’s why the team grew exponentially from 2022, I believe when she joined. And then the year after, things just kept spiraling. And then now we have a massive team with lots of volunteers, everybody’s happy to help.\n\n\n\nThe other thing that is quite nice is that there was a nice spread of people who are volunteering. So it’s not just maybe from one region or one country. We are a very nice spread of people, so that’s really nice. So from different parts, from Asia, from Africa, from the Americas and all of that, they’re all wide base.\n\n\n\n[00:09:33] Nathan Wrigley: That’s amazing. Everybody from all over the place. That’s really lovely.\n\n\n\nDavid, in your introduction, in your bio, you described that you are kind of eating your own dog food a little bit here in that, I can’t remember the exact phrasing that you had around your eyes. How did you describe the condition that you have, if that’s the right word?\n\n\n\n[00:09:50] David Denedo: Okay, yeah. So I am visually impaired, so I have very high myopia and high astigmatism. I also struggle to see myself, so that’s one reason why I got really interested when I saw how people are able to make the web more accessible. Because I grew up in a background where we had to adapt to so many stressful things, like there wasn’t really much help for people with accessibility needs.\n\n\n\nSo I didn’t really know there were ways to help people out. Until I came into the whole system and I realised that, oh wow, so you can actually do this to help somebody else. Because I was always struggling, most times I couldn’t see the screen. So I’m always like relying on other people to tell me what’s in front of me, what’s on the screen, and all of that.\n\n\n\nBut then when you start to see that, oh yeah, we can use a screen reader, you can use screen magnifier, you can do this, you can do that, you can just improve a little bit on your website, or even on the reality, makes things more accessible. I was like, wow, I’ve been living under the rock basically.\n\n\n\n[00:10:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s absolutely fascinating. I’m just wondering, June, if you have a similar story to tell in that, is there anything that you would like to share in that regard?\n\n\n\n[00:11:01] June Jiu: I do. My mother had a stroke, and from that she had vascular dementia. And being her caregiver for that many years, and seeing the decline in her loss of independence, because she wasn’t able to navigate the medical system by herself anymore. It was kind of, I learned everything in hindsight. I wish I had the knowledge that I have today to have helped her like 8, 10 years ago. But that drew me in.\n\n\n\nI was telling you how I came back into the workforce, and one of the things that somebody said to me was, hey, there’s this free event. It’s online, you don’t have to leave your house, just try it out. And it was WPAD. And when I was listening to the talks, I was like, yeah, wait a second, you mean that websites can be laid out differently so that it would be easier for somebody to navigate it, even with a mental decline?\n\n\n\nAnd it’s those simple, to us, it initially could be simple, but in the back end it might not be so simple. But just having her read through an online PDF, you know, it was difficult for her to hit the right area, because the PDF lines were so tiny. And her eye, hand coordination was reduced, so she’s not able to hit those lines to fill in the PDF.\n\n\n\nSo for me it was the acknowledgement of, oh my gosh, it doesn’t have to be this way going forward. So it’s me trying to learn as much as I can to direct my future clients into a direction that gives better accessibility to all, and not just their one demographic.\n\n\n\n[00:12:41] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so curious that you’ve both got two stories where the end of it, the target, if you like, is the same, but how you’ve arrived at the things are entirely different.\n\n\n\nDavid, a very personal story about your own life. And June, well, another personal story, but viewed through the prism of somebody else. Almost like standing over somebody’s shoulder and being able to ascertain, well, this person’s not getting what they could out of the internet.\n\n\n\nAnd it strikes me that if you rewound the clock, I don’t know, let’s say 30 years ago before the internet was in any way, shape, or form common, but you could describe what would be available in 30 years time. And you could say, well, so many people, they’d have this little device in their hand, and there’d be these machines where there’d be screens on desktops and things like that.\n\n\n\nAt that moment, you would be thinking to yourself, this is literally the perfect technology to help people who, let’s say for example, are struggling to see. Are unable to get out of the house. There may be an aspect of their body which doesn’t function in the way that your body or my body might function.\n\n\n\nYou would describe that and you’d think, oh, this is like manna from heaven. This is the perfect thing. But it never turned out that way. The internet went in a way entirely leaving those people behind, I think, which was such a lost opportunity.\n\n\n\nSo we’re kind of 25 years or whatever it is into the internet, and we’re now going back and filling in all of the gaps that probably, with the benefit of hindsight, should never have been left.\n\n\n\nI mean, I don’t know that there’s any question in there, but it’s curious that that one technology which could have made the lives of so many people so much more straightforward, really hasn’t serviced those people particularly well until events like this come along and educate the rest of us in how to do it.\n\n\n\n[00:14:23] June Jiu: I think, Nathan, you hit two big points. Everyone’s journey with accessibility is very personal, and unless you experienced it firsthand, or even secondhand in my case, you don’t really see that impact.\n\n\n\nAnd the second part is that the second nail that you hit is that a lot of times it becomes an afterthought. Accessibility becomes the afterthought. I think that with an event like WPAD, we want it to become the foundational, so we’re hoping to make that change.\n\n\n\n[00:14:53] Nathan Wrigley: For example, I’m imagining, again harking back to how the internet could have been, we’ve now got a technology where a small rectangle held in your hand, with a few clicks of a few buttons can enable you to more or less have anything delivered to your front door, in a very short space of time. Which is like, how incredible is that, that that is even possible?\n\n\n\nAnd so this is the perfect answer to people, let’s say for example, who struggle to get out of the front door, and navigate the shops and what have you.\n\n\n\nAnd yet we’re faced with a situation where that sublimely cool technology is impenetrable, and unavailable, to many people because it never got baked in as a requirement, and we can come to that later. David, I’m sorry, I think I interrupted.\n\n\n\n[00:15:36] David Denedo: Oh no. Yeah, what you said is quite right. There is an imbalance in the way things are getting better, but it’s getting better for a certain set of people, but leaving some other people behind. So that is the problem.\n\n\n\nWith the web, it was improving at a very fast rate in terms of how to build the web, but somewhere along the line, people forgot that the whole essence of worldwide web, the man who created the W3C consortium, who basically created the web, the father of the web, his whole idea was that the web should be accessible to all. That was his vision, his goal from the very start.\n\n\n\nBut as people are trying to push the boundaries, sometimes they forget, well, it is quite normal that sometimes unless you are experiencing a certain problem, you will not find a solution to it. So now that we are bringing the awareness to people, then they’re now finding out, okay, we forgot this certain set of people, let’s now incorporate them into our thinking, into our design, into everything.\n\n\n\nSo that is one nice thing about having a conference like WPAD, to help spread awareness to people. Because if you’ve never experienced a certain problem, for example, you’ve never been blind or you’ve never had something with your mobility. You may not really appreciate the struggles of those people. But when they’re able to express it out and explain to you in these conferences, then you can now get that third party understanding, and at least you can incorporate accessibility into your own lifestyle.\n\n\n\n[00:17:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I have a question around that, because I am in the position where my eyes, despite the fact I wear glasses, once the glasses are on my nose, my eyes, functionally, I think you would describe them as normal, and I have good ish hearing, and my body functions. And so, David, you’ve basically just described me.\n\n\n\nIt can be, it has been hard to imagine, what is the lived experience of people who are not in the same boat as I am?\n\n\n\nAnd I did wonder if a part of WPAD, I did wonder if a part of that was that educational piece? Whether it was explaining to people, web developers, people who may not be accustomed to what the conference is about, and what the summit will, you know, the educational pieces. I wondered if there was a piece where you explained, okay, this is the setup that somebody using a screen reader, this is what it feels like to them when they’re on the internet. This is what it would feel like, for example, I don’t know, if you are using a puff and sip system or something like that.\n\n\n\nSo I don’t know if you are providing content like that, but I’d be curious to know whether you explain what the lived experience would be for people who may benefit as a result of the tech talks in the conference.\n\n\n\n[00:18:34] David Denedo: Yeah, so from what we have planned, there are a few of the conference talks that will reflect about accessibility. I think one of them is by Dennis, he’s going to show how a screen reader user will access a website. And then there are also talks about post-production of videos. So some people will incorporate the talks in, or at least talk about the experiences, but it may not be like a full on description.\n\n\n\nBut yeah, I’ve seen a few of the talks that will be happening and they will be incorporating some of the disabilities that we know, like colorblindness, and then like audio and other things. So that will help people to get an awareness of what disabilities are out there, and how to incorporate that into building a more accessible system.\n\n\n\n[00:19:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s really interesting. I suppose the old adage is, you know, a picture says the same as a thousand words or something like that. And being able to perceive what’s going on. I’ve always found that incredibly motivating, because immediately I can see how the internet is a more difficult place than a thousand words could describe and what have you.\n\n\n\nSo, okay, so that’s interesting. And then moving on to the conference itself, I’m presuming that this is aimed squarely at people already using WordPress as their content management system, their website builder. But it is curious because, I don’t know exactly where you land on this, maybe what I’m about to say doesn’t fit at all, but I’m presuming the conference is designed to enable everybody to get some way along the road of producing an accessible website.\n\n\n\nBut presumably also the audience is a little bit of, trying to do what I’ve just described, make the case, the moral case, the legal case for needing to do it as well. So it’s the tech side of how to do it, as well as the sort of the moral and the legal obligations that might sort of follow that in train.\n\n\n\n[00:20:32] June Jiu: Yeah, there is one session that I think you might find interesting along that line, is that it’s talking about accessibility as a risk management for agencies and for business owners. So I think that in particular, I have found it most interesting. With a background in project management, I’ve often had conversations where somebody will say to me, but why do I need to have it assessable? And then you’d have to take that pause and go, okay. But I think that to have the angle of risk management is certainly something that business owners will be able to relate to a little bit better.\n\n\n\nWe also have another one that is talking about what features you should be on a lookout for so that you can kind of mitigate the legal portion of it. I’m not saying that you can avoid it completely, but at least you’re more aware of it.\n\n\n\nSo there’s that one and, of course, our keynote speaker is Vitaly Friedman, from Smashing Magazine. He’s going to come at it from the UI, UX portion of it. So it’s not just all on the development, but it’s also on different aspects of website building and different viewpoints on business and ownership of a website.\n\n\n\n[00:21:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting because there are many threads there aren’t there. If you were just to take the technical side, you could probably do a conference that lasted many, many weeks about the technicalities of how to do it.\n\n\n\nBut it’s curious that you’ve also leaned into the things like, well, the compulsion, the kind of maybe the advent of the ambulance chasing lawyer, dare I say it, who has realised, latched onto the fact that the European Accessibility Act over this side of the Atlantic is now a thing. There is no longer just a moral component to doing the accessibility work on your website. There is now increasingly a big legal hammer, which could be deployed.\n\n\n\nAnd so that alone, I presume will draw a certain audience who, you know, if the only thing that they want to hear about is how to mitigate that problem, well, maybe that’s not the ideal motivation for it, but nevertheless, it is a bit of a carrot and stick, and it will bring some people into the arena, which is good.\n\n\n\n[00:22:41] June Jiu: And here’s why I’d like to give a shout out to a team that I forgot, the speaker team. They’re the ones that put together the application, and they vetted through all the applications to see what would be more interesting for everybody.\n\n\n\nThe rating system is, when they go through the rating system, they kind of make it anonymous of who the presenter would be. So it makes it, you are really looking at what the topic is being talked about, rather than who might be presenting. And that gives us an edge in finding topics that might not be as well known and from areas that are less featured.\n\n\n\nSo we do have a couple of speakers that are coming from the continent of Africa, and those are always very interesting to hear. In the past, because of the location and the technical availability, there had been technical issues. But this year we’re having it so that the sessions are all prerecorded. So that will kind of help with the presentation of it, the clarity. But each of the speakers will be in the chat and they’ll be available to answer questions in the chat.\n\n\n\nSo I think that’s an interesting fold into this year’s event, to have that feature in there so that the speaker is not just presenting, but they’re in the chat room answering questions. I think that adds another layer to the event.\n\n\n\n[00:24:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think what’s really nice about that as well is that if everything’s prerecorded, the speaker will get the chance to create and then re-edit, and then adapt and modify. And what you end up with hopefully is the best version of that talk.\n\n\n\nWith the best will in the world, some people are not as great as others at doing live things. You know, they go down rabbit holes, and they lose their train of thought or what have you. This completely gets rid of that problem. They can do it as many times as they like and give you the best version.\n\n\n\nBut also that lovely aspect of, they suddenly become available to have a conversation in the chat, whereas before, they was presenting, you know, and presumably needed to go and have a bit of a lie down afterwards. Whereas in this situation, much more relaxed, you can ask them the questions.\n\n\n\nI really appreciate that format. I think that’s actually, that’s my preferred way of a summit, kind of like this, the Accessibility Day in this case, being put together. I think that’s very forward thinking. And I hope that you continue doing it that way because I think the presenters probably appreciate it. Your audience will appreciate it, because it will be polished, and also you get to chat with the person involved. Anything on that, David?\n\n\n\n[00:25:11] David Denedo: Yeah. Another thing we forgot to talk about is the translation team. So as the talks are being presented, there are also some nice volunteers who are translating it into other languages to have as much diversity as possible. Because some people, English is not their first language, so we have a team trying to convert to like French. We have the one for Spanish. There are also some other ones, even like Hebrew and so many other ones. So it’s a very nice feeling to have so many translations and everybody is doing their bit.\n\n\n\nThat is one thing I love about WP Accessibility, the entire organising team is the fact that everybody’s skill level, it doesn’t matter your skill level, you can always put in something. So that is something great. Whether you are a web designer, you are just a business owner, you can sponsor the event. If you are good with multilingual, you can be part of the translation. You can apply to speak.\n\n\n\nThe whole talks is not all technical, like you already mentioned. The talks are varied, so we talk about risk management, we talk about designers can give their own bits. People who are in business can give the business case for accessibility. So it’s all, it’s a lovely spread and I really love it.\n\n\n\n[00:26:30] Nathan Wrigley: There really is a lovely spread. I mean, firstly, one thing that I should have done right top of the show, which I didn’t, and I will mention it because I record a preamble before we actually start talking, one thing I will do is I’ll read into the record the URL. But I’ll do that now as well.\n\n\n\nSo the URL is fabulous, by the way. It’s just ideal. If you are returning customer, if you like, it’s wpaccessibility.day. Just one more time, wpaccessibility, the regular spelling, no underscores, no hyphens or anything like that, dot day.\n\n\n\nAnd then as a subdomain you are going to put in the year. So in this case it’s going to be 2 0 2 5, 2025.wpaccessibility.day. And you’re going to find all the different bits and pieces over there.\n\n\n\nAnd one of the things that I noticed about the getting involved side of things is, yeah, there’s the whole sponsorship thing. So you can become a sponsor if you’d like to do that. But also you can volunteer, you can become a media partner. If you feel philanthropic and you just want to donate some of your money into the project, that is also an option. And then there’s a whole tab for the attendees as well. It’s under community. There’s an attendee section as well.\n\n\n\nSo it sounds like it’s not just this little event which flicks on for a couple of days and then turns off again. I mean, certainly from your side, it sounds like there’s a whole fun community of things happening in the background.\n\n\n\nAnd really that’s the glue that binds a successful project together. If it was all very uninteresting and dry and a bit boring and you were all feeling under pressure, it wouldn’t have so many legs, it wouldn’t be able to run for this many years. But I’m guessing that you’ve had nice experiences, right, in the background?\n\n\n\n[00:28:04] June Jiu: Oh, yes. Yes. We have a lot of fun. But thank you for mentioning those links.\n\n\n\n[00:28:08] Nathan Wrigley: No, I think that’s wonderful. So again, go and check that out.\n\n\n\nThe other thing to say though is, let’s talk about how it’s actually happening. Obviously you’ve described that it’s going to be prerecorded videos. How are you making that content available? What’s going to be the platform of choice, or how are you going to get it?\n\n\n\nIs there a way that you can, I don’t know, for example, download all of the bits and pieces so you can watch them in your own time? Is it an event which is spanning a single day, you know, a 24 hour time?\n\n\n\n[00:28:35] June Jiu: Yeah, we do say that it is 24 hours, but all the content and the videos, they’re going to be available for replay after we go through the post-event production. Either from each subdomain, as you mentioned, the 2025 will be available on the 2025.wpaccessibility.day.\n\n\n\nLast year’s event is available on the 2024.wpaccessibility.day. So you can rewatch them. It’s also available through YouTube. So if you need some background noise, I often do it. I just turn on that and let it roll.\n\n\n\nI have to say, it is a lot of information to absorb, but I do find it to be very resourceful. I know that one of David’s work this year is to put in chapters for these past event videos. So that has been very helpful to me when I find the relevant video from the past. And I said, I remember somebody saying something about that. Now with the chapters there, it’s much easier to navigate and find it. So good work, David. Thank you.\n\n\n\n[00:29:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, indeed. Good work. But what’s this, in the show notes that were shared before we actually joined the call, it describes, it says here, and I don’t know which one of you wrote it, but it says, the event will be hosted through Zoom events. And Zoom is capitalised, so I presume it’s the platform Zoom that we’re all familiar with. I don’t know what a Zoom event is. Does that differ from a regular Zoom call? Is there some key difference?\n\n\n\n[00:29:59] June Jiu: Yes. It’s different from like a Zoom webinar or a Zoom call. It’s a platform that has a lobby. You’re registering on our site, but then on event day you’ll be able to go into the Zoom event.\n\n\n\nThere’ll be a lobby and there’ll be a chat room, that’s where you can find all the information for the event. So, it’s not like a traditional webinar where there’s just one link in order to go and join it, to join that session, or that sector of sections. So now you can go in and when that hour pops up, that session would pop up.\n\n\n\n[00:30:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. Right. So you go to this one central place, and everything’s kind of bound in this one, so as soon as you’re in, you’re in, basically, and you don’t have to keep clicking links in emails to find the latest session, which is going live.\n\n\n\n[00:30:44] June Jiu: Exactly.\n\n\n\n[00:30:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That’s really nice. Dave, anything to add to that?\n\n\n\n[00:30:47] David Denedo: Yeah. And you also have access to like swag. Everything will be in the event, so you can get some of the sponsor swag, you can chat with the speakers, you can chat with other event members, all within the same platform. So not having to jump from one platform to another platform to chat and then come back. You can lose people that way, but now everything all packaged together.\n\n\n\n[00:31:12] June Jiu: I wanted to give a shout out to the platform itself. It allows us to do live captioning. A lot of times with webinars, it is just automated caption. We actually do have live captioners typing into Zoom. That is another layer to WP Accessibility Day that is not a feature in other events.\n\n\n\n[00:31:32] Nathan Wrigley: No kidding, yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:31:33] June Jiu: Yes. And the other big one, expense for us is the American Sign Language interpreters. So they will be also on hand on event day, and there’s a team of them that will be available to us, and they do the ASL.\n\n\n\nThis year one of our speakers is from Australia and he will be bringing in Australian Sign Language, which is different from American Sign Language. So there’s another layer to the accessibility. We understand either British Sign Language or American Sign Language but, yeah, there’s Australian Sign Language too.\n\n\n\n[00:32:08] Nathan Wrigley: You drop this as if it’s really straightforward, but when my head starts spinning on the technicalities there, the idea of injecting real time, typed transcriptions, somehow overlaying that into the video, there’s a whole technical piece there.\n\n\n\nAnd then you’ve got a sign language person. That’s a whole nother layer as well. That all needs, presumably, I don’t know if that’s going to be done live or filmed. Maybe there’s an opportunity.\n\n\n\n[00:32:33] June Jiu: It’s live.\n\n\n\n[00:32:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. So all of that, there are lots and lots of moving parts here.\n\n\n\n[00:32:37] June Jiu: That’s why we have the technical and vendor team, and the volunteer team. They’re pivotal on event day to have those two teams in place.\n\n\n\n[00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask, because I know there’ll be some people that are curious about the, how to describe it, the business status, let’s put it that way. And maybe this is not something that either of you can answer, I don’t know.\n\n\n\nWhat’s the structure of WP Accessibility Day? So, for example, if I was to donate, in the UK we call these things charities. I think in the US the correct term is non-profit. So if I was to donate, do I have some sort of assurance that the money isn’t going to end up in some, I don’t even want to say the words because I know that nobody’s ethics are this poorly thought through, but I’m going to say it anyway. Just want to make sure that the money doesn’t end in somebody’s back pocket.\n\n\n\nWhere did the donations end up? How is the structure of this organisation ensuring that everything is out in the open and clear and easy to understand?\n\n\n\n[00:33:28] June Jiu: Well, this year WordPress Accessibility Day was recognised by IRS as the 501 C3 public charity. So based upon that, a hundred percent of our income that comes in goes right back into the event.\n\n\n\nOrganisers and volunteers are not paid. Every one of us who are working on this is out of the goodness of our heart, and what time availability that we have.\n\n\n\nThe one caveat I will say, some of our translators are paid because translation is an income based business. And this is a recent development. In the past we’ve had to ask them to please donate their time to do the translation. But now we have a little bit more security to be able to pay them.\n\n\n\nPeople who have the ability to speak multiple languages, look into the translation because if you aren’t able to participate as an organiser or a volunteer, donating your time to translate or being paid for be translators for us is a huge difference for us to bring all these sessions available to a greater audience.\n\n\n\n[00:34:36] Nathan Wrigley: I think everybody would understand that there’s, that is how that industry works, isn’t it? When you go to a WordCamp, for example, and you see the people doing the live captioning, or you see the people standing on the stage and they’re doing the sign language, I think it’s understood that that is what they do for a living.\n\n\n\n[00:34:51] June Jiu: And I would be remiss not to give credit to our sponsors too. We have many sponsors who are repeat sponsors year after year, and they support us with their sponsorship. We are very appreciative of that.\n\n\n\nThis year we have some new ones and a lot of repeating ones from every range. Our higher level are of course now closed, but we still have the bronze level, which is at a $500, or a micro sponsor which is at $150. And the difference between that is the Bronze has a webpage, a dedicated webpage for their company, and the micro sponsor has a logo on our sponsor page.\n\n\n\n[00:35:28] Nathan Wrigley: So as of recording, and maybe that will keep going right up to the deadline, I don’t know, so if what you’ve heard has made you feel that you’d like to be involved on a sponsorship level, bronze is available, that one is $500, and there’s a micro one. And obviously you can go onto the 2025 Accessibility Day website and discover for yourself what’s available in there.\n\n\n\nSo we found out what’s happening. We found out why it’s being done. We found out some of the people that are being involved. I suppose what we ought to do at this point is drive people toward the schedule.\n\n\n\nWell, you’ve announced it already, but let’s just make sure we’re doing it again. The date for this event is when?\n\n\n\n[00:36:03] David Denedo: So it’ll be happening on October 15th to the 16th, and it’ll be 24 hour long event. So it’s going to go right up for 24 hours. We have the speakers all in the schedule, so you can go ahead and check it out. The link will be in the shownotes.\n\n\n\n[00:36:19] Nathan Wrigley: It will. Yeah, that’s absolutely right. So the 15th of October, it’s a 24 hour event. So I don’t know if you start in the sort of Pacific neck of the woods, that seems to be the traditional way that things are done. So Australia, they’re the sort of first people to receive the content, and then it just goes around the globe. And maybe the people in, on the west coast of the US and Hawaii and what have you, they get the content more towards the end of the day. I assume that’s how it’s working.\n\n\n\nBut if you go to the URL that we mentioned earlier and just add forward slash schedule to it, you will be able to see through opening remarks from Joe Dolson right at the beginning of the day, right through the keynotes and everything, to the closing remarks, or at least the last presentation, which is happening some 23 or so hours later.\n\n\n\nI think that’s all the questions that I had. Is there anything that you feel it would’ve been important to say that we didn’t say? If that’s the case, please feel free to use this platform now.\n\n\n\n[00:37:09] June Jiu: The event is free, but we do ask that you register, so that we do have a good count of how many people are coming. So please sign up at 2025.wpaccessibility.day and you’ll find the registration link there.\n\n\n\n[00:37:26] Nathan Wrigley: Is that a mere request or is that a requirement? In order to gain access, do you need to have, yeah, okay. So I’m getting a nod of the head there from June. So go and register in order to access the content as well. David, anything we missed?\n\n\n\n[00:37:38] David Denedo: Yeah, the only thing is that I’m excited for Vitaly Friedman, because he has a very wide following, so he will bring more people into our event, hopefully. And he is going to be talking about accessible designs, which is something quite powerful. Because in this day and age, people always associate accessibility with very boring designs. But he’s coming to show you that you can have very beautiful designs in 2025 and still be accessible. So that’s a very important topic.\n\n\n\n[00:38:09] Nathan Wrigley: Well, the WP Accessibility Day website is an example of that. It’s actually a really tasteful, beautiful design. I’m going to guess that it’s, you know, the accessibility credentials of it are fairly strong. Let’s just, make that assumption, but it’s beautifully designed.\n\n\n\nYeah, we didn’t really touch on the names of the speakers or what have you. But yeah, I’ll just go through a few just as I scroll through, just to give you some ideas.\n\n\n\nSo accessible design patterns is Vitaly. Being a colorblind designer, typography, readability, digital accessibility, building accessibility that works in the global south, hyper accessible web design for the blind, audio accessibility, accessibility lawsuits, gosh, we’re only like six or seven in, and we’ve run the full gamut already. So here we go. Why accessibility matters, video and media your post-production, guide making WordPress events accessible, gosh, that’s fascinating. Auditing WordPress plugin accessibility, demystifying screen readers, technical checklists. That means testing WordPress themes and plugins for accessibility. The future is automated, will it be accessible? Making Gutenberg blocks accessible. I’m going to stop there, but you get the idea. There’s absolutely loads of breadth and depth.\n\n\n\nIt’s very much the case that if you were to show up, I would guarantee more or less that there’s going to be something which will pique your interest and keep you engaged. The schedule, like I said, is at forward slash schedule.\n\n\n\nOkay, if that’s the case, I will just say thank you so much for being one of many cogs in this very important wheel. Thank you for doing what is incredibly important work, making the web accessible to far more people. Thank you. That’s quite amazing.\n\n\n\nSo June and David, thanks for joining us today. Really appreciate it.\n\n\n\n[00:39:46] June Jiu: Thanks for having us.\n\n\n\n[00:39:48] David Denedo: Thanks for having us.\n\n\n\n\nOn the podcast today we have June Liu and David Denedo.\n\n\n\nBoth June and David are key members of the WP Accessibility Day organising team, a global, volunteer-driven event focused on improving accessibility in the WordPress ecosystem. June serves as the marketing team co-lead and works with sponsors, bringing her background in project management to keep the event\u2019s efforts on track. David, a web designer and content creator based in London, contributes to the marketing and post-event teams, with his interest in web accessibility stemming from his personal experience as a visually impaired user.\n\n\n\nWP Accessibility Day has grown significantly in the past few years, uniting a large, international group of volunteers and organisers to drive awareness and practical change in web accessibility. The event is powered by a host of teams, marketing, sponsors, tech and vendor, post-event, translation, speakers, and more, ensuring that everything from live captioning to sign language interpretation is in place.\n\n\n\nWe begin by learning about June and David\u2019s unique paths to accessibility advocacy, one through direct lived experience, and the other through supporting a loved one with cognitive challenges. Their stories highlight why accessibility can’t be an afterthought and how events like WP Accessibility Day are raising awareness in this important area.\n\n\n\nWe discuss what attendees can expect at this year\u2019s event, happening from October 15th, 2025. It\u2019s free, fully virtual, and runs for 24 hours, making space for a diverse range of speakers and topics. Whether you\u2019re interested in the moral, legal, or technical cases for accessibility, there\u2019s something for you here, including sessions on accessible design, risk management for agencies, legal compliance, and demonstrations of assistive technologies.\n\n\n\nJune and David share how the event format, a combination of pre-recorded talks and live chat, mixes polished content with real-time engagement, plus how translation and community involvement are key to its growing impact.\n\n\n\nIf you want to learn more about how you can make your WordPress sites, and the web in general, more inclusive, or if you\u2019re motivated by global collaboration and personal stories, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\nWP Accessibility Website\n\n\n\nThe WP Accessibility Day Team\n\n\n\nThe WP Accessibility Day Schedule\n\n\n\nWP Accessibility Day YouTube Channel", "date_published": "2025-10-01T10:00:00-04:00", "date_modified": "2025-09-29T07:36:48-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/187-June-Liu-and-David-Denedo-on-Making-the-Web-Accessible-The-Mission-Behind-WP-Accessibility-Day.jpg", "tags": [ "accessibility", "podcast", "WP Accessibility Day" ], "summary": "In this episode of WP Tavern, host Nathan Wrigley chats with June Liu and David Denedo about WP Accessibility Day, a global 24-hour online event dedicated to making WordPress and the web more accessible. They discuss the event\u2019s diverse organising teams, personal stories that drive their passion for accessibility, and the importance of embedding accessibility from the start. The 2025 event features pre-recorded sessions, live chat with speakers, translation support, and practical sessions on both the technical and business aspects of web accessibility. Registration is free, and everyone is encouraged to participate. If you want to learn more about how you can make your WordPress sites, and the web in general, more inclusive, or if you\u2019re motivated by global collaboration and personal stories, this episode is for you.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2152785/c1e-90r1rudpvp6bwppqp-ww8v8gooag05-8hws58.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=199649", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/186-dave-winer-on-decentralisation-wordpress-and-open-publishing", "title": "#186 \u2013 Dave Winer on Decentralisation, WordPress and Open Publishing", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case Decentralisation, WordPress and Open Publishing.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Dave Winer. Dave’s journey into the heart of Silicon Valley began in the 1980s when he left Wisconsin and moved to California with two products and a dream to achieve fame and fortune in the world of technology. Driven by a deep belief that real communication involves people truly connecting, he set out to make his mark.
\n\n\n\nEarly on, he found himself in a memorable meeting with Steve Jobs. Both were in their early twenties, bursting with ambition and self-assurance. Their encounter was fiery and competitive, yet it marked the start of Dave’s lifelong mission to wire the world together, not just with technology, but by bringing people closer through it.
\n\n\n\nIf you’ve ever subscribed to a blog, listened to a podcast, or shared your thoughts online, chances are you’ve benefited from Dave’s pioneering work. He’s the developer behind influential technologies like RSS, and a longtime advocate for open, user owned, publishing platforms.
\n\n\n\nHe describes himself as someone who wrote the first versions of lots of software, wants to work with everyone, still has big ideas, he likes things to be open from top to bottom and doesn’t care for greedy people.
\n\n\n\nToday we’re talking about the vision, history, and future of the open web. Dave reminisces about the origins of today’s internet, the early days when idealism and collaboration were at the web’s core. He shares stories from his career, the rise and fall of early software startups, and how the initial spirit of community slowly gave way to the walled gardens of big tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
\n\n\n\nBut the conversation isn’t just about nostalgia. It’s a call to action for reclaiming the internet’s potential. Dave explains what went wrong with the evolution of the social web, why he thinks blogging tech like RSS just need more love, and how the influx of money and centralisation stifled the creativity and interoperability the web was built for.
\n\n\n\nYou’ll also get to hear about Dave’s latest efforts to reignite those original web ideals. He reveals the thinking behind Wordland, a minimalist and powerful writing tool for WordPress users that puts freedom, portability, and open protocols front and centre.
\n\n\n\nDave also lays out his Textcasting manifesto, challenging platforms to truly support writers with features like unlimited length, markdown support, and true ownership of content, without the need for permission or platform lock-in.
\n\n\n\nDave truly is a pioneer of the internet, and is certainly not finished yet. He’s putting WordPress at the centre of many of his future endeavors.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re passionate about owning your content, deeply curious about web history, or looking for inspiration on how technology can empower rather than control, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Dave Winer.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast today by Dave Winer. Hello Dave.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:26] Dave Winer: Hey, how you doing?
\n\n\n\n[00:04:27] Nathan Wrigley: I confess, I’m going to get this out the way and I’m going to put it on the record because Dave Winer has been in my brain for about 20 years or more. And I’m going to allow Dave the opportunity to do a bio. He may lean into that and tell us many, many things, or he may not. But I would just like to offer my profound congratulations for many of the things that I literally have as the foundational bits of my working life.
\n\n\n\nMany of those bits are because of you, and I would like to express my enormous thanks for the way that you’ve done that, the stuff that you’ve built, the method in which you deployed that, and the way that you didn’t tie it up to a subscription model.
\n\n\n\nAnd, with that out of the way, I would just like to offer you the opportunity to introduce yourself. So do you mind just little potted bio, two or three minutes tops, something like that.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:18] Dave Winer: Wow. I didn’t realize I was gonna be doing this. Well, I’m a software developer and a blogger. I started software development when I was a grad student in the 1970s, at the University of Wisconsin. And I immediately knew that this is what I was going to do in my whole career. Up to that point, I didn’t know.
\n\n\n\nIt just fit. Everything about developing software, and communication with software. I used to call it communication with a big C. So you talk about communication with a little C is like wiring everything together. But the big C, its people getting connected. And that was going back to the, I guess the early eighties.
\n\n\n\nI moved from Wisconsin to California to Silicon Valley, and I had two products. My goal was to go to California and achieve fame and fortune, and it didn’t happen all at once at least. One of my first meetings was with Steve Jobs, and we were both exactly the same age, 23 or something like that, and very arrogant and full of ourselves, and we ended up insulting each other, and I have a lot of regrets about that because I had the two products and he wanted the wrong one. And I told him, man, that’s the wrong one. You should want the other one.
\n\n\n\nAnd anyway, so I ended up hooking up with a company that eventually became the biggest software company in the valley and then exploded. And then I started my own company. And that was a pretty long haul. But we got there. We made software for the Apple 2, the IBM PC, the Macintosh.
\n\n\n\nWe had a really big hit in 1986, product called MORE. It was a really good product, but it also hit the market at exactly the right time. And then I sold the company and then I started developing software on my own, because that’s really what I always wanted to do. I was a CEO because I had to be, because nobody else understood the idea, that we were doing there.
\n\n\n\nAnd that’s actually been the story of my life, is like when I start something, I tell everybody how great it’s gonna be, and then they look at me like, what are you talking about? I have no idea. Or, that’s not useful. Or AI, this is what they say today. Oh, AI is gonna do that for us. And I go, no, I actually, I don’t think it is.
\n\n\n\nAnd so one thing led to another. I started making software on the web. I saw the web as complete liberation. Because the tech industry had gotten so congested with the power of the big companies. This happens periodically by the way. You end up, they get, they lock themselves in, and then they just protect their lock in. And then nothing happens for a while, and then an explosion happens, usually. A new company comes along with a big idea, and the big companies don’t understand it, and all of a sudden. And that was the web.
\n\n\n\nAnd there were things before that. The PC was like that to some extent. The Mac was. Rock and roll was like that for sure. The Beatles fit into that pattern of things that fundamentally changed everything. And the web was one of those things too.
\n\n\n\nAnd it blew the doors off the tech industry. Whenever a big tech company tried to dominate the web, it just didn’t work. It didn’t work. Until eventually it did work, and now we’re pretty thoroughly dominated. We got dominated by Facebook, by Google. Twitter, very influential company, and a few others, and now it’s Bluesky. They’re out there telling them that everybody, that they’re decentralized and whatever. They say they’re on the web, they’re not on the web.
\n\n\n\nThe web means something. It means that I can add a feature that hooks into your product and I don’t need your permission to do it. That’s what you have to have for the web.
\n\n\n\nYou also have to have links. If you don’t give the person writing in your environment the ability to put hyperlinks in their text, you can’t say you’re the web. Because you’ve deprived the writers of the one most essential thing that they need, the ability to defer to somebody else as the expert on this topic, and build these structures. Twitter, took that out. They just said, we don’t need that. Or put character limits on it. Or they said no titles. Or you can’t edit your post, or you can’t put a podcast, you can’t put an audio on there, on a post. And they add an API and that’s really nice, but it’s still, you don’t get that freedom. There’s nothing like that there.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:40] Nathan Wrigley: I watched the internet develop in much the same way as I might watch a game of, we call it football, you may call it soccer, in that I’d be in the crowd and all of these characters are moving around on the field and doing important things and it just develops.
\n\n\n\nThe game is afoot and it develops and it’s like evolution. Curiously, you were one of the people on the field kind of making these decisions. And so with the benefit of hindsight, looking back, it sounds like there’s a part of you which, not just a part of you, I feel like it might be a big part, which regrets a lot of the way that it has developed. The beginnings of the internet, there seem to be more, I don’t know, blue sky thinking, let’s put it that way.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:19] Dave Winer: We actually called it that. We actually called it that, believe it or not, a piece of blue sky. The clouds, sky is overcast and then there’s a little bit of blue sky and we’re all gonna go there. Yeah, it was like that, but what was wrong was my model was wrong. My model for humanity.
\n\n\n\nOur model, the early web people. We had this very idealistic idea of what humanity was, and how they would take advantage of the opportunity. And that includes the entrepreneurs, because they create structures where people can be very abusive to each other, and they don’t do anything really about that.
\n\n\n\nAnd then the people, and we still live with this, in fact, well this comes up sometimes people say, you’re being altruistic. I’ve heard that said, and I reject that. I’m not being altruistic. If anything trying to set an example for what we have to do collectively in order to have freedom.
\n\n\n\nIf you don’t, if you don’t enable your competitors, you don’t deserve users, is my feeling. And in fact, you can see that playing out in the WordPress community right now, right? That is what the big controversy seems to be. I’m gonna step back from it. I’m not part of the WordPress community. It’s not that I’m not really, I’m not. And I’m an observer of all of this, and I see it all playing out in a sort of predictable way.
\n\n\n\nBut as I think you said earlier, we end up in a pretty good place and I put this in one of the pieces I wrote recently about the whole why I am betting so heavy on WordPress, is that whatever you can say about Automattic and Matt and whatever, he didn’t lock you in. You have freedom of movement. All your data can move with you wherever you want. Anybody can add a feature to WordPress if they want. It probably won’t get into the main distribution, but you can build on it.
\n\n\n\nAnd I have proven that by building on it. I never hit any dead ends. What I also see there, this is another plus for this platform is, whoever it is that’s building this, and I know there’s some contention about that, it really believes in not breaking developers, and that is super important.
\n\n\n\nThat’s one of the basic, also fundamental principles of the web, is that a website that you built in 1995, you should still be able to read it in 2025. And you can, except Google doesn’t think you should. Google as recently as 2014, that’s when HTTPS came along and became something that people wanted to use. Up until that point, HTTP was perfectly fine. And then one day Google and the EFF decided no more of this. It was very bad development. It set a bad precedent, but that’s a sidebar. That’s not the real thing.
\n\n\n\nWhat’s really going on here is, I think there is now an opportunity in the, what we call, I call the Twitter, like world, I won’t call it the social web, because it isn’t the web. That’s not fair, they can’t. They should support the web before they get to call themselves the web. And they’ve just inherited all the limits that Twitter put on there.
\n\n\n\nThey had the opportunity to relax those limits, but they have no incentive to do it. I could sit there, like you said, as an observer. See, that’s what I’ve been too, for the last, whatever, 16 years. 2006, it’s 2025, 19 years, sorry, for the last 19 years. With all due humility. I’m a pretty freaking good developer, and I really work very energetically, and I love making products for users, and I’m stuck. There’s no place for me to go. And I can’t accept that. That’s all I want to say, is I don’t accept that, and I found a way to work around it, that’s what I’m doing. And WordPress is key to it, central to it.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:11] Nathan Wrigley: We’ll come onto that whole project in a minute, which is really fascinating. But I’m just gonna rewind the clock and go back to the very beginnings of what we might now call the internet.
\n\n\n\nAn academic enterprise, really, it felt like. A bunch of academics. Maybe you’ll go back as far as CERN and have those discussions about just wanting to send academic documentation to one another, and, then the hyperlink came along, and then all of a sudden this world of possibility opened up, and it felt as if there was so much positive potential there.
\n\n\n\nI remember the beginnings of the internet, the burgeoning of it, people beginning to talk about it, people starting to use it on desktops and things like that. And there was this real sense positivity that it was, like it was, it was this blue sky thing. For the first time in humanity’s history everybody had a way to interconnect.
\n\n\n\nWe don’t need to go into what happened, but at some point, through a whole series of dominoes falling, we get all these walled gardens, and now the internet seems like anything other than blue sky. It feels like there’s just these silos everywhere. You’ve got a Meta silo, and you’ve got an X silo, and you’ve got a TikTok silo, and a YouTube silo.
\n\n\n\nAnd I think, with hand on heart, almost everybody would be able to point to at least some downside to that. Sure, you might enjoy consuming YouTube videos, but there may be a flip side to that. You end up doing it at the wrong time of the day. I think anybody could agree that people’s passions get inflamed to the point of getting a bit out of hand on the internet.
\n\n\n\nThis was never what it was supposed to be. And so going back to my question from a minute ago, where I was implying that maybe there’s some sense of regret. If you could go back and move the jigsaw pieces, or move the chess pieces differently, I expect you would. I’d expect you’d be shouting a bit louder about the need for things to be not walled in, and maybe things would be different.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:58] Dave Winer: I don’t think anybody hears that. I think I shouted it pretty loud. I repeated it over and over. I don’t have any regret about that, I think I did a tremendous amount of that, but the problem is, I can’t call it regret. I think that collectively there was a blogging community prior to WordPress. There was. There were competitive products. And then in 1999, it all clicked with RSS, and that gave us a way, we had ways, by the way, to find the updates on blogs before that.
\n\n\n\nWe had a site called weblogs.com, and it would go looking around the blogosphere, had a list. There weren’t that many blogs, okay. So it would look at all of them, see if they updated, and if they updated it would put it at the top of the list. And so bloggers were just reloading that page all day long. And it worked. You still had to find the new post, but that wasn’t too hard because they were at the top of the page, right.
\n\n\n\nAnd then after that, with Netscape, we got RSS going. And that led to a whole other generation of that kind of stuff. We had it, it was going. But what killed it. Killed is too strong a word. What put a limit on it, what said that what you described would happen is that, do you remember the .com boom, right?
\n\n\n\nAll of a sudden it wasn’t just a place for idealists to screw around and try out new ideas and everything. It was a place to come and get rich, and so it attracted all those people who wanted to get rich. That’s all they wanted. They didn’t care about what they had to do to get rich, and that attracted the professional investors, the venture capitalists. They want to get rich, it’s totally okay to do whatever they have to do to get rich. It just simply, it is their business to get rich, and it’s hard to blame them for that. And then, here’s the key point, they wouldn’t work with each other.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:50] Dave Winer: They would not work with each other. And I just wrote a piece this morning, on my blog, and it said in retrospect, it was a retrospective thing about RSS, because that’s becoming an issue again, and it said what RSS needed was love. It needed to be loved and nurtured, and fed and taken care of, and the users had to be given features that were collective across all the products. So that if you wanted to subscribe to a feed, you didn’t have to memorize a complicated process, involving pasting URLs or reading the HTML source, or all the crazy stuff that became, until Twitter, what choice was there, right? So people had to do it, but it was tremendous weakness.
\n\n\n\nAnd Twitter came in and just completely blew it out. Because in Twitter subscribing was a single click. And we’re gonna hit that again now. If I’m successful in what I do, we’re gonna hit it again, and we’re gonna have to answer that question differently.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was just gonna say, so many of the underpinnings that could have made the internet into a different place never went away, they just got ignored. Maybe that’s the wrong word, but they just got forgotten about. And so we wholeheartedly subscribed to X, formally Twitter. We wholeheartedly jumped in on Facebook, because they offered this amazing level of convenience. And of course, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see how maybe that was a catastrophic failure, but the time.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:18] Dave Winer: I have no regrets about that either, Twitter was amazing.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:21] Nathan Wrigley: It was so revolutionary, you could suddenly connect with people that you’d lost touch with many years ago.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:26] Dave Winer: There you go. You put your finger right on it. It wasn’t that Twitter was so great. It’s that look at all the people. One of the first experiences I had on Twitter that really, really showed me what the difference is, is that there was just this random guy. I would meet him. We had our own community too, by the way. And so we would go to conferences and, I watched the WordCamp conference from afar, right? And I said, oh, I know all those people. Because in our community we had people like that. Only there only about 30 years younger than I was, than we were, but I recognize it.
\n\n\n\nAnd, meet somebody at a conference that’s, now I know what he’s doing with his family. I know what his sports are, who his team is, what’s the weather like where they live. And how does he describe it? There’s all these inputs that you simply don’t get from seeing somebody couple of times a year. It’s nice and everything, but this was a different thing altogether.
\n\n\n\nAnd I still use Facebook. I don’t use Twitter very much anymore. But, I still have my account. I didn’t delete it. But I use Facebook. I will never stop using Facebook because my friends from childhood are there. Where am I gonna get new friends from childhood? That’s not happening, right. They have their advantages. But they’re a really good example of people that refuse to do anything to help anything other than their mission to make more money. I’ve had these conversations with executives at Facebook, and we’ve had a couple of, fits and starts a couple of them, twice.
\n\n\n\nThey were gonna add RSS support in and out, to Facebook. Kind of like what they’re doing with Threads and ActivityPub, right? Or the Fediverse. Yeah, I’m trying to forget that because I don’t believe in it, to be honest with you, but I do believe in Mastodon. I think that’s what we’re really doing here. And I think they blow a lot of smoke at these things, and they, make them seem like, they shouldn’t make them appear to be more than they are because we need to have both of those things. There’s no reason we can’t have both, but that means you have to be a little bit altruistic to use that word. You may feel like you’re being an altruist, but then look at the times we live in.
\n\n\n\nIn the United States, we are very worried about what’s coming or what’s here right now. And we’re all asking, what can we do? What can we do? One of the things you can do is let down, open up to your inner altruist, start doing things that aren’t just about putting food on the table or getting ahead in your career.
\n\n\n\nDo things that make connecting with other people a lot easier, and more free. Because those services are now owned by people that go to dinner with the government of the United States. You’ve never seen a more clear picture of what we’re up against. You think that somebody from the White House calls Mark Zuckerberg and says, get Dave Winer off of Facebook. I guarantee you I’m off Facebook in 10 seconds. That’s who we are, depending on their honor, I think that’s a really bad bet. We’re all gonna have that choice.
\n\n\n\nAnd at the same time, people who know how to work with WordPress are gonna have an amazing advantage, because I see WordPress as being comparable to the Mastodon server and the Bluesky server, and Bluesky doesn’t give you a server to install yet, but Mastodon does. And, I didn’t install it. I had a friend because I tried and I couldn’t get it to go. That is what it’s gonna take. And WordPress is a lot easier to install, and it’s a lot more mature, and it really works and the APIs aren’t gonna break. So we got a much better foundation to build on.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:04] Nathan Wrigley: Going back to what you said a moment ago about, it’s not either or. What we’re imagining here, I think is, you keep your Facebook, and you keep your X, and all of those things can go. Fine, carry on using those, but there’s an alternative, which many people may prefer. There’s a whole kind of ethos behind that, and a whole philosophy behind that. But underpinning it all, things like Mastodon, and potentially WordPress, and we’ll get into that, are a bunch of APIs and protocols and things like that, many of which you were very much involved in the creation of things like RSS, and thank you for that.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:38] Dave Winer: More altruism there, huh?
\n\n\n\n[00:23:39] Nathan Wrigley: This entire whole podcast thing sits right on top of it. It feels like we’re going back to those things to try and, not compete, but be alongside of these other walled gardens, if you like.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:51] Dave Winer: Oh, I think we’re competing. I’m not scared of competition. Let’s do it. There will be differences, however. There will be. There’ll be things that you can do in this world that you couldn’t do over there. But the opposite is true as well.
\n\n\n\nBut the thing that we’re gonna do, if we’re successful, is we’re gonna influence those networks. And we’re going to get them to support markdown. That’s very specific. Just let me put markdown in my posts on Bluesky and get rid of the character limits and let me edit. And then we’re, we’re fine.
\n\n\n\nYou have to support inbound RSS as well, not just outbound. I have to be able to stay in my space, and contribute, and write, and have anybody read it wherever they are. That’s it. It’s saying basically, let’s actually live up to the promise of the web. And that’s what the web promised. And if you’re confident in your users will find value in your network, and there’s no reason they won’t. I’m talking about Bluesky and Mastodon, then why wouldn’t you do it?
\n\n\n\nI think then we’ve outed you. If you don’t want to do it. Okay, they don’t want to do it now because they don’t see it as a way of attracting new users, or keeping the users they have. They don’t see it that way because it’s true. It’s not, and that’s what we have to do. We have to make it that. They have to be hearing it all the time. You have to support markdown, that’s what Textcasting was all about. I think markdown is the mp3 of text. We did podcasting too.
\n\n\n\nThat was a fall out of all this stuff. I want to do radio. I love radio. I always have. And I always thought at some point I’m gonna do audio blogs. That’s what I was doing, getting ready to do that. And there we were, and one thing led to another and did I ever think about using something other than mp3? That would be crazy. It was a gift. They gave me the answer. Of course I’m going to use mp3. Why would I screw around with that? We’re gonna make it just as obvious that the other networks, if they’re gonna pretend to deal with text, they have to support a basic set of features, which are simply defined by the web. That’s it.
\n\n\n\nAnd WordPress does all that. WordPress documents are web documents, and that’s super important. That’s everything.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:15] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like in the last few months you’ve very much planted a flag in the sand and it feels like you’ve committed to following through on the promise that we’re about to get into. And the underpinnings of it, I’m gonna link in the show notes to this, so you want to head to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Dave Winer, and in there will be a whole list of things. Anything that discuss, I’ll basically link to.
\n\n\n\nBut there’s a couple of pieces which Dave has penned. One of them was in 2024, November, 2024, called Textcasting. And the URL for that is textcasting.org, and we’ll go into that in a minute. But then much more recently over on scripting.com, published on 28th of August, 2025, so very recently, was a piece which kind of built a top of that called Think Differently About WordPress.
\n\n\n\nI’m gonna return to the Textcasting one ’cause this feels like the foundational technological underpinnings of what you are proposing here, this thing which would be a competitor to all of these walled gardens. It sits outside of WordPress.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:14] Dave Winer: It’s more of a, okay, for me, this is when I was planning this product. I hadn’t even begun to develop it yet. But I wanted to write down in one place, these are all the things we’re gonna do. And that’s it. That’s all it was. I keep going on and on about all the different things that I wanted that I wasn’t getting, as a writer. I am a writer and I feel like Twitter was the original one, said you can’t have all your writing tools. It’s like I’m designing a guitar. And I’m saying, you can have three strings if you want. You can play music on three strings, right?
\n\n\n\nThe ultimate insult is the people who made this decision are not guitar players. They’re not musicians. They don’t have the slightest clue what the f they’re doing, and I’ve been told that even getting a new generation of products isn’t gonna solve this problem, because they are just as clueless about what writers need. And so at least I feel like upfront I ought to tell them exactly what I want from them. And that’s what textcasting.org is.
\n\n\n\nSo when we give it to the people, they can say, they might say, why didn’t you tell us that’s all you want? Yeah, look at textcasting.org, and look at the creation date. I was very clear about what I wanted, but understand that I needed this for myself as the requirements document for the product I was making. I’m a blogger, so when I write a requirements document, I put it in the public, because that’s what bloggers do. It is just the knee jerk. I do write some private documents, I do, it’s true. But my impulse is to write them publicly. So that’s really all that it is. It’s just saying, this is what we’re gonna do.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:58] Nathan Wrigley: So right at the top, the goal is very simply encapsulated and it goes like this. It’s easy to get in your head and parse. Interop between social media apps based on the features writers needs, specifically the services of the social web, and there’s a link there, support these basic features.
\n\n\n\nAnd then you go on to describe the ethics behind the movement is. But then you list out the things that you would like as a writer. It’s surprisingly a short list. There’s only six things, titles, optional. Links, de rigueur, you’ve gotta have links. Simple styling, bold, italics, that’s probably enough. Enclosures making it possible to do other things like, I don’t know, podcasting and things like that. Unlimited length, that’s the big differentiator, isn’t it? Because more or less all the platforms that have gained success have stifled that in some way. And then the, this is important, I think maybe this is the bit that I think is most enjoyable, editable. Go back, modify it because why not? You wrote it, it’s yours. And markdown. That basically is textcasting encapsulated in just a few sentences. I’ve probably missed a lot of the nuance there, but that’s kind of how I see it.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:04] Dave Winer: No, I don’t think so. Actually. Notice what’s not there? You’ll kick yourself. Comments. I don’t give a damn about comments.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:12] Nathan Wrigley: Presumably the comments could be handled elsewhere.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:15] Dave Winer: Absolutely, and I have a new idea for how comments should work. I wrote that up. I did a podcast about that, I think it was yesterday or the day before. I’ve had this design for many years, but I think there’s a way around all the abuse, and all the spamming that goes on these networks. I think it’s time for another look, first of all. I mean, I had a look, okay.
\n\n\n\nBut, second of all, it’s time to open it up so everybody can play in this game so we can try out lots of different ways of doing it. Which by the way is also part of what I’m doing. I’m making a, the thing Wordland. If you go to wordland.social. Go there and try it out.
\n\n\n\nIt’s there. It works with your WordPress sites. And so you might think, okay, it is actually my business to make a new writing tool for WordPress. I made the writing tool I would like to use. The idea is that you focus all your attention on writing, so it has all the functionality that you need to write and nothing else.
\n\n\n\nEverything else that it does that’s in the WordPress, their command structure. And it was what I felt was in the way for me to be a writer using WordPress. Because what WordPress, I don’t want to call it a mistake, it’s just how it evolved, is that the writing functionality is intermixed with everything else. And it makes it a very intimidating thing to get started with.
\n\n\n\nAnd so if you look at the people that are the insiders in the WordPress community, that’s a very small number compared to the number of people who have tried to use WordPress. That’s a huge number because WordPress is it, right?
\n\n\n\nAnd the number of people who use it, but they might prefer a better tool because this isn’t really what they think about. The things that are in the WordPress command structure are things that most people never need to go to. It’s too complicated. Look at the feature set of Twitter, for example. And it does a lot more than Twitter does, but most people aren’t interested in that. That’s one.
\n\n\n\nNumber two is, there are modes of working and writing requires severe focus. I don’t want to have to jump. Every time I have to go some random other place in the, that I have to devote my brain power to that, what I’m not doing, I’m not focused on the plan for writing. When I write something, I’m thinking three paragraphs ahead. And I’m trying to remember that because I don’t want to stop writing to take a note. I want to just go down the page and get my first draft out. But if in order to do this I have to go somewhere far away, that requires me to think, now I’ve lost my place.
\n\n\n\nAnd it creates a certain stress and programmers, if you say this to a programmer, most programmers go, oh, you’re just being weird. That’s not the way it works. Let me tell you how it works. I am also myself a programmer, so I understand the thought process, but you have to play. You have to have both roles in there. And that’s one of the things that makes me a fairly unique developer, is that I’m both a writer and a developer.
\n\n\n\nSo I play on both sides of that fence. And so if I want a writer to test my code, I don’t do it right after I wrote the code. I come back a couple of days later, now that I’ve got a fresh way of looking at things and then I try to use it, and then I see the problems right off the bat.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:26] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll link to Wordland. I’ve had a good long look at the pages that you’ve offered up. I confess, I haven’t actually tried it out, but it’s a, it’s a very different take on a fairly minimal editing interface in WordPress. So I’ll make sure to link out to that.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:37] Dave Winer: It’s fairly minimal, but it does everything on the Textcasting page. It doesn’t have the limits that all the Twitter like products have. It’s all supported, you get to do all of that stuff. And plus you get categories. And I think categories are huge. I really do. And it has a very nice, simple interface for it, but a very powerful one for categories. So, have a look at that.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:58] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:59] Dave Winer: And bookmarks. It’s very important for a writer. I have, I don’t know how many hundreds of documents that I’ve written over the years. I pretty much need quick access to all of them. Because I never know when I’m gonna have to make a change, and that’s in there too.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:12] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:12] Dave Winer: Oh wait, I forgot the actual main point. The main point I was gonna make is that I’ve also, all the work I had to do on the server side to set this up, I’m not gonna make anybody have to do. That’s all open source, and I’ll even run the server for you.
\n\n\n\nYeah, because what I want is a development community to pop up here. And so if somebody looks at Wordland, says that’s not the way to do it, here’s how you should do it. Say, great, go ahead, do it. And what they’ll find is, just like with WordPress, okay, there’s nothing in your way. You get to do that.
\n\n\n\nAnd there’s more from that too, is that the user owns the documents, and all the documents are in markdown format. And so if you want to use a different editor on a document, just to work on it for whatever purpose, go ahead and it’ll still work in the place it came from.
\n\n\n\nAnd this is going back to the IBM PC and the Macintosh, where when you had those machines, you owned the documents and you could have any editor you want edit it. And this led to file format standards, because if you come along three years after Microsoft Word comes along in the Macintosh, you better read Word format documents.
\n\n\n\nSince I get to go first here, if this, if something happens, okay, that I have to say, maybe nothing will happen here, you never know. But because I got to go first, I chose markdown. Because markdown is the mp3 of text. It’s the obvious answer. And tell me why they don’t support markdown. Anything that works with text should support markdown in my opinion.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:00] Nathan Wrigley: It’s just a nice, easy to access. The keyboard does everything.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:03] Dave Winer: There’s more. I’ve written feed readers. All along have been writing feed readers, and we have to sterilize the content because people put all kinds of garbage. And so you basically strip everything out. I’m tired of doing that. What I want to do is give the writers the ability to put some bold face and italics, and put some links in there, and give it, all the things that are on the Textcasting thing.
\n\n\n\nSo I don’t want to strip that out anymore. And so in Feedland and in Wordland, markdown is fully supported everywhere, and in RSS. It’s a key point. If I had that to do over again. I can’t do that one. I’m sorry, I’m going on about this but I really believe in it. I couldn’t do it over again. If I had to do over again in the beginning, I would’ve made markdown the text format in RSS, totally. I couldn’t do it ’cause it didn’t exist. RSS came first but I’ve taken care of it.
\n\n\n\nNow, Wordland produces its own RSS feed for every document, along with the one that WordPress produces. And the feed we produce has the markdown in it. And it has a couple of other things, and it, we will have more. As we think of more features to add. I’ve now got a place where I can add features. These are in a namespace, it’s totally non-controversial. I’m not modifying RSS, I have something called the source namespace.
\n\n\n\nAnd then at some point, again, it’s all prefixed by if it catches on, then I’ll go to the guys that do the feeds inside of WordPress and say, here’s some suggestions for features to your feed. And at that point we’ll be friends, I hope. And they’ll, love me and I’ll love them. It’s not impossible. There are people on the team that are helping us. That’s nice, I really love that.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:47] Nathan Wrigley: So taking it back a little bit, we’ve got the Textcasting framework that we described a little bit, a few moments ago. That kind of feels like the underpinnings to this other piece that I mentioned. And again, links in the show notes. Think Different About WordPress. Now, I confess, I’ve been following you for many years. really, in my head, collided you with WordPress.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:08] Dave Winer: I wasn’t, you interpreted
\n\n\n\n[00:38:10] Nathan Wrigley: And then suddenly you pop up with this piece about Wordland for start, which is a, an editor, which binds to WordPress. And then this whole piece about think differently about WordPress. Now this is really curious because, well you tell me what you’re proposing. I could try, try to interpret it.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:26] Dave Winer: I tried put the key idea upfront, okay. When I say Think Different About WordPress, I can tell you exactly what that is, what you’re supposed to think. I used the grammatically incorrect version that Apple uses.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:42] Nathan Wrigley: Think different.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:43] Dave Winer: Yeah, it was cute. I thought, what the heck, let’s do it. That’s the point, really. And it is just think of WordPress as the equivalent of the Bluesky service and the Mastodon service. And the reason you can do that is because it’s really comparable. They’re all text databases, that’s what they are. They have some different structures. That’s okay, we can add structures too. But it’s how good are they at doing that, and how mature is their code, this is very technical stuff, right? But what does the API look like, and how stable is the API? These are all the concerns that limit what people can develop on the platform. And if you do the check boxes, I probably should do that, but WordPress wins on every one of them.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:31] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a lot of life behind it and a lot of commitment to backwards compatibility.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:35] Dave Winer: It’s very simple actually. The reason it is that way is that whoever made the calls, they had a philosophy for the whole 22 years of the web will tell us what to do, and they did it. What else?
\n\n\n\nI know, I felt Rip Van Winkle, you know what I’m saying? It’s like, I was not paying attention to WordPress because I had all the wrong ideas. Now, they didn’t market to me. They never told me in 2017 they had a new API never. It. They didn’t tell me that they had a Node.js package for that API. They never told me. I was working in Node.js at that point. So I could have tried it out right away. They never told me. And all of a sudden, like I’m looking around, I need to add WordPress login to Feedland, because that’s running, we have a, at feedland.com people should try that too. Okay, because that’s a big part.
\n\n\n\nIt’s the feed backend for the system that we’re talking about. And Feedland runs on the Automattic VIP server. So that thing scales. Okay. I learned how to write, I didn’t know how to write scalable software before I hooked up with them, in I guess it was like three years ago or something.
\n\n\n\nAnd the first thing we did is, and they were very generous about this in teaching me, and I kept finding things I had to change to make it so that you could support millions of users, right? It’s not mysterious once you learn how to do it, but there’s an art to it.
\n\n\n\nThe bigger project is imagine Twitter with an editor that could support. Twitter has what I call a tiny little text box, okay? You get to type something in there and they’ve extended their limit, if you pay them money, 10,000 characters, that’s a pretty good character limit. I say in Textcasting, unlimited. 10,000 is unlimited, okay. For all practical purposes, if you’re writing more than 10,000 characters, there shouldn’t be a limit, but, okay.
\n\n\n\nSo you got a text editor. Twitter has a text editor. We have a text editor. Our text editor does the web the way I want it to do the web. And it has timelines where you see messages in reverse chronological order. So imagine if that was RSS, instead of their server. That timeline. You could make a timeline in RSS look just like it came from Twitter. There’s no problem with that, and that’s what I’ve done. When you subscribe to feeds, what you get.
\n\n\n\nSo anything that supports RSS plugs into this system, and guess what? RSS is totally replaceable. Everything that I do, you can come up with another one and it works just as well, because RSS is an open format. Yeah, it’s got a protocol with it too. There’s a RSS cloud, which I mentioned in that piece, which does the real time component of it. It worked great.
\n\n\n\nWordPress supports it in every one of the instances they do it, and so it may be more limited than the one, but I don’t know the one that’s in Bluesky or Mastodon. It may have features that are hard to do, but like I said, then it will do features. It’ll have things that they can’t do either.
\n\n\n\nOne thing it’ll do is it’ll be very, very, very, very, simple. That’s the point.
