As the American Thanksgiving holiday is coming up, I am so grateful for all of our Tavern readers and the people who make WordPress – 800 in the most recent 6.1 release with 35 percent of them being new contributors. This community has made remarkable progress this year, while navigating changes and uncertain times. Committed contributors continue to show up and make WordPress the best platform for publishing on the web.

The recent social media upheaval with Twitter has been an unexpected gift that has created an opportunity for a mass return to decentralization and open web protocols, like ActivityPub and RSS. The sting of the prospect of losing Twitter followers and the network that users worked to build, has underscored the importance of agency in social networking, the ability to take your data and connections with you to other networks on your own terms.

Although it is somewhat heartbreaking to see Twitter struggling to survive, one silver lining is that this situation is inspiring a drive towards a greater level of interoperability between apps, like Tumblr engineers working to add ActivityPub support so users can connect across Mastodon and other networks that use the same protocol.

People are steadily moving away from the all-powerful algorithms that steer consumers and subtly manipulate the public consciousness, and migrating away in search of healthier, more ethical social networking alternatives. The refreshing lack of ads and algorithms are winning people over in decentralized social networks, which are getting a second look from mainstream publications in light of Twitter’s loss of critical engineering teams.

I’m thankful for this renewed focus on networks that value the open web, where people are now exploring alternatives to walled gardens with their friends, instead of having to start over alone. Never underestimate the power of friction and crisis to refine how we communicate and motivate us to find a better way to stay connected. This is a moment that may have enough traction to change the course of social interaction on the web.

With things changing all around, it’s heartening to know that WordPress is still here and going strong, for those of us who have chosen it as the home for our content. We’re fortunate to have so many plugins available that connect our ecosystem to the broader web, allowing us to syndicate content to almost anywhere. Let’s not miss this opportunity to dig into the open web and see where it takes us.

This Week at WordPress.org (November 21, 2022)

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This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

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Jukebox 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 websites more sustainable.

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If 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 forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, well, I’m very keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox. And use the form there.

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So on the podcast today, we have Hannah Smith. Hannah is the operations and training manager for the Green Web Foundation, and founder of The Let’s Green The Web campaign. She’s also co-founder of Green Tech Southwest.

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Her background is in computer science. She previously worked as a freelance WordPress developer and also for the Environment Agency, where she managed business change projects.

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It’s pretty easy to forget that the device that you’re reading or listening to this podcast on is consuming power. We plug things in or charge them up, and they just work. They are sleek and sterile. No pollution comes out of the device directly. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that many of us never make the connection between our use of technology and the impact that this has on the environment.

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Enter Hannah Smith. She’s been thinking about this for years and is on the podcast today to highlight the issue and hopefully get your ideas about what users of WordPress can do to make sure that the websites we create are having the smallest impact possible.

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Her approach is not that we need to cease and desist using our technology. Rather it’s about coming up with new and innovative ways that we can reduce the impact that we have.

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As creators of websites, there are a whole raft of options available to us. Reducing the size of our images. Inspecting the HTML to remove bloat. Choosing hosting options that source renewable energy.

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With this in mind, Hannah and others have been working on a sustainability related blog post, which has been published on the Make WordPress site this week. This post is intended to trigger meaningful and open discussion in the global WordPress community about the topic of sustainability.

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She really wants to encourage others to weigh into this public conversation with their own thoughts, so that we can build on what is already happening to make WordPress more sustainable.

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It’s a fascinating and thought provoking topic, and if you’re interested in finding out more, you can get all of the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast. Where you’ll find all of the other episodes as well.

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And so without further delay, I bring you Hannah Smith.

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I am joined on the podcast today by Hannah Smith. Hello Hannah.

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[00:04:02] Hannah Smith: Hello Nathan. Thank you so much for having me today.

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[00:04:05] Nathan Wrigley: You are so welcome. Hannah is here today to talk about the environmental impact of having WordPress websites, and I genuinely think this is going to be a real eye opener for many of us.

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Before we do that though Hannah, we always orientate our listeners by allowing the guests to just give us a bit of background on who they are and what their relationship is with WordPress. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to ask you that very generic question is just tell us a little bit about yourself and how come you are into WordPress.

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[00:04:35] Hannah Smith: Thank you. I’m a massive fan of WordPress. I’ve so much love and admiration for the community. So my background is as a computer scientist, so that’s what I studied in my degree. Had, like many people, are very sort of winding interesting journey in and around different things.

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And about eight years ago, I set myself up as a freelance WordPress developer. So having done sort of other careers within tech, I won’t give you the long winding path that I got there, but serendipity basically somehow landed me, as a freelance WordPress developer. Finding myself wanting to give it a go.

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I was living in Bristol at the time, and wanted to learn more about WordPress and found that we had a meetup community in Bristol, and decided to pop along. Was made to feel very welcome, and learn loads from the awesome people there. So, a shout out to Simon, Janice, and Rob, who were the people that grounded me into that community.

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And then it wasn’t long before I somehow found myself invited to help run that community and help drive that community, which I was very happy to do for a good few years. And then in 2019 we did WordCamp Bristol. We had about 200 odd people come to that, which was brilliant. And I’ve been quite involved in WordCamps and speaking at conferences. Try and contribute where I can.

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These days I’ve actually hung up my shoes, only recently as a WordPress developer, and I’ve transitioned to working full-time for the Green Web Foundation. But part of my role at the Green Web Foundation, so I do a lot of training and outreach and operations, because we’re small, so everyone wears lots of hats.

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But I do also manage our WordPress website as well and our WordPress estate too. So, whilst it might not be my full job title to have WordPress every single day, it is still very much a part of what I do.

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[00:06:35] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. What a, rich and interesting history you’ve had. We’ve met in person on a number of occasions, but it’s been a little while since we met up in person. But you came across my radar on the 1st of November because of a piece that you had written over on make.wordpress.org.

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I will link to it in the show notes and, it may well be a good idea, if you’re listening to this podcast and you are anywhere near a device, it might be a good idea to pause the podcast actually. Go and read the piece it’s called, now we have a sustainability channel in making WordPress Slack, what should we do?

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And the reason I’m asking you to potentially go and read that is because really it’s going to form the basis of everything that we are going to be talking about around the environment and so on. So tell us what was the concern? What was the primary motive for writing that piece?

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[00:07:25] Hannah Smith: So, the piece was written very much in collaboration with four others, so I want to say from the outset that whilst it was my face next to the post when you read it, I was the nominated person to publish it. It was very much a collaborative effort with four others.

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So with Nora, Nahuai, Pace, and Csaba, who are placed in different places across Europe. And, Nahuai and Nora, I knew from some workshops I’d run back in the spring, exploring the topic of digital sustainability. But we were chatting and we all felt that where was the action in WordPress on sustainability?

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We were kind of looking around and, I’m very involved in the wider community around digital sustainability. But I was looking around and I was like, I just don’t feel this in WordPress. It’s just not surfaced enough. It’s very niche and, we are really getting to a point where sustainability can’t be a niche concern.

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It has to be a concern for everybody, everywhere because what’s happening around us in terms of the changing climate, in terms of our lack of sustainable approaches, does affect every single person, whether they want to admit that or not. We are all impacted by it. Rich, poor, young, old, we’re all going to face these consequences.

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So we were chatting and Nora and Nahuai I were at WordCamp Europe this year, and Nora actually asked a question in, you know the Q and A that Josepha and Matt have? So Nora asked a question about sustainability and stood up. I mean more power to her. She stood up in front of the whole crowd and said, hey, sustainability. We really care about this, but there’s nothing much happening, and Matt and Josepha said, well, okay, look. The very first thing we can do is set up a channel in Slack. So maybe that will help, WordPress Slack. You know to give people a collaboration space and a meeting space.

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And they also said, well, and if you’ve got any ideas or specific proposals that you want to make, we are going to listen. The door is open, essentially. So Nora set this ball in motion really with her question. And then Josepha and Matt responded really well. And so since then, since the summer, a few of us have been sort of working, just informally, thinking, okay, well how do we capitalize upon this?

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WordPress leadership is saying we’re listening, or, we are happy to collaborate with you. But now what we need to do is to get the community together and to get the community, A, to know who each other are, and B, to acknowledge this is a topic and to talk about it, and discuss it, and bring knowledge and ideas into a space together. So this is why we ended up writing the post. And the post is very much saying, hey, WordPress community, look, we’ve got this channel, but you know, a channel isn’t going to solve our problems.

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It’s, it’s you. You and your ideas that are going to solve these problems or that are going to make progress. So, could we please get into a discussion about what people’s ideas are? So we’ve invited people to share their ideas and particularly any vision that they have. Or ideas that they have around what sustainability and WordPress might look like in the future.

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Because if we can’t imagine it, we’re not going to get there. And I think a lot of the narrative around climate change is very doom and gloom. It’s very pessimistic. It feels almost like we’re accepting that we’ve been defeated. opposite. It’s so the opposite. We have every opportunity and potential here to turn things around and change things. It is not yet too late. So we wanted to really bring everyone together and imagine these ideas together and then see where that leads us.

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[00:11:18] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. That’s really helpful. You used the word sustainable a dozen times or more in, in that, last little section, and it occurs to me that there’s probably quite a few people listening who have some sort of conception of what we mean by sustainability, but I’m pretty sure that everybody’s conception of it will be slightly different to everybody else’s.

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What exactly are you meaning when you say sustainability in WordPress or sustainability surrounding WordPress? What are the areas that you are touching on? What are the points of concern that we need to have drawn to our attention?

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[00:11:54] Hannah Smith: Yeah, that’s a great question. You are absolutely right that most people will have slightly differing ideas of sustainability. Some people may even have a very narrow view of sustainability, which might be something called decarbonization. Which really relates around carbon emissions. But, Perhaps let me give a really sort of wide view of what sustainability is outside of the realms of tech or WordPress, and then we can kind of narrow in a bit and talk about how that relates then to tech or digital specifically, or WordPress specifically.

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So if we talk about sustainability or the word sustain, it means that we’re able to keep doing things into the long term. There’s this quote that’s often used. It’s about meeting the needs of the present without compromising the needs, or the ability of the future generations to meet their needs. So at it’s most basic level, sustainability can mean that. To get a bit more specific about it, I draw on something called the donor economics framework.

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If anybody here is interested in a really holistic way of thinking about sustainability, that’s a bit more in depth, I really recommend this as a resource to have a look at. Very accessible. Don’t let the fact that it’s about economics or economics turn you away, make you think it’s not for you. It is for everybody. And the way that donor economics talks about sustainability, I really love this is, it talks about sustainability as having humanity at the center of the story.

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So sustainability is much more than us thinking about the environmental ecosystems. It’s about thinking about how humanity sits within the environment. So if you can imagine a simple donut shape with a hole in the middle. Essentially what you get there is two circles, one smaller one inside, a bigger one. That smaller circle, we might often think of something that they term as the social foundation. And the social foundation is a set of 12 things that, when you consider them all in relation to one another, define the things that makes us human, and defines the things that just allow us to survive as humans, but allows us to really thrive as humans.

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So it’s more than just thinking about food, water, shelter, clothing. It’s also thinking about those emotional needs that we have as well around peace and justice. Around meaningful connections with other people around access to education and opportunities. So I love to think about our social foundation as the center of the story of sustainability. Because humans are a part of this planet. And it is a very dangerous mindset, or a very dangerous kind of thing to get into, to think that the only way that we become more sustainable is by not being here. And that’s really not a good story to tell, and it’s not the right story to tell. We are part of the planet, and we can live within the boundaries of what the planet can provide for us.

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And that moves me onto the second circle, this outer circle. And donor economics talks about that as our ecological boundaries or our ecological ceiling. And that’s basically accepting that the planet has a finite amount of resources. There’s only so much wind that blows. There’s only so many raw materials in the ground. There’s only so much accessible water, drinkable water. There’s only so much land.

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It helps us understand that we have these boundaries in place. We have these limitations. So when we talk about sustainability, or when I’m talking personally talking about sustainability, I’m thinking about those concepts. I’m thinking about humanity being at the center of the planet. Being at the center of our concerns, but I’m also thinking that humanity has to live within these constraints that the world places upon us.

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And in donor economics, if you have that donut shaped circle, if I’m hoping everyone listening can picture it or maybe you’ve looked it up online. If you’ve got this kind of circle, what you have is, the way the donor economics talks about it is we talk about sustainability as being this sweet spot in the middle where we are meeting everybody’s needs to thrive. But we are doing that within the boundaries of the planet. And that it is absolutely possible that we can have nice things and that we can be happy, healthy, joyful humans, but that we can live within the means of our planet.

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So for me, sustainability is that broad concept. And I’m just going to stop there, Nathan, because I know we haven’t actually talked about this before and I’m curious to know, how that resonates with you, as a definition of sustainability or as a way of thinking about it.

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[00:17:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I fully understand where you are coming from. I guess the piece that I’m confronted with is that, I always think of, how to describe this. I very often think of conservation and I think about it in terms of we’ve got to do less things. We’ve got to drive the car less. We’ve got to consume less electricity, we’ve got to get on planes less. We’ve got to produce less.

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And so the environmental debate always, for me at least anyway, comes back to reducing what we’re doing and kind of admitting to ourselves that the aspirations that we seem to have as a species, to rampantly consume everything and believe that we are fully in charge of everything on the planet.

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It feels as if we need to put the breaks on and actually, rather than that, we need to go in reverse. We need to, like I said, produce less things, consume less things. It sounds as if you’ve got a slightly different philosophy there, which is we’ve just got to figure out how we can carry on the way we are. But with cleverer solutions so that the things that we create, the plane journeys that we go on, the cars that we drive. All of that’s still possible, but we need to figure out how the impact of that would be lessened.

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[00:18:28] Hannah Smith: Almost, yeah. That’s almost what I’m saying, but not quite. If we think about what we’re driving our cars for. What we are flying for. What are we doing these things for? It might be that the mechanism by which we create connection with one another or that we get from A to B, or that we see our family and friends, or that we have meaningful relationships with people.

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It might be that those things are done differently. And yeah, so it might mean that we reduce car use. We reduce airplane flights. But that doesn’t mean we don’t replace it with other things. Technology is amazing. I mean, look at, look at the internet. It’s absolutely incredible what digital technology enables us to do.

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So I think the story of sustainability, it’s very, very important to not get drawn into this narrative that we’ve all got to live like cave people, which is so often what people think being sustainable means. It means giving up all the things that bring us joy and bring us meaning in life.

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And actually, I don’t buy that at all. I think that that is the wrong way to look at sustainability. I actually think what living in a truly sustainable way means is reducing the things that don’t give us those joyful things. Don’t provide meaningful connection in our life, and replacing them with the things that do. And do you know what? What’s amazing is that the things that genuinely, meaningfully do improve our lives, are generally sustainable, at the same time. Like riding a bike, walking, exercising, spending less time on social media, perhaps doing more time crafting or reading a book. Those things do all actually add to our lives, add to our happiness, add to our, you know, meaning and purpose.

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So I think it’s a really important starting point just to say to the WordPress community, hey, look, being sustainable doesn’t mean we’re going to lose all these things that we love. In fact, we are going to lose the things that don’t service and replace them with better, better, more meaningful things.

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[00:20:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. One of the things that I find tricky is I don’t really equate my use of the internet with the environmental consequences that there are from my use of the internet. Before we hit record, I was talking to you, I described how the technology that I’m using, so I’ve got a computer in front of me, I have a mobile phone. Unless I actually apply thought, my default in a way, is that they are completely benign and harmless. Typically, if I’m using my mobile phone say, there’s not really any part of me which is consciously thinking, okay, for every minute that I spend on this phone, there’s a consequence to this. There’s an environmental impact. I’m consuming electricity. That phone needed to be charged, and the same would go for any device, any piece of technology, any website that I visit.

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Just not bridging that gap. Whereas other things, so for example, the driving of the car. I’m acutely aware of the consequences of that because there’s things actually coming out of the rear of that car through the exhaust system that I can detect. I can feel the harm from that.

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You know? There’s no way that if you told me to go and stand behind a car for 10 minutes and breathe in deeply. There’s no way that that’s going to be something that I wish to do. I can draw a, a line between the stuff that’s coming out the exhaust, and my health and lungs, I can completely understand that. Whereas the phone, like I said, is completely benign. I could do that for hours, and so, I do think it’s an interesting thing.

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I wonder if you sense that generally speaking. When you have these discussions and you are trying to encourage people to equate internet use, technology use, whatever it may be, with the consequences of that, I’m wondering if people are generally, they’re open to it, they understand it, they draw that line themselves immediately.

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Or is there a bit of, what, hang on a minute. I’ve, I’m going to have to apply some thought to this. What do you mean? How can my, how can my computer possibly be doing any harm?

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[00:22:53] Hannah Smith: oh yeah, it’s such a good point. I mean, I can speak from my own experience as someone that has always been really interested in the environment, and really conscious of sustainability, environmentalism. And it wasn’t until I went to WordCamp Europe, when it was in Berlin actually, and Jack Lenox was giving a talk and Jack Lenox’s talk was, are website’s killing the planet? Something along those lines.