\n\n\n\n[00:42:48] Nathan Wrigley: What I’m thinking here is, I think that the typical listener listening to this will be thinking, how does this differ from, let’s say, going to Twitter, but it’s got a different interface and it’s got a different character limit.
\n\n\n\n[00:42:59] Dave Winer: Not that different. whole idea is that it won’t be that different. I’m not actually running your server. Go, you could pick and choose. You don’t like my timeline, fine. Go get Joe’s timeline or Mary’s timeline or, Google might have a timeline or OpenAI might have one or. Do you need a license to create an RSS reader? No, that’s the point. The point is you get innovation, you get the doors blown off. You don’t have a silo. There’s no silo anywhere in sight.
\n\n\n\nIf you want the users, you have to give them features, performance or price. They don’t have to stay with you if they don’t want to. There’s no import or export. It’s just there. It’s the feeds you subscribe to. That’s really, there’s not a whole lot of technology there.
\n\n\n\n[00:43:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I mean, it’s a fairly nice, simple, basic proposition. It sounds from what you were saying in the Think Different About WordPress, it sounds like, well I said you planted your flag in the sand a little bit before. It sounds like you are committing yourself to do.
\n\n\n\n[00:44:03] Dave Winer: I’ve already done the work. I’ll be demoing this at WordCamp Canada in October, hopefully that will all be webcast so everybody can watch it. And it’ll be archived and it probably will crash, because that’s the way these things work, right? And, but I will stay with it.
\n\n\n\nI will get the bugs out. It’s gonna be a process. It’s not gonna be done, on October, whatever, 17th I think it is. It’s not gonna be done. All I ask is have a look then, and then when there’s a new version, please come have a look then too, and I’ll come back on your podcast if you want. We can talk about it as it develops. Remember the things that we’re puzzling, and don’t mistake for a minute that I’m not confused too. I am.
\n\n\n\nI’m gonna tell you a little self-aggrandizing anecdote. Once in, I think it was high school or something, teachers said, somebody like to come up and solve this problem, it was a math class, solve this problem on the whiteboard?
\n\n\n\nI said, okay, I’ll go. And I go up there and I’m doing it, and I got the answer, and the teacher said, you didn’t know the answer when you raised your hand, did you? No. I, it’s like, I’m an old guy now, that was when I was young. What the hell have I got to lose? Nothing. Nothing. I’m giving you software, an approach to software that I believe in. And, I’m testing the idea of the assumption.
\n\n\n\nI was always told that RSS can’t do what Twitter does, and because I had not mastered server side scaled software, and remember until a couple of years ago, I had never done that. So I said, I have no way of testing that. They say you can’t do it. They know. I have my doubts about what they said, but I have no way of doing anything about it. And then I got the skill, and then I think now that it’s not true, I think that you absolutely can do it, and that they had a reason for telling me that, is that they didn’t want me to do it. Okay, that’s an invitation, a great invitation if I’ve ever seen one, right.
\n\n\n\nI mean go for it. Let’s go for it, but let’s all go for it together. You see, that’s the point. It’s no fun if I’m just sitting here going, oh, please, I beg you, would you please try my software so I can be a billionaire too?
\n\n\n\n[00:46:19] Nathan Wrigley: I was just gonna say, if you’re going into WordCamp Canada, and you’re demoing it all there, but at the moment, I’m guessing you’re doing all of the work, or you have done all of the work, by yourself. Are you hoping to create a community around this?
\n\n\n\n[00:46:31] Dave Winer: Yeah. I want a developer community, but in order to have a developer community, there better be some users, ’cause the developers don’t come until there are users. So this is something, if a user says, what can I do to help? I’m just a user. The answer is you could do a lot to help. You can use the damn thing. Your product, your content, the stuff that you write will be a magnet for other people. They’ll see the reality of it and they’ll say, oh wow, I guess you can use stuff like this.
\n\n\n\n[00:47:03] Nathan Wrigley: So the next question I have then is how does what you wish to do, how does that stand in relation to some of the currently existing things out there? So for example, the Fediverse, I know maybe that term’s not something you like to use, but let’s say Mastodon for want of a better word or ActivityPub, let’s go with that.
\n\n\n\nActivityPub has a plugin which is under the custodianship of Automattic, so we’re obviously trying to bind our WordPress websites with the Fedi verse and being able to communicate in that way.
\n\n\n\n[00:47:31] Dave Winer: No, that’s good. That’s very good.
\n\n\n\n[00:47:33] Nathan Wrigley: How does yours stand in contrast to that? How, will yours differ from that familiar thing?
\n\n\n\n[00:47:39] Dave Winer: What that does is it’s wonderful. First, let me tell you why it’s wonderful, and then I’ll tell you, I don’t even know how to begin telling you what the difference is. But, it’s wonderful because it accomplishes at least part of the goal of bringing the Textcasting vision into Mastodon. So if I have a blog called daveverse.org, which is a WordPress blog, and when I post something there, it’s also cross posted to Mastodon. And as far as I can tell, there’s no character limit. And it has styling, and it supports links, and it has images, and block quotes. It’s got a lot of the stuff. It even has titles. That’s right, it has titles too. If you go look at the Textcasting list, that’s pretty good coverage, right? It’s a major innovation, it’s a major step forward.
\n\n\n\nSo what that does, hopefully it gets it onto the radar of the developers of Mastodon. The more people want that, okay, they have to make that clear. And right now, I don’t think people even know it exists. There’s not a lot of awareness of it. I’ve tried the best I can to, and I’ll keep pumping it for this reason. And the more successful it is, the more it puts pressure on Bluesky to do the same thing.
\n\n\n\nSo it’s having the same effect that I’m hoping to have and, so I like it. Remember, I’m wearing a lot of hats here, but one of the hats I wear is, as a writer who wants the freedom to use all the writing tools, I don’t want to be given three strings, I want all five strings, using the guitar anology.
\n\n\n\nSo this, what I’ve done is create something that has the potential of playing the role that, the core of Mastodon does. The whole thing. The whole thing, right? It’s not comparable to a plugin that connects WordPress to Mastodon because that’s a plugin, and what they’re doing is heroic, that’s the word I use for it, Matthias and his team are doing at Automattic, are doing is heroic, because it’s a hard problem to solve. It’s taking ’em a lot of time and they’re working really hard, but those guys really believe, they’re really committed. And I, love that. It’s both heroic and love inspiring. These guys are great. And they won’t have to do that for my system. They won’t, it’ll just come for free.
\n\n\n\n[00:50:04] Nathan Wrigley: With the Mastodon system, obviously the ActivityPub protocol will bind to a server of your choice. So many people go with mastodon.social as the sort of the default. Presumably there’s gotta be some part of the architecture for your system, which in that way, some central place.
\n\n\n\n[00:50:20] Dave Winer: There is a server component to what I’m doing. Okay. It doesn’t matter where that server is running. You can run it anywhere, somebody has to run it, and it’s open source, and it’s not even a GPL license, it’s MIT licensed. So go have fun with this thing.
\n\n\n\nAnd it’s on GitHub right now. I’m not asking people to install it yet because I want to get a chance to like lock it down before we start cloning it. It’s going to, it is designed to be no lock-in. It is, does, require somebody to run a server
\n\n\n\n[00:51:00] Nathan Wrigley: So the bit that I’m reading off the scripting.com website where, you know the piece entitled Think Different About WordPress. You have this sentence where it says, a storage service and it says, I’m going to run the server for you to get the bootstrap going, my treat. That was the bit.
\n\n\n\n[00:51:14] Dave Winer: That raised the alarms, right? It should raise the alarms.
\n\n\n\n[00:51:17] Nathan Wrigley: Exactly. It made me think Twitter in a way, it made me think there’s this central bit.
\n\n\n\n[00:51:21] Dave Winer: No, it’s not, because I have the answer that Twitter never had, which is I’m giving you all the code you need to run your own server. I’m giving that to you. I’m not making you write it. In Twitter you can’t even write it. If I wrote a server that did what Twitter’s server does, that’s great, but it wouldn’t be part of Twitter. It wouldn’t be available to everyone. The availability here is the same availability as RSS. So can I subscribe to your RSS feed, even if your thing is on another server? Of course.
\n\n\n\nThat’s all you need to know. Ultimately, that’s all you’re going to need is to be able to. It’s just RSS, that’s all it is.
\n\n\n\n[00:52:01] Nathan Wrigley: It’s RSS all the way down.
\n\n\n\n[00:52:03] Dave Winer: But let me just say this, is that’s also a strength of the WordPress community, the skepticism. You’re always, you guys are always watching for the lock in.
\n\n\n\n[00:52:13] Nathan Wrigley: We’ve spent trying to encourage the world that you need to own your own data, or at least have.
\n\n\n\n[00:52:17] Dave Winer: Right.
\n\n\n\n[00:52:19] Nathan Wrigley: Unfortunately the world, on the whole, didn’t listen, so we keep banging that gong.
\n\n\n\n[00:52:24] Dave Winer: Yes. But let me point out that you are the distillation of the people. You’re the group of people who care deeply about that stuff. So keep it up because, and that’s why I’m ready to answer those questions because, and here’s the punchline. Even though I’m not part of your community, we share that religion.
\n\n\n\n[00:52:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that’s nice.
\n\n\n\n[00:52:43] Dave Winer: Why do we share the religion? Because it’s the web. Because that’s what the web taught us. Maybe we believed, maybe we were very naive in the nineties and the early two thousands. We were, we’re not naive anymore. I think the last, the very last sentence in the Think Different, go read that, right now.
\n\n\n\n[00:53:02] Nathan Wrigley: They lied to the users all the time, over and over. No, I don’t object to you making money, but I’m putting it out there. You can compete with me. I want you to compete with me, as long as you don’t try to cut off the interop. I’m not naive. Believe me, I expect that will happen.
\n\n\n\n[00:53:16] Dave Winer: That’s just all the credentials I need to be in your community, right? Not all the credentials. I don’t know half the stuff any of you guys know about the how to do. I don’t do PHP for example. I don’t know how to set up a WordPress server. I have somebody that helps me with that. So I’m not qualified to be a member of the WordPress community, but that’s the beauty of the web. I don’t have to be to connect with that community, because that’s what the web gives. And that’s pretty awesome, don’t you think? And the other thing is that makes it even more awesome is that all the other people like me will be able to do it too. Why? Because in the end they played straight with you.
\n\n\n\n[00:54:01] Nathan Wrigley: Depending on when this podcast is released, it may well be that you’ve done your presentation. If that is in fact the case, then I will make sure to link to the WordPress TV, the video that will have been captured. I’ll link that into this post. But also I’ll link to the Textcasting document and, also the Think Different About WordPress document. And encourage you, if you’ve got any interesting kind of, I’m gonna say rewinding the clock and returning the world to a different era where the blue sky was there, and there was less cloud, than go and explore those different bits and pieces.
\n\n\n\nAnd I will definitely be coming back to you, Dave Winer, to figure out exactly how it’s gone and maybe call it months or something like that. And we’ll see where you’ve got with the WordPress community.
\n\n\n\n[00:54:40] Dave Winer: If we’re still here.
\n\n\n\n[00:54:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But we will, we’ll leave it there. And, I will say thank you for chatting to me today about this really important subject. Thank you.
\n\n\n\n[00:54:48] Dave Winer: Thank you much, it was great. Have a good day.
\nOn the podcast today we have Dave Winer.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nDave\u2019s journey into the heart of Silicon Valley began in the early 1980s, when he left Wisconsin and moved to California with two products and a dream: to achieve fame and fortune in the world of technology. Driven by a deep belief that real communication involves people truly connecting, he set out to make his mark.
\n\n\n\nEarly on, he found himself in a memorable meeting with Steve Jobs, both were in their early 20s, bursting with ambition and self-assurance. Their encounter was fiery and competitive, yet it marked the start of Dave\u2019s lifelong mission to wire the world together, not just with technology, but by bringing people closer through it.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019ve ever subscribed to a blog, listened to a podcast, or shared your thoughts online, chances are you\u2019ve benefitted from Dave\u2019s pioneering work, he\u2019s the developer behind influential technologies like RSS, and a long-time advocate for open, user-owned, publishing platforms.
\n\n\n\nHe describes himself as someone who wrote the first versions of lots of software, wants to work with everyone, still has big ideas, he likes things to be open from top to bottom, and doesn’t care for greedy people.
\n\n\n\nToday we\u2019re talking about the vision, history, and future of the open web. Dave reminisces about the origins of today\u2019s internet, the early days when idealism and collaboration were at the web\u2019s core. He shares stories from his career, the rise and fall of early software startups, and how the initial spirit of community slowly gave way to the \u201cwalled gardens\u201d of big tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
\n\n\n\nBut the conversation isn\u2019t just about nostalgia, it\u2019s a call to action for reclaiming the internet\u2019s potential. Dave explains what went wrong with the evolution of the social web, why he thinks blogging tech like RSS just needed \u201cmore love\u201d, and how the influx of money and centralisation stifled the creativity and interoperability the web was built for.
\n\n\n\nYou\u2019ll also get to hear about Dave\u2019s latest efforts to reignite those original web ideals, he reveals the thinking behind Wordland, a minimalist and powerful writing tool for WordPress users that puts freedom, portability, and open protocols front and centre.
\n\n\n\nDave also lays out his \u201cTextcasting\u201d manifesto, challenging platforms to truly support writers with features like unlimited length, markdown support, and true ownership of content, without the need for permission or platform lock-in.
\n\n\n\nDave truly is a pioneer of the internet, and is certainly not finished yet. He\u2019s putting WordPress at the centre of many of his future endeavours.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re passionate about owning your content, deeply curious about web history, or looking for inspiration on how technology can empower rather than control, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nThe birth of the Web – CERN
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nActivityPub on Wikipedia
\n\n\n\nFediverse on Wikipedia
\n\n\n\nDave’s textcasting.org website
\n\n\n\nThink Different about WordPress post on scripting.com
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAccess to Wordland
\n\n\n\nAccess to Feedland
\n\n\n\nWordPress and the open social web, Dave’s presentation at WordCamp Canada 2025
\n\n\n\n\n", "content_text": "Transcript\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case Decentralisation, WordPress and Open Publishing.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Dave Winer. Dave’s journey into the heart of Silicon Valley began in the 1980s when he left Wisconsin and moved to California with two products and a dream to achieve fame and fortune in the world of technology. Driven by a deep belief that real communication involves people truly connecting, he set out to make his mark.\n\n\n\nEarly on, he found himself in a memorable meeting with Steve Jobs. Both were in their early twenties, bursting with ambition and self-assurance. Their encounter was fiery and competitive, yet it marked the start of Dave’s lifelong mission to wire the world together, not just with technology, but by bringing people closer through it.\n\n\n\nIf you’ve ever subscribed to a blog, listened to a podcast, or shared your thoughts online, chances are you’ve benefited from Dave’s pioneering work. He’s the developer behind influential technologies like RSS, and a longtime advocate for open, user owned, publishing platforms.\n\n\n\nHe describes himself as someone who wrote the first versions of lots of software, wants to work with everyone, still has big ideas, he likes things to be open from top to bottom and doesn’t care for greedy people.\n\n\n\nToday we’re talking about the vision, history, and future of the open web. Dave reminisces about the origins of today’s internet, the early days when idealism and collaboration were at the web’s core. He shares stories from his career, the rise and fall of early software startups, and how the initial spirit of community slowly gave way to the walled gardens of big tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.\n\n\n\nBut the conversation isn’t just about nostalgia. It’s a call to action for reclaiming the internet’s potential. Dave explains what went wrong with the evolution of the social web, why he thinks blogging tech like RSS just need more love, and how the influx of money and centralisation stifled the creativity and interoperability the web was built for.\n\n\n\nYou’ll also get to hear about Dave’s latest efforts to reignite those original web ideals. He reveals the thinking behind Wordland, a minimalist and powerful writing tool for WordPress users that puts freedom, portability, and open protocols front and centre.\n\n\n\nDave also lays out his Textcasting manifesto, challenging platforms to truly support writers with features like unlimited length, markdown support, and true ownership of content, without the need for permission or platform lock-in.\n\n\n\nDave truly is a pioneer of the internet, and is certainly not finished yet. He’s putting WordPress at the centre of many of his future endeavors.\n\n\n\nIf you’re passionate about owning your content, deeply curious about web history, or looking for inspiration on how technology can empower rather than control, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Dave Winer.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast today by Dave Winer. Hello Dave.\n\n\n\n[00:04:26] Dave Winer: Hey, how you doing?\n\n\n\n[00:04:27] Nathan Wrigley: I confess, I’m going to get this out the way and I’m going to put it on the record because Dave Winer has been in my brain for about 20 years or more. And I’m going to allow Dave the opportunity to do a bio. He may lean into that and tell us many, many things, or he may not. But I would just like to offer my profound congratulations for many of the things that I literally have as the foundational bits of my working life.\n\n\n\nMany of those bits are because of you, and I would like to express my enormous thanks for the way that you’ve done that, the stuff that you’ve built, the method in which you deployed that, and the way that you didn’t tie it up to a subscription model.\n\n\n\nAnd, with that out of the way, I would just like to offer you the opportunity to introduce yourself. So do you mind just little potted bio, two or three minutes tops, something like that.\n\n\n\n[00:05:18] Dave Winer: Wow. I didn’t realize I was gonna be doing this. Well, I’m a software developer and a blogger. I started software development when I was a grad student in the 1970s, at the University of Wisconsin. And I immediately knew that this is what I was going to do in my whole career. Up to that point, I didn’t know.\n\n\n\nIt just fit. Everything about developing software, and communication with software. I used to call it communication with a big C. So you talk about communication with a little C is like wiring everything together. But the big C, its people getting connected. And that was going back to the, I guess the early eighties.\n\n\n\nI moved from Wisconsin to California to Silicon Valley, and I had two products. My goal was to go to California and achieve fame and fortune, and it didn’t happen all at once at least. One of my first meetings was with Steve Jobs, and we were both exactly the same age, 23 or something like that, and very arrogant and full of ourselves, and we ended up insulting each other, and I have a lot of regrets about that because I had the two products and he wanted the wrong one. And I told him, man, that’s the wrong one. You should want the other one.\n\n\n\nAnd anyway, so I ended up hooking up with a company that eventually became the biggest software company in the valley and then exploded. And then I started my own company. And that was a pretty long haul. But we got there. We made software for the Apple 2, the IBM PC, the Macintosh.\n\n\n\nWe had a really big hit in 1986, product called MORE. It was a really good product, but it also hit the market at exactly the right time. And then I sold the company and then I started developing software on my own, because that’s really what I always wanted to do. I was a CEO because I had to be, because nobody else understood the idea, that we were doing there.\n\n\n\nAnd that’s actually been the story of my life, is like when I start something, I tell everybody how great it’s gonna be, and then they look at me like, what are you talking about? I have no idea. Or, that’s not useful. Or AI, this is what they say today. Oh, AI is gonna do that for us. And I go, no, I actually, I don’t think it is.\n\n\n\nAnd so one thing led to another. I started making software on the web. I saw the web as complete liberation. Because the tech industry had gotten so congested with the power of the big companies. This happens periodically by the way. You end up, they get, they lock themselves in, and then they just protect their lock in. And then nothing happens for a while, and then an explosion happens, usually. A new company comes along with a big idea, and the big companies don’t understand it, and all of a sudden. And that was the web.\n\n\n\nAnd there were things before that. The PC was like that to some extent. The Mac was. Rock and roll was like that for sure. The Beatles fit into that pattern of things that fundamentally changed everything. And the web was one of those things too.\n\n\n\nAnd it blew the doors off the tech industry. Whenever a big tech company tried to dominate the web, it just didn’t work. It didn’t work. Until eventually it did work, and now we’re pretty thoroughly dominated. We got dominated by Facebook, by Google. Twitter, very influential company, and a few others, and now it’s Bluesky. They’re out there telling them that everybody, that they’re decentralized and whatever. They say they’re on the web, they’re not on the web.\n\n\n\nThe web means something. It means that I can add a feature that hooks into your product and I don’t need your permission to do it. That’s what you have to have for the web.\n\n\n\nYou also have to have links. If you don’t give the person writing in your environment the ability to put hyperlinks in their text, you can’t say you’re the web. Because you’ve deprived the writers of the one most essential thing that they need, the ability to defer to somebody else as the expert on this topic, and build these structures. Twitter, took that out. They just said, we don’t need that. Or put character limits on it. Or they said no titles. Or you can’t edit your post, or you can’t put a podcast, you can’t put an audio on there, on a post. And they add an API and that’s really nice, but it’s still, you don’t get that freedom. There’s nothing like that there.\n\n\n\n[00:09:40] Nathan Wrigley: I watched the internet develop in much the same way as I might watch a game of, we call it football, you may call it soccer, in that I’d be in the crowd and all of these characters are moving around on the field and doing important things and it just develops.\n\n\n\nThe game is afoot and it develops and it’s like evolution. Curiously, you were one of the people on the field kind of making these decisions. And so with the benefit of hindsight, looking back, it sounds like there’s a part of you which, not just a part of you, I feel like it might be a big part, which regrets a lot of the way that it has developed. The beginnings of the internet, there seem to be more, I don’t know, blue sky thinking, let’s put it that way.\n\n\n\n[00:10:19] Dave Winer: We actually called it that. We actually called it that, believe it or not, a piece of blue sky. The clouds, sky is overcast and then there’s a little bit of blue sky and we’re all gonna go there. Yeah, it was like that, but what was wrong was my model was wrong. My model for humanity.\n\n\n\nOur model, the early web people. We had this very idealistic idea of what humanity was, and how they would take advantage of the opportunity. And that includes the entrepreneurs, because they create structures where people can be very abusive to each other, and they don’t do anything really about that.\n\n\n\nAnd then the people, and we still live with this, in fact, well this comes up sometimes people say, you’re being altruistic. I’ve heard that said, and I reject that. I’m not being altruistic. If anything trying to set an example for what we have to do collectively in order to have freedom.\n\n\n\nIf you don’t, if you don’t enable your competitors, you don’t deserve users, is my feeling. And in fact, you can see that playing out in the WordPress community right now, right? That is what the big controversy seems to be. I’m gonna step back from it. I’m not part of the WordPress community. It’s not that I’m not really, I’m not. And I’m an observer of all of this, and I see it all playing out in a sort of predictable way.\n\n\n\nBut as I think you said earlier, we end up in a pretty good place and I put this in one of the pieces I wrote recently about the whole why I am betting so heavy on WordPress, is that whatever you can say about Automattic and Matt and whatever, he didn’t lock you in. You have freedom of movement. All your data can move with you wherever you want. Anybody can add a feature to WordPress if they want. It probably won’t get into the main distribution, but you can build on it.\n\n\n\nAnd I have proven that by building on it. I never hit any dead ends. What I also see there, this is another plus for this platform is, whoever it is that’s building this, and I know there’s some contention about that, it really believes in not breaking developers, and that is super important.\n\n\n\nThat’s one of the basic, also fundamental principles of the web, is that a website that you built in 1995, you should still be able to read it in 2025. And you can, except Google doesn’t think you should. Google as recently as 2014, that’s when HTTPS came along and became something that people wanted to use. Up until that point, HTTP was perfectly fine. And then one day Google and the EFF decided no more of this. It was very bad development. It set a bad precedent, but that’s a sidebar. That’s not the real thing.\n\n\n\nWhat’s really going on here is, I think there is now an opportunity in the, what we call, I call the Twitter, like world, I won’t call it the social web, because it isn’t the web. That’s not fair, they can’t. They should support the web before they get to call themselves the web. And they’ve just inherited all the limits that Twitter put on there.\n\n\n\nThey had the opportunity to relax those limits, but they have no incentive to do it. I could sit there, like you said, as an observer. See, that’s what I’ve been too, for the last, whatever, 16 years. 2006, it’s 2025, 19 years, sorry, for the last 19 years. With all due humility. I’m a pretty freaking good developer, and I really work very energetically, and I love making products for users, and I’m stuck. There’s no place for me to go. And I can’t accept that. That’s all I want to say, is I don’t accept that, and I found a way to work around it, that’s what I’m doing. And WordPress is key to it, central to it.\n\n\n\n[00:14:11] Nathan Wrigley: We’ll come onto that whole project in a minute, which is really fascinating. But I’m just gonna rewind the clock and go back to the very beginnings of what we might now call the internet.\n\n\n\nAn academic enterprise, really, it felt like. A bunch of academics. Maybe you’ll go back as far as CERN and have those discussions about just wanting to send academic documentation to one another, and, then the hyperlink came along, and then all of a sudden this world of possibility opened up, and it felt as if there was so much positive potential there.\n\n\n\nI remember the beginnings of the internet, the burgeoning of it, people beginning to talk about it, people starting to use it on desktops and things like that. And there was this real sense positivity that it was, like it was, it was this blue sky thing. For the first time in humanity’s history everybody had a way to interconnect.\n\n\n\nWe don’t need to go into what happened, but at some point, through a whole series of dominoes falling, we get all these walled gardens, and now the internet seems like anything other than blue sky. It feels like there’s just these silos everywhere. You’ve got a Meta silo, and you’ve got an X silo, and you’ve got a TikTok silo, and a YouTube silo.\n\n\n\nAnd I think, with hand on heart, almost everybody would be able to point to at least some downside to that. Sure, you might enjoy consuming YouTube videos, but there may be a flip side to that. You end up doing it at the wrong time of the day. I think anybody could agree that people’s passions get inflamed to the point of getting a bit out of hand on the internet.\n\n\n\nThis was never what it was supposed to be. And so going back to my question from a minute ago, where I was implying that maybe there’s some sense of regret. If you could go back and move the jigsaw pieces, or move the chess pieces differently, I expect you would. I’d expect you’d be shouting a bit louder about the need for things to be not walled in, and maybe things would be different.\n\n\n\n[00:15:58] Dave Winer: I don’t think anybody hears that. I think I shouted it pretty loud. I repeated it over and over. I don’t have any regret about that, I think I did a tremendous amount of that, but the problem is, I can’t call it regret. I think that collectively there was a blogging community prior to WordPress. There was. There were competitive products. And then in 1999, it all clicked with RSS, and that gave us a way, we had ways, by the way, to find the updates on blogs before that.\n\n\n\nWe had a site called weblogs.com, and it would go looking around the blogosphere, had a list. There weren’t that many blogs, okay. So it would look at all of them, see if they updated, and if they updated it would put it at the top of the list. And so bloggers were just reloading that page all day long. And it worked. You still had to find the new post, but that wasn’t too hard because they were at the top of the page, right.\n\n\n\nAnd then after that, with Netscape, we got RSS going. And that led to a whole other generation of that kind of stuff. We had it, it was going. But what killed it. Killed is too strong a word. What put a limit on it, what said that what you described would happen is that, do you remember the .com boom, right?\n\n\n\nAll of a sudden it wasn’t just a place for idealists to screw around and try out new ideas and everything. It was a place to come and get rich, and so it attracted all those people who wanted to get rich. That’s all they wanted. They didn’t care about what they had to do to get rich, and that attracted the professional investors, the venture capitalists. They want to get rich, it’s totally okay to do whatever they have to do to get rich. It just simply, it is their business to get rich, and it’s hard to blame them for that. And then, here’s the key point, they wouldn’t work with each other.\n\n\n\n[00:17:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.\n\n\n\n[00:17:50] Dave Winer: They would not work with each other. And I just wrote a piece this morning, on my blog, and it said in retrospect, it was a retrospective thing about RSS, because that’s becoming an issue again, and it said what RSS needed was love. It needed to be loved and nurtured, and fed and taken care of, and the users had to be given features that were collective across all the products. So that if you wanted to subscribe to a feed, you didn’t have to memorize a complicated process, involving pasting URLs or reading the HTML source, or all the crazy stuff that became, until Twitter, what choice was there, right? So people had to do it, but it was tremendous weakness.\n\n\n\nAnd Twitter came in and just completely blew it out. Because in Twitter subscribing was a single click. And we’re gonna hit that again now. If I’m successful in what I do, we’re gonna hit it again, and we’re gonna have to answer that question differently.\n\n\n\n[00:18:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was just gonna say, so many of the underpinnings that could have made the internet into a different place never went away, they just got ignored. Maybe that’s the wrong word, but they just got forgotten about. And so we wholeheartedly subscribed to X, formally Twitter. We wholeheartedly jumped in on Facebook, because they offered this amazing level of convenience. And of course, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see how maybe that was a catastrophic failure, but the time.\n\n\n\n[00:19:18] Dave Winer: I have no regrets about that either, Twitter was amazing.\n\n\n\n[00:19:21] Nathan Wrigley: It was so revolutionary, you could suddenly connect with people that you’d lost touch with many years ago.\n\n\n\n[00:19:26] Dave Winer: There you go. You put your finger right on it. It wasn’t that Twitter was so great. It’s that look at all the people. One of the first experiences I had on Twitter that really, really showed me what the difference is, is that there was just this random guy. I would meet him. We had our own community too, by the way. And so we would go to conferences and, I watched the WordCamp conference from afar, right? And I said, oh, I know all those people. Because in our community we had people like that. Only there only about 30 years younger than I was, than we were, but I recognize it.\n\n\n\nAnd, meet somebody at a conference that’s, now I know what he’s doing with his family. I know what his sports are, who his team is, what’s the weather like where they live. And how does he describe it? There’s all these inputs that you simply don’t get from seeing somebody couple of times a year. It’s nice and everything, but this was a different thing altogether.\n\n\n\nAnd I still use Facebook. I don’t use Twitter very much anymore. But, I still have my account. I didn’t delete it. But I use Facebook. I will never stop using Facebook because my friends from childhood are there. Where am I gonna get new friends from childhood? That’s not happening, right. They have their advantages. But they’re a really good example of people that refuse to do anything to help anything other than their mission to make more money. I’ve had these conversations with executives at Facebook, and we’ve had a couple of, fits and starts a couple of them, twice.\n\n\n\nThey were gonna add RSS support in and out, to Facebook. Kind of like what they’re doing with Threads and ActivityPub, right? Or the Fediverse. Yeah, I’m trying to forget that because I don’t believe in it, to be honest with you, but I do believe in Mastodon. I think that’s what we’re really doing here. And I think they blow a lot of smoke at these things, and they, make them seem like, they shouldn’t make them appear to be more than they are because we need to have both of those things. There’s no reason we can’t have both, but that means you have to be a little bit altruistic to use that word. You may feel like you’re being an altruist, but then look at the times we live in.\n\n\n\nIn the United States, we are very worried about what’s coming or what’s here right now. And we’re all asking, what can we do? What can we do? One of the things you can do is let down, open up to your inner altruist, start doing things that aren’t just about putting food on the table or getting ahead in your career.\n\n\n\nDo things that make connecting with other people a lot easier, and more free. Because those services are now owned by people that go to dinner with the government of the United States. You’ve never seen a more clear picture of what we’re up against. You think that somebody from the White House calls Mark Zuckerberg and says, get Dave Winer off of Facebook. I guarantee you I’m off Facebook in 10 seconds. That’s who we are, depending on their honor, I think that’s a really bad bet. We’re all gonna have that choice.\n\n\n\nAnd at the same time, people who know how to work with WordPress are gonna have an amazing advantage, because I see WordPress as being comparable to the Mastodon server and the Bluesky server, and Bluesky doesn’t give you a server to install yet, but Mastodon does. And, I didn’t install it. I had a friend because I tried and I couldn’t get it to go. That is what it’s gonna take. And WordPress is a lot easier to install, and it’s a lot more mature, and it really works and the APIs aren’t gonna break. So we got a much better foundation to build on.\n\n\n\n[00:23:04] Nathan Wrigley: Going back to what you said a moment ago about, it’s not either or. What we’re imagining here, I think is, you keep your Facebook, and you keep your X, and all of those things can go. Fine, carry on using those, but there’s an alternative, which many people may prefer. There’s a whole kind of ethos behind that, and a whole philosophy behind that. But underpinning it all, things like Mastodon, and potentially WordPress, and we’ll get into that, are a bunch of APIs and protocols and things like that, many of which you were very much involved in the creation of things like RSS, and thank you for that.\n\n\n\n[00:23:38] Dave Winer: More altruism there, huh?\n\n\n\n[00:23:39] Nathan Wrigley: This entire whole podcast thing sits right on top of it. It feels like we’re going back to those things to try and, not compete, but be alongside of these other walled gardens, if you like.\n\n\n\n[00:23:51] Dave Winer: Oh, I think we’re competing. I’m not scared of competition. Let’s do it. There will be differences, however. There will be. There’ll be things that you can do in this world that you couldn’t do over there. But the opposite is true as well.\n\n\n\nBut the thing that we’re gonna do, if we’re successful, is we’re gonna influence those networks. And we’re going to get them to support markdown. That’s very specific. Just let me put markdown in my posts on Bluesky and get rid of the character limits and let me edit. And then we’re, we’re fine.\n\n\n\nYou have to support inbound RSS as well, not just outbound. I have to be able to stay in my space, and contribute, and write, and have anybody read it wherever they are. That’s it. It’s saying basically, let’s actually live up to the promise of the web. And that’s what the web promised. And if you’re confident in your users will find value in your network, and there’s no reason they won’t. I’m talking about Bluesky and Mastodon, then why wouldn’t you do it?\n\n\n\nI think then we’ve outed you. If you don’t want to do it. Okay, they don’t want to do it now because they don’t see it as a way of attracting new users, or keeping the users they have. They don’t see it that way because it’s true. It’s not, and that’s what we have to do. We have to make it that. They have to be hearing it all the time. You have to support markdown, that’s what Textcasting was all about. I think markdown is the mp3 of text. We did podcasting too.\n\n\n\nThat was a fall out of all this stuff. I want to do radio. I love radio. I always have. And I always thought at some point I’m gonna do audio blogs. That’s what I was doing, getting ready to do that. And there we were, and one thing led to another and did I ever think about using something other than mp3? That would be crazy. It was a gift. They gave me the answer. Of course I’m going to use mp3. Why would I screw around with that? We’re gonna make it just as obvious that the other networks, if they’re gonna pretend to deal with text, they have to support a basic set of features, which are simply defined by the web. That’s it.\n\n\n\nAnd WordPress does all that. WordPress documents are web documents, and that’s super important. That’s everything.\n\n\n\n[00:26:15] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like in the last few months you’ve very much planted a flag in the sand and it feels like you’ve committed to following through on the promise that we’re about to get into. And the underpinnings of it, I’m gonna link in the show notes to this, so you want to head to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Dave Winer, and in there will be a whole list of things. Anything that discuss, I’ll basically link to.\n\n\n\nBut there’s a couple of pieces which Dave has penned. One of them was in 2024, November, 2024, called Textcasting. And the URL for that is textcasting.org, and we’ll go into that in a minute. But then much more recently over on scripting.com, published on 28th of August, 2025, so very recently, was a piece which kind of built a top of that called Think Differently About WordPress.\n\n\n\nI’m gonna return to the Textcasting one ’cause this feels like the foundational technological underpinnings of what you are proposing here, this thing which would be a competitor to all of these walled gardens. It sits outside of WordPress.\n\n\n\n[00:27:14] Dave Winer: It’s more of a, okay, for me, this is when I was planning this product. I hadn’t even begun to develop it yet. But I wanted to write down in one place, these are all the things we’re gonna do. And that’s it. That’s all it was. I keep going on and on about all the different things that I wanted that I wasn’t getting, as a writer. I am a writer and I feel like Twitter was the original one, said you can’t have all your writing tools. It’s like I’m designing a guitar. And I’m saying, you can have three strings if you want. You can play music on three strings, right?\n\n\n\nThe ultimate insult is the people who made this decision are not guitar players. They’re not musicians. They don’t have the slightest clue what the f they’re doing, and I’ve been told that even getting a new generation of products isn’t gonna solve this problem, because they are just as clueless about what writers need. And so at least I feel like upfront I ought to tell them exactly what I want from them. And that’s what textcasting.org is.\n\n\n\nSo when we give it to the people, they can say, they might say, why didn’t you tell us that’s all you want? Yeah, look at textcasting.org, and look at the creation date. I was very clear about what I wanted, but understand that I needed this for myself as the requirements document for the product I was making. I’m a blogger, so when I write a requirements document, I put it in the public, because that’s what bloggers do. It is just the knee jerk. I do write some private documents, I do, it’s true. But my impulse is to write them publicly. So that’s really all that it is. It’s just saying, this is what we’re gonna do.\n\n\n\n[00:28:58] Nathan Wrigley: So right at the top, the goal is very simply encapsulated and it goes like this. It’s easy to get in your head and parse. Interop between social media apps based on the features writers needs, specifically the services of the social web, and there’s a link there, support these basic features.\n\n\n\nAnd then you go on to describe the ethics behind the movement is. But then you list out the things that you would like as a writer. It’s surprisingly a short list. There’s only six things, titles, optional. Links, de rigueur, you’ve gotta have links. Simple styling, bold, italics, that’s probably enough. Enclosures making it possible to do other things like, I don’t know, podcasting and things like that. Unlimited length, that’s the big differentiator, isn’t it? Because more or less all the platforms that have gained success have stifled that in some way. And then the, this is important, I think maybe this is the bit that I think is most enjoyable, editable. Go back, modify it because why not? You wrote it, it’s yours. And markdown. That basically is textcasting encapsulated in just a few sentences. I’ve probably missed a lot of the nuance there, but that’s kind of how I see it.\n\n\n\n[00:30:04] Dave Winer: No, I don’t think so. Actually. Notice what’s not there? You’ll kick yourself. Comments. I don’t give a damn about comments.\n\n\n\n[00:30:12] Nathan Wrigley: Presumably the comments could be handled elsewhere.\n\n\n\n[00:30:15] Dave Winer: Absolutely, and I have a new idea for how comments should work. I wrote that up. I did a podcast about that, I think it was yesterday or the day before. I’ve had this design for many years, but I think there’s a way around all the abuse, and all the spamming that goes on these networks. I think it’s time for another look, first of all. I mean, I had a look, okay.\n\n\n\nBut, second of all, it’s time to open it up so everybody can play in this game so we can try out lots of different ways of doing it. Which by the way is also part of what I’m doing. I’m making a, the thing Wordland. If you go to wordland.social. Go there and try it out.\n\n\n\nIt’s there. It works with your WordPress sites. And so you might think, okay, it is actually my business to make a new writing tool for WordPress. I made the writing tool I would like to use. The idea is that you focus all your attention on writing, so it has all the functionality that you need to write and nothing else.\n\n\n\nEverything else that it does that’s in the WordPress, their command structure. And it was what I felt was in the way for me to be a writer using WordPress. Because what WordPress, I don’t want to call it a mistake, it’s just how it evolved, is that the writing functionality is intermixed with everything else. And it makes it a very intimidating thing to get started with.\n\n\n\nAnd so if you look at the people that are the insiders in the WordPress community, that’s a very small number compared to the number of people who have tried to use WordPress. That’s a huge number because WordPress is it, right?\n\n\n\nAnd the number of people who use it, but they might prefer a better tool because this isn’t really what they think about. The things that are in the WordPress command structure are things that most people never need to go to. It’s too complicated. Look at the feature set of Twitter, for example. And it does a lot more than Twitter does, but most people aren’t interested in that. That’s one.\n\n\n\nNumber two is, there are modes of working and writing requires severe focus. I don’t want to have to jump. Every time I have to go some random other place in the, that I have to devote my brain power to that, what I’m not doing, I’m not focused on the plan for writing. When I write something, I’m thinking three paragraphs ahead. And I’m trying to remember that because I don’t want to stop writing to take a note. I want to just go down the page and get my first draft out. But if in order to do this I have to go somewhere far away, that requires me to think, now I’ve lost my place.\n\n\n\nAnd it creates a certain stress and programmers, if you say this to a programmer, most programmers go, oh, you’re just being weird. That’s not the way it works. Let me tell you how it works. I am also myself a programmer, so I understand the thought process, but you have to play. You have to have both roles in there. And that’s one of the things that makes me a fairly unique developer, is that I’m both a writer and a developer.\n\n\n\nSo I play on both sides of that fence. And so if I want a writer to test my code, I don’t do it right after I wrote the code. I come back a couple of days later, now that I’ve got a fresh way of looking at things and then I try to use it, and then I see the problems right off the bat.\n\n\n\n[00:33:26] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll link to Wordland. I’ve had a good long look at the pages that you’ve offered up. I confess, I haven’t actually tried it out, but it’s a, it’s a very different take on a fairly minimal editing interface in WordPress. So I’ll make sure to link out to that.\n\n\n\n[00:33:37] Dave Winer: It’s fairly minimal, but it does everything on the Textcasting page. It doesn’t have the limits that all the Twitter like products have. It’s all supported, you get to do all of that stuff. And plus you get categories. And I think categories are huge. I really do. And it has a very nice, simple interface for it, but a very powerful one for categories. So, have a look at that.\n\n\n\n[00:33:58] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you.\n\n\n\n[00:33:59] Dave Winer: And bookmarks. It’s very important for a writer. I have, I don’t know how many hundreds of documents that I’ve written over the years. I pretty much need quick access to all of them. Because I never know when I’m gonna have to make a change, and that’s in there too.\n\n\n\n[00:34:12] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.\n\n\n\n[00:34:12] Dave Winer: Oh wait, I forgot the actual main point. The main point I was gonna make is that I’ve also, all the work I had to do on the server side to set this up, I’m not gonna make anybody have to do. That’s all open source, and I’ll even run the server for you.\n\n\n\nYeah, because what I want is a development community to pop up here. And so if somebody looks at Wordland, says that’s not the way to do it, here’s how you should do it. Say, great, go ahead, do it. And what they’ll find is, just like with WordPress, okay, there’s nothing in your way. You get to do that.\n\n\n\nAnd there’s more from that too, is that the user owns the documents, and all the documents are in markdown format. And so if you want to use a different editor on a document, just to work on it for whatever purpose, go ahead and it’ll still work in the place it came from.\n\n\n\nAnd this is going back to the IBM PC and the Macintosh, where when you had those machines, you owned the documents and you could have any editor you want edit it. And this led to file format standards, because if you come along three years after Microsoft Word comes along in the Macintosh, you better read Word format documents.\n\n\n\nSince I get to go first here, if this, if something happens, okay, that I have to say, maybe nothing will happen here, you never know. But because I got to go first, I chose markdown. Because markdown is the mp3 of text. It’s the obvious answer. And tell me why they don’t support markdown. Anything that works with text should support markdown in my opinion.\n\n\n\n[00:36:00] Nathan Wrigley: It’s just a nice, easy to access. The keyboard does everything.\n\n\n\n[00:36:03] Dave Winer: There’s more. I’ve written feed readers. All along have been writing feed readers, and we have to sterilize the content because people put all kinds of garbage. And so you basically strip everything out. I’m tired of doing that. What I want to do is give the writers the ability to put some bold face and italics, and put some links in there, and give it, all the things that are on the Textcasting thing.\n\n\n\nSo I don’t want to strip that out anymore. And so in Feedland and in Wordland, markdown is fully supported everywhere, and in RSS. It’s a key point. If I had that to do over again. I can’t do that one. I’m sorry, I’m going on about this but I really believe in it. I couldn’t do it over again. If I had to do over again in the beginning, I would’ve made markdown the text format in RSS, totally. I couldn’t do it ’cause it didn’t exist. RSS came first but I’ve taken care of it.\n\n\n\nNow, Wordland produces its own RSS feed for every document, along with the one that WordPress produces. And the feed we produce has the markdown in it. And it has a couple of other things, and it, we will have more. As we think of more features to add. I’ve now got a place where I can add features. These are in a namespace, it’s totally non-controversial. I’m not modifying RSS, I have something called the source namespace.\n\n\n\nAnd then at some point, again, it’s all prefixed by if it catches on, then I’ll go to the guys that do the feeds inside of WordPress and say, here’s some suggestions for features to your feed. And at that point we’ll be friends, I hope. And they’ll, love me and I’ll love them. It’s not impossible. There are people on the team that are helping us. That’s nice, I really love that.\n\n\n\n[00:37:47] Nathan Wrigley: So taking it back a little bit, we’ve got the Textcasting framework that we described a little bit, a few moments ago. That kind of feels like the underpinnings to this other piece that I mentioned. And again, links in the show notes. Think Different About WordPress. Now, I confess, I’ve been following you for many years. really, in my head, collided you with WordPress.\n\n\n\n[00:38:08] Dave Winer: I wasn’t, you interpreted\n\n\n\n[00:38:10] Nathan Wrigley: And then suddenly you pop up with this piece about Wordland for start, which is a, an editor, which binds to WordPress. And then this whole piece about think differently about WordPress. Now this is really curious because, well you tell me what you’re proposing. I could try, try to interpret it.\n\n\n\n[00:38:26] Dave Winer: I tried put the key idea upfront, okay. When I say Think Different About WordPress, I can tell you exactly what that is, what you’re supposed to think. I used the grammatically incorrect version that Apple uses.\n\n\n\n[00:38:42] Nathan Wrigley: Think different.\n\n\n\n[00:38:43] Dave Winer: Yeah, it was cute. I thought, what the heck, let’s do it. That’s the point, really. And it is just think of WordPress as the equivalent of the Bluesky service and the Mastodon service. And the reason you can do that is because it’s really comparable. They’re all text databases, that’s what they are. They have some different structures. That’s okay, we can add structures too. But it’s how good are they at doing that, and how mature is their code, this is very technical stuff, right? But what does the API look like, and how stable is the API? These are all the concerns that limit what people can develop on the platform. And if you do the check boxes, I probably should do that, but WordPress wins on every one of them.\n\n\n\n[00:39:31] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a lot of life behind it and a lot of commitment to backwards compatibility.\n\n\n\n[00:39:35] Dave Winer: It’s very simple actually. The reason it is that way is that whoever made the calls, they had a philosophy for the whole 22 years of the web will tell us what to do, and they did it. What else?\n\n\n\nI know, I felt Rip Van Winkle, you know what I’m saying? It’s like, I was not paying attention to WordPress because I had all the wrong ideas. Now, they didn’t market to me. They never told me in 2017 they had a new API never. It. They didn’t tell me that they had a Node.js package for that API. They never told me. I was working in Node.js at that point. So I could have tried it out right away. They never told me. And all of a sudden, like I’m looking around, I need to add WordPress login to Feedland, because that’s running, we have a, at feedland.com people should try that too. Okay, because that’s a big part.\n\n\n\nIt’s the feed backend for the system that we’re talking about. And Feedland runs on the Automattic VIP server. So that thing scales. Okay. I learned how to write, I didn’t know how to write scalable software before I hooked up with them, in I guess it was like three years ago or something.\n\n\n\nAnd the first thing we did is, and they were very generous about this in teaching me, and I kept finding things I had to change to make it so that you could support millions of users, right? It’s not mysterious once you learn how to do it, but there’s an art to it.\n\n\n\nThe bigger project is imagine Twitter with an editor that could support. Twitter has what I call a tiny little text box, okay? You get to type something in there and they’ve extended their limit, if you pay them money, 10,000 characters, that’s a pretty good character limit. I say in Textcasting, unlimited. 10,000 is unlimited, okay. For all practical purposes, if you’re writing more than 10,000 characters, there shouldn’t be a limit, but, okay.\n\n\n\nSo you got a text editor. Twitter has a text editor. We have a text editor. Our text editor does the web the way I want it to do the web. And it has timelines where you see messages in reverse chronological order. So imagine if that was RSS, instead of their server. That timeline. You could make a timeline in RSS look just like it came from Twitter. There’s no problem with that, and that’s what I’ve done. When you subscribe to feeds, what you get.\n\n\n\nSo anything that supports RSS plugs into this system, and guess what? RSS is totally replaceable. Everything that I do, you can come up with another one and it works just as well, because RSS is an open format. Yeah, it’s got a protocol with it too. There’s a RSS cloud, which I mentioned in that piece, which does the real time component of it. It worked great.\n\n\n\nWordPress supports it in every one of the instances they do it, and so it may be more limited than the one, but I don’t know the one that’s in Bluesky or Mastodon. It may have features that are hard to do, but like I said, then it will do features. It’ll have things that they can’t do either.\n\n\n\nOne thing it’ll do is it’ll be very, very, very, very, simple. That’s the point.\n\n\n\n[00:42:48] Nathan Wrigley: What I’m thinking here is, I think that the typical listener listening to this will be thinking, how does this differ from, let’s say, going to Twitter, but it’s got a different interface and it’s got a different character limit.\n\n\n\n[00:42:59] Dave Winer: Not that different. whole idea is that it won’t be that different. I’m not actually running your server. Go, you could pick and choose. You don’t like my timeline, fine. Go get Joe’s timeline or Mary’s timeline or, Google might have a timeline or OpenAI might have one or. Do you need a license to create an RSS reader? No, that’s the point. The point is you get innovation, you get the doors blown off. You don’t have a silo. There’s no silo anywhere in sight.\n\n\n\nIf you want the users, you have to give them features, performance or price. They don’t have to stay with you if they don’t want to. There’s no import or export. It’s just there. It’s the feeds you subscribe to. That’s really, there’s not a whole lot of technology there.\n\n\n\n[00:43:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I mean, it’s a fairly nice, simple, basic proposition. It sounds from what you were saying in the Think Different About WordPress, it sounds like, well I said you planted your flag in the sand a little bit before. It sounds like you are committing yourself to do.\n\n\n\n[00:44:03] Dave Winer: I’ve already done the work. I’ll be demoing this at WordCamp Canada in October, hopefully that will all be webcast so everybody can watch it. And it’ll be archived and it probably will crash, because that’s the way these things work, right? And, but I will stay with it.\n\n\n\nI will get the bugs out. It’s gonna be a process. It’s not gonna be done, on October, whatever, 17th I think it is. It’s not gonna be done. All I ask is have a look then, and then when there’s a new version, please come have a look then too, and I’ll come back on your podcast if you want. We can talk about it as it develops. Remember the things that we’re puzzling, and don’t mistake for a minute that I’m not confused too. I am.\n\n\n\nI’m gonna tell you a little self-aggrandizing anecdote. Once in, I think it was high school or something, teachers said, somebody like to come up and solve this problem, it was a math class, solve this problem on the whiteboard?\n\n\n\nI said, okay, I’ll go. And I go up there and I’m doing it, and I got the answer, and the teacher said, you didn’t know the answer when you raised your hand, did you? No. I, it’s like, I’m an old guy now, that was when I was young. What the hell have I got to lose? Nothing. Nothing. I’m giving you software, an approach to software that I believe in. And, I’m testing the idea of the assumption.\n\n\n\nI was always told that RSS can’t do what Twitter does, and because I had not mastered server side scaled software, and remember until a couple of years ago, I had never done that. So I said, I have no way of testing that. They say you can’t do it. They know. I have my doubts about what they said, but I have no way of doing anything about it. And then I got the skill, and then I think now that it’s not true, I think that you absolutely can do it, and that they had a reason for telling me that, is that they didn’t want me to do it. Okay, that’s an invitation, a great invitation if I’ve ever seen one, right.\n\n\n\nI mean go for it. Let’s go for it, but let’s all go for it together. You see, that’s the point. It’s no fun if I’m just sitting here going, oh, please, I beg you, would you please try my software so I can be a billionaire too?\n\n\n\n[00:46:19] Nathan Wrigley: I was just gonna say, if you’re going into WordCamp Canada, and you’re demoing it all there, but at the moment, I’m guessing you’re doing all of the work, or you have done all of the work, by yourself. Are you hoping to create a community around this?\n\n\n\n[00:46:31] Dave Winer: Yeah. I want a developer community, but in order to have a developer community, there better be some users, ’cause the developers don’t come until there are users. So this is something, if a user says, what can I do to help? I’m just a user. The answer is you could do a lot to help. You can use the damn thing. Your product, your content, the stuff that you write will be a magnet for other people. They’ll see the reality of it and they’ll say, oh wow, I guess you can use stuff like this.\n\n\n\n[00:47:03] Nathan Wrigley: So the next question I have then is how does what you wish to do, how does that stand in relation to some of the currently existing things out there? So for example, the Fediverse, I know maybe that term’s not something you like to use, but let’s say Mastodon for want of a better word or ActivityPub, let’s go with that.\n\n\n\nActivityPub has a plugin which is under the custodianship of Automattic, so we’re obviously trying to bind our WordPress websites with the Fedi verse and being able to communicate in that way.\n\n\n\n[00:47:31] Dave Winer: No, that’s good. That’s very good.\n\n\n\n[00:47:33] Nathan Wrigley: How does yours stand in contrast to that? How, will yours differ from that familiar thing?\n\n\n\n[00:47:39] Dave Winer: What that does is it’s wonderful. First, let me tell you why it’s wonderful, and then I’ll tell you, I don’t even know how to begin telling you what the difference is. But, it’s wonderful because it accomplishes at least part of the goal of bringing the Textcasting vision into Mastodon. So if I have a blog called daveverse.org, which is a WordPress blog, and when I post something there, it’s also cross posted to Mastodon. And as far as I can tell, there’s no character limit. And it has styling, and it supports links, and it has images, and block quotes. It’s got a lot of the stuff. It even has titles. That’s right, it has titles too. If you go look at the Textcasting list, that’s pretty good coverage, right? It’s a major innovation, it’s a major step forward.\n\n\n\nSo what that does, hopefully it gets it onto the radar of the developers of Mastodon. The more people want that, okay, they have to make that clear. And right now, I don’t think people even know it exists. There’s not a lot of awareness of it. I’ve tried the best I can to, and I’ll keep pumping it for this reason. And the more successful it is, the more it puts pressure on Bluesky to do the same thing.\n\n\n\nSo it’s having the same effect that I’m hoping to have and, so I like it. Remember, I’m wearing a lot of hats here, but one of the hats I wear is, as a writer who wants the freedom to use all the writing tools, I don’t want to be given three strings, I want all five strings, using the guitar anology.\n\n\n\nSo this, what I’ve done is create something that has the potential of playing the role that, the core of Mastodon does. The whole thing. The whole thing, right? It’s not comparable to a plugin that connects WordPress to Mastodon because that’s a plugin, and what they’re doing is heroic, that’s the word I use for it, Matthias and his team are doing at Automattic, are doing is heroic, because it’s a hard problem to solve. It’s taking ’em a lot of time and they’re working really hard, but those guys really believe, they’re really committed. And I, love that. It’s both heroic and love inspiring. These guys are great. And they won’t have to do that for my system. They won’t, it’ll just come for free.\n\n\n\n[00:50:04] Nathan Wrigley: With the Mastodon system, obviously the ActivityPub protocol will bind to a server of your choice. So many people go with mastodon.social as the sort of the default. Presumably there’s gotta be some part of the architecture for your system, which in that way, some central place.\n\n\n\n[00:50:20] Dave Winer: There is a server component to what I’m doing. Okay. It doesn’t matter where that server is running. You can run it anywhere, somebody has to run it, and it’s open source, and it’s not even a GPL license, it’s MIT licensed. So go have fun with this thing.\n\n\n\nAnd it’s on GitHub right now. I’m not asking people to install it yet because I want to get a chance to like lock it down before we start cloning it. It’s going to, it is designed to be no lock-in. It is, does, require somebody to run a server\n\n\n\n[00:51:00] Nathan Wrigley: So the bit that I’m reading off the scripting.com website where, you know the piece entitled Think Different About WordPress. You have this sentence where it says, a storage service and it says, I’m going to run the server for you to get the bootstrap going, my treat. That was the bit.\n\n\n\n[00:51:14] Dave Winer: That raised the alarms, right? It should raise the alarms.\n\n\n\n[00:51:17] Nathan Wrigley: Exactly. It made me think Twitter in a way, it made me think there’s this central bit.\n\n\n\n[00:51:21] Dave Winer: No, it’s not, because I have the answer that Twitter never had, which is I’m giving you all the code you need to run your own server. I’m giving that to you. I’m not making you write it. In Twitter you can’t even write it. If I wrote a server that did what Twitter’s server does, that’s great, but it wouldn’t be part of Twitter. It wouldn’t be available to everyone. The availability here is the same availability as RSS. So can I subscribe to your RSS feed, even if your thing is on another server? Of course.\n\n\n\nThat’s all you need to know. Ultimately, that’s all you’re going to need is to be able to. It’s just RSS, that’s all it is.\n\n\n\n[00:52:01] Nathan Wrigley: It’s RSS all the way down.\n\n\n\n[00:52:03] Dave Winer: But let me just say this, is that’s also a strength of the WordPress community, the skepticism. You’re always, you guys are always watching for the lock in.\n\n\n\n[00:52:13] Nathan Wrigley: We’ve spent trying to encourage the world that you need to own your own data, or at least have. \n\n\n\n[00:52:17] Dave Winer: Right.\n\n\n\n[00:52:19] Nathan Wrigley: Unfortunately the world, on the whole, didn’t listen, so we keep banging that gong.\n\n\n\n[00:52:24] Dave Winer: Yes. But let me point out that you are the distillation of the people. You’re the group of people who care deeply about that stuff. So keep it up because, and that’s why I’m ready to answer those questions because, and here’s the punchline. Even though I’m not part of your community, we share that religion.\n\n\n\n[00:52:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that’s nice.\n\n\n\n[00:52:43] Dave Winer: Why do we share the religion? Because it’s the web. Because that’s what the web taught us. Maybe we believed, maybe we were very naive in the nineties and the early two thousands. We were, we’re not naive anymore. I think the last, the very last sentence in the Think Different, go read that, right now.\n\n\n\n[00:53:02] Nathan Wrigley: They lied to the users all the time, over and over. No, I don’t object to you making money, but I’m putting it out there. You can compete with me. I want you to compete with me, as long as you don’t try to cut off the interop. I’m not naive. Believe me, I expect that will happen.\n\n\n\n[00:53:16] Dave Winer: That’s just all the credentials I need to be in your community, right? Not all the credentials. I don’t know half the stuff any of you guys know about the how to do. I don’t do PHP for example. I don’t know how to set up a WordPress server. I have somebody that helps me with that. So I’m not qualified to be a member of the WordPress community, but that’s the beauty of the web. I don’t have to be to connect with that community, because that’s what the web gives. And that’s pretty awesome, don’t you think? And the other thing is that makes it even more awesome is that all the other people like me will be able to do it too. Why? Because in the end they played straight with you.\n\n\n\n[00:54:01] Nathan Wrigley: Depending on when this podcast is released, it may well be that you’ve done your presentation. If that is in fact the case, then I will make sure to link to the WordPress TV, the video that will have been captured. I’ll link that into this post. But also I’ll link to the Textcasting document and, also the Think Different About WordPress document. And encourage you, if you’ve got any interesting kind of, I’m gonna say rewinding the clock and returning the world to a different era where the blue sky was there, and there was less cloud, than go and explore those different bits and pieces.\n\n\n\nAnd I will definitely be coming back to you, Dave Winer, to figure out exactly how it’s gone and maybe call it months or something like that. And we’ll see where you’ve got with the WordPress community.\n\n\n\n[00:54:40] Dave Winer: If we’re still here.\n\n\n\n[00:54:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But we will, we’ll leave it there. And, I will say thank you for chatting to me today about this really important subject. Thank you.\n\n\n\n[00:54:48] Dave Winer: Thank you much, it was great. Have a good day.\n\n\n\n\nOn the podcast today we have Dave Winer.\u00a0\n\n\n\nDave\u2019s journey into the heart of Silicon Valley began in the early 1980s, when he left Wisconsin and moved to California with two products and a dream: to achieve fame and fortune in the world of technology. Driven by a deep belief that real communication involves people truly connecting, he set out to make his mark.\n\n\n\nEarly on, he found himself in a memorable meeting with Steve Jobs, both were in their early 20s, bursting with ambition and self-assurance. Their encounter was fiery and competitive, yet it marked the start of Dave\u2019s lifelong mission to wire the world together, not just with technology, but by bringing people closer through it.\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019ve ever subscribed to a blog, listened to a podcast, or shared your thoughts online, chances are you\u2019ve benefitted from Dave\u2019s pioneering work, he\u2019s the developer behind influential technologies like RSS, and a long-time advocate for open, user-owned, publishing platforms.\n\n\n\nHe describes himself as someone who wrote the first versions of lots of software, wants to work with everyone, still has big ideas, he likes things to be open from top to bottom, and doesn’t care for greedy people.\n\n\n\nToday we\u2019re talking about the vision, history, and future of the open web. Dave reminisces about the origins of today\u2019s internet, the early days when idealism and collaboration were at the web\u2019s core. He shares stories from his career, the rise and fall of early software startups, and how the initial spirit of community slowly gave way to the \u201cwalled gardens\u201d of big tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.\n\n\n\nBut the conversation isn\u2019t just about nostalgia, it\u2019s a call to action for reclaiming the internet\u2019s potential. Dave explains what went wrong with the evolution of the social web, why he thinks blogging tech like RSS just needed \u201cmore love\u201d, and how the influx of money and centralisation stifled the creativity and interoperability the web was built for.\n\n\n\nYou\u2019ll also get to hear about Dave\u2019s latest efforts to reignite those original web ideals, he reveals the thinking behind Wordland, a minimalist and powerful writing tool for WordPress users that puts freedom, portability, and open protocols front and centre.\n\n\n\nDave also lays out his \u201cTextcasting\u201d manifesto, challenging platforms to truly support writers with features like unlimited length, markdown support, and true ownership of content, without the need for permission or platform lock-in.\n\n\n\nDave truly is a pioneer of the internet, and is certainly not finished yet. He\u2019s putting WordPress at the centre of many of his future endeavours. \n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re passionate about owning your content, deeply curious about web history, or looking for inspiration on how technology can empower rather than control, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\nDave’s MORE product\n\n\n\nEFF\n\n\n\nThe birth of the Web – CERN\n\n\n\nscripting.com\n\n\n\nActivityPub on Wikipedia\n\n\n\nFediverse on Wikipedia\n\n\n\nDave’s textcasting.org website\n\n\n\nThink Different about WordPress post on scripting.com\n\n\n\nAbout Wordland\n\n\n\nAccess to Wordland\n\n\n\nAccess to Feedland\n\n\n\nWordPress and the open social web, Dave’s presentation at WordCamp Canada 2025\n\n\n\nDaveverse", "date_published": "2025-09-24T10:00:00-04:00", "date_modified": "2025-09-22T05:46:24-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/186-Dave-Winer-on-Decentralisation-WordPress-and-Open-Publishing.jpg", "tags": [ "feedland", "podcast", "rss", "textcasting", "wordland" ], "summary": "In this WP Tavern episode, host Nathan Wrigley interviews software pioneer Dave Winer, a key figure behind technologies like RSS and podcasting. Winer reflects on the early idealism of the web, the rise of walled gardens, and why open and interoperable platforms matter. He discusses his latest project, \u201cWordland,\u201d which leverages WordPress and markdown to create a decentralised alternative to social media silos, aiming to restore user freedom and creativity online. Dave emphasises the importance of open standards, backwards compatibility, and collaborative development for a healthier, more connected digital future. If you\u2019re passionate about owning your content, deeply curious about web history, or looking for inspiration on how technology can empower rather than control, this episode is for you.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2146495/c1e-jjdvdt5j564f528xr-ww8dn1vrs882-l8sgds.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=199566", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/185-mary-ann-aschenbrenner-on-switching-clients-from-classic-to-block-themes", "title": "#185 \u2013 Mary Ann Aschenbrenner on Switching Clients From Classic to Block Themes", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, switching clients from classic to block themes.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast, player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Mary Ann Aschenbrenner. Mary Ann has been the president of Waterlink Web, a digital agency specializing in WordPress web design, since 2014. Her experience includes e-commerce and membership websites, websites for local nonprofit organizations, and starter websites for small businesses As a lifelong learner, Mary Ann likes to keep pace with the latest innovations in WordPress. She is a fan of block themes, and particularly the WordPress default themes.
\n\n\n\nWe start by discussing the differences between classic and block themes, with Mary Ann offering practical step-by-step advice for anyone considering a move from a classic theme to a modern block-based theme. She talks about why you might want to make the switch, potential challenges to look out for, and stories from her own experience converting client sites.
\n\n\n\nWe also chat about the evolution of WordPress, the diminishing need for third party page builders, the importance of client education, and the ongoing improvements in the block editor. Plus Mary Ann shares insights from her WordCamp presentation, and her experiences collaborating with the WordPress community.
\n\n\n\nWhether you’re a seasoned WordPresser or just starting out and keen to know how block themes are making site building more accessible for everyone, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Mary Ann Aschenbrenner.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Mary Ann Aschenbrenner. Hello.
\n\n\n\n[00:02:54] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Hello. Nice to be here.
\n\n\n\n[00:02:56] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. Thank you so much. You are the first interview that I’m carrying out at WordCamp US in Portland in the year 2025.
\n\n\n\nThe endeavour here is to talk about classic themes and block themes. You are doing a presentation. I don’t suppose you’ve done it yet, because we’re right at the beginning of the main conference.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:12] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I do it this afternoon at 2:15pm, yes.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Good luck with that. Let’s just first of all find out a little bit about you. So if you don’t mind, would you just give us your biography, your potted biography, if you like. Who you are, what you do.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:24] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I’m from Portland, born and raised here. And the reason I got into website design is kind of a fluke and kind of really related to my whole ethos as a citizen of this great city.
\n\n\n\nWell, Pier Park is a North Portland park and it’s where my kids learned to swim. It’s where a lot of kids learned to swim. It was in a fairly low income neighborhood. And in 2005, the City of Portland decided to close the outdoor pool that was open in the summers. Just funding issues. And I worked with some other North Portland people and we gathered 700 signatures, which I don’t know if you know this, it’s a lot of work to get 700 signatures. And we took them down to City Hall, and we presented them and we talked about why Pier Pool needed to stay open.
\n\n\n\nAnd Sam Adams at the time said, we can find money for these folks. He was on the city council. And lo and behold, they decided to keep Pier Pool open.
\n\n\n\nWell, about a month later, I’m at a City Bureau meeting and was told that the reason they decided to close Pier Pool at the time, instead of Buckman Pool was because Buckman had a website. This was 2000 and five. I was like, oh, it can’t be that hard to get a website. I’ve collected 700 signatures, websites have to be easier. So Friends of Pier Park has had a website ever since and we, of course, keep our pool open with it. And that’s the long story short of how I got into it.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:58] Nathan Wrigley: That’s nice. That’s a real sort of philanthropic community endeavour that got you started on the road to WordPress. I’m guessing you built that site with WordPress.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:05] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I got someone else to do it because I knew nothing about building websites. In 2012, I had the opportunity to go back to school, and I actually went to PCC and studied web design. And I’ve been building websites, I started my own company shortly after that, and I’ve been doing it ever since with Water Link Web.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’ve been in the weeds for a fairly long time.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:24] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Yeah, well over a decade. 14 years or something like that.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:27] Nathan Wrigley: You’re obviously keeping up to date with all the different bits and pieces in the WordPress space, because the content of your presentation later today is, well, the title is Moving a Website from Classic to Block themes. Some examples, some live and learns. And so I’m guessing you’re going to be instructing people on, if they wish to make the move, how to go from what we call a classic theme.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:45] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It will be like the real step by step. This is what you do this first, you do this second, this is what it’s going to look like, these are the problems you may come into, and this is how to fix them. And voila, it’s going to be great.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:58] Nathan Wrigley: And so from your perspective, what’s the sort of, the single, well, maybe not single, maybe there’s a few things that you can mention, what are the most compelling reasons that you would ever want to move away from a classic theme?
\n\n\n\nLet’s say that I’ve got a website, it’s working perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong with it, but I’m kind of curious. I want to explore the option. What are the big ticket items why you would wish to move?
\n\n\n\n[00:06:19] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Well, a couple of reasons. Often the plugins that might be associated with your old theme may no longer being maintained. So there’s one situation where I mentioned in the presentation, they’re not being maintained, you won’t be able to update the PHP on your server and you could have a site that’s open to hacking and be slower therefore, because it’s running on a lower grade PHP.
\n\n\n\nSo that’s one reason to do it. Another is once you start using the block theme editor, you don’t want to go back. And so, you know, I’ve always maintained my skills with WordPress. I’ve been active in the WordPress community. I’ve continued to learn. And, yes, I’ll admit when the block editor first came out, I was a little trepidatious. I didn’t use it that first year. But the second year I did, and the third year I did. And I have been using the latest theme every year, ever since when I build my client’s websites.
\n\n\n\nSo I just don’t like going back to the classic and then like, okay, how do we do this? It just isn’t as intuitive. And as well, it’s easy to maintain, you don’t have as much opportunity to make changes as you do in the new block editor. So I’m just gradually updating my clients.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:33] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have a background in code or are you more of a kind of mouse driven builder?
\n\n\n\n[00:07:38] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Do I have a background in code? I did a little HTML. I understand CSS and I certainly use that a lot with the classic theme, CSS especially. But that isn’t really where I trained in.
\n\n\n\nReally where my skill lies is working with my clients and creating a website that is unique to them. Every website I do is original. And I look at what colours they want, what values they want to display. And we design based on that.
\n\n\n\nAnd my clients love me. I mean, I’ve had clients over a decade. Still same clients, still working with me. And they trust me and I know it’s like, it’s time to upgrade your website and then we do that.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:20] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the things about the classic themes was that having a deep knowledge of the code and the templating hierarchy in WordPress and those kind of things meant that it was available to some, but not necessarily to everybody.
\n\n\n\nWhereas the block based themes, the more modern WordPress, if you like, there is much more opportunity to get into the weeds. To do your templates and template parts and things like that with a visual editor.
\n\n\n\nSo long as you can understand the UI, and where to find the menus, and where to construct the different parts of your website. And that promise of democratising publishing seems to be something that is being delivered, despite the fact that, you know, it’s a bit of a jump to go from classic to full site.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:58] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It is, absolutely. My daughter’s wedding photographer contacted me. She’d had a website on Squarespace, and she found out after 10 years of working as a wedding photographer in southern Oregon, she was only on page five of search results. And that’s ridiculous, but it’s because of where she had her website.
\n\n\n\nSo she switched it over to WordPress and was confused, what do I do next? She had bought a photographer theme, and so it was going to work perfect for her. And I said, you know what? You see those three lines at the top of the page when you go to edit the page, hit them. And she did.
\n\n\n\nAnd then it was like, oh, the light went on. So she’s going to contact me again when she’s got that built out. But now she understands what to do. All she needed to learn was those three lines because then she knows she can edit every single block in there, and knows what to do.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:49] Nathan Wrigley: If you were to look at the growth of WordPress over the last, I’m going to say sort of 10 years, something like that, the uptick in WordPress usage up to kind of 40 plus percent, whatever it is now, I think there’s been a lot of page builders responsible for that uptick. So for example, the likes of Elementor or what have you.
\n\n\n\nAnd it was curious that in the blurb that went with your presentation, you particularly pointed out, I think the quote was, no page builder is needed, or something that. Is that a big part of it for you, that you don’t need to rely on any third party tool, often which have a fee attached to them for an annual or a recurring license or something like that? Is like that a big part of it?
\n\n\n\n[00:10:22] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I’ve never used page builders. And I have friends in the industry who love page builders, rely on page builders, and I have happy clients and I’ve never used a page builder. And the site is unique to them. I don’t feel like adding on another layer.
\n\n\n\nI’ve had to change over websites where a page builder was used, and it was very heavy, and slow because there was so much code. And back in the day, an individual who was vision impaired couldn’t use it because the web reader that they were using couldn’t read through all this extra code. I just never used it for that reason.
\n\n\n\nBut I’m sure they’re better now. I do believe that, but you don’t need them. When you have the block editor, you don’t need a page builder.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:06] Nathan Wrigley: Are there any situations in which you wouldn’t ascribe the necessity to move over to a more modern, block based theme? In other words, is there any scenario where you look at somebody that’s on a classic theme and you say, you know what, just stay where you are, everything’s fine? Or are you always keen to promote people to move in this direction?
\n\n\n\n[00:11:25] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I’m not always keen to promote people. So I have a client who, oh gosh, she was part of the second wave feminist movement, and has a really great website people love. I built it for her in like 2015 and it’s still working fine. She can stay on it. She’s comfortable with it. You know, there’s no reason really, if it starts being an issue with the PHP levels and so forth, then I’ll talk to her about it.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I suppose there’s also, given the trends in graphic design and the way websites look, there’s always a moment in time where your website just begins to look stale on the front end.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:59] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Or it looks retro, or it looks cool. And the others all look the same. So there’s always that.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:05] Nathan Wrigley: So that, if you like, was more about the why of you may wish to move over to a, away from a classic theme.
\n\n\n\nSo let’s move into the sort of the how then because that I think is the crux of your presentation really, how to do it and you need to demonstrate on the screen and what have you. So let’s go through that process. What is the first thing that you do when you are looking to transfer somebody over?
\n\n\n\n[00:12:25] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Well, the first thing you do is you set up a staging site. I’m not saying doing this live. Bring up a staging site on your server. It’s your same website and all it is is the new URL that says staging, dot, blah, blah, whatever.
\n\n\n\nThen after your staging site is up, you activate your 2025 theme. You may want to use 2024. 2024 is a really good theme as well. I think the patterns in 2024 are maybe a little more geared toward business, and the patterns in 2025 may be a little more geared towards personal blogs and artists. But pick one.
\n\n\n\nSo you have now have the 2025 theme, and it’s going to look very plain because it’s just plain until you fix it. And the next thing I usually do is I go through and start editing the pages. So a lot of my old themes, I put in the classic editor plugin. Remember the classic editor plugin?
\n\n\n\n[00:13:18] Nathan Wrigley: I do, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:19] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Yeah, we were afraid of block editor so we all put classic editor on. And so it kind of keeps it looking classic. And, well, you deactivate that. And then when you go to a page or a blog post, you’ll see a little greyed block on the top of that content that says classic editor. You click it, and then it’ll say, convert to blocks. And this is where you just do it. You say, yes, I’m going to convert to blocks. You click it, and you got blocks.
\n\n\n\nNow, where you are going to find problems? But first of all, most of it deploys really well. Paragraphs deploy, they’re still paragraphs. Headers deploy, they’re still headers, et cetera, et cetera. But where you have columns, your original theme may have used some sort of a short code for columns that’s different than a block editor. So that may not convert.
\n\n\n\nWhere you have embedded YouTube videos or something, you may decide to do them differently using the YouTube embed plugin instead of whatever code comes up. And you’ll get a little, if a paragraph doesn’t convert well or a block doesn’t convert well, it’ll say, you’ll know that.
\n\n\n\nBut you still have your live site. So you can go there and find the content and put it back in. You know, it would would be cut and paste if you may have to chase down a YouTube link to embed a YouTube video. But it is all very doable and it’s pretty fast. It doesn’t take that long. I had a website with 200, over 200 blog posts that I had to do that on. That took a little while. But it was 200 blog posts, more than that actually. But for just a standard website with a dozen or so pages, it’s not hugely time consuming.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:54] Nathan Wrigley: I guess the only problems that may occur is if some part of the, well, let’s say theme, but it may be a plugin, but it may be part of the theme was injecting something somewhere. And in the classic editor you don’t see it, but it somehow surfaces on the front end. I don’t know, it may be the insertion of an ad or something like that. And then you may run into problems because you can’t see where that content’s coming from.
\n\n\n\nBut I suppose in your scenario, you’re just flicking backwards and forwards between the current live site, which is the classic one, and then you’ve got your staging site, which is the block based one. I guess it’s just a jigsaw puzzle really. You’re trying to figure out, okay, why is that missing? Where does that come from? How can I deploy it in blocks and go through that process? And hopefully on each iteration you get more and more back to what the original content was.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:38] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Right, exactly. That’s how you do it.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And so it’s a process of going through it kind of one at a time.
\n\n\n\nHave you ever encountered something which you couldn’t solve in that scenario? Have you ever come across something where you just throw your hands in the air and think, what, where’s that?
\n\n\n\n[00:15:50] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: One time. So I had a website on a Studio Press theme, and I did the conversion. It all looked good to me. And then I realised when you were not logged into the site, the navigation didn’t show up properly. And I tried to figure that out and I redid the navigation. It looked good when you’re logged in, but when you’re just looking at the site not logged in, it wasn’t. So I ended up actually rebuilding that site entirely.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:16] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:17] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I just went ahead and brought up a whole new 2025 theme and copied and pasted content and brought it over.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:23] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so rather than having a staging site, well, you presumably did have a staging site, but it wasn’t a case of going into the posts or the pages and clicking the convert button. This more of a, okay, something’s broken here, I need to start from scratch.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:34] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Something’s broken, I couldn’t figure it, I mean, I’m sure if I were a coder, I would’ve dug into the code. But it’s like, it’s going to take me hours, it’s going to be easier in this case. It didn’t have a ton of content. There was like six or eight pages and maybe four or five blog posts. So it wasn’t that hard to do. It was easier to just bring up the new 2025 theme and start fresh.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, in the scenario where you’ve only got a handful of pages, it probably is literally quicker to do it that way and copy and paste.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:58] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Especially if you see an issue pop up immediately. It’s something, the navigation, I couldn’t figure out why that wasn’t working. But it was a Studio Press theme, so something was coming through from the old theme.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:09] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And you mentioned that this whole process where you, you go to your staging site and you go into a post or a page, and there’s this bar at the top. The content is missing essentially. And there’s this bar, it’s a grey bar and it looks.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:23] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Well, the content is usually there.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but it’s all in the wrong, it’s as it was essentially. So it’s not yet as blocks. And you click the button, wait a heartbeat, a moment, and the WordPress sort of process of migrating one to the other just sort of takes over. Paragraphs become paragraphs blocks, and on you go. I’ve yet to have that fail on me in a catastrophic way. It’s never done anything unexpected.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:45] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It’s never failed catastrophically, not on me. And I’ve converted, even on that one website I just mentioned, the content converted great. It was just the navigation that was the issue. But I’ve used Canvas theme, which used to be produced by WooCommerce before it became a part of WordPress. And I’ve used, of course another theme on, that another website. So that content comes through actually, really easily.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:09] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned also that you are using the default theme in most cases. So you mentioned 2025, but also you said, I think perhaps try 2024 or something like that. Is that your kind of go-to? Do you explore the ecosystem of other themes that are out there in the environment, either the repo or possibly commercial themes, or you just heavily leaning into default themes?
\n\n\n\n[00:18:28] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I just lean into the default theme.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:29] Nathan Wrigley: Is there any particular reason for that? Because obviously, you know it’s going to be updated, which is really nice. You know that it’s a, well, it’s deployed on every WordPress website, a standard if you download a vanilla version of WordPress.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:39] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It’ll be maintained for a long, long time. I know somebody who’s still in the 2015 theme and their site still works great.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the backwards compatibility promise of WordPress is pretty remarkable.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:51] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It’s pretty remarkable.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Have you found limitations in those themes though? So one of the things that I think people wish were better would be, for example, things like navigation. You know, the options that you have in default blocks for navigation. Currently, there’s quite a lot of work going on to improve that as it happens. But are there any limitations that you’ve encountered where you thought, I wish it could do more?
\n\n\n\n[00:19:12] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I haven’t with the 2025, not recently anyway. But with 2024, I used a little bit of CSS in the navigation block. So add a little CSS.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, just tweak it a little bit. There’s a lot of requirements for maybe, I don’t know, mega menus, things like that, adaptations to the mobile menu that are not available in the blocks. And as we’re leaning more into kind of like a no code environment with block based themes.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:35] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I have used a plugin for mega menus on one of my clients.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:37] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So you take care of that in a different way by using plugins? Yeah, okay. That kind of makes sense.
\n\n\n\nOkay, so that’s the bits and pieces perhaps about the sort of how you do it.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:46] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: And the reason I used the mega menu plugin for that client was he had very specific ideas of how he wanted his navigation to look on cell phone.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because it is fairly limited what you get out of the box. There’s not too many options and think the community is possibly moving towards having something a little bit better in the, yeah, a bit more full featured, let’s put it that way.
\n\n\n\nIt’s a curious question, do you see any need for more than a single theme in the WordPress space anymore? So in other words, now that we’re leaning into an era where all of the bits and pieces that would’ve been handled by the theme is now handled by the interface of the block-based theme. So, for example, all of your templates is within the UI of full site editing and what have you. Do we even need a whole bunch of themes?
\n\n\n\nCould we just have a single theme which did the bare bones, maybe headers, footers, menus, that kind of thing. And then all of it is done by patterns or templates, which can be pointed on and clicked in, in the interface?
\n\n\n\n[00:20:44] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Well, I think that it’s good to have themes, and I’ll tell you why. My daughter’s wedding photographer. She is not a website designer. You know, she was used to using Squarespace, realised that the SEO on it sucked and decided to go to WordPress and found a great photography theme from a good maker of themes. I had no problem with it. I looked at it. And all she needed was a little tip on how to see where her blocks were and what the block is. She’s just going to be able to go with that.
\n\n\n\nNow if she was starting from scratch with no theme to work with, and just trying to figure it out, I think it’d be a lot harder for her. But having a template that’s like, here’s your photography template, she can put her own pictures in there. She understands the concept, and she’ll be able to build her own website with it.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:36] Nathan Wrigley: Do you find it’s easier for your clients then to work with the block based themes than it was with the classic themes?
\n\n\n\n[00:21:43] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Yes.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:44] Nathan Wrigley: I find sometimes it’s difficult to kind of work out where you are in the UI. You know, you’ve clicked on a bunch of things and you can’t figure out how to get back to where you were, things like that. But then if I weigh that up against how difficult it was with classic themes, where you had to basically have a code editor open at some point and be editing template, PHP files, and things like this. Although it’s a bit confusing navigating around the UI, I think even the people developing WordPress would say, yes, there’s a bit of work to be done on the UI. I think on the whole, it’s much easier, but I don’t know what your clients think.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:13] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You know how I explained to my clients, I said, if you use Mac, can you put together a Pages document and maybe add some images, can you do that? And they say, yes. I said, well, if they’re using Microsoft, can you do the same thing? Yes, I can. Well, then you can use the block theme.
\n\n\n\nBecause once it’s set up, I mean, I think that there’s certain areas that are a little more tricky and for our clients, I’ll say, look, don’t get into the editor. Do not do full site editing. Let me do that. If you want to add something to the navigation, just tell me, I’ll edit it. It’s not a big deal. It takes me five minutes. They’re going to have to figure it out, because it’s only something they’re going to do once in a while when they change their navigation.
\n\n\n\nBut for any of their pages, you know, they know how to hit the three lines, see what block they’re in, click it, it lights up the block on the right hand side, and then they can do the editing to the right of that. They can do it.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:03] Nathan Wrigley: Do you lean into the feature of locking blocks? Because it sounds like you’ve got a fairly close relationship with your clients. You’re probably able to get on the phone with them and things like that, have that communication. So you can just say, don’t touch that, leave that alone, and that’s fine.
\n\n\n\nBut obviously in different scenarios where, I don’t know, it might be more corporate, that kind of thing, the capacity within native WordPress to exclude the client from being able to edit that.
\n\n\n\nSo as an example, yeah, you can change the text on that block, but it’s a cover block, but we’re not going to allow you to change the background image. Or conversely, you can change the background image, but you can’t change the text, those kind of things. So these are sort of new features which have crept in over time, and I’m not sure how many people use those, whether or not that would be of interest to you and your clients.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:45] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You know, it’s their website. They may be on my servers that I’m hosting, but it’s their website and if they really want to mess it up, they can. And I can fix it. But really, it’s not a problem.
\n\n\n\nThere’s been a few times, I have one client who adds content and he happened to add it all in tables. I don’t know why or how. I had to fix it on one of his pages. But, you know, I fixed it and the content is there down and it’s not in a table.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:10] Nathan Wrigley: Do you build into your process, when you have converted something from classic to block base, do you have like an education piece in the middle there somewhere?
\n\n\n\n[00:24:18] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Oh, yes.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:19] Nathan Wrigley: So time to show the client how to use it. Because obviously they may be very familiar with classic editing, or it may be something that they’re not really dabbling in that much. Either way, it’s not at all like the new thing. And how do you do that? Do you allocate time? Do you have videos prepared or just sit next to them in their offices?
\n\n\n\n[00:24:35] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You know, we usually do it as like a Zoom call. They share their screen. Well, actually, during the process, there’ll be times when I’m on the phone in a Zoom call with the client or a Google Meet call with the client, and I’m showing them what I’m doing on my end. So that’s part of the education process.
\n\n\n\nAnd we talk about, okay, do you like this font? No, I don’t like this one. Okay, well, how about this one? They see me change things back and forth. I put up content and they say, oh, we want to edit that. We want to rephrase it like this.
\n\n\n\nSo if we’re doing it on a Zoom call, it’s going back and forth, they see how I’m working. And I make a point, oh, see how I hit these three lines, and we can edit this paragraph block, let’s put a background on this paragraph block. Here’s how you do it. So they learn how to do that, just kind of as we’re building it.
\n\n\n\nAnd then when it’s done, I will definitely show them how, anything they want to change. And I’ll walk through them how to add a blog post, for example. Usually the pages are pretty dialed in by the time we go live, it’s exactly where they want. So they might need to learn how to add blog posts. And I’ll introduce them to the blocks I think they’re going to use. They don’t need to know how to do every single block because there’s so many blocks.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Do you switch some of them off, make them unavailable? I don’t know, there’s things like the Animoto Block, which goodness knows whoever was using that, I don’t know. But it’s there. I think most clients don’t need them. And having the capacity to switch some blocks off, quite a nice idea.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:00] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You can. I haven’t done that.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:01] Nathan Wrigley: No, okay. And are there any common gotchas? When you’ve gone through this process multiple times, is there anything which comes out the other end which is reliably strange to the client? You know, okay every client’s reporting back either, nothing, this is brilliant, it’s a hundred percent, I’m all on board. Or do you have common things which you have to explain over and over again to the different clients because it’s just quirky?
\n\n\n\n[00:26:21] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: There’s a couple clients that are boards, nonprofit boards, and so then I have to explain it over and over again.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:29] Nathan Wrigley: And is that because of the nature of.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:31] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Because the person I’m talking to changes.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:33] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:34] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Sometimes clients will want something I don’t really feel like I can deliver. So I have a client who wants full with image, with content on top of it, and wants it to be a slider. So there’ll be a full width image with content and a button, and then another full width image with content and a button. It’s a slider. So I created this.
\n\n\n\nAnd then when it was done, they were like, well, I want the whole image to show on a cell phone. I had to explain, if that entire image gets so narrow that it shows on a cell phone and it’s not very tall, your content won’t fit in it. And it was really hard to accept. So that kind of thing can occur.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, it’s not for everybody, but I feel at this point, this is the future of WordPress. This is the way it’s going to go. This is what most people are talking about and what have you. Just getting into your presentation later, firstly, good luck with it. I hope it goes well.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:26] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Thank you.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:27] Nathan Wrigley: How are you tackling this subject? Are you going to be doing slides? Because it’ll be curious, the audience, presumably in front of you are, well, we’re at WordCamp. Presumably they are a bunch of WordPressers. I’m curious to know at what level you are pitching it.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:39] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You know, I think somebody who’s fairly new to WordPress will be able to get a lot out of this. I think it’s geared towards somebody with a little bit of experience, not a lot.
\n\n\n\nI’m going to talk about three different websites. One of them was actually built in 2006 on Blogger. I wasn’t the one that built it. And two other websites. And I’m going to talk a little bit about the City of Portland, so people who come to this, even if they know everything I’m talking about will learn a little bit about the City of Portland.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:05] Nathan Wrigley: And this is all filmed as well, which is kind of nice. And these days those videos tend to get turned around pretty quickly. Long gone is the day that you would attend a WordCamp and then six months, a year later, the video would still be stuck in somebody’s hard disk.
\n\n\n\nHopefully by the time this podcast episode drops, that will be out and we’ll be able to watch your presentation. I think I’ve asked everything that I wish to ask. Is there anything that you think that we didn’t touch during our conversation?
\n\n\n\n[00:28:31] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: There is.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:31] Nathan Wrigley: Go for it.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:32] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: While I was building the site with 200 blog posts, I discovered a little, what I thought was a glitch. And it turns out it’s a feature. But if you were a developer, you think it’s a feature. So in the 2025 theme, when you go to templates, you go to your website editor and you go to patterns, and then you have the header, the footer, and the page templates.
\n\n\n\nFor the blog page, I pick a page template for the blog page, just that one. And then I can go in and I can select the style of my query loop. So if I want a query loop that’s just a picture on the left and content on the right for that blog page, and then people can scroll through and see all the different blog posts.
\n\n\n\nI picked one that was different than that. So I picked it, and then I deployed it, and then I went to the blog page and looked at it and it looked great. Except when I hit next page, it returned to the same page. It never was advancing to all these other 200 blog posts. And I was like, what happened here?
\n\n\n\nSo I went back to the template, page, templates, blog page, picked a different query loop. Same thing. Picked a third query loop. Ah, this one worked. I could advance to the next pages. So then I was curious, why is this?
\n\n\n\nSo I went back to that template, hit the three line dropdown arrow, looked at every single block in there and saw a pagination block that had not been in the others at the bottom of the group. So then I copied that and I put it in. And voila, my original one worked, I was very happy with it.
\n\n\n\nSo I went yesterday to the Contributor Day and I sat at the Core Performance table, and normally not where I would belong, and said, this is your issue, it’s got to be fixed. And they looked at it, and a couple more people looked at it, and then they explained to me that not all query loops are used on the blog page. Some might be used on a landing page. And you may not want a next pages on every one of your query loops, so it’s not there on everyone.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:53] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting that it got there on one of them. And I think this is something that can be quite confusing, things like that, which in the old world, you would’ve dropped in as a short code. And in order to get that short code, you would’ve gone into some other UI and configured it all, and then the short code would’ve been spat out with the correct parameters to do what you wanted. So there might have been a toggle for show pagination, take pagination off, and what have you. And then the short code would ultimately do that.
\n\n\n\nIn the block editor, this kind of thing happens fairly frequently in that there are nested blocks. And if you don’t deploy the nested blocks, so for example, if you didn’t know that pagination was a separate block, which usually sits outside of the query loop, usually below it in the same group or something like that, it’s easy to think, well, it ought to be there. Why isn’t it there? And sometimes you have to go find that pagination block, insert it in the right place and what have you.
\n\n\n\nYeah, so things like that, if you don’t see it, you don’t see it. It’s not intuitive to think that it ought to be there. And I can think of probably dozens of examples of that kind of thing where blocks that you may rely on are in fact nested blocks of other blocks, and they may not come in automatically.
\n\n\n\nSo, yeah, it’s a process of figuring that out, and maybe a toggle inside the query loop block saying, just enable pagination, turn it off, or something like that.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:11] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: That might be helpful. But I was able to fix it, and I realise now that it actually is a feature because they can, you can go to those query loops and look at all sorts of query loops that you might use elsewhere on your website. So I thought it was great to go to Contributor Day. I contributed and I learned.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really nice. And people were able to explain it to you. Yeah, definitely a thing if you come to a WordCamp, certainly of this magnitude, attend the Contributor Day. And it’s not just a process of contributing, it can be a process of sitting next to people who are working and asking them questions and thereby upping your own knowledge.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:44] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: And I don’t think that they were aware of it until I pointed it out.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, they’re in the weeds of deploying it, and they may not consider all the use cases. And in this case, you had one in which it didn’t work as expected. I guess from their point of view, everything that they said is probably true. You know, it may be deployed in this way, it may not, and so we built it in such a way that you can have the pagination or not, but nevertheless, you kind of needed it right away.
\n\n\n\nWell, that’s brilliant. Thank you so much Mary. Appreciate you chatting to me today.
\n\n\n\nWhere can we find you if people would like to reach out about anything you’ve talked about? Where’s the best places?
\n\n\n\n[00:33:14] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: On my website is waterlinkweb.com. You can find me there. I’m on Instagram at Water Link Web. I have a LinkedIn, Mary Ann Aschenbrenner at LinkedIn. And I think that does it.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:28] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you very much. I’ll make sure all those bits and pieces get into the show notes. So head to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Mary Ann Aschenbrenner. I will hopefully speak to you another time. Thank you very much for chatting to me.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:40] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Thank you very much, Nathan.
\nOn the podcast today we have Mary Ann Aschenbrenner.
\n\n\n\nMary Ann has been the President of Waterlink Web, a digital agency specialising in WordPress web design since 2014. Her experience includes e-Commerce and membership websites, websites for local nonprofit organisations, and starter websites for small businesses. As a life-long learner, Mary Ann likes to keep pace with the latest innovations in WordPress. She is a fan of block themes and particularly the WordPress default themes.
\n\n\n\nWe start by discussing the differences between classic and block themes, with Mary Ann offering practical, step-by-step advice for anyone considering a move from a classic theme to a modern block-based theme. She talks about why you might want to make the switch, potential challenges to look out for, and stories from her own experience converting client sites.
\n\n\n\nWe also chat about the evolution of WordPress, the diminishing need for third-party page builders, the importance of client education, and the ongoing improvements in the block editor. Plus, Mary Ann shares insights from her WordCamp presentation, and her experiences collaborating with the WordPress community.
\n\n\n\nWhether you\u2019re a seasoned WordPresser, or are just starting out, and keen to know how block themes are making site building more accessible for everyone, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nMary Ann Aschenbrenner on LinkedIn
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMoving a Website from Classic to a Block Theme
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "content_text": "Transcript\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, switching clients from classic to block themes.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast, player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Mary Ann Aschenbrenner. Mary Ann has been the president of Waterlink Web, a digital agency specializing in WordPress web design, since 2014. Her experience includes e-commerce and membership websites, websites for local nonprofit organizations, and starter websites for small businesses As a lifelong learner, Mary Ann likes to keep pace with the latest innovations in WordPress. She is a fan of block themes, and particularly the WordPress default themes.\n\n\n\nWe start by discussing the differences between classic and block themes, with Mary Ann offering practical step-by-step advice for anyone considering a move from a classic theme to a modern block-based theme. She talks about why you might want to make the switch, potential challenges to look out for, and stories from her own experience converting client sites.\n\n\n\nWe also chat about the evolution of WordPress, the diminishing need for third party page builders, the importance of client education, and the ongoing improvements in the block editor. Plus Mary Ann shares insights from her WordCamp presentation, and her experiences collaborating with the WordPress community.\n\n\n\nWhether you’re a seasoned WordPresser or just starting out and keen to know how block themes are making site building more accessible for everyone, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Mary Ann Aschenbrenner.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Mary Ann Aschenbrenner. Hello.\n\n\n\n[00:02:54] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Hello. Nice to be here.\n\n\n\n[00:02:56] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. Thank you so much. You are the first interview that I’m carrying out at WordCamp US in Portland in the year 2025.\n\n\n\nThe endeavour here is to talk about classic themes and block themes. You are doing a presentation. I don’t suppose you’ve done it yet, because we’re right at the beginning of the main conference.\n\n\n\n[00:03:12] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I do it this afternoon at 2:15pm, yes.\n\n\n\n[00:03:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Good luck with that. Let’s just first of all find out a little bit about you. So if you don’t mind, would you just give us your biography, your potted biography, if you like. Who you are, what you do.\n\n\n\n[00:03:24] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I’m from Portland, born and raised here. And the reason I got into website design is kind of a fluke and kind of really related to my whole ethos as a citizen of this great city.\n\n\n\nWell, Pier Park is a North Portland park and it’s where my kids learned to swim. It’s where a lot of kids learned to swim. It was in a fairly low income neighborhood. And in 2005, the City of Portland decided to close the outdoor pool that was open in the summers. Just funding issues. And I worked with some other North Portland people and we gathered 700 signatures, which I don’t know if you know this, it’s a lot of work to get 700 signatures. And we took them down to City Hall, and we presented them and we talked about why Pier Pool needed to stay open.\n\n\n\nAnd Sam Adams at the time said, we can find money for these folks. He was on the city council. And lo and behold, they decided to keep Pier Pool open.\n\n\n\nWell, about a month later, I’m at a City Bureau meeting and was told that the reason they decided to close Pier Pool at the time, instead of Buckman Pool was because Buckman had a website. This was 2000 and five. I was like, oh, it can’t be that hard to get a website. I’ve collected 700 signatures, websites have to be easier. So Friends of Pier Park has had a website ever since and we, of course, keep our pool open with it. And that’s the long story short of how I got into it.\n\n\n\n[00:04:58] Nathan Wrigley: That’s nice. That’s a real sort of philanthropic community endeavour that got you started on the road to WordPress. I’m guessing you built that site with WordPress.\n\n\n\n[00:05:05] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I got someone else to do it because I knew nothing about building websites. In 2012, I had the opportunity to go back to school, and I actually went to PCC and studied web design. And I’ve been building websites, I started my own company shortly after that, and I’ve been doing it ever since with Water Link Web.\n\n\n\n[00:05:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’ve been in the weeds for a fairly long time.\n\n\n\n[00:05:24] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Yeah, well over a decade. 14 years or something like that.\n\n\n\n[00:05:27] Nathan Wrigley: You’re obviously keeping up to date with all the different bits and pieces in the WordPress space, because the content of your presentation later today is, well, the title is Moving a Website from Classic to Block themes. Some examples, some live and learns. And so I’m guessing you’re going to be instructing people on, if they wish to make the move, how to go from what we call a classic theme.\n\n\n\n[00:05:45] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It will be like the real step by step. This is what you do this first, you do this second, this is what it’s going to look like, these are the problems you may come into, and this is how to fix them. And voila, it’s going to be great.\n\n\n\n[00:05:58] Nathan Wrigley: And so from your perspective, what’s the sort of, the single, well, maybe not single, maybe there’s a few things that you can mention, what are the most compelling reasons that you would ever want to move away from a classic theme?\n\n\n\nLet’s say that I’ve got a website, it’s working perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong with it, but I’m kind of curious. I want to explore the option. What are the big ticket items why you would wish to move?\n\n\n\n[00:06:19] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Well, a couple of reasons. Often the plugins that might be associated with your old theme may no longer being maintained. So there’s one situation where I mentioned in the presentation, they’re not being maintained, you won’t be able to update the PHP on your server and you could have a site that’s open to hacking and be slower therefore, because it’s running on a lower grade PHP.\n\n\n\nSo that’s one reason to do it. Another is once you start using the block theme editor, you don’t want to go back. And so, you know, I’ve always maintained my skills with WordPress. I’ve been active in the WordPress community. I’ve continued to learn. And, yes, I’ll admit when the block editor first came out, I was a little trepidatious. I didn’t use it that first year. But the second year I did, and the third year I did. And I have been using the latest theme every year, ever since when I build my client’s websites.\n\n\n\nSo I just don’t like going back to the classic and then like, okay, how do we do this? It just isn’t as intuitive. And as well, it’s easy to maintain, you don’t have as much opportunity to make changes as you do in the new block editor. So I’m just gradually updating my clients.\n\n\n\n[00:07:33] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have a background in code or are you more of a kind of mouse driven builder?\n\n\n\n[00:07:38] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Do I have a background in code? I did a little HTML. I understand CSS and I certainly use that a lot with the classic theme, CSS especially. But that isn’t really where I trained in.\n\n\n\nReally where my skill lies is working with my clients and creating a website that is unique to them. Every website I do is original. And I look at what colours they want, what values they want to display. And we design based on that.\n\n\n\nAnd my clients love me. I mean, I’ve had clients over a decade. Still same clients, still working with me. And they trust me and I know it’s like, it’s time to upgrade your website and then we do that.\n\n\n\n[00:08:20] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the things about the classic themes was that having a deep knowledge of the code and the templating hierarchy in WordPress and those kind of things meant that it was available to some, but not necessarily to everybody.\n\n\n\nWhereas the block based themes, the more modern WordPress, if you like, there is much more opportunity to get into the weeds. To do your templates and template parts and things like that with a visual editor.\n\n\n\nSo long as you can understand the UI, and where to find the menus, and where to construct the different parts of your website. And that promise of democratising publishing seems to be something that is being delivered, despite the fact that, you know, it’s a bit of a jump to go from classic to full site.\n\n\n\n[00:08:58] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It is, absolutely. My daughter’s wedding photographer contacted me. She’d had a website on Squarespace, and she found out after 10 years of working as a wedding photographer in southern Oregon, she was only on page five of search results. And that’s ridiculous, but it’s because of where she had her website.\n\n\n\nSo she switched it over to WordPress and was confused, what do I do next? She had bought a photographer theme, and so it was going to work perfect for her. And I said, you know what? You see those three lines at the top of the page when you go to edit the page, hit them. And she did.\n\n\n\nAnd then it was like, oh, the light went on. So she’s going to contact me again when she’s got that built out. But now she understands what to do. All she needed to learn was those three lines because then she knows she can edit every single block in there, and knows what to do.\n\n\n\n[00:09:49] Nathan Wrigley: If you were to look at the growth of WordPress over the last, I’m going to say sort of 10 years, something like that, the uptick in WordPress usage up to kind of 40 plus percent, whatever it is now, I think there’s been a lot of page builders responsible for that uptick. So for example, the likes of Elementor or what have you.\n\n\n\nAnd it was curious that in the blurb that went with your presentation, you particularly pointed out, I think the quote was, no page builder is needed, or something that. Is that a big part of it for you, that you don’t need to rely on any third party tool, often which have a fee attached to them for an annual or a recurring license or something like that? Is like that a big part of it?\n\n\n\n[00:10:22] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I’ve never used page builders. And I have friends in the industry who love page builders, rely on page builders, and I have happy clients and I’ve never used a page builder. And the site is unique to them. I don’t feel like adding on another layer.\n\n\n\nI’ve had to change over websites where a page builder was used, and it was very heavy, and slow because there was so much code. And back in the day, an individual who was vision impaired couldn’t use it because the web reader that they were using couldn’t read through all this extra code. I just never used it for that reason.\n\n\n\nBut I’m sure they’re better now. I do believe that, but you don’t need them. When you have the block editor, you don’t need a page builder.\n\n\n\n[00:11:06] Nathan Wrigley: Are there any situations in which you wouldn’t ascribe the necessity to move over to a more modern, block based theme? In other words, is there any scenario where you look at somebody that’s on a classic theme and you say, you know what, just stay where you are, everything’s fine? Or are you always keen to promote people to move in this direction?\n\n\n\n[00:11:25] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I’m not always keen to promote people. So I have a client who, oh gosh, she was part of the second wave feminist movement, and has a really great website people love. I built it for her in like 2015 and it’s still working fine. She can stay on it. She’s comfortable with it. You know, there’s no reason really, if it starts being an issue with the PHP levels and so forth, then I’ll talk to her about it.\n\n\n\n[00:11:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I suppose there’s also, given the trends in graphic design and the way websites look, there’s always a moment in time where your website just begins to look stale on the front end.\n\n\n\n[00:11:59] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Or it looks retro, or it looks cool. And the others all look the same. So there’s always that.\n\n\n\n[00:12:05] Nathan Wrigley: So that, if you like, was more about the why of you may wish to move over to a, away from a classic theme.\n\n\n\nSo let’s move into the sort of the how then because that I think is the crux of your presentation really, how to do it and you need to demonstrate on the screen and what have you. So let’s go through that process. What is the first thing that you do when you are looking to transfer somebody over?\n\n\n\n[00:12:25] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Well, the first thing you do is you set up a staging site. I’m not saying doing this live. Bring up a staging site on your server. It’s your same website and all it is is the new URL that says staging, dot, blah, blah, whatever.\n\n\n\nThen after your staging site is up, you activate your 2025 theme. You may want to use 2024. 2024 is a really good theme as well. I think the patterns in 2024 are maybe a little more geared toward business, and the patterns in 2025 may be a little more geared towards personal blogs and artists. But pick one.\n\n\n\nSo you have now have the 2025 theme, and it’s going to look very plain because it’s just plain until you fix it. And the next thing I usually do is I go through and start editing the pages. So a lot of my old themes, I put in the classic editor plugin. Remember the classic editor plugin?\n\n\n\n[00:13:18] Nathan Wrigley: I do, yeah.\n\n\n\n[00:13:19] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Yeah, we were afraid of block editor so we all put classic editor on. And so it kind of keeps it looking classic. And, well, you deactivate that. And then when you go to a page or a blog post, you’ll see a little greyed block on the top of that content that says classic editor. You click it, and then it’ll say, convert to blocks. And this is where you just do it. You say, yes, I’m going to convert to blocks. You click it, and you got blocks.\n\n\n\nNow, where you are going to find problems? But first of all, most of it deploys really well. Paragraphs deploy, they’re still paragraphs. Headers deploy, they’re still headers, et cetera, et cetera. But where you have columns, your original theme may have used some sort of a short code for columns that’s different than a block editor. So that may not convert.\n\n\n\nWhere you have embedded YouTube videos or something, you may decide to do them differently using the YouTube embed plugin instead of whatever code comes up. And you’ll get a little, if a paragraph doesn’t convert well or a block doesn’t convert well, it’ll say, you’ll know that.\n\n\n\nBut you still have your live site. So you can go there and find the content and put it back in. You know, it would would be cut and paste if you may have to chase down a YouTube link to embed a YouTube video. But it is all very doable and it’s pretty fast. It doesn’t take that long. I had a website with 200, over 200 blog posts that I had to do that on. That took a little while. But it was 200 blog posts, more than that actually. But for just a standard website with a dozen or so pages, it’s not hugely time consuming.\n\n\n\n[00:14:54] Nathan Wrigley: I guess the only problems that may occur is if some part of the, well, let’s say theme, but it may be a plugin, but it may be part of the theme was injecting something somewhere. And in the classic editor you don’t see it, but it somehow surfaces on the front end. I don’t know, it may be the insertion of an ad or something like that. And then you may run into problems because you can’t see where that content’s coming from.\n\n\n\nBut I suppose in your scenario, you’re just flicking backwards and forwards between the current live site, which is the classic one, and then you’ve got your staging site, which is the block based one. I guess it’s just a jigsaw puzzle really. You’re trying to figure out, okay, why is that missing? Where does that come from? How can I deploy it in blocks and go through that process? And hopefully on each iteration you get more and more back to what the original content was.\n\n\n\n[00:15:38] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Right, exactly. That’s how you do it.\n\n\n\n[00:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And so it’s a process of going through it kind of one at a time.\n\n\n\nHave you ever encountered something which you couldn’t solve in that scenario? Have you ever come across something where you just throw your hands in the air and think, what, where’s that?\n\n\n\n[00:15:50] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: One time. So I had a website on a Studio Press theme, and I did the conversion. It all looked good to me. And then I realised when you were not logged into the site, the navigation didn’t show up properly. And I tried to figure that out and I redid the navigation. It looked good when you’re logged in, but when you’re just looking at the site not logged in, it wasn’t. So I ended up actually rebuilding that site entirely.\n\n\n\n[00:16:16] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting.\n\n\n\n[00:16:17] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I just went ahead and brought up a whole new 2025 theme and copied and pasted content and brought it over.\n\n\n\n[00:16:23] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so rather than having a staging site, well, you presumably did have a staging site, but it wasn’t a case of going into the posts or the pages and clicking the convert button. This more of a, okay, something’s broken here, I need to start from scratch.\n\n\n\n[00:16:34] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Something’s broken, I couldn’t figure it, I mean, I’m sure if I were a coder, I would’ve dug into the code. But it’s like, it’s going to take me hours, it’s going to be easier in this case. It didn’t have a ton of content. There was like six or eight pages and maybe four or five blog posts. So it wasn’t that hard to do. It was easier to just bring up the new 2025 theme and start fresh.\n\n\n\n[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, in the scenario where you’ve only got a handful of pages, it probably is literally quicker to do it that way and copy and paste.\n\n\n\n[00:16:58] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Especially if you see an issue pop up immediately. It’s something, the navigation, I couldn’t figure out why that wasn’t working. But it was a Studio Press theme, so something was coming through from the old theme.\n\n\n\n[00:17:09] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And you mentioned that this whole process where you, you go to your staging site and you go into a post or a page, and there’s this bar at the top. The content is missing essentially. And there’s this bar, it’s a grey bar and it looks.\n\n\n\n[00:17:23] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Well, the content is usually there.\n\n\n\n[00:17:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but it’s all in the wrong, it’s as it was essentially. So it’s not yet as blocks. And you click the button, wait a heartbeat, a moment, and the WordPress sort of process of migrating one to the other just sort of takes over. Paragraphs become paragraphs blocks, and on you go. I’ve yet to have that fail on me in a catastrophic way. It’s never done anything unexpected.\n\n\n\n[00:17:45] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It’s never failed catastrophically, not on me. And I’ve converted, even on that one website I just mentioned, the content converted great. It was just the navigation that was the issue. But I’ve used Canvas theme, which used to be produced by WooCommerce before it became a part of WordPress. And I’ve used, of course another theme on, that another website. So that content comes through actually, really easily.\n\n\n\n[00:18:09] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned also that you are using the default theme in most cases. So you mentioned 2025, but also you said, I think perhaps try 2024 or something like that. Is that your kind of go-to? Do you explore the ecosystem of other themes that are out there in the environment, either the repo or possibly commercial themes, or you just heavily leaning into default themes?\n\n\n\n[00:18:28] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I just lean into the default theme.\n\n\n\n[00:18:29] Nathan Wrigley: Is there any particular reason for that? Because obviously, you know it’s going to be updated, which is really nice. You know that it’s a, well, it’s deployed on every WordPress website, a standard if you download a vanilla version of WordPress.\n\n\n\n[00:18:39] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It’ll be maintained for a long, long time. I know somebody who’s still in the 2015 theme and their site still works great.\n\n\n\n[00:18:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the backwards compatibility promise of WordPress is pretty remarkable.\n\n\n\n[00:18:51] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It’s pretty remarkable.\n\n\n\n[00:18:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Have you found limitations in those themes though? So one of the things that I think people wish were better would be, for example, things like navigation. You know, the options that you have in default blocks for navigation. Currently, there’s quite a lot of work going on to improve that as it happens. But are there any limitations that you’ve encountered where you thought, I wish it could do more?\n\n\n\n[00:19:12] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I haven’t with the 2025, not recently anyway. But with 2024, I used a little bit of CSS in the navigation block. So add a little CSS.\n\n\n\n[00:19:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, just tweak it a little bit. There’s a lot of requirements for maybe, I don’t know, mega menus, things like that, adaptations to the mobile menu that are not available in the blocks. And as we’re leaning more into kind of like a no code environment with block based themes.\n\n\n\n[00:19:35] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I have used a plugin for mega menus on one of my clients.\n\n\n\n[00:19:37] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So you take care of that in a different way by using plugins? Yeah, okay. That kind of makes sense.\n\n\n\nOkay, so that’s the bits and pieces perhaps about the sort of how you do it.\n\n\n\n[00:19:46] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: And the reason I used the mega menu plugin for that client was he had very specific ideas of how he wanted his navigation to look on cell phone.\n\n\n\n[00:19:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because it is fairly limited what you get out of the box. There’s not too many options and think the community is possibly moving towards having something a little bit better in the, yeah, a bit more full featured, let’s put it that way.\n\n\n\nIt’s a curious question, do you see any need for more than a single theme in the WordPress space anymore? So in other words, now that we’re leaning into an era where all of the bits and pieces that would’ve been handled by the theme is now handled by the interface of the block-based theme. So, for example, all of your templates is within the UI of full site editing and what have you. Do we even need a whole bunch of themes?\n\n\n\nCould we just have a single theme which did the bare bones, maybe headers, footers, menus, that kind of thing. And then all of it is done by patterns or templates, which can be pointed on and clicked in, in the interface?\n\n\n\n[00:20:44] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Well, I think that it’s good to have themes, and I’ll tell you why. My daughter’s wedding photographer. She is not a website designer. You know, she was used to using Squarespace, realised that the SEO on it sucked and decided to go to WordPress and found a great photography theme from a good maker of themes. I had no problem with it. I looked at it. And all she needed was a little tip on how to see where her blocks were and what the block is. She’s just going to be able to go with that.\n\n\n\nNow if she was starting from scratch with no theme to work with, and just trying to figure it out, I think it’d be a lot harder for her. But having a template that’s like, here’s your photography template, she can put her own pictures in there. She understands the concept, and she’ll be able to build her own website with it.\n\n\n\n[00:21:36] Nathan Wrigley: Do you find it’s easier for your clients then to work with the block based themes than it was with the classic themes?\n\n\n\n[00:21:43] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Yes.\n\n\n\n[00:21:44] Nathan Wrigley: I find sometimes it’s difficult to kind of work out where you are in the UI. You know, you’ve clicked on a bunch of things and you can’t figure out how to get back to where you were, things like that. But then if I weigh that up against how difficult it was with classic themes, where you had to basically have a code editor open at some point and be editing template, PHP files, and things like this. Although it’s a bit confusing navigating around the UI, I think even the people developing WordPress would say, yes, there’s a bit of work to be done on the UI. I think on the whole, it’s much easier, but I don’t know what your clients think.\n\n\n\n[00:22:13] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You know how I explained to my clients, I said, if you use Mac, can you put together a Pages document and maybe add some images, can you do that? And they say, yes. I said, well, if they’re using Microsoft, can you do the same thing? Yes, I can. Well, then you can use the block theme.\n\n\n\nBecause once it’s set up, I mean, I think that there’s certain areas that are a little more tricky and for our clients, I’ll say, look, don’t get into the editor. Do not do full site editing. Let me do that. If you want to add something to the navigation, just tell me, I’ll edit it. It’s not a big deal. It takes me five minutes. They’re going to have to figure it out, because it’s only something they’re going to do once in a while when they change their navigation.\n\n\n\nBut for any of their pages, you know, they know how to hit the three lines, see what block they’re in, click it, it lights up the block on the right hand side, and then they can do the editing to the right of that. They can do it.\n\n\n\n[00:23:03] Nathan Wrigley: Do you lean into the feature of locking blocks? Because it sounds like you’ve got a fairly close relationship with your clients. You’re probably able to get on the phone with them and things like that, have that communication. So you can just say, don’t touch that, leave that alone, and that’s fine.\n\n\n\nBut obviously in different scenarios where, I don’t know, it might be more corporate, that kind of thing, the capacity within native WordPress to exclude the client from being able to edit that.\n\n\n\nSo as an example, yeah, you can change the text on that block, but it’s a cover block, but we’re not going to allow you to change the background image. Or conversely, you can change the background image, but you can’t change the text, those kind of things. So these are sort of new features which have crept in over time, and I’m not sure how many people use those, whether or not that would be of interest to you and your clients.\n\n\n\n[00:23:45] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You know, it’s their website. They may be on my servers that I’m hosting, but it’s their website and if they really want to mess it up, they can. And I can fix it. But really, it’s not a problem.\n\n\n\nThere’s been a few times, I have one client who adds content and he happened to add it all in tables. I don’t know why or how. I had to fix it on one of his pages. But, you know, I fixed it and the content is there down and it’s not in a table.\n\n\n\n[00:24:10] Nathan Wrigley: Do you build into your process, when you have converted something from classic to block base, do you have like an education piece in the middle there somewhere?\n\n\n\n[00:24:18] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Oh, yes.\n\n\n\n[00:24:19] Nathan Wrigley: So time to show the client how to use it. Because obviously they may be very familiar with classic editing, or it may be something that they’re not really dabbling in that much. Either way, it’s not at all like the new thing. And how do you do that? Do you allocate time? Do you have videos prepared or just sit next to them in their offices?\n\n\n\n[00:24:35] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You know, we usually do it as like a Zoom call. They share their screen. Well, actually, during the process, there’ll be times when I’m on the phone in a Zoom call with the client or a Google Meet call with the client, and I’m showing them what I’m doing on my end. So that’s part of the education process.\n\n\n\nAnd we talk about, okay, do you like this font? No, I don’t like this one. Okay, well, how about this one? They see me change things back and forth. I put up content and they say, oh, we want to edit that. We want to rephrase it like this.\n\n\n\nSo if we’re doing it on a Zoom call, it’s going back and forth, they see how I’m working. And I make a point, oh, see how I hit these three lines, and we can edit this paragraph block, let’s put a background on this paragraph block. Here’s how you do it. So they learn how to do that, just kind of as we’re building it.\n\n\n\nAnd then when it’s done, I will definitely show them how, anything they want to change. And I’ll walk through them how to add a blog post, for example. Usually the pages are pretty dialed in by the time we go live, it’s exactly where they want. So they might need to learn how to add blog posts. And I’ll introduce them to the blocks I think they’re going to use. They don’t need to know how to do every single block because there’s so many blocks.\n\n\n\n[00:25:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Do you switch some of them off, make them unavailable? I don’t know, there’s things like the Animoto Block, which goodness knows whoever was using that, I don’t know. But it’s there. I think most clients don’t need them. And having the capacity to switch some blocks off, quite a nice idea.\n\n\n\n[00:26:00] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You can. I haven’t done that.\n\n\n\n[00:26:01] Nathan Wrigley: No, okay. And are there any common gotchas? When you’ve gone through this process multiple times, is there anything which comes out the other end which is reliably strange to the client? You know, okay every client’s reporting back either, nothing, this is brilliant, it’s a hundred percent, I’m all on board. Or do you have common things which you have to explain over and over again to the different clients because it’s just quirky?\n\n\n\n[00:26:21] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: There’s a couple clients that are boards, nonprofit boards, and so then I have to explain it over and over again.\n\n\n\n[00:26:29] Nathan Wrigley: And is that because of the nature of.\n\n\n\n[00:26:31] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Because the person I’m talking to changes.\n\n\n\n[00:26:33] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay.\n\n\n\n[00:26:34] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Sometimes clients will want something I don’t really feel like I can deliver. So I have a client who wants full with image, with content on top of it, and wants it to be a slider. So there’ll be a full width image with content and a button, and then another full width image with content and a button. It’s a slider. So I created this.\n\n\n\nAnd then when it was done, they were like, well, I want the whole image to show on a cell phone. I had to explain, if that entire image gets so narrow that it shows on a cell phone and it’s not very tall, your content won’t fit in it. And it was really hard to accept. So that kind of thing can occur.\n\n\n\n[00:27:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, it’s not for everybody, but I feel at this point, this is the future of WordPress. This is the way it’s going to go. This is what most people are talking about and what have you. Just getting into your presentation later, firstly, good luck with it. I hope it goes well.\n\n\n\n[00:27:26] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Thank you.\n\n\n\n[00:27:27] Nathan Wrigley: How are you tackling this subject? Are you going to be doing slides? Because it’ll be curious, the audience, presumably in front of you are, well, we’re at WordCamp. Presumably they are a bunch of WordPressers. I’m curious to know at what level you are pitching it.\n\n\n\n[00:27:39] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You know, I think somebody who’s fairly new to WordPress will be able to get a lot out of this. I think it’s geared towards somebody with a little bit of experience, not a lot.\n\n\n\nI’m going to talk about three different websites. One of them was actually built in 2006 on Blogger. I wasn’t the one that built it. And two other websites. And I’m going to talk a little bit about the City of Portland, so people who come to this, even if they know everything I’m talking about will learn a little bit about the City of Portland.\n\n\n\n[00:28:05] Nathan Wrigley: And this is all filmed as well, which is kind of nice. And these days those videos tend to get turned around pretty quickly. Long gone is the day that you would attend a WordCamp and then six months, a year later, the video would still be stuck in somebody’s hard disk.\n\n\n\nHopefully by the time this podcast episode drops, that will be out and we’ll be able to watch your presentation. I think I’ve asked everything that I wish to ask. Is there anything that you think that we didn’t touch during our conversation?\n\n\n\n[00:28:31] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: There is.\n\n\n\n[00:28:31] Nathan Wrigley: Go for it.\n\n\n\n[00:28:32] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: While I was building the site with 200 blog posts, I discovered a little, what I thought was a glitch. And it turns out it’s a feature. But if you were a developer, you think it’s a feature. So in the 2025 theme, when you go to templates, you go to your website editor and you go to patterns, and then you have the header, the footer, and the page templates.\n\n\n\nFor the blog page, I pick a page template for the blog page, just that one. And then I can go in and I can select the style of my query loop. So if I want a query loop that’s just a picture on the left and content on the right for that blog page, and then people can scroll through and see all the different blog posts.\n\n\n\nI picked one that was different than that. So I picked it, and then I deployed it, and then I went to the blog page and looked at it and it looked great. Except when I hit next page, it returned to the same page. It never was advancing to all these other 200 blog posts. And I was like, what happened here?\n\n\n\nSo I went back to the template, page, templates, blog page, picked a different query loop. Same thing. Picked a third query loop. Ah, this one worked. I could advance to the next pages. So then I was curious, why is this?\n\n\n\nSo I went back to that template, hit the three line dropdown arrow, looked at every single block in there and saw a pagination block that had not been in the others at the bottom of the group. So then I copied that and I put it in. And voila, my original one worked, I was very happy with it.\n\n\n\nSo I went yesterday to the Contributor Day and I sat at the Core Performance table, and normally not where I would belong, and said, this is your issue, it’s got to be fixed. And they looked at it, and a couple more people looked at it, and then they explained to me that not all query loops are used on the blog page. Some might be used on a landing page. And you may not want a next pages on every one of your query loops, so it’s not there on everyone.\n\n\n\n[00:30:53] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting that it got there on one of them. And I think this is something that can be quite confusing, things like that, which in the old world, you would’ve dropped in as a short code. And in order to get that short code, you would’ve gone into some other UI and configured it all, and then the short code would’ve been spat out with the correct parameters to do what you wanted. So there might have been a toggle for show pagination, take pagination off, and what have you. And then the short code would ultimately do that.\n\n\n\nIn the block editor, this kind of thing happens fairly frequently in that there are nested blocks. And if you don’t deploy the nested blocks, so for example, if you didn’t know that pagination was a separate block, which usually sits outside of the query loop, usually below it in the same group or something like that, it’s easy to think, well, it ought to be there. Why isn’t it there? And sometimes you have to go find that pagination block, insert it in the right place and what have you.\n\n\n\nYeah, so things like that, if you don’t see it, you don’t see it. It’s not intuitive to think that it ought to be there. And I can think of probably dozens of examples of that kind of thing where blocks that you may rely on are in fact nested blocks of other blocks, and they may not come in automatically.\n\n\n\nSo, yeah, it’s a process of figuring that out, and maybe a toggle inside the query loop block saying, just enable pagination, turn it off, or something like that.\n\n\n\n[00:32:11] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: That might be helpful. But I was able to fix it, and I realise now that it actually is a feature because they can, you can go to those query loops and look at all sorts of query loops that you might use elsewhere on your website. So I thought it was great to go to Contributor Day. I contributed and I learned.\n\n\n\n[00:32:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really nice. And people were able to explain it to you. Yeah, definitely a thing if you come to a WordCamp, certainly of this magnitude, attend the Contributor Day. And it’s not just a process of contributing, it can be a process of sitting next to people who are working and asking them questions and thereby upping your own knowledge.\n\n\n\n[00:32:44] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: And I don’t think that they were aware of it until I pointed it out.\n\n\n\n[00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, they’re in the weeds of deploying it, and they may not consider all the use cases. And in this case, you had one in which it didn’t work as expected. I guess from their point of view, everything that they said is probably true. You know, it may be deployed in this way, it may not, and so we built it in such a way that you can have the pagination or not, but nevertheless, you kind of needed it right away.\n\n\n\nWell, that’s brilliant. Thank you so much Mary. Appreciate you chatting to me today.\n\n\n\nWhere can we find you if people would like to reach out about anything you’ve talked about? Where’s the best places?\n\n\n\n[00:33:14] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: On my website is waterlinkweb.com. You can find me there. I’m on Instagram at Water Link Web. I have a LinkedIn, Mary Ann Aschenbrenner at LinkedIn. And I think that does it.\n\n\n\n[00:33:28] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you very much. I’ll make sure all those bits and pieces get into the show notes. So head to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Mary Ann Aschenbrenner. I will hopefully speak to you another time. Thank you very much for chatting to me.\n\n\n\n[00:33:40] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Thank you very much, Nathan.\n\n\n\n\nOn the podcast today we have Mary Ann Aschenbrenner.\n\n\n\nMary Ann has been the President of Waterlink Web, a digital agency specialising in WordPress web design since 2014. Her experience includes e-Commerce and membership websites, websites for local nonprofit organisations, and starter websites for small businesses. As a life-long learner, Mary Ann likes to keep pace with the latest innovations in WordPress. She is a fan of block themes and particularly the WordPress default themes.\n\n\n\nWe start by discussing the differences between classic and block themes, with Mary Ann offering practical, step-by-step advice for anyone considering a move from a classic theme to a modern block-based theme. She talks about why you might want to make the switch, potential challenges to look out for, and stories from her own experience converting client sites.\n\n\n\nWe also chat about the evolution of WordPress, the diminishing need for third-party page builders, the importance of client education, and the ongoing improvements in the block editor. Plus, Mary Ann shares insights from her WordCamp presentation, and her experiences collaborating with the WordPress community.\n\n\n\nWhether you\u2019re a seasoned WordPresser, or are just starting out, and keen to know how block themes are making site building more accessible for everyone, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\nMary Ann Aschenbrenner on LinkedIn\n\n\n\nWaterlink Web\n\n\n\nFriends of Pier Park website\n\n\n\nMoving a Website from Classic to a Block Theme\n\n\n\n\u200aStudioPress\n\n\n\nBlogger", "date_published": "2025-09-17T10:00:00-04:00", "date_modified": "2025-09-16T12:48:44-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/185-Mary-Ann-Aschenbrenner-on-Switching-Clients-From-Classic-to-Block-Themes.jpg", "tags": [ "block based themes", "FSE", "podcast" ], "summary": "In this WP Tavern episode, Nathan Wrigley interviews Mary Ann Aschenbrenner at WordCamp US 2025 about transitioning websites from classic to block themes in WordPress. Mary Ann shares her journey from community activism to web design, explains the benefits of block themes, including easier maintenance and better SEO, and provides a step-by-step guide for migrating sites. They discuss practical challenges, client education, and the evolving user experience, emphasising that block themes can eliminate the need for page builders and are generally more accessible for clients. Mary also shares anecdotes from her own migration projects and involvement in the WordPress community. Whether you\u2019re a seasoned WordPresser, or are just starting out, and keen to know how block themes are making site building more accessible for everyone, this episode is for you.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2142054/c1e-2kn3num75gmhmrm69-9jqodn8vsn39-qiic1g.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=199424", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/184-rachel-cherry-and-alex-aspinall-on-the-state-of-wordpress-in-higher-education", "title": "#184 \u2013 Rachel Cherry and Alex Aspinall on the State of WordPress in Higher Education", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the state of WordPress in higher education.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Rachel Cherry and Alex Aspinall.