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I had this like total mad aha moment where I was like, oh my God, right? Digital tech runs on electricity. Has to be built. All that stuff’s got to come from somewhere. So of course it has an impact. But it wasn’t until I heard Jack’s talk, and also around the same sort of time, I heard Whole Grain Digital talking as well, I put two and two together.

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So it’s funny, but once, as soon as someone told me, oh yeah, you are using electricity to run this stuff. And of course electricity is mostly coming from the burning of fossil fuels, and all this stuff has to be manufactured. So all the lithium and cobalt, gold and silver and all the stuff that’s in your phone all has to come from somewhere. And that’s really energy intensive and damaging to create, or extract.

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As soon as I was given that little push in the right direction, suddenly this whole cascade of implications unfolded in front of me, and I was like, oh, well, yeah obviously, now I see it. But I, like many people, I think just need to be given that little nudge. Really helps to hear someone say that explicitly. Hey, did you know that between, see if I can get the numbers right. 1.9 and 3.3% of the world’s global greenhouse gas emissions arise from our use of digital tech.

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Did you know that that’s more than shipping and more than aviation? Did you know that that actually means that the internet becomes the world’s seventh biggest polluter is a country? When you start to hear those things, yeah, it dawns on you. And that’s certainly how I came into this space, or certainly how I kind of realized this for the first time.

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Maybe many people listening to what I’ve just said, the light bulbs have just flicked on as well and gone, oh right, yeah, of course, good point. It’s unseen, isn’t it, this pollution? To your point earlier, it’s all been abstracted away from us, so that we have clean, convenient lives. As you rightly say, you know, our phones are really sleek. Our laptops are really sleek. And that’s part of the service I suppose, that we’re being provided. We’re being given this convenience. We’re being given beautiful, well designed things. But that impact, unfortunately, is still very real at the moment. Maybe in time to come, we’ll get to a place where it’s not.

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We’ll have some new technologies that perhaps use the regenerative techniques, where we’re not extracting materials from the ground. Maybe we can start to grow them or find other ways to create them. But right now, yeah, that impact is real. Whoever came up with the term cloud really like clever, but from a sustainability angle, not helpful.

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[00:26:15] Nathan Wrigley: It’s about the most benign thing imaginable, isn’t it? It’s fluffy and, welcoming and, you know, they’re associated with the sun and all of that. Yeah, that’s interesting.

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[00:26:24] Hannah Smith: Yeah, and it’s just not true. Like actually it’s like a big diesel plume. To your point, actually the reality is 62% of the world’s energy, electricity comes from fossil fuel sources. And we can think about it as the internet is actually the world’s largest coal fired machine. When you start to have those pictures in your head, it does change your relationship to what you’re doing and what you have in front of you a bit I think.

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[00:26:51] Nathan Wrigley: And I guess that’s really the purpose of what it is that you are doing in the article that you wrote. Is you are, you’re keenly aware of this. It’s obviously something which is meaningful to you on a personal level. And you are, you’re really scouting out for ideas and suggestions and, for the community to gather around, and come up with what we can do.

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So, let’s lay out a few things in terms of WordPress. These are the things which just come into my mind as we’re sitting here talking to one another. I confess that there isn’t a great deal of backstory here. I’m just going to generate things as they come up into my mind.

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So the first thing is that our website’s dependent upon what is being presented to the end user. So, you know, if it’s a, if it’s a website, which is rich in large images. If it’s a website which is rich in video. If it’s a website which has huge amounts of JavaScript and CSS. We are pushing more bits over the wire. And so maybe there’s a piece there. Can we cut down the amount that WordPress needs to do, and needs to deliver?Would that have an impact?

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[00:28:00] Hannah Smith: Definitely.

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[00:28:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And then another thing which comes into my head is, at the end of the day when I finish with my computer, the last thing I do is I switch it off. I turn it off, and then when I need it again, I’ll switch it on and I’ll, whenever I’ve finished I turn it off again, so it’s on, off, on, off.

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What I’m trying to say is that it’s off more than It’s on. Significantly more. But our website hosting, let’s just call it that, wherever that might be, whatever system you are using. We need that to be on all the time because our websites need to be available all the time. That’s one of the points is something which is, you know, you don’t have to go to a website and be visited by a page which says, one moment, we’re just going to switch the computer on, and come back in a moment and everything will be ready to go.

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No, you want it to be ready immediately. And in fact, we’re being told all the time that the faster our webpage is being served up, the better it’s going to do in search engine rankings, which is almost like a holy grail. So everything needs to be quicker and everything needs to be more available.

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So there’s just a couple of pieces there really, which came to my head, the first one being that can we reduce the amount that WordPress has to serve up, and will that have a positive effect? And obviously that very much feels like a seesaw. You could argue that from both sides. But also the machines that our websites are running on, there’s probably quite a lot of conversations that we could have around there. The kind of things that hosting companies are doing to source the power and so on and so forth.

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[00:29:30] Hannah Smith: Yeah, I mean, it’s brilliant, isn’t it? You start to think about these things and you’ve hit upon two real, really key actionable things that we can look at within WordPress. So we’re talking at the moment about electricity and energy use, and I’m just going to sort put this into context and say, hey, don’t forget that electricity and energy use is just one aspect of sustainability. There is a little bit more to it than that.

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But I do think that when you are brand new to thinking about the impact of digital tech on sustainability, this is an absolutely awesome starting point. It’s very tangible and there’s quite a bit of research and tooling out there to help you. So I just want to kind of caveat and say, let’s deep dive into that for a little bit, awesome. But bear in mind, there’s more to think about.

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There is a very direct relationship between the amount of data that you send and the amount of CO2 emissions that that creates. So the more data to use your words, the more data, the more stuff you’re sending down the wire, the more pollution or the more energy that you’re using.

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And there’s a simple way to calculate this. For anyone that wants to get into this. If you know how much data you are sending, we can estimate how much electricity that is going to use to send that data from A to B. Whole load of assumptions that you’ll have to make in order to make that estimation.

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But there’s some models out there that you can use. You can have a look at the sustainable web design website. So if you know how much data you’ve got, you can figure out an estimation of how much electricity that would use to send from A to B. And then we can use something called carbon intensity data.

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And carbon intensity data allows us to understand how much CO2 emissions are created per unit of energy, or per unit of electricity that is created. So I mentioned to you that 62% of the worlds electricity is generated by fossil fuels. In different countries, and in different regions that will change. So I think Norway, for example, is 100% renewable energy.

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So depending on where you are in the world, you’ll have different carbon intensities to consider. But yeah, so essentially it can come down, a really good starting point is to think about performance and optimization, and think about how can I reduce the waste around this. There are dozens of reasons why we should be thinking about performance anyway.

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This is not a new ask of developers, or ask of technical people to think about performance. We have reasons around accessibility. We have reasons around cost. We also have reasons around SEO as well. The more performant and optimize something is, the better your SEO. And we also have things to think about in terms of people’s enjoyment of using said service, or said website.

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And we can add another one, another cracking good reason to think about this optimization and performance, and that is also the sustainability angle. So, I mean, really this stuff is just stacking up and stacking up to be like a no brainer. If you want to be a sustainable web developer, your first job is to get good at performance and optimization.

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[00:32:50] Nathan Wrigley: It’s interesting, the whole performance thing, while you were talking about that, I was thinking about the fact that performance really can go in two directions. The performance could be gained by cutting out waste, but it can also be gained by using more resources.

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[00:33:05] Hannah Smith: Ha ha, yes, good shout.

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[00:33:07] Nathan Wrigley: It is possible to simply say to yourself, I shall purchase more expensive hosting, which has got more CPUs and so on and so forth. And in that way, I cut out the need for me to make my website leaner, if you know what I mean. So, just to be clear, when you talk about performance, you really are talking about getting rid of the waste, considering whether that image needs to be that big or could it be smaller? Do I need to put that video on there? It’s more trimming things down as opposed to spending more money on a faster machine for example.

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[00:33:39] Hannah Smith: Interesting point. I’m really glad we’re having this conversation. Yes and no I would answer that question. 100% the yes part is definitely around the waste. Is around just not sending stuff we don’t need. Not having analytics collecting that we don’t need. Not generating data that we don’t need.

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The resources part is a really interesting one, because there’s a piece around maybe using our resources more wisely. So there can be arguments for perhaps having better hosting. Because if that better hosting, say you are serving a website across, you’ve got users all across the world visiting your website. Actually having a better hosting service that makes really good use of CDNs, content delivery networks, actually can have an impact on sustainability.

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Because if you are serving your data closer to the person that actually wants to use that data, you can save quite a bit of energy, electricity, because you’re not sending it from one side of the world to the other. And there is an electricity cost to doing that. Again, it’s not seen by us, but it’s real. It is there.

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So the service side, the hosting side of things. Something very specific you can do there is look for hosting companies that are using renewable energy, using renewable energy sources to power themselves. And I’m going to plug the Green Web Foundation where I’m working now.

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We have a really awesome data set, which we’ve been collecting for 10 years or so on hosting companies that are powered by renewables. That’s a very specific action you can take. But yeah, to your point that you can make something really performant by chucking loads of resources at it. Yeah, that’s not what we are talking about here when we are talking about sustainability. We are talking about speeding things up through the use of wise resources instead.

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[00:35:36] Nathan Wrigley: I know that time is pressing for you, so we’ll wrap up fairly shortly, but I just want to, just want to offer a few thoughts as well, and, the piece that I mentioned towards the beginning of the podcast where I said that, it’s very difficult I think for me, and I’m sure a lot of other people as well, to draw the line between the website and the impact on the environment, and I’m wondering if it might be that we need to be alerted to the consequences of our use of the internet.

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So just throwing out some ideas, which probably, may very well have no legs, but just some thoughts really. Would be interesting, for example, if in the WordPress backend we could see something which gave us a measure of what it was that our website was doing. So if it gave us a direct link to okay, every, every time somebody comes to this particular page, this is what you are sending to them, and that has this kind of consequence.

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Now, obviously, that’s much more complicated, as you’ve described, because it depends on the hosting that you’re using. It depends whether they’re close or far away. But just some sort of broad metrics so that we could understand what the consequence of the thing that we’re building is. So I don’t even know what that would look like. Maybe it would be some sort of graph or chart or just raw number that would give us some indication.

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And then also more broadly, just browsing the internet. If we could have this kind of information coming back to us. So, I don’t know, I’m thinking of like a browser extension or something like that, which would measure what it was that I was doing when I went around the internet, and then give me some kind of feedback for, okay, this week you consumed this much in terms of electricity or carbon that was produced as a result of your browsing the internet.

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Last week it was this, the week before it was this, so you know you’re going in the right direction. Just those kind of things. I’m just wondering if there are things afoot. Maybe tools that exist already, or projects that you know about that can help us to understand the consequences of what we are doing.

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[00:37:39] Hannah Smith: Definitely, and do you know what Nathan? These ideas absolutely have legs and these are exactly the kind of ideas that we are inviting people to come and share on our post with us. All of these suggestions, all of these ideas are relevant and very, very actionable, and have already been actioned in certain ways.

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So to your point about CO2, understanding CO2 emissions of websites, so there’s a fantastic tool called Website Carbon Calculator. I think the URL is websitecarbon.com. So you can go along to that and put any URL in, and immediately get a sense of how polluting that page is. And that is such an awesome tool to use with bosses or clients, who perhaps aren’t so interested in the nitty gritty technical detail, but want a number, or a statistic or a sense of how good or bad they’re doing.

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And the Website Carbon Calculator has a little bit of JavaScript code that you can embed in your site that will give you a reading of each page of how much CO2 that that page is polluting. Now I believe that there is a plugin for that as well, and I don’t know if that would give you the information in the back end of WordPress, but Website Carbon Calculator’s being developed by Whole Grain Digital. If you’re interested in WordPress sustainability, I mean, they’re really thought leaders in this space, so definitely worth checking them out.

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I had some conversations with Jenny Wong many years ago, and, and those of you that are in the UK WordPress community, you’ll probably know Jenny. I think most people do. And if you’re listening, Jenny, hello. Jenny and I exchanged some ideas around using Site Health, and actually building some of these ideas into Site Health. That section of the WordPress backend. It might be difficult to get that as a core contribution to begin with, but we could certainly look at making some plugins.

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There’s loads and loads of data out there that we could use to surface these emissions. And then to your point about browsers, yes. Actually at the Green Web Foundation, we’ve been talking quite a lot with the Firefox people, made by Mozilla. And there are some open issues in GitHub at the moment around integrating carbon emission readings and estimations into the Firefox browser.

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I don’t know off the top of my head whether the intention would be to track it in the way that you’ve talked, but you know how if you’re a developer, you, you might be familiar with the web dev tooling that we have, say within Firefox or Chrome. The idea is to create a separate tab in the performance section, to start to give you a reading within the browser as well.

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So there are all these things happening, and this is where I really want to invite people to come and join us. Please let us share these initiatives that are happening. If you’ve got some time and capacity and you’ve got some energy, and you want to take action, we desperately want people to come and join in, and make these things happen. So yeah, please share these ideas that you have.

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[00:40:49] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Yeah, that’s really, really interesting. Just before we wrap it up finally, it just occurs to me that we’re always looking for ways to, to have a competitive edge. If you are a freelancer or an agency, you’re always trying to figure out ways that you are different from your competition. And it just strikes me that maybe this, maybe this could be one of those ways. You are one of the developers who actually gives this some thought. And it may very well be that there are a whole load of clients out there for whom this would be a very important metric when making hiring decisions, so.

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[00:41:24] Hannah Smith: Such a good point. As a freelance WordPress developer, uh, you know, people were, were starting to know me as someone who knew about digital sustainability and who could build sustainable WordPress sites, you know, efficient WordPress sites. And the demand was mad. I couldn’t keep up with it. I was constantly being like, oh, I need more people to recommend this work to. So yeah, I think this is a really strong selling point, and it makes you feel good as well, to know that you’re doing the best you can, you’re doing the right things.

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[00:41:55] Nathan Wrigley: Hannah, just as a very final thing. If people have been interested in this, I will obviously link to the post in the show notes. You can check those out on wptavern.com, but if they want to contact you, are you available? And if so, where should we do that? What’s the best way to reach out to you?

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[00:42:12] Hannah Smith: Yeah, well, I mean, I would love to chat with anyone that’s interested in bouncing some ideas around, or is interested in finding out more. The best way to get hold of me is through the Green Web Foundation, so hannah@thegreenwebfoundation.org, or if you’re in make WordPress you can also drop me a line. You’ll see me lurking around in the sustainability channel quite a lot in the make WordPress Slack space. You can drop me a line there too.

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[00:42:38] Nathan Wrigley: Hannah Smith, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast.

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[00:42:41] Hannah Smith: Oh, thank you Nathan. Thank you for making time for this today. I really appreciate it.

Her background is in Computer Science. She previously worked as a freelance WordPress developer, and also for the Environment Agency, where she managed large business change projects.

It’s pretty easy to forget that the device that you’re reading this post on is consuming power. We plug things in or charge them up, and they just work. They are sleek and sterile. No pollution comes out of the device directly. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that many of us never make the connection between our use of technology and the impact this has on the environment.

Enter Hannah Smith. She’s been thinking about this for years and is on the podcast today to highlight the issue, and hopefully get your ideas about what users of WordPress can do to make sure that the websites we create are having the smallest impact possible.

Her approach is not that we need to cease and desist using our technology. Rather, it’s about coming up with new and innovative ways that we can reduce the impact that we have.

With this in mind, Hannah and others have been working on a sustainability related blog post which has been published on the Make WordPress site this week.

This post is intended to trigger meaningful and open discussion in the global WordPress community about the topic of sustainability. She really wants to encourage others to weigh into this public conversation with their own thoughts, so we can build on what is already happening to make WordPress more sustainable.

Useful links.

BuddyPress lead developer Mathieu Viet said he’s not sure there is a specific reason explaining why this was kept in place. Before the plugin introduced the BP Theme Compat API in version 1.7, it was necessary to use a BuddyPress compatible theme like the one bundled by default (BP Default).

“I think we kept the way this theme was loading these assets into the first Template Pack (BP Legacy) we added to BuddyPress,” Viet said.

Users have often requested BuddyPress only load its assets on community pages in hopes of further optimizing their websites. For example, in 2020, a user on the BuddyDev forums requested custom code to accomplish this. Experts recommended against doing it

“It is not going to help you much and will cause a lot of issues in future,” BuddyPress contributor Brajesh Singh said. “There are dependent plugins which may start throwing JavaScript errors and breaking some of your site functionality. It is not worth the effort.”

Singh recommended the user enable browser caching to avoid loading the assets multiple times and stick to best practices for enabling gzip compression and other optimization measure. He also recommended adding a plugin that would conditionally prevent loading BuddyPress on certain pages.