\n\n\n\nRachel is the founder of WP Campus, a nonprofit organization she launched a decade ago to support professionals using WordPress in higher education. Under her leadership, WP Campus has become a community hub, hosting conferences, and leading research projects tailored to the unique needs of its members. Currently, Rachel serves as the organization’s Director of Technology, and sits on its board of directors where she continues to drive innovative projects.
\n\n\n\nAlex is part of the globally distributed team at Human Made, an established WordPress Enterprise Agency founded in 2011. At Human Made, Alex helps deliver large scale web platforms for major organizations, including names like Harvard, Standard Chartered and PlayStation. In recent years, Alex has developed a strong interest in how WordPress can uniquely serve the higher education sector, and he’s become especially passionate about exploring and supporting this use case.
\n\n\n\nDuring the podcast, we get into the story behind WP Campus, which has for the past decade been empowering people who use WordPress in colleges and universities. We explore Human Made’s growing interest in the complexities of higher education projects, from large multi-site networks to the strict accessibility and governance requirements such projects increasingly require.
\n\n\n\nThe heart of the conversation is the just released State of WordPress in Higher Education 2025 report. We dig into the reports key findings, such as the slow adoption of the block editor and full site editing, the challenges of managing hundreds of university websites with small teams, and why enterprise level tools are in such high demand.
\n\n\n\nWhether you’re a WordPress professional, agency, educator, or are just curious about the unique needs and opportunities the higher education space offers, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Rachel Cherry and Alex Aspinall.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast today by two fabulous guests. I have Rachel Cherry and Alex Aspinall. Hello both. How are you doing?
\n\n\n\n[00:03:36] Rachel Cherry: I’m lovely, Nathan. How are you?
\n\n\n\n[00:03:38] Nathan Wrigley: Good, thank you. And Alex, you all right?
\n\n\n\n[00:03:40] Alex Aspinall: How are you doing? I’m great.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:41] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. So we’re going to be talking today about the higher ed space, the higher education space, and WordPress. Specifically about WP Campus. In order to establish both of your credentials in this space, I wonder if we could get a little biography from you both, maybe 30 seconds, something like that, just explaining who you are, where you work, what your connection is to WordPress and specifically WP Campus.
\n\n\n\nSo let’s go with Rachel first, if you don’t mind.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:05] Rachel Cherry: Hi, yes. So I am the founder of WP Campus, which has been around 10 years as of last month, which is kind of wild. And so we are a nonprofit organisation that supports people that use WordPress in higher education. And we host conferences, we host research projects like the one we’re going to discuss today.
\n\n\n\nSo currently I am just one of a board of directors and I’m the director of technology specifically, but I was the lead for this project.
\n\n\n\nAnd then by day I am the accessibility developer at the University of Rochester. And so I’ve worked in higher ed and other enterprise organisations for the last 18 years.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:43] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. That’s great. And Alex.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:46] Alex Aspinall: I mean, I have way less credentials in terms of my WP Campus presence. I work for Human Made, which is an enterprise WordPress agency. We’ve been around since 2011, I think.
\n\n\n\nWe’re a globally distributed team, people across all continents. And we specialise in building larger scale web platforms for organisations such as Harvard, Standard Chartered, PlayStation, few other names I could throw in there.
\n\n\n\nWe also have an enterprise hosting solution too. We, probably about a year, two years ago started, well, I personally started becoming really interested in the higher education use case for WordPress. I think it’s really interesting. I think it’s quite unique. And that’s really why Rachel and I started speaking, I don’t know, maybe 18 months or so ago, and that led us to I guess this podcast.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. So the podcast is going to be framed around a freely available resource, and it’s called The State of WordPress in Higher Education. I will link in the show notes rather than try to butcher a URL in an audio podcast. I’ll link in the show notes over at WP Tavern to that and you can freely download it.
\n\n\n\nIt’s billed as a research report in the year 2025. I confess, I don’t know if you did a 2024 version and beyond, but we’re going to concentrate on the 2025 version.
\n\n\n\nBut I guess some more preamble, I’m afraid, but I guess we probably should establish what WP Campus is. And I just want to be clear, we recently released an episode about WP Campus Connect, and so I just want to draw a distinction there. These two things are not the same thing.
\n\n\n\nSo I’m going to toss that one to Rachel. Will you just tell us what the endeavor is at WP Campus, why it was set up? What need is it trying to satisfy?
\n\n\n\n[00:06:22] Rachel Cherry: Yeah, so about 10 years ago I was working in higher education, building WordPress websites, and I wanted my own community. And I was going to a lot of WordCamps and no one was talking about the work that I was doing, the kind of work that I was doing. There wasn’t a space for my kind of work at camps at the time and so I started this organisation.
\n\n\n\nAnd so for the last 10 years we have worked to build a community of people, of like-minded people, that are using WordPress to support the mission of higher education. And we support each other with professional development, with resources, with connection, and every now and then some advocacy. Years ago we raised funds to do the audit of Gutenberg, accessibility audit to be more specific.
\n\n\n\nAnd so because accessibility is very important in our space, and here was this editor coming round going to cause a lot of change, as it has, and there was this huge unknown of whether or not it was accessible. And that was a very big deal to our group. A lot of our group has policies and such. And so every now and then we do work like that.
\n\n\n\nThis type of research is very important to our mission as well, to provide data, to provide insight to our community members and our institutions.
\n\n\n\nAnd I think one of our kind of ideals that we stand on is that we want to give people data to inform their own decisions, kind of like with the editor audit. Like, we didn’t tell people it was inaccessible or accessible, we gave them data so that they can decide for themselves. And so this research, you know, is a big part of that as well.
\n\n\n\nThere’s a lot going on in our community right now. And we wanted to pull out this data, and one of our objectives was to better understand the needs and challenges of people using WordPress in higher education.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you for that, Rachel. I’m going to advise that everybody goes over to the following URL. In fact, pause the podcast right now. If you’re sitting at a computer or you’re on your phone, go to wpcampus.org and over there you’re going to be able to see more about the mission.
\n\n\n\nAt the moment, the membership numbers are displayed on the website. Whether or not that’s true when you visit, I don’t know, but 1,763 members, 688 institutions. That is an impressive number, by the way. I mean, the membership is great, but the institutional count is utterly fabulous. That’s really impressive.
\n\n\n\nBut the idea is to juxtapose WordPress and higher ed. We don’t really use that word in the UK too much. We just kind of generically call things, I think university, so I just want to clear that up. Does higher ed basically service the needs of anybody that’s left traditional school? So I don’t know, 18 plus who’s going through some degree program or something like that?
\n\n\n\n[00:08:58] Rachel Cherry: Yes. Our mission is really to support kind of that, and I apologise, I can’t think of the general term. There’s a kind of a general term that we do use across, that’s more of a global, because higher ed is very specific to the United States in a lot of ways.
\n\n\n\nSo we do support kind of that further education. We do have a lot of UK institutions and universities that participate in the work that we do. I would say that our group is largely United States, a lot of UK, a lot of Canadians as well. But we do have folks from all around the world. So it’s really just that spirit of wanting to support that mission of education.
\n\n\n\nOver the years have had a lot of people, even in the kind of K through 12 or early education people, wanting to be involved. And a lot of the things that early education and higher, or later, education have in common, but they’re also very different. So we haven’t quite merged with the early education group in that way. But yes, we do support largely this kind of university, higher education context.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. Yeah, that clears that up. I mean, you’re really busy over there. You’ve got loads of, I mean, an awful lot going on. There’s a whole thing about governance. You’ve got a newsletter, you put on real world events as well as online based events, and a Slack community. And there’s just a lot going on. It seems like, I don’t know if this has taken over your life, but it seems like it could well have done.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:17] Rachel Cherry: It did for a long time, and these days I have a lot more help. For a long time I was really the only director and then a few years back we did the work to implement more of a fleshed out kind of board of directors. And so I’m just a member of that board now. I am not the director in charge.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, all of that, again, is freely available on the website. You can see who the current custodians of the project are.
\n\n\n\nSo where does Human Made, Alex, where does Human Made fit into this piece of the puzzle? How, have you become involved?
\n\n\n\n[00:10:45] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, I guess it goes back to what I was saying a little bit before about, I was just personally really interested in the higher ed use case of WordPress, and started digging around into learning a bit more about what kind of projects people had on the go, and what kind of platforms were being built in the space. They’re diverse, they’re complicated, they’re multi-site, you know, interesting, I guess is why I started getting involved.
\n\n\n\nHuman Made is one of the agencies that builds complex, larger projects, so there’s a fit there as well. So we started looking around the space, seeing who it might be interesting to talk to, just in terms of learning a bit more. Obviously Rachel and WP Campus. We started talking informally about just the experience of being in WordPress in higher education.
\n\n\n\nI think the first thing we collaborated on over a year ago now was we did an online conference in the run up to WP Campus’ IRL conference a couple of weeks later. And then after that we enjoyed working together, we thought there was a lot more material we could work on, and this research project, I suppose was the biggest idea that came out of those discussions following that.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So I’ve downloaded the report and I’ve had a thorough look through it. There’s an awful lot in here actually. It is available, like I said, I’ll link to it in the show notes. However, I have to say, it’s a very graphical thing that we’re going to be talking about. There’s loads of charts kind of explaining the percentages in many cases of one thing versus another. So you will probably get more out of this podcast if you have downloaded it, and had a little peruse.
\n\n\n\nIt doesn’t really matter who wants to take this, but I’m going to ask one of you to sort of explain what are some of the curious findings that you’ve got? Maybe the one, two, or three top level items that you think might be of great interest, and then we can maybe dig into the weeds of those particular things. So anything that your intuition suggests as something our audience might be interested in.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:32] Rachel Cherry: I’ll start with like my key takeaways, which are very broad, and then dive into a few of the data points. But my two key takeaways that I reported on was that our higher ed teams need more resources, and a way to share more resources, and that higher education needs more enterprise features in the WordPress product. Those were kind of my two, like looking at the data, my two takeaways. And at our report presentation that we had recently, we talked about that with folks in the community.
\n\n\n\nBut some of the really interesting questions that we asked were around usage of the block editor and full site editing. And so nothing super surprising. But let me pull up that particular chart really quick.
\n\n\n\nSo we asked folks, how fully have you adopted the block editor and full site editing? And only 40% of the respondents are using it on all of their sites. And there was a range there. Like we asked, are you using it on all of them? Are you using it on like most of them? Alex touched on this earlier, higher ed is a very interesting space, and the thing that I, people used to hear me say frequently was that WordPress and higher ed is WordPress in the enterprise on a budget. And what that usually means is a lot of under-resourced teams having to use WordPress to solve these large scale enterprise, high user environments.
\n\n\n\nWhat comes out of that is very creative, very custom, very interesting, complex solutions. This is kind of tying back to my takeaway of people need more resources and they need ways to share them. Because something that is also interesting in our space is how much custom work there is. How much people are solving the same problems, but they’re solving them on their own, and they don’t have a way to really share them. It takes a lot of energy to like maintain a public plugin that gets used around. And so because these plugins are usually so custom that creates this whole challenge.
\n\n\n\nSo anyway, back to the block editor. So when you’re trying to introduce new functionality in these complex enterprise environments, it can take a while. Higher ed is usually, it’s usually a pretty slow train of adoption, and there are reasons. And a big reason for that is resources. And you’re not just going to turn around and add the block editor on because you’re probably managing like 300 websites, and you can’t just change the editing experience without changing all of your training materials, and without changing your governance.
\n\n\n\nSo yeah, so there’s context to why, and there’s lots of reasons. There’s other reasons that we don’t really dive into in these numbers, but there’s context that goes into why only 40% are actually using it on all their sites, even though Gutenberg came out in 2019.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:28] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask you a quick question? You said something which took my breath away there. You said these people are managing probably 300 websites. I didn’t see that in the report anyway, and that seems like a really surprising number. How does that map to an institution? Is it because there’s a website for, I don’t know, the geography department, and then there’s another one for the sociology department? Is that what’s going on there? Because 300 seems like, well, I mean you could run your entire agency and not have 300 websites under your custodianship. So what’s going on there? You dropped that number and I was really surprised by it.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:01] Rachel Cherry: Yes, in higher ed, there is a website for everything. And there is the notion of, if you’re familiar with domain of one’s own, which is a concept actually introduced in, or invented in, higher education in the States. And what it really means in our context is that people will set up WordPress multi-sites and then let people create their own sites on it.
\n\n\n\nAnd they’re largely blogs, like a faculty member’s blog or a research lab’s blog. But it’s a way to allow the sharing and the spreading of information and research in higher ed with kind of a low service effort.
\n\n\n\nSo like you can log on and you have like two template choices or two theme choices, and then you’re responsible for kind of managing a site on there. And then they try to, you know, build this domain in a way that’s kind of reusable code and plugins, like you do in WordPress. So yeah, you can get a lot of sites going.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s absolutely fascinating. I hadn’t really thought about it as, well, for example, if I go to a university website here and I end up at the Department of Geography, I’m kind of thinking it’s the same website, but I imagine, you’re right, it’s a whole different team of staff that are logging in and doing the geography stuff than they would be elsewhere.
\n\n\n\nOkay, so that’s curious. Right, back to the points that you mentioned, the resources. When you say that universities, I’m just going to use the word university, when you say that these institutions have limited resources, it kind of feels like the funding model in the US is very different to one that we have in the UK, and possibly different parts of the world.
\n\n\n\nAnd it always feels as if the US institutions probably have more money, but I’m probably thinking of things like the Ivy League universities where the fees are very high, but that probably doesn’t map all over the place.
\n\n\n\nSo when you say resources, are you talking about cash, them being strapped for cash, or are you talking about human beings? You know, there’s not enough boots on the ground, if you like, or maybe it’s a confection of both.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:50] Rachel Cherry: Probably both, but largely headcount. I mean every university or institution’s different and some might actually be more cash strapped than others. But it’s largely a headcount. It’s largely the fact that in a lot of these institutions, you’ll have a web team of like three people managing 300 websites. And what that means, how they have to kind of manage how they spend their time and what they do with it.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it’s a bit of both. There’s less human beings than there might be in the corporate space, but also they’re probably fairly strapped for cash.
\n\n\n\nAnd then moving onto the block editor, I’ll come to you in a second, Alex, if that’s all right. But staying with Rachel for a moment. I’m looking at the chart now, 40% adoption of the block editor entirely, using them on all the websites, so point four, 40%. Then we drop down to 23% using it on some of them. 19% using on most, and then the last one really of interest here is 16% who are not using the block editor at all.
\n\n\n\nHas that adoption just sort of slowly ramped up, because 40% in higher ed feels like, to me, it doesn’t seem like a bad number in all honesty. I know that in the real world probably it is higher adoption than that, but I’m guessing that there are many more constraints on universities just switching out to the block editor. So is that number slowly but inexorably rising? It feels like it’s going in the right direction, but with the caveats that it has to happen slowly.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:11] Rachel Cherry: We don’t have data from the last, you know, four or five years to truly answer that question. But the vibe, or the sentiment, in our space is that, yes, it’s been slowly increasing. And part of that is just people, you know, there’s lots of factors, right? There’s people waiting for maturity. They’re waiting for it to grow more before they adopt. Or because of said resource discussion, people are waiting for the next redesign, for example.
\n\n\n\nIn our space, I think we even asked, how often do you redesign? Is one of the questions that we asked in our survey. I think it’s on average like every three years or so, three to five years, something like that. And so people in our space tend to wait for that to really implement large scale changes because it’s just easier to do it then than it is, you’re already doing a bunch of work, you might as well do it then. And so that’s another factor involved.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s a little corollary to the chart that I’ve just described, underneath it, where the question was asked, how long did you wait before implementing the block editor? And basically the data skews towards, we’re trying to wait as long as possible. You know, more than two years is 35%. So it feels like, because of the nature of the audience, and I guess accessibility is a really crucial part of this, you’ve got to put the brakes on. You can’t be all that agile in the same way that maybe a corporate would, because you’ve got lots of stakeholders, lots of editorial teams that need updating and so on and so forth. So that’s kind of interesting.
\n\n\n\nAnd then I know that you didn’t mention this, Rachel, but it’s tantalizingly underneath the question that has just been mentioned. We move on to full site editing and it feels like, whoa, the brakes are really on for that. 62% of respondents said that they’re not using full site editing at all, and the numbers are kind of into low single figures where they’re describing whether or not they’re using it on all their sites.
\n\n\n\nSo the block editor, in terms of content creation is on the rise, but it would appear that full site editing, the ability to, you know, modify themes and customise that kind of thing inside of WordPress, not so much. It feels like the breaks are really on there, probably as a result of the resources that you mentioned earlier.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:15] Rachel Cherry: It’s probably following the same trajectory. Full site editing is newer and it will grow with time. But I think with full site editing, it’s very similar concerns to the block editor, but it’s more about governance and control. When you do set up these WordPress websites where you do have a lot of governance over accessibility or over branding, it’s really scary.
\n\n\n\nThe full site editing without fully understanding what it does, and how you can control it and set boundaries, there’s that concern about governance of, we don’t actually want people using our websites to be able to customise the site. We want a lot of control over that, most of the time, not everyone, but most people. Because in our space, a lot of the users that are coming in and kind of admining their site, or editing their site, are not trained web professionals. They are biology professor who’s kind of doing job as needed.
\n\n\n\nAnd so we want them to have flexibility to go in and publish content. We want them to be able to share their research, share their information, but we don’t want them to be able to have free reign to kind of break our governance rules, and potentially create risk to our brand or to our accessibility and things like that. And so the full site editing, there’s a lot of people that are kind of hesitant and being patient for the full site editing implementation.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:43] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for that. So we’ve got a picture then of how WordPress is deployed. It seems like it’s the CMS of choice over in the education, higher ed landscape anyway.
\n\n\n\nSo moving over to Alex, I’m talking more about the implementation of this now. Presumably agencies such as yourself, Human Made, you are getting requests from these institutions to build these websites.
\n\n\n\nHow does that process work? Do you generally tend to work with like the web team over there and you, you know, backwards and forwards with them? And then the bit that I’m most curious about, talking about what Rachel just said, how on earth do you get these people so that they can use the website that you’ve built? Because, in many institutions it may be one or two people have got their hands on this, but it sounds like there may be several hundred people who need to access the WordPress website. So training.
\n\n\n\nSo there’s two parts to that question really. How are you interfacing in terms of building the things when you are approached by these institutions? And then how do you get to hand it off and provide a good level of support and training to them?
\n\n\n\n[00:23:37] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think the main back and forth we have would be with, typically the web team of course, as you guessed there. I think each institution is set up differently. I think Rachel probably could testify to the fact that, you know, the challenges and benefits of being set up one way is not mirrored and how it’s done elsewhere. So I do think agencies generally have to be flexible, and work within the parameters that they’re asked to, you know, that’s kind of our job.
\n\n\n\nI think there are also, particularly with the biggest implementations in higher ed, there’s often other agencies involved or other specialists involved as well. You might be working with someone, you know, we might be bringing design and platform expertise and you might be working with someone that’s looking after the marketing and the wider brand of the university as well.
\n\n\n\nSo I think there’s quite a lot of collaboration indeed, like the amount of time I’ve spent within higher ed, I think collaboration is a really big theme, and I think that the successful projects that we see getting delivered are very collaborative in nature.
\n\n\n\nAnd then yeah, in terms of training and handover, I imagine on the ground in the universities in question, they have a bigger challenge than perhaps we do, because we’ll be handing it over to a smaller percentage ultimately of the wider institution. We don’t run 300 separate training sessions or anything like that. We provide detailed documentation, videos, follow up sessions, and we make sure that the team that are receiving the product are fully versed in it.
\n\n\n\nI think a lot of the time those people are. I think it’s handing it over to the editors that then the work will have to be done on a one-to-one basis in terms of what they’re allowed to do, going back to the FSE point. Not everyone can edit everything.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:08] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of curious because when I see a website for, again, I’m going to use the word university. When I see the website for university, I’m just seeing this kind of brochure site, really. In other words, here’s the university, look at all the magical things that we do. But my daughter has just been at university, and there’s so much more to it than that. So there’s like this portal where my daughter goes, logs in, and now the expectation is that much of the work will be carried out in that format. You know, you’ll submit content, there will be lesson plans and all of that kind of thing.
\n\n\n\nSo essentially the question is leading me up to, what kind of things are being built into this website apart from the public facing bit, which we might call a prospectus, really? You’ve got this online prospectus, the world can see it, we can marvel at how great the university is, but it seems like there’s a heck of a lot more. Each department has its own stuff. Presumably the students, increasingly being expected to log in, especially post COVID, I imagine as well. So again, that one probably to Alex. What kind of curious things are built inside these WordPress websites, LMSs, brochure sites, and so on?
\n\n\n\n[00:26:10] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, I mean, no, you listed off a lot of the options there really. I mean, the main three or four pages you might think of as being the university site are very much that, just the brochure. But there’s all kinds of different requirements for different departments. We’ll have different kinds of products that they want to build in there. You’ve got archives of hundreds and thousands of different reports and pieces of information from the past that will be needed to be upheld.
\n\n\n\nWe rebuilt Harvard Gazette, which is, you know, obviously part of the wider infrastructure at Harvard. So that’s a massive publishing site. That’s essentially the same as any magazine or newspaper would have. It’s what it is. As you say, the student logins, all the complexities of multi-site. Rachel, I’m sure you’ve probably got a list longer than that.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:53] Rachel Cherry: It’s a lot, right? In my role as an accessibility professional, do a lot of governance work and it’s trying to tie together all these different types because there’s WordPress at my university, but there’s tons of other stuff. There’s front end brochure websites, and there’s research lab sites, and there’s marketing websites, and then there’s all the academic focused, as Alex mentioned a few. There’s a lot of web applications. There’s a lot of people doing a lot of different types of content in different ways. And how does that all tie together?
\n\n\n\nWe talk a lot about things like data sharing and a lot of the work that we do is also just trying to keep all this content in sync and trying to not have duplicates or not have outdated content, things like that. So when we talk about governance is like a big word that means a lot of things to different people. But a lot of it is really just kind of managing quality and the expectations of how websites are managed and how our mission as an institution is kind of presented to the world.
\n\n\n\nSo it’s interesting, Nathan, that you say, like to you, it’s like you just see this brochure site, and that’s a common conversation about kind of the challenges of enterprise. We have all this internal knowledge and we also have, you know, there’s a funny common conversation in universities about acronyms. We have all this internal terminology that we use, but does that come across to the end user? Does the work that we do translate? And it’s a complicated question to solve.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:22] Nathan Wrigley: I’m kind of curious as to whether or not WordPress can service the needs of the entire IT department, if you like, within a higher ed institution. So I’m imagining that the legacy is that there’s many, many pieces of software that are being used throughout the university. You know, there may be some sort of portal where people log in and check in that they’re actually at work. There may be other things where people log their essays that they supply to their tutors and things like that. Plus then there’s the brochure on the front end.
\n\n\n\nI’m curious as to whether or not WordPress in the future can handle most of those, and whether there’s an appetite from the higher ed institutions to have everything in one platform. They may see that as, you know, maybe that presents an Achilles heel to them. If there’s one systemic failure, then the whole thing goes down. But I’m curious as to whether or not WP Campus is trying to pitch WordPress as the answer to all the things, or is it a much more limited subset of things? You know, it’s the website, and it’s the LMS and that kind of thing. So that’s more of a kind of roadmap question, whether you’re trying to push WordPress as being the answer to everything.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:20] Rachel Cherry: As an organisation, we don’t really push for WordPress to be used. It’s not really our mission. That’s not how we think or how we work. It’s really more just to support people that have, that are using it, and to help each other in our roles.
\n\n\n\nTo answer your broader question, I mean I kind of, it depends. Can WordPress be used for all these things? Sure. I’m sure you could finagle it to do a lot of things. Should it do all those things? Probably not. Not in its current state, no. It, in and of itself, is a database with programming and you can get it to do all kinds of things.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there was one of the questions which I’ve just refound and it was, what challenges do you face with the WordPress plugin ecosystem? And bloat was one of the things that was mentioned. So yeah, this is specifically to do with WordPress plugins. It’s not WordPress Core. I thought that was kind of curious.
\n\n\n\nAnd then in second place, just by a whisker, was accessibility requirements as well. And you’ve touched on accessibility a lot, Rachel. You’ve mentioned the word tangentially, and obviously that’s your kind of area of expertise.
\n\n\n\nI’m guessing, but I’m not sure for certain, does the US compel certain things to be done in certain ways? You know, if you’re a university and you launch a website, does it have to comply with things? And do those things map across the globe? I know that we’ve got the European Accessibility Act, which just dropped earlier this year. So the question is pretty broad, but just tell us about the accessibility requirements and how stringent they are in higher ed as compared to just, I don’t know, if I’ve got a brochure site online selling widgets into the community.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:51] Rachel Cherry: So unfortunately the US does not have as strong accessibility laws as Europe does, or many countries in Europe, like the UK and others. We do have some though, and we do have something called section 508, which basically means that if you receive federal funding or federal service, you do have to meet certain accessibility requirements.
\n\n\n\nAnd so universities in the US largely fall under that. Not always. Universities are probably the only real kind of ecosystem in the US that does have more accessibility rules than other industries like general business. And so that’s why we did that accessibility audit of Gutenberg to help support our community in that time.
\n\n\n\nAnd so it is very important, accessibility is very important. And it kind of touches on something that I said earlier about, a lot of universities in the US especially build custom plugins because they have to meet accessibility guidelines and it’s really challenging sometimes to find general use plugins available in the ecosystem that meet those guidelines. And so a lot of teams just kind of build their own stuff.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I would say that those top two challenges, when it comes to bloat and accessibility are really, like that was not surprising in any way. That is the common struggle. It’s finding plugins that meet our accessibility requirements, especially with the front end. And then having plugins that do a lot of functionality that people don’t need. And so I think a lot of these times will lend people to kind of build their own plugins.
\n\n\n\nThey won’t rebuild like complicated plugins, any kind of administrative plugins or like form builders and things like that. Like, people largely will use plugins from the ecosystem. But there’s a lot of custom functionality in the work that we do.
\n\n\n\nSo once again, I think the common theme is it’s complex, and because of that complexity, there’s all kinds of interesting challenges. And so plugins are hard to kind of maintain. It feels like, I hear a lot of people expressing to me, you know, how often they have to kind of update them and keep them up to date, and manage and do all that. And so it’s not enough to stop people from using WordPress, like they’re using it, but having better solutions for some of these challenges would be an example of kind of supporting these higher ed institutions using WordPress.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:12] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Alex, back to you. A question around just higher ed in general, is this like an area which Human Made is drilling down on? Is this an endeavor that you are trying to grow the pie, if you like? There’s thousands, I would imagine, maybe tens of thousands of institutions which come under the banner of higher ed. And at the moment, I don’t know what percentage of them are using WordPress. If we were to ask every single one of them, I would imagine it’s a significant percentage.
\n\n\n\nBut the idea of WP Campus, I guess, is to have a central place where people can go and learn about it. And Human Made being involved, presumably there’s some advantage to you as an enterprise agency. The question basically boils down to, is this an area that you are going to be working on, pitching towards, trying to grow in the near future?
\n\n\n\n[00:33:55] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, for sure. I think like I said at the start, we’re generally the kind of agency who works on larger platforms, maybe more complicated platforms. And I think we’re interested in, you know, a broad range of industries. Probably higher ed is one of four or five, probably publishing, finance, enterprise generally, entertainment, higher ed. I think those industries tend to provide very interesting use cases for WordPress. We’re interested in all of them.
\n\n\n\nI think we’ve seen, in the last couple of years, a lot of interesting higher ed projects being worked on by us and obviously by lots and lots of other people. And yeah, like we’re definitely part of that world, and really interested in it and, you know, yeah, definitely keen to continue being part of it, a hundred percent.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:45] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting, towards the bottom of the survey, so right near the bottom, probably nine tenths of the way through, there’s a whole series of kind of roadmap questions, if you like, things about the future of WordPress. And the fairly, I don’t know, blunt question, let’s put it that way, because it could have gone in the other direction it turns out, it’s hopefully gone in the right direction, but the question was asked, would you move to another CMS if you had time and resources?
\n\n\n\nAnd gosh, that could go the wrong way. The answer was a strong 49% no. Which, when you say it like that you think, hang on, only half of the people wouldn’t move. But then you ask, then the other bit was only 23% are looking to move at all, and 28% are unknown. So really you’re up into the sort of seventies really, who either are not sure or want to stick around.
\n\n\n\nThat seems like an amazing statistic to me. And obviously, Human Made have kind of put their flag in the ground in higher ed, WP Campus, the same. It feels like you’ve got quite a lot of runway with these institutions in the future. Unless things go horribly wrong within WordPress, it looks like you’ve got an audience long into the future.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:43] Alex Aspinall: I think the report offers a really positive view of WordPress. As a technology choice, I think on the whole, most people are saying it was delivering what they needed it to. I can’t remember if it’s 70, 75%, something like that, it was said that it was either meeting or exceeding their expectations, which I think is a large number. Again, it’s not like 90, but if you think about the amount of ways you can complain about software, particularly people that know a lot about the software, I think 75% is pretty good.
\n\n\n\nAnd yeah, you’re right, whilst people are perhaps saying, oh, they’re looking around or they’re always considering alternatives, I think we’ve seen repeatedly that the platform, its security credentials, its extensibility, some of the core features, are all spoken about really, really favorably from the people that responded to the survey.
\n\n\n\nAnd I think really we saw a passionate group of people responding to a technology they know a lot about. There are a lot of ways it could improve, we all know that, and the people that completed the survey know that as well, and they’ve, you know, they weren’t shy about listing them out. But I think you’re right, overall, the level of satisfaction is good, and I think with further adoption and the adoption of newer features, I think that that satisfaction should continue to grow.
\n\n\n\nIn fact, one of the things I was actually kind of wanting to ask Rachel actually was back to the point about FSE earlier on. I actually think WordPress needs to do a much better job of marketing itself, particularly around newer features, and particularly perhaps at the enterprise level, or where there’s complex use cases, or where a lot of the users aren’t developers. The benefits of FSE, for example, are numerous. And we’ve seen clients and indeed we’ve used it ourselves, and the people using it really like it, and I think that’s reflected in the report as well.
\n\n\n\nSo I was going to ask Rachel, as well as the other examples of why adoption might have been slow in higher ed, do you think that there’s actually a case for people in, maybe agencies, maybe WordPress Core doing a better job of the selling and the pitching? Because I actually believe that there are worse solutions that do a better job of convincing people that they should work in a certain way.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:51] Rachel Cherry: I think there’s always room for more marketing and kind of communication about what’s going on, and there’s always improvement for that. And I do feel like Core could do more towards the enterprise ecosystem as well. That, you know, I don’t know what their primary use case that they’re focusing on is. But I would be surprised to find out that enterprise is higher up on that list. And so paying attention to our community and having open conversations with them, and there has been some efforts at that. There’s not like a non amount of effort on that.
\n\n\n\nBut yeah there’s, I think a good way to kind of describe how a lot of our community works is just kind of, it’s cautiously optimistic, but cautious. And having to manage risk and having to manage their time and energy, and so they’re not going to jump into anything. They’re going to do a lot of research. They’re going to try to find out who else is doing it, and is it working well for them?
\n\n\n\nSo there’s a lot of, we do a lot of case studies and try to encourage our community to share about the work they’re doing. Because really that goes a long way too. If a university sees another university using full site editing and that it’s successful, then that goes a long way.
\n\n\n\nAnd when you have an absence of that, when you have an absence of examples, then it’s a struggle, right? Because our environment is so complex that an article about full site editing and what it can do doesn’t really go super far. We need to understand, not just what it does, but the long-term implications. Because once we implement it, that’s it. It’s very hard to back up, especially in our, these 300 website multi-site instances where we’ve got to train people and do all these things. We can’t rush into it.
\n\n\n\nSo there’s a lot of cautious waiting and seeing. So the more that universities can share about how they’re using the tools and how it’s working for them, and what’s not working for them. Being genuine in the reality of what we’re doing goes a long way. So there’s pros and cons, like, here’s how it worked, here’s the roadblocks we hit, here’s how it could be better. Having those kinds of conversations can really go a long way towards adoption.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:59] Nathan Wrigley: I have a few things to add to this, and the first one would be that my expectation when a survey is put out is, broadly speaking, the expectation is that negativity is going to be the thing driving them to the survey. And that’s not what you find here. People who’ve got an axe to grind are frequently more likely to open up a survey and grind the axe, and that isn’t the case here.
\n\n\n\nYou know, it’s remarkably sanguine. Everybody seems entirely optimistic. And even the data which may be not quite as favorable, is not unfavorable. It’s just maybe not as shiny as it could have been.
\n\n\n\nBut then I’m looking at the second question here about what the favorite things are and it’s all the stuff that we lean into all the time. The extensibility, the fact that it’s free, otherwise known as cost, the fact that it’s multi-site capable, the fact that there’s plugins and what have you that you can extend it with.
\n\n\n\nAnd the editing experience, so we’re talking about full site editing, I guess there as well as the editor, is low on the list of priorities, which is quite interesting. Only 36% of respondents thought that that was their priority.
\n\n\n\nAnd then talking to the broader, I don’t know, the marketing piece, I think WordPress as a whole, it is really difficult to market something to the entire world. And that’s what WordPress is. So for the, like the Core community and things like that, to try and figure out where to put their best efforts, you know, how to convince people that WordPress is the solution for them, is really difficult, because it’s everybody. It’s literally anybody who might want a website.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I think that’s where endeavors like WP Campus really pull out all the stops. You know, you are out there shouting loudly that this is the credible solution, if you’ve got a need for a website in the higher ed space. You are making it so that, I guess if we were to Google higher ed CMS, WordPress is going to come up fairly high. So you are growing that pie.
\n\n\n\nBut I guess the audience is fairly small, isn’t it? You know, at each institution, how many people are going to be making those searches? It’s not going to be the 300 people that you mentioned. It’s probably going to be the web team.
\n\n\n\nSo I think you’re doing great work. You know, you’re definitely finding those people and the important decision makers are probably the people. that you need to find.
\n\n\n\nI keep coming back to the phrase, growing the pie. That’s what I think WP Campus is basically about. You know, of the 10,000 institutions out there that might use WordPress, it’s about making sure that a growing proportion of them know that it’s a credible alternative to whatever they’re using now. And from the numbers in the survey, it looks like once you’ve onboarded them, it’s easy to keep hold of them, which is pretty cool.
\n\n\n\n[00:42:21] Rachel Cherry: For WP Campus as an organisation, we wanted to use the survey to really surface the needs. And so there’s questions in this survey that talk about what plugin needs exist.
\n\n\n\nYou know, one of my takeaways from this survey is how WordPress does need more enterprise functionality. And that’s covered a lot in the questions about plugin functionality. There is a big need and a gap for a lot of enterprise functionality in the WordPress ecosystem and higher ed needs it. So if there are people out there wanting to build it, we are ready for it.
\n\n\n\nAnd so, you know, I want to surface those needs to kind of help bring more resources to our community and to what they’re doing. And so anyone out there looking to help fill that gap, please check out the survey and I’m open to have a conversation at any time, and we’d love for you to join our Slack and ask us questions and get us involved.
\n\n\n\n[00:43:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s an interesting call to action because you know, if you’ve got space in your calendar to build a new thing, you now have a brand new audience potentially, if you’ve not considered the higher education space, there’s a ton of data in this report which you can download. So maybe this is a whole new audience that you didn’t realise that you could tap into. Alex, was there anything, it sounded like you had something.
\n\n\n\n[00:43:33] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, no, I was just going to echo really to what Rachel was saying there. I think the idea with this report was to, as Rachel said earlier on, provide data that has been missing. There’s no cynical play, it’s a collaborative report that’s designed to help other people understand how their peers are working, what their challenges are, how they’re trying to solve them, what kind of environment they’re doing it all in.
\n\n\n\nIt’s a really fascinating area, as I said earlier on, and we are really excited to see it develop and help it develop. And, yeah, we will be certainly collaborating with WP Campus and Rachel going forward.
\n\n\n\n[00:44:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so whether or not, it really doesn’t matter which bit of WordPress you are attached to, whether you’re a hosting company or a plugin or a theme developer or an agency, just building out websites, there really is a bit of this which will map to whatever it is that you are doing.
\n\n\n\nThe website URL I mentioned earlier, wpcampus.org is where you’re going to find this out. I presume that they’re somewhere, if I was to explore, I would probably find a contact form. But beyond that, let’s go to Rachel first, how could people reach out to you if they’re curious about what you’ve said to today? Where would they best find you?
\n\n\n\n[00:44:36] Rachel Cherry: Yeah, so you can join our Slack, which is accessible from wpcampus.org. There is a Slack page and you fill out a form and you get an invite, and feel free to join and start some conversations. There is a contact form on wpcampus.org, and I do receive those emails along with other people in our organisation. So that’s another great way to get in touch with me as well.
\n\n\n\n[00:44:59] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. And Alex, same question.
\n\n\n\n[00:45:01] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, for us, obviously website, humanmade.com. There’s a contact form on there. But also Twitter and LinkedIn tend to be our main sort of points of contact for people getting in touch with us.
\n\n\n\nMight also be worth flagging out, we’ve got a Word on the Future newsletter, which goes out once a month. You can sign up for that on the website. That generally has this kind of content, not always about higher education, but about the enterprise WordPress space in general. So that’s quite a nice touch point too.
\n\n\n\n[00:45:24] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll just mention before we finish off that the WP Campus site not only links to, you know, the bits and pieces that are going on right now, but there’s the blog and there’s also links to the events as well as the Slack channel and things like that, oh, and a newsletter. There’s a whole load of opportunities to keep in touch with what’s going on over there.
\n\n\n\nSo, yeah, what I would also say is it’s very hard in an audio podcast to do justice to a report, which is primarily graphics. So please, if you’ve any curiosity around what we’ve been talking about, go and download that and you’ll be able to get the full detail of what we’ve been talking about. You’re going to find that on the Human Made website, and I will link to it in the show notes.
\n\n\n\nOkay, Rachel Cherry, Alex Aspinall, thank you so much for chatting to me today. Really appreciate it.
\n\n\n\n[00:46:05] Alex Aspinall: Thanks for having us.
\n\n\n\n[00:46:06] Rachel Cherry: Yes, thank you.
\nOn the podcast today we have Rachel Cherry and Alex Aspinall.
\n\n\n\nRachel is the founder of WP Campus, a nonprofit organization she launched a decade ago to support professionals using WordPress in higher education. Under her leadership, WP Campus has become a community hub, hosting conferences and leading research projects tailored to the unique needs of its members. Currently, Rachel serves as the organization’s Director of Technology and sits on its board of directors, where she continues to drive innovative projects.
\n\n\n\nAlex Aspinall is part of the globally distributed team at Human Made, an established enterprise WordPress agency founded in 2011. At Human Made, Alex helps deliver large-scale web platforms for major organizations, including names like Harvard, Standard Chartered, and PlayStation. In recent years, Alex has developed a strong interest in how WordPress can uniquely serve the higher education sector, and he\u2019s become especially passionate about exploring and supporting this use case.
\n\n\n\nDuring the podcast we get into the story behind WP Campus, which has, for the past decade, been empowering people who use WordPress in colleges and universities. We explore Human Made\u2019s growing interest in the complexities of higher education projects, from large multisite networks to the strict accessibility and governance requirements such projects increasingly require.
\n\n\n\nThe heart of the conversation is the just released \u2018State of WordPress in Higher Education 2025\u2019 report. We dig into the reports key findings such as the slow adoption of the block editor and full site editing, the challenges of managing hundreds of university websites with small web teams, and why enterprise-level tools are in such high demand.
\n\n\n\nWhether you\u2019re a WordPress professional, agency, educator, or are just curious about the unique needs and opportunities the higher education space offers, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\n\u200aThe State of WordPress in Higher Education report
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u200aWord on the Future newsletter
\n", "content_text": "Transcript\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the state of WordPress in higher education.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Rachel Cherry and Alex Aspinall.\n\n\n\nRachel is the founder of WP Campus, a nonprofit organization she launched a decade ago to support professionals using WordPress in higher education. Under her leadership, WP Campus has become a community hub, hosting conferences, and leading research projects tailored to the unique needs of its members. Currently, Rachel serves as the organization’s Director of Technology, and sits on its board of directors where she continues to drive innovative projects.\n\n\n\nAlex is part of the globally distributed team at Human Made, an established WordPress Enterprise Agency founded in 2011. At Human Made, Alex helps deliver large scale web platforms for major organizations, including names like Harvard, Standard Chartered and PlayStation. In recent years, Alex has developed a strong interest in how WordPress can uniquely serve the higher education sector, and he’s become especially passionate about exploring and supporting this use case.\n\n\n\nDuring the podcast, we get into the story behind WP Campus, which has for the past decade been empowering people who use WordPress in colleges and universities. We explore Human Made’s growing interest in the complexities of higher education projects, from large multi-site networks to the strict accessibility and governance requirements such projects increasingly require.\n\n\n\nThe heart of the conversation is the just released State of WordPress in Higher Education 2025 report. We dig into the reports key findings, such as the slow adoption of the block editor and full site editing, the challenges of managing hundreds of university websites with small teams, and why enterprise level tools are in such high demand.\n\n\n\nWhether you’re a WordPress professional, agency, educator, or are just curious about the unique needs and opportunities the higher education space offers, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Rachel Cherry and Alex Aspinall.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast today by two fabulous guests. I have Rachel Cherry and Alex Aspinall. Hello both. How are you doing?\n\n\n\n[00:03:36] Rachel Cherry: I’m lovely, Nathan. How are you?\n\n\n\n[00:03:38] Nathan Wrigley: Good, thank you. And Alex, you all right?\n\n\n\n[00:03:40] Alex Aspinall: How are you doing? I’m great.\n\n\n\n[00:03:41] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. So we’re going to be talking today about the higher ed space, the higher education space, and WordPress. Specifically about WP Campus. In order to establish both of your credentials in this space, I wonder if we could get a little biography from you both, maybe 30 seconds, something like that, just explaining who you are, where you work, what your connection is to WordPress and specifically WP Campus.\n\n\n\nSo let’s go with Rachel first, if you don’t mind.\n\n\n\n[00:04:05] Rachel Cherry: Hi, yes. So I am the founder of WP Campus, which has been around 10 years as of last month, which is kind of wild. And so we are a nonprofit organisation that supports people that use WordPress in higher education. And we host conferences, we host research projects like the one we’re going to discuss today.\n\n\n\nSo currently I am just one of a board of directors and I’m the director of technology specifically, but I was the lead for this project.\n\n\n\nAnd then by day I am the accessibility developer at the University of Rochester. And so I’ve worked in higher ed and other enterprise organisations for the last 18 years.\n\n\n\n[00:04:43] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. That’s great. And Alex.\n\n\n\n[00:04:46] Alex Aspinall: I mean, I have way less credentials in terms of my WP Campus presence. I work for Human Made, which is an enterprise WordPress agency. We’ve been around since 2011, I think.\n\n\n\nWe’re a globally distributed team, people across all continents. And we specialise in building larger scale web platforms for organisations such as Harvard, Standard Chartered, PlayStation, few other names I could throw in there.\n\n\n\nWe also have an enterprise hosting solution too. We, probably about a year, two years ago started, well, I personally started becoming really interested in the higher education use case for WordPress. I think it’s really interesting. I think it’s quite unique. And that’s really why Rachel and I started speaking, I don’t know, maybe 18 months or so ago, and that led us to I guess this podcast.\n\n\n\n[00:05:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. So the podcast is going to be framed around a freely available resource, and it’s called The State of WordPress in Higher Education. I will link in the show notes rather than try to butcher a URL in an audio podcast. I’ll link in the show notes over at WP Tavern to that and you can freely download it.\n\n\n\nIt’s billed as a research report in the year 2025. I confess, I don’t know if you did a 2024 version and beyond, but we’re going to concentrate on the 2025 version.\n\n\n\nBut I guess some more preamble, I’m afraid, but I guess we probably should establish what WP Campus is. And I just want to be clear, we recently released an episode about WP Campus Connect, and so I just want to draw a distinction there. These two things are not the same thing.\n\n\n\nSo I’m going to toss that one to Rachel. Will you just tell us what the endeavor is at WP Campus, why it was set up? What need is it trying to satisfy?\n\n\n\n[00:06:22] Rachel Cherry: Yeah, so about 10 years ago I was working in higher education, building WordPress websites, and I wanted my own community. And I was going to a lot of WordCamps and no one was talking about the work that I was doing, the kind of work that I was doing. There wasn’t a space for my kind of work at camps at the time and so I started this organisation.\n\n\n\nAnd so for the last 10 years we have worked to build a community of people, of like-minded people, that are using WordPress to support the mission of higher education. And we support each other with professional development, with resources, with connection, and every now and then some advocacy. Years ago we raised funds to do the audit of Gutenberg, accessibility audit to be more specific.\n\n\n\nAnd so because accessibility is very important in our space, and here was this editor coming round going to cause a lot of change, as it has, and there was this huge unknown of whether or not it was accessible. And that was a very big deal to our group. A lot of our group has policies and such. And so every now and then we do work like that.\n\n\n\nThis type of research is very important to our mission as well, to provide data, to provide insight to our community members and our institutions.\n\n\n\nAnd I think one of our kind of ideals that we stand on is that we want to give people data to inform their own decisions, kind of like with the editor audit. Like, we didn’t tell people it was inaccessible or accessible, we gave them data so that they can decide for themselves. And so this research, you know, is a big part of that as well.\n\n\n\nThere’s a lot going on in our community right now. And we wanted to pull out this data, and one of our objectives was to better understand the needs and challenges of people using WordPress in higher education.\n\n\n\n[00:08:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you for that, Rachel. I’m going to advise that everybody goes over to the following URL. In fact, pause the podcast right now. If you’re sitting at a computer or you’re on your phone, go to wpcampus.org and over there you’re going to be able to see more about the mission.\n\n\n\nAt the moment, the membership numbers are displayed on the website. Whether or not that’s true when you visit, I don’t know, but 1,763 members, 688 institutions. That is an impressive number, by the way. I mean, the membership is great, but the institutional count is utterly fabulous. That’s really impressive.\n\n\n\nBut the idea is to juxtapose WordPress and higher ed. We don’t really use that word in the UK too much. We just kind of generically call things, I think university, so I just want to clear that up. Does higher ed basically service the needs of anybody that’s left traditional school? So I don’t know, 18 plus who’s going through some degree program or something like that?\n\n\n\n[00:08:58] Rachel Cherry: Yes. Our mission is really to support kind of that, and I apologise, I can’t think of the general term. There’s a kind of a general term that we do use across, that’s more of a global, because higher ed is very specific to the United States in a lot of ways.\n\n\n\nSo we do support kind of that further education. We do have a lot of UK institutions and universities that participate in the work that we do. I would say that our group is largely United States, a lot of UK, a lot of Canadians as well. But we do have folks from all around the world. So it’s really just that spirit of wanting to support that mission of education.\n\n\n\nOver the years have had a lot of people, even in the kind of K through 12 or early education people, wanting to be involved. And a lot of the things that early education and higher, or later, education have in common, but they’re also very different. So we haven’t quite merged with the early education group in that way. But yes, we do support largely this kind of university, higher education context.\n\n\n\n[00:09:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. Yeah, that clears that up. I mean, you’re really busy over there. You’ve got loads of, I mean, an awful lot going on. There’s a whole thing about governance. You’ve got a newsletter, you put on real world events as well as online based events, and a Slack community. And there’s just a lot going on. It seems like, I don’t know if this has taken over your life, but it seems like it could well have done.\n\n\n\n[00:10:17] Rachel Cherry: It did for a long time, and these days I have a lot more help. For a long time I was really the only director and then a few years back we did the work to implement more of a fleshed out kind of board of directors. And so I’m just a member of that board now. I am not the director in charge.\n\n\n\n[00:10:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, all of that, again, is freely available on the website. You can see who the current custodians of the project are.\n\n\n\nSo where does Human Made, Alex, where does Human Made fit into this piece of the puzzle? How, have you become involved?\n\n\n\n[00:10:45] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, I guess it goes back to what I was saying a little bit before about, I was just personally really interested in the higher ed use case of WordPress, and started digging around into learning a bit more about what kind of projects people had on the go, and what kind of platforms were being built in the space. They’re diverse, they’re complicated, they’re multi-site, you know, interesting, I guess is why I started getting involved.\n\n\n\nHuman Made is one of the agencies that builds complex, larger projects, so there’s a fit there as well. So we started looking around the space, seeing who it might be interesting to talk to, just in terms of learning a bit more. Obviously Rachel and WP Campus. We started talking informally about just the experience of being in WordPress in higher education.\n\n\n\nI think the first thing we collaborated on over a year ago now was we did an online conference in the run up to WP Campus’ IRL conference a couple of weeks later. And then after that we enjoyed working together, we thought there was a lot more material we could work on, and this research project, I suppose was the biggest idea that came out of those discussions following that.\n\n\n\n[00:11:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So I’ve downloaded the report and I’ve had a thorough look through it. There’s an awful lot in here actually. It is available, like I said, I’ll link to it in the show notes. However, I have to say, it’s a very graphical thing that we’re going to be talking about. There’s loads of charts kind of explaining the percentages in many cases of one thing versus another. So you will probably get more out of this podcast if you have downloaded it, and had a little peruse.\n\n\n\nIt doesn’t really matter who wants to take this, but I’m going to ask one of you to sort of explain what are some of the curious findings that you’ve got? Maybe the one, two, or three top level items that you think might be of great interest, and then we can maybe dig into the weeds of those particular things. So anything that your intuition suggests as something our audience might be interested in.\n\n\n\n[00:12:32] Rachel Cherry: I’ll start with like my key takeaways, which are very broad, and then dive into a few of the data points. But my two key takeaways that I reported on was that our higher ed teams need more resources, and a way to share more resources, and that higher education needs more enterprise features in the WordPress product. Those were kind of my two, like looking at the data, my two takeaways. And at our report presentation that we had recently, we talked about that with folks in the community.\n\n\n\nBut some of the really interesting questions that we asked were around usage of the block editor and full site editing. And so nothing super surprising. But let me pull up that particular chart really quick.\n\n\n\nSo we asked folks, how fully have you adopted the block editor and full site editing? And only 40% of the respondents are using it on all of their sites. And there was a range there. Like we asked, are you using it on all of them? Are you using it on like most of them? Alex touched on this earlier, higher ed is a very interesting space, and the thing that I, people used to hear me say frequently was that WordPress and higher ed is WordPress in the enterprise on a budget. And what that usually means is a lot of under-resourced teams having to use WordPress to solve these large scale enterprise, high user environments.\n\n\n\nWhat comes out of that is very creative, very custom, very interesting, complex solutions. This is kind of tying back to my takeaway of people need more resources and they need ways to share them. Because something that is also interesting in our space is how much custom work there is. How much people are solving the same problems, but they’re solving them on their own, and they don’t have a way to really share them. It takes a lot of energy to like maintain a public plugin that gets used around. And so because these plugins are usually so custom that creates this whole challenge.\n\n\n\nSo anyway, back to the block editor. So when you’re trying to introduce new functionality in these complex enterprise environments, it can take a while. Higher ed is usually, it’s usually a pretty slow train of adoption, and there are reasons. And a big reason for that is resources. And you’re not just going to turn around and add the block editor on because you’re probably managing like 300 websites, and you can’t just change the editing experience without changing all of your training materials, and without changing your governance.\n\n\n\nSo yeah, so there’s context to why, and there’s lots of reasons. There’s other reasons that we don’t really dive into in these numbers, but there’s context that goes into why only 40% are actually using it on all their sites, even though Gutenberg came out in 2019.\n\n\n\n[00:15:28] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask you a quick question? You said something which took my breath away there. You said these people are managing probably 300 websites. I didn’t see that in the report anyway, and that seems like a really surprising number. How does that map to an institution? Is it because there’s a website for, I don’t know, the geography department, and then there’s another one for the sociology department? Is that what’s going on there? Because 300 seems like, well, I mean you could run your entire agency and not have 300 websites under your custodianship. So what’s going on there? You dropped that number and I was really surprised by it.\n\n\n\n[00:16:01] Rachel Cherry: Yes, in higher ed, there is a website for everything. And there is the notion of, if you’re familiar with domain of one’s own, which is a concept actually introduced in, or invented in, higher education in the States. And what it really means in our context is that people will set up WordPress multi-sites and then let people create their own sites on it.\n\n\n\nAnd they’re largely blogs, like a faculty member’s blog or a research lab’s blog. But it’s a way to allow the sharing and the spreading of information and research in higher ed with kind of a low service effort.\n\n\n\nSo like you can log on and you have like two template choices or two theme choices, and then you’re responsible for kind of managing a site on there. And then they try to, you know, build this domain in a way that’s kind of reusable code and plugins, like you do in WordPress. So yeah, you can get a lot of sites going.\n\n\n\n[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s absolutely fascinating. I hadn’t really thought about it as, well, for example, if I go to a university website here and I end up at the Department of Geography, I’m kind of thinking it’s the same website, but I imagine, you’re right, it’s a whole different team of staff that are logging in and doing the geography stuff than they would be elsewhere.\n\n\n\nOkay, so that’s curious. Right, back to the points that you mentioned, the resources. When you say that universities, I’m just going to use the word university, when you say that these institutions have limited resources, it kind of feels like the funding model in the US is very different to one that we have in the UK, and possibly different parts of the world.\n\n\n\nAnd it always feels as if the US institutions probably have more money, but I’m probably thinking of things like the Ivy League universities where the fees are very high, but that probably doesn’t map all over the place.\n\n\n\nSo when you say resources, are you talking about cash, them being strapped for cash, or are you talking about human beings? You know, there’s not enough boots on the ground, if you like, or maybe it’s a confection of both.\n\n\n\n[00:17:50] Rachel Cherry: Probably both, but largely headcount. I mean every university or institution’s different and some might actually be more cash strapped than others. But it’s largely a headcount. It’s largely the fact that in a lot of these institutions, you’ll have a web team of like three people managing 300 websites. And what that means, how they have to kind of manage how they spend their time and what they do with it.\n\n\n\n[00:18:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it’s a bit of both. There’s less human beings than there might be in the corporate space, but also they’re probably fairly strapped for cash.\n\n\n\nAnd then moving onto the block editor, I’ll come to you in a second, Alex, if that’s all right. But staying with Rachel for a moment. I’m looking at the chart now, 40% adoption of the block editor entirely, using them on all the websites, so point four, 40%. Then we drop down to 23% using it on some of them. 19% using on most, and then the last one really of interest here is 16% who are not using the block editor at all.\n\n\n\nHas that adoption just sort of slowly ramped up, because 40% in higher ed feels like, to me, it doesn’t seem like a bad number in all honesty. I know that in the real world probably it is higher adoption than that, but I’m guessing that there are many more constraints on universities just switching out to the block editor. So is that number slowly but inexorably rising? It feels like it’s going in the right direction, but with the caveats that it has to happen slowly.\n\n\n\n[00:19:11] Rachel Cherry: We don’t have data from the last, you know, four or five years to truly answer that question. But the vibe, or the sentiment, in our space is that, yes, it’s been slowly increasing. And part of that is just people, you know, there’s lots of factors, right? There’s people waiting for maturity. They’re waiting for it to grow more before they adopt. Or because of said resource discussion, people are waiting for the next redesign, for example.\n\n\n\nIn our space, I think we even asked, how often do you redesign? Is one of the questions that we asked in our survey. I think it’s on average like every three years or so, three to five years, something like that. And so people in our space tend to wait for that to really implement large scale changes because it’s just easier to do it then than it is, you’re already doing a bunch of work, you might as well do it then. And so that’s another factor involved.\n\n\n\n[00:20:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s a little corollary to the chart that I’ve just described, underneath it, where the question was asked, how long did you wait before implementing the block editor? And basically the data skews towards, we’re trying to wait as long as possible. You know, more than two years is 35%. So it feels like, because of the nature of the audience, and I guess accessibility is a really crucial part of this, you’ve got to put the brakes on. You can’t be all that agile in the same way that maybe a corporate would, because you’ve got lots of stakeholders, lots of editorial teams that need updating and so on and so forth. So that’s kind of interesting.\n\n\n\nAnd then I know that you didn’t mention this, Rachel, but it’s tantalizingly underneath the question that has just been mentioned. We move on to full site editing and it feels like, whoa, the brakes are really on for that. 62% of respondents said that they’re not using full site editing at all, and the numbers are kind of into low single figures where they’re describing whether or not they’re using it on all their sites.\n\n\n\nSo the block editor, in terms of content creation is on the rise, but it would appear that full site editing, the ability to, you know, modify themes and customise that kind of thing inside of WordPress, not so much. It feels like the breaks are really on there, probably as a result of the resources that you mentioned earlier.\n\n\n\n[00:21:15] Rachel Cherry: It’s probably following the same trajectory. Full site editing is newer and it will grow with time. But I think with full site editing, it’s very similar concerns to the block editor, but it’s more about governance and control. When you do set up these WordPress websites where you do have a lot of governance over accessibility or over branding, it’s really scary.\n\n\n\nThe full site editing without fully understanding what it does, and how you can control it and set boundaries, there’s that concern about governance of, we don’t actually want people using our websites to be able to customise the site. We want a lot of control over that, most of the time, not everyone, but most people. Because in our space, a lot of the users that are coming in and kind of admining their site, or editing their site, are not trained web professionals. They are biology professor who’s kind of doing job as needed.\n\n\n\nAnd so we want them to have flexibility to go in and publish content. We want them to be able to share their research, share their information, but we don’t want them to be able to have free reign to kind of break our governance rules, and potentially create risk to our brand or to our accessibility and things like that. And so the full site editing, there’s a lot of people that are kind of hesitant and being patient for the full site editing implementation.\n\n\n\n[00:22:43] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for that. So we’ve got a picture then of how WordPress is deployed. It seems like it’s the CMS of choice over in the education, higher ed landscape anyway.\n\n\n\nSo moving over to Alex, I’m talking more about the implementation of this now. Presumably agencies such as yourself, Human Made, you are getting requests from these institutions to build these websites.\n\n\n\nHow does that process work? Do you generally tend to work with like the web team over there and you, you know, backwards and forwards with them? And then the bit that I’m most curious about, talking about what Rachel just said, how on earth do you get these people so that they can use the website that you’ve built? Because, in many institutions it may be one or two people have got their hands on this, but it sounds like there may be several hundred people who need to access the WordPress website. So training.\n\n\n\nSo there’s two parts to that question really. How are you interfacing in terms of building the things when you are approached by these institutions? And then how do you get to hand it off and provide a good level of support and training to them?\n\n\n\n[00:23:37] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think the main back and forth we have would be with, typically the web team of course, as you guessed there. I think each institution is set up differently. I think Rachel probably could testify to the fact that, you know, the challenges and benefits of being set up one way is not mirrored and how it’s done elsewhere. So I do think agencies generally have to be flexible, and work within the parameters that they’re asked to, you know, that’s kind of our job.\n\n\n\nI think there are also, particularly with the biggest implementations in higher ed, there’s often other agencies involved or other specialists involved as well. You might be working with someone, you know, we might be bringing design and platform expertise and you might be working with someone that’s looking after the marketing and the wider brand of the university as well.\n\n\n\nSo I think there’s quite a lot of collaboration indeed, like the amount of time I’ve spent within higher ed, I think collaboration is a really big theme, and I think that the successful projects that we see getting delivered are very collaborative in nature.\n\n\n\nAnd then yeah, in terms of training and handover, I imagine on the ground in the universities in question, they have a bigger challenge than perhaps we do, because we’ll be handing it over to a smaller percentage ultimately of the wider institution. We don’t run 300 separate training sessions or anything like that. We provide detailed documentation, videos, follow up sessions, and we make sure that the team that are receiving the product are fully versed in it.\n\n\n\nI think a lot of the time those people are. I think it’s handing it over to the editors that then the work will have to be done on a one-to-one basis in terms of what they’re allowed to do, going back to the FSE point. Not everyone can edit everything.\n\n\n\n[00:25:08] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of curious because when I see a website for, again, I’m going to use the word university. When I see the website for university, I’m just seeing this kind of brochure site, really. In other words, here’s the university, look at all the magical things that we do. But my daughter has just been at university, and there’s so much more to it than that. So there’s like this portal where my daughter goes, logs in, and now the expectation is that much of the work will be carried out in that format. You know, you’ll submit content, there will be lesson plans and all of that kind of thing.\n\n\n\nSo essentially the question is leading me up to, what kind of things are being built into this website apart from the public facing bit, which we might call a prospectus, really? You’ve got this online prospectus, the world can see it, we can marvel at how great the university is, but it seems like there’s a heck of a lot more. Each department has its own stuff. Presumably the students, increasingly being expected to log in, especially post COVID, I imagine as well. So again, that one probably to Alex. What kind of curious things are built inside these WordPress websites, LMSs, brochure sites, and so on?\n\n\n\n[00:26:10] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, I mean, no, you listed off a lot of the options there really. I mean, the main three or four pages you might think of as being the university site are very much that, just the brochure. But there’s all kinds of different requirements for different departments. We’ll have different kinds of products that they want to build in there. You’ve got archives of hundreds and thousands of different reports and pieces of information from the past that will be needed to be upheld.\n\n\n\nWe rebuilt Harvard Gazette, which is, you know, obviously part of the wider infrastructure at Harvard. So that’s a massive publishing site. That’s essentially the same as any magazine or newspaper would have. It’s what it is. As you say, the student logins, all the complexities of multi-site. Rachel, I’m sure you’ve probably got a list longer than that.