Coming in version 11.0.0, BuddyPress core will progressively move towards loading only the assets it needs in community areas. This update will still load JS and CSS everywhere but will offer a filter that users can add to their bp-custom.php files in order to keep BP assets on community pages only:

“If using the above filter, you notice something is going wrong with your website due to the use of a specific BP plugin or theme, report it here and we’ll then have another development cycle to fix things before we completely restrict these assets to BuddyPress generated pages in a second step in version 12.0.0,” Viet said.

Version 11.0.0 is expected to be released on December 14, 2022. Early adopters and BuddyPress site owners who have always wished for the plugin to behave this way can take advantage of it after the next major update using the filter. The filter can also be easily removed if users are troubleshooting and having issues with plugins.

The makers of the Fonts Plugin, a commercial product with a free version on WordPress.org, have created a tool called Google Fonts Checker that will help website owners discover where their fonts are hosted. The tool analyzes any URL entered and if the fonts are hosted by Google, it says “Google Fonts Connection Found” with a red ‘X.’ Sites that are in the clear will show a notice that a Google Fonts connection was not found:

Google Fonts Checker is useful for non-technical users who are not sure whether their theme or plugins are referencing fonts hosted on Google’s servers. Beyond delivering the simple connection message, the tool scans the website and returns a list of the font files used to render the page, which can be helpful in tracking down the specific extension loading these files.

More than 200,000 people are using the Fonts Plugin to load assets from the Google Fonts Library. Although the Google Fonts Checker tool is free to use and doesn’t require any personal information or login, the free version of the Fonts Plugin doesn’t support hosting fonts locally. Users will either need to upgrade to the commercial version or use a different plugin, like Local Google Fonts or the OMGF | Host Google Fonts Locally plugin, both of which perform this for free.

Those who find a Google Fonts connection using the tool may also consider switching to Bunny Fonts, an open-source, privacy-first web font platform with no tracking or logging that is fully GDPR compliant. It can act as a drop-in replacement to Google Fonts. The Replace Google Fonts with Bunny Fonts plugin makes it easy to switch.

Some of WordPress’ older default themes are still loading fonts from Google. A ticket for bundling the fonts with the legacy default themes had patches and was on track to be included in WordPress 6.1, but ended up getting punted to a future release after it was determined the approach needed more work. In the meantime, those who are concerned about using Google Fonts in older default themes can use a plugin to host them locally.

With the end of the year fast approaching, the WordPress project has not slowed down. Read on to learn more about the latest major release, WordPress 6.1, and the State of the Word 2022 live event, among other exciting news. It’s time to catch up on all things WordPress!

Say hello to WordPress 6.1 “Misha”

The third and last major release of 2022, WordPress 6.1 “Misha,” shipped on November 1, 2022. Named after jazz pianist Mikhail “Misha” Alperin, this release comes packed with many improvements that refine the site-building experience introduced earlier this year in WordPress 5.9 and 6.0, as well as accessibility and performance upgrades.

WordPress 6.1 is also bundled with a new default block theme, Twenty Twenty-Three (TT3), that features 10 style variations designed by WordPress community members. These intentionally unique designs ensure that you can change the visual details of your site with ease—and within a single theme.

Following WordPress 6.1 “Misha”, a 6.1.1 maintenance release landed on November 15, 2022. This minor release includes about 50 bug fixes.

State of the Word 2022 is coming on December 15

State of the Word 2022, the annual keynote address delivered by the WordPress project’s co-founder, Matt Mullenweg, will be held on December 15, 2022. The event will take place in person in New York City and live-streamed via various WordPress.org social media platforms.

What’s new in Gutenberg

Team updates: Documentation Contributor Day, WordPress.org redesign updates, and more

Feedback & testing requests

Event updates & WordCamps

Have a story that we should include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Fill out this quick form to let us know.

Learn why NitroPack made the decision to go cloud-based vs. self hosted with the SasS product.

WordPress.org will soon be launching a blog for developers. The blog went into beta at the end of last week and resides on a subdomain of the main site. It is sporting a design similar to WordPress’ general News blog.

One of the big picture goals that WordPress’ Executive Director Josepha Haden-Chomphosy identified for 2022 was the creation of a developer-focused communications site. This new blog is the culmination of an effort that began earlier this year.

“Staying on top of the new features coming to the WordPress open-source project is one of the main barriers expressed by developers,” contributor Birgit Pauli-Haack said in the original proposal.

“The Make Core blog has a heavy emphasis on meeting notes for the various core teams, rather than highlighting new features. This makes it difficult for developers who are not contributors or who just occasionally contribute to find the relevant information among the team-related posts.”

Content on the new developer blog will be focused on updates applicable to theme and plugin creators, developers who work at agencies, Gutenberg API updates, advanced programming concepts, PHP gems, and developer case studies.

There are already three posts published, which offer a hint at what kind of content WordPress developers can expect on the blog:

The blog’s editorial process is being entirely managed on GitHub from pitches to publication. Anyone who wants to contribute can post to the Ideas board for discussion. Approved ideas become blessed tasks and drafts and go through two reviews. People can contribute by posting ideas, writing posts, or joining the editorial team that reviews posts.

Now that the blog is in beta, contributors are looking for feedback from WordPress’ developer community. Leave comments on the beta announcement or join the next meeting in the core-dev-blog WP Slack channel on December 1, at 13:00 UTC. Subscribe to the RSS feed to never miss a post from WordPress’ new developer blog.

Matt Mullenweg’s annual State of the Word (SOTW) address will be delivered in New York City this year before a live audience, on December 15. The event format is similar to last year where a small group of invited guests will join in person.

Traditionally, the State of the Word has been given at WordCamp US, capping off the event with an inspiring review of WordPress’ progress and a lively Q&A session. Starting in 2020, due to the pandemic, the SOTW transitioned to a separate, smaller event that can be broadcast to all who cannot attend. Organizers are planning to livestream this year’s event across WordPress.org’s social media platforms.

Unlike last year, where prominent members of the community were invited to attend, organizers have created a form where anyone can request an invitation to attend. Seats are available to the public on a first-come, first-served basis. The form states that masks will not be required at the event, a policy that is as controversial today as it was last year, and makes it impossible for medically vulnerable people to attend:

Since the majority of people will be watching via live stream, the Q&A portion of the event will be handled via email for virtual participants. Anyone can ask a question in advance by emailing ask-matt@wordcamp.org or may ask during the event in the live stream chat on YouTube. WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden-Chomphosy said there may be a follow-up post published with answers to questions not covered at the event.

State of the Word is the annual keynote address delivered by the WordPress project’s co-founder, Matt Mullenweg. Every year, the event shares reflections on the project’s progress and the future of open source. Expect this and more in this year’s edition.

This year’s event will take place in person in New York City and live-streamed via various WordPress.org social media platforms.

Join Matt as he provides a retrospective of 2022, the latest WordPress releases, Site Editor advancements, and a return to in-person events around the globe, among other topics.

How: If you’re watching from the comfort of your home or local watch party, the live stream will be embedded in this post and available through the WordPress YouTube channel.

Have a question for Matt?

State of the Word will include a Q&A session. If you want to participate, you can either send your question ahead of time to ask-matt@wordcamp.org or ask during the event in the live stream chat on YouTube.

Given the volume of questions that are usually submitted, please note that it may not be possible to answer all of them in the live Q&A. A follow-up post will be published after the State of the Word to answer those not covered at the event.

Join a State of the Word Watch Party near You

Can’t make it to New York? No problem, organize or join a watch party in your community in person or online. Like last year, the Community team has resources available to help! Check out this handbook page, which includes event templates, information on requesting a Zoom account, and how to get some swag.

Gather together to look back on how WordPress has grown in 2022 and what is ahead for 2023. Stay up-to-date as a group on the latest happenings in the WordPress world and collaborate together on any questions you might have for Matt!

We will be compiling a list of State of the Word watch parties in this post, which will be updated regularly as the event approaches. If you don’t see a watch party in your region listed here in the next few weeks, check this page on Meetup.com to see if your local WordPress group is organizing one.

If you are planning a watch party for State of the Word and have questions, please email support@wordcamp.org. A member of the WordPress community team will assist you in the best way possible.

I am so excited about next week! Finally, there will be another Six-a-side Festival at the Sarasota International Cricket Club. I’ll be there Saturday and Sunday. I am excited to see all the friends again, most I haven’t seen in three years.

If you are in the area, come on by. It’s a lot of fun, a diverse community, and you can meet cricketers from England, the Caribbean, and the West-Indies coming together to play cricket, party and play cricket again the next day and the next. It’s great fun for the whole family!

In this edition, you’ll find a vast array of videos, blog posts and podcasts from Learn.WordPress, WordPress TV and around the community. Let’s get started!

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Also, part of WordPress 6.1 is a new default theme. In her post Introducing Twenty Twenty-Three, Beatriz Fialho, design lead, takes you a long for the journey exploring the new default theme and it’s community-submitted style variations.

WordPress 6.1.1 was released, fixing a few bugs on the backend and frontend of the software. Core contributors and release leads JB Audras, Jeff Paul and George Mamadashvili, worked hard to get this out with two weeks of the 6.1 release. This was a really fast turn around.

In his Design Share: Oct 24-Nov 4, Joen Asmussen lists the project the WordPress design team has been working on. The visuals representation of upcoming feature are absolutely exciting. First up are the screens of possible location for the Custom CSS feature, many of you found missing around the block themes. You can also see the design explorations for the interface to make a Group block sticky. You could use it for an ever present navigation bar or a public service announcement. Or an ongoing news ticker banner.

If you use the latest version of the Gutenberg plugin, you might have noticed, that the the info screen with the meta information on word count, or the outline was moved into the List view as an additional tab. The design team also explored more delightful designs for this panel.

James Koster tries to answer how to make it possible to push local block styles to global block styles. In other words, after you modified the look and feel of a single block, how can you make the styles persistent for all the blocks of that particular type on your site.

The WordPress meta, design, and marketing teams have been working on the redesign of the Showcase page on the main website. Joen Asmussen reports on the progress in his post A refresh of WordPress.org/Showcase. “The current work represents a starting point that will continue to be iterated upon as additional features, and content changes are explored.” he wrote. He also provides links to the Figma file and the Showcase GitHub repository.

Gutenberg 14.5 released

Nick Diego was the lead for last week’s Gutenberg plugin release. In his posts What’s new in Gutenberg 14.5? (9 November) he wrote: “It consolidates the list view and document information, expands margin and padding support while improving spacing visualizers, and sets the groundwork for future releases with numerous code quality improvements and bug fixes.”

One of the new features is a new Social Link Block for Mastodon accounts, Mastodon, is an open-source decentralized social network, that many feel comfortable as using while Twitter seems to be deteriorating fast.

On a side note, I just created the @gutenbergtimes account on the mastodon server at twit.social. If you want to follow, just search for https://twit.social/@gutenbergtimes on any mastodon server, and you can follow me there. It’s a new account so not much going on.

Gutenberg 14.6 RC is already available for testing. The stable version will be release by Fabian Kägy on November 23, 2022

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

Thien Nguyen published his Mindmap Block It’s a cool block that provides the conversion from Markdown input in the block editor to a Mind map display on the frontend. This could get fascinating when Phase 3 of the Gutenberg project progresses, as then you can use this to collaborate on mind maps, too. We’ll revisit this in two years or so. It’s not a free plugin, and it is available on Gumroad with single site or unlimited site levels.

Today’s count is 182 Themes supporting the Site editor in the WordPress Themes Directory. New themes are available by the Block Styles team, Brian Gardner, Blockify, Catch Themes, Wen Solutions, and by Wwwows.

Rich Tabor and Courtney Portnoy discussed The creative side of blocks on WordPressTV. Rich Tabor walks the viewers through one of his block art creations. It’s quite inspiring to watch Tabor’s exploratory creative process using the block editor. I learned quite a few things about the power of the various color features: gradient, nested group blocks, and how to replace the theme’s primary and secondary colors for the whole site. You’ll also get an introduction to the Museum of Block Art, where Rich and other block artists showcase their creations.

On the Torque Social Hour, host Doc Pop interviewed Roy Sivan and James Tryon about Block Styles Community and plugins built by the two. Gutenberg adopters of the first hour, the team aims to augment the Block editor with Block Styles to make it a professional page builder for power users. They created 160 input fields to customize a site.

The most obvious styles enhancements are the tools to separate the page layout features by screen sizes for desktop, tablet, and mobile. It’s a bit unfortunate to give a product / membership service the same name as a WordPress feature. Plugin developers have the advantage of a shortened implementation time and run into the danger to be passed by core in the long run.

Missing Menu plugin and the newest block theme Gesso were also mentioned on the show.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

In his post Creating Themes from a Pattern-First Mindset, Justin Tadlock helped theme developers interested in block themes to see the power of using pattern in their templates to reduce code redundancy and simplicity.

On Tuesday next week (Nov 22) Daisy Olsen and Justin Tadlock, together with Damon Cook will hold a Hallway Hangout on Future of CSS in block themes. It will be in a casual chat about some Block Theme development-related features that are under active development. Hope to see you there 🙂

Ganesh Dahal wrote about Managing CSS Styles in a WordPress Block Theme and took a deep dive into the migration from styles.css files to theme.json. “One of the major benefits of moving CSS to JSON is that JSON is a machine-readable format, which means it can be exposed in the WordPress Site Editor UI by fetching an API, thus allowing users to modify default values and customize a site’s appearance without writing any CSS at all.” he wrote.

“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2022”
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test and Meta team from Jan. 2021 on. Updated by yours truly. The index 2020 is here

Sarah Gooding reports on an update of the Create Theme plugin in her post: Gutenberg’s Roadmap for a “Font Library” Will Give Users an Interface for Registering and Managing Web Fonts. Besides the features: create a new theme, start with a blank theme, create a child theme, or create a style variation, in now sports a dedicated screen for managing fonts. In her post, Gooding also summarized the tracking ticket on the Webfonts API and links to design exploration for a font manager within the core app.

Mike McAlister shows you Three beautiful font pairs to bring your design to life. “With all the new fonts out there, there’s no excuse to be using tired old fonts on your website. Here are a few fonts that should definitely be on your radar.” he wrote.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

Manoj Kumal wrote a tutorial on CSS-Tricks on Creating a Settings UI for a Custom WordPress Block. It’s the third post in the series “Working With External APIs in WordPress Blocks”. The first two post cover the rendering of external data on backend and frontend. The last post on “Saving custom block settings” is coming soon.

As always, if you read this post two weeks after it was published, you’ll find the recording of the Twitch streams on Ryan Welcher’s YouTube channel.

Jonathan Bossenger and Álvaro Gómez ran a two-part workshop on Developing blocks without React. The recordings are now available on WordPress TV:

Dan Knauss of Post Status reported on The Future of GiveWP and the Block Editor. He summarized: “The journey to GiveWP 3.0 is well underway — an open, iterative development process that fully embraces WordPress’s Gutenberg block editor. Give cofounder Matt Cromwell and development director Jason Adams share what they’ve learned so far.”

The main reasons for the rebuild are that the plugin match visual experience of the block editor, the need for more form field flexibility and to simplify template building. “Taking advantage of the components and packages of the block editor, as visual builder framework, continually improved and maintained by the open-source project, the GiveWP developers were faster in getting specific features done in a matter of hours rather than months.

Upcoming WordPress events

New Date! December 16, 2022
WordFest Live Returns – the 24-hour Festival of WordPress

Learn WordPress Online Meetups

Featured Image: Early morning. Building with where the lights are on by Paal Joachim Romdaal found on WordPress.org/photos

Divi, the popular commercial WordPress theme and page builder created by Elegant Themes, has announced major changes coming in version 5.0 that constitute a complete rewrite of Divi’s core technologies. The update, which is expected to be released in beta next year, will focus on performance, stability, scalability, and extendability, but it will not introduce any new features.

“We are recreating Divi’s backend framework, cleaning up years of technical debt, changing Divi’s storage format and improving its rendering mechanism,” Elegant Themes CEO Nick Roach said. “This new version of Divi will be able to processes design settings much more quickly.”

One of the most notable changes coming in 5.0 is that Divi will be migrating away from shortcodes.

“This change will bring Divi into alignment with the future of WordPress, which is evolving in a new direction,” Roach said.

Divi will migrate to a new JSON format that is similar to the way Gutenberg stores data. The legacy shortcodes will continue to work and for a time Divi will lazy load in the old framework as necessary.

“If you are using Divi shortcodes outside of your post content, it will be highly recommended to replace these shortcodes with our new json-based elements,” Roach said. “Otherwise, you are going to take a performance hit.”

As part of the 5.0 update, Divi’s developers plan to include a button to perform the migration away from shortcodes, which will automatically change posts to use the new system.

Divi 5.0 will also introduce a new Builder API, which Roach said “may also open up opportunities for Divi/Gutenberg cross-compatibility:”

News of the coming update was well-received by Divi users who posted additional questions and concerns in the comments. A few users were skeptical about the new direction but willing to see how it pans out.

Peter R, a current user who said he appreciates Divi’s “nicer and smoother UX,” along with the collections of design settings, indicated that Divi seems to be falling behind what the block editor offers for building pages with dynamic data:

More than 2,425,411 live websites are currently using Divi and an an additional 1,486,812 sites that used the product historically, according to BuiltWith. The nearly 10-year-old product has grown steadily for years but seems to have plateaued beginning in 2020.

Embracing the way WordPress is going will be important for the page builder’s continued success, and Elegant Themes seems to be acknowledging this with the planned update.

“On the block theme front, as a part of Divi 5.0, we are also transitioning into a Block Based theme, and since Divi 5.0 is actually internally built using the same ‘packages’ that Gutenberg itself is composed of, Divi 5.0 has a lot of compatibility built in from the core,” Elegant Themes developer Josh Ronk said.

“We are working diligently to push Divi 5.0 for maximum Gutenberg block compatibility, with the goal being that you would be able to use Gutenberg blocks inside of your Divi built pages, and then apply all of the Divi design options you love to the otherwise plain Gutenberg blocks you have installed. This means you won’t have to choose between Divi or Gutenberg, and rather you get Divi AND Gutenberg.”

Divi’s developers plan to ensure the old Divi modules built with the current Divi API are backwards-compatible, working on the front end but with a more limited capacity in the Visual Builder. They will be encouraging developers to move to the new API to take advantage of the performance benefits.

Divi 5.0 will not introduce new features or changes to Divi’s design, but the underlying architecture will be moving closer to Gutenberg compatibility.

“Divi 5.0 will use React and it will leverage more of the native Gutenberg packages,” Roach said. “At some point we hope that Divi and Gutenberg will work in harmony. We don’t want to fight against the direction that WordPress is heading.”

A New Home for the WordPress Community?

It sounds like a tall order, but there it is: over at Ollie, Mike McAlister has proposed “a thought experiment and design concept” called OpenPress:

Alex Kirk drew attention to his work on a plugin I\'d never heard of called Friends. Friends makes it easier to follow your selected blogs/RSS feeds inside WordPress — and restrict some posts to a private network of friends. There are content blocks with restricted visibility “for friends on a per-block basis.” Friends “supports IndieAuth” and “doesn’t interfere with other IndieWeb projects such as Webmentions.”

Sabina Ionescu published a lot of different responses from people in the WordPress community to questions about the impact of the pandemic on them.

The history of screen readers is incredible! Sheon Han tells their hidden story and how “blind programmers have been creating the tools their community needs” — for decades.

Upcoming Events

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

Tom Willmot on the Challenges and Opportunities Facing Enterprise WordPress

Sparked by Magne Ilsaas‘s ideas in The WordPress Enterprise Paradox, Tom started a Twitter thread and hosted a live discussion with Magne and others at enterprise WordPress agencies this week. Their main concern is the challenges that arise from not having a well-defined brand and market that allows “WordPress for the Enterprise” to stand out — without being ties to a particular WordPress company or host. After getting an outline of the problem as it stands today, I asked Tom what might help differentiate “Enterprise WordPress” as a collective or entire ecosystem of agencies operating within it. Can open-source values of sharing and cooperation shape a unique global identity for enterprise WordPress agencies? Is it time for an inter-agency association or “guild” to take on these challenges? LISTEN→

Big Growth Isn’t for Everyone

Back in 2019, Tom Lach‘s agency was a team of 10 people, and they were entering a space where they could easily start working with big enterprises. Their idea of the future was to scale up and grow. Of course it was. How honest conversations at WCEU changed that. READ→

The Future of GiveWP and the Block Editor

The journey to GiveWP 3.0 is well underway — an open, iterative development process that fully embraces WordPress\'s Gutenberg block editor. Give cofounder Matt Cromwell and development director Jason Adams share what they\'ve learned so far. READ→

Evolving Edupack — and Sunsetting It

Blake Bertuccelli shares how a plugin that tried to do it all led to an accessibility platform and enhanced client services. READ→

Quick links

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

Tom Willmot has been a WordPress pioneer and leader in the agency space since co-founding Human Made in 2010. Just in the past year, Human Made has more than doubled its size with a team of 100. Tom is also CEO and co-founder of Altis DXP, Human Made\'s enterprise WordPress digital experience platform. I caught up with Tom this week to find out what he\'s thinking about the challenges and opportunities of the enterprise market for WordPress agencies today.

Sparked by Magne Ilsaas‘s ideas in The WordPress Enterprise Paradox, Tom started a Twitter thread and hosted a live discussion this week about the challenges of not having a well-defined brand and market for enterprise WordPress. In the minds of clients beyond the WordPress and open-source community not to mention unhelpful tech industry analysts, “WordPress” is something you can buy, and it\'s often confused with any number of related brands: Automattic, WordPress VIP, and managed WordPress hosts that support enterprise clients.

After getting an outline of the problem as it stands today, I asked Tom what might help differentiate “Enterprise WordPress” as a collective or entire ecosystem of agencies operating within it. Can open-source values of sharing and cooperation shape a unique global identity for enterprise WordPress agencies? Is it time for an inter-agency association or “guild” to take on these challenges? (Human Made has an internal “guild” structure of cross-functional teams — what could it look like to extend them across the whole agency space?)

And how might that look within the WordPress ecosystem and others adjacent to it? Are more inter-agency gatherings needed along with greater participation in existing tech and design conferences? Will agencies like Human Made resume hosting conferences like their Day and Week of REST events in the past? Can the larger WordCamps cater to an enterprise track? Does Enterprise WordPress need its own conferences? I like Jeremy Keith and ClearLeft as a model for agency thought leadership. Magne has pointed to the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) as a model for organized peer collaboration and North Patrol as a model for a research and advisory firm that connects agencies with clients and reports on regional enterprise web tech markets.

This is an open, ongoing conversation. If it piques your interest, connect with Tom on Twitter.

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Transcript

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

In a recent podcast I gave a bit more insights to what you will be seeing with out newest update in early 2023.

Learn Accessibility

Digital accessibility, commonly abbreviated a11y, is an important subject in web developer circles. More and more, folks are looking for solid guidance on designing and building websites and web apps that disabled people can interact with in a meaningful and equivalent way.

This course is for beginner and advanced web developers. You can go through the series from start to finish to get a general understanding of accessibility practices and testing, or you can use it as a reference for specific subjects.

The Return of SmashingConf

SmashingConf SF will cover everything from accessibility and advanced CSS to JavaScript gems and web performance, while SmashingConf Freiburg is all about front-end, UX, and design.

PHP 8.2 Release Delayed

Due to some critical bugs related to OPcache that “are very likely to happen in a real-world use case” the PHP release managers have decided to add another PHP 8.2.0 RC and push back the final 8.2.0 release to December 8, 2022.

With the fast pace at which new PHP releases have been coming out, it’s good to remember that early testing of release candidates is critical to solid releases.

Deno for Headless WordPress Themes

Deno is a runtime for JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly that is based on the V8 JavaScript engine and the Rust programming language. Created by Ryan Dahl, the creator of the Node.js runtime, Deno aims to address some of Dahl’s regrets about the initial design decisions with Node.js.

With the increased popularity of headless WordPress, this is an interesting entry into the space.

Substack, the WordPress Plugin

LogoIpsum, Post to Telegram, and WP .gitgnore

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

Jetpack Search, a plugin that enhances WordPress’ search capabilities, has added a free tier and a three-month free trial to what was previously only available as a paid upgrade. The plugin uses WordPress.com’s infrastructure to provide instant, more relevant search results without reloading the page, with real-time indexing, integration with WooCommerce, spelling correction, and more.

Jetpack Search was launched as a standalone plugin earlier this year but the user base hasn’t grown beyond a couple hundred active installs. The new free tier and free trials enable prospective customers to try out the functionality on their sites before committing to a new annual subscription.

Free users are limited to 5k records (all posts, pages, and other types of content the site indexes) and 500 requests (every time a visitor searches for something on the site) per month. Sites that go over the limits will not be cut off for the first three months.

At 10K records, pricing starts at $8.25/month, billed annually, and includes 10k requests, priority support, and unbranded search. When purchasing, Jetpack estimates the size of the site, but users who are not sure how many records they have can sign onto the free tier to find out.

The previous pricing for Jetpack Search started at $2.50 per month (billed annually) for up to 100 records. The plugin’s support docs explain why Jetpack implemented this major pricing change:

Jetpack assured existing search customers that the new pricing will not yet affect them until their plan renews and Automattic will contact them by email before the pricing changes.

Jetpack Search is built on top of Elasticsearch, and currently uses version 7.16, which is Elastic’s proprietary offering after the company abandoned its open source licensing. As a consequence, Amazon forked Elasticsearch and Kibana at version 7.10 to create the OpenSearch project.

“We built our own solution on top of it. We use Elasticsearch to build Jetpack Search, but we also use a lot of our other systems, especially Jetpack Stats, to provide great search relevancy that you can’t get by just deploying Elasticsearch,” Jetpack Marketing Lead Rob Pugh said.

“We are running both OpenSearch and Elasticsearch for different services but Jetpack Search is on ES. We’ll continue to consider both in the future.”

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

As a followup to my note in August on this topic, here\'s what Tom Greenwood had to say about WebP\'s value to sustainability in WordPress:

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

Back in July, Sabina Ionescu published a lot of different responses from people in the WordPress community to questions about the impact of the pandemic on them. I missed it then, but it\'s still relevant and worth reading.

The history of screen readers is incredible! Sheon Han tells their hidden story and how “blind programmers have been creating the tools their community needs” — for decades.

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

Piccia is passionate about good UX, and in this show offers some great user experience insights into both WordPress and WooCommerce sites.

Back in August, Oliver Sild announced in Post Status Slack that Patchstack was opening up “additional data” to “enrich the vulnerability data” their service discloses, now “with [a] real-time IP feed of attackers who hit [Patchstack\'s] virtual patches.”

Virtual patches are Patchstack\'s quick interventions for customers\' sites when an official patch doesn\'t exist yet for a newly disclosed vulnerability. In Oliver\'s words, they are “security rules that protect from specific plugin/theme/core vulnerabilities.” So, if someone is actually hitting these virtual patches, it\'s very likely they are trying to probe or exploit a vulnerability.

Since the large number of sites being protected by Patchstack\'s virtual patches makes a very big (but impenetrable) attack surface for new vulnerabilities and zero-day attacks, it makes a perfect attack monitoring network — or possibly even a honeypot for attackers. The data Patchstack can get from hits to their patches “gives more context to all vulnerabilities.” In other words, they can see if a particular vulnerability is being targeted heavily — or not at all. Then they can prioritize the attention of their security network partners and “fight fearmongering (i.e low severity plugins that get to media, but we all know are not exploited).”

This is cool indeed! WordPress security could go on the offensive with information like this and shut down attackers with the help of hosting partners.

Patchstack is going to publicly release the actual attack levels for each vulnerability in their database, “but for anyone who needs such data in bulk (to apply on their entire hosting infrastructure or to network firewalls), here’s some more information already: https://patchstack.com/for-hosts/

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

Automattic has released a new block theme called Loudness that is available on both WordPress.com and WordPress.org. It’s an artistic and opinionated theme based on the company’s Block Canvas starter theme. Although Loudness’ brief description suggests the theme was created for “music and learning,” the design and custom patterns lend themselves to a variety of different use cases. It could easily be used to whip up a quick event website with ticketing, an artist’s portfolio, or even a personal blog.

Loudness’ typography features the energetic combination of the sans-serif Rubik font for headers and DM Mono for paragraph text. The type design and font development for DM Mono was commissioned from Colophon Foundry, an award-winning type foundry based in London.

Installing and activating the theme on a fresh website offers users a good experience, as it automatically puts everything in the design in place exactly like the live demo on WordPress.com. Users don’t have to figure out which patterns to add in order to get it looking like the demo.

Loudness packages 12 custom block patterns, which can be previewed on WordPress.org. The pattern organization in this theme could be improved, as Loudness’ patterns are intermixed with selections from the pattern directory. It’s not easy to differentiate which ones belong to the theme. For purists who like to use only the patterns included in the theme to keep the design tight, it’s much easier when a theme creates a custom label in the pattern explorer for its own patterns.

Not pictured in the demo is a full-width FAQ pattern with a dark color scheme, which matches the other quirky design elements in the theme.

In addition to the instructors pattern and pricing table shown in the demo, Loudness includes artistic designs for a pullquote pattern and a section of large text.

Two illustrations are included for use in the header area or to break up the design. They can easily be swapped out for a photo or a custom illustration from another source.

Loudness doesn’t include any style variations, likely because most of the patterns are highly dependent on the established color palette. Although users are free to alter it in the Site Editor, the results may not be as harmonious as expected when using the illustrations in the site design.

Loudness is a unique block theme that makes a strong impression and can be creatively applied to many different types of websites – from events to blogs to businesses and agencies. The theme is available for free from WordPress.org and is also available to users on WordPress.com.

Bob puts out so much writing and audio at Do the Woo and has so many different people featured, it\'s hard to keep up! These are some recent ones I\'ve taken note of but didn\'t get into a post or newsletter. Definitely worth a listen:

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

This is an important topic that came out of a Post Status Slack #security discussion involving Robert Rowley and John James Jacoby: WordPress Terminology Meta. It continued over at the WPwatercooler.

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

This Week at WordPress.org (November 14, 2022)

News

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This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

WordCamp Asia 2023, the first flagship event to take place in Asia, is just a few months away, scheduled for February 17-19, 2023, in Bangkok, Thailand. Organizers have announced the first round of speakers, a diverse selection of WordPress professionals from Asia and across the globe.

The event has also unveiled its wapuu mascot. After receiving 10 design submissions from eight designers from India, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan, organizers selected the Chao Phraya Boat Wapuu. Designer Chiaki Kouno explained the concept:

WordCamp Asia is running a series of webinars for contributors and attendees. The first episode was broadcast on Twitter this week and is embedded below. Organizers are asking contributors to share their stories in text, audio, or video format, to encourage newcomers to participate in the Contributor Day event. The webinar also featured tours of ICONSIAM, a beautiful and modern venue where the first WordCamp Asia will take place.

Organizers published a notice that there will be no childcare offered at the WordCamp, due to the potential for COVID-19 transmission. Nursing and changing facilities are available the 4th and 5th floor of the venue, which also offers some children’s entertainment options. Those who are 12 years old and younger can attend the conference for free if accompanied by an adult who has purchased a ticket.

Jukebox 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 the new plugin from Pinegrow to create complex WordPress websites.

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If 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 forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players. If 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.

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Head over to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jutebox and use the contact form there.

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So on the podcast today, we have Adam Lowe. Adam runs Peak Performance Digital, a small web consulting agency in Washington, DC, which specializes in providing website strategy along with custom WordPress solutions.

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He’s on the podcast today to talk about a new plugin from Pinegrow. Adam does not represent the company, but as an avid user of their products and experienced in how they work. The Pinegrow web editor is a desktop tool that lets you build websites with a graphical user interface.

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The closest comparison would be a page builder, but this is not entirely accurate. Unlike most page builders, which require very little technical expertise. Pinegrow does require an understanding of technology such as CSS, SASS Grid, Bootstrap, Tailwind CSS, to make use of the platform. The intention of the tool is to make it possible to create complex sites, but with a close eye on the HTML and CSS that is being output.

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Given the popularity of WordPress, the Pinegrow developers have created a WordPress plugin, which is just about to be released. It’s in closed beta and Adam has been using it as his go-to solution for several months now.

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We talk about what the platform can do and how it works. It’s not going to be a plugin for beginners, and there’s going to be a learning curve for those who do take the plunge. It’s intended as a bit of a bridge between novices and WordPress experts.

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We also get into a discussion about the fact that Pinegrow is intended to be a no dependency solution. Once you finished creating your theme block or whatever else you might want to create, you can export that in a way that no longer needs Pinegrow at all. If you’re curious about new ways to create websites in WordPress, have a listen to the podcast and see if Pinegrow is a good fit.

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If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

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And so without further delay, I bring you Adam Lowe.

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I am joined on the podcast today by Adam Lowe. Hello, Adam.

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[00:03:46] Adam Lowe: Hello.

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[00:03:47] Nathan Wrigley: It is very nice to have you on the podcast today. We normally begin with a little bit of a brief introduction from our guests, just so that we can orientate ourselves around who you are, what your relationship is with WordPress. So if you wouldn’t mind, just for a few moments, just briefly describe your past in the WordPress space or with tech in a more general way.

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[00:04:07] Adam Lowe: I had been in the website space for a long time. I started in the late nineties. I actually think that I built my first website and sold my first in website 1997. And I’ve been around WordPress since the very first version, I think that was called Miles Davis actually. Used it for quite a while. Took a little bit of time away while I worked in-house in corporate, using some enterprise products. And then I got back into it again, I guess six or seven years ago. So it’s been a really interesting journey and seeing how far it’s come in that time period has been incredible.