\n\n\n\n[00:26:53] Rachel Cherry: It’s a lot, right? In my role as an accessibility professional, do a lot of governance work and it’s trying to tie together all these different types because there’s WordPress at my university, but there’s tons of other stuff. There’s front end brochure websites, and there’s research lab sites, and there’s marketing websites, and then there’s all the academic focused, as Alex mentioned a few. There’s a lot of web applications. There’s a lot of people doing a lot of different types of content in different ways. And how does that all tie together?\n\n\n\nWe talk a lot about things like data sharing and a lot of the work that we do is also just trying to keep all this content in sync and trying to not have duplicates or not have outdated content, things like that. So when we talk about governance is like a big word that means a lot of things to different people. But a lot of it is really just kind of managing quality and the expectations of how websites are managed and how our mission as an institution is kind of presented to the world.\n\n\n\nSo it’s interesting, Nathan, that you say, like to you, it’s like you just see this brochure site, and that’s a common conversation about kind of the challenges of enterprise. We have all this internal knowledge and we also have, you know, there’s a funny common conversation in universities about acronyms. We have all this internal terminology that we use, but does that come across to the end user? Does the work that we do translate? And it’s a complicated question to solve.\n\n\n\n[00:28:22] Nathan Wrigley: I’m kind of curious as to whether or not WordPress can service the needs of the entire IT department, if you like, within a higher ed institution. So I’m imagining that the legacy is that there’s many, many pieces of software that are being used throughout the university. You know, there may be some sort of portal where people log in and check in that they’re actually at work. There may be other things where people log their essays that they supply to their tutors and things like that. Plus then there’s the brochure on the front end.\n\n\n\nI’m curious as to whether or not WordPress in the future can handle most of those, and whether there’s an appetite from the higher ed institutions to have everything in one platform. They may see that as, you know, maybe that presents an Achilles heel to them. If there’s one systemic failure, then the whole thing goes down. But I’m curious as to whether or not WP Campus is trying to pitch WordPress as the answer to all the things, or is it a much more limited subset of things? You know, it’s the website, and it’s the LMS and that kind of thing. So that’s more of a kind of roadmap question, whether you’re trying to push WordPress as being the answer to everything.\n\n\n\n[00:29:20] Rachel Cherry: As an organisation, we don’t really push for WordPress to be used. It’s not really our mission. That’s not how we think or how we work. It’s really more just to support people that have, that are using it, and to help each other in our roles.\n\n\n\nTo answer your broader question, I mean I kind of, it depends. Can WordPress be used for all these things? Sure. I’m sure you could finagle it to do a lot of things. Should it do all those things? Probably not. Not in its current state, no. It, in and of itself, is a database with programming and you can get it to do all kinds of things.\n\n\n\n[00:29:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there was one of the questions which I’ve just refound and it was, what challenges do you face with the WordPress plugin ecosystem? And bloat was one of the things that was mentioned. So yeah, this is specifically to do with WordPress plugins. It’s not WordPress Core. I thought that was kind of curious.\n\n\n\nAnd then in second place, just by a whisker, was accessibility requirements as well. And you’ve touched on accessibility a lot, Rachel. You’ve mentioned the word tangentially, and obviously that’s your kind of area of expertise.\n\n\n\nI’m guessing, but I’m not sure for certain, does the US compel certain things to be done in certain ways? You know, if you’re a university and you launch a website, does it have to comply with things? And do those things map across the globe? I know that we’ve got the European Accessibility Act, which just dropped earlier this year. So the question is pretty broad, but just tell us about the accessibility requirements and how stringent they are in higher ed as compared to just, I don’t know, if I’ve got a brochure site online selling widgets into the community.\n\n\n\n[00:30:51] Rachel Cherry: So unfortunately the US does not have as strong accessibility laws as Europe does, or many countries in Europe, like the UK and others. We do have some though, and we do have something called section 508, which basically means that if you receive federal funding or federal service, you do have to meet certain accessibility requirements.\n\n\n\nAnd so universities in the US largely fall under that. Not always. Universities are probably the only real kind of ecosystem in the US that does have more accessibility rules than other industries like general business. And so that’s why we did that accessibility audit of Gutenberg to help support our community in that time.\n\n\n\nAnd so it is very important, accessibility is very important. And it kind of touches on something that I said earlier about, a lot of universities in the US especially build custom plugins because they have to meet accessibility guidelines and it’s really challenging sometimes to find general use plugins available in the ecosystem that meet those guidelines. And so a lot of teams just kind of build their own stuff.\n\n\n\nAnd so I would say that those top two challenges, when it comes to bloat and accessibility are really, like that was not surprising in any way. That is the common struggle. It’s finding plugins that meet our accessibility requirements, especially with the front end. And then having plugins that do a lot of functionality that people don’t need. And so I think a lot of these times will lend people to kind of build their own plugins.\n\n\n\nThey won’t rebuild like complicated plugins, any kind of administrative plugins or like form builders and things like that. Like, people largely will use plugins from the ecosystem. But there’s a lot of custom functionality in the work that we do.\n\n\n\nSo once again, I think the common theme is it’s complex, and because of that complexity, there’s all kinds of interesting challenges. And so plugins are hard to kind of maintain. It feels like, I hear a lot of people expressing to me, you know, how often they have to kind of update them and keep them up to date, and manage and do all that. And so it’s not enough to stop people from using WordPress, like they’re using it, but having better solutions for some of these challenges would be an example of kind of supporting these higher ed institutions using WordPress.\n\n\n\n[00:33:12] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Alex, back to you. A question around just higher ed in general, is this like an area which Human Made is drilling down on? Is this an endeavor that you are trying to grow the pie, if you like? There’s thousands, I would imagine, maybe tens of thousands of institutions which come under the banner of higher ed. And at the moment, I don’t know what percentage of them are using WordPress. If we were to ask every single one of them, I would imagine it’s a significant percentage.\n\n\n\nBut the idea of WP Campus, I guess, is to have a central place where people can go and learn about it. And Human Made being involved, presumably there’s some advantage to you as an enterprise agency. The question basically boils down to, is this an area that you are going to be working on, pitching towards, trying to grow in the near future?\n\n\n\n[00:33:55] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, for sure. I think like I said at the start, we’re generally the kind of agency who works on larger platforms, maybe more complicated platforms. And I think we’re interested in, you know, a broad range of industries. Probably higher ed is one of four or five, probably publishing, finance, enterprise generally, entertainment, higher ed. I think those industries tend to provide very interesting use cases for WordPress. We’re interested in all of them.\n\n\n\nI think we’ve seen, in the last couple of years, a lot of interesting higher ed projects being worked on by us and obviously by lots and lots of other people. And yeah, like we’re definitely part of that world, and really interested in it and, you know, yeah, definitely keen to continue being part of it, a hundred percent.\n\n\n\n[00:34:45] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting, towards the bottom of the survey, so right near the bottom, probably nine tenths of the way through, there’s a whole series of kind of roadmap questions, if you like, things about the future of WordPress. And the fairly, I don’t know, blunt question, let’s put it that way, because it could have gone in the other direction it turns out, it’s hopefully gone in the right direction, but the question was asked, would you move to another CMS if you had time and resources?\n\n\n\nAnd gosh, that could go the wrong way. The answer was a strong 49% no. Which, when you say it like that you think, hang on, only half of the people wouldn’t move. But then you ask, then the other bit was only 23% are looking to move at all, and 28% are unknown. So really you’re up into the sort of seventies really, who either are not sure or want to stick around.\n\n\n\nThat seems like an amazing statistic to me. And obviously, Human Made have kind of put their flag in the ground in higher ed, WP Campus, the same. It feels like you’ve got quite a lot of runway with these institutions in the future. Unless things go horribly wrong within WordPress, it looks like you’ve got an audience long into the future.\n\n\n\n[00:35:43] Alex Aspinall: I think the report offers a really positive view of WordPress. As a technology choice, I think on the whole, most people are saying it was delivering what they needed it to. I can’t remember if it’s 70, 75%, something like that, it was said that it was either meeting or exceeding their expectations, which I think is a large number. Again, it’s not like 90, but if you think about the amount of ways you can complain about software, particularly people that know a lot about the software, I think 75% is pretty good.\n\n\n\nAnd yeah, you’re right, whilst people are perhaps saying, oh, they’re looking around or they’re always considering alternatives, I think we’ve seen repeatedly that the platform, its security credentials, its extensibility, some of the core features, are all spoken about really, really favorably from the people that responded to the survey.\n\n\n\nAnd I think really we saw a passionate group of people responding to a technology they know a lot about. There are a lot of ways it could improve, we all know that, and the people that completed the survey know that as well, and they’ve, you know, they weren’t shy about listing them out. But I think you’re right, overall, the level of satisfaction is good, and I think with further adoption and the adoption of newer features, I think that that satisfaction should continue to grow.\n\n\n\nIn fact, one of the things I was actually kind of wanting to ask Rachel actually was back to the point about FSE earlier on. I actually think WordPress needs to do a much better job of marketing itself, particularly around newer features, and particularly perhaps at the enterprise level, or where there’s complex use cases, or where a lot of the users aren’t developers. The benefits of FSE, for example, are numerous. And we’ve seen clients and indeed we’ve used it ourselves, and the people using it really like it, and I think that’s reflected in the report as well.\n\n\n\nSo I was going to ask Rachel, as well as the other examples of why adoption might have been slow in higher ed, do you think that there’s actually a case for people in, maybe agencies, maybe WordPress Core doing a better job of the selling and the pitching? Because I actually believe that there are worse solutions that do a better job of convincing people that they should work in a certain way.\n\n\n\n[00:37:51] Rachel Cherry: I think there’s always room for more marketing and kind of communication about what’s going on, and there’s always improvement for that. And I do feel like Core could do more towards the enterprise ecosystem as well. That, you know, I don’t know what their primary use case that they’re focusing on is. But I would be surprised to find out that enterprise is higher up on that list. And so paying attention to our community and having open conversations with them, and there has been some efforts at that. There’s not like a non amount of effort on that.\n\n\n\nBut yeah there’s, I think a good way to kind of describe how a lot of our community works is just kind of, it’s cautiously optimistic, but cautious. And having to manage risk and having to manage their time and energy, and so they’re not going to jump into anything. They’re going to do a lot of research. They’re going to try to find out who else is doing it, and is it working well for them?\n\n\n\nSo there’s a lot of, we do a lot of case studies and try to encourage our community to share about the work they’re doing. Because really that goes a long way too. If a university sees another university using full site editing and that it’s successful, then that goes a long way.\n\n\n\nAnd when you have an absence of that, when you have an absence of examples, then it’s a struggle, right? Because our environment is so complex that an article about full site editing and what it can do doesn’t really go super far. We need to understand, not just what it does, but the long-term implications. Because once we implement it, that’s it. It’s very hard to back up, especially in our, these 300 website multi-site instances where we’ve got to train people and do all these things. We can’t rush into it.\n\n\n\nSo there’s a lot of cautious waiting and seeing. So the more that universities can share about how they’re using the tools and how it’s working for them, and what’s not working for them. Being genuine in the reality of what we’re doing goes a long way. So there’s pros and cons, like, here’s how it worked, here’s the roadblocks we hit, here’s how it could be better. Having those kinds of conversations can really go a long way towards adoption.\n\n\n\n[00:39:59] Nathan Wrigley: I have a few things to add to this, and the first one would be that my expectation when a survey is put out is, broadly speaking, the expectation is that negativity is going to be the thing driving them to the survey. And that’s not what you find here. People who’ve got an axe to grind are frequently more likely to open up a survey and grind the axe, and that isn’t the case here.\n\n\n\nYou know, it’s remarkably sanguine. Everybody seems entirely optimistic. And even the data which may be not quite as favorable, is not unfavorable. It’s just maybe not as shiny as it could have been.\n\n\n\nBut then I’m looking at the second question here about what the favorite things are and it’s all the stuff that we lean into all the time. The extensibility, the fact that it’s free, otherwise known as cost, the fact that it’s multi-site capable, the fact that there’s plugins and what have you that you can extend it with.\n\n\n\nAnd the editing experience, so we’re talking about full site editing, I guess there as well as the editor, is low on the list of priorities, which is quite interesting. Only 36% of respondents thought that that was their priority.\n\n\n\nAnd then talking to the broader, I don’t know, the marketing piece, I think WordPress as a whole, it is really difficult to market something to the entire world. And that’s what WordPress is. So for the, like the Core community and things like that, to try and figure out where to put their best efforts, you know, how to convince people that WordPress is the solution for them, is really difficult, because it’s everybody. It’s literally anybody who might want a website.\n\n\n\nAnd so I think that’s where endeavors like WP Campus really pull out all the stops. You know, you are out there shouting loudly that this is the credible solution, if you’ve got a need for a website in the higher ed space. You are making it so that, I guess if we were to Google higher ed CMS, WordPress is going to come up fairly high. So you are growing that pie.\n\n\n\nBut I guess the audience is fairly small, isn’t it? You know, at each institution, how many people are going to be making those searches? It’s not going to be the 300 people that you mentioned. It’s probably going to be the web team.\n\n\n\nSo I think you’re doing great work. You know, you’re definitely finding those people and the important decision makers are probably the people. that you need to find.\n\n\n\nI keep coming back to the phrase, growing the pie. That’s what I think WP Campus is basically about. You know, of the 10,000 institutions out there that might use WordPress, it’s about making sure that a growing proportion of them know that it’s a credible alternative to whatever they’re using now. And from the numbers in the survey, it looks like once you’ve onboarded them, it’s easy to keep hold of them, which is pretty cool.\n\n\n\n[00:42:21] Rachel Cherry: For WP Campus as an organisation, we wanted to use the survey to really surface the needs. And so there’s questions in this survey that talk about what plugin needs exist.\n\n\n\nYou know, one of my takeaways from this survey is how WordPress does need more enterprise functionality. And that’s covered a lot in the questions about plugin functionality. There is a big need and a gap for a lot of enterprise functionality in the WordPress ecosystem and higher ed needs it. So if there are people out there wanting to build it, we are ready for it.\n\n\n\nAnd so, you know, I want to surface those needs to kind of help bring more resources to our community and to what they’re doing. And so anyone out there looking to help fill that gap, please check out the survey and I’m open to have a conversation at any time, and we’d love for you to join our Slack and ask us questions and get us involved.\n\n\n\n[00:43:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s an interesting call to action because you know, if you’ve got space in your calendar to build a new thing, you now have a brand new audience potentially, if you’ve not considered the higher education space, there’s a ton of data in this report which you can download. So maybe this is a whole new audience that you didn’t realise that you could tap into. Alex, was there anything, it sounded like you had something.\n\n\n\n[00:43:33] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, no, I was just going to echo really to what Rachel was saying there. I think the idea with this report was to, as Rachel said earlier on, provide data that has been missing. There’s no cynical play, it’s a collaborative report that’s designed to help other people understand how their peers are working, what their challenges are, how they’re trying to solve them, what kind of environment they’re doing it all in.\n\n\n\nIt’s a really fascinating area, as I said earlier on, and we are really excited to see it develop and help it develop. And, yeah, we will be certainly collaborating with WP Campus and Rachel going forward.\n\n\n\n[00:44:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so whether or not, it really doesn’t matter which bit of WordPress you are attached to, whether you’re a hosting company or a plugin or a theme developer or an agency, just building out websites, there really is a bit of this which will map to whatever it is that you are doing.\n\n\n\nThe website URL I mentioned earlier, wpcampus.org is where you’re going to find this out. I presume that they’re somewhere, if I was to explore, I would probably find a contact form. But beyond that, let’s go to Rachel first, how could people reach out to you if they’re curious about what you’ve said to today? Where would they best find you?\n\n\n\n[00:44:36] Rachel Cherry: Yeah, so you can join our Slack, which is accessible from wpcampus.org. There is a Slack page and you fill out a form and you get an invite, and feel free to join and start some conversations. There is a contact form on wpcampus.org, and I do receive those emails along with other people in our organisation. So that’s another great way to get in touch with me as well.\n\n\n\n[00:44:59] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. And Alex, same question.\n\n\n\n[00:45:01] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, for us, obviously website, humanmade.com. There’s a contact form on there. But also Twitter and LinkedIn tend to be our main sort of points of contact for people getting in touch with us.\n\n\n\nMight also be worth flagging out, we’ve got a Word on the Future newsletter, which goes out once a month. You can sign up for that on the website. That generally has this kind of content, not always about higher education, but about the enterprise WordPress space in general. So that’s quite a nice touch point too.\n\n\n\n[00:45:24] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll just mention before we finish off that the WP Campus site not only links to, you know, the bits and pieces that are going on right now, but there’s the blog and there’s also links to the events as well as the Slack channel and things like that, oh, and a newsletter. There’s a whole load of opportunities to keep in touch with what’s going on over there.\n\n\n\nSo, yeah, what I would also say is it’s very hard in an audio podcast to do justice to a report, which is primarily graphics. So please, if you’ve any curiosity around what we’ve been talking about, go and download that and you’ll be able to get the full detail of what we’ve been talking about. You’re going to find that on the Human Made website, and I will link to it in the show notes.\n\n\n\nOkay, Rachel Cherry, Alex Aspinall, thank you so much for chatting to me today. Really appreciate it.\n\n\n\n[00:46:05] Alex Aspinall: Thanks for having us.\n\n\n\n[00:46:06] Rachel Cherry: Yes, thank you.\n\n\n\n\nOn the podcast today we have Rachel Cherry and Alex Aspinall.\n\n\n\nRachel is the founder of WP Campus, a nonprofit organization she launched a decade ago to support professionals using WordPress in higher education. Under her leadership, WP Campus has become a community hub, hosting conferences and leading research projects tailored to the unique needs of its members. Currently, Rachel serves as the organization’s Director of Technology and sits on its board of directors, where she continues to drive innovative projects.\n\n\n\nAlex Aspinall is part of the globally distributed team at Human Made, an established enterprise WordPress agency founded in 2011. At Human Made, Alex helps deliver large-scale web platforms for major organizations, including names like Harvard, Standard Chartered, and PlayStation. In recent years, Alex has developed a strong interest in how WordPress can uniquely serve the higher education sector, and he\u2019s become especially passionate about exploring and supporting this use case.\n\n\n\nDuring the podcast we get into the story behind WP Campus, which has, for the past decade, been empowering people who use WordPress in colleges and universities. We explore Human Made\u2019s growing interest in the complexities of higher education projects, from large multisite networks to the strict accessibility and governance requirements such projects increasingly require.\n\n\n\nThe heart of the conversation is the just released \u2018State of WordPress in Higher Education 2025\u2019 report. We dig into the reports key findings such as the slow adoption of the block editor and full site editing, the challenges of managing hundreds of university websites with small web teams, and why enterprise-level tools are in such high demand.\n\n\n\nWhether you\u2019re a WordPress professional, agency, educator, or are just curious about the unique needs and opportunities the higher education space offers, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\nWP Campus\n\n\n\n\u200aThe State of WordPress in Higher Education report\n\n\n\nHuman Made\n\n\n\nHarvard Gazette\n\n\n\nWP Campus Slack\n\n\n\n\u200aWord on the Future newsletter", "date_published": "2025-09-10T10:00:00-04:00", "date_modified": "2025-09-09T10:05:52-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/184-Rachel-Cherry-and-Alex-Aspinall-on-the-State-of-WordPress-in-Higher-Education.jpg", "tags": [ "podcast", "WP Campus" ], "summary": "In this episode, Nathan Wrigley interviews Rachel Cherry (founder of WP Campus) and Alex Aspinall (Human Made) about the state of WordPress in higher education. They discuss the WP Campus organisation, its mission to support WordPress users in higher ed, insights from a new research report, ongoing challenges like limited resources and slow adoption of new features, and the critical need for accessibility and enterprise-level tools. The episode also explores collaborative opportunities, plugin needs, and how agencies and developers can better serve this complex, resourceful sector. Whether you\u2019re a WordPress professional, agency, educator, or are just curious about the unique needs and opportunities the higher education space offers, this episode is for you.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2136854/c1e-3gd9dikdg18sw5w88-xx4nv98rbgz1-bya9bm.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=199013", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/183-destiny-kanno-isotta-peira-and-anand-upadhyay-on-how-wordpress-is-shaping-the-future-of-education-for-students-worldwide", "title": "#183 \u2013 Destiny Kanno, Isotta Peira and Anand Upadhyay on how WordPress is shaping the future of education for students worldwide", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how WordPress is shaping the future of education for students worldwide.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Destiny Kanno, Isotta Peira, and Anand Upadhyay.
\n\n\n\nDestiny is the Head of Community Education at Automattic. Isotta is the leader of the WordPress Credits Initiative for students, and Anand is the founder of WordPress Campus Connect.
\n\n\n\nThis episode is all about how WordPress is not only powering websites, but also empowering the next generation of learners and creators. You’ll hear about the growing movement of education focused WordPress events happening worldwide, from hands-on workshops on university campuses in India, to student clubs designed to keep the momentum going after introductory events.
\n\n\n\nAnand shares how WP Campus Connect is bringing WordPress directly to students, reducing barriers to entry, and helping bridge the gap between academic learning and real world tech skills. We also explore the challenges of organizing these events, from convincing institutions of the value of open source, to fostering genuine community involvement among both students and educators.
\n\n\n\nIsotta then introduces us to the WordPress Credits Program, an initiative that lets students turn their contributions to the WordPress ecosystem into recognized academic credits at universities like, Pisa in Italy. It’s a win-win. Students gain practical resume worthy experience, while educational institutions get a transferable, skills focused, program that prepares learners for the jobs of the future.
\n\n\n\nWhether you’re an educator, a WordPress enthusiast, or just someone who cares about open source and community, this episode is packed with actionable insights. The guests share how flexible and resilient these education initiatives are, how you can get involved, and why engaging the next generation is not just important, but essential for the continued growth and sustainability of the WordPress community.
\n\n\n\nIt’s a truly inspiring episode, and is at the intersection of so many areas of profound importance.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re curious about how to bring WordPress into your local school, university, or community, or if you just want to hear how WordPress is making a difference far beyond the web, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Destiny Kanno, Isotta Peira and Anand Upadhyay.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Destiny Kanno, by Isotta Peira, and also by Anand Upadhyay. Welcome all three of you. Thanks for joining me today.
\n\n\n\nNow just before we begin this podcast, we’re going to be talking about education, the education landscape, and how WordPress combines with that. I hope during the course of this conversation, you will get an impression that this is something which is very dear to my heart. We don’t need to go into that, but this is about the most profoundly purposeful use of a CMS that I can actually imagine. I mean, I’m sure there’s other scenarios for other people, but for me, this is the perfect sweet spot. Education, WordPress, open source software. It doesn’t basically get better than that for me.
\n\n\n\nSo with that out of the way, I think it would be good to go round the houses one at a time and just give a little short biography of who you are, where you work, what your history is with WordPress, something like that. You can make it as long or as short as you like, but if we keep it under a minute, maybe something like that, that would be good. So let’s go to Destiny first.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:46] Destiny Kanno: Yes. Hi there, I’m Destiny. I’m currently head of community education at Automattic. I’m a sponsored contributor in the .org space. And yes, before working on the exciting new initiatives we’re going to chat through today, I was working alongside the training team, two years as a training team rep, helping build out content, like online workshops and courses and learning pathways. And I was part of the group of folks that brought that new relaunch live last year. So yeah, exciting stuff, and that’s what I’m up to right now.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:23] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s great. Thank you so much. We have some context there, that’s lovely. And okay, let’s go to Isotta. Do you want to give us your bio next?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:30] Isotta Peira: Sure. Thanks a lot Nathan for inviting us and, yeah. I’m Isotta, I’ve been around the community since, WordPress community since 2022 when I joined Automattic, and I’ve been a sponsored contributor since then. For the past year, three years, four years, I’ve been contributing full time to the community team. And recently this year I switched on to the educational initiative, and I’m currently leading the WordPress Credits program for students.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you very much. And finally, Anand.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:04] Anand Upadhyay: Hi, my name is Anand, and I am running a WordPress plugin development company WPVibes. I am a user of WordPress from the last 15 years, since 2010 I’m using WordPress for various purposes.
\n\n\n\nI have been contributing to WordPress through much multiple channels like Core, docs, polyglots, jumping from one team to another. And from the last year, I have found like my new passion. Just like you, I am also passionate about education and teaching. So from the last year, I found this idea of WordPress Campus Connect, and currently I’m very much involved in trying to bring it to the broader community.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:39] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. So I think we’ve established that the panelists today, there’s a lot of really meaningful contributions in all of your past, especially around WordPress and education. So let’s dig into that a little bit. As I said at the top of this show, I can’t see a more meaningful use of WordPress, frankly.
\n\n\n\nI mean, I don’t know what it’s like in the places where you live, but in the UK where I live, education is one of those things where we like to talk about it being a priority, but the finances kind of don’t really match up to that aspiration. And so things like ICT, websites, coding, all of that, it’s a nice thing to have, but I think often it gets left in the background a little bit.
\n\n\n\nAnd because of that, things like open source platforms, I feel there’s a really great use of that, not only from the educator’s point of view, you know, people that can use those platforms to help with their class education, maybe set up a community website, maybe set up a school website or something like that. But also from the point of view of learners, people who wish to get a leg up in life, and figure that maybe learning technology and learning how to build on the web is a credible place for them to start.
\n\n\n\nSo let’s just go through, where is WordPress at the moment in the educational landscape? I know that’s incredibly broad because we haven’t sort of pinned it down to any of the projects. Where are we at? What are the initiatives that are going on at the moment? So, again, anybody that wants to jump in, if we do a bit of crosstalking, so be it. But anybody that wants to jump in, just go for it.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:13] Destiny Kanno: I’ll start from like what I’ve observed a little bit. I’m pretty new to the Community Team itself and this event space, but I have seen that there have been a few education related events happening throughout the years, regardless of WordPress Campus Connect.
\n\n\n\nLike in Africa, they recently had their, I think it’s annual event, I believe in Uganda. And that has been going on for a while. It just hasn’t been under like the name WordPress Campus Connect.
\n\n\n\nAnd then I believe as well, and correct me if I’m wrong, there was, with Sebastian in Poland, this like WordPress Academy, like they’re also doing like education type events and initiatives. But when it comes to now this WordPress Campus Connect, it’s an official event series, like do_action. It has like more intention around that. And I think because when you go in and you, you know, apply to organise, and now there’s this way to do it through WordPress Campus Connect, it’s just going to bring those initiatives that are already happening into like a more streamlined funnel of people seeing that it’s happening, I think, in a more, how do I say it?
\n\n\n\n[00:09:21] Nathan Wrigley: Cohesive would be the word.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:22] Destiny Kanno: Yeah, cohesive way. Thank you.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so I guess what you’re saying there is that there’s a lot of people out there in the WordPress community, many of whom might be educators or, you know, working in a school or what have you, and that they’ve rolled their own thing like we all have with WordPress. And that’s great. That’s one of the benefits of having open source software. You download it, roll your own, what have you.
\n\n\n\nBut it’s also, it’s nice, it’s meaningful, it’s impactful if everybody can see, oh, there’s a bigger, kind of more organised piece somewhere. And it may not fit exactly what I’m doing, but at least I can see that it can be deployed this way. Maybe I can talk to those people, get some intuitions and ideas from those people and what have you, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:01] Isotta Peira: I wanted to jump in and connect with what Destiny was saying because this is exactly what happened from the community perspective. So talking about events, a few years ago we were seeing the Training Team doing a lot of great progress around education and the Community Team around events. But we weren’t that connected between contribution teams. And we’ve also, as like project wise, we were seeing also the need to bring a different type of audience to the WordPress events.
\n\n\n\nAnd we weren’t exploring at all the education field. With all the students around the world, we weren’t like taking care of them in our programs. So from the Community Team, they kind of encourage organisers all over the world to come up with new diverse format for events. And in 2023 it was launched this, it was called at the time next generation of WordPress events.
\n\n\n\nAnd one of the formats that stood out was exactly the Campus Connect brought up by Anand and the community. And other events like the Website challenge, and the others that’s been mentioned. And as he was saying, then we have had the time now to come back, connect the pieces between different contribution teams, and be able to offer something recognisable, standardised, something not as overwhelming as sometimes open source programs are.
\n\n\n\nAnd so we hope not just to reach a wider audience of students, but also to empower more teachers, more trainings, and anybody else in the community into bringing WordPress in any different type of education at different levels. With the support of course of the community.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:47] Nathan Wrigley: We will get into the bits that WP Campus Connect do in a moment, but just coming back to something that you said there, it feels to me, if I browse around in the WordPress landscape, and trust me, I browse around in the WordPress landscape rather a lot. It always feels to me as if, how to describe this, initiatives where companies sell WordPress on, they build things and there’s a fee involved. You know, so you’re a web agency or what have you, you build the thing and you sell it on.
\n\n\n\nThat seems to dominate the conversation. And the more philanthropic side of things, the education piece, the bit where you’re just, you’re doing the work because it’s meaningful, and perhaps you are not getting remunerated for it. That bit somehow gets, well, it gets ignored. It somehow is the silent relation of the for-profit things. You know, you hang out in Facebook groups and you hang out on Twitter, X, whatever, online, it’s always the for-profit bit, which seems to be making the noise, you know, the plugins, the themes, and rah, rah, rah.
\n\n\n\nAnd this kind of stuff seems to get left. And I don’t know why that is, but it’s, hopefully this podcast is addressing some of that.
\n\n\n\nAnyway, sorry Anand, I think it’s your turn to have a little bit of a chat with us. Tell us about, yeah, the same question really, your experience in the education space and where you think WordPress is at at the moment.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:02] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah, so just as you explained about the state of education in the UK, so the same is in our region, India as well. So students in the academic life are slightly disconnected with the, what is happening in the industry? So there is like a gap between the academics and the industry. So through these kind of events, we are empowering the students to come closer to what really happening in there.
\n\n\n\nAnd we are also helping them to make aware about the various carrier opportunities that WordPress ecosystem can bring to them. It’s not like about just one thing, it’s also about if someone is interested in programming, someone is interested in designing, SEO, content. So there is something for everyone, right?
\n\n\n\nSo with this program, we are trying to connect the students with the various career opportunities, and also trying to bring some fresh energy to the WordPress ecosystem. They can become the contributors, they can bring their own fresh perspective. Because I have read somewhere the WordPress community in many areas is aging. We need that new fresh energy. So this kind of program can also address that problem.
\n\n\n\nIt’s always good to have more people getting involved in the contribution, like sort of just started with the WP Credit, which is bringing actually students to the contribution. And the Campus program is trying to introduce them to the WordPress. So all these kind of programmers combined with working towards getting more and more people getting involved in the WordPress ecosystem, and trying to make the project more sustainable in the long run.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:28] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting, I attend quite a lot of WordPress events, and particularly the flagship events so, you know, the WordCamp Asia’s and Europe’s and US and what have you. And, I think you’re right about the demographic. The demographic definitely skews older. It’s hard to see anything above, I would imagine 10% of the crowd that would be under the age of 20. I have no data to back any of that up. I’m kind of putting my finger in the air a little bit.
\n\n\n\nBut it feels like that. It feels like the demographic is, I don’t know, 30, 35, 40 and above. And if that were the only reason that you were doing WP Campus Connect, that in itself would be a credible reason, you know? But obviously there’s a lot more to it than that. But just that alone would be significant and important.
\n\n\n\nAnd I think also, in a world dominated by proprietary platforms where everything is siloed, you don’t own your own data, the experience is exciting because there’s some kind of algorithm trying to hook into your brainstem, then we need to get these young people. And because we don’t have the marketing budgets of a Facebook or a TikTok or what have you, then we have to do it in different ways. And attaching an event to a campus, to a university, to an educational institution is a great way I think of doing this.
\n\n\n\nSo firstly, bravo, for getting this thing off the ground. Perhaps this one is for Anand again. I don’t know if he wants to take this question, but can you just describe what WP Campus Connect is? What’s involved in that? What’s the age group? Where are you doing it predominantly? How long has it been going? As much or as little as you like. And depending on what you give back to us, we can take it from there.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:09] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah, so WordPress Campus Connect, there is no like fixed criteria on to whom you are going to deliver this. So the only thing is we are going to the students, we are going to their campus. We are not creating a kind of WordCamp kind of thing, or centralised workshop where everybody is coming to our venue and we are delivering them the knowledge, but it’s about going to their campus. And because this will reduce the friction, like if we are going to organise an event, centralised event, we are inviting everyone to join, then there will be a friction. A lot of people might not going to join. Maybe there were some valid reasons as well.
\n\n\n\nSo with Campus Connect, we are going to their campus and delivering the WordPress knowledge to them. And so far we have done this in the universities, postgraduate colleges, undergraduate students. And we are helping them to understand the WordPress, how WordPress can be a career choice for them, and how WordPress can be useful for whatever their interest is.
\n\n\n\nBecause as I already said, that there is students, if we are going to a college or university, that every student might have different kind of interests. Maybe they are enrolled in the same course, but still they have, might have some different kind of interests.
\n\n\n\nSo we are trying to explain them that they are with various career opportunities available so you can jump in. And we are doing it through the hands-on workshops. It’s not like that we are just doing a kind of seminar or lecture kind of thing. We are doing it in form of a kind of a hands-on workshop, like five to six hour workshop where we will help them to build their first website.
\n\n\n\nAnd it’s not about like we want to make them expert in six hours. It’s not possible. So what we want to do is, we want to give them a feeling of accomplishment. This is something that is something interesting and this is something that we can use and build something.
\n\n\n\nSo this way, if they get some, after six hour workshop or five hours workshop, if they’re coming out with kind of feeling of accomplishment that this is interesting, we should explore it further, we should explore it more. So that’s our win.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:05] Nathan Wrigley: Can I ask, in the part of the world where you are, is there a real hunger for this? Is there a real appetite for this? Because with the best will in the world, I think there might be a geographical divide in terms of interest and hunger for things like WordPress. And again, there’s no heuristics behind this, this is me supposing from what I’ve heard and conversations that I have had.
\n\n\n\nIt feels like in your part of the world, and you only have to look at plugin contributions, contributions to Core, events that are taking place in your neck of the woods. It seems like there’s a real appetite for it, that there may not be quite in the part of the world where I am from. So first of all, can we speak to that? Is that the case? Is it like, you know, you put this stuff on and people show up? You build it and they come?
\n\n\n\n[00:18:56] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah, so there is a quite hunger. India is like a kind of a very large country and if you count the number of WordCamps that happening in India every year, it’s quite big. Right now, these are like two, three months where we don’t have any WordCamps because it’s mostly the rainy season in everywhere. Otherwise every month you will have one or two WordCamps. And the communities that are organising WordCamps struggle to find a date that is not conflicting with another WordCamp in the same country. So that’s how the things happen.
\n\n\n\nIf you talk about the beginning of this year, first three weekends have WordCamps in India, and all were very successful. So there is a kind of WordPress community is very engaging in India, and so the way everywhere.
\n\n\n\nAnd also if you talk about the hunger in the students, so it can vary about what they are learning, what their background is, where they’re located. But, yeah, students from what we have interacted, because we interacted with the students who doesn’t have any knowledge. We got a very good response. We saw them talking about like, oh, this is great. We can do something amazing with this. We have a lot of ideas already. This is something that we can use to implement those ideas.
\n\n\n\nSo there is surely a hunger, but we just need to give them a path like, this is the path, and you can follow this. And we need to ensure them, there’s big opportunities, big market opportunities are also waiting for them if they excellent with some skills in this segment.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think it’s true to say that more or less every young person, let’s go, child or young adult or what have you, has some sort of insatiable appetite to learn. But given the education that they’re presented with, given the opportunities that are put in front of them, their experience of life later on will be very different. And so if WordPress never comes on the menu for them, if nobody ever suggests, well, have a look at this thing, then they’ll never know about this thing. This whole wonderful world of online publishing and all of the myriad things that you can do around the WordPress ecosystem. And so WP Campus Connect, I guess is facilitating that.
\n\n\n\nNow, curiously though, you said that you go to where the educational institution is. How does that work? How do you connect, so again, this doesn’t have to go to Anand, this can go to anybody. How do you connect the educator, let’s say, or the institution that wishes to put something on because, you know, their students might like it. How do you connect the educational institution with the people who then go in and provide this WordPress workshop and training? How does that work? How does that get paid for? Is it all voluntary? There’s a lot in there to unpack, but I hope you get the thrust of my question. How do all those jigsaw pieces fit together?
\n\n\n\n[00:21:37] Anand Upadhyay: The first thing is it’s all voluntary. So just like in a WordCamp, we have an organising team, a team of organisers and speakers. Nobody’s getting paid for this. We are also doing it voluntary. We have a team of organisers, not specifically to me, every WordCamp has a team of organisers, have a team of volunteers, workshop facilitators who are organising the workshops. So it’s all voluntary, nobody’s getting paid.
\n\n\n\nAnd also it’s free for students as well. There is no charge for students from the WordPress Campus team. So it’s not like we are putting a kind of a ticket to them. It’s completely free. Going to your question about getting the institutes convinced for letting us do the workshop in their campus, so it’s kind of a tricky thing.
\n\n\n\nThe first time we reached out to the institute, so it was very tricky. I get to the college with a pitch deck. So I pitched the complete idea, complete presentation to show them what is WordPress, what are the kind of community thing? Because every institute has this question like, why you are doing this? What are your benefit?
\n\n\n\nAnd It’s the same thing that you said, we have to pass that bureaucracy before getting to the better benefit of the student. We have to go to the bureaucracy. And it’s a genuine question in their mind as well, because, not a lot of such communities exist that are doing these kind of free things voluntarily. For the students. So the first question we were asked is, why are you doing this? What are your benefits? And don’t expect anything from us.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:58] Nathan Wrigley: It rings so bizarre in the world in which we live. Everything about that screams, hang on. Wait, where’s the catch? Where’s the sales pitch? What’s going to happen after the fact?
\n\n\n\n[00:23:10] Anand Upadhyay: We have to work on with this way and we have to explain like complete things. We showed them that these are the big events that in the WordCamp ecosystem happens, and we are trying to create a unique initiative for students and we’ll be delivering everything free to them. And we were not going to charge, we just need you to provide the students and the required infrastructure.
\n\n\n\nSo the pitch is really tough. In some institutes we got very understanding people who understood what we are saying. Within the next 15 minutes, we got them convinced. In some places we have to discuss a lot of questions. But yeah, it was again, interesting experience as well. We got some general feedback from them as, because last time it was the very first time we were doing this kind of thing. We don’t have any reference, like we just have an idea like we are going through this thing. So we also brainstorm with them like, what are the expectation of your students? They also gave us some suggestions.
\n\n\n\nSo because in every institute you’ll find different kind of students, you have to plan your workshops, you have to plan your workflow according to the interest of the students. So that’s how we approached, yeah, to convince the institute is the most tricky part. Because other than that, if you have to do workshop, we have our facilitators who are already working in WordPress. So it’s not difficult for them to deliver the same knowledge to adults. The only barrier that we have is to convince the college and universities to join and become a partner.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:32] Nathan Wrigley: And has that journey, that, I guess bridge that you’ve got to cross, has that now become more straightforward? In that, you’ve got a history of things that you’ve done. So it’s now more a case of, look, here’s the testimonials. Here’s the things that have happened. We have credibility, we’ve done it before. This is not brand new. Has that become an easier journey? In other words, the door is more open than it was the first few times around.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:54] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah, so the last year it was very tough. We have to reach up to them, take appointment, go there and spend some time there. And this year in the institute where we have done this last year, I just sent them a message like, we are doing it again, and if you want to be a part, just fill this form and we will discuss further.
\n\n\n\nIt works. So it’s much easier. And to those who are not a partner last year, but they have seen our post on the social media after the event, and they reached out to us like somehow we missed it, this time connect with us whenever you are doing it again. So once you have done this thing, you have a credibility and you can just showcase them.
\n\n\n\nAfter that event, we have got a lot of the students joining our meetup. Before that, I’m running our city meetup from 2017, and we barely get 10 to 12 members in every meetup. Right now we are doing the meetups of 40 to 50 members. And it’s a kind of amazing thing. And it’s not only about having a lot of the students only. After seeing the students joining in, after seeing our pictures and the sort of local community going on, some professionals are also jumping in to join the meetups.
\n\n\n\nBecause they see that there is something valuable going on. So they’re also joining. So this is something amazing, because this is a byproduct. You’ll be able to grow your local community. You’ll be able to strengthen your local community more.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:10] Nathan Wrigley: I have such profound respect for what you are doing. It is almost bringing tears to my eyes. It’s incredible. Everything that you say there is just so philanthropic. It’s just philanthropy all the way down. College students probably don’t have a great deal of money to throw around. They would want to consume education, which will make their life prospects better. They would like that to be as affordable as possible.
\n\n\n\nAnd you show up, like here’s a bunch of stuff and it’s completely free. Okay, that’s great. And then there’s this virtuous cycle of, okay, we do it each year. That becomes easier, because the testimonials work, and presumably you can spread out and the ripples will move around where you live. And then hopefully maybe hop through jurisdictions and borders and international, who knows? We can get to that.
\n\n\n\nBut then also this knock on effect, which was maybe unexpected, a consequence that was unexpected of the WordPress community, the meetups that you offer, the swelling there and swelling in the, we talked about the demographics earlier, it’s skewing younger. And if you can attract a percentage of those, and keep them sticking around in the community, they can then take on these roles in the future.
\n\n\n\nAnd the whole thing kind of propels itself. What it needed was the prime mover, which was you, which is pretty incredible. So I don’t know if Destiny or Isotta want to add anything. I’m almost speechless.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:31] Destiny Kanno: I did have like a few points I wanted to add to what everyone’s saying. Reducing barriers has been a huge factor of setting this up. Originally we were using like the previous event organisation form and were like, actually there’s a lot of stuff in here. It doesn’t make sense for this use case. So we really paid a lot of attention to just thinking differently for this, and treating it differently. We don’t have to use the same things as we had before.
\n\n\n\nAnd Isotta said before, like it’s standardised in a way, but it’s flexible too. So even though we have this framework that people can come to, we don’t say, you can only do the event in this way. You can have a one day event, you could do a half day event, you could have event series over a couple weeks like Anand is doing, and that is totally cool. Like, however you want to run this, we are open to that, and we’re also here to mentor you and support you in that.
\n\n\n\nAnd then I, a thought came to my mind as Anand was talking, and you Nathan as well about like, you know, what’s in it for the volunteers? And I’m like, I think it’s an opportunity for volunteers just as much as it is the students, because they’re also getting exposure to these universities. And I don’t know, maybe someone has an ambition to teach at university someday, or like at least teach about WordPress at a university. So, you know, as you go into these, yes, there’s a hundred percent the philanthropic aspect, but it’s also like a learning experience for you as well as a volunteer to be in that space with the students too.
\n\n\n\nAnd then lastly, I wanted to say as well, like going a little bit back about the current climate and how it feels like we are kind of like aging, I’ve also noticed in my experience it’s like, we are all also just, this is probably very like, duh, but we’re all professionals, right? So we’re not really looking to talk to students most of the time. We’re looking to sell something or network or like talk to other professionals. So I do think that this is a great way to bring in that new batch of folks that are going to become professionals, hopefully in the WordPress space. But yeah, it’s just that renewal instead of like just trying to sell or buy from whoever’s there based off of whatever you’re currently working on in the WordPress space.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:46] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Isotta, anything you want to throw in at this point?
\n\n\n\n[00:29:49] Isotta Peira: Of course. I want to add one point about the aging discussion that we were having, because also, in my opinion, it is true what you, Nathan, said at the beginning that just only the fact of reaching younger people is a way to make the project more sustainable, long term. But also I would love everyone to think about the other way around, because what is WordPress giving to all these younger generations?
\n\n\n\nBecause wins are much, I mean, for how I see it, I see like a winning opportunity everywhere. Because it’s not just about reducing the age of the people involved in the project. If we reduce the age, but people are not engaged. If they’re not getting what they need, learning opportunities, networking opportunities, even just opportunities to understand that they have a whole world around them, they didn’t even know that it existed, which happened to me before I learned about WordPress community and WordPress, this is huge.
\n\n\n\nSo this is a real, like all this initiative are core of the service that will be giving to millions of students. For now, we are at thousands of students already, but, this would be available for any students worldwide. And this is a pretty big deal, I believe, for younger generation and their futures.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:12] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s, on every level this is just so remarkably interesting, and the growth of it hopefully we’ll get into the millions. Right now you say you’re in the thousands. It’s still remarkable.
\n\n\n\nI want to sort of drill into it a little bit. So it feels like there’s this sort of double fronted marketplace aspect to it where WP Campus Connect kind of sits in the middle, and so you’ve got WP Campus Connect in the center, and then on the one side you’ve got the students and the institutions that those students attend. And then on the other side, you’ve got the educators who will come into that institution and WP Campus Connect is sort of like the fulcrum, the center, the spokes all lead into WP Campus Connect, and they do all the connecting and what have you.
\n\n\n\nLet’s talk about the educator side. So this is people who already are familiar with WordPress. Are there any constraints on who you would welcome into WP Campus Connect there? Like, is there any level of expertise that you’ve got to have, or any kind of proof that you’ve got to go through that you, yourself would be a credible educator? I don’t know, so that’s open to anybody. Is there any kind of barrier to entry if you are an existing WordPresser and want to be involved?
\n\n\n\n[00:32:20] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah, so far we have not planned any kind of a specific requirements or the limitations or criteria. So far we have picked from the local community members, like we just opened the call for facilitators, and all those who are interested in teaching. And they responded to it and we just picked them.
\n\n\n\nWe are doing a kind of a series of event to, I think five to six colleges in this time and going every weekend to one college. So we have a pool of four workshop facilitators and we’ll be rotating them to multiple colleges. So this is how it is working. So there is no kind of barrier kind of thing.
\n\n\n\nWe are just thinking about if they are ready for the community work, because there may be many educators, but there may not be everyone who will be doing it for free because we are not going to pay them anything. So if they have the community feeling, they have the community vibes and they can come forward for this. So that’s the only criteria we have. You have the WordPress knowledge, you have the love for community. Just come forward and join us for the event.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:19] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s great. Great to hear. So staying on that side of things then, I remember my forays in education, one of the things that was kind of drummed into me was, failing to plan is planning to fail. And so there was always this aspect of, if you’re going to stand up in front of a bunch of people, you have to be ready. You can’t necessarily, I mean you can, right? A workshop environment maybe maps to that pretty well, where you stand up and it’s led by what the audience, the students in this case, would like to hear.
\n\n\n\nI’m wondering if there’s a curriculum which you have planned or do plan, or if somebody can kind of like drop in and just pick up the pieces of paper if you like and say, okay, here’s the lesson plan, if you like. WP Campus Connect has put these plans together, and we’re going to go and show these students how to do this.
\n\n\n\nSo that is my ignorance. I don’t know if that’s the kind of thing that you do. Do you provide materials for wannabe educators to deliver, or is it very much you create your own curriculum on the fly or however you wish to do that?
\n\n\n\n[00:34:16] Anand Upadhyay: So we just meet together and just plan, just think about like how we can go on ahead, like what are the things that we to teach? And we just brainstorm it together. It’s not like we are giving the, because there is not much different between the organiser and workshop facilitators here. So we are all the community members, so we have just divided the roles, but we are all, they’re working towards the same goal.
\n\n\n\nSo we just all sit together, brainstorm the ideas, like what should we give to the students? So for example, last year we helped them to build a kind of a business website. So all the educators plan together. So we will follow this workflow, we will follow this approach. And we went to one college, we tried to do the same thing. We came back and then we again said what went wrong? What was difficult for the students to follow? How we can overcome them in the next college? We repeat, we improvise and deliver the same thing.
\n\n\n\nThis year we, again, we are planning, so we again sit together. And then we thought about, last year we helped them to create a kind of a simple business website, but we found that students were not connected with that. They built the same thing, but they didn’t utilise it later because it was not connected to them. So this year we are planning to help them to build their personal portfolio website, a kind of a resume, where they can showcase their projects, they can showcase their resume, they can showcase their work or learning what they have done. So we are planning that kind of website.
\n\n\n\nSo again, our workshop facilitators are working together, all those educators, and working together to create a kind of a reference website. And then we will guide them to recreate this, the same thing, adding their own touch because this will be more personalised thing. They will get attached to this, and maybe we can have some of the students to put their websites live. So it’ll be, again, a good chance.
\n\n\n\nAnd we are also getting some support from the hosting companies who are offering some pre-hosting accounts so we can do kind of a competition kind of thing, or someone who has done incredible work during the workshops and post workshop, we can provide them those free hostings and they can get the chance to put their website live.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it’s a real kind of project based education then. So you walk into the room, you interact with the educators, you ask questions, I’m struggling with this thing, I can’t make this work, and they come and step in. So you described it as a workshop and maybe the audience, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that kind of setup, but education often felt like to me, person at the front with some kind of display, whiteboard, blackboard, whatever. They talk, I listen, I fall asleep.
\n\n\n\nBut this is not that. This is, okay, we have a project, we’re going to design a business website, a personal portfolio, resume kind of website. And the idea is that you interact with that and by the time you’ve left, you’ve got some useful knowledge. You’ve done a thing, not just listen to somebody talking about possibly doing a thing hands on. Okay, that’s brilliant.
\n\n\n\nIs there any kind of age restriction? Because obviously if I was to bring along a 3-year-old to this, we would question the utility of that. You kept talking about colleges and I think you mentioned universities a couple of times. So it feels to me as if we’re 18 or something is kind of where this goes, yeah?
\n\n\n\n[00:37:28] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah, most of the students we interacted with are around mostly 17 plus we can say, 17 or 18 plus. So that’s the age group. And this year we have got a student, we have got a request from one of the high school as well. So they want to, their approach was very nice. They want to give the students kind of exposure to what they are going to face after completing their high school. So they’re running kind of a program so they’re also interested in if we can just go to their school and give their students some kind of a short introduction about any skill that is relevant for them. So we’re also getting that kind of request as well.
\n\n\n\n[00:38:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and that’s such an interesting age as well, because you haven’t yet kind of formulated your path. And I think maybe by the time you get to 16, 17, 18, you’re more funneled. You’ve made decisions which have led you in a certain direction. You know, I’m going to be a, I’m into agriculture, I want to do whatever it may be.
\n\n\n\nBut if the high school level, everything’s wide open still, isn’t it? And if you can get them and expose somebody that’s never been on a computer even, and, oh look, I put something and people nowhere in me can suddenly see it, that may open up a completely new pathway.
\n\n\n\nBut what you’ve got going at the moment, what do these students get in return? Is there like a quid pro quo? Is there some, sort of leading question here really. Is there some credit that you might get on the other end of this? Do students get to walk away with, apart from obviously the knowledge, which is now in their head for life, do they get to walk away with some kind of accreditation to say, I did this, here’s my certificate, or whatever it may be?
\n\n\n\n[00:38:59] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah. So we are again providing them certificates for the completion of attending the workshop. And, yes, obviously they are getting some amazing knowledge, amazing exposure to the community. Yeah, but as a proof of thing that they have done something, we are providing them certificates.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:14] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And obviously, you know, if they then continue that participation in the meetups and what have you, you get the bit which is way more important than the certificate, which is the actual exposure to the people out there in the real world who can give you that leg up or point you in the right direction for the person that you need to help you on that first career step.
\n\n\n\nSo I’m just going to the panel, I’m just going to say. Did you want to add anything to that? So I was talking about this sort of double fronted marketplace, you know, students, one side, educators on the other. Anything to add?
\n\n\n\n[00:39:43] Destiny Kanno: Well, I did want to add in general that we’ve been very careful to say in all of the handbooks and landing pages, educational institutions. So that could be colleges, that could be high schools, that could be technical schools or different business schools, boot camps, wherever you’re getting educated on something that WordPress can maybe be hand in hand with.
\n\n\n\nWe would love you to run a WordPress Campus Connect event, so I wanted to like make sure we clarify that. And then also, anyone could put this on. A request to organise could come from like a teacher, for example, or a student even. We’re not like limiting it to local community organisers or anything like that. So if there is direct interest as well from a campus, then that’s even better because, you know, they’re going to have a venue and all they really need is like mentorship and maybe some facilitators.
\n\n\n\nAnd then to plug in just a bit, you were like, what kind of curriculum do they have? Don’t forget, there’s Learn WordPress, you know, .org as well where folks can definitely use the materials there to craft their own curriculum or a series of workshops or whatever they’re going to put on as well. So I do want to ensure folks know that there are resources available that are free to help you with that part of the programming too.
\n\n\n\n[00:41:00] Nathan Wrigley: I’m just going to read this into the record. If you are, I don’t know how podcasts are consumed, I just know that they’re consumed in a wide variety of ways. If you are driving the car or you are walking somewhere and you think, I’ll get to this later, stop. If you know an educator somewhere, make a point to mention this to them at some point. You know, tomorrow, get home, phone them up. They’ve probably never heard of this. They’re probably not in the WordPress space. They probably don’t have the slightest intuition that this freely available stuff could step into their institution, with what sounds like minimal work required on their part.
\n\n\n\nBut it’s unlikely that they’re WordPressers in the same way that you are because you’re listening to this podcast. So that’s my request to you, that’s your philanthropic request of the day. Go and mention it to the people that you know, who work in these places and have connections with these places, because it won’t happen without those kind of things happening. So, sorry, Isotta, I didn’t allow you a chance to speak. I got all carried away.
\n\n\n\n[00:42:00] Isotta Peira: Don’t worry at all, Nathan. I believe that we’ve been saying a lot already, and there is just a good amount of information around for everyone who’s listening about how this program works, how to connect with us, and how to just launch their Campus Connect series events in their cities.
\n\n\n\n[00:42:18] Nathan Wrigley: So we’ve spent a long time thinking about WP Campus Connect, but something that was dropped into the show notes, and I confess, I don’t really have a great deal of background on this, so you’re going to have to explain it in full. WordPress Credits. The name I guess suggests something, but I don’t really know what that something is. So, Isotta, if you fancy just running with that, tell us about WordPress Credits.
\n\n\n\n[00:42:39] Isotta Peira: Of course. Big pleasure for me to share more about it. WordPress Credits, in simple words, is a contribution based practice programs by the WordPress foundation open to students to just to bridge them in the Core of WordPress. Regardless of what they’re studying, their fields, their interests, what we want to do is take one step from the WordPress skills education and show them how they can enhance, train, and gain new skills using the WordPress ecosystems, regardless their interests.
\n\n\n\nAnd the word credits, as you said, yes, it’s just something because we want to partner with educational institutions, universities, schools, that will recognise the practice program into their students’ curriculum.
\n\n\n\nA clear example, we’ve just launched a pilot with the University of Pisa in Italy for the Department of Translation and Communication. And for them, we are offering 150 hours of practice for the students. They will be connected with mentors. They’re going to have their virtual classrooms, and they’ll be guided since the beginning until the end. At the end, they’re going to build their website of WordPress, we teach them how to do it. You are going to use the Learn platform to guide them through the whole process. And they’re going to be involved in practical work within the community.
\n\n\n\nThey get to pitch what they want to work on. So this is open for designer, translators, developers, whoever wants to practice their own skills and position themself already into the job environment. Because we noticed, I felt like livid on my skin when I was studying translation at the University of Pisa, that I had to do countless hours of practice translating things that nobody ever read, used. It was very good for me. For me it was perfect to have things to practice on, and so I could become a great translator, but I worked on stuff that nobody ever used.
\n\n\n\nAnd the moment I joined the WordPress community in 2022 and I found out about the Polyglots team, I start thinking, hey, I could have been translating WordPress for five years and getting real life experience, exposure to a global community of professionals in the field that I’m interested, and also connection with companies with other fields that I couldn’t even imagine it existed for me as a translator.
\n\n\n\nSo the goal of this program is exactly to enable students around the world, regardless what they’re studying, to become, to shape their future through practice. And we, when I say we, I mean all the volunteers and contributors who are participating into this project. We have designed a path for each student where they not only get to practice the skills that are more relevant to the fields of study, but also transferable skills.
\n\n\n\nLike, for example, organising, working independently in a remote and async environment while keeping stakeholders updated. How to design a project, because they will have to finish the program, presenting a project that they would’ve designed, developed, and worked on. Public speaking because they would have also exposure to presenting the work to the WordPress community.
\n\n\n\nAnd at the end of the mentorship, of course, from experienced contributors in our community, and at the end, at the wrap up, they will receive a certificate from the WordPress Foundation, certifying the hours of contribution within the program. And at that point, the educational institution they’re studying, they’re going to recognise these as a part of their curriculum.
\n\n\n\nFor some universities and schools, it translates into credits. For example, for Pisa, 150 hours of contribution translating into six credits. So students can decide to skip a traditional exam and do this practice. And for other institution might look different. But the requirement for an institution to join this program is that they have to recognise this work into the students curriculum.
\n\n\n\n[00:47:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay so, dear listener, you may have noticed we shifted gears. We went from talking about WP Campus Connect to WordPress Credits, and we’ve now moved into a very different arena.
\n\n\n\nAnd so now, I’ve never been to the University of Pisa, but I’m going to guess that, just the name itself, it’s an utterly credible institution, you know, with a long history of taking in students and requiring them to work hard in order that they get some kind of qualification at the end.
\n\n\n\nSo this is very different. We are now talking about doing WordPressy things, and at the end of it, it’s equal to a proportion of the stuff that they would be doing at that university already. Now that then, I guess, implies that this is a more structured thing, that there needs to be more inspection of what’s going on, that there needs to be kind of hoops to jump through that you need to be able to credibly say, we know that this person did this. We can prove it. There’s a paper trail, and at the end of it you get, with the University of Pisa, six credits, which equals whatever that equals.
\n\n\n\nSo presumably there’s more backwards and forwards. Rather than the WP Campus Connect, which is more philanthropic and, you know, more community based, presumably you’ve had to have fairly lengthy conversations and dialogue with the University of Pisa so that they know that you are not giving away six credits for nothing. What’s that been like?
\n\n\n\n[00:48:39] Isotta Peira: Yes, you are absolutely right, and this is the case, and it is understandably, because we need to show them what is the potential, and what the students will gain. For me, it’s been a wonderful experience. And now I’m also in conversation with other universities and other schools. And having myself lived, like felt this gap between, oh, I’m doing practice, but it feels like it’s just useful to me, but it’s not applied in the real world.
\n\n\n\nAnd seeing, hey, this could bring, just basically push all these students into creating something that not only they own, because I believe the ownership is very important because most of cases, studies are a little bit passive. So as you were saying before, we have a teacher, we sit, we listen and we do what we’re asked to do.
\n\n\n\nIn this case is the other way around. It’s, hey, this is a playground of learning opportunities for you. We show you everything that you can play with, and then you get to design the project. You get to experiment all this exposure to real life that usually you don’t get at university or another, let’s say, formal institutions. And for the universities, this is going to be, basically a certificate for institutional excellence for them, because right now, only the University of Pisa is offering this. In a few weeks, also the universities Fid\u00e9litas in Costa Rica will start offering this.
\n\n\n\nSo just, hey, to institutions worldwide, this is something that the university, once they understand what it is, they will want to jump on it. And so as you say, it’s a lot of back and forth. It’s always a very interesting conversation because every university has some similar and some different needs for their students. And for me it’s a huge learning curve because I’m getting to learn a lot about other institutions. But at the end, everyone who I’ve been talking to so far, they are like over the moon with the idea of offering this option, this possibility to their students.
\n\n\n\nWhat I’m doing right now is starting connecting with teachers, schools, universities, institution that I personally, I’m already personally connected with, like the case in Pisa. And the WordPress community is key because also, in this community, there’s plenty of teachers. Everywhere you look, there is, oh, okay, I teach WordPress, I teach this other WordPress related theme. Oh, I teach at this school, I teach at this universities. Or, hey, in my kids’ school, they were looking for something like this, and it turns out that maybe you’re not a teacher, but you have kids and they’re at schools.
\n\n\n\nSo it’s been key, the connection with the community. And it’s actually one of the biggest needs that we have right now. Right now, there are three, including myself, contributors focusing on this project. We need more help, also to create this connection, to get into the institution and to have them understand the offer that we’re giving to them.
\n\n\n\n[00:51:59] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m going to read into the record a recycled version of the comment that I made a moment ago about WP Campus Connect. And that is that if you know anybody who could fit into this part of the jigsaw, you know, an educator or somebody that works in a university, whatever capacity that may be, I guess you are looking for that door to be slightly pushed ajar so that you’ve got these contacts wherever they may be. Obviously you’ve got Pisa, Costa Rica and what have you. But it would be nice to spread this a little bit further.
\n\n\n\nOkay. Okay, so that bit is now done. The bit that I want to ask with this is with the university students going through the WordPress Credit system, is this kind of a distributed thing? Is it something that they can do in their own time? Or do they need to, I don’t know, attend, be in a particular lecture hall at a particular time in order to prove that they’ve done a particular thing? Or is it entirely remote with, well, basically it’s a very open-ended question. How does it work from a student point of view? How do they achieve this?
\n\n\n\n[00:52:59] Isotta Peira: This is a great question actually. The values behind this program is to keep the open source experience as real as possible. So it is a hundred percent remote. We have built the virtual classroom for each student on the Learn platform, and they will be able to self onboard themself, go through the all the steps, but at the same time, they will be paired with the mentors.
\n\n\n\nSo we strongly recommend, and for this first, let’s say, round of program, we are making strong suggestion to meet with their mentor once per week, so they can learn more about each other, the mentor can help them guiding their way, but they have to complete the hours. We want to, not just respect the principle of the WordPress ecosystems, but also put students in this real life environment that they will find in their job.
\n\n\n\nBecause most of the roles in different type of companies, you just don’t have to like stay there and show that they’re doing the things. You work at your pace. You have your project. You have to share updates, of course, and show that you are progressing. And for WordPress credits, if students want to work on weekends, during night, this is up to them. They just have to complete the WordPress site and the hours assigned.
\n\n\n\nAnd there are couple of steps that will have them syncing at a specific moment with other parts of the community. For example, participating to a discussion on Slack, or a discussion on a blog post. Because also they’re experimenting different tool and different communication styles. And if there is a meetup, local meetup active in their cities, one of the step would also be participate to one of them. Or if there is no meetup, local meetup happening, to join an online meetup.