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[00:04:36] Nathan Wrigley: You are on the podcast today to talk about a particular tool that you’ve been using. It’s a curious tool in that it is soon to be a WordPress plugin. So the features that the desktop version has had for a long time are being ported over into a WordPress plugin so that you can use it inside different installs of WordPress.

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It’s called Pinegrow. If you’ve not come across Pinegrow before, maybe it’s a good idea to pause the podcast and go Google Pinegrow. I’m sure you’ll find it. You can see exactly what it does, but would you be able to, first of all, lay out what Pinegrow is, and also would you just make it clear what your relationship to the company is? Because I think that might be an important thing to clarify right at the start.

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[00:05:19] Adam Lowe: It definitely is and I appreciate that. So Pinegrow, it looks like a page builder. It acts like a page builder. It smells like a page builder, but it’s not a page builder. Pinegrow is actually a theme builder and a block plugin builder, and what it does is it lets you visually create websites and visually create blocks and themes, and then it takes what you create in their builder and it spits out WordPress native code.

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So it uses native WordPress functions and all of that to, spit out React blocks, and PHP themes that you can just move to your website and install like you would anything else that you had hand coded. So, whereas most page builders live inside of WordPress and require you to have it installed and running, Pinegrow doesn’t need that.

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Pinegrow is just a builder that lets you, build things, basically code in a very visual manner. My relation to them is, I’m just a user. I pay for the product. I didn’t even think that it was going to be my main product a year and a half ago, but the more that I’ve used it, the more I’ve come to rely on it and I see the benefits of it.

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So I have developed a very close relationship with the company. I’m not employed by them. They don’t pay me, nothing like that. I just feel very passionate about this as a product and it definitely suits my needs from a business standpoint.

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[00:06:36] Nathan Wrigley: That’s good to clear up. Thank you for that. The intention of the product then, in the future will be that the desktop version that you’ve been using for years, is now going to be a WordPress plugin. In other words, you could install it on different sites, and you could modify all of the different pieces of your WordPress website.

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But just to be clear, once you have finished that work and exported a theme or a plugin, block, whatever it may be, you’re making the point that it’s no longer required. There isn’t a dependency to have that plugin installed any longer. You could whip it out. Remove all trace of Pinegrow, and everything should still just work.

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[00:07:17] Adam Lowe: That’s absolutely right. And when I talked to Matjaž a few, I guess several months ago, and he was telling me about this project, I had asked him, hey, is it possible to be able to do this sort of thing? And he came back and said, yes. And my mind was completely blown. I just didn’t think that anyone was going to be, maybe brave enough or, able to build something like that.

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And when he came back and said that, yes, this is the way that it already works, I was like, I need to get in this beta. And maybe two months ago he invited me into the private beta, and I’ve been testing it ever since. And yeah, it’s incredible that that’s what it does. It is just a builder that, it creates a plugin that you activate like a normal plugin or creates a theme that you activate like a normal theme. And once you’ve got it in there, the need for the Pinegrow builder plugin is gone. The only reason why you would potentially need or even want it, is if you wanted to make a change to that theme or to that block plugin. So there is still a benefit of having it on there, but it’s definitely not a dependency or a requirement.

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[00:08:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really quite interesting. Obviously, if we’re using a typical page builder, if we remove the page builder, the page will look entirely different. But in this scenario, everything should still look the same because it’s not requiring Pinegrow from that moment on.

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[00:08:26] Adam Lowe: Exactly.

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[00:08:27] Nathan Wrigley: I’ve watched a few of your YouTube videos and I think we should probably figure out who the target audience for this is first, because the promise of page builders really is that more or less anybody can start building a website. And obviously, the advent of Gutenberg and full site editing and so on, that is hoped to be the promise. That anybody can log in and with a little bit of orientation and familiarization, they can start dropping things into the page and come up with something, perhaps use templates and modify those templates and so on.

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I think it’s fair to say that Pinegrow is not really aimed at that target audience. It feels to me like the barrier to entry may be a little bit higher than that. Have you got anything to, to add to that?

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[00:09:10] Adam Lowe: You’re right on the money. It is definitely not aimed at the new person. It’s not aimed at the Elementor crowd. It’s not aimed at even the DIY person. Originally Pinegrow was aimed at developers, and the desktop version, which is continuing to be supported and available. The desktop version continues to have more and different features than the website plugin. But that is really aimed towards people who want to get into the weeds.

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For the WordPress plugin, they’ve definitely put some considerations in there for people who aren’t quite as comfortable in code. So we’ve got some quick start tutorials. We’ve got some more, a little bit more handholding, but not as much as you would get with an Elementor. The best audience for Pinegrow would be somebody who is comfortable with code but doesn’t want to use it.

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Or maybe somebody who is trying to learn a little bit of code, or knows the concepts, but doesn’t want to get in there and write PHP, HTML, CSS all day long.

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[00:10:06] Nathan Wrigley: Is the reason for that because you need to have some sort of understanding, familiarity with the way WordPress works internally. Because this is generating, essentially code? You need to really understand where that code needs to be deployed, which lines of the HTML for example, it is that you’re going to target with various things. You need to basically have some understanding, otherwise, is it just going to be a purely frustrating experience?

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[00:10:32] Adam Lowe: That’s exactly what it is, and you need to have a conceptual understanding of how WordPress works and how code works. Not really a practical hands on understanding of it. So you don’t need to know what all the functions are and how to, how to write them from scratch. But you need to know when to use different things. You need to understand how the theme hierarchy works. You need to understand how WordPress calls different pieces. Again, what the names of some of those functions are so that you can apply them.

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[00:11:00] Nathan Wrigley: So, from everything that you’ve said, it feels a little bit like a bridge between, let’s just use the word novice, a novice user, and somebody who essentially is a complete expert. They understand everything. They can just open up, sort of IDE, a text editor if you like, and happily type away and build up all of the bits and pieces that they need.

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This is somewhere in between. You need to be, not an expert, but not a complete novice. There’s going to be some handholding and the UI will assist you along that path. But there’s definitely going to be some requirement to understand bits and pieces of how WordPress works conceptually.

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[00:11:34] Adam Lowe: That’s exactly what it is. And if you look at some of the more advanced page builders on the market, I’d say about half that crowd, the more advanced half of that crowd, would be perfect for using Pinegrow. And the less advanced half might get confused by it. And then you have the developer side, the people that can code who just don’t want to, and don’t want to do all that repetitive stuff. And that is definitely a great market for Pinegrow.

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[00:11:56] Nathan Wrigley: In terms of the level of understanding that would be a sensible default. Where are we pitching that really? Do you have to understand pretty much all of HTML and CSS? Do you have to have any understanding of JavaScript and React and so on? What are the core principles that you’d have to know off the bat, just so that you could begin using it?

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Because, I get the impression, having looked at your YouTube videos, that if I put a complete inexperienced user in front of this, there would just be, well, 10 minutes of mayhem and then throwing the computer out the window because it would be a very frustrating experience, because you wouldn’t know what anything meant. Where would you pitch this in terms of your CSS knowledge, HTML knowledge, and so on?

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[00:12:38] Adam Lowe: You definitely want to know HTML, and you want to understand, again, the concepts of CSS and maybe what the different things are called in there. Because Pinegrow has the visual controls for everything. You don’t need to remember what all the different classes are and what all the different properties are and everything like that.

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You can come in and click and start creating your CSS rules visually. So that’s great. But you do need to understand how CSS works, again, at a conceptual level. And the same thing with HTML. You don’t need to know all the different bits and pieces. You don’t have to memorize 300 and some odd elements. You need to have an understanding of what to use and when.

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[00:13:12] Nathan Wrigley: Does the plugin, because I think really that’s what we’re focusing on here. Does plugin bring along any guidance or tutorials to help you bridge that gap? So, explanations of how the UI works, but also more broadly, explanations of how WordPress works and explanations of things like CSS so that you can be swept along, just following Pinegrow’s documentation.

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[00:13:38] Adam Lowe: First of all, Pinegrow’s got an incredible amount of documentation on their website and they’ve got tutorials for just about everything. So if you’re interested in it, I would start there. The plugin does have a new tutorial section built in and they have one tutorial built that takes you kind of start to finish on how to create a block. And it walks you through how to use the interface, how to create CSS rules, how to put elements on the page. Basically how to do everything you need to do.

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So them, including that has been, a great way to get your feet wet and get a basic understanding. But then, you go to the website and they’ve got tutorials on how CSS works. They’ve got tutorials on how WordPress works. They’ve got tutorials on how to create a WooCommerce site from scratch. How to create themes from scratch, all of that stuff. And it’s really just a matter of going in, and the more you use it, and the more you do the tutorials yourself, the better you’re going to understand it.

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[00:14:28] Nathan Wrigley: A typical page builder’s UI would contain a panel at some point on the page, which would have icons, and those icons would be indicative of what the thing that you are about to drop on the page, the element, the module, whatever it is. You’d drop that onto the page and then something would immediately appear and you would then go about tweaking. You’d maybe change some numbers if it was padding or margin or font size or what have you. You could type text and change different things like background layouts and all of that. Is that broadly what Pinegrow looks like? Could you just sort of give us some indication of what the UI looks like and what we can expect? I know that’s very difficult in audio, but it’s probably important to understand what you’re getting into.

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[00:15:08] Adam Lowe: It really is, and you should see the hand gestures that I’m doing right now. They make absolutely no sense to anybody. So no, you’re definitely not dragging elements onto the page like you would with something like Elementor. You’re dragging raw HTML elements, which, if you don’t have any styling on them, they look like nothing, or they just look like plain text. It’s not until you start adding CSS to it that it does anything.

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So no, you don’t have those icons on there. You don’t have that kind of friendly thing. Again, I would equate it more to what you see with the advanced page builders in the WordPress space where you’re adding a section, you’re adding a column, you know, you’re adding in a header, you’re adding a text element. You do not get those predefined components. So you’re not going to get a menu builder. You’re not going to get a carousel element that you can just drag on there. You’re not going to get an accordion element that you can just drag onto there.

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Pinegrow does expect that you are able to either build that yourself or find libraries that are out there that you can just grab the code from and plop that into your page. They do include some starter libraries, and blocks, and components if you’re using something like Bootstrap or Tailwind. But if you’re just doing an HTML and CSS project, then no, you’re not going to get that.

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[00:16:18] Nathan Wrigley: Does Pinegrow have a community of people that have been doing things for a while in the background there? So in other words, if I was to get into this, is there a forum of some kind where I could go and see other people’s work that’s already been created? Or am I very much looking at tutorials and then I’m on my own, I’ve gotta work it out for myself?

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[00:16:37] Adam Lowe: So the Pinegrow website does have a very good forum. They’re not very active on Facebook. They’ve got their own reason, basically they don’t like Facebook and, and I’m okay with that. They’re not very active on Facebook, but if you go to pinegrow.com, they do have forums on there. It’s actually forum.pinegrow.com and that’s a great place to talk to other Pinegrow users, to get directly in touch with the company themselves. And they do have a section on there where people can showcase their work.

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The other place you can go, they’ve got a product called Pinegrow Online, which probably isn’t going anywhere, but it’s actually a very, very early version of this WordPress plugin. And if you go to pinegrowonline.com, I believe it is, or if you just Google Pinegrow online, you’ll see this. And right there on the page they’ve got, I don’t know, maybe 20 projects that people had submitted that you can come in, you can look at, and you can even open up the builder right there from the website and see how they’re created.

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[00:17:31] Nathan Wrigley: That’s really nice to know. Yeah, thank you for that. With a page builder, the intention is very much to build a website. You install it. You add pages. Possibly some templates for various different things, categories and so on and so forth. And at the end of it, the website is built that really is the point.

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Now, it feels to me that whilst that is also the point of Pinegrow, the intention is very much to create other things. So for example, to create blocks which you may wish to export and use elsewhere. Themes, which you may wish to use and export elsewhere? Have I got that? Have I understood that right? Is this not just a tool for building websites? This is also a tool for building components, themes, blocks, and so on. Plugins for other websites, other projects. So you could use it as a, as an example, you could have a standalone Pinegrow website, where you do all the building and then you could simply export the bits and pieces that you’ve built to use on your other client projects. That might be a possible use of it?

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[00:18:27] Adam Lowe: Probably not. You know, it sounds like what you’re describing might be getting again into page builder territory. So when you say building a website, there’s really two different ways that I see that. One is building a static HTML site, and that’s something where you would use a Pinegrow desktop app that just spits out generic HTML and CSS that you upload to any place.

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And then the other would be, you know, to use something inside a WordPress, it needs to be in either a theme or a block. So that’s how you enter your content. That’s how you make your pages look like something and do certain things. So Pinegrow doesn’t let you design pages. It lets you design those themes and those blocks that you can then activate on your site and start putting content into. Does that make sense?

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[00:19:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. I guess what I was trying to say was, if you created an array of blocks, which let’s say for example, you’re in the real estate niche or something like that, and you have a block that you’ve created in Pinegrow, that really satisfies almost everything that a real estate agent might wish to do. House pictures and pricing and so on and so forth. And it would spit out a nice display on the front end of the website. That was what I was imagining. You could then create that block, take it, export it, put it on all your other client websites and future client websites, and deploy it in that way.

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[00:19:41] Adam Lowe: Yes, absolutely. And here’s where we start getting into the gray area of whether the WordPress plugin version or the desktop plugin version makes more sense. So you can do that, and you can create those block libraries and export your themes and your blocks to use anywhere you want. On the WordPress plugin version, you’re kind of limited to everything being contained on that one site to build it.

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And, if you want to export the block and use it somewhere else, that’s great, you can do that. But then to modify that block, you’ve gotta go back to the original project that lives on your source website, let’s just call it that. So that gets a little bit cumbersome. And this is where the desktop version really comes into play because it lets you create reusable libraries.

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So you can create those libraries of components, of code, of themes. You can create those master themes that you can drop into any project. So it really speeds up the workflow. So for example, I’ve got a component library that I’ve created over time for basically everything that I need. And when I fire up Pinegrow Desktop, I just come in and with a few clicks I can drop a carousel or I can drop a menu on to someplace.

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I don’t have to recreate it from scratch. I don’t have to go back to an old project and copy paste code, like I would otherwise. That’s really the benefit there, and that’s part of the reason why you end up paying a little bit more for the desktop version than you will for the WordPress version.

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[00:21:03] Nathan Wrigley: I understand. So the desktop version may be more suitable for building components which you use all over the place, because that’s the place where they’re originating from. And perhaps if you’re building client websites, the WordPress plugin, and we’ll find out about the pricing shortly, is going to be suitable to install on each individual website until it’s no longer needed. Right, got it.

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[00:21:20] Adam Lowe: It is. And, while you can do what you were saying on the WordPress plugin, it’s just not going to be as efficient as you would be with the desktop.

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[00:21:27] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Thank you. In terms of the way that the tool has been built, I don’t know if this question will be of great interest for everybody, but it may be to some. Presumably given what it’s trying to do and the way that it’s trying to do it, it had to work fairly tightly in the, I’m doing air quotes, in the WordPress way.

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It had to stick fairly closely to the WordPress way of doing things. Is that the case? Has it been built with WordPress standards and typical ways that people would hopefully build themes and blocks, in order to achieve what it is hopefully outputting?

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[00:22:03] Adam Lowe: It has been. And there are a few places where it, kind of strays from that. And, just to give you an example. WordPress says that you should not include functionality in a theme. That a theme should be your design only, that if you’re going to put something in the WordPress repository that you really need to split functionality from design.

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However, in practice when somebody’s building a website for a client or for themselves, they’re going to combine the two because you cannot really separate the two practically. So, while you can use Pinegrow and you can create a plugin that has all your blocks in it, with all the smarts, and then a separate theme that has just your templates in there.

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Practically speaking, that doesn’t make sense. And all the tutorials and all the guidance says, just put it into the theme, that’s going to be the easiest way to go. So, yes you can do it 100% the WordPress way. You can completely work it if you want, or you can use a hybrid approach.

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[00:22:57] Nathan Wrigley: I have a, I have a curious question about this idea of the business going out of existence. And so, for any WordPress company, let’s say a page builder. If that company folded, then you are to some extent left in the lurch. You know, you’re hoping that somebody maintains that project and carries it on and what have you.

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With this, it presents a slightly different problem in that everything will still continue to work, but the Pinegrow editor, you would no longer be able to use, well, I guess you could use it, if WordPress didn’t change in such a way that it made it impossible to use. But you could in theory carry on editing all of the bits and pieces that you’ve got with your IDE, in a text editor if you like. That would still be possible?

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[00:23:39] Adam Lowe: It is, and this is actually one of the things that drove me to Pinegrow more than anything else. If you’ve been around WordPress for any period of time, you’ve seen the problem with abandoned plugins, You’ve seen the problem with things that just stop working. As a matter of fact, I’m working on a project right now where I have, out of 52 plugins, I think 10 of them are abandoned. Two of them have been removed from the repo, and more than half of them are older than three years old, and can’t be upgraded for one reason or another. So that’s the sort of thing that I fight against on a daily basis is, all these dependencies, all this crazy stuff that’s happening.

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And then you’ve got your page builders where, okay, the page builder’s one dependency, but then on top of the page builder, you have all these other add-ons. You’ve got frameworks, you’ve got, extra components that are being put in there. And each of those things adds just one more dependency on top of it.

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One more dependency. And if any one of those companies goes out of business, stop supporting it, has a security problem that they can’t fix or won’t fix, then you’re kind of left having to either refactor the whole website, or you’ve got a insecure website that you’re dealing with. So this is one of the big challenges that I’ve been facing over and over again.

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And when I saw Pinegrow and saw what they were doing with WordPress, this was one of the things that really drove me to it, was that it is creating native themes and native blocks that you would create them the same way if you were doing it by hand, using VS code or any other IDE.

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And if Pinegrow were to go out of business, that’s not a problem at all. You’ve still got those things that don’t rely on the builder at all to use or to modify. You can just go right in, change your PHP, change your blocks and, keep using it as if nothing ever happened.

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[00:25:19] Nathan Wrigley: Can you think of any caveats where that’s not necessarily the case? You know, this promise has been offered several times before, and then as you’ve described, it doesn’t actually bear out when the company does go out of existence. To your knowledge, I’m guessing, because you could simply remove Pinegrow and the whole thing still just works. There are no caveats to that as far as you know, there’s no dependency of any kind whatsoever. It’s just the ability to use their UI to modify things that you would lose out on if they disappeared.

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[00:25:51] Adam Lowe: I would say yes and no to that. So, yes, it really is just the dependency on their builder for making changes to it. However, there are things like Tailwind and Bootstrap and Green Sock that are extra libraries that could be dependencies if you chose to use them. So Pinegrow does let you use those frameworks, Bootstrap and Tailwind, in both the desktop version and the WordPress version.

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So if something were to happen with either of those and they no longer were supported or maintained, then yes, you would have that dependency problem. Same thing for Green Sock. And Green Sock is an animation library. It’s really a JavaScript library that lets you do all sorts of things from creating menu animations to things flying all around your screen and all sorts of silliness. It’s a very powerful piece. But again, if something happened with any of those other component libraries that you chose to use in your project, then you would run into that problem.

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[00:26:44] Nathan Wrigley: Just to be clear, that’s an option in Pinegrow or that’s a necessity. In other words, you don’t need to use Tailwind, you don’t need to use Bootstrap. And obviously if your site is animation free, you’re not going to be using any of that Green Sock either. All of that’s the case if you choose not to use those things, and just write native JavaScript, native CSS, we’re all good.

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[00:27:03] Adam Lowe: Yep, 100% optional.

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[00:27:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That’s great. The way that blocks have been growing over time, it feels like in the last year in particular, the complexity, the number of companies getting into this space has changed quite a lot. WordPress itself offering us heaps more functionality in the things that we can do. So for example, we’ve now got, full site editing, which enables us to do things on the back end. The capabilities and the different options available to us inside of blocks, too numerous to count.

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But each and every week it seems that there’s a new bit of news about something that’s going to be coming down in the next version of WordPress, which will alter the visual experience of how we interact with blocks. Have you noticed that Pinegrow, does it update basically? Does it watch the WordPress project closely to ensure that there’s compatibility, stability with the most recent versions of WordPress?

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[00:27:57] Adam Lowe: It does, and you raised an interesting point there where you talked about sorry, the block themes. Because right now Pinegrow does not have anything built in that works directly with block themes or to directly create a block theme. It still does, what are called classic themes. They are working on, some things for the block themes, but like you mentioned right now, it’s moving so fast in the WordPress space and it’s changing so often, that even if you were to install a block theme, you’d see the word beta inside of WordPress.

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So, really Pinegrow is waiting for WordPress to stabilize a little bit before they go in and really start supporting or letting you create a block theme, using some of their helpers. That’s not to say that you can’t create a block theme using Pinegrow, because I have, and I’ve got several sites that are running block themes that I created with Pinegrow. But there’s a few other manual steps that you need to take.

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In terms of blocks themselves, I’ve got a love hate relationship with blocks. I think there are pain in the butt, I think is just the most clunky way to build a website. But frankly, it, again, it’s the WordPress way. So either get on the bus or get off. There’s so many other benefits to WordPress that I’m on that bus. So I deal with it, and the blocks are changing all the time and they’re adding new things.

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So being able to do more with typography in there. Using fluid typography. And even now we have the ability to do a little bit of block locking and, content locking in there. Those are all really good things, and those were problems that I initially had turned to Pinegrow to solve. So it looks like WordPress is starting to do a little bit of that on their own. They’re still not quite there yet. So, there’s definitely room for both.

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[00:29:30] Nathan Wrigley: Tell me a little bit more about that. I know that the block locking capabilities in WordPress have been improved. Well, in the last few weeks we’ve had the ability to, with a click of a button, you can lock all the, the children of a particular parent block and so on and so forth. But the, the permissions model around that is not particularly, effective. There’s a lot that needs to be engineered to make that block locking solution work effectively. Are you saying that with. Pinegrow, you’re able to lock much more down?

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You can say, okay, you have a certain role or your username is this. You can only do this, this, this, but you’ve got a different role over there and you’ve got a different username, whatever it may be. You can do a whole bunch of other things. Does it have capabilities, permissions, which exceed what you can do with blocks at the moment, with blocks designed with Pinegrow?

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[00:30:16] Adam Lowe: Yes and no. So to get that granular as to, you know, role-based permissions to, for example, change a picture or, you know, user specific permissions to edit a text field. That’s the sort of thing that you may need to come in and write a little bit of custom code to do. Or write some conditionals in there. I actually haven’t tried to do that at that level, so it might be a whole lot easier than what I’m thinking. And I’d love if the Pinegrow people could just jump in and tell me, rather than me having to research it myself. Because I think there is some benefit to that.

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How I’ve used it is, just being able to define what fields are editable, and using standard role-based permissions for that sort of thing. So a lot of times, when I’m working with a client, they’ve got a marketing team that comes in and helps to find how things are going to look. But then the people that are actually editing the content, shouldn’t be able to remove a block, or they shouldn’t be able to do certain things.

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They need to adhere to certain style standards. So that’s the sort of thing where, within Pinegrow, I can define here’s the fields that you’re able to modify. Here’s the properties you’re able to modify, on a field by field basis. Whereas with WordPress, it’s kind of all or nothing.

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[00:31:22] Nathan Wrigley: That’s interesting. Thank you. In the preparation for this, I watched a few of the videos that you’ve made, more recently and, it’s certainly around Pinegrow but also around other different pieces. And one of the videos that I caught sight of was one where you were looking at the accessibility options in different page builders and, and how menus, for example, were accessible or were not accessible out of the gate.

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Is there anything to be said about the way that Pinegrow handles accessibility? I’m guessing the answer is, because you can do anything, you can make it as accessible as you like or not. But does it handle that kind of thing natively or is it simply the fact that it opens up the options? You can manually insert them to make anything as accessible as possible.

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[00:32:07] Adam Lowe: That’s exactly it. It opens up the options for you to make it as accessible as you want to or not. Again, it’s not going to make decisions for you. And, if you go to the forums, you’ll actually see a lot of conversations around people requesting that Pinegrow do certain things by default.

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But then they come back and, Pinegrow comes back and says, Well, you know, what about this case? What about this case? What about this case? And, the decision with Pinegrow is to leave things as open as possible for you to make those decisions rather than them forcing certain things on you.

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And it even comes down to silly stuff like, do you have a trailing backslash at the end of a URL? Do you put a no opener at the end of a link? That sort of thing. Where they really try to make it as open as possible. So, yes, for accessibility. Again, this comes back to one of the reasons that, I wouldn’t say in love with, but one of the reasons why I’ve standardized on Pinegrow is because I can build accessibility into my projects and, and accessibility’s become more of a focus of my agency over the last 18 months to two years.

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So the fact that I can come in and make a completely accessible menu is amazing. That I can create all these components in very accessible ways. Whereas before, I might have to turn to three or four different block plugins because, maybe the carousel in plugin number one is accessible, but the rest of the things aren’t.

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And the menu in another one is accessible, but the rest of the things aren’t. So, rather than cobble together all these bits and pieces that may or may not be the way that I want to accessibility wise, I just build. The templates are out there. The information’s out there. You just need to apply it.

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[00:33:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. That’s really helpful. tool itself, I think we’ve established, it is for intermediate or above users I’m guessing might be a reasonable way of describing it. Now, by pure good coincidence, we’ve recorded this episode right before, like, literally right before the release from beta into a stable version of the product.

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Can you give us some indication, we are recording this right at the beginning of November. If memory serves, you are going to be, well, I say you, Pinegrow are going to be actually launching the product on the 17th of November, and given the date that this podcast is going to go out, that’s probably a day or two around that date. Have I got that right? The stable version’s coming out on the 17th of November, 2022.

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[00:34:25] Adam Lowe: Fingers crossed, that is going to be the date. So I don’t see any reason why they won’t hit that date. And that’s the date that Pinegrow has released me to talk about. So, uh, yes. November 17th is going to be the date that they launch it. They’re going to launch a free version as well as a paid version.

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[00:34:40] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s probably apropos to say at this point that this isn’t a product which coming out of beta, is new is it? The change log for the desktop version extends back, well, years and years and years. And like you said, most of the functionality for this is ported from the desktop version.

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So, stepping in early, you are fairly confident that the product’s going to be, well, not just labeled stable, but will be stable. You’ve had a long, long play with the beta I guess?

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[00:35:10] Adam Lowe: I’ve had a long play and I think we’ve had over 30 beta releases come out since I’ve been involved. You just said it right there, is that this is a product with a long history. It goes back to 2014. And the codebase is exactly the same across all of them. It’s built on node.js. So that core is the same on Mac, Windows, Linux, desktop and WordPress. There’s no difference at all in what the builder does, how it works, the code that it spits out. So everything that you’re doing, from a builder standpoint is tried and tested, and it’s been out there in the field for quite a long time.

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The new pieces are really the ways that it interacts with WordPress from a front end standpoint. So, things like making sure that only people with the correct permissions can open a project. That two people can’t open the same project and step on each other, so that we’re not introducing security problems inside of WordPress by running the builder. That’s the kind of thing that is new. Not the builder itself, and the code that it spits out for your websites.

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[00:36:10] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to link in the show notes to the desktop version, which has been out for a long time, but I’ll also, assuming that the links are live, I will endeavor to put in the plugin version as well. Just before we round it off, I think people will want to know what the opportunities are to get in here.

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My understanding is there’s going to be two pricing tiers for the paid version, but there’ll also be a free version. Now, just to be clear, the free version isn’t going to be available on the repo, but the free version, I’m guessing, will have a limited array of functionality. Maybe you could speak about that, but then could you also just highlight the pricing for the two models as you understand it?

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[00:36:48] Adam Lowe: Sure, and I’m going to talk about the free version for a minute because I think Pinegrow’s absolutely insane for what they’re doing. When I asked what I could talk about for the free version and they came back and told me, I was blown away. So you can do pretty much everything with the free version, with just a few minor exceptions.

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So, the big one is that you can’t export themes with the free version. You can only export blocks. So that’s going to be one of your biggest limitations. The other big limitation is that you cannot do what are called inner blocks. So, inside of WordPress you can create blocks within blocks within blocks, Yeah. Blockception even. You can’t do that with the free version of Pinegrow. You can create your one main block and that’s it. So you can create blocks with it, but you cannot do themes. You can’t do inner blocks. And the other part is that you cannot import and export projects, to and from the desktop.

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So that’s your other big limitation. The only one other thing that I’m going to throw out there is that the Green Sock, what they call Pinegrow interactions, is not available in the free version because of licensing restriction with Green Sock themselves. So you do have to go to a paid version to be able to use that.

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Otherwise, you can use the entire builder as much as you want. You really get a feel for how it works, how to do different things. And, quite frankly, you can build a whole website with this, with no problem. It’s pretty amazing what they’re giving away for free. And I’m happy to talk about pricing too, if you guys want to get into that.

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[00:38:09] Nathan Wrigley: Two models. There’s a one site model and then there’s the unlimited sites, an interesting pricing structure. One site or unlimited. Tell us the pricing around those.

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[00:38:18] Adam Lowe: Yeah. So it’s going to be $49 per year for a single site, or $199 a year for unlimited sites. And the reason why it’s so interesting to me is because once you build your site, there’s no dependency on Pinegrow anymore. So theoretically you could buy a single site license and export themes and blocks to use on as many sites as you want.

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You’re just not going to want to do that because, going back and modifying and editing those things is going to become a real pain in the butt. $199 is a fantastic price point for what you’re getting here, especially for a developer who, presumably is working on client sites and getting their money back for this thing.

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In addition, they’re also going to have Black Friday deal. So it’s going to be 35% off for Black Friday, and I think that sales going to start right around the same time that they launch this plugin. That’s a bonus. And then there’s also going to be a very steep discount for people who already have the Pinegrow desktop version.

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So if you want to own both the desktop and the WordPress version, I believe you get 50% off of the Pinegrow WordPress plugin. There’s a lot of incentive here and Pinegrow’s put a lot of time and effort into the WordPress space. They definitely see this as a strategic move to get into WordPress, and they’re doing everything they can to make it easy to use Pinegrow in there.

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[00:39:28] Nathan Wrigley: Just before we round off, it strikes me that we’ve missed a particular piece of the puzzle here, and it’s not something that should be ignored I think. Having watched your videos, I confess I haven’t actually opened up the tool myself, but I’ve watched quite a large amount of what you’ve done.

\n\n\n\n

It really feels like this could be a good place to increase your knowledge of WordPress and how WordPress works. If you are prepared to go through the learning curve, you’re going to be seeing what WordPress is doing, or, or at least the way that it is intending to be doing things. The HTML that it requires to make things work, and the PHP, and the functions and so on.

\n\n\n\n

So really there’s that, that we missed just the fact that it could be a good tool, should you wish to learn a bit more about WordPress. It may be that if you feel that you are a little bit below the level that is required to get up and running straight away, it might be a good way to bridge that gap as well.

\n\n\n\n

[00:40:18] Adam Lowe: It really is, and I can tell you I’ve learned so much about WordPress and even CSS just from using this tool. Because it has, it’s given me that bridge to go from the page builder world to, oh my gosh, I’m sitting here in front of a blank text editor. So it gives me those tools to be able to learn it and, so then I don’t get stuck in the process.

\n\n\n\n

As a matter of fact, it’s quite interesting, Pinegrow had a project that they used the early version of this WordPress plugin for, to teach kids how to do HTML. So that’s where a lot of this came into play. That’s actually part of the reason why they even built this WordPress plugin was for their, I forget what they call it, but it’s like, HTML academy for kids or something like that. So yeah, it is a great learning platform if you’re so inclined.

\n\n\n\n

[00:41:00] Nathan Wrigley: Adam, just before we round off, if people are interested in this, they can obviously go to the Pinegrow website. You, as you said, are a very interested user. You’re not affiliated with Pinegrow but nevertheless people might wish to ask you some questions and, plunder your growing knowledge about how it works and whether or not it would be a good fit for position and what they’re trying to achieve with their clients or their own website. Where could we find you best?

\n\n\n\n

[00:41:25] Adam Lowe: Two different places. My website is peakperformancedigital.com, and then I’ve been doing more and more on YouTube. So if you just search for Peak Performance Digital on YouTube, you’ll find my channel there. All the videos that I’ve created, and I try to be very responsive to anybody that leaves me a comment or sends me an email.

\n\n\n\n

[00:41:40] Nathan Wrigley: Adam Lowe, I appreciate you joining us on the podcast today. Thanks very much indeed.

\n\n\n\n

[00:41:45] Adam Lowe: Thank you, Nathan.

Adam Lowe runs Peak Performance Digital, a small web consulting agency in Washington, DC, that specialises in providing website strategy along with custom WordPress solutions.

He’s on the podcast today to talk about a new plugin from Pinegrow. Adam does not represent the company, but is an avid user of their products, and experienced in how they work.

The ‘Pinegrow Web Editor’ is a desktop tool that lets you build websites with a GUI. The closest comparison would be a page builder, but this is not entirely accurate. Unlike most page builders, which require very little technical expertise, Pinegrow does require an understanding of technologies such as CSS, SASS, CSS Grid, Bootstrap and Tailwind CSS to make use of the platform. The intention of the tool is to make it possible to create complex sites, but with a close eye on the HTML and CSS that is being output.

Given the popularity of WordPress, the Pinegrow developers have created a WordPress plugin, which is just about to be released. It’s been in closed beta, and Adam has been using it as his go-to solution for several months now.