\n\n\n\nSo in this way the success of this program would reach the most, the highest point, if they have not only completed the work they decided to do, but if they also have experienced all the different parts of the ecosystem. So this way they work out the program, and they have the new world possibility open. They can decide to stay, they can decide to just focus more on one particular thing and they would’ve learned how to upload and work on WordPress, TV. How to use tools like Slack, GitHub, WordPress, the Learn platform, everything. So this is what they will get.
\n\n\n\n[00:55:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. I mean, set aside the fact that when I was at university, the internet just didn’t exist because I’m of a certain age, but I would’ve loved something like this. The capacity to just sort of do things in my own time, you know, fit it around, cherry pick the bits that I want to pick. For me it was much more, you pick a course, you show up to the course, you imbibe the content, you sit and exam and so it goes. And that was what was on offer. But this is so great.
\n\n\n\nAnd also, I don’t know if this is something that you do do but it just came into my head, the capacity for this to be an accreditation prior to gaining access to a university. So at the minute in the UK, all of the results are coming out for the examinations which children, well, young adults require in order to get to their place at university. And then when they’re at the university, they obviously get these credits and get the degree or what have you. But something like WordPress credits, it’d be kind of fun if it could count towards that onboarding process, you know, to get you in the door of a university to show up and say, I did the WordPress thing. I did something a little bit above and beyond what everybody else is doing. I mean, I don’t know if there’s any plans for that, but that struck me as a curious option.
\n\n\n\n[00:56:45] Isotta Peira: That would be the dream. Having WordPress credits embedded into like mandatory curriculum to get to a specific level of education, or to be able to end, to graduate from a specific level of education. This is going to be the dream. Now we’ve taken the first steps, so now we’ve built up the program, we are going to gather feedback, improve it, adjust it with all these first new batch of students that are coming. And also from the sponsors, the universities, and the mentors feedback. And then little by little, this is where we want to go. Ready to bring WordPress contributions everywhere.
\n\n\n\n[00:57:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, gosh, what an episode this has been. I thoroughly enjoyed this. However, I don’t know if we’re done yet because on the show notes that I had, we had three points that we were to mention. One was WP Campus Connect, which we did at the beginning, and then we’ve just spent a few moments talking about WordPress Credits. But there’s this other curious bit that I don’t know much about, and I don’t know if this is something we want to delve into, WordPress Student Clubs. What’s that?
\n\n\n\n[00:57:47] Destiny Kanno: Yeah, so that is, you don’t have to have a WordPress Campus Connect event to request a WordPress Student Club on your campus. But it essentially was birthed out of this idea from Anand of like, hey, you know, now that we’ve got this captive audience of students, like where do they go to continue the WordPress activities after we’re gone? And so the, yeah, WordPress Student Clubs were born.
\n\n\n\nYou can now request a site created for your Student Club when you request to organise a WordPress Campus Connect event, or you can just reach out to us directly. And right now, I believe Anand is working with the Sophia Girls College right now in Ajmer to set up their WordPress Student Club. I think they’re the first actually to have one.
\n\n\n\nAnd the goal is that they can continue on campus, their WordPress activities. They can connect still with the local community, potentially like invite them to their student club events. It’s just like a extracurricular circle or club that now is WordPress themed that will, I think, help them continue.
\n\n\n\nAnd also, sorry, I just wanted bring in like the Credits portion too. Like you might have folks from different majors, right, that are using WordPress in different ways. So it’s a way for also the students to intermingle amongst different majors within their campus as well.
\n\n\n\n[00:59:08] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of a way to keep the conversation going, isn’t it, in a sense? It’s more opportunities to kind of keep people interested and give them opportunities. And all of that is just so necessary. We talked at the beginning about the age demographic of WordPress and how all of this stuff is just such a real credible way of trying to tackle that.
\n\n\n\nAnd I think if you were to put somebody that went through, let’s say, WP Campus Connect. If you were to drop them straight into a meetup, maybe that’s too much, because it can get fairly technical. You know, the presentations are often about some fairly technical things, and so this feels like a really nice bridge. It keeps it more based around the students, so they’re familiar with each other. They’re in the same institution, presumably. It’s kind of like a club. We call them afterschool clubs in the UK. It feels a little bit more like that. So it’s much more based around where they already are and that kind of thing.
\n\n\n\n[00:59:59] Destiny Kanno: It gives them a sense of ownership as well, because it’s as you said, it’s a students’ club, so, you know, there’s going to be someone that’s leading it, and maybe a co-lead as well, and a faculty member who will also be there to advise or assist.
\n\n\n\n[01:00:13] Anand Upadhyay: It’s kind of an in campus meetup group, that kind of thing. So they can, just like you said, taking them to the local community meetup will be a little bit overwhelming from them, because whatever the sessions, whatever the topics that are planned in the meetups stuff, catering to the wider audience. So in the campus club they can decide their own kind of topics. What are the topics they are interested in? And they can learn, it’s kind of a group learning as well. Someone from them is learning one topic and delivering this knowledge to the other club members. So it’s a way to keep the momentum going on that is started with WordPress Campus Connect program.
\n\n\n\n[01:00:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s absolutely wonderful. I’m going to make sure, before we finally finish this call, although we’ll end the podcast recording in a moment, I’ll make sure that I ask these panelists to send me any links that may assist you. And so what I’m going to say is if you head to the wptavern.com website, and if you search for this episode, you could probably search for WP Campus Connect or WordPress Credits or what have you, certainly it’ll be there available in search.
\n\n\n\nHead to that, look at the show notes and the links. There’ll be a transcript of this and there’ll be some show notes where I just sort of summarise what’s going on. But right at the bottom, a little way down the page will be all of the links for everything that we have discussed. Maybe some additional ones as well for things that we didn’t have.
\n\n\n\nAnd when I attend WordPress events, there’s always a sense of this, there’s always a sense of look around, the community’s not getting any younger. We’ve got to do something about it. Complaining is the wrong word. People are not doing that, they’re just curious about that. Well, here, you’ve been spoonfed the solution. You now know what it is that you could do to skew the demographic younger. If the WordPress project is something that you believe in, and you would like to carry on, the only way to do that is to have a funnel of younger people who will become the older people, who will then teach the younger people. And so the cycle continues.
\n\n\n\nIf you want that to happen and you don’t know how to make that happen, well, now you do. You’ve got these people to reach out to. You’ve got these projects that you know about. You can get involved in any of this, at any level.
\n\n\n\nAnd all that it remains for me to do is to say, wow, thank you to all three of you for being interested in this. Not just interested, being active and making the effort to get these things started, to get them off the ground, which is the hardest bit, I think. And hopefully now that they have got off the ground, they will fly with wings of their own. That would be really nice. So, Destiny, Isotta and Anand, thank you so much for chatting to me today. What an episode that was.
\n\n\n\n[01:02:55] Destiny Kanno: Thank you so much, Nathan.
\n\n\n\n[01:02:57] Isotta Peira: Thank you. It’s been a huge pleasure.
\n\n\n\n[01:02:59] Anand Upadhyay: And thank you for giving us a platform to share all these initiatives.
\nOn the podcast today we have Destiny Kanno, Isotta Peira and Anand Upadhyay.
\n\n\n\nDestiny is the head of Community Education at Automattic. Isotta is the leader of the WordPress credits initiative for students. Anand is the founder of WordPress Campus Connect.
\n\n\n\nThis episode is all about how WordPress is not only powering websites but also empowering the next generation of learners and creators. You\u2019ll hear about the growing movement of education-focused WordPress events happening worldwide, from hands-on workshops on university campuses in India, to student clubs designed to keep the momentum going after introductory events.
\n\n\n\nAnand shares how WP Campus Connect is bringing WordPress directly to students, reducing barriers to entry and helping bridge the gap between academic learning and real-world tech skills. We also explore the challenges of organising these events, from convincing institutions of the value of open source, to fostering genuine community involvement among both students and educators.
\n\n\n\nIsotta then introduces us to the WordPress Credits program, an initiative that lets students turn their contributions to the WordPress ecosystem into recognised academic credit at universities like Pisa in Italy. It\u2019s a win-win: students gain practical, resume-worthy experience, while educational institutions get a transferable, skills-focused, program that prepares learners for the jobs of the future.
\n\n\n\nWhether you\u2019re an educator, a WordPress enthusiast, or just someone who cares about open source and community, this episode is packed with actionable insights. The guests share how flexible and resilient these education initiatives are, how you can get involved, and why engaging the next generation is not just important, but essential for the continued growth and sustainability of the WordPress community.
\n\n\n\nIt\u2019s a truly inspiring episode, and is at the intersection of so many areas of profound importance.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re curious about how to bring WordPress into your local school, university, or community, or if you just want to hear how WordPress is making a difference far beyond the web, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nWordPress Credits: A bridge to open-source technology
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIntroducing WordPress Credits: A New Contribution Internship Program for University Students
\n\n\n\nDestiny Fox Kanno, sponsored contributor at Automattic with a focus on education within the WordPress community. Currently focusing on growing, enabling and amplifying the WordPress Campus Connect and Student Club initiatives.
\n\n\n\nIsotta joined the WordPress Community in 2022 as a full-time contributor to the Community Team, sponsored by Automattic. With a background in translation, sales, training, and community management, she also ran a culinary events business. She values making informed decisions by integrating data analysis into her work and believes sharing knowledge is key to fighting inequality. Isotta is currently leading the WordPress Credits program, an initiative that connects open-source contributions with academic curricula worldwide.
\n\n\n\nAnand Upadhyay is the founder of WPVibes, a WordPress plugin development company. He has been working with WordPress since 2010 and contributes to several Make WordPress teams, including Core, Docs, Polyglots, and Community. He also serves as an organizer for WordCamp Asia, one of the flagship events in the WordPress ecosystem.
In addition to building plugins, Anand is deeply passionate about teaching and education. He co-organizes the Ajmer WordPress Meetup and is currently contributing to the global expansion of WordPress Campus Connect, a program he initiated as a pilot in 2024 to introduce students to WordPress and open source. Through these efforts, he focuses on helping new learners and contributors discover opportunities to learn, grow, and find their place in the WordPress community.
[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case the long complex story of how WordPress came to have a.com and.org variety.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy and paste that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers. Michelle is well known in the WordPress community for her myriad roles, including Executive Director of Post Status, and program director for WP Includes. She’s a prolific freelancer, podcaster, and a driving force behind many WordPress initiatives.
\n\n\n\nJonathan is a WordPress Core committer, contributing to the project since 2013, and has been sponsored by Bluehost to work on WordPress Core since 2018. His work largely takes place behind the scenes supporting contributors, maintaining build tools, and keeping WordPress running smoothly for millions of users.
\n\n\n\nIf you’ve ever searched for WordPress online, you’ve probably found both wordpress.com and wordpress.org at the top of your results, and like many, you might be unsure what really separates the two.
\n\n\n\nToday, Michelle and Jonathan helped clear up the history, philosophy, and practical differences between wordpress.com and wordpress.org.
\n\n\n\nThey talk about how these two flavors of WordPress came to be, why they’ve both been key to WordPress’s growth and the ways they overlap and differ in features, user experience, and monetization.
\n\n\n\nMichelle shares her perspectives as a longtime user and advocate, with experience across both.com and.org sites. While Jonathan dives into the technical and historical details from his Core contributor vantage point.
\n\n\n\nThey also explore whether the naming conventions of .com and.org have helped or hindered the project, and how the WordPress communities open source ethos shapes the ongoing conversation.
\n\n\n\nAlong the way, they touch on how .com made WordPress accessible in the early days, the importance of data portability, and evolving efforts to unify the user experience between the two platforms.
\n\n\n\nIf you’ve ever wondered which version of WordPress is right for you, why the projects seems split into two variants, or how community and commerce intertwine in the WordPress ecosystem, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by two guests today. I’m joined by Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers. Hello.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:48] Michelle Frechette: Hello.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:48] Jonathan Desrosiers: Hi, how’s it going?
\n\n\n\n[00:03:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good thank you. We’re going to talk today a little bit about a subject, which I confess confuses me greatly. It’s the differences, the similarities between WordPresses variance, .com and.org.
\n\n\n\nBefore we get into that, I know it’s a terribly generic thing to do, but nevertheless, we’re going to do it anyway because we have a new audience member each time this podcast airs. So I’m going to ask you both to give us your little potted bio. Tell us who you are. So let’s start with Michelle.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:14] Michelle Frechette: Hi, I am Michelle Frechette. I do a lot of freelancing type work in WordPress, and I also am the Executive Director of Post Status, and the Program Director for WP Includes. I have a couple podcasts, a couple different things that I do, lots of different projects I’ve started, none of which are relevant today.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:31] Jonathan Desrosiers: Hi, I am Jonathan Desrosiers. I am a WordPress Core committer since 2018. I’ve been contributing to the project in some way since 2013, and I am partially sponsored by Bluehost to be a contributor to the project.
\n\n\n\nAnd so for me, a lot of that results in, some people call it invisible work, but I’m behind the scenes just making sure people are supported properly, they have the resources they need, they’re not blocked.
\n\n\n\nI also do a lot with our build tools. So making sure our tests keep running and our different build processes to build the software that’s eventually shipped to the world is working in order. Yeah, you’ll find me a little bit everywhere. I’m a generalist. I have my hands in a lot of different things.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:13] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you both for joining me and also for giving us your credentials there. That’s great. So we’re going to get into this strange topic.
\n\n\n\nNow, I just carried out a typical search. I went onto a search engine. It wasn’t Google, by the way, but nevertheless, I went to a search engine, and I typed in one word, and that word was WordPress.
\n\n\n\nAnd I’m now confronted by a result at the top, which says wordpress.com. That came in at number one. The second result for me was wordpress.org. And I’ll just give you the headlines. It says wordpress.com, this is the first result, wordpress.com, everything you need to build your website. And then the second result, download wordpress.org.
\n\n\n\nAnd both of you know the difference. I know the difference, on a very high level, I understand the difference, but when we get into the weeds, I quickly start to misunderstand what the difference is. But they are different. These two things are radically different in their intention, in the relationship they have with their users, the way that they’re monetised, and so on and so forth.
\n\n\n\nSo let’s, first of all, just clear that up. Let’s rewind the clock, if you like. How did this all start? What’s the history of wordpress.com and wordpress.org. And then we can get into what the heck they are and how they’re different a bit later. So, I don’t know who wants to answer that.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:28] Michelle Frechette: I’ll give a quick start. Then I’m going to let Jonathan get into the more technical aspects of things.
\n\n\n\nBack in the nineties, blogging became a thing, and lots of people were establishing blogs online through things like Blogger, Blogspot and all those things. And then WordPress was one of the blogging platforms that you could create your blog on. All of them were free. I think I still have a Blogspot out there somewhere with really angsty poetry on it. So if you ever really want to find that out, sure, I could send you a link. But the idea was that, you know, you could get online and you could do the blogging things with it.
\n\n\n\nAnd then it was like, well, is it just for blogging or could it be used for other things? And so there are still people today that when you say, oh, I could build you a WordPress website, say, isn’t that just a blog? And to which I say, look at all of these websites that are built on, like the White House and NASA and all of these other things that are not just blogging, and are building their websites on WordPress.
\n\n\n\nBut that’s different necessarily from wordpress.com where I do have a blog, right? I actually, it’s actually a website, wptrailbuddies.wordpress.com. I’m using the free .com to create a very quick, very simple, very easy way for people to sign up for one program.
\n\n\n\nBut I also have several websites built on the .org idea, right, which is self-hosted. Find a host, download the software, or have the one button install, which is much more common now.
\n\n\n\nAnd then also I have a paid plan on wordpress.com as well, which takes away any ad space, and also allows me to have plugins and themes within that website.
\n\n\n\nSo that’s what I know at the surface level, what are the differences. I know that Jonathan knows much more about the software itself.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think you’ve highlighted some of the top level items, so we’ll circle back to those in a moment. But first, let’s get Jonathan’s take on that. So it’s the history question, really. What’s the history of these two different things?
\n\n\n\n[00:08:24] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, so WordPress started as a project in 2003, and it’s what we call a fork. And so you probably know if you listen to this, that WordPress is open source software. And basically that means, it’s licensed under the GPL, and you have the right to download it, make modifications, see how it works. We distribute, all those things are your right to do with the software that is published.
\n\n\n\nAnd so it was forked from a project called b2 where a couple people were not really happy with the development that was happening on that, bugs weren’t being fixed to their liking, and so they decided to fork it. And so that was Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. And that was in 2003, and they called it WordPress. And so that was the beginning of the WordPress project that we know today that is now over 22 years old.
\n\n\n\nA few years later, Automattic just turned 20 years old, so in 2005, Matt Mullenweg, one of the co-creators of WordPress, co-founders of WordPress, decided to create a company. And so he created a company called Automattic. And the company’s bread and butter was obviously WordPress, because he knew it very well. And so that’s how wordpress.com came about.
\n\n\n\nAnd in many ways it was the first true managed WordPress hosting platform, because you could sign up, you could get a blog for free, and you still can, and your URL will be, you know, nathanssite.wordpress.com, or johnssite.wordpress.com. And you can pay for additional things such as, the subscription plans allow you to have a custom domain name, and that’s evolved. The features that you can pay for has evolved significantly over the years.
\n\n\n\nBut along with this is the WordPress software that I mentioned earlier. And so the WordPress software is available for anyone to download and run, as I mentioned. And Automattic has a hosting setup that runs the open source software. And so many of the hosts that you have today, you all run that same software at the core of it, and it’s just a matter of what services are surrounded with it. What do they allow you to do within their environment? And how they support you in your journey to have an online presence.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:36] Nathan Wrigley: So the .com side of things was a very early move. So really, more or less as, I mean we’re into sort of the 20 plus years of history of WordPress, but right back near the beginning it was made easier to install. And nowadays, if you go to more or less any host that’s got any association with WordPress, they will offer some kind of one click solution, which makes it trivially easy, within a couple of moments, really, and a few buttons, you’ll have a version of WordPress. And I’m talking there about the .org side of things. So you’ll have a .org install of WordPress. Really straightforward.
\n\n\n\nHowever, if you rewind the clock right back to the beginning when .com started, I’m guessing it was a much more painful process. There weren’t these managed hosts where you could do that, and so it made sense, I guess, into the market to put something where you didn’t need to install anything. You simply sign up, create an account, be it free or paid, we’ll get into that in a moment as well, and you’ve got yourself the software.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I guess that’s an important part to remember. It was much more difficult back then to do the .org thing than it is now. So many tools now making it relatively straightforward. I guess that’s a part of the success of .com, that it was just the first mover made it more straightforward.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:51] Jonathan Desrosiers: The WordPress project has several philosophies that we use to guide our decisions and how we choose what makes it into the software and what shape that takes. And some of those, for example, are design for the majority, decisions not options, clean, lean, and mean, striving for simplicity, out of the box software.
\n\n\n\nAnd so you see this in the setup process in the five minute install. We really aim to make the installation as simple as possible for the software itself. But that doesn’t mean the surrounding database set up and server set up and uploading, getting the files on the server, doesn’t mean that that’s easy as a part of that.
\n\n\n\nAnd so WordPress could be two clicks to install. Could be really simple, email and password and installs it for you, but it doesn’t really, can only contribute so much to that cohesive experience, that all encompassing experience of what a website is, of what hosting is.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:42] Michelle Frechette: I think back to, again, the early days of blogging where that was the goal. You could change the colors behind it, you were limited to the theming that was provided with whatever platform you were choosing from. And the way that we’ve grown from just like, here are your five options, kind of like a MySpace idea, right? You’re kind of limited with what you could do back in those days as well, to where you can do a lot more now.
\n\n\n\nAnd so even with .com, with the free plan, you have a lot more options than you did 20 years ago, 23 years ago. And if you upgrade to a business plan, then you have all the options basically that you have with the install, the .org install for yourself, self-hosted.
\n\n\n\nOne of the things I love about it is that I don’t have to worry about security, I don’t have to worry about traffic, and I don’t have to worry about upgrades. I don’t get a message that my PHP version is outdated. On some other sites where I’m self-hosting, I have to make sure that everything’s up to date all the time. With the .com. It’s one of those things that I don’t have to do.
\n\n\n\nAnd so for me, that is one of the benefits. Of course, I have only one site there, but I’m loving the fact I can walk away from it and not be having to check it on a regular basis. And I think that’s one of the beautiful things for people who are not tech savvy, because they can get in and do the things like they would in one of the competitors.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:57] Nathan Wrigley: So a lot of this conversation is going to be done through the prism of history, you know, and decisions that were made which now perhaps people have got opinions about, maybe they think poor decisions were made, or brilliant decisions were made, they were made at a different time.
\n\n\n\nAnd I’m going to allude to what I said right at the top of this episode, which was that if you do a Google search, for just simply for the word WordPress, and that probably is the word that you’ve heard. You probably have no familiarity with whatever WordPress is. You just, somebody told you, you know, you were in a bar somewhere and somebody said, oh, you want a website? WordPress can do that.
\n\n\n\nSo you end up at a search engine and in it goes, WordPress, and up come these slightly conflicting things. And I guess that’s maybe where some problems for end users begin. We’re in the inside of it all, so we’ve totally got a grip on this. We might not understand the intricacies of all of the bits and pieces, but we understand what .com is and we understand the difference.
\n\n\n\nThis is a question you don’t have to answer in a binary way. It doesn’t have to be a yes or a no. But, do you think with the benefit of hindsight, it would’ve been a good idea to call these different versions different things? So for example, WordPress could have been the .com or the .org, and it would’ve had a different name for something else. And that’s purely from a, keeping it obvious what the two different things are. So again, you can obfuscate or you know, dodge that question if you like.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:18] Michelle Frechette: I’m reminded of George Foreman, whose children are all named George.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:23] Jonathan Desrosiers: Most confusing household ever. Without getting into the nuances of the agreements and all, how the permissions work, Automattic just has special permission to use the WordPress trademark. And so that’s why it’s called wordpress.com and wordpress.org. And while there are some, there is some confusion that comes from that. In many ways, it also has contributed to the success of the project, because in the early days, it was very easy to get a site spun up on WordPress, on wordpress.com, and people started using WordPress.
\n\n\n\nAnd so there are definitely people out there that solely started using WordPress because they got to wordpress.com and they were able to get a site. And now more and more hosting companies are much more capable, and we all have our own, like I said, I work at Bluehost, so for example, we have our own special sauce of onboarding, where we ask you a couple questions and we help you. We find that the thing people struggle with a lot is where to start.
\n\n\n\nYou get dumped into WordPress, right? And you don’t know where to start. What do I need on my site? What do I make it look like? What do I need to do? And so using these onboarding questions to produce a starting point for you, that’s contextual to what you’re trying to do. And so that’s one of the things that we take pride in is our onboarding process that we’re working on and is available if you want to try it out.
\n\n\n\nBut all that to say is that, you know, in the early days it was definitely a benefit. And now as the project has grown to over 40% of the internet, that confusion gets magnified in some ways. And a lot of times that takes the form of, as you said, Googling and finding conflicting resources as people not accurately describing the differences.
\n\n\n\nWe get a lot of tickets on Trac, which is the bug tracking software for WordPress, for the software itself, that incorrectly is saying there’s a bug, but it’s actually intended behavior, but it’s on .com and not in the .org software. The support forums are full of people that are not sure of the difference.
\n\n\n\nAnd so it’s just important as community members that we keep this in mind, that it’s not always easy to understand, but a lot of times people just need a push in the right direction. And in some ways it returns to our philosophies of making it simple because the majority of WordPress users are not technically minded and so they probably don’t care about the difference, right? They just want their WordPress site. I have a site, I need it up, I need it to not go down. I need customers. And so keeping that lens in mind as well is helpful to get through this.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:40] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of interesting, I’ve been using the internet more or less from the beginning and although these boundaries have got really blurred, back in the day, anything which ended .org had a real kind of community, charity, non-profit kind of focus to it. I don’t know if you both remember that as well, but anything ended .org, it felt like there was a philanthropic purpose to it. And anything which was .com, that wasn’t the case.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:11] Michelle Frechette: It was commerce.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:12] Jonathan Desrosiers: Commercial. Yeah, it for commercial.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there go. So commercial, company, along those lines. And I don’t know when that was, but that just ceased to be a thing at some point. But back when .com began, naming it .org maybe was a bigger signpost than it now appears to be, if you know what I mean. Oh, look, it’s WordPress, it’s .org. It speaks for itself. It’s a philanthropic version or what have you. And that is maybe a part of the jigsaw puzzle.
\n\n\n\nAnd again, rewinding history, when the split happened between.com and .org, I’m presuming that nobody had any intuition that any of this was going to be successful in any way, shape, or form. .com, you know, the commercial wing could have been an absolute failure. The whole project could have collapsed within a couple of years. . org, again, nobody took any interest in it. It just didn’t work out. And it became, well, another b2, the annals of history. And it didn’t work out that way.
\n\n\n\nBut I guess once you’ve started down the path, you are going to stick with it. There would be no point 3 years in in saying, you know what? Everybody’s confused about .com, .org, we should upend the whole thing. I guess that’s off the table a bit at that point as well.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:20] Michelle Frechette: Well, I think that the generic web user who’s not a techie still doesn’t necessarily have an idea that the .org and .com were originally intended for different audiences, right? So I think that, I mean there are, definitely are some savvy people who understand that, but I think that the majority of people still, it doesn’t matter if it’s a .io, we have so many extensions now that I think it’s kind of blurred what those actually mean. And if you actually go to register a .org, it’ll say, do you want the .com and the dot net, and the dot whatever else too? So that you’re kind of getting all of your traffic driven to the same place.
\n\n\n\nI think that that is something that, yes, we understand that now. And I think that we would’ve always understood that, the three of us, but I don’t know that that was such a huge distinction back in the day.
\n\n\n\nI also think that it was one of those things where, you know, you have light versions of something or, you know, you have free versions of other things in life that aren’t software related that you can upgrade to or that, you know, free gifts with purchase.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I think the idea of, you could have this free one, or you can upgrade to these other things, or you could take it and run with it and do it your own thing, I think is something that made sense at the beginning, but again, can be slightly confusing now.
\n\n\n\nBecause I do see people come to my meetup and they’re asking questions, and we all try to troubleshoot. We get them to log in, and we’re like, oh, okay, now I see, you’re using the free version, so you don’t have the ability to add this plugin or change your theme this way, or use CSS, you know, and those kinds of things, as you can with the paid version or with the self-hosted. And so I think that there is an opportunity for us to make that distinction in different places.
\n\n\n\nI will say one of the benefits, however, even if you start on the free .com, you can upgrade to paid and get that, or you can port that over to your own self-hosted as well. Other competitors don’t necessarily let you, like take your whole version of your website that you’ve built on their platform and bring it into a self-hosted situation like WordPress can.
\n\n\n\nAnd so even if you made the decision to go with wordpress.com, and halfway through a build, or a year later, realise that you really wish you had done something different, we make it easy for you to be able to take that and move it someplace else, like Bluehost or you know, SiteGround or other places like that. So we make it easy for you. We’re not trying to shove you into one box and make you stay there and say look at all those people over there doing things you wish you could do.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:43] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, I think that the underlying motivations was just fueled by the open source ideals, and the software belongs to the people and not so much specific companies or corporations. And so by putting it in .org, it was just more about being open and available and for the community, right?
\n\n\n\nMatt and Mike, when they forked b2, the intention was to get more people to work on it with them, right? And ensure that the software that they were running their website with survived and continued to grow and didn’t have bugs. And so I think that that was just part of the motivation where, I just looked it up, and the .org domains were intended to only be used by organisations. And it seems like the intention was to require documentation at some point, but it was never enforced.
\n\n\n\nI mean, when I got, in the late two thousands when I got involved, there was always the perception in my mind that you had to be an organisation to get one of those right? But that’s not actually the case. At least my early perception was that I needed it in order to do that. And so I wonder if that persists with other people as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I think that what Michelle also said resonates well is that, you know, no matter where you WordPress, you’re going to be able to take your site with you and go somewhere else. And that’s what makes WordPress great. And maybe you’re not even taking your site somewhere else, maybe you’re just taking out your content and, I don’t know, maybe feeding it into AI, or creating a book of all your posts, like a historical reference or something.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:07] Michelle Frechette: I did that.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:07] Jonathan Desrosiers: That sounds kind of cool actually, yeah. And so being able to take your content with you and you are the true owner of your content, and you have the rights to it, is not something that’s true for other platforms. You know, not to name names, but there’s a lot of other website platforms where it’s difficult to impossible to extract out your content if you need to move somewhere else.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:27] Michelle Frechette: It’s a lot of copy, paste at that point.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:29] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, or like finding someone that knows how to create a browser extension, or a scraper or something like that. And so that’s always something that I tell someone looking to get started with a website where, you know, it might be easier to get started with this other service now, and it might be okay with your needs now, but if you outgrow that website or that service, it’s more difficult to bring it elsewhere later.
\n\n\n\nWe’re working on different ways with the data liberation initiative where we’re looking at ways to make our data more portable from other platforms to other platforms. And so I really feel strongly about that.
\n\n\n\nLike, that’s the strongest point, one of the strongest points of WordPress is that you own your content, you control it, there’s no algorithm changes, you know, on Facebook where all of a sudden people aren’t seeing your content. They change a feature, right? People can’t react a certain way to your content anymore, and it affects your traffic to your site.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I always strongly emphasise that to people, because people don’t think about that. They think I just need a website, right? But they don’t think about, what happens if I need to make changes and this software doesn’t work, or this service doesn’t help me anymore?
\n\n\n\n[00:24:36] Nathan Wrigley: We’ve definitely moved as a community, and by community I don’t mean the WordPress community, I mean the community of online users. We’ve definitely moved towards more gatekeeping and siloed consent repositories. You know, you think of things like social media, and essentially anything where there’s a, you know, a username and a password and a paywall. We seem to be more at peace with that.
\n\n\n\nAnd that brings me to the next thing actually. And I’m sorry if this comment lands badly, dear listener, but I think there is something quite curious about our community. I think we are full of people who are very well intentioned, who have extremely benevolent motives, and often, I think, regard commercial things sometimes as something to be viewed with a little bit of suspicion. I don’t know if you’ve detected this kind of thing as well.
\n\n\n\nAll of those things are things which drew me in. They didn’t alienate me. They were exactly the kind of people that I wanted to be around. But I do wonder if WordPress’ history, so the .com, .org history over the last, let’s say 15 years or so, I do wonder if the flavor, the colour of the community, if you like, that we’ve got meant that we were going to have problems about this .com, .org split.
\n\n\n\nBecause on the one side, fierce, fierce open source advocacy people. You must own your own content. You’ve got to be able to download the software. This is terribly important, you want to be able to fork it at a moment’s notice.
\n\n\n\nAnd then on the other hand, a bunch of people are, well, that’s great you do that, but I’m happy over here. I’ll pay my fee for the premium version of wordpress.com. That’s fine with me. I’m okay with that. I don’t need all the bells and whistles that you seem to have. I don’t need it to be this version and that version. I don’t need this plugin or that thing.
\n\n\n\nBut I do wonder if the community that we’ve got is a part of that. In the mix somewhere is just what we’ve got. The people that are drawn to open source are going to view the .com side of things with a little bit of suspicion, and maybe see that, you know, that’s something which, gosh, we should not have that.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:46] Jonathan Desrosiers: The only thing I’d challenge you on there is that I don’t think it’s fair to say that people on the .com side don’t also care about the open source ideals. I think that many of them, if not all of them, do care about the underlying principles there. I think that, you always hear, you have to look after your own, right? You have to make sure you can pay your bills and you have a business and you. I’m US based, the American dream, right? Of creating a business and growing that into something sizable that can help people and benefit many.
\n\n\n\nAnd so that’s my only pushback there is that they do. It’s not a binary thing. It’s definitely an overlap. And I like to think that there’s more overlap than we think. And that might be a little naive, but I do tend to think that it overlaps pretty heavily in that section there.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:29] Nathan Wrigley: I think you are right, and I think what you’ve done there is uncovered the poor way that I phrased what I was saying. I think when I was trying to describe that I was, although I didn’t say it, I was trying to describe things from the .org point of view only. And so the nature of that community is fiercely protective of the open source values there and what have you. So yeah, you’re quite right. It felt, with a bit of hindsight, it felt like that question was coming from both sides and it really wasn’t. So thank you for picking me up on that.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:01] Jonathan Desrosiers: It’s normal to be skeptical of other people, right? Especially when you see all these horror stories of this big business, you know, draining these businesses out there that are draining money out of everybody and raising prices and profits are through the roof, right? So it’s normal to have this skepticism towards commercial entities, and that they’re trying to do the right things and things of that nature.
\n\n\n\nBut to that, I just say to look at how the company and the space is contributing back and how they are ensuring that they do get their fair share of the WordPress pie, that is billions of dollars, on the last publishing that I saw, last report that I saw. But also making sure that that ecosystem is still strong, and supportive of everybody in the pool. To make sure that we can all compete to, you know, there’s definitely competition. We’re all going to compete together to make sure we’re trying to get more of the pie, right? And try to prove that our service or our products are the best.
\n\n\n\nBut, yeah, so I think a little level of skepticism is healthy. You always hear, assume good intent. I think that’s very important, and to obviously judge people by their actions and what they do to help grow that open source community while they’re living in that .com commercial space.
\n\n\n\nYeah, I don’t know, Michelle, if you have anything to add there. You probably have a different lens as the non-developer background.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:19] Michelle Frechette: Definitely the non-developer background here. So you used the word community when you talked about that when you first started the question, and I think we have to think about the fact that the community, although it does encompass both .com users and anybody who’s self-hosted through .org. It really is the lion’s share of that community comes from that self-hosted .org side. Comes from the people who go to Meetups. Comes from the people who attend WordCamps. And most importantly, it comes from the people who contribute to the ecosystem.
\n\n\n\nWhether that’s by volunteering through the .org and Make WordPress, whether that’s selling a product, or having a podcast or any of the things, a newsletter, any of the things that contribute to the success of WordPress overall, it applies across the board. But when you look at all of the volunteerism, and all of the unsponsored people, and even sponsored people who are creating, right? So Jonathan is a developer, he’s in the weeds with it. He’s got a sense of pride with what the community creates for each other.
\n\n\n\nAnd when you have a sense of pride in what you do, you have a loyalty to that as well. And so we are part of a group of people, a huge group of people, a multimillion group of people worldwide who are this .org community with some .com community peppered in. So of course there’s going to be skew, one direction versus the other.
\n\n\n\nI don’t think it’s necessarily derision. That I don’t think people like necessarily look at .com and go, ugh, what do they say? The redheaded stepchild of, you know, .org or whatever. I think it’s more along the lines of, we know this, we use this. We want other people to use this too. This is our community and this is what we’ve built this community around.
\n\n\n\nBut I think that democratising publishing is used by both, right? So if you look at .org and .com, we talk about democratising publishing. And the free .com allows people in incredibly socioeconomically depressed areas, and who have very little side income to be able to start a website. The ability to do that, whether it’s a website to talk about a service that they offer. Whether it’s a website just to blog. Whether they’re trying to monetize or not, there’s opportunities for people around the world to create a free, absolutely free website on .com.
\n\n\n\nAnd have it say, you know, michellefrechette.wordpress.com, because that’s what I could afford at the time. And then when I can, I either upgrade to paid, or I port that over to a self-hosted situation. So I think that both of them really have an amazing place in our ecosystem, but we tend not to see that when we sit squarely in one side or the other.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:02] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know? That’s a really interesting point, and one I cannot believe I’ve never thought about that. Over all these many years of thinking about WordPress and all of its different flavors and things, wordpress.org carries the word free around with it in my head. I’m thinking wordpress.org, free. I’m struggling to imagine a scenario where it is entirely free to deploy.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:25] Michelle Frechette: I used to say WordPress is free like a free puppy. A free puppy, you still have to take to the vet, and buy food, and get their nails trimmed, and buy the leash, and all of the things that go along with a free puppy. WordPress.org is like that. It’s a free puppy. You still have to pay for hosting and pay for themes, and I mean, you couldn’t do it fairly inexpensively, but not a hundred percent free.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:44] Jonathan Desrosiers: I was just going to add in, likewise, it’s not free to get to the point where it’s published. And another thing that you brought up, Michelle, that made me think is, I mentioned about judging companies based on how they contribute and the ideals they follow. But that also is true for the individuals that spend their personal time, or self sponsor, to contribute to the software.
\n\n\n\nAnd so they are not looking, most likely, not looking for your business. They may be if they’re a freelancer type thing. But in most cases they’re looking for just recognition, or maybe a job, or maybe sponsorship, so that they could continue to help the software grow.
\n\n\n\nAnd so there’s multiple lenses to that commercial side of things, right? Where we talked about .org versus .com, and commercial versus, open source. But within that, there’s also other layers of that as well where you’re contributing to make sure the software grows, so that your company continues to do good. But also maybe you just really enjoy the software and believe in it and want to contribute on your own to ensure that that same thing happens.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, interesting. I’m just going to finish off my thought from previously there. So the free to download bit, I think where I was going with that was that there’s a minimum of hosting. In order to get that free version of the software, the zip file that you download. In order to make it meaningful, you’ve got to at least do the hosting. The other bit, well, I suppose you could host it on your own computer, but good luck with that if you’re a newbie.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:09] Jonathan Desrosiers: I challenge that too, not necessarily, right? Like a website is only as good as who can access it, if they find what they’re looking for. But you could very easily just run WordPress on a Raspberry Pie somewhere in your basement that, you know, you use it to send requests to, to turn on your lights or something like that, or sync up your garage door. You know, you could theoretically use WordPress to do all these types of things.
\n\n\n\nSo I would also challenge you to think outside the box a little bit on that. I’m not saying it’s a good idea and I’m not saying I might grunt at you when you come with your really weird obscure edge case in Trac, but that’s part of the great thing about WordPress.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:45] Michelle Frechette: But it’s possible.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:46] Jonathan Desrosiers: You can use WordPress in many different ways, with many different combinations of plugins and themes. And that makes WordPress great, but it also makes it incredibly difficult to maintain and ensure that backwards compatibility, which is one of our main pillars, is sustained release to release.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:02] Nathan Wrigley: It’s fascinating. Yeah, what insight that was. That’s remarkable.
\n\n\n\nThe commercial side, so the .com side where you’re paying a subscription if you want the different tiers and the abilities that you get for doing that, I don’t know if any of this data is available, whether it’s been published, whether it’s easy to access, I’m not sure. But I’m guessing that there is some through line between the profitability of the .com business side of things, and the open source project.
\n\n\n\nWe all know that many, many, many volunteers contribute to .org in every conceivable way. Whether that’s to the code, to events, to whatever it may be. But I’m imagining there is some connection. Maybe it’s attenuating a little bit more now. Maybe it was more in the past than it is now. But I’m imagining that there is a connection between sales, unit sales of the .com out into the open world, and people being paid, seconded, and what have you, to work on the .org side.
\n\n\n\nI actually don’t know if there’s any truth in that, if there’s anything there, but I’m imagining there is. If the .com business pays for the .org side to be as successful as it is essentially is what I’m trying to say.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:18] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, I mean, historically Automattic has been the most sizable contributor to the project. There’s something called the Five for the Future Project, which is basically a challenge to companies, or individuals, making a living on WordPress to contribute 5% of their time back to the project. It’s a great initiative. That’s something that I was hired to participate in, so I’m very thankful for that because I’m able to have employment to work on open source software because of it.
\n\n\n\nBut there are some flaws with it in that 5% isn’t right for everyone. It’s a goal, right? It’s, I’ve talked about this at WordCamps in the past, but time is not necessarily a good measure because it doesn’t measure the impact you have, or the productivity, or the efficiency that you have, right? So you could spend one hour working on this one bug fix that could fix screen reader software for millions of people accessing sites across the world. That’s very meaningful and that has a very strong impact. But that’s very hard to measure. And hours is certainly not the way that you can measure that.
\n\n\n\nSo it’s a good idea. I like that a lot of people rallied behind that, and that it’s a very strong program. There’s a lot of participants. I’m looking forward to the next iteration of that, which a lot of community members are discussing and, you know, I’m sure leadership is always thinking about that as well. Like, how can we improve this and encourage more people to contribute and give back?
\n\n\n\nAnd so I guess all that to say that, you know, I guess .com and Automattic have contributed a sizable amount to the project over its history, and many other companies as well have historically contributed a lot back too.
\n\n\n\n[00:37:53] Nathan Wrigley: So another thing that I wanted to discuss, which we haven’t discussed so far is the sort of different feature set that you get, and the evolution of that over time. So if I was to get a .com site back, I don’t know, 12 years ago, the things that I could do with that would be different to what I can do now.
\n\n\n\nObviously with the .org side, all bets are off. You can do what you wish with that. It’s yours. You can do anything you like. But on the .com side, it was limited in certain ways. The software was designed presumably to facilitate whatever it was that their agenda items were, whether that was profitability, growth, simplicity to use, whatever those metrics were.
\n\n\n\nWhere are we at at the moment? Because it kind of feels like the two are coalescing, especially from a UI point of view. It feels like there’s moves at the moment to make the .com side be brought in line with the .org side. So the .org UI it feels like is going to be made available or pushed into the .com side.
\n\n\n\nAnd that kind of feels curious to me. It always felt that the UI was a big differentiator, like, you know, it looks different, you can immediately see that’s a .com website. Maybe in the future it won’t be. So let’s just talk around that. What are the differences in what you can do with the platforms? And then maybe we can get onto the UI and the UX.
\n\n\n\n[00:39:08] Michelle Frechette: So the free .com versus the upgraded paid plans have very different things that you can do within them. And then the paid plans are almost identical to what you can do with self-hosted. And so the difference really is you’re looking at the free plan versus any upgraded paid plan.
\n\n\n\nAnd with the free plan, you’re very limited into plugins and themes. There are very few that you can choose from. There’s more now than there were 10 or 15 years ago for sure. And I think my experience with logging into a free .com site looks different now than it did 10 or 12 years ago as well. But it still looks different than it does on a self-hosted WordPress installation.
\n\n\n\nThat does change with an upgrade plan, because now you have a lot more features that you can add, you can bring in plugins, you can change a lot of the way that things look through CSS or through customisation. And so, yes, I think that the paid plan and the self-hosted are very much in sync with one another.
\n\n\n\nBut the free plan still looks, to me at least, a lot different. And when I tried to add CSS to what it said, oh, you need to upgrade to do that, which I understand, right? So if they gave away everything, then there would be no money coming into the company to be able to operate and to pay the employees that actually work at Automattic. So yeah, I think there is still a difference. And I know that Jonathan probably knows a lot more about the technical differences than I do, but that’s my experiential difference.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:38] Jonathan Desrosiers: Well, one interesting fact is that wordpress.com is just one multi-site. So when you create a site, it’s just all in the same instance of WordPress. You just have your own space on that install.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:48] Nathan Wrigley: That is truly remarkable by the way. That is a quite numbing thought when you actually ponder that for a moment.
\n\n\n\n[00:40:54] Jonathan Desrosiers: For anyone that’s worked with multi-site, you know how challenging it is to have 10 sites, nevermind millions of sites. So it’s definitely impressive and interesting.
\n\n\n\nI’d also add that, you know, Michelle has talked a lot about more the personal style plans, right? Where we mentioned you get a free site if you have your site at nathan.wordpress.com. You can pay, you know, to get a domain, like I mentioned is the next plan. And then you can pay for more things like different plugins and different backups, whatever the features are that they offer.
\n\n\n\nBut after you get past that, there’s additional tiers for people like agencies. There’s very, very high level, reliable hosting for companies that run Fortune 500 companies, Fortune 10 companies, whatever it is that they need more handholding. They need you to help them with engineering maybe with their team. There’s tiers all the way up to that level at Automattic. And I think it’s fair to say that any, you know, they have plans that compete with any different tier that may be out there.
\n\n\n\nThere’s e-commerce plans and all of that. And, you know, at Bluehost we have e-commerce plans. We have managed plans just like they do. And like I said, before, we’re all trying to have our special sauce to make our home the best place to WordPress and for you to come and want to set up your site and make a living on us.
\n\n\n\n[00:42:09] Nathan Wrigley: So then back to the question of the, what feels like an endeavor to make the .com look a lot like the .org. Now that was something that I caught sight of not that long ago. It was probably, maybe, I want to say about eight weeks ago, something like that. I don’t know if either of you caught that piece of news, and whether or not that’s in fact moving forward. But the idea is to make a default version of .org basically identical in terms of look and feel.
\n\n\n\nI found that curious. I wondered what the intention was there. Was it purely just to have, I don’t know, one base of software that could be relied upon for both, or whether it was to make it easier to do a migration in either direction? I don’t know. So, I don’t know if either of you do.
\n\n\n\n[00:42:48] Jonathan Desrosiers: So a little, I guess a little history is that wordpress.com used to use the same dashboard as .org. And a while ago there was a project called Calypso, and that is basically the dashboard that you know probably from the last five years or so. And I can’t confirm this, but I believe that it was an exploration on what the dashboard, what a new WordPress dashboard could be. And I think that they’ve realised that having your own dashboard that’s different than .org is not really the best path.
\n\n\n\nAnd there’s a few reasons for that. One is that we mentioned you have millions of sites on .com, right? That’s all very valuable feedback from using the software. And if they’re using a different dashboard than everybody that’s not on wordpress.com, that’s basically lost opportunities to receive feedback on the software that we’re building. And so that’s one aspect.
\n\n\n\nAnd the other aspect is that, if you have a different dashboard, you have to have people maintaining that different dashboard, and making sure it works with all the new features that are added to wordpress.org. Make sure it’s sustainable and performant and all of this requires resources. But if you could adapt your products to use the same dashboard that everybody else has, then maybe you could take some of those resources and put them back to the .org software, instead of the internal Calypso project.
\n\n\n\nI should correct that, it wasn’t an internal project, it was used internally. It is open source and, especially initially there was a lot of encouragement for community members to participate in that. And so it’s not like it was a closed thing where they shut everybody out and they wanted, you know, it to be their own thing. It wasn’t trade secret type stuff. It was open source.
\n\n\n\nSo, yeah, those are just two things that stand out to me as reasons why you would want to use the same experience that everybody else has, as it just contributes to the greater good of the software and the health of the ecosystem.
\n\n\n\n[00:44:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting, and again, something I hadn’t really thought about. The heuristics that would come out of .com. Well, for a start, it’s incredibly cohesive. That data set is going to be enormous, whereas trying to gather that from all the other versions of WordPress, you would obviously have to opt people into that to begin with. But also, it would be very difficult to gather all of that, whereas presumably the .com side of things has got that completely sealed up. So yeah, again, really interesting.
\n\n\n\nIt is curious. I don’t really know if we’ll ever overcome in people’s heads the, well, for some people I think it’s a chasm. You know, it’s a really big divide, the difference between .org and .com. But I think we’ve done a fairly good job of explaining what the history is, why the things have been done in the way that they’ve been done, maybe a little bit into the future and how things are going to look.
\n\n\n\nI don’t know if there’s any salient point that you think we missed there, but if not, I think we’ll round it up. So I’ll just ask Michelle first. Anything you wanted to get across about that before we knock it on the head?
\n\n\n\n[00:45:43] Michelle Frechette: I think that we often talk about .org versus .com as though they were adversarial, but it’s really just a comparison as opposed to one being better than the other. I think you choose the option that’s best for you and your goals, and there’s nothing wrong with choosing any of those options.
\n\n\n\n[00:46:02] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, I’d just add that with any technology or anything, knowledge is not always binary, right? It’s a spectrum. And so how can we better expose people to the concepts, better explain them to people so that it’s easier to understand and get up to speed on what different concepts are. Technical concepts, brand concepts, whatever that may be, software, and strive for simplicity, right? That’s our, one of our philosophies. And so how can we make things more simple so that more people are able to better understand and be empowered to have a better online presence by having a greater understanding.
\n\n\n\n[00:46:37] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you both for picking that puzzle apart with me. That’s been really interesting. So Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers, thank you both for joining me today. Really appreciate it. Thank you.
\n\n\n\n[00:46:46] Michelle Frechette: Thanks for having us.
\n\n\n\n[00:46:46] Jonathan Desrosiers: Always a pleasure. Thank you Nathan.
\nOn the podcast today we have Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers.
\n\n\n\nMichelle is well known in the WordPress community for her myriad roles, including Executive Director of Post Status and program director for WP Includes. She\u2019s a prolific freelancer, podcaster, and a driving force behind many WordPress initiatives.
\n\n\n\nJonathan is a WordPress core committer, contributing to the project since 2013, and has been sponsored by Bluehost to work on WordPress core since 2018. His work largely takes place behind the scenes, supporting contributors, maintaining build tools, and keeping WordPress running smoothly for millions of users.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019ve ever searched for \u201cWordPress\u201d online, you\u2019ve probably found both WordPress.com and WordPress.org at the top of your results, and, like many, you might be unsure what really separates the two.
\n\n\n\nToday, Michelle and Jonathan help clear up the history, philosophy, and practical differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. They talk about how these two flavours of WordPress came to be, why they\u2019ve both been key to WordPress\u2019 growth, and the ways they overlap and differ in features, user experience, and monetisation.
\n\n\n\nMichelle shares her perspective as a long-time user and advocate, with experience across both .com and .org sites, while Jonathan dives into the technical and historical details from his core contributor vantage point.
\n\n\n\nThey also explore whether the naming conventions .com and .org have helped or hindered the project, and how the WordPress community\u2019s open source ethos shapes the ongoing conversation.