We talk about what the platform can do, and how it works. It’s not going to be a plugin for beginners, and there’s going to be a learning curve for those who do take the plunge. It’s intended as a bit of a bridge between novices and WordPress experts.

We also get into a discussion about the fact that Pinegrow is intended to be a ‘no dependency’ solution. Once you’ve finished creating your theme, block or whatever else you might want to create, you can export that in a way that no longer needs Pinegrow at all.

If you’re curious about new ways to create websites in WordPress, have a listen to the podcast and see if Pinegrow is a good fit.

Useful links.

Meetup.com raised some concerns with the WordPress community (and the broader community of accessibility professionals) this week after it added an accessibility overlay to its website. The overlay, powered by EqualWeb, displays a list of settings that can be toggled, ostensibly to address various accessibility needs.

Accessibility overlay products are often marketed as a quick fix solution that will make a website ADA compliant and immune from legal action, when accessibility had not been built in from the beginning.

In May 2021, accessibility advocates signed an open letter urging people not to use accessibility overlay products like AccesiBe, EqualWeb, and others. Signatories published a four-part statement that articulates the reasons why overlays are harmful:

WordPress’ Community Team uses Meetup.com to organize local and virtual meetups, as well as educational events. Accessibility practitioners consider the use of overlay products a flagrant malpractice and are calling on Meetup.com to abandon this solution in favor of addressing inaccessibility at the root of the problem.

After receiving some complaints, Meetup appeared to take the overlay down but reinstated it the next day. At the time of publishing. the overlay is still on the website. WordPress community organizer Angela Jin offered to contact Meetup.com on behalf of concerned community members. In the meantime, accessibility evangelist Amber Hinds suggested the Community Team explore Meetup.com alternatives and said the WordPress Accessibility Meetup will be looking into using a different events calendar.

WordPress.com has expanded its library of blocks to include a new Pocket Casts block that makes it easy to embed any show or episode in the WordPress editor. The block is branded for Pocket Casts and will display a podcast player and a selection of episodes when the show URL is selected. Alternatively, users can embed a specific episode by using its episode URL.

Automattic acquired Pocket Casts in 2021 after the app began struggling financially. At the time, Automattic’s Head of Apps, Eli Budelli, said the company would explore building deep integrations with WordPress.com and Pocket Casts by developing ways to make it easier to distribute and listen to podcasts. This new Pocket Casts block delivers on that promise with a solid integration for WordPress.

Last month, Pocket Casts open sourced its mobile apps under the Mozilla Public License, a GPL-compatible copyleft license that encourages contributors to share their modifications of the code under the same license. The code for Pocket Casts iOS and Pocket Casts Android is available on GitHub.

“We believe that podcasting can not and should not be controlled by Apple and Spotify, and instead support a diverse ecosystem of third-party clients,” the Pocket Casts team said when announcing its open source podcasting client. Users and contributors can now more easily report bugs, suggest new features, and submit pull requests.

Self-hosted WordPress users also have access to the new Pocket Casts block if using the latest version of WordPress. The Pocket Casts embed block variation was quietly added to Gutenberg 13.6, which was one of the releases that was rolled into WordPress core in 6.1.

I wish this was a WordPress story. It should\'ve been and could still be — a simple publishing platform built around freemium newsletters — and writers.

Ben Thompson\'s Stratechery was a Substack inspiration and has always run on WordPress, I believe.

I recall reading years ago that an early Substack proof-of-concept or early version was built on WordPress. That seems to be true according to this post by co-founder Hamish McKenzie\'s on the occasion of Substack\'s fifth birthday. It\'s unclear how far they went with WordPress before making Substack a proprietary project:

Substack was built around — and for writers — so they can get paid and do great work.

Former Economist editor Bill Bishop launched the tremendously valuable Sinocisim as Substack blog #1:

That\'s something the WordPress ecosystem distinction lacks for and about itself — WordPress writers writing about WordPress professionally and for a living.

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

WordPress 6.1.1 is now available

This minor release features 29 bug fixes in Core and 21 bug fixes for the block editor. WordPress 6.1.1 is a short-cycle maintenance release. You can review a summary of the key updates in this release by reading the RC1 announcement.

If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically.

Thank you to these WordPress contributors

WordPress 6.1.1 would not have been possible without the contributions of more than 105 people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver several enhancements and fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community.

How to contribute

Every University IT department dreams of a self-service system in which they do not have to deal with outside vendors. The dream includes a simple form that its users can fill out to generate websites from a library of templates. With Nathan Monk and Matt Lees, I cofounded a project called Edupack to realize the dream of simplified website management with a single WordPress plugin.

After user studies with folks from over 40 universities, including Harvard and Georgetown, I realize that Edupack cannot simplify website management with one plugin.

University users have particular website needs. We would have to build thousands of templates to satisfy the many detail-focused university users before. That design work is not affordable for many Higher Ed technology teams.

That said, Higher Ed pros should keep their dream of simplified website management alive.

I encourage most Universities to give up templated solutions and restrict “self-service” controls. Templates do not meet specific user requirements. Technology teams should focus on websites that can’t be built on WordPress.com or Squarespace. Many self-service use cases, like faculty profiles, can be satisfied with simple forms instead of access to an entire Content Management System.

Another key to simplified website management is increased resources. Website managers should argue the importance of their role. Websites are a key touchpoint for students. They not only include vital services like Student Information Systems, but websites also establish branding. Branding is an undervalued resource. Security teams rely on branding to establish official communication and brand awareness increases the marketing potential of any institution.

Of course, Harvard has one of the most recognizable brands. They also have one of the more successful web teams I’ve seen. The Harvard Web Publishing team fields tickets for new websites. Some of their websites are delivered as templated solutions. Other websites are built to the bespoke interests of their colleagues. Every new user goes through a content accessibility training course and their support staff is trained to answer most website publishing issues. That model allows Harvard to set their own requirements instead of relying on a third-party service while giving faculty and students a vital resource for promoting university-related work.

Most institutions do not have a budget to create their in-house web agency or hire third-party vendors. That fact troubles me. My only solution to that problem is for prominent universities to open-source their work and knowledge. Groups like WP Campus help share open-source web publishing knowledge. Without paying any membership fee, administrators at small schools can participate in the active WP Campus Slack channels and attend their annual conference. The onus is on university staff to contribute their knowledge to the group.

Edupack was born because of WP Campus. Matt, Nathan, and I saw reoccurring complaints about the complexity of website management on the WP Campus Slack. After many months of work, I hope lessons from Edupack inspire ever-better solutions.

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

Krissie VandeNoord shares insights and experiences with WooCommerce and WordPress through her agency North UX Design.

WordPress lead developer Helen Hou-Sandí has proposed using GitHub Codespaces to improve the contributor experience. GitHub recently announced the availability of GitHub Codespaces, its quick launch cloud-based developer environment, for all users, with 60 hours free per month for Free users and 90 hours for Pro users. Codespaces makes it possible to launch any GitHub repository in a single click.

“I’m looking to make wordpress/wordpress-develop usable in GitHub Codespaces with an initial target audience of folks getting started with contributing to core on a Contributor Day,” Hou-Sandí. “This seems to mostly be a matter of making decisions about our container setup(s).”

Getting a development environment up and running can be one of the most time-consuming aspects of attending a contributor day, especially with slow wi-fi. Hou-Sandí recently experienced this at the 2022 WordCamp US Contributor Day.

“This experience reminded me that as a project we should take a look at making it ever-easier to contribute to WordPress, and a remote development option is a good thing to have in our toolkit,” she said. “This allows contributors to get started with minimal setup and without the requirement of a desktop/laptop – you could patch and test WordPress from a tablet or your phone.”

Hou-Sandí has been working with Codespaces for nearly two years. In her 2021 WCUS presentation titled “A voice for the new White House administration with the block editor,” she surprised the audience with a live demo of the architecture of a custom block using Codespaces. The recording, which tours some of the work she and her team did on the 2020/2021 Biden/Harris whitehouse.gov website, is a good example of how Codespaces can be a helpful tool for WordPress development.

WordPress developers responded positively in support of using Codespaces to improve contributor experience and many are eager to help on the project and test when it’s ready.

Gutenberg engineer Riad Benguella said having a built-in online development and testing environment would be “a great addition to the WordPress and Gutenberg repositories.”

If using Codespaces can reduce the friction and help people get set up with a development environment in a matter of minutes versus hours, it would significantly improve the productivity at events dedicated to contributing.

“I believe this will help not only new but all contributors,” WordPress developer Tung Du said. “To me, using Codespaces to review PRs is such a great experience.”

“Besides, adding Codespaces support also means adding devcontainer support, which makes it way easier to set up the local development environment for contributors who use VS Code.”

GitHub’s limit of 60 free hours may also be used up by developers in their own projects so there may still be the need for tutorials on using other local development methods. For the occasional Codespaces user, it’s tough to beat the convenience of spinning up a development environment in seconds.

“I love this even for contributors who aren’t new,” Scott Kingsley Clark said. “I personally would find this very handy as it removes another roadblock towards contributing. I’m all for it, I can’t wait to give it a try once it’s ready for testing.”

A little over a year ago, I cofounded Edupack with Nathan Monk and Matt Lees. Edupack endeavored to simplify Higher Ed website publishing with a single WordPress plugin.

For many months, Edupack met with folks from over 40 universities, including Harvard, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, and Georgetown. We identified key problems around accessibility, governance, and sunsetting sites with stale content. Lessons from countless user interviews led to months of user testing before we released a coded version in early 2022.

I now believe that a one size fits all website publishing product is not possible. Each university has its own set of requirements. The requirements vary from the placement of buttons to the type of accessibility a university mandates. In the end, universities shouldn’t sacrifice individual requirements for ease of use.

The features that can be productized are largely around content accessibility. In our Edupack interviews, Higher Ed admins said they were overwhelmed by accessibility issues. Good accessibility tools, like SiteImprove, are too expensive for most web teams. Cheaper tools, like accessiBe, do more harm than help.

Edupack lessons around Accessibility inspired a new project called Equalify. Equalify releases tools users expect from accessibility scanners under an Open Source, Affero General Public License. On top of Open Source code, we will build additional tools that simplify content accessibility, hopefully satisfying the needs of Higher Ed pros we spoke with when building Edupack.

Edupack lessons outside of Accessibility will also not go to waste. My web design agency, Decubing, is launching “Managed Campus.” Managed Campus brings no productized requirements to a project. That allows us to adapt to the individual Higher Ed specifications, which prevented us from continuing Edupack.

My career is built around website management. While I will miss the ring of the “Edupack” name, I am confident that my new chapter with Decubing and Equalify is a step toward better website management.

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

In the forty-third episode of the WordPress Briefing, Josepha Haden Chomphosy explores two resources for openly licensed media in the WordPress project– Openverse and Photo Directory– and how they differ from one another!

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.

Credits

References

Transcript

Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks.

About 18 months ago, the Openverse project became part of the WordPress open source project, and at roughly the same time, we also welcomed the Photo Directory.

Since that time, we’ve seen growth in teams supporting both of these initiatives. But if you’re not involved in the day-to-day, it can be hard to know how those two things fit together or if they fit together at all.

In my timeline, work on the Photo Directory started before the work on Openverse, so that’s where we’ll start.

For as long as I can remember, the WordPress community has raised the need for WordPress-first ways to have and host GPL-compatible photos for use in themes, site builds, and marketing efforts as a whole. As recently as 2016, that was still coming up as a question at various flagship events and among the career photographers that contribute their time to WordPress.

So in 2017 and 2018, as attention started to turn toward rebuilding the CMS using blocks, it dropped down the list of priority items. But it never really went away as a thing that people were hoping we could do for the project as a whole. So in 2019, it was becoming clear that having open source-first tools of all varieties for people whose businesses were built on our software would help broaden the availability of the open source freedoms we believe in.

This began the work on the Photo Directory with the intention of providing a GPL-friendly, community-driven repository of images. It has since launched, and we have photos in it now. We have a whole team around it. It’s wonderful. But that is how that all kind of came to be.

Openverse, on the other hand, was launched as CC Search in 2019 with the laudable mandate to increase the discoverability and accessibility of open access media.

Late in 2020, while work on the Photo Directory was underway, Matt shared with me that the team was looking for a new project home. When I first met with them, they shared an overview of the product, which they shorthanded as an open source search engine that searches openly licensed images. We were working on a repo of openly licensed images, so clearly, this was all written in the stars. And so you might be asking yourself at this point, great, how does it work together?

I think for most of us, the timeline there kind of covers the question of what is the difference between these two things.

But because I never know which of you will want to strike up a conversation about open source on an elevator, I’ve also got the elevator pitch version.

Openverse is an open source search engine that searches, indexes, and aggregates copy left media from across the web using sources such as WordPress’s Photo Directory, Flickr’s CC Tagged Media, and Wikimedia, to name just a few.

Another key difference between the Photo Directory and Openverse is that in order to contribute to the Photo Directory, now that it’s all built, that’s mostly done by submitting photos or reviewing photos. So you don’t really need to be a developer to join in.

Openverse is not only a developer-centric contribution opportunity, but it also uses a different tech stack than WordPress as a whole. So it’s a good place for folks to go if they’re looking to broaden their horizons.

So that’s your elevator pitch of what Openverse is and how it uses the Photo Directory.

You have a couple of ways that you can get involved with these two projects. For the Photo Directory, as I mentioned at the start, you can always contribute photos, and they could always use more photo contributions.

I’ll include a link to the submission guidelines in the show notes below, and as I mentioned, it is a no-code way to give back to the WordPress project. So no code, development environments, and testing skills are required. The Photo Directory team also could always use more contributors to help with the moderating of photo submissions.

And so I’ll link to their making WordPress page in the show notes as well so that you can get started there.

And as I mentioned before, Openverse is an aggregator, so it doesn’t host any media itself, but it is always accepting suggestions for new GPL-compatible media providers. I’ll link the area where you can leave suggestions in the show notes as well.

And if you are more code inclined, there’s an open issue for adding Openverse browsing to the block editor right now.

So I’ll link that issue in the show notes in case you thought to yourself, gosh, that sounds like my most favorite thing to do. That is where you can go.

In case you missed it, WordPress 6.1 is now available. It launched on November 1st. Late, late, late in the day, and so it was easy to miss if you’re used to seeing it at a particular time. We were about six hours later than usual. But if you go to wordpress.org/download, you can get your own copy there.

The second thing on our small list of big things is that the Docs team had a contributor day. It was excellent. There’s a recap post up. I will include that in the show notes.

And then the final thing is that there was a recent hallway hangout that talked about the site editor and block themes.

And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.

Where (and how) do we connect?

Twitter is fast becoming a dumpster fire. Every time I look at my account, the settings, access, and options change. Sometimes overnight. Sometimes seemingly every fifteen minutes. There is a lot that happens on Twitter in the WordPress community. So it begs the question, where will you go if it all ends in a fiery crash like a SpaceX Rocket, or runs out of energy like a Tesla on the side of the road.

Finding each other isn’t necessarily the difficult part. There’s Slack, of course, and Facebook groups. It’s building the rapport in a new “main place” that is challenging, as well as finding new ways and locations to seek out and connect with customers and clients.

Mastodon is gaining in popularity, but there is a slight learning curve. And it’s a bit like shouting “Marco” into the void and not hearing anyone shout back “Polo” back when trying to find connections. Tumblr is an option, but it doesn’t work in the same way Twitter or Mastodon do as far as posting, following, and connecting.

Tell me where you will be building your next following if it’s not on Twitter. DM me on Slack (or Twitter while it’s still standing.)

More News & Links

In the Business Spotlight this week: Dominyka Mikšėnaitė with Hostinger
In the Member Spotlight this week: Parvez Akther

Upcoming Events

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

In this episode of Post Status Draft, Cory is joined by James Farmer, CEO of Incsub, WPMU DEV, CampusPress, and Edublogs. James’ WordPress story goes all the way back to his launch of the first hosted WordPress multisite blogging platform — just a few days ahead of WordPress.com. Edublogs currently hosts millions of students’ and educators’ blogs. James talks about successes and failures, his views on Gutenberg, and how he stays competitive with Squarespace. Cory brings up the WordPress.org active install growth data question and gets James’ take on how he’d like to see that data re-emerge with greater value for plugin businesses.

$\"🔗\"$ Mentioned in the show:

$\"🐦\"$ You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:

Transcript

Cory Miller: [00:00:00] Hey, everybody at Post Status. I\'m excited to have this conversation today. Um, my special guest is James Farmer, founder of Wpm U Dev, and, um, I\'ve known of James. I think I\'ve got to meet him maybe once. I know we\'ve talked before, but you know, as far back as James goes with WordPress, And the cool stuff he was doing at the beginning when I knew about him.

And now, fast forward to today, I thought this would be a very relevant conversation. And if you know anything about James, he, uh, knows his stuff and has opinions and, and I like his opinions, and I want to hear those. So, uh, James, thanks for coming on the, uh, uh, post status draft, uh, pleasure. In doing this conversation with me.