\n\n\n\nAlong the way, they touch on how .com made WordPress accessible in the early days, the importance of data portability, and evolving efforts to unify the user experience between the two platforms.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019ve ever wondered which version of WordPress is right for you, why the project seems split into two variants, or how community and commerce intertwine in the WordPress ecosystem, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\n\u200aMichelle’s WP Trail Buddies on WordPress.com
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u200aData Liberation
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "content_text": "Transcript\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case the long complex story of how WordPress came to have a.com and.org variety.\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy and paste that URL into most podcast players.\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers. Michelle is well known in the WordPress community for her myriad roles, including Executive Director of Post Status, and program director for WP Includes. She’s a prolific freelancer, podcaster, and a driving force behind many WordPress initiatives.\n\n\n\nJonathan is a WordPress Core committer, contributing to the project since 2013, and has been sponsored by Bluehost to work on WordPress Core since 2018. His work largely takes place behind the scenes supporting contributors, maintaining build tools, and keeping WordPress running smoothly for millions of users.\n\n\n\nIf you’ve ever searched for WordPress online, you’ve probably found both wordpress.com and wordpress.org at the top of your results, and like many, you might be unsure what really separates the two.\n\n\n\nToday, Michelle and Jonathan helped clear up the history, philosophy, and practical differences between wordpress.com and wordpress.org.\n\n\n\nThey talk about how these two flavors of WordPress came to be, why they’ve both been key to WordPress’s growth and the ways they overlap and differ in features, user experience, and monetization.\n\n\n\nMichelle shares her perspectives as a longtime user and advocate, with experience across both.com and.org sites. While Jonathan dives into the technical and historical details from his Core contributor vantage point.\n\n\n\nThey also explore whether the naming conventions of .com and.org have helped or hindered the project, and how the WordPress communities open source ethos shapes the ongoing conversation.\n\n\n\nAlong the way, they touch on how .com made WordPress accessible in the early days, the importance of data portability, and evolving efforts to unify the user experience between the two platforms.\n\n\n\nIf you’ve ever wondered which version of WordPress is right for you, why the projects seems split into two variants, or how community and commerce intertwine in the WordPress ecosystem, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers.\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by two guests today. I’m joined by Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers. Hello.\n\n\n\n[00:03:48] Michelle Frechette: Hello.\n\n\n\n[00:03:48] Jonathan Desrosiers: Hi, how’s it going?\n\n\n\n[00:03:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good thank you. We’re going to talk today a little bit about a subject, which I confess confuses me greatly. It’s the differences, the similarities between WordPresses variance, .com and.org.\n\n\n\nBefore we get into that, I know it’s a terribly generic thing to do, but nevertheless, we’re going to do it anyway because we have a new audience member each time this podcast airs. So I’m going to ask you both to give us your little potted bio. Tell us who you are. So let’s start with Michelle.\n\n\n\n[00:04:14] Michelle Frechette: Hi, I am Michelle Frechette. I do a lot of freelancing type work in WordPress, and I also am the Executive Director of Post Status, and the Program Director for WP Includes. I have a couple podcasts, a couple different things that I do, lots of different projects I’ve started, none of which are relevant today.\n\n\n\n[00:04:31] Jonathan Desrosiers: Hi, I am Jonathan Desrosiers. I am a WordPress Core committer since 2018. I’ve been contributing to the project in some way since 2013, and I am partially sponsored by Bluehost to be a contributor to the project.\n\n\n\nAnd so for me, a lot of that results in, some people call it invisible work, but I’m behind the scenes just making sure people are supported properly, they have the resources they need, they’re not blocked.\n\n\n\nI also do a lot with our build tools. So making sure our tests keep running and our different build processes to build the software that’s eventually shipped to the world is working in order. Yeah, you’ll find me a little bit everywhere. I’m a generalist. I have my hands in a lot of different things.\n\n\n\n[00:05:13] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you both for joining me and also for giving us your credentials there. That’s great. So we’re going to get into this strange topic.\n\n\n\nNow, I just carried out a typical search. I went onto a search engine. It wasn’t Google, by the way, but nevertheless, I went to a search engine, and I typed in one word, and that word was WordPress.\n\n\n\nAnd I’m now confronted by a result at the top, which says wordpress.com. That came in at number one. The second result for me was wordpress.org. And I’ll just give you the headlines. It says wordpress.com, this is the first result, wordpress.com, everything you need to build your website. And then the second result, download wordpress.org.\n\n\n\nAnd both of you know the difference. I know the difference, on a very high level, I understand the difference, but when we get into the weeds, I quickly start to misunderstand what the difference is. But they are different. These two things are radically different in their intention, in the relationship they have with their users, the way that they’re monetised, and so on and so forth.\n\n\n\nSo let’s, first of all, just clear that up. Let’s rewind the clock, if you like. How did this all start? What’s the history of wordpress.com and wordpress.org. And then we can get into what the heck they are and how they’re different a bit later. So, I don’t know who wants to answer that.\n\n\n\n[00:06:28] Michelle Frechette: I’ll give a quick start. Then I’m going to let Jonathan get into the more technical aspects of things.\n\n\n\nBack in the nineties, blogging became a thing, and lots of people were establishing blogs online through things like Blogger, Blogspot and all those things. And then WordPress was one of the blogging platforms that you could create your blog on. All of them were free. I think I still have a Blogspot out there somewhere with really angsty poetry on it. So if you ever really want to find that out, sure, I could send you a link. But the idea was that, you know, you could get online and you could do the blogging things with it.\n\n\n\nAnd then it was like, well, is it just for blogging or could it be used for other things? And so there are still people today that when you say, oh, I could build you a WordPress website, say, isn’t that just a blog? And to which I say, look at all of these websites that are built on, like the White House and NASA and all of these other things that are not just blogging, and are building their websites on WordPress.\n\n\n\nBut that’s different necessarily from wordpress.com where I do have a blog, right? I actually, it’s actually a website, wptrailbuddies.wordpress.com. I’m using the free .com to create a very quick, very simple, very easy way for people to sign up for one program.\n\n\n\nBut I also have several websites built on the .org idea, right, which is self-hosted. Find a host, download the software, or have the one button install, which is much more common now.\n\n\n\nAnd then also I have a paid plan on wordpress.com as well, which takes away any ad space, and also allows me to have plugins and themes within that website.\n\n\n\nSo that’s what I know at the surface level, what are the differences. I know that Jonathan knows much more about the software itself.\n\n\n\n[00:08:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think you’ve highlighted some of the top level items, so we’ll circle back to those in a moment. But first, let’s get Jonathan’s take on that. So it’s the history question, really. What’s the history of these two different things?\n\n\n\n[00:08:24] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, so WordPress started as a project in 2003, and it’s what we call a fork. And so you probably know if you listen to this, that WordPress is open source software. And basically that means, it’s licensed under the GPL, and you have the right to download it, make modifications, see how it works. We distribute, all those things are your right to do with the software that is published.\n\n\n\nAnd so it was forked from a project called b2 where a couple people were not really happy with the development that was happening on that, bugs weren’t being fixed to their liking, and so they decided to fork it. And so that was Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. And that was in 2003, and they called it WordPress. And so that was the beginning of the WordPress project that we know today that is now over 22 years old.\n\n\n\nA few years later, Automattic just turned 20 years old, so in 2005, Matt Mullenweg, one of the co-creators of WordPress, co-founders of WordPress, decided to create a company. And so he created a company called Automattic. And the company’s bread and butter was obviously WordPress, because he knew it very well. And so that’s how wordpress.com came about.\n\n\n\nAnd in many ways it was the first true managed WordPress hosting platform, because you could sign up, you could get a blog for free, and you still can, and your URL will be, you know, nathanssite.wordpress.com, or johnssite.wordpress.com. And you can pay for additional things such as, the subscription plans allow you to have a custom domain name, and that’s evolved. The features that you can pay for has evolved significantly over the years.\n\n\n\nBut along with this is the WordPress software that I mentioned earlier. And so the WordPress software is available for anyone to download and run, as I mentioned. And Automattic has a hosting setup that runs the open source software. And so many of the hosts that you have today, you all run that same software at the core of it, and it’s just a matter of what services are surrounded with it. What do they allow you to do within their environment? And how they support you in your journey to have an online presence.\n\n\n\n[00:10:36] Nathan Wrigley: So the .com side of things was a very early move. So really, more or less as, I mean we’re into sort of the 20 plus years of history of WordPress, but right back near the beginning it was made easier to install. And nowadays, if you go to more or less any host that’s got any association with WordPress, they will offer some kind of one click solution, which makes it trivially easy, within a couple of moments, really, and a few buttons, you’ll have a version of WordPress. And I’m talking there about the .org side of things. So you’ll have a .org install of WordPress. Really straightforward.\n\n\n\nHowever, if you rewind the clock right back to the beginning when .com started, I’m guessing it was a much more painful process. There weren’t these managed hosts where you could do that, and so it made sense, I guess, into the market to put something where you didn’t need to install anything. You simply sign up, create an account, be it free or paid, we’ll get into that in a moment as well, and you’ve got yourself the software.\n\n\n\nAnd so I guess that’s an important part to remember. It was much more difficult back then to do the .org thing than it is now. So many tools now making it relatively straightforward. I guess that’s a part of the success of .com, that it was just the first mover made it more straightforward.\n\n\n\n[00:11:51] Jonathan Desrosiers: The WordPress project has several philosophies that we use to guide our decisions and how we choose what makes it into the software and what shape that takes. And some of those, for example, are design for the majority, decisions not options, clean, lean, and mean, striving for simplicity, out of the box software.\n\n\n\nAnd so you see this in the setup process in the five minute install. We really aim to make the installation as simple as possible for the software itself. But that doesn’t mean the surrounding database set up and server set up and uploading, getting the files on the server, doesn’t mean that that’s easy as a part of that.\n\n\n\nAnd so WordPress could be two clicks to install. Could be really simple, email and password and installs it for you, but it doesn’t really, can only contribute so much to that cohesive experience, that all encompassing experience of what a website is, of what hosting is.\n\n\n\n[00:12:42] Michelle Frechette: I think back to, again, the early days of blogging where that was the goal. You could change the colors behind it, you were limited to the theming that was provided with whatever platform you were choosing from. And the way that we’ve grown from just like, here are your five options, kind of like a MySpace idea, right? You’re kind of limited with what you could do back in those days as well, to where you can do a lot more now.\n\n\n\nAnd so even with .com, with the free plan, you have a lot more options than you did 20 years ago, 23 years ago. And if you upgrade to a business plan, then you have all the options basically that you have with the install, the .org install for yourself, self-hosted.\n\n\n\nOne of the things I love about it is that I don’t have to worry about security, I don’t have to worry about traffic, and I don’t have to worry about upgrades. I don’t get a message that my PHP version is outdated. On some other sites where I’m self-hosting, I have to make sure that everything’s up to date all the time. With the .com. It’s one of those things that I don’t have to do.\n\n\n\nAnd so for me, that is one of the benefits. Of course, I have only one site there, but I’m loving the fact I can walk away from it and not be having to check it on a regular basis. And I think that’s one of the beautiful things for people who are not tech savvy, because they can get in and do the things like they would in one of the competitors.\n\n\n\n[00:13:57] Nathan Wrigley: So a lot of this conversation is going to be done through the prism of history, you know, and decisions that were made which now perhaps people have got opinions about, maybe they think poor decisions were made, or brilliant decisions were made, they were made at a different time.\n\n\n\nAnd I’m going to allude to what I said right at the top of this episode, which was that if you do a Google search, for just simply for the word WordPress, and that probably is the word that you’ve heard. You probably have no familiarity with whatever WordPress is. You just, somebody told you, you know, you were in a bar somewhere and somebody said, oh, you want a website? WordPress can do that.\n\n\n\nSo you end up at a search engine and in it goes, WordPress, and up come these slightly conflicting things. And I guess that’s maybe where some problems for end users begin. We’re in the inside of it all, so we’ve totally got a grip on this. We might not understand the intricacies of all of the bits and pieces, but we understand what .com is and we understand the difference.\n\n\n\nThis is a question you don’t have to answer in a binary way. It doesn’t have to be a yes or a no. But, do you think with the benefit of hindsight, it would’ve been a good idea to call these different versions different things? So for example, WordPress could have been the .com or the .org, and it would’ve had a different name for something else. And that’s purely from a, keeping it obvious what the two different things are. So again, you can obfuscate or you know, dodge that question if you like.\n\n\n\n[00:15:18] Michelle Frechette: I’m reminded of George Foreman, whose children are all named George.\n\n\n\n[00:15:23] Jonathan Desrosiers: Most confusing household ever. Without getting into the nuances of the agreements and all, how the permissions work, Automattic just has special permission to use the WordPress trademark. And so that’s why it’s called wordpress.com and wordpress.org. And while there are some, there is some confusion that comes from that. In many ways, it also has contributed to the success of the project, because in the early days, it was very easy to get a site spun up on WordPress, on wordpress.com, and people started using WordPress.\n\n\n\nAnd so there are definitely people out there that solely started using WordPress because they got to wordpress.com and they were able to get a site. And now more and more hosting companies are much more capable, and we all have our own, like I said, I work at Bluehost, so for example, we have our own special sauce of onboarding, where we ask you a couple questions and we help you. We find that the thing people struggle with a lot is where to start.\n\n\n\nYou get dumped into WordPress, right? And you don’t know where to start. What do I need on my site? What do I make it look like? What do I need to do? And so using these onboarding questions to produce a starting point for you, that’s contextual to what you’re trying to do. And so that’s one of the things that we take pride in is our onboarding process that we’re working on and is available if you want to try it out.\n\n\n\nBut all that to say is that, you know, in the early days it was definitely a benefit. And now as the project has grown to over 40% of the internet, that confusion gets magnified in some ways. And a lot of times that takes the form of, as you said, Googling and finding conflicting resources as people not accurately describing the differences.\n\n\n\nWe get a lot of tickets on Trac, which is the bug tracking software for WordPress, for the software itself, that incorrectly is saying there’s a bug, but it’s actually intended behavior, but it’s on .com and not in the .org software. The support forums are full of people that are not sure of the difference.\n\n\n\nAnd so it’s just important as community members that we keep this in mind, that it’s not always easy to understand, but a lot of times people just need a push in the right direction. And in some ways it returns to our philosophies of making it simple because the majority of WordPress users are not technically minded and so they probably don’t care about the difference, right? They just want their WordPress site. I have a site, I need it up, I need it to not go down. I need customers. And so keeping that lens in mind as well is helpful to get through this.\n\n\n\n[00:17:40] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of interesting, I’ve been using the internet more or less from the beginning and although these boundaries have got really blurred, back in the day, anything which ended .org had a real kind of community, charity, non-profit kind of focus to it. I don’t know if you both remember that as well, but anything ended .org, it felt like there was a philanthropic purpose to it. And anything which was .com, that wasn’t the case.\n\n\n\n[00:18:11] Michelle Frechette: It was commerce.\n\n\n\n[00:18:12] Jonathan Desrosiers: Commercial. Yeah, it for commercial.\n\n\n\n[00:18:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there go. So commercial, company, along those lines. And I don’t know when that was, but that just ceased to be a thing at some point. But back when .com began, naming it .org maybe was a bigger signpost than it now appears to be, if you know what I mean. Oh, look, it’s WordPress, it’s .org. It speaks for itself. It’s a philanthropic version or what have you. And that is maybe a part of the jigsaw puzzle.\n\n\n\nAnd again, rewinding history, when the split happened between.com and .org, I’m presuming that nobody had any intuition that any of this was going to be successful in any way, shape, or form. .com, you know, the commercial wing could have been an absolute failure. The whole project could have collapsed within a couple of years. . org, again, nobody took any interest in it. It just didn’t work out. And it became, well, another b2, the annals of history. And it didn’t work out that way.\n\n\n\nBut I guess once you’ve started down the path, you are going to stick with it. There would be no point 3 years in in saying, you know what? Everybody’s confused about .com, .org, we should upend the whole thing. I guess that’s off the table a bit at that point as well.\n\n\n\n[00:19:20] Michelle Frechette: Well, I think that the generic web user who’s not a techie still doesn’t necessarily have an idea that the .org and .com were originally intended for different audiences, right? So I think that, I mean there are, definitely are some savvy people who understand that, but I think that the majority of people still, it doesn’t matter if it’s a .io, we have so many extensions now that I think it’s kind of blurred what those actually mean. And if you actually go to register a .org, it’ll say, do you want the .com and the dot net, and the dot whatever else too? So that you’re kind of getting all of your traffic driven to the same place.\n\n\n\nI think that that is something that, yes, we understand that now. And I think that we would’ve always understood that, the three of us, but I don’t know that that was such a huge distinction back in the day.\n\n\n\nI also think that it was one of those things where, you know, you have light versions of something or, you know, you have free versions of other things in life that aren’t software related that you can upgrade to or that, you know, free gifts with purchase.\n\n\n\nAnd so I think the idea of, you could have this free one, or you can upgrade to these other things, or you could take it and run with it and do it your own thing, I think is something that made sense at the beginning, but again, can be slightly confusing now.\n\n\n\nBecause I do see people come to my meetup and they’re asking questions, and we all try to troubleshoot. We get them to log in, and we’re like, oh, okay, now I see, you’re using the free version, so you don’t have the ability to add this plugin or change your theme this way, or use CSS, you know, and those kinds of things, as you can with the paid version or with the self-hosted. And so I think that there is an opportunity for us to make that distinction in different places.\n\n\n\nI will say one of the benefits, however, even if you start on the free .com, you can upgrade to paid and get that, or you can port that over to your own self-hosted as well. Other competitors don’t necessarily let you, like take your whole version of your website that you’ve built on their platform and bring it into a self-hosted situation like WordPress can.\n\n\n\nAnd so even if you made the decision to go with wordpress.com, and halfway through a build, or a year later, realise that you really wish you had done something different, we make it easy for you to be able to take that and move it someplace else, like Bluehost or you know, SiteGround or other places like that. So we make it easy for you. We’re not trying to shove you into one box and make you stay there and say look at all those people over there doing things you wish you could do.\n\n\n\n[00:21:43] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, I think that the underlying motivations was just fueled by the open source ideals, and the software belongs to the people and not so much specific companies or corporations. And so by putting it in .org, it was just more about being open and available and for the community, right?\n\n\n\nMatt and Mike, when they forked b2, the intention was to get more people to work on it with them, right? And ensure that the software that they were running their website with survived and continued to grow and didn’t have bugs. And so I think that that was just part of the motivation where, I just looked it up, and the .org domains were intended to only be used by organisations. And it seems like the intention was to require documentation at some point, but it was never enforced.\n\n\n\nI mean, when I got, in the late two thousands when I got involved, there was always the perception in my mind that you had to be an organisation to get one of those right? But that’s not actually the case. At least my early perception was that I needed it in order to do that. And so I wonder if that persists with other people as well.\n\n\n\nAnd so I think that what Michelle also said resonates well is that, you know, no matter where you WordPress, you’re going to be able to take your site with you and go somewhere else. And that’s what makes WordPress great. And maybe you’re not even taking your site somewhere else, maybe you’re just taking out your content and, I don’t know, maybe feeding it into AI, or creating a book of all your posts, like a historical reference or something.\n\n\n\n[00:23:07] Michelle Frechette: I did that.\n\n\n\n[00:23:07] Jonathan Desrosiers: That sounds kind of cool actually, yeah. And so being able to take your content with you and you are the true owner of your content, and you have the rights to it, is not something that’s true for other platforms. You know, not to name names, but there’s a lot of other website platforms where it’s difficult to impossible to extract out your content if you need to move somewhere else.\n\n\n\n[00:23:27] Michelle Frechette: It’s a lot of copy, paste at that point.\n\n\n\n[00:23:29] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, or like finding someone that knows how to create a browser extension, or a scraper or something like that. And so that’s always something that I tell someone looking to get started with a website where, you know, it might be easier to get started with this other service now, and it might be okay with your needs now, but if you outgrow that website or that service, it’s more difficult to bring it elsewhere later.\n\n\n\nWe’re working on different ways with the data liberation initiative where we’re looking at ways to make our data more portable from other platforms to other platforms. And so I really feel strongly about that.\n\n\n\nLike, that’s the strongest point, one of the strongest points of WordPress is that you own your content, you control it, there’s no algorithm changes, you know, on Facebook where all of a sudden people aren’t seeing your content. They change a feature, right? People can’t react a certain way to your content anymore, and it affects your traffic to your site.\n\n\n\nAnd so I always strongly emphasise that to people, because people don’t think about that. They think I just need a website, right? But they don’t think about, what happens if I need to make changes and this software doesn’t work, or this service doesn’t help me anymore?\n\n\n\n[00:24:36] Nathan Wrigley: We’ve definitely moved as a community, and by community I don’t mean the WordPress community, I mean the community of online users. We’ve definitely moved towards more gatekeeping and siloed consent repositories. You know, you think of things like social media, and essentially anything where there’s a, you know, a username and a password and a paywall. We seem to be more at peace with that.\n\n\n\nAnd that brings me to the next thing actually. And I’m sorry if this comment lands badly, dear listener, but I think there is something quite curious about our community. I think we are full of people who are very well intentioned, who have extremely benevolent motives, and often, I think, regard commercial things sometimes as something to be viewed with a little bit of suspicion. I don’t know if you’ve detected this kind of thing as well.\n\n\n\nAll of those things are things which drew me in. They didn’t alienate me. They were exactly the kind of people that I wanted to be around. But I do wonder if WordPress’ history, so the .com, .org history over the last, let’s say 15 years or so, I do wonder if the flavor, the colour of the community, if you like, that we’ve got meant that we were going to have problems about this .com, .org split.\n\n\n\nBecause on the one side, fierce, fierce open source advocacy people. You must own your own content. You’ve got to be able to download the software. This is terribly important, you want to be able to fork it at a moment’s notice.\n\n\n\nAnd then on the other hand, a bunch of people are, well, that’s great you do that, but I’m happy over here. I’ll pay my fee for the premium version of wordpress.com. That’s fine with me. I’m okay with that. I don’t need all the bells and whistles that you seem to have. I don’t need it to be this version and that version. I don’t need this plugin or that thing.\n\n\n\nBut I do wonder if the community that we’ve got is a part of that. In the mix somewhere is just what we’ve got. The people that are drawn to open source are going to view the .com side of things with a little bit of suspicion, and maybe see that, you know, that’s something which, gosh, we should not have that.\n\n\n\n[00:26:46] Jonathan Desrosiers: The only thing I’d challenge you on there is that I don’t think it’s fair to say that people on the .com side don’t also care about the open source ideals. I think that many of them, if not all of them, do care about the underlying principles there. I think that, you always hear, you have to look after your own, right? You have to make sure you can pay your bills and you have a business and you. I’m US based, the American dream, right? Of creating a business and growing that into something sizable that can help people and benefit many.\n\n\n\nAnd so that’s my only pushback there is that they do. It’s not a binary thing. It’s definitely an overlap. And I like to think that there’s more overlap than we think. And that might be a little naive, but I do tend to think that it overlaps pretty heavily in that section there.\n\n\n\n[00:27:29] Nathan Wrigley: I think you are right, and I think what you’ve done there is uncovered the poor way that I phrased what I was saying. I think when I was trying to describe that I was, although I didn’t say it, I was trying to describe things from the .org point of view only. And so the nature of that community is fiercely protective of the open source values there and what have you. So yeah, you’re quite right. It felt, with a bit of hindsight, it felt like that question was coming from both sides and it really wasn’t. So thank you for picking me up on that.\n\n\n\n[00:28:01] Jonathan Desrosiers: It’s normal to be skeptical of other people, right? Especially when you see all these horror stories of this big business, you know, draining these businesses out there that are draining money out of everybody and raising prices and profits are through the roof, right? So it’s normal to have this skepticism towards commercial entities, and that they’re trying to do the right things and things of that nature.\n\n\n\nBut to that, I just say to look at how the company and the space is contributing back and how they are ensuring that they do get their fair share of the WordPress pie, that is billions of dollars, on the last publishing that I saw, last report that I saw. But also making sure that that ecosystem is still strong, and supportive of everybody in the pool. To make sure that we can all compete to, you know, there’s definitely competition. We’re all going to compete together to make sure we’re trying to get more of the pie, right? And try to prove that our service or our products are the best.\n\n\n\nBut, yeah, so I think a little level of skepticism is healthy. You always hear, assume good intent. I think that’s very important, and to obviously judge people by their actions and what they do to help grow that open source community while they’re living in that .com commercial space.\n\n\n\nYeah, I don’t know, Michelle, if you have anything to add there. You probably have a different lens as the non-developer background.\n\n\n\n[00:29:19] Michelle Frechette: Definitely the non-developer background here. So you used the word community when you talked about that when you first started the question, and I think we have to think about the fact that the community, although it does encompass both .com users and anybody who’s self-hosted through .org. It really is the lion’s share of that community comes from that self-hosted .org side. Comes from the people who go to Meetups. Comes from the people who attend WordCamps. And most importantly, it comes from the people who contribute to the ecosystem.\n\n\n\nWhether that’s by volunteering through the .org and Make WordPress, whether that’s selling a product, or having a podcast or any of the things, a newsletter, any of the things that contribute to the success of WordPress overall, it applies across the board. But when you look at all of the volunteerism, and all of the unsponsored people, and even sponsored people who are creating, right? So Jonathan is a developer, he’s in the weeds with it. He’s got a sense of pride with what the community creates for each other.\n\n\n\nAnd when you have a sense of pride in what you do, you have a loyalty to that as well. And so we are part of a group of people, a huge group of people, a multimillion group of people worldwide who are this .org community with some .com community peppered in. So of course there’s going to be skew, one direction versus the other.\n\n\n\nI don’t think it’s necessarily derision. That I don’t think people like necessarily look at .com and go, ugh, what do they say? The redheaded stepchild of, you know, .org or whatever. I think it’s more along the lines of, we know this, we use this. We want other people to use this too. This is our community and this is what we’ve built this community around.\n\n\n\nBut I think that democratising publishing is used by both, right? So if you look at .org and .com, we talk about democratising publishing. And the free .com allows people in incredibly socioeconomically depressed areas, and who have very little side income to be able to start a website. The ability to do that, whether it’s a website to talk about a service that they offer. Whether it’s a website just to blog. Whether they’re trying to monetize or not, there’s opportunities for people around the world to create a free, absolutely free website on .com.\n\n\n\nAnd have it say, you know, michellefrechette.wordpress.com, because that’s what I could afford at the time. And then when I can, I either upgrade to paid, or I port that over to a self-hosted situation. So I think that both of them really have an amazing place in our ecosystem, but we tend not to see that when we sit squarely in one side or the other.\n\n\n\n[00:32:02] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know? That’s a really interesting point, and one I cannot believe I’ve never thought about that. Over all these many years of thinking about WordPress and all of its different flavors and things, wordpress.org carries the word free around with it in my head. I’m thinking wordpress.org, free. I’m struggling to imagine a scenario where it is entirely free to deploy.\n\n\n\n[00:32:25] Michelle Frechette: I used to say WordPress is free like a free puppy. A free puppy, you still have to take to the vet, and buy food, and get their nails trimmed, and buy the leash, and all of the things that go along with a free puppy. WordPress.org is like that. It’s a free puppy. You still have to pay for hosting and pay for themes, and I mean, you couldn’t do it fairly inexpensively, but not a hundred percent free.\n\n\n\n[00:32:44] Jonathan Desrosiers: I was just going to add in, likewise, it’s not free to get to the point where it’s published. And another thing that you brought up, Michelle, that made me think is, I mentioned about judging companies based on how they contribute and the ideals they follow. But that also is true for the individuals that spend their personal time, or self sponsor, to contribute to the software.\n\n\n\nAnd so they are not looking, most likely, not looking for your business. They may be if they’re a freelancer type thing. But in most cases they’re looking for just recognition, or maybe a job, or maybe sponsorship, so that they could continue to help the software grow.\n\n\n\nAnd so there’s multiple lenses to that commercial side of things, right? Where we talked about .org versus .com, and commercial versus, open source. But within that, there’s also other layers of that as well where you’re contributing to make sure the software grows, so that your company continues to do good. But also maybe you just really enjoy the software and believe in it and want to contribute on your own to ensure that that same thing happens.\n\n\n\n[00:33:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, interesting. I’m just going to finish off my thought from previously there. So the free to download bit, I think where I was going with that was that there’s a minimum of hosting. In order to get that free version of the software, the zip file that you download. In order to make it meaningful, you’ve got to at least do the hosting. The other bit, well, I suppose you could host it on your own computer, but good luck with that if you’re a newbie.\n\n\n\n[00:34:09] Jonathan Desrosiers: I challenge that too, not necessarily, right? Like a website is only as good as who can access it, if they find what they’re looking for. But you could very easily just run WordPress on a Raspberry Pie somewhere in your basement that, you know, you use it to send requests to, to turn on your lights or something like that, or sync up your garage door. You know, you could theoretically use WordPress to do all these types of things.\n\n\n\nSo I would also challenge you to think outside the box a little bit on that. I’m not saying it’s a good idea and I’m not saying I might grunt at you when you come with your really weird obscure edge case in Trac, but that’s part of the great thing about WordPress.\n\n\n\n[00:34:45] Michelle Frechette: But it’s possible.\n\n\n\n[00:34:46] Jonathan Desrosiers: You can use WordPress in many different ways, with many different combinations of plugins and themes. And that makes WordPress great, but it also makes it incredibly difficult to maintain and ensure that backwards compatibility, which is one of our main pillars, is sustained release to release.\n\n\n\n[00:35:02] Nathan Wrigley: It’s fascinating. Yeah, what insight that was. That’s remarkable.\n\n\n\nThe commercial side, so the .com side where you’re paying a subscription if you want the different tiers and the abilities that you get for doing that, I don’t know if any of this data is available, whether it’s been published, whether it’s easy to access, I’m not sure. But I’m guessing that there is some through line between the profitability of the .com business side of things, and the open source project.\n\n\n\nWe all know that many, many, many volunteers contribute to .org in every conceivable way. Whether that’s to the code, to events, to whatever it may be. But I’m imagining there is some connection. Maybe it’s attenuating a little bit more now. Maybe it was more in the past than it is now. But I’m imagining that there is a connection between sales, unit sales of the .com out into the open world, and people being paid, seconded, and what have you, to work on the .org side.\n\n\n\nI actually don’t know if there’s any truth in that, if there’s anything there, but I’m imagining there is. If the .com business pays for the .org side to be as successful as it is essentially is what I’m trying to say.\n\n\n\n[00:36:18] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, I mean, historically Automattic has been the most sizable contributor to the project. There’s something called the Five for the Future Project, which is basically a challenge to companies, or individuals, making a living on WordPress to contribute 5% of their time back to the project. It’s a great initiative. That’s something that I was hired to participate in, so I’m very thankful for that because I’m able to have employment to work on open source software because of it.\n\n\n\nBut there are some flaws with it in that 5% isn’t right for everyone. It’s a goal, right? It’s, I’ve talked about this at WordCamps in the past, but time is not necessarily a good measure because it doesn’t measure the impact you have, or the productivity, or the efficiency that you have, right? So you could spend one hour working on this one bug fix that could fix screen reader software for millions of people accessing sites across the world. That’s very meaningful and that has a very strong impact. But that’s very hard to measure. And hours is certainly not the way that you can measure that.\n\n\n\nSo it’s a good idea. I like that a lot of people rallied behind that, and that it’s a very strong program. There’s a lot of participants. I’m looking forward to the next iteration of that, which a lot of community members are discussing and, you know, I’m sure leadership is always thinking about that as well. Like, how can we improve this and encourage more people to contribute and give back?\n\n\n\nAnd so I guess all that to say that, you know, I guess .com and Automattic have contributed a sizable amount to the project over its history, and many other companies as well have historically contributed a lot back too.\n\n\n\n[00:37:53] Nathan Wrigley: So another thing that I wanted to discuss, which we haven’t discussed so far is the sort of different feature set that you get, and the evolution of that over time. So if I was to get a .com site back, I don’t know, 12 years ago, the things that I could do with that would be different to what I can do now.\n\n\n\nObviously with the .org side, all bets are off. You can do what you wish with that. It’s yours. You can do anything you like. But on the .com side, it was limited in certain ways. The software was designed presumably to facilitate whatever it was that their agenda items were, whether that was profitability, growth, simplicity to use, whatever those metrics were.\n\n\n\nWhere are we at at the moment? Because it kind of feels like the two are coalescing, especially from a UI point of view. It feels like there’s moves at the moment to make the .com side be brought in line with the .org side. So the .org UI it feels like is going to be made available or pushed into the .com side.\n\n\n\nAnd that kind of feels curious to me. It always felt that the UI was a big differentiator, like, you know, it looks different, you can immediately see that’s a .com website. Maybe in the future it won’t be. So let’s just talk around that. What are the differences in what you can do with the platforms? And then maybe we can get onto the UI and the UX.\n\n\n\n[00:39:08] Michelle Frechette: So the free .com versus the upgraded paid plans have very different things that you can do within them. And then the paid plans are almost identical to what you can do with self-hosted. And so the difference really is you’re looking at the free plan versus any upgraded paid plan.\n\n\n\nAnd with the free plan, you’re very limited into plugins and themes. There are very few that you can choose from. There’s more now than there were 10 or 15 years ago for sure. And I think my experience with logging into a free .com site looks different now than it did 10 or 12 years ago as well. But it still looks different than it does on a self-hosted WordPress installation.\n\n\n\nThat does change with an upgrade plan, because now you have a lot more features that you can add, you can bring in plugins, you can change a lot of the way that things look through CSS or through customisation. And so, yes, I think that the paid plan and the self-hosted are very much in sync with one another.\n\n\n\nBut the free plan still looks, to me at least, a lot different. And when I tried to add CSS to what it said, oh, you need to upgrade to do that, which I understand, right? So if they gave away everything, then there would be no money coming into the company to be able to operate and to pay the employees that actually work at Automattic. So yeah, I think there is still a difference. And I know that Jonathan probably knows a lot more about the technical differences than I do, but that’s my experiential difference.\n\n\n\n[00:40:38] Jonathan Desrosiers: Well, one interesting fact is that wordpress.com is just one multi-site. So when you create a site, it’s just all in the same instance of WordPress. You just have your own space on that install.\n\n\n\n[00:40:48] Nathan Wrigley: That is truly remarkable by the way. That is a quite numbing thought when you actually ponder that for a moment.\n\n\n\n[00:40:54] Jonathan Desrosiers: For anyone that’s worked with multi-site, you know how challenging it is to have 10 sites, nevermind millions of sites. So it’s definitely impressive and interesting.\n\n\n\nI’d also add that, you know, Michelle has talked a lot about more the personal style plans, right? Where we mentioned you get a free site if you have your site at nathan.wordpress.com. You can pay, you know, to get a domain, like I mentioned is the next plan. And then you can pay for more things like different plugins and different backups, whatever the features are that they offer.\n\n\n\nBut after you get past that, there’s additional tiers for people like agencies. There’s very, very high level, reliable hosting for companies that run Fortune 500 companies, Fortune 10 companies, whatever it is that they need more handholding. They need you to help them with engineering maybe with their team. There’s tiers all the way up to that level at Automattic. And I think it’s fair to say that any, you know, they have plans that compete with any different tier that may be out there.\n\n\n\nThere’s e-commerce plans and all of that. And, you know, at Bluehost we have e-commerce plans. We have managed plans just like they do. And like I said, before, we’re all trying to have our special sauce to make our home the best place to WordPress and for you to come and want to set up your site and make a living on us.\n\n\n\n[00:42:09] Nathan Wrigley: So then back to the question of the, what feels like an endeavor to make the .com look a lot like the .org. Now that was something that I caught sight of not that long ago. It was probably, maybe, I want to say about eight weeks ago, something like that. I don’t know if either of you caught that piece of news, and whether or not that’s in fact moving forward. But the idea is to make a default version of .org basically identical in terms of look and feel.\n\n\n\nI found that curious. I wondered what the intention was there. Was it purely just to have, I don’t know, one base of software that could be relied upon for both, or whether it was to make it easier to do a migration in either direction? I don’t know. So, I don’t know if either of you do.\n\n\n\n[00:42:48] Jonathan Desrosiers: So a little, I guess a little history is that wordpress.com used to use the same dashboard as .org. And a while ago there was a project called Calypso, and that is basically the dashboard that you know probably from the last five years or so. And I can’t confirm this, but I believe that it was an exploration on what the dashboard, what a new WordPress dashboard could be. And I think that they’ve realised that having your own dashboard that’s different than .org is not really the best path.\n\n\n\nAnd there’s a few reasons for that. One is that we mentioned you have millions of sites on .com, right? That’s all very valuable feedback from using the software. And if they’re using a different dashboard than everybody that’s not on wordpress.com, that’s basically lost opportunities to receive feedback on the software that we’re building. And so that’s one aspect.\n\n\n\nAnd the other aspect is that, if you have a different dashboard, you have to have people maintaining that different dashboard, and making sure it works with all the new features that are added to wordpress.org. Make sure it’s sustainable and performant and all of this requires resources. But if you could adapt your products to use the same dashboard that everybody else has, then maybe you could take some of those resources and put them back to the .org software, instead of the internal Calypso project.\n\n\n\nI should correct that, it wasn’t an internal project, it was used internally. It is open source and, especially initially there was a lot of encouragement for community members to participate in that. And so it’s not like it was a closed thing where they shut everybody out and they wanted, you know, it to be their own thing. It wasn’t trade secret type stuff. It was open source.\n\n\n\nSo, yeah, those are just two things that stand out to me as reasons why you would want to use the same experience that everybody else has, as it just contributes to the greater good of the software and the health of the ecosystem.\n\n\n\n[00:44:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting, and again, something I hadn’t really thought about. The heuristics that would come out of .com. Well, for a start, it’s incredibly cohesive. That data set is going to be enormous, whereas trying to gather that from all the other versions of WordPress, you would obviously have to opt people into that to begin with. But also, it would be very difficult to gather all of that, whereas presumably the .com side of things has got that completely sealed up. So yeah, again, really interesting.\n\n\n\nIt is curious. I don’t really know if we’ll ever overcome in people’s heads the, well, for some people I think it’s a chasm. You know, it’s a really big divide, the difference between .org and .com. But I think we’ve done a fairly good job of explaining what the history is, why the things have been done in the way that they’ve been done, maybe a little bit into the future and how things are going to look.\n\n\n\nI don’t know if there’s any salient point that you think we missed there, but if not, I think we’ll round it up. So I’ll just ask Michelle first. Anything you wanted to get across about that before we knock it on the head?\n\n\n\n[00:45:43] Michelle Frechette: I think that we often talk about .org versus .com as though they were adversarial, but it’s really just a comparison as opposed to one being better than the other. I think you choose the option that’s best for you and your goals, and there’s nothing wrong with choosing any of those options.\n\n\n\n[00:46:02] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, I’d just add that with any technology or anything, knowledge is not always binary, right? It’s a spectrum. And so how can we better expose people to the concepts, better explain them to people so that it’s easier to understand and get up to speed on what different concepts are. Technical concepts, brand concepts, whatever that may be, software, and strive for simplicity, right? That’s our, one of our philosophies. And so how can we make things more simple so that more people are able to better understand and be empowered to have a better online presence by having a greater understanding.\n\n\n\n[00:46:37] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you both for picking that puzzle apart with me. That’s been really interesting. So Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers, thank you both for joining me today. Really appreciate it. Thank you.\n\n\n\n[00:46:46] Michelle Frechette: Thanks for having us.\n\n\n\n[00:46:46] Jonathan Desrosiers: Always a pleasure. Thank you Nathan.\n\n\n\n\nOn the podcast today we have Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers.\n\n\n\nMichelle is well known in the WordPress community for her myriad roles, including Executive Director of Post Status and program director for WP Includes. She\u2019s a prolific freelancer, podcaster, and a driving force behind many WordPress initiatives.\n\n\n\nJonathan is a WordPress core committer, contributing to the project since 2013, and has been sponsored by Bluehost to work on WordPress core since 2018. His work largely takes place behind the scenes, supporting contributors, maintaining build tools, and keeping WordPress running smoothly for millions of users.\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019ve ever searched for \u201cWordPress\u201d online, you\u2019ve probably found both WordPress.com and WordPress.org at the top of your results, and, like many, you might be unsure what really separates the two.\n\n\n\nToday, Michelle and Jonathan help clear up the history, philosophy, and practical differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. They talk about how these two flavours of WordPress came to be, why they\u2019ve both been key to WordPress\u2019 growth, and the ways they overlap and differ in features, user experience, and monetisation.\n\n\n\nMichelle shares her perspective as a long-time user and advocate, with experience across both .com and .org sites, while Jonathan dives into the technical and historical details from his core contributor vantage point.\n\n\n\nThey also explore whether the naming conventions .com and .org have helped or hindered the project, and how the WordPress community\u2019s open source ethos shapes the ongoing conversation.\n\n\n\nAlong the way, they touch on how .com made WordPress accessible in the early days, the importance of data portability, and evolving efforts to unify the user experience between the two platforms.\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019ve ever wondered which version of WordPress is right for you, why the project seems split into two variants, or how community and commerce intertwine in the WordPress ecosystem, this episode is for you.\n\n\n\nUseful links\n\n\n\n\u200aBlogger\n\n\n\n\u200aMichelle’s WP Trail Buddies on WordPress.com\n\n\n\n\u200aThe story of forking b2\n\n\n\nBluehost\n\n\n\n\u200aData Liberation\n\n\n\n\u200aFive for the Future\n\n\n\n\u200aCalypso", "date_published": "2025-08-20T10:00:00-04:00", "date_modified": "2025-08-19T08:55:20-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" } ], "author": { "name": "Nathan Wrigley", "url": "https://wptavern.com/author/nathanwrigley", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6e348ad810ccc76cb2ba50cc0e42699e1f676d620c66199684f0190f1d7cb793?s=512&d=retro&r=r" }, "image": "https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/182-Michelle-Frechette-and-Jonathan-Desrosiers-on-the-story-of-com-and-org.jpg", "tags": [ "podcast", "wordpress.com", "wordpress.org" ], "summary": "On the podcast today we have Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers, and we're here to unravel the key differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. We explore the historical development, technical distinctions, and user experiences of both platforms, including issues of ownership, ease-of-use, open-source philosophy, community contributions, and the evolving feature sets. The discussion also touches on branding confusion, community perceptions, and the value of both approaches, emphasising that the right choice depends on individual needs rather than a strict rivalry between the two versions. If you\u2019ve ever wondered which version of WordPress is right for you, why the project seems split into two variants, or how community and commerce intertwine in the WordPress ecosystem, this episode is for you.", "attachments": [ { "url": "https://episodes.castos.com/601a97348e9993-63339407/2114690/c1e-5kx0xu1owozfq7w4n-pkxm2jroimg1-hxouc1.mp3", "mime_type": "", "size_in_bytes": 0 } ] }, { "id": "https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=198779", "url": "https://wptavern.com/podcast/181-bob-dunn-on-rebranding-do-the-woo-and-growing-openchannels-fm", "title": "#181 \u2013 Bob Dunn on rebranding Do the Woo and growing openchannels.fm", "content_html": "\n[00:00:19] Bob Dunn: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, rebranding Do the Woo, and growing openchannels.fm.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today, we have Bob Dunn. Bob is a long standing figure in the WordPress community, having branded himself as BobWP back in 2010. With nearly two decades of experience in WordPress, Bob has become one of the most recognizable voices in WordPress podcasting. Producing shows that have educated, inspired, and connected countless developers, builders, and enthusiasts.
\n\n\n\nMost recently, he launched Open Channels FM, a rebrand and expansion from his well-known Do the Woo podcast, which was originally focused on WooCommerce, but now explores broader topics around the open web, open source, and the wider maker community.
\n\n\n\nBob talks about his journey in podcasting, from running Do the Woo for almost seven years to the decision to rebrand and launch Open Channels FM. He explains why he felt it was time to broaden the focus, welcoming listeners from outside of just the WooCommerce and WordPress ecosystem, and how that led to a network approach with multiple channels and series.
\n\n\n\nBob describes how Open Channels is structured. Rather than traditional shows, the network features three flexible channels, Open Makers, Open Source Reach, and Open Web Conversations, each hosting a variety of series. This lets content stay organized and evergreen, and accommodates the 25 to 30 rotating hosts with the freedom to produce series across different topics.
\n\n\n\nBob talks about the challenges, and rewards, of handing over the mic, stepping into a more of a managerial and founder role and how he’s building a sustainable, collaborative, podcasting network.
\n\n\n\nWe discuss Bob’s technical approach as well, including how he uses WordPress to manage multiple RSS feeds and subscriptions, making it easy for listeners to follow specific channels or get the fire hose of all content.
\n\n\n\nBob also shares insights on rebranding a podcast, managing redirects, retaining audiences, updating hundreds of featured images, and ensuring continuity without confusing listeners.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in open source podcasting, or building community driven content, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Bob Dunn.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:37] Nathan Wrigley: I am joined on the podcast by Bob Dunn. Hello Bob.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:40] Bob Dunn: Hey, hello Nathan. Great to be back.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much for joining me today. Bob and I have been chatting for quite a long time. Actually over many years, we’ve been chatting for quite a long time, because we’re both very, very, very into the exact same thing, and that is podcasting in the WordPress space.
\n\n\n\nShould anybody not have heard of you, Bob, I know it’s a bit of a generic question. Do you mind doing your little potted bio to tell us who you are, and what you’ve been doing?
\n\n\n\n[00:04:04] Bob Dunn: Been in business a long time. Two major businesses, branded myself, BobWP in 2010. Did a lot of stuff between then and now.
\n\n\n\nAnd, yeah, right now I am doing openchannels.fm. I’m running that, that is a podcast channels with, actually three channels, we’ll be explaining more about that. But yeah, I’ve just been in WordPress quite a while and I think since, oh, I don’t know, about 17, 18 years or so.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s a fairly long time. You were one of the voices, when I joined the WordPress space, you were the established podcast voice I think. There were a few, but not many. And there’s very few that have survived. You’ve managed to, turn a living out of podcasting in the WordPress space. So Bravo, well done.
\n\n\n\n[00:04:50] Bob Dunn: Thank you. Yeah, it’s been interesting. It’s something you just kind of keep going and, you know, doing it all yourself. It gets to a point where, yeah, it’s a lot of work, but it’s paid off.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:00] Nathan Wrigley: So a little while ago, I’m going to say about, I don’t know, six months ago, something like that, you can correct me in a moment. But for the longest period of time you’ve had Do the Woo. Prior to Do the Woo, there was a bunch of other naming conventions for your podcast. What was it that, in the most recent past, why did you decide to jettison Do the Woo and create openchannels?
\n\n\n\nOpen channels, by the way, you can be found at openchannels.fm. There’s no hyphens or anything. It’s just as you’d imagine, openchannels.fm. Go and check that out. You’d be able to see what we’re talking about. What was the reasoning behind that?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:35] Bob Dunn: Yeah, so I actually did the rebrand early June. It was at WordCamp Europe, but I’d been thinking about it for about a year. So you have almost seven years under the belt with Do the Woo, and it started out as a WooCommerce focused podcasts. And over the years I added more WordPress into it.
\n\n\n\nAnd then over the last couple years I started talking about a bit more of the, you know, even outside the WordPress bubble. And I felt like something was always missing, because it’s kind of two-prong where WordPress developers, builders, a lot of our audience need to also be aware of other stuff that is going on around them. I’m not trying to push somebody one direction or another. It’s like just know stuff that is happening out there.
\n\n\n\nAnd then also for people that don’t know WooCommerce, expanding on that, trying to bring them in on other topics. They would look at WooCommerce or they look at WordPress and say, hey, you know, I’ve never really dug into them. I listen to a few of these.
\n\n\n\nThe two major things that really, I had been chewing on for like, oh man, it had to be almost a year, was growth and sustainability of the site. And, you know, it worked great when it was really WooCommerce focus, but people had the impression that, if they know Woo, they’d look at it and say, oh, it’s a WooCommerce podcast. I’m not going to check it out because I’m not using WooCommerce.
\n\n\n\nAnd then of course, people that didn’t know anything about it, they would maybe think it’s, I don’t know, some wrapper or something. I don’t know what, you know, the title is like, it didn’t really define it. And of course they dig in a little bit, they learn what it is.
\n\n\n\nBut, yeah, that was the impetus. It was like, I thought, man, it’s time to, as hard as it is to change a brand or even drop one that has worked for you, I thought we are moving more into content around the open web, open source, fediverse, all these different things. And I really want to make this something where, like I said before, people that don’t know WordPress or WooCommerce would come and listen to other stuff and maybe they’d check it out, maybe they don’t.
\n\n\n\nAnd then the WordPress people would continue, because we still have that content in there and they could learn about other stuff. They could learn about things that probably will really help their business even staying in WordPress. So I’m not, again, trying to push them out of it, it’s just open your mind a bit and learn new things.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:14] Nathan Wrigley: The wisdom that I often get when I read around the podcast industry, and if you are just a consumer of podcasts and you’ve never really dug into that industry, in the same way that WordPress has just a gigantic amount in the background, as soon as you prize open the can and realise that there’s this whole open source software, and there’s events and all of that, the same is true inside of podcasting. There’s a whole industry going on in the background that you may not realise is there.
\n\n\n\nAnd one of the pieces of sage advice which is often delivered, is to kind of niche down when you are beginning your podcast. Because obviously, you are going to be a small fish in a very big pond. And so the more specific that you can get, the more likely you are to build up that audience over time.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I’m guessing that that’s kind why you went with Do the Woo? So that it was pretty clear at the beginning, okay, we’re really focusing on Woo. So have you noticed that the pivot away from that, so from Do the Woo as a name, even though there was more content in there, to this much more open channel, so open source, whatever that might cover. Has your audience kind of, and I don’t really want to use the word forgiven, maybe I want to use the words, gone with you.
\n\n\n\nHave they come across that brand transition willingly, or do you sense that some people have, you know, lost interest because now it’s not just Do the Woo? Because that’s, I suppose, something you have to be mindful of.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:29] Bob Dunn: Yeah. You know, I’m sure some have maybe decided differently, but the interesting thing is how I built it and how I, even after the launch, reorganised it even more, is that all the content that was on there is still on there and continues to be on there. And so as I looked at how can I best organise it, I first put it into like five shows, and it still didn’t quite make sense and gel. So I thought, well, what if I do three channels, and I have an open source reach channel, an open web conversations channel, and an open makers channel.
\n\n\n\nA lot of the WordPress and Woo stuff went under the open makers channel. So now we still have series, like three or four series on WordPress. At least three series on WooCommerce, and then a variety of other stuff. So the thing was to get people convinced, and when I talked to a lot of people and I was at WordCamp Europe, you know, it’s like, it’s basically the brand is changing, we’re expanding, but the stuff you’ve been listening to is not going away.
\n\n\n\nAnd I have to really emphasise that. And it’s, yeah, there’s a bit where you think, oh, you know, am I going to lose it? But then they may come back, they may actually see that, yes, this is still existing, you know, getting this stuff out in front of people. And also, there will be now newer people that will, instead of looking at a name, Do the Woo and thinking, hmm, what do I do? Something like open channels, even though it is a lot broader, might interest them a little bit more.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s definitely the ability to tap into a new audience. So this podcast, WP Tavern, it has one show. And on a weekly basis we have a show and, you know, it’s me talking to somebody else. And I guess Do the Woo was a bit more like that. There was this one show and it would drop with a regular cadence and what have you.
\n\n\n\nAnd it may have escaped people because we didn’t really introduce it as such. But open channels is not that formula is it? It’s more of a, kind of like a network, I suppose, for want of a better word. You’ve got your own mini kind of network of podcasts. So let’s just dig into that a little bit. So you’ve iterated it a bit. You started with maybe three shows and now it’s up to however many, we’ll get into that. Do you just want to go through what all of the different shows are, and broadly what they cover?
\n\n\n\n[00:11:41] Bob Dunn: Yeah, so what happened is during this whole time of change, and some of this even happened before June, was that I had a whole bunch of shows. So you go to the thing and you’d see like, I don’t know, there was like 15 shows or something. And it seemed a bit too much to me. You’d go there and it’d be like, whoa, you know? Realistic, you’d think, okay, you’d find the show you like and stuff and listen to it.
\n\n\n\nBut as I was expanding the content I launched on June 5th with, there’s a website, there’s five shows and there’s some series under those five shows. And that still didn’t gel after I started getting in there and start rebranding it and working on it deeper, and I’m still working on it. I realised that what I’d like to do is eliminate the aspect of a show, so when they go there, it’s open channels, so it’s plural.
\n\n\n\nYou’ve got the three channels that I mentioned, and underneath all of those are series. So there’s several. Some of them, there’s quite a few series under open makers. There’s some under the other two channels. And the reason I did that is channels are a lot more flexible, and also series are incredibly flexible. If you have a show and you stop it, it’s like, bam, you know, people, oh, where did that go?
\n\n\n\nAnd I thought, what if I had these three umbrella channels that I could put series in? I could start them up. Some of them have been going on forever. Some may just go on a few months, but they’re part of that whole stream under that channel.
\n\n\n\nNow everybody can go there and get all the podcasts that come in, or they can actually subscribe to the three channels.
\n\n\n\nBut the series are just a variety under it. And I haven’t really, the series are often focused more when they happen, the name of the series. I mean, I decided putting all the series on the site would just confuse people more. It’d be like, oh, what?
\n\n\n\nThen they can go through and they’ll see, you know, if they look through the episodes, they’ll see the various series. I mean, there’s, under open makers, there’s Woo Product Chat, there’s WP Behind the Builds, there’s WP Agency Tracks. And a lot of those were pre-existing. And so the other channels as well will have specific series under it, like Open Web Conversations has a series on the fediverse. One is on, oh man, I should have written some of this down. I can’t even remember all the series.
\n\n\n\nAnyway, there’s a few under that and there’s a few under open source. And what the beauty of it is too with as many hosts as we have now, I don’t know if it’s like around 25 to 30 hosts. They can pop around in different channels and under different series, or they come up with an idea for a show and we basically do it, and I say, okay, where should I pop that under? I can pop it under a series. It just makes it a lot more flexible.
\n\n\n\nTalking about it makes it sound more confusing. Going to the site is a bit more cohesive. But the feedback I got from a lot of people, they loved the idea of the organisation and they loved the idea of expanding into more of the open web and open source stuff.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well, let’s get into that bit in a minute. But let’s just stick to the consumption of open channels. So if you go and subscribe in a podcast player, so, you know, typically on a phone or something like that, to this podcast, WP Tavern, it’s fairly straightforward. You either drop in the RSS feed, which is, you know, available, or you can type in WP Tavern, and that’s then saved. And every episode that we produce, including this one, will appear when it’s published.
\n\n\n\nHow are you doing it for openchannels.fm? Because you’ve obviously got three channels, and then there’s different shows and series which live under that. How is it consumed? Is there just one overall RSS feed which will get you the lot? Or can you say, okay, I only want to, I don’t know, consume the stuff about the open makers or the open web conversations? How does it work?
\n\n\n\n[00:15:55] Bob Dunn: Yeah. What I’ve done is, you can, if you want the fire hose, you can go to openchannels.fm, it has its own feed, and then I do the feed for each of the channels. Like you said, open makers, open source and open web conversations. I thought of going down even more to every series, but I thought that just confuses people more so, you know, it encapsulates what each of those channels are about.
\n\n\n\nI mean, open makers is, somebody said, yeah, you know, it’s about people in tech making stuff. You make stuff, even if it’s WordPress only. Sometimes it’s interesting to hear how other people are making stuff. And it opens it enough where it’s long, that long funnel of people that make things, you know, whether the developer, designer, their marketing stuff, whatever.
\n\n\n\nAnd so that was, yeah, I think that’s the best way to have people subscribe is, you know, they can get it all. But they can look at the three channels too. So if they go on their pod thing and look for open web conversations, that’s primarily what they’re interested in. What we’re talking about there, they can subscribe to that.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:04] Nathan Wrigley: Just from a, well, it’s not particularly technical, but from a slightly technical point of view, how do you manage that? If memory serves you’re using Castos, which is a sort of self-hosted, it’s a WordPress plugin, which binds your RSS feed into your WordPress website, but also carries the functionality to have different series and episodes all within the same WordPress website. I might have been kind of promoting that a bit, and it’s not the solution that you used, but I think it is.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:29] Bob Dunn: Yeah, it is. And so what it allows you to do, I could have actually created feeds for each series, but then I thought, is that going too granular? I mean, are you looking at all this stuff and thinking, so Open Web channel is like the default channel, I mean, openchannels.fm. Then you create three feeds for three shows or channels, which are the other three. And then when I do a series, I just choose to put it under whichever channel it should fall under.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:01] Nathan Wrigley: Right, okay. So you’ve basically got three places to go and update, and you can handle all of that in the WordPress admin and what have you. I should probably say that there’s a SaaS equivalent as well. You don’t have to use WordPress to make that happen, but it’s so tightly integrated with WordPress, it kind of makes sense.
\n\n\n\nThe other curious thing about it though is that for the longest time we were really familiar with you as a real significant piece of that jigsaw puzzle. You know, Bob would do the episodes. It is always Bob, in the same way that there’s always me on this. But with this, I think you said now you’re up to, did you say 25 or 15 co-hosts, something?
\n\n\n\n[00:18:36] Bob Dunn: 25-30 hosts.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:38] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s a lot. So you’ve got 25 other people who are helping you create the content. In effect, they have become you for these shows. They are the host, if you like, and they’re then interviewing people, and talking about whatever that episode may be about.
\n\n\n\nHow are you coping with that? How are you coping with no longer being behind the mic? And you’ve basically become a bit of a manager for a podcast network, which is curious.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:59] Bob Dunn: Yeah. Yeah, I’d like to, you know, I was talking to somebody about this and to me it was, it ended up being a goal that I didn’t know I wanted it to be a goal. You know, as I started to step back, I thought, well, you know, I’ve talked a lot over the years, I mean, more than anybody ever wanted to hear. I thought, well, maybe, you know, it’s time to get some other voices out there.
\n\n\n\nFor the time being, I’m still doing the opening, but I keep myself as forefront as, I guess you call founder or whatever, of the podcast channel. And I’m cool with it. I love hearing the different opinions. It just was a shift for me at some point where I had no problem with it. And I think testing it in the beginning, I think the first three, so I brought on Brad Williams at the very beginning, because I didn’t want to do it by myself. We were just doing co-hosts and then we continued for a while.
\n\n\n\nThen I brought on, later on I brought on Mendel Kurland, which at the time was GoDaddy, and Jonathan Wold who at the time, he was at WooCommerce, and now he has his own thing going on. And I would still be part of it, so it was the four of us. But I started liking the idea when I wasn’t part of it. It was fun to see somebody else take and run with it.
\n\n\n\nAnd so over that period of years, I became more and more confident with people. Now, it’s basically, unless I have an idea for a guest, a lot of them choose our guests. They choose a topic because they’ve done this long enough. They know what I like to hear. They know what not to do and to do. I keep it pretty open for them. And they love that freedom because they don’t have to, you know, they come in, they do the recording, all the production stuff is not their responsibility.
\n\n\n\nAnd I think it’s also helped them to get to know each other more. They’ve gotten to know other guests. It’s built their brands some, I hope. And it became a point where I was just like, I thought this is it, this just works. And I’ve been really lucky with the hosts I’ve had, because they’ve been excellent. I never have problems. I mean, it just is a nice flow and they’ve all become good friends and, yeah, it works.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think if you were looking at it from the outside, there are so many trip wires there where you think, well, that, couldn’t work. You know, 25 hosts, multiple shows, yeah, okay. Good luck with that.
\n\n\n\nBut obviously, the history that you’ve got doing the shows and turning up to WordPress events, presumably you kind of knew most of these people fairly well already, so you had that rapport and trust with each other.
\n\n\n\nBut it’s a lot to trust them to just get on with it. To be able to say, okay, here’s the time slot, go off, get your guests and then just hand me the recording at the end, I’ve got complete trust in you.
\n\n\n\nBut it does sound like you’ve still got your fingers in there a little bit with the kind of like the post-production and the editing, and finally making the episode into what it is and all of that, and shipping it. Do you ever see yourself stepping out to the point where you don’t even do that, where it’s just, there’s just this network?
\n\n\n\n[00:22:05] Bob Dunn: You know, I’d really like to kind of just have the role as founder. I mean, I’ve done a production and I’ve done this for, when we ran our other business before WordPress, the life and WordPress and stuff, we basically did everything, we didn’t have employees. So I’ve been doing this like over three decades.
\n\n\n\nYou know, I am at a point where, no, I think it’s time to step back from some of this production stuff. I would like to because it, yeah, it buries you. And when it picks up and you have quite a few shows in a row or something, there’s some serious work to do. And I get a little too over picky with editing, probably somebody could do it a lot quicker. I mean, I, it drives me nuts sometimes. I’m thinking, why am I spending this much time on it?
\n\n\n\nBut, yeah, I definitely am looking at some ways of doing that over the next few months. And looking at some other opportunities, but want to still be part of this, because it’s still my baby.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that’s incredible to have that level of trust. I’ve never yet managed to have that relationship where I thought that I wanted to step away. I think for me, the bit that I enjoy more than anything else is this bit that we’re doing now, the bit I’m having a chat with somebody. I really do like the one to one, or one to few. So the most I do is 2, 3, 4 really is the sort of ceiling, and that’s the bit that I like most.
\n\n\n\nAnd so the bit that you’ve stepped into, curiously, would be something that I would not really wish to be involved in. I’d rather just hand that off to somebody, but I do know what you mean.
\n\n\n\nYou have a perfectionist approach to the editing, and you can be halfway through it and think, I’ve just spent six hours and all I’ve done is remove empty space that nobody would’ve noticed. Anyway, it can be curious.
\n\n\n\nSo are you still iterating? Are you still willing to take on some new voices? Are you still open to people approaching you?
\n\n\n\n[00:23:57] Bob Dunn: Yeah, we are. Because I think with this new brand, it’s kind of, before I get into that, I was just going to mention is that when you rebrand, I’m finding there’s a ton of work with post rebranding, and another one of my picky little, I don’t know what you want to call it, is I started looking at the site and I thought, well, I want this site to reflect the new brand a hundred percent. I don’t want people to go back and get confused.
\n\n\n\nI’ve been changing the featured images on 670 episodes with the new brand. And, you know, that’s just, again, that’s me. But I want, it was quite a shift in rebranding and I want to make sure that, when they even go back, they see that, yes, I’m still on the same podcast, you know, I’m still on the same site so. Now I’ve lost track of what you asked.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:45] Nathan Wrigley: No, it’s okay. I’m actually going to pivot and just ask you a quick technical question, which is, did you close down your previous RSS feed, and rely on people finding the new one, or is there some clever way of moving people over?
\n\n\n\n[00:24:58] Bob Dunn: Yeah, you have to redirect it basically. It’s not a lot of steps, but it’s steps that if you don’t do it in the right order, it can really pretty much screw up everything. And right now, I am having a bit of challenge with some of the stuff moving over on Apple and the feeds and stuff, and I just put in a support question with them.
\n\n\n\nBut you basically, eventually I’ll shut down a show called Content Sparks and Do The Woo. Because they were, they’re now under Open Makers as a series, but I kind of got to make sure all the things are connected and working smoothly. So it’s something, if anybody ever does this, whoever’s hosting your podcast, talk to them and ask them questions until you feel confident to be able to do steps one through five, without blowing up your whole podcast.
\n\n\n\n[00:25:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s a bit like when you move a website, there’s loads of different bits and pieces that you’ve got to get right and in the correct order so that, I don’t know, your email carries on sending, and all the posts that you desperately want to be still in the search engine results, that kind of thing. Yeah, there’s a lot of hoops to jump through.
\n\n\n\nIn fact, so much so that a few kind of pivot ideas that I’ve had, not around WP Tavern, but around other podcasts that I do, I’ve kind of backed away just because the technical challenge was just not worth the time investment for the minor thing that I wanted to do.
\n\n\n\nAnyway, the question, returning to where we got to. The question was, are you still open to modifying what you do or have you solidified for a little period of time? In other words, if somebody catches sight of your podcast or listens to this one and thinks, do you know what I could contribute? I’ve got an idea in the open space that I would like to contribute. Are you still open to new hosts or is it really just guests now? Have you solidified on the hosts? Where are you at with all that?
\n\n\n\n[00:26:36] Bob Dunn: You know, the hosts, I think the hosts that are on it right now, they always have the option. I mean, they volunteer their time. I’m hoping they get rewarded by, you know, brand and exposure. And I know a lot of them have met a lot of people and built relationships that they never would’ve been able to because they actually talked with someone.
\n\n\n\nSo that’s another reason this particular structure of it now is so great because it’s so fluid. So it’s easy. If somebody comes in and has an idea, and it kind of gels and I think, okay, this is great, or maybe it exists with an idea I already have going or a series I do. Yeah, I’m always open to that because, you know, and some people kind of serve as, I don’t want to say substitute hosts, but they’re kind of there if I need to grab somebody, or I have an idea and it’s like, I need somebody to host this and this person would be good.
\n\n\n\nSo, yeah, kind of a long answer there, but I’m always open, because this is not, this is a reason to change this is to keep it fluid and make it sustainable basically, where it can continue to grow.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:42] Nathan Wrigley: So definitely not closed, but you’re happy with where things are at the moment. If the status quo was to continue, that would be great. But, you know, new voices is possible.
\n\n\n\nAgain, not just with the personnel, are you kind of fairly happy with the structure that you’ve got, the three channels that you’ve got now? Have you solidified more? Because it sounds like there’s, you know, been a couple of months of chopping and changing over there. Do you think you’ll stick with what you’ve got?
\n\n\n\n[00:28:02] Bob Dunn: Yeah, I think that’s definitely, it’s where it is because, like I said, I did something completely different in the rebrand in June, and since then I did something different again.
\n\n\n\nI think what happens is, when you rebrand and you start restructuring, what you thought was the right structure, you start looking at it and you think, oh, maybe this isn’t quite right. Maybe I should do it this way.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I talked to several people. Getting some opinions, it’s nice because sometimes I’m inside my own head and it’s like, I need somebody to tell me if I’m just stupid or it’s a wild idea or, yeah, this is good. So, yeah, I like the three structured channels because it gives me so much flexibility under those.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:45] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s pretty remarkable what you’ve managed to do. You know, you went from just many, many, many years ago, just beginning a podcast. And just hacking away at that for years and years and years. And now you’ve got this, kind of like little mini network.
\n\n\n\nBut also, I’m getting the intuition, I could be wrong about this, but I get the intuition that you’ve leaned into the word open so that you are no longer limited to just WordPress as a project. Is that the case? Are you going to be leaning into just other open source things, whether that’s other CMSs or, I don’t know, anything in the open source space? Is that in fact the case?
\n\n\n\n[00:29:19] Bob Dunn: Yeah, you know, I think what it is, in fact I was just talking to somebody, person that does accessibility, she wants to bring on somebody from Joomla and talk about accessibility because she’s under the open source channel. And exactly that. The impact of open source has been so huge and WordPress has been at the core of it. And WordPress will still be a big part of this podcast or this channels. And, yeah, I feel it’s healthy for my hosts. It’s healthy for everybody that listens, and everybody in the WordPress to hear about other stuff.
\n\n\n\nYou know, it just opens your mind. It has you thinking more about things and knowing what’s out there. And sometimes maybe you think, well, you know, I’m burned out on WordPress, but you hear some other stuff and you think, well, maybe it’s not so bad. You get a big picture of the open source and open web.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:11] Nathan Wrigley: There’s certainly no shortage of things to talk about if you go into open. I mean, obviously WordPress is such a large niche that you really can talk about that until the cows come home. But the you prize open the can of open source, you know, you really are a hundred x’ing the amount of things that you can talk about. So that’s kind of really nice that you can, well, you’ve basically got an infinite horizon of content to make in the near and distant future. And I don’t suppose open source is going anywhere in the short, medium, or long term. It’ll still be around.
\n\n\n\nOkay, speaking of short, medium, and long term, if you’ve taken yourself away from the mic on every occasion to being in a few, and then kind of now being in the minority of things, and we talked about how you enjoy kind of managing the whole thing, even though it sounds like there’s a lot of shepherding cats, let’s put it that way, in the background.
\n\n\n\nIs the intention for you to sort of get to the point where you can be invisible in this, well, certainly from a public facing point of view. You wouldn’t have your voice in any of them at some point, and you would be able to, I guess, silently kind of move away. Is this like an end game here? What’s going on?
\n\n\n\n[00:31:14] Bob Dunn: No, you know, I think I’m going to be involved, and the thing was built on my brand really. And I need to stay and keep my fingers in whatever way works for me. And, you know, I’m, I just turned 68, and I’m ready to do other things every once in a while like sit on a rock on the beach and look the water. You know, important things like that.
\n\n\n\nBut no, it’s, I like looking at it as still being the face of it, but maybe, can I say not so much the voice of it? I’m out there, I’m still, you know, a huge part of it, and probably as long as I have my fingers in it, I’ll occasionally do little short podcasts. Right now, I do some on the updates on the site and, you know, I might even whip up something like, you know, thoughts from the founder, I don’t know.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:03] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I like it, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:05] Bob Dunn: Yeah, something like that. So there’s, I don’t want to just become invisible because it really, how a lot of people have known this, and how I’ve built it is through my personal brand, and I think that’s important to stay intact with it. So I’m not going away anytime soon. And yeah, just need to reevaluate how many hours I put into it and how I can make it, again, more productive and sustainable. Because, you know, if I’m sick, who’s to do the production?
\n\n\n\n[00:32:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. When it was just you, you could just say, well, I’m not to record that one. I’ll just skip a week. But now that you’ve got like these 25 other hosts, you’ve got to kind of manage all of that. Oh, that’s really interesting. And of course, you’ve got to put time in the calendar to sit on the rock on the beach as well.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:47] Bob Dunn: Yeah, I know. I’ve got to get that in there, you know. It’s very important.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:52] Nathan Wrigley: How does this whole thing hang together from a financial point of view then? So is it a sponsorship relationship? Do you onboard sponsors to keep the whole thing, because obviously, you know, it’s trying to, you’re trying to support yourself in all of this. How does that work?
\n\n\n\n[00:33:03] Bob Dunn: Yeah, it’s basically sponsorship. And the sponsorship model, but ever since I started this podcast, in fact, before I started this one and did another one before that, I started having sponsors right away.
\n\n\n\nAnd if your podcast is your main source of income, you got to have something. So yeah, it’s sponsorships. I am sure you relate to it yourself. And, you know, unless you’re famous and they just roll in, or you can get like a million subscribers paying $5 a month or something like that.
\n\n\n\nSo, yeah, we’re constantly looking for sponsors. And I’ve changed the model so many times over the years. And it’ll probably change a little bit here again soon. So it’s never capped at a certain number. That might be capped for a period of time. But, yeah, it’s a constant flex and it’s hard work. And that’s all I can say.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I will just drop the URL for that. So if you’re interested from this conversation, if you’re interested in getting on as a sponsor for the openchannels.fm network, it’s the regular URL, openchannels.fm, but then append to the end of that, /sponsors, plural, or you can just find it in the main menu at the top of the site. That will also get you there and, yeah, you’ll be able to find out more about how you might make the journey into sponsoring that podcast.
\n\n\n\nWell, Bob, I know that you are a busy man. You’ve got 25 cohosts to shepherd and lots of editing to do, and dare I say it, sitting on a rock on the beach is also going to feature at some point during the day as well.
\n\n\n\nSo thank you so much for chatting to me today. Once more, if you want to check out what Bob is doing with all of his co-hosts and his new structure, go to openchannels.fm to find out more. Bob Dunn, thank you so much for chatting to me today.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:47] Bob Dunn: Thank you. Always a pleasure.
\nOn the podcast today we have Bob Dunn.
\n\n\n\nBob is a long-standing figure in the WordPress community, having branded himself as BobWP back in 2010. With nearly two decades of experience in WordPress, Bob has become one of the most recognisable voices in WordPress podcasting, producing shows that have educated, inspired, and connected countless developers, builders, and enthusiasts. Most recently, he\u2019s launched Open Channels FM, a rebrand and expansion from his well-known \u201cDo the Woo\u201d podcast, which was originally focused on WooCommerce but now explores broader topics around the open web, open source, and the wider maker community.
\n\n\n\nBob talks about his journey in podcasting, from running Do the Woo for almost seven years, to the decision to rebrand and launch Open Channels FM. He explains why he felt it was time to broaden the focus, welcoming listeners from outside of just the WooCommerce and WordPress ecosystem, and how that led to a network approach with multiple channels and series.
\n\n\n\nBob describes how Open Channels is structured. Rather than traditional shows, the \u2018network\u2019 features three flexible channels, Open Makers, Open Source Reach, and Open Web Conversations, each hosting a variety of series. This lets content stay organised and evergreen, and accommodates the 25 to 30 rotating hosts with the freedom to produce series across different topics.
\n\n\n\nBob talks about the challenges and rewards of handing over the mic, stepping into more of a managerial and founder role, and how he\u2019s building a sustainable, collaborative podcasting network.
\n\n\n\nWe discuss Bob\u2019s technical approach as well, including how he uses WordPress to manage multiple RSS feeds and subscriptions, making it easy for listeners to follow specific channels, or get the firehose of all content. Bob also shares insights on rebranding a podcast, managing redirects, retaining audiences, updating hundreds of featured images, and ensuring continuity without confusing listeners.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re interested in open source, podcasting, or building community-driven content, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, what goes into organizing a flagship WordCamp.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Karla Campos. Karla has been involved in the WordPress community for over 10 years. Starting out in Miami, and taking part in meetups and word camps before stepping into larger organizational roles. With a background in media and marketing, Karla brings plenty of experience in both web and events to the world of WordPress.
\n\n\n\nKarla joins us today as a lead organizer for the upcoming WordCamp US 2025, which will take place in Portland at the end of August. Remarkably, this is her first flagship WordCamp, and she’s organizing before ever attending.
\n\n\n\nWe discuss what motivated Karla to take on this major responsibility, how she balances the volunteer work with her professional life, and the challenges, expected and unexpected, along the way.
\n\n\n\nWe discuss the organization of such a huge event from working with a professional production company to handling the logistics, communications, accessibility requests, visas, and more, for a thousand plus attendees. Karla shares how the community side of the event is managed, the late night worries, and what it really takes, both in time and personal commitment, to make a WordCamp US happen, especially as a volunteer.
\n\n\n\nShe also highlights some of the initiatives for this year’s event, renewed efforts to welcome students and first time attendees, including student ticket pricing and the WP Trail Buddies Program to help newcomers feel at home. She also teases the introduction of a hackathon style contributor today, and new remote collaboration options.
\n\n\n\nIf you’ve ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes of a WordCamp US, how it’s organized, how volunteers are supported, and what motivates people like Karla to invest their own time and resources, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Karla Campos.
\n\n\n\nI am joined on the podcast by Karla Campos. Hello, Karla.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:21] Karla Campos: Hello. How are you, Nathan?
\n\n\n\n[00:03:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good thank you. Very nice for you to join us today. I really appreciate it. Karla’s here today, we’re going to talk about WordCamp US, which is happening in Portland. Actually, I was going to say later this month, almost later this month. We’re recording it right at the very, very end July, 2025. It’s taking place toward the end of August, 2025. So it’s pretty soon.
\n\n\n\nBut before we get into that, Karla, will you just give us your little potted bio. Tell us who you are, what you do in the WordPress space, and maybe very quickly just tell us how the heck you came to be organising a WordCamp, one of these flagship WordCamps.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:56] Karla Campos: I always like to say that my involvement in projects sometimes comes about serendipitously. Just kind of like, hey, look, I saw that on the internet, it looked interesting, and I decided to join.
\n\n\n\nI actually have about more than 10 years with the WordPress community in Miami. When I first moved to Florida, I started going to meetup groups and then I met the WordPress Miami organisers and started really getting involved with them.
\n\n\n\nMy ex-colleague and coworker, her name was Jackie Jimenez, she unfortunately passed away, but we had a lot of great moments building things together in the WordPress Miami community. And when I saw the announcement online, I said, you know, she would’ve loved to do this with me. Let me check it out. And then that’s how I kind of just decided to join the organizer group.
\n\n\n\nSo I’ve been with WordPress for over 10 years. I’ve been working in marketing. I used to work for Telemundo here in the Florida area. I used to work for iHeartRadio. So I have a lot of the media marketing background as well as the working on websites and copy. So I’ve been around for a while, just I’m more of like a quiet, in the background type of person.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:09] Nathan Wrigley: And have you attended any of these flagship, so the flagship ones are obviously WordCamp Asia, WordCamp Europe, WordCamp US. Have you attended any of those flagship ones in the past?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:18] Karla Campos: Is it odd that this is my first flagship and I’m organising it?
\n\n\n\n[00:05:21] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s great.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:22] Karla Campos: It feels almost surreal.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:23] Nathan Wrigley: So just before we hit record, you said that, I don’t know, something like a month ago, you caught wind of the fact that WordCamp US still needed some volunteers. Have I got that about right? It’s about a month ago that you became involved in the organisation of the upcoming event.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:38] Karla Campos: I would say May, I think May. You know, the dates are all come together. We don’t even know what month it is. Because we’re working on it so much in the backend. So I would say around May, when I first saw the, or when I got pulled into the organiser group.
\n\n\n\n[00:05:53] Nathan Wrigley: Since then, has it kind of taken over your life? I don’t mean that to sort of sound disparaging, but has it kind of crept in into all the different parts of your life? So you’ve basically got no free time left anymore.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:04] Karla Campos: It has because you’d think, okay, you know, even because we do have a production team that’s helping organise the event to make sure it’s properly handled for all the attendees, because we do expect around a thousand, it’s always been that amount for a flagship.
\n\n\n\nSo we have a production company working on the backend helping us with the production to make sure everything is smooth. But still, with that going on, I still feel like at 2:00 AM I’m thinking WordCamp US, WordCamp US. I know there’s something I have to do. So yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:34] Nathan Wrigley: Let’s split out what the production company do first of all. So I genuinely don’t know what that even means. So, a production company, I’m guessing you offload something, all the tasks that you can to them. I’m guessing they’re a commercial entity and they get paid to fulfill whatever contractual obligations that you’ve got. What is it that they handle? And then we’ll get into what the community side of things, the team of community, volunteers, and so on are doing.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:59] Karla Campos: So the production team is making sure that the venue and everything that happens at the venue is organised. So from some of the room logistics, so more on the venue side, that they’re handling that part to make sure that we can handle everything else that comes with organising, including all the planning around contributor day, showcase day, the photographers. So that’s our side, and then their side, the production team, is more of venue logistics.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:27] Nathan Wrigley: And so do they handle things like, oh, I don’t know, the building of the sponsor booths and things like that? Because when you attend these events, there’s a very, very professional feel to them. So it’s not like you just show up and, you know, it’s kind of thrown together at the last minute. It really does feel, when you actually stop and think about it, you have a great sense of, gosh, there’s months, possibly years of organising that’s gone on in the background. Is it that kind of thing? You know, making sure that essentially when you walk in, everything looks right, everything that you can see, they do.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:57] Karla Campos: Yes. And then Megan Marcel, which is my co-lead organiser, she’s heading that part. So she’s managing that production company to make sure the venue and all the booths are on point, that they look like what they cost. Because, you know, those booths and everything that the sponsors spend, it’s not cheap things. They’re very luxurious. Sometimes more than others. But yeah, so she’s making sure that that’s covered with the production team. That it looks a hundred percent what the sponsors expect.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:25] Nathan Wrigley: And, okay then, let’s flip to the more community side. So everything that is not part of the production team’s remit. What are some of the tasks that you are finding yourself worrying about at 2:00 AM in the morning?
\n\n\n\n[00:08:36] Karla Campos: Actually just making sure the communications, and all the attendees are getting service. So I am the lead organiser in charge of communications and marketing, and I have other team leaders under me, like Caroline Harrison, who is the team lead for the attendee communications. So we’re getting a lot of requests when it comes to accessibility, food that they have allergies or that they need visas.
\n\n\n\nA lot of traffic, of course, right now, I told you we had about 730 attendees already registered, so that email traffic is coming into our teams. So I’m just like, I saw an email and I know my team handled it, and I know they’re prompt but, you know, I wake up at 2:00 AM. Did I answer that email? Was that a nightmare? Did I miss something?
\n\n\n\nThat’s how it’s been in my life, you know, like I’m having these nightmares that I didn’t do something, but I did, because I’m a very responsible individual. But it just feels like that. It’s become so intertwined in my life that I’m having nightmares that I didn’t do a task.
\n\n\n\n[00:09:33] Nathan Wrigley: When you get involved in the WordPress community, there’s obviously so many bits and pieces that you can get involved in, but very many of them don’t really, at the beginning, at least anyway of community involvement, don’t necessarily have crunch points in time. Obviously, as you get more into the community, there might be moments. You might be, I don’t know, a release lead or something like that, in which case there will be a date in the calendar where things have got to be all tied off.
\n\n\n\nBut mostly, there’s never that calendar moment where everything’s got to be finished. But you very, very much are faced with a ticking clock, aren’t you? Because come the date that the first people are arriving, the attendees are arriving, and presumably, before that the production team need to get in, and set up all the sponsor booths and make sure all of that’s taken care of and what have you.
\n\n\n\nThat’s a curious thing. So the stress, I guess, does pile up a little bit. And it would behoove all of us who attend events like this, just to pause for a moment and remember that it is done by a bunch of volunteers who have this ticking time bomb, if you know what I mean, in the back, where everything’s got to be finished by a certain date. And so I would just like to express my gratitude for the fact that you’ve stepped up basically and tried to fulfill that role. Appreciate it.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:40] Karla Campos: Thank you. I appreciate the nice kind words, because it’s been a little bit hectic and, you know, it’s good to hear that people appreciate your work.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:48] Nathan Wrigley: Have you actually had a chance to go around the building yet? I know we discussed this prior to hitting record, but is this more of a kind of, you’ll be showing up the first time in the same way that everybody else will, or have you managed to sort of walk the floorboards as it were?
\n\n\n\n[00:11:00] Karla Campos: Like I mentioned earlier, but we weren’t live, I’ve seen personally the venue in virtual tours and et cetera, but I’m coming to the Oregon area a week before. So I’ll be there earlier to see the venue. Go through the walkthroughs and do what the team does earlier, so that everything’s on point. But from what I’ve seen, everything’s going great.
\n\n\n\n[00:11:22] Nathan Wrigley: Do you get any sort of remuneration for any of the work that you do? So by remuneration, I’m specifically talking about finance. Does anything get offset? So for example, if you are based in Florida, presumably you’re going to be hopping on a plane, and there’ll be the food that you’ve got to eat during the time that you’re there, and the accommodation, the hotels and so on. Does somebody at the level of volunteering that you have nominated yourself for, does any of that get offset, or is this completely voluntary, where you’ve got to dig into your pocket for every single expense?
\n\n\n\n[00:11:50] Karla Campos: This is voluntary. So yeah, I’m just putting in from my end to support the community. So if ever you are planning on joining something like the WordCamp organisation groups, it usually is a volunteer thing. There are some scholarships but that’s, you have to apply for and it’s very competitive. So I don’t think everyone gets one. But yeah, no, everything that I’m putting in personally is through my own finances.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, again, obviously I gave you some thanks a moment ago and I’m about to do it again. Thank you for that commitment as well, because it’s not nothing. You know, going to Portland on an airplane from where you are, you know, it’s all the way across the country. It’s not a cheap place to reside in. Accommodation in and around the venue is probably at a premium, you know, it’s summertime, everything’s quite expensive around there. So it’s not inconsiderable, and there is an impact to that. So again, once again, thank you for taking the time, and also allocating the funds to make that possible. Obviously, events like this cannot happen without people like you doing it.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:51] Karla Campos: Yes. And I think they must be done. You know, sometimes we have to make sacrifices to bring together something that brings people together around WordPress, which powers people’s businesses, their livelihoods. So, you know, I don’t mind putting in when I know that I make an impact in a community and helping those people with their livelihoods.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:12] Nathan Wrigley: Now you said that this all began for you in May, and we could get into what it was that exactly prompted you to do that. It sounds like somebody kind of sent something in your direction, which you responded to. So what have we had May, June, July, basically, you’ve been into this for a couple of months.
\n\n\n\nAny intuitions now of regret? That’s probably not something that we want to get into too much, but do you know what I mean? If you could rewind the clock to, let’s say April during 2025, did you get into this with your eyes wide open, or has it ended up being much more of a task than you imagined? What I’m basically trying to ask is, are there any bits of this that you think, gosh, I didn’t really anticipate that was going to be involved? This is way more than I was imagining biting off.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:54] Karla Campos: Yeah, the time required to do all the work that needs to be done, and I’m a confident person, so I went in this, I have experience organising events for Telemundo, big concerts of 50,000 people plus. So I went in confident thinking, I got this. But as I got more into it, I just started to notice, okay, well, this is taking a lot of my time that I wasn’t prepared for.
\n\n\n\nBut I’ve adapted and I’m good now. It’s been a rollercoaster ride, but it’s fun for me because I’m that type of person who enjoys the challenge.
\n\n\n\nYeah, it’s been fun, it’s been unexpected for sure. So we’ve had ups and downs, but we’re getting through it, you know, and that’s the fun of a rollercoaster ride, so yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:31] Nathan Wrigley: What are some of the things that you didn’t anticipate? Obviously, you said it’s ended up being more time, so yeah, more time has been required of you. But what beyond that? What are some of the things that you didn’t anticipate that you would need to do, that you have in fact ended up doing?
\n\n\n\n[00:14:44] Karla Campos: I think all the time spent talking to people, it’s been really crazy. So I think I just didn’t anticipate the timing. So I think I originally volunteered for about 10 hours per week. Leading up to the event I think, a week before the event we’re supposed, or a month before the event, we’re supposed to be putting more in time, but this feels like a full-time job.
\n\n\n\nOh my gosh, you know, like I just didn’t anticipate for that. So it’s been kind of, like we talked about before, merging with my normal life where I’m just like, oh wait, my to-do list for my regular projects, and my family and everything is now part of WordCamp, if that makes sense.
\n\n\n\n[00:15:19] Nathan Wrigley: So during the onboarding process that you’ve had over the last couple of months, how have you learnt what you needed to know? Because this event, I mean, it can’t have been thrown together in the last couple of months. Presumably you came along and joined at some point where many things had been set in motion. But how did you acquire the knowledge that you needed to do the work that you are now doing? Who taught you all of this and so on?
\n\n\n\n[00:15:43] Karla Campos: Well, we do get the last year’s folder with all the information. So it came about from a lot of reading, asking past team members. So we do have some people who were part of the organizing team last year. Gail Wallace, one of our co-leads, she’s doing contributor day, she’s doing photography, she’s also helping with the lead organising. So she was very helpful in just kind of letting us know about the previous year.
\n\n\n\nWe have mentors like Kevin Christiano and Aaron Campbell from hosting.com, who also worked with WordCamps in the past. And there are mentors who we can always contact on Slack. So we do a lot of work on Slack, and we can always message them back and forth with any information any, hey, we need help with this. They’re always there to just say, hey, this would be a better practice from our experience last year. So we do have mentors there that help us, and that’s been a big relief.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:37] Nathan Wrigley: How much time do you imagine, if I was to ask you on a, let’s go for a weekly basis. At the moment, so we’re three-ish weeks away from the event, something like that, how much time are you spending during the previous week? So the last seven days, how many hours do you think you’ve clocked up working towards this event?
\n\n\n\n[00:16:53] Karla Campos: At least, I would say 30 hours.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:55] Nathan Wrigley: Wow, okay. And so that then presumably has had a material impact upon the regular work that you do. Now, either you are just superhuman and can add 30 hours into your working week with no perceived, you know, there’s just, that’s fine. I can just add 30 hours in. Most of us, including myself, could not do that. I would have to kind of offset one thing with the other. Have you done that? Has it had an impact on the business, the work that you normally do? Have you had to sort of downgrade the amount of time you’ve been spending recently on that kind of work?
\n\n\n\n[00:17:22] Karla Campos: Not on my business, more on my free time, so I’m not getting out this summer to the pool as I would have last year. But luckily, we’re having a super heat wave in Florida, so it’s too hot outside anyway.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:33] Nathan Wrigley: It’s like it’s been planned, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:35] Karla Campos: It’s been planned. The universe is putting a heat wave out there, so now I can’t outside in the pool, but I would probably still take my devices out there.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:42] Nathan Wrigley: Has the team had any concerns around attendee numbers? Because I remember I went to this event last year, and I actually don’t know what the numbers are, but I’m going to guess it was in the region of, I don’t know, 1,300 to 1,500, something like that, attendees.
\n\n\n\nThere’s obviously been a lot of controversy in the WordPress space since that event. I wondered if there has been some anxiety? I have a recollection that the event, the planning of the event probably would’ve been happening earlier than it did for this event.
\n\n\n\nSo I’m just wondering if you could speak to that, whether or not the team itself are happy with the numbers that you’ve got so far? And whether or not things are kind of late in the planning, let’s put it that way. Do you feel that it’s all being put together in a rushed way?
\n\n\n\n[00:18:23] Karla Campos: No, I think we’re on track. I mean, we expected the event to be smaller this year because there have been discussions around different things that are happening in just the space, like traveling restrictions, people being scared to fly to the US, different things that we knew it was going to make the numbers less.
\n\n\n\nBut right now we’re up to 730 registered attendees. So we are planning for a thousand attendees. That’s our goal. Hopefully more. But yeah, we expected that it was going to be a little bit less than last year for the various reasons, including the travel restrictions and things that people do not want to come to the US for.
\n\n\n\nBut, Portland is ultimately a very friendly place and I think our concern is that everyone is safe and happy at the event. So I think we’re doing a very good job with that right now.
\n\n\n\n[00:19:11] Nathan Wrigley: I guess also there’s maybe, the fact that an event like this has happened in the previous year at the exact same venue. There’s maybe a little bit that would be squandered there, if you know what I mean?
\n\n\n\nSo the idea that you’d get a similar number of the exact same people, plus others, coming back to the same venue. I know for me at least anyway, it is quite nice to have the opportunity to go to different places. I’m going to be in attendance, so it hasn’t put me off. I’m still going to be there. But I think some people do like the fact that, you know, it’s in Portland one year and it’s in, I don’t know, Texas or California or whatever it may be in different years.
\n\n\n\nSo maybe that kind of speaks into it a little bit as well. But yeah, the whole thing around traveling to the US, plus the obvious problems that we’ve had in the WordPress space around the community and so on. And then maybe this third piece of it being in the same venue and in the same location, maybe all of those conspire to not make it as big as last year. But still, a thousand, which seems to be the target number, is pretty credible.
\n\n\n\nDo you anticipate getting to a thousand? Is the trajectory at the moment, if you were to map that forward, do you think you’ll actually manage that? Despite the fact that it’s an aspirational target? Are you fairly confident you’ll get there?
\n\n\n\n[00:20:14] Karla Campos: Yeah, I’m confident. But I told you earlier, I’m a confident person, I’m always thinking positive. And we do have a lot of student initiatives, because we want to bring more people into the WordPress community, more students that perhaps haven’t even had the opportunity to experience WordPress, and the community, and how that can help them build their career.
\n\n\n\nSo, our topic is sort of like the future of WordPress. And we’re doing a lot of student initiatives so that, you know, everybody gets a little bit of that WordPress community feel and that would, there’s a lot of students very interested, so I think we can reach the number.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:48] Nathan Wrigley: I certainly hope so. I mean, when you say students, I’m presuming from that, that you mean younger people by that as well. So not just people that are in education, but really aiming that target at young people in education.
\n\n\n\nIt always struck me when you go to these events that the demographic definitely skews older. I don’t mean, you know, particularly old, but you don’t tend to find a bunch of 18 to 20 year olds wandering around in large proportion.
\n\n\n\nIt seems to me, it’s definitely in the late twenties, early thirties, forties, fifties and and upwards. So that’s been a definite charge that you’ve had then has it, to try and get younger people? Have I got that right? When you said student, did you mean younger people?
\n\n\n\n[00:21:29] Karla Campos: Well, we are working with colleges because they’re very interested in how AI and WordPress are evolving, and everything that’s going around that. And through our event, the teachers that work at the colleges are very excited to connect the students with the future of the web and whatever’s happening with web development and AI.
\n\n\n\nThey’re really interested in sending the students there because even though they’re educators, they’re not the innovators. So they want to come to WordCamp to connect with those innovators, including Google. Google’s liaison of search, Danny Sullivan, that was amazing to the students. They wanted to meet people in charge of the tech industry and connect there. So I’m talking about those students, yeah, the students that are in the tech industry that want to connect with the industry leaders.
\n\n\n\n[00:22:17] Nathan Wrigley: I think things work slightly differently over here in the UK, but I know that in the US there’s this sort of concept of college credits, where you do a certain thing and it can count towards part of your educational program. You know, you can tick some boxes and it will get you to jump over some hurdles.
\n\n\n\nDo you know if an event like WordCamp, in this case WordCamp US, do you know if an event like that can count? And does that in some way then kind of make it slightly easier to sell a WordPress event into that student marketplace, if you like?
\n\n\n\n[00:22:47] Karla Campos: It can, depending on the teachers. Some of the universities and colleges already have their structured standards on how credits work. But if we’re working with the teachers, sometimes they have summer school projects that they get extra credit, that helps their grades. So we can tie that in with that.
\n\n\n\nWe’re welcome to working with any teacher who wants to help their students grow their career and willing to give them extra credit and opportunities. So it depends on the college and the teacher and what already they have established.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, like I said, we don’t kind of operate that system, certainly for WordCamp US, I don’t think that would particularly count. But I know that those kind of systems exist.
\n\n\n\nJust pivoting to you a little bit and the work that you did in the past. Obviously it sounds like you’ve got a heritage in being involved in sizable events, credible events in the tech space, and perhaps other spaces as well.
\n\n\n\nWhat do you make of this event? How do you sort of see it? Do you see it as a sort of professional tech event, something that you may have attended on behalf of organisations that you were working for before? Or is this much more of a kind of community event?
\n\n\n\nI can’t really sum up the exact target of what I’m trying to say there, but I’m just really after a feel of what you make of the event in terms of whether it’s more, I don’t know, more friendly, a little bit less business orientated, and perhaps skewing more to community, that kind of thing.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:05] Karla Campos: I think it’s a little bit of both. It is a friendlier atmosphere from the different tech events that I’ve been involved in that feel more serious. Because when you go to a WordCamp, you automatically feel that it’s a little friendlier, a little bit less corporate.
\n\n\n\nYes, everyone is very skilled. They’re very like awesome in their profession, but they’re also very down to earth and just willing to, hey, share a tidbit here, a tip here. I’ve even seen people help other people with their websites live at the events. Hey, look, I’m having a problem with my website. It’s not doing something on mobile. It’s not responding the way I want it to. It’s not responsive. Can you help me? And someone will stop and say, yeah, let’s sit down here in this corner. Let’s go to that room, and let me look at it and help you a little bit. And it’s something that I don’t see at other conferences where people have this community feel. So I’ve always admired that about WordCamps.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s really hard to encapsulate, isn’t it? What that thing is. But that thing is a thing. And what I mean by that is there is some quality of community spirit that definitely hasn’t existed at any event that I’ve been to outside of the WordPress space. It feels a little bit more like, heads down, you’re there for work, you must concentrate entirely on work, and maybe you’ll attend some kind of, I don’t know, after party or something like that. But again, the entire purpose of that will be business, business as usual.
\n\n\n\nAnd there is much more of sense of camaraderie. And really, I suppose if somebody is listening to this and is kind of on the fence about these events, definitely I would draw your attention to that fact. And although if you are perhaps slightly more on the introverted side, it doesn’t necessarily make it a hundred percent easier to attend, and this feeling that you’ll just suddenly be embraced by everybody in the hallway, it probably won’t work that way. But there is definitely a more friendly atmosphere. There’s a different, and dare I say it, vibe going on, which I have always really appreciated. It definitely feels less corporate, more friendly. There’s more of an opportunity to make friendships, for want of a better way of describing it.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:07] Karla Campos: Yes. And also, I’m sure you know Michelle Frechette.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:10] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:11] Karla Campos: I think everyone knows Michelle. She’s organising something called WP Trail Buddies. So she’s actually connecting veteran WordCamp attendees with new attendees, so that they can have like a friend, a buddy at the WordCamp that they can do things with, so they don’t feel alone and they feel welcome.
\n\n\n\nSo that’s a new thing, and that sounds, you know, if a person is coming to WordCamp for the first time, they can go that route, you know, they can actually have somebody there with them.
\n\n\n\n[00:26:37] Nathan Wrigley: I would draw everybody’s attention, if you’ve never been to one of these flagship WordPress events before, there is something particularly good about this Portland one. And the thing that I enjoyed so much last year, I enjoyed the event, but the venue itself was so brilliant, so enormous. There was never this hint of falling over people. There was quite literally acres of space to mill around.
\n\n\n\nAnd so the hallway track felt very much, you know, you could take five minutes out and go and sit in the corner over there and get on with your own stuff, what have you. But this would be a really good one to attend. So I would definitely advise people, if you’re on the fence and you kind of think, I maybe should go, I’m not entirely sure. Everything is geared up. We know what that place is like, the conference center is absolutely magnificent. So I would definitely urge people who are wavering, who aren’t entirely sure to give it a go.
\n\n\n\nAnd I will put a link into the show notes for the initiative that Michelle Frechette is leading, the WP Trail Buddies. And if you’ve got concerns about showing up and just hanging out and feeling a little bit isolated, then Michelle will be able to introduce you to somebody who has been there, done that, for want of a better word. Again, another reason to have a little look.
\n\n\n\nAnd the tickets are really inexpensive. It’s not nothing, but at the moment, I don’t think there’s going to be any change in this. But it’s a flat hundred bucks. And, in all honesty, you’ll probably eat more than a hundred dollars worth of food in the time that you’re there. So the ticket price is just absurdly low.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:02] Karla Campos: Yes, and we do also have a student pricing of $25, if the students show ID, or proof that they’re enrolled in school. So that’s also like an amazing deal.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:12] Nathan Wrigley: Now, the events often have a bit of a formula to them. There’ll be presentations, and they will run over a couple of days. So you’ll pick various tracks and you can go and see this person, and then come out into the hallway and hang out in the hallway.
\n\n\n\nBut then also there’s this idea of contributor day. And in contributor day, typically you would select a table, that table will be aligned to some core part of the project. So it could be photography, it could be Core, it could be, I don’t know, polyglots, something like that. And you would allocate your time and decide to work on that for the day.
\n\n\n\nI have a feeling that you are doing something a little bit different on contributor day this time around. Do you know about that? Do you want to speak about that?
\n\n\n\n[00:28:51] Karla Campos: We are, but it’s a secret.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:53] Nathan Wrigley: Is it? Okay.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:54] Karla Campos: No, it’s a hackathon, but Gail Wallace is going to speak more about that in the coming weeks. So we’re just waiting for her to share all the information about what she’s been working on with that.
\n\n\n\nBut there is something new, which is collaborating remotely for the Testing Team. So that’s fun. That hasn’t been done before.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:14] Nathan Wrigley: So the Testing Team will be open to kind of like a, more of like a Zoom approach. So it won’t just be people that are attending in the room. They’ll be able to offer the opportunity for people to join live, but remotely. Yeah, that’s really nice. That’s a really nice idea.
\n\n\n\nThe hackathon, I was lucky enough to go to a hackathon earlier this year. I attended CloudFest in Germany, in Rust in Germany. Obviously you are not able to reveal whether you know or otherwise what that will involve. For the people listening to this, I’ll just give you some indication of what that might involve.
\n\n\n\nAnd a hackathon, rather than just showing up and deciding on the spur of the moment what it is that you’re going to be involved with. A hackathon is more of a kind of project based thing, where you come to the hackathon with a project that you would like to see finished in a certain way. So you might come and say, during the next day, we’re going to try and do this thing, so we’re going to move from here to here.
\n\n\n\nAnd in that way, everybody coalesces on the exact same purpose, and tries to push that thing over the line. And in the hackathons that I’ve been to, again, there’s this sort of slightly tongue in cheek, fun, competitive edge as well, where at the end of the day, different people from the different teams sort of stand up and say exactly what they did and how they did.
\n\n\n\nAnd then there’s kind of like a voting, there’s a panel of people who decide who the, and I’m doing air quotes, who the winner is. So, again, obviously I’m not going to try and get you to reveal any details, but that kind of component, if it is anything like that, that really does bring something new and a bit of fun, I think.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:40] Karla Campos: Yeah, I think people enjoy, when it’s friendly competition on something that they’re passionate about building, I think they enjoy that, like sports. So it’s exciting.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s a good way of describing it, sporty, competitive edge kind of thing, isn’t it? Just sort of rehashing a bit of a question I asked a minute ago though. Obviously, like I said, you’ve been involved in these kind of events before in different spheres. Is there anything that you think, if you were to rerun your time, and maybe you’ll be involved in next year’s WordCamp US, I don’t know. Is there anything where you think, do you know what, I think we could try this, or we should jettison that? Obviously nobody’s implying that you are going to be the decision maker in any of this, but are there any bits and pieces that you think, well, we should definitely try that, or we should definitely maybe lose that?
\n\n\n\n[00:31:23] Karla Campos: I think we’ve had so many ideas, and we were all just kind of thrown together as a new team. And there were so many ideas flying around that we just couldn’t get to. So we’re doing the best ones that we thought about, but like there were so many others that we could’ve included.
\n\n\n\nSo I’m not sure if I’m going to be joining next year or not, I haven’t planned that out yet. But I think we’re going to at least have a discussion with the organisers about just kind of like looking back, hey, what did we like. Let’s leave little notes for the next year’s organising team so that they can, you know, they can know what to expect.
\n\n\n\nBut now we have a roadmap together as a team. So I think it’s fun. And we’ll be way more prepared next year and add more fun stuff that we just didn’t have time for. But we’re all very creative, so you know how those discussions go when everybody’s creative, throwing ideas. And it’s like, all right, we have to pick just three because all of these are great but, you know, we’re on a time constraint, so we just execute these.
\n\n\n\nSo I think it’s been fun all around. But yeah, just kind of getting all the ideas that we had together and executing them next year.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:23] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s kind of an important moment for these kind of events because they’ve been running largely on the same format for a really long time. And there’s definitely, in events outside of the WordPress space, there definitely are some of these fun ideas kind of creeping in, making it a little bit more entertainment, if you know what I mean, at the same time as being educational and informative. And I think it would be interesting to sound some of those different organisations out. Maybe go to the different events like DrupalCon and things like that, and see how they do things differently. See how sponsorship works and so on and so forth.
\n\n\n\nNow, one question, which I think probably will be rounding off the episode, if that’s all right with you, would be to ask you, when does your involvement with this end? And I don’t mean, you know, that you might get involved next year. Because obviously I’m going to attend, and the minute the whole thing is finished, it’s kind of more or less over for me. I may go back to the hotel or spend a few days in Portland having a look around or what have you. But for me, the event has kind of finished at that moment. For you, I’m guessing that’s not the case. Do you have any anticipation of what it will involve in terms of collapsing the event down? At what point it will be considered to be finished by the team?
\n\n\n\n[00:33:28] Karla Campos: Well, physically we have to be out by a certain date and everything cleaned out. So I am planning to stay there a little bit longer to handle that with the rest of the team. But I think we should be done by the 31st. Everything should be cleared out, physically.
\n\n\n\nBut then of course we’re going to reunite and just kind of have a meeting and talk about the experience. And like we were talking about, what can we do better next year? And I think maybe, I think we’re still going to be in talks at least two weeks after the event is over to kind of close that out as a team.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So it definitely doesn’t end on the day that it’s going to end for me. So, yeah, there’s another example of the amount that people like you are doing.
\n\n\n\nI would just draw attention to the fact that clearly this is not an event which is being organised entirely by you. There’s obviously a huge team of people going on in the background. And it would be remiss of us not to thank all of them. Can’t mention them all by name, but if you go to the website, I’m sure there’ll be places where you can go and find out who is involved in the team.
\n\n\n\nDon’t forget that if you want to get tickets and you’re a student, you can pay just $25 for a, basically three day event. I mean, that’s nuts. Or if you are not a student and you want to attend, then $100. And there are still, I think, some additional options that you can explore, perhaps sponsorship options and things like that, above and beyond that as well.
\n\n\n\nSo, Karla, that’s all the questions I’ve got. Is there anything that I’ve missed? Is there anything prior to recording to this you thought, ah, I must remember to say that, but didn’t get a chance to say it?
\n\n\n\n[00:34:57] Karla Campos: I just want to say thank you everyone for even thinking of attending. It’s going to be a great event. We have amazing speakers all about the future of WordPress and AI. How everything in technology is changing, what that means for your business now. Or if you have plans for a new business, what it means for you in your career. It’s going to be just a great place to network with people in the field, and I’m extremely excited. So I hope you’re excited just like I am. And I hope to see you guys at the WordCamp US 2025.
\n\n\n\n[00:35:26] Nathan Wrigley: So I should probably at this point mention that the links to anything that we’ve mentioned so far will be in the show notes. But if you do wish to find out more about it, head to us.wordcamp.org/2025. And as is usually the case, there’s a whole bunch of links at the top of that website.
\n\n\n\nSo for example, you can look at the schedule, so see who’s speaking. You can look and dig into the location and about it. And obviously buying the tickets as well, that’s all going to be there. So us.wordcamp.org/2025, the numbers.
\n\n\n\nThere we go. Thank you very much for chatting to me today, Karla Campos. Really, really appreciate it. And very, very best of luck with the event. I hope to see you there.
\n\n\n\n[00:36:07] Karla Campos: Thank you, Nathan.
\nOn the podcast today we have Karla Campos.
\n\n\n\nKarla has been involved in the WordPress community for over 10 years, starting out in Miami and taking part in meetups and WordCamps before stepping into larger organisational roles. With a background in media and marketing, Karla brings plenty of experience in both web and events to the world of WordPress.
\n\n\n\nKarla joins us today as a lead organiser for the upcoming WordCamp US 2025, which will take place in Portland at the end of August. Remarkably, this is her first flagship WordCamp, she’s organising before ever attending.
\n\n\n\nWe discuss what motivated Karla to take on this major responsibility, how she balances the volunteer work with her professional life, and the challenges, expected and unexpected, along the way.
\n\n\n\nWe discuss the organisation of such a huge event, from working with a professional production company to handling the logistics, communications, accessibility requests, visas, and more for a thousand-plus attendees. Karla shares how the community side of the event is managed, the late-night worries, and what it really takes, both in time and personal commitment, to make WordCamp US happen, especially as a volunteer.
\n\n\n\nShe also highlights some new initiatives for this year\u2019s event, renewed efforts to welcome students and first-time attendees, including student ticket pricing and the WP Trail Buddy’s program to help newcomers feel at home. She also teases the introduction of a hackathon-style Contributor Day and new remote collaboration options.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019ve ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes of WordCamp US, how it\u2019s organised, how volunteers are supported, and what motivates people like Karla to invest their own time and resources, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\n[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
\n\n\n\nJukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how the Google Site Kit plugin is attempting to simplify their product offering, right inside of WordPress.
\n\n\n\nIf you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.
\n\n\n\nIf you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea. Featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.
\n\n\n\nSo on the podcast today we have Mariya Moeva. Mariya has more than 15 years of experience in tech across search quality, developer advocacy, community building and outreach, and product management. Currently, she’s the product lead for Site Kit, Google’s official WordPress plugin.
\n\n\n\nShe’s presented at Word Camp Europe in Basel this year and joins us to talk about the journey from studying classical Japanese literature to fighting web spam at Google, and eventually shaping open source tools for the web.
\n\n\n\nMariya talks about her passion for the open web, and how years of direct feedback from site owners shaped the vision for Site Kit. Making complex analytics accessible and actionable for everyone, from solo bloggers to agencies and hosting providers.
\n\n\n\nSite Kit has had impressive growth for a WordPress plugin, currently there are 5 million active installs and a monthly user base of 700,000.
\n\n\n\nWe learn how Site Kit bundles core Google products like Search Console, Analytics, Page Speed Insights, AdSense into a simpler, curated WordPress dashboard, giving actionable insights without the need to trawl through multiple complex interfaces.
\n\n\n\nMariya explains how the plugin is intentionally beginner friendly with features like role-based dashboard sharing, integration with WordPress’ author and category systems, and some newer additions like Reader Revenue Manager to help site owners become more sustainable.
\n\n\n\nShe shares Google’s motivations for investing so much in WordPress and the open web, and how her team is committed to active support, trying to respond rapidly on forums and listening closely to feedback.
\n\n\n\nWe discussed Site Kit’s roadmap, from benchmarking and reporting features, to smarter, more personalized recommendations in the future.
\n\n\n\nIf you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by analytics dashboards, or are looking for ways to make data more practical and valuable inside WordPress, this episode is for you.
\n\n\n\nIf you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.
\n\n\n\nAnd so without further delay, I bring you Mariya Moeva.
\n\n\n\nI’m joined on the podcast by Mariya Moeva. Hello, Mariya. Nice to meet you.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:35] Mariya Moeva: Nice to be here.
\n\n\n\n[00:03:36] Nathan Wrigley: Mariya is doing a presentation at WordCamp Europe. That’s where we are at the moment, and we’re going to be talking about the bits and the pieces that she does around Site Kit, the work that she does for Google. Given that you are a Googler, and that we’re going to be talking about a product that you have, will you just give us your bio? I’ve got it written here, you obviously put one on the WordCamp Europe website. But just roughly what is your place in WordPress and Google and Site Kit and all of that?
\n\n\n\n[00:04:05] Mariya Moeva: Yeah. I mean, I’ve had a very meandering path. When you would look back to what I studied, which was, you know, classical Japanese literature, all these poems about the moon and the cherry blossoms, who would’ve thought at that time that I would end up building open source plugins? But I did have a meandering path and I ended up here because, mostly because of passion for the open web, and for all kinds of weird websites that exist out there. I really love stumbling upon something great.
\n\n\n\nI started Google on the web spam team, actually looking into the Japanese spam market, because of this classical Japanese literature degree and the Japanese skills. And then after a couple years or so, I basically despaired of humanity because all you look at is spam every day. Bad sites, hacked sites, malicious pages. And I just wanted to do something that makes the web better rather than removing all the bad stuff.
\n\n\n\nAnd so I switched over to an advocacy role, and in that role I essentially was traveling, maybe attending 20, 30 conferences every year, talking to a lot of people about their needs, what they have to complain about Google, what requests they have. And I would collect all of this feedback, and then I would go back to the product teams and I would say, hey, this and this is something that people really want. And they would say, thank you for your feedback.
\n\n\n\nEssentially at one point I said, okay, we’re going to build this thing, and that’s why I switched into product role. And I was able to take all the feedback over the years, that we’ve gotten from developers and site owners, and to try to build something that makes sense for them. So that’s how I ended up in the product role for building Site Kit.
\n\n\n\nAnd the idea from the very beginning was to make it beginner friendly and to make it from their perspective to match that feedback, rather than doing something that is like, here’s your stuff from analytics, here’s your stuff from Search Console, figure it out. That’s how we ended up building this and it’s been now five years. And it actually just a month ago entered the top 10 plugins. So clearly people find some value in it.
\n\n\n\nWe have 700,000 people that use it every month. And overall it’s currently at 5 million active installs, meaning that these sites are kind of pinging WordPress so they’re alive and kicking. It’s been very encouraging to see that what we’re doing is helpful to people and we will keep going. There’s a lot to do.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:29] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s kind of amazing because in the WordPress space, there are some of the, let’s call them the heavy hitters. You know, the big plugins that we’ve all heard of, the Yoasts of this world that kind of thing. Jetpack, all those kind of things. This, honestly has gone under the radar a bit for me, and yet those numbers are truly huge. Four and a half to 5 million people over a span of five years is really rather incredible.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:54] Mariya Moeva: It grew very fast, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:06:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And yet it’s not one that, well, I guess most people are reaching out to plugins to solve a problem, often a business problem. So, you know, there’s this idea of, I install this and there’s an ROI on that. This is not really that, not really ROI, it’s more site improvement. Okay, here’s a site that needs things fixing on it. Here’s some data about what can be fixed. And so maybe for that reason and that reason alone, it’s flown under the radar for me because it doesn’t have that commercial component to it.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:24] Mariya Moeva: Yeah, for sure. It’s for free and it’s not something that, yeah, sells features or has like a premium model and we don’t market it so much. But I run a little survey in the product where people tell us where they heard from it, and a lot of the responses are either YouTube video, or like blog posts or word of mouth. So it seems to be spreading more that way.
\n\n\n\n[00:07:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no kidding. I’ll just say the URL out loud in case you’re at a computer when you’re listening to this. It’s SiteKit, as one word, dot withgoogle.com. I don’t know if that’s the canonical URL, but that’s where I ended up when I did a quick search for it. So sitekit.withgoogle.com. And over there you’ll be able to download well, as it labels itself, Google’s official WordPress plugin.
\n\n\n\nThe first thing that surprises me is, a, Google’s interest in WordPress. That is fascinating to me. I mean, obviously we all know, Google is this giant, this leviathan. Maybe you’ve got interest in other CMSs, maybe not. I don’t really know. But I think that’s curious. But obviously 43% of the web, kind of makes sense to partner with WordPress, doesn’t it? To improve websites.
\n\n\n\n[00:08:31] Mariya Moeva: Yeah. I work with plenty of CMSs. I work with Wix, with Squarespace, and we essentially what I try to do and what my team tries to do, we are called the Ecosystem Team. So we want to bring the things that we think would be useful to site owners and businesses directly to where they are.
\n\n\n\nSo if you are in your Wix dashboard, you should be able to see the things from Google that are useful. And same if you are in WordPress. And obviously WordPress is, orders of magnitude, a bigger footprint than any of the others. And also it has this special structure where everything is decentralised and people kind of mix and match. So that’s why we went with the plugin model. And using the public APIs, we want to show what’s possible.
\n\n\n\nBecause all the data that we use is public data. There’s no special Google feature that only the Google product gets, right? We are just combining it in interesting ways because I’ve spent so much time talking to people, like what they need. And so we just curate and combine in ways that are actually helping people to make decisions and to kind of clear the clutter.
\n\n\n\nBecause when you go to analytics, it’s like 50 reports and so many menus and it’s like, where do I start? So we try to give a starting point in Site Kit. And we also try to help with other things like make people sustainable. One thing that we recently launched just a month ago is called Reader Revenue Manager. So you can put a little prompt on your site, which asks people to give you like $2 or whatever currency you are in, or even put like a subscription.
\n\n\n\nAnd so the idea is you don’t have to have massive traffic in order to generate revenue from your content. If you have your hundred thousand loyal readers, they can help you be more sustainable. So we’re looking at these kind of features, like what can we launch that is more for small and medium sites and would be helpful? And how can we make it as simple as possible? So that people don’t kind of drop off during the setup because it’s too complicated.
\n\n\n\n[00:10:33] Nathan Wrigley: Would it be fair to summarise the plugin’s initial purpose as kind of binding a bunch of Google products, which otherwise you would have to go and navigate to elsewhere? So for example, I’m looking at the website now, Search Console, Analytics, Page Speed Insights, AdSense, Google Ads, and all of those kind of things. Typically we’d have to go and, you know, set up an account. I guess we’d have to do that with Site Kit anyway. But we’d have to go to the different URLs and do all of that.
\n\n\n\nThe intention of this then is to bind that inside of the WordPress UI, so it’s not just the person who’s the admin of that account. You can open it up so that people who have the right permissions inside of WordPress, they can see, for example, Google Analytics data. And it gets presented on the backend of WordPress rather than having to go to these other URLs. Is that how it all began as a way of sort of surfacing Google product data inside the UI of WordPress?
\n\n\n\n[00:11:21] Mariya Moeva: Yeah, we wanted to bring the most important things directly to where people are, so they don’t have to bother going to 15 places. And we wanted to drastically decrease and curate the information so that it’s easy to understand, because when you have 15 dashboards in Analytics and 15 dashboards in Search Console, and then you have to figure out what to download and in which spreadsheet to merge and how to compare, then this is. Maybe if you have an agency taken care of, they can help you. But if you don’t, which 70% of our users say that they’re one person operation, so they’re taking care of their business, and on top of that, the website. We wanted to make it simpler to understand how you’re doing, and what you should do next with Google data.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:02] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s a curated interface. So it’s not, I mean, maybe you can pull in every single thing if you so wish. But the idea is you give a, I don’t know, an easier to understand interface to, for example, Google Analytics.
\n\n\n\nThat was always the thing for me in Google Analytics. I’m sure that if you have the time and the expertise, like you’re an agency that deals with all of that, then all of that data is probably useful and credible. But for me, I just want to know some top level items. I don’t need to dig into the weeds of everything.
\n\n\n\nAnd there was menus within menus, within menus, and I would get lost very quickly, and dispirited and essentially give up. So I guess this is an endeavor to get you what you need quickly inside the WordPress admin, so you don’t have to be an expert.
\n\n\n\n[00:12:43] Mariya Moeva: Yeah. And then it gets more powerful when you are able to combine data from different products. So, for example, we have a feature called Search Funnel in the dashboard, which lets you, it combines data from Search Console on search impressions and search clicks, and then it combines data from Analytics on visitors on the site and conversions. So it kind of helps you map out the entire path, versus having to go over here, having to go over there, having to combine everything yourself. So when you combine things, then it gets also more powerful.
\n\n\n\nWe have another feature which lets you combine data from AdSense and Analytics. So if you have AdSense on your site, you can then see which pages earn you the most revenue. So when you have that, suddenly you can see, okay, so I have now these pages here, what queries are they ranking for? How much time people spend on them? Can I expand my content in that direction? It helps you to be more focused in kind of the strategy that you have for your site.
\n\n\n\n[00:13:45] Nathan Wrigley: Is it just making, I mean, I say just, is it making API calls backwards and forwards to Google’s Analytics, Search Console, whatever, and then displaying that information, or is it kind of keeping it inside the WordPress database?
\n\n\n\n[00:13:58] Mariya Moeva: We don’t store anything, well, almost anything. Yeah, we wanted to keep the data as secure as possible, so we created this proxy service, which kind of helps to exchange the credentials. So the person can authenticate with their Google account, and then from there, the data is pulled via API, and we cache the dashboard for one hour. After that we refreshed authentication token. From the data itself, nothing is stored.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:23] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s just authentication information really that’s stored. Well, that’s kind of a given, I suppose. Otherwise you’ll be logging in every two minutes.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:29] Mariya Moeva: Right. So that’s the model that we have because we really wanted people to be able to access this data, but also to keep it secure. And because of how the WordPress database is, we didn’t feel like we could save it there.
\n\n\n\n[00:14:41] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds from what you’ve just said, it’s as if it’s combining things from a variety of different services, kind of linking them up in a structured way so that somebody who’s not particularly experienced can make connections between, I don’t know, ads and analytics. The spend on the ads and the analytics, you know, the ROI if you like.
\n\n\n\nDoes it do things uniquely? Is there something you can get inside of Site Kit which you could not get out of the individual products if you went there? Or is it just more of a, well, we’ve done the hard work for you, we’ve mapped these things together so you don’t have to think about it?
\n\n\n\n[00:15:10] Mariya Moeva: The one thing that it does that I’m super excited about, and we’ll build on that, but we have the fundamental of it now, is it actually creates data for you. Because in contrast to Search Console or Analytics or all these other, which are kind of Google hosted, they can only tell you like a long help center article, go there on your site, then click this, then paste this code, right? They cannot help you with this, whereas Site Kit is on the website.
\n\n\n\nSo if you agree, which we don’t install anything without people’s consent, like they have to activate the feature, but if you agree, then we can do things on your behalf. So for example, we can track every time someone clicks the signup button and we can generate an analytics event for you, even if that plugin normally doesn’t send analytics events. And that way, suddenly you have your conversion data available.
\n\n\n\nSo very often people look to the top of the funnel, like how many people came to my site? But they don’t look to what these people did beyond kind of, oh, they stayed two minutes. So what does this mean? You want to see, did they buy the thing? Did they sign up for the thing, or subscribe or whatever it is? And we help create this data because we have this unique access to the source code of the site.
\n\n\n\nSo we create, for example, on leads generation or purchases. We also, every time that a specific page is viewed, we will generate an event about the author of the page. So then we can aggregate the data, which authors bring in the most page views. Let’s say you have like a site with five, six, whatever authors. Or which categories are bringing in the most engagement and these kind of things.
\n\n\n\n[00:16:52] Nathan Wrigley: So it really does get very WordPressy. It’s not just to do with the Google side of things. It is mapping information from Google, so categories, author profiles, that kind of thing, and mapping them into the analytics that you get. Okay, that’s interesting. So it’s a two-way process, not just a one-way process.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:09] Mariya Moeva: Yeah. It’s very much integrated with WordPress. We have also a lot of other features, like for example, that kind of stretch into other parts of the website. So this Reader Revenue Manager that I mentioned before with the prompts that you can put on your pages. You can go to the individual post and for every post there’s like a little piece of control UI that we’ve added there in the compose screen, where you can say, this is excluded from this prompt, or, you know, you can control from there.
\n\n\n\nSo we try to integrate where it makes sense, like where the person would want to take this action. And again, because it’s on the website, we can kind of spread out beyond just this one dashboard.
\n\n\n\n[00:17:48] Nathan Wrigley: And would I, as a site admin, would I be able to assign permissions to different user roles within WordPress? So for example, an editor, or a certain user profile, may be able to see a subset of data. You know, for example, I don’t know, you are involved in the spending on AdSense. But you, other user over there, you’ve got nothing to do with that. But you are into the analytics, so you can see that, and you over there you can see that. Is that possible?
\n\n\n\n[00:18:12] Mariya Moeva: We have something called dashboard sharing. So it has the same, like if you use Google Docs or anything like that, it has this little person with a plus in the corner, icon. And then from there, if you are the admin who set up this particular Google Service, who connected it to Site Kit, then you’re able to say who should be able to see it. So you essentially grant view only access to, let’s say all the editors, or all the contributors or whatever. And then you can choose which Google service’s data they can see.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:44] Nathan Wrigley: So yes is the answer to that, yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:46] Mariya Moeva: Yeah, yeah. So they don’t have to set it up, I mean, they have to go through a very simplified setup, and then they basically get a kind of a screenshot. I mean it’s, you can still click on things, but you can’t change anything, so it’s kind of a view-only dashboard.
\n\n\n\n[00:18:59] Nathan Wrigley: I’m kind of curious about the market that you pitch this to. So sell is the wrong word because it’s a free plugin, but who you’re pitching it at. So obviously if you’ve got that end user, the site owner. Maybe they’ve got a site and they’ve got a small business with a team. Maybe it’s just them, so there’s the whole permissions thing there.
\n\n\n\nBut also I know that Google, there are whole agencies out there who just specialise in Google products, and analysing the data that comes out of Analytics. Can you do that as well as an agency? Could I set this up for my clients and have some, you know, I’ve got my agency dashboard and I want to give this client access to this website, and this website and this website, but not these other ones? Can it be deployed on a sort of agency basis like that?
\n\n\n\n[00:19:38] Mariya Moeva: You would still have to activate it for every individual site. So in that sense, there’s a bunch of steps that you have to go through. But once it’s activated, you can then share with any kind of client. And actually we have a lot of agencies that can install it for every site that they have.
\n\n\n\nJust today someone came and after he saw the demo, he was like, okay, I’m going to install it for all my clients. Because what we’ve heard is that it’s exactly the level of information that a client would benefit from. And this means then that they pester the agency less. So we’ve literally heard people saying, you’re saving me a lot of phone calls. So that’s why agencies really like it.
\n\n\n\nAnd the next big feature request, which we’re working on right now, is to generate like an email report out of that. So for those who don’t even want to log into WordPress to see, there will be a possibility to get this in their inbox.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:30] Nathan Wrigley: So you could get it like a weekly summary, whatever it that wish to trigger. And, okay, so that could go anywhere really. And then your clients don’t even need to phone you about that.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:41] Mariya Moeva: Yeah. So we are trying to really actively reach people where they are, even if that’s their email inbox.
\n\n\n\n[00:20:49] Nathan Wrigley: And the other question I have is around your relationship with some of the bigger players, maybe hosting companies. Do you have this pre-installed on hosting cPanels and their, you know, whatever it is that they’ve got in their back end?
\n\n\n\n[00:21:02] Mariya Moeva: Yeah, we have quite a few hosting providers that pre-install it for their WordPress customers. The reason for this is that they see better lifetime value for those customers that have a good idea of how their site is doing. And yeah, Hostinger is one of those. cPanel. Elementor pre-installs it for all of their users. And they see very good feedback because again, it’s super simple to set up and super easy to understand once you have it. So for them it’s kind of like an extra feature that they can offer, extra value to their users for free.
\n\n\n\n[00:21:32] Nathan Wrigley: We know Google’s a fabulous company, but you don’t do things for nothing. So what’s the return? How does it work in reverse? So we know that presumably there must be an exchange of data. What are we signing up for if we install Site Kit?
\n\n\n\n[00:21:47] Mariya Moeva: So, at least, I mean, Google is a huge company, right? There’s hundreds of thousands of people working. So I can’t speak for the whole of Google, but I can speak for the Ecosystem Team, which I’m part of, like the web ecosystem.
\n\n\n\nThe main investment here, or the main goal for us is that the open web continues to thrive, because if people don’t put content, interesting, relevant content on the open web, the search results are going to be very poor and that’s not a good product.
\n\n\n\nSo our idea is to support all the people who create content to make sure that they’re found, like if you’re a local business, that people can find you when they need stuff from that particular local business. And what we see is that, especially for smaller and medium sites, they really struggle, first with going online, and then with figuring out what they’re supposed to do. And so a lot of them give up because in comparison to other platforms, it’s a little bit of an upfront investment, right? Like you have to pay for hosting, you have to set up the site, you have to add content.
\n\n\n\nSo we try to help people as much as we can to see the value that the open web brings to them, so that they can continue to create for the open web. So that’s our hidden motivation. I think in that sense, we’re very much aligned with the WordPress community because here everybody cares about the open web and for all kind of small, weird websites to continue flourishing and get their like 100 or 300 or 1,000 readers that they deserve.
\n\n\n\nSo that’s the motivation. I think because it includes other things like AdSense and AdWords, like people can set up a ads campaign directly from Site Kit in a very simplified flow, and the same thing for AdSense. Obviously some money exchanges hands, but this is relatively minor compared to the benefit that we think there is for the web in general.
\n\n\n\n[00:23:35] Nathan Wrigley: Google really does seem to have a very large presence at WordPress events. I mean, I don’t know about the smaller ones, you know, the regional sort of city based events, but at the, what they call flagship events, so WordCamp Asia and WordCamp Europe and US, there’s the whole sponsor area. And it’s usual to see one of the larger booths being occupied by Google. And I wonder, is it Site Kit that you are talking about when you are here or is it other things as well?
\n\n\n\nBut also it’s curious to me that Google would be here in that presence, because those things are not cheap to maintain. So there must be somebody up in Google somewhere saying, okay, this is something we want to invest in. So is it Site Kit that you are basically at the booth talking about?
\n\n\n\n[00:24:19] Mariya Moeva: So me, yes, or people on my team. We have like a Site Kit section this year. There’s also Google Trends. There’s also some other people talking about user experience and on search. And this changes depending on which teams within Google want to reach out to the WordPress community.
\n\n\n\nBut with Site Kit, we’ve been pretty consistent for the last six years. We are always part of the booth. But the kind of whole team, like the whole Google booth content has kind of changed over the years as well depending on who’s coming.
\n\n\n\n[00:24:51] Nathan Wrigley: I know that a lot of work being done is surrounding performance and things like that, and a lot of the Google staff that are in the WordPress space seem to be focused on that kind of thing, talking about the new APIs that are shipping in the browsers and all of those kind of things.
\n\n\n\nOkay, so on the face of it, a fairly straightforward product to use. But I’m guessing the devil is in the detail. How do you go about supporting this? So for example, if I was to install it and to run into some problems, do you have like a, I don’t know, a documentation area or do you have support, or chat or anything like that? Because I know that with the best will in the world, people are going to run into problems. How do people manage that kind of thing?
\n\n\n\n[00:25:27] Mariya Moeva: Yeah, this was something that I was super, I felt really strongly about based on my previous experience in the developer advocate world. Because very often I got feedback that it’s super hard to reach Google. And it’s also understandable given the scale of some of the products.
\n\n\n\nBut when I started this project I insisted that we allocate resources for support. So we have two people full-time support. One of them is upstairs, the support lead. He knows the product inside and out. They’re always on the forum, the plugin forum, support forum. And they answer usually within 24 hours. So everybody who has a question gets their question answered.
\n\n\n\nWe’ve also created the very detailed additions. When you have Site Kit, you also get a few additions to the Site Health forum, so you can share that information with them and they see like detailed stuff about the website so they can help debug. And in many, many cases, I’ve seen people coming pretty angry, leave a one star review, then James or Adam who are support people, engage with them, and then it turns into a five star review because they feel like, okay, someone listened to me and helped me figure out what is going on.
\n\n\n\nWe have real people answering questions relatively quickly. And they don’t just go, of course they focus on the WordPress support forum, but they also check Reddit and other places where people like mentioned Site Kit, and they try to help and to direct them to the right place. So for Site Kit, we have very robust support.
\n\n\n\nNow, when it’s an issue with a product, a Google product that is connected to Site Kit, so it’s not a Site Kit problem, let’s say you got some kind of strange message from AdSense about your account status changing. Then we would have to hand over to the AdSense account manager or support team that they have, because we don’t know everything, like how AdSense makes decisions and stuff like that. But for anything Site Kit related, we are very fast to answer.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:22] Nathan Wrigley: That’s good to hear because I think you’re right. I think the perception with any giant company is that it kind of becomes a bit impersonal, and Google would be no exception. And having just a forum which never seems to get an answer, you drop something in, six months later, you go back and nobody’s done anything in there except close the thread, kind of slightly annoying. But something like this. So 24 hours, roughly speaking, is the turnaround time.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:45] Mariya Moeva: Yeah. I mean, not on the weekend, but yeah.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Still, that’s pretty amazing.
\n\n\n\n[00:27:47] Mariya Moeva: Yeah, yeah. We are very serious about this because, I mean, also the WordPress community is really strong, right? So you want to show that we care. We want to hear from people. A lot of bugs then also turn into feature requests and get prioritised to be developed. So, yeah, we really value when people come to complain. It’s a good thing.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:03] Nathan Wrigley: Excellent. Okay, well, we won’t open that as a goal, please send in your complaints. But nevertheless, it’s nice that you take it seriously.
\n\n\n\nSo it sounds like it’s under active development. You sound like this is basically what you’re doing over at Google. Do you have a roadmap? Do you have a sort of laundry list of things that you want to achieve over the next six months? Interesting things that we might want to hear about.
\n\n\n\n[00:28:21] Mariya Moeva: Sure, yeah. I mean, my ultimate vision, which is not the next six months, I would love to move away as much as possible from just stats. As curated and as kind of structured as it is right now, and get more into like recommendations, and like to-do list. Because what I hear from people again and again, it’s like, I have two hours this month, tell me what should I do with those two hours?
\n\n\n\nSo they’re asking a lot from us. They’re asking essentially to look, analyse everything and to prioritise their tasks, to tell them which one is the most important or most impactful. And this is like several levels of analysis further than where we are now.
\n\n\n\nSo one thing that we are looking to work on is benchmarking, because you cannot know are you growing or not, unless you know how you’re doing on average. And today, people who are a little bit more savvy can do this of course, but a lot of people don’t. And so for us to be able to tell you, not just you got 20 clicks this week, but also this is okay for you, or this is better than last year, this time, or this is better than your competitors. I think that’s a really valuable way to interpret the data and to help people understand what it means.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And really, Google is one of the only entities that can provide that kind of data.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:44] Mariya Moeva: Especially for search.
\n\n\n\n[00:29:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, especially against competitors. That’s really interesting because analysing the data, whilst it’s fun for some people, I feel it’s not that interesting for most people. And so just having spreadsheets of data, charts of data, it’s interesting and you no doubt gain some important knowledge from it. But being told, here’s the outcomes of that data, try doing this thing and try doing that thing, that is much more profound than just demonstrating the data.
\n\n\n\nAnd I’m guessing, I could be wrong about this, and I’ve more or less said this in every interview over the last year, I’m guessing there’s an AI component to all of that. Getting AI to sort of analyse the data and give useful feedback.
\n\n\n\n[00:30:22] Mariya Moeva: I mean, we are investigating how to do all of these things. I think in the case of WordPress, it’s a little bit trickier again, because of the distributed nature, and the fact that all the site information lives on the site and then all the Google information. So we’re not like fully hosted where you can access everything and control everything, something like a Squarespace or a Wix.
\n\n\n\nBut there’s definitely, like AI is a perfect use case for this, right? Like benchmarking, you can bucket sites into relevant groups and then see, are they performing better or worse? That’s like classic machine learning case. And we will see exactly, technically, how we’re going to reach this, but that’s one of the things that we’re working on right now.
\n\n\n\nAnother thing is to expand much more the conversion reporting and to help people understand, are they achieving their goals? Because this is something that surprisingly to me, so many people pay money and invest time in the site, and they cannot articulate what the site is doing. Is it working? Is it doing its job? And they’re like, well, like I got some people visiting. And I’m like, did they buy the thing? So you have to know what to
\n\n\n\ntrack, and then also to take action after you see the metrics, like to move them in one direction or another. And so helping people like map out this full funnel is one thing that we’re working on. And the other thing is also this email report.
\n\n\n\n[00:31:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s amazing. So really under active development. And you sound very impassioned about it. You sound like this has become your mission, you know?
\n\n\n\n[00:31:47] Mariya Moeva: I think, nobody ever complained that something is easy, right? When you make things simple and easy for people, they appreciate, even if they’re more knowledgeable than if they can do more advanced things themselves.
\n\n\n\nAnd I personally really care, like every time that I find a random website with really strange content, but just, someone put their soul into it. I recently found something in Zurich of like tours of Zurich, walking tours, by someone who really cares about history and architecture.
\n\n\n\nAnd it’s a terrible website design wise, but the content is amazing. And I was like, okay, this person could use some help, but he’s doing, or she’s doing like a great job at the content part, and then should get the traffic that they deserve for this. So that’s what motivates me also to come here.
\n\n\n\nOne person, two or three WordCamps ago came over and was saying, everything about Google is hard except Site Kit. And I was like, yeah, that’s what we are trying to do. We really want to simplify things for you. So, yeah, being here is also super motivating. To talk to people and to hear feedback and feature requests. And again, we like when people come to complain.
\n\n\n\n[00:32:54] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I was just speaking to a few people prior to you entering the room and those few people all have Site Kit installed on their site. So you’re doing something right.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:02] Mariya Moeva: I hope it’s helpful. I hope it answers some questions and saves people some time. That’s what we are trying to do. Yeah, we are in the part of Google that has the ecosystem focus, so we know that ecosystem changes take longer. I mean, still it’s a fast growing plugin. It got to 5 million in 5 years, but still that’s 5 years. And in the context of software companies which move very fast, 5 years is a long time.
\n\n\n\nYeah, we will keep going and hopefully more people can benefit from it. But we do have, yeah, still there are many people who come by and they’re like, whoa, what is this? Show me.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:36] Nathan Wrigley: Well, that’s nice. There’s for growth as well.
\n\n\n\n[00:33:38] Mariya Moeva: Yeah, yeah. For sure. I mean, for sure there’s always, and more people create new sites. So, again, going back to that hosting provider question of like, can we bring it to them at the moment of creation so that they know this is something I can use?
\n\n\n\n[00:33:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So one more time, the URL is sitekit.withgoogle.com. I will place that into the show notes as well.
\n\n\n\nMariya, I think that’s everything that I have to ask. Thank you so much for chatting to me about Site Kit.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:01] Mariya Moeva: Yeah, thank you for the invitation. It’s been a pleasure to talk about the ecosystem. And, yeah, if people have feature requests, they can always write us either on GitHub in the Site Kit repo, or on the support forum, or if they are coming to any WordCamp where we also are, we are also super happy to hear. So we always love to know what people struggle with, so that we can build it for them and make it easy.
\n\n\n\n[00:34:23] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much indeed.
\nOn the podcast today we have Mariya Moeva.
\n\n\n\nMariya has more than 15 years of experience in tech across search quality, developer advocacy, community building and outreach, and product management. Currently she\u2019s the product lead for Site Kit, Google\u2019s official WordPress plugin. She\u2019s presented at WordCamp Europe in Basel this year, and joins us to talk about the journey from studying classical Japanese literature to fighting web spam at Google, and eventually shaping open source tools for the web.
\n\n\n\nMariya talks about her passion for the open web and how years of direct feedback from site owners shaped the vision for Site Kit, making complex analytics accessible and actionable for everyone, from solo bloggers to agencies and hosting providers.
\n\n\n\nSite Kit has had impressive growth for a WordPress plugin, currently there are 5 million active installs and a monthly user base of 700,000.
\n\n\n\nWe learn how Site Kit bundles core Google products, like Search Console, Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, AdSense into a simpler, curated WordPress dashboard, giving actionable insights without the need to trawl through multiple complex interfaces.
\n\n\n\nMariya explains how the plugin is intentionally beginner-friendly, with features like role-based dashboard sharing, integration with WordPress\u2019 author and category systems, and some newer additions like Reader Revenue Manager to help site owners become more sustainable.
\n\n\n\nShe shares Google\u2019s motivations for investing so much in WordPress and the open web, and how her team is committed to active support, trying to respond rapidly on forums and listening closely to feedback.
\n\n\n\nWe discuss Site Kit\u2019s roadmap, from benchmarking and reporting features to smarter, more personalised recommendations in the future.
\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019ve ever felt overwhelmed by analytics dashboards, or are looking for ways to make data more practical and valuable inside WordPress, this episode is for you.
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