It\'s fun to, to, uh, hear your voice and hear what you\'re doing and get your thoughts on some things.

James Farmer: Uh, it\'s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation. It\'s, um, it\'s, yeah, it\'s really.

Cory Miller: Uh, you were just telling me, uh, it\'s like [00:01:00] beautiful sunny skies in Melbourne where I think you\'re based, uh, this morning.

James Farmer: Yeah. No, it\'s, um, it\'s just, uh, spring has finally arrived. We we\'re currently having a, a big wet, as it\'s called in Australia, which means that it\'s just rain, rain, rain everywhere. But finally it\'s sunny and nice and, uh, we\'re, uh, rolling into our, into our, towards our.

Cory Miller: Awesome. Well, I\'m jealous. I, I want to get to Australia at some point, and I haven\'t been there and, and hope to see in person and, and see the country. Well, absolutely. Okay. I\'m gonna dive right in, James, because I\'m, I\'m interested in these questions and I want to hear your thoughts and, and opinions on things.

But the first is just like, I know you as an early pioneer in WordPress in the, in the product space in particular. Um, but there\'s some people that may not know some of the backstory. So could you tell us like how you get got started with WordPress and then what the point where W P M U [00:02:00] started, you know, that kind of origin story?

James Farmer: I\'m curious to hear for myself. Yeah, for sure. Um, no trouble at all. So, so way back in the midst of time, I was interested in blogging as an educational tool. I was a, I was a teacher, um, and uh, English as a foreign language. And then, um, kind of, uh, working in that area and then education design.

And I started to, I wanted to use blogs for like, education purposes and, um, I had a look around and I found this piece of software called Radio User Land by Dave Wener. And it\'s this fantastic. Piece of software, um, you kind of wrote it and on your every, managed everything on your desktop and it kind of pushed it to a static HTML site.

I mean, you could even call it headless maybe. I dunno. But, but, but, um, but yeah, that would\'ve been, oh man, 2003. And, um, I started my. Blog, James Farmer\'s Radio web blog. And um, I got a link [00:03:00] from, um, from Dave Wener himself cuz um, probably cuz I was using his software and I think I got described as an enthusiastic new edgy blogger and, uh, and so I kind of got into it that way.

Um, and then a year later my subscription was coming up and, uh, I\'d heard about this, you know, kind of, um, this other interest. Software that was out there, there\'s this thing called movable type, um, which is doing all right. It\'s quite pretty. There\'s this single WordPress everyone was raving about. And so I thought, well, you know, might as well learn how to install something on a server, also learn what, what a server is and

That was the level of my technical ability and um, and so I kind of did all the steps and talked myself through and set up a WordPress blog. Um, yeah, in 2004, I think called Incorporated sub versions. Which was all about educational philosophy of incorporating subversion into the design of your software, which then eventually became Ink Sub [00:04:00] cuz Incorporated and Subversion kind of went together.

Cory Miller: So, uh, 2004. So you got me. Um, similarity, you know, 2006, one, I used this software. You may remember back in the day, because I had no coding, I still don\'t have any coding experience, but Claris homepage on the Mac and building my website, I was like, this is ridiculous, trying to update my copyright footer or something when something changed.

But before WordPress, mine was Google, uh, was blog. Ah yes. Cause you could publish things to the thing, but when you said weblog, it took me back to that web period.

James Farmer: Like I know Go golden period dm. The, what I really wanted to do like this, the core thing was I really wanted to do is I wanted to start like a blogger kind of service for students so that rather than people like typing in like [00:05:00] discussion boards and doing all that flat boardy kinda stuff, which is still doing amazingly, just, it makes me.

Shutter . I could think about the state of educational technology, but the, um, so rather than doing, um, that, um, they would each have their own site and people would have their own profile and a bit like a kind of proto face Facebook kind of experience. And, um, Radio use had this other bit of software called Manila, which allowed you to do that.

But this was hideously complex and incredibly hard to put together. And I worked with like some of the IT guys in, um, the school where I was at the time, R M I T, English Worldwide. And we just tried to do it and we kind of got it together and it kind of didn\'t work so. So when, um, I discovered WordPress, I was really enjoying it because, you know, it\'s as, as we all know, it\'s a fantastic blogging platform and it was so much kind of more fun and interesting.

I could play with things and these plugins, which was so much better than this kind of static publishing thing where you\'d have to tweet gates also, not a coder. Terrible tweaking. I mean, like, yeah, the way back machine will demonstrate [00:06:00] very clearly my, my, my, my, my design and uh, coding talents. But, um, then the, the real thing for me, the thing that when it really kicked off was when I\'m gonna mispronounce his name cuz I always have done that.

I\'ve never been on to Donica, put together this WordPress m u thing as a side project and I was like, holy shit. That\'s how I can do blogger for the students. They could put this together. Oh my word. And so I just, I just went to town on that and working on that. And I tried loads of examples and set ups and things here.

And, um, it wasn\'t working. It wasn\'t working. And then, um, I, at the same time, Matt went over to Ireland to, um, to do some work with Donica. I\'m sorry, Donica, please. I really am sort of the misappropriation, , the um, They went over to Ireland and they kind of re re uh, rejigged. What would you, what would you call it?

Um, oh man, they\'re always doing it in our plugins. Refactored, refactored, WordPress, mu refactored, WordPress mu. [00:07:00] And, um, and turned into this really nice thing and I was like, Oh my God, it\'s even better. And I was having a glass of wine at home one night. And just dood noodling around with this. And, um, I, I owned at that point, I think about like four domain names, or three domain names.

So I\'d add Insub, which was my blog and a couple of others, like for friends and family. But because I was an edgy blogger, um, I\'d also, you know, I\'d been like, Oh, I wonder if there\'s anything about edgy page blogs. And, and edgy blog.org was available for like, you know, 8 95. And so I was like, Oh, cool. I buy that and.

Had this, I was sitting on this flat leather couch in the suburb of Melbourne at 7:00 PM couple of glass of red, and I just thought, what about if I put this new WordPress, SMU stuff onto edgy blogs.org and then just posted about it and saw what happened. And so I did that and um, it took a while. It was a bit hard, and I woke up the next day and like 80 people had created.

I was like, [00:08:00] Yeah, like my, my jaw hit the floor. It was astonishing because all of these people in the blogging community, most people using probably movable type, some people using radio use land as DRO or users, people like kind of, you know, all sorts of different platforms and everyone was. Everyone was interested in WordPress and what WordPress was, but you know, like nobody really necessarily had the capacity or the extra area or even the coding ability to try it out.

And so you could just set up a WordPress site and play with WordPress. People are like, Oh yeah, hell yeah, I\'ll do that. And, um, I think, um, my, my claim to fame is that, um, that, uh, edgy.org predated wordpress.com by four weeks. So they, they, There you go. See, that\'s where, and, and that\'s why I\'m a billionaire.

Cory Miller: I love that. I, I thought I knew the origins of WMU as well, like your company name now, [00:09:00] um, heavy with the, Oh, what\'s, what does image stand for? Multiuse. I think you, So

James Farmer: actually, uh, mu actually, here\'s an interesting fact. Not a lot of people No, it\'s actually the Greek letter of the alphabet Mu Okay. Um, which actually was actually done by a little symbol that looks like this, and essentially it means infas or multiple, multiple and things there.

And so it never was WordPress Mu, it was actually WordPress. But of course, you know, nobody understood that, understood that or figured that out. So it became WordPress mu And then of course later on, um, after, uh, Ida utterly dominated the WPP size, a bottle of domains, WordPress multi-site, which I got a little bit, I got a little bit salty about that change

Cory Miller: Uh, so I remember the symbol now that you\'re saying. Um, connected to that way back, so I\'m getting some nostalgia here too, thinking about, because it was always [00:10:00] this cool thing that you could do. And, um, and you did it well with edgy blogs and that\'s how I remember, you know, um, hearing about what you were doing.

I think it was Word Camp San Francisco, one of the first ones. Mm-hmm. that I think you presented. If I, if I\'m not mistaken. Oh,

James Farmer: I don\'t think I presented at it. I don\'t, I did, I did. Um, I did the first. Word Words Camp, um, in the Southern Hemisphere. Um, word camp down un down under, um, in, uh, in Melbourne, in Docklands.

And so that might have, it might have been from there. That would be, uh, our original kind of thing.

Cory Miller: So then Edge bro, edgy blogs took off, I think from what I, what I understand. And then how did, how did you get to Wpm U Dev, what you\'re doing now in some form?

James Farmer: So, um, I, I, as, as I mentioned probably mentions route, I\'m, I\'m not much of a developer or a coder.

I\'m actually not a developer or a coder. And, um, uh, but I, I wanted things [00:11:00] jilo, you know, I wanted this feature or this sort of thing or, and this extra functionality to be added to, you know, like, uh, simple things like, you know, kind of take the remember me box by. Or, um, slightly more complex ones, like where I wanted to put like a donate bus in so people could support it.

And, um, so I was, um, kneeling around on the forums. Um, with, um, you know, back in the day there was a, I think the, there was a separate, like WordPress move. Forum area. I don\'t think it was part of the original WordPress org one. And I\'m chatting to people and they\'re asking \'em questions and eventually I ended up chatting to this guy called Andrew Billz, who, um, was also on there and asked him like, maybe, you know, if I kind of like gave him, I didn\'t have very much money, a few bucks or something, or if we could do some exchange, I could do something and could he do a few things.

And so we started pottering. Um, kind of help him, helping me with a few things like that. And also at the same time, he had set up [00:12:00] a site called wpm u dev.org, which, um, he was basically using, uh, essentially wordpress.org was set up for WordPress stuff. It had nothing related to this new mu stuff. It was separate thing.

And so he set that up in order to basically be plum, who would just be about WordPress. Cause that\'s what we were interested and that\'s what we were playing with. And. So we kind of continued to kind of work together and done those little things. And then around about 2006 when this kind of like progressed on and edgy blocks had taken on, LED started like a sideline of it called Edgy Blocks Campus, which is now Campus press, the education provider, um, the, um, but uh, we, um, interesting campus.

Best fact, I think I\'m allowed to say it here. We\'re not allowed to put it on our marketing material, but, um, Harvard, um, business school employed Dave Winer for a year as a visiting fellow to set up their blogging platform on Manila. You know, the platform I was [00:13:00] talking about, set off radio use land as an early business thing there, and now Harvard runs on WordPress powered by campus press.

Which is . That\'s awesome. I know. It\'s so awesome. I\'m so happy about that. It only took like 15 years of like constantly pestering them going, Please, please, please use us. Please let us help you. But yeah, we can\'t be confident in marketing material. But I think you can mention it, someone like that I suppose.

I suppose I will find out if, um, if we can\'t with some angry emails, in which case, Sorry. Sorry, Harvard, I\'m just boasting cause I\'m pleased about it. Yeah, it\'s a nice story. . Um, the um, but. Uh, so, so basically it, it had progressed and then I got this like contact from a, um, football management game that I\'d actually played, um, saying we\'d like to make a football related kind of thing here, just like edge blogs.

They found me through edge blogs and, um, to my utter shock, I put forward a proposal for, I think it was like 50 grand. [00:14:00] And they were like, Yeah, that sounds reasonable, . And I was like, What, how could anybody spend this amount of money? Are you insane? And they flew me to, um, San Francisco, um, to do it. I spoke to Andrew.

Andrew, um, was gonna be the developer and put all this stuff together. I was gonna do the business and the content and the structure and the project management and those things. And we did, we put it together. It was called football united.com. That\'s really cool. But then I said to Andrew, Well, you know, how about, you know, like, rather than, Employing you these things here.

How about we actually join up together and we, we form a company and we do this stuff together and split it 50 50. And um, he was like, Yeah, cool. And I was like, you know, and um, you could have 10% of ed blogs. What is worth is making no money. And, you know, kind of, we can bring in W P U Dev, you know, this, um, free repository place.

I didn\'t really have any ideas for it. We can just pull our ideas and work together. And we did. And hence ink. Which is the company name, because it was a free domain name I had lying [00:15:00] around. I was like, Well, I\'ve got this.com, why don\'t we use this? And hence, Y W P Dev then became part of iub.

Cory Miller: Yeah. I, I always love these, hearing these origin stories because they, um, you know, it starts with this wonder, like you said, I wonder if. We could do this and I wonder if or, or how things evolve over time because like, This started with a, what if that became edgy blogs and then eventually Ink Sub Wpm U Dev kind of came out of that.

And now we\'re here today in 2020. So it\'s crazy thinking back too. But I love hearing the stories of how they evolved because, uh, I\'m the same way, you know, I\'m not a developer either, and, uh, . So I I love that. Um, okay, so that\'s some of the backstory. I wanted, I wanted to share that or you to share that because I want people to know there\'s some things we could have a whole conversation on.

Movable [00:16:00] type, right? Some of those Oh yeah. , because I remember that too. And uh, some of the mis moves they made, missteps they made that really helped propel word, presidents level. Yeah. Yeah know. But I wanna set this , right? . I wanna set that stage though, to say you\'ve been doing this a long time, James, and you\'ve seen a lot of the evolution of WordPress and the industry, the market, the growth, some of the things that have changed over time.

And so it was good to share that story, but we could just camp out an entrepreneurial, But I really want to also, okay, in this. Second step is like, go, Okay, now setting the stage, tell me how, where Wpm U is today. And, uh, then I wanna talk about technology. I wanna talk about the web, and I wanna talk about WordPress.

And I wanna get your, your thoughts on all these things. So where is Sounds good today?

James Farmer: Cool. Right. So, Wp Me Dev today has evolved from its various plugin forms into [00:17:00] something. It\'s somewhere halfway between plugins and a service and a hosting platform. Can you be halfway between three things? Absolutely.

Um, so. Um, I, yeah, so, so essentially we\'ve, we\'ve offer a, you know, kind of a core suite of plugins, you know, for security performance. Um, we\'ve actually got a really good SEO plugin, but we just marketed terribly by name, name terribly by me. Um, and, um, you know, kind of a form builder and, uh, security, I said security deni already.

And then we\'ve got like a site management area that, uh, you know, very. To manage WP in some respects, but it allows you to look after all of those different things. But you, first and foremost, really over the last few years has been a hosting product, um, which is, um, built on top of, um, ation and lions infrastructure.

Well, you node, depending upon your preference there. Yeah. Which, which, which offers a really, a [00:18:00] really different, um, managed, um, WordPress experience that\'s really catered directly for, uh, for resellers. Web developers, freelancers, agencies who are, um, you know, catering to, um, clients who are often small businesses or medium businesses and those things.

And so we\'re essentially trying to provide all the tools, the platform, the background to save them time, save them money, and help them produce really cool sites. That\'s what we are.

James Farmer: The whole ink sub team is, uh, it fluctuates a bit cuz we, we, we hire quite a lot.

We try and hire everybody at a junior, um, level or mid level. I mean like our entire exec team is like, you know, people who started basically as junior staff things. In fact, um, I think tmr coo, I turned him down twice, got rejected. It\'s always, always fun to think about you. Not good enough, . Yeah,

James Farmer: times. , He\'s, he\'s a, he\'s a, he\'s good value, isn\'t he? He\'s a great manager as well. Um, so, um, yeah. But, um, so we, so the numbers vary, but I think we\'re about 175. 176. Fantastic. Is those Yeah, it\'s cool. It\'s amazing. It shocks me, to be honest with you. I\'m still a. But, um, we are, um, But yeah, we\'ve, we\'ve, we\'ve done some nice things and people, um, meeting up and stuff and we are doing, um, next April, we\'re having our first, not our first, cause we did one in New York back today, but our first proper company retreat and we\'re all gonna go to Bali.

I dunno if you\'ve been to Bali. It\'s a, it\'s a lovely place in Indonesia, um, just north of, um, Australia. And, uh, we\'re staying over. Yeah, yeah. Bar. Yeah. And so, and so we we\'re going for a week with 60. Is so exciting. It\'s gonna be so cool. It\'s like, I was like, ah, I like do a couple of days work and then mostly just hang out and chat and see.

You can see the sites, you can go to bars, you [00:20:00] can do all sorts of different things. But um, yeah, I\'m, I\'m, I\'m super excited about that.

Cory Miller: Yeah, I get that elbow time. Well, I love that and congratulations to hear kind of the before, how it gets started now today, and one thing, you know, I paid attention to Wpm U Death for a long time, but a couple things I\'ve always admired is, one is you have a tool set of things that if you wanna build.

Or press sites and things like that. You\'ve got it like it seemed like grown over time. I\'d go back when I was still running Ithe and go, How the heck are they doing all of this stuff with

Cory Miller: And I\'ve been on the emails for a long time too, and I\'ve always admired too the content production that you all have done historically through Wpm U Oh, thank you so.

James Farmer: for me. I will, I\'ll pass it on. He said he was looking forward to the live version of this. [00:21:00] He got some. I bet he, I was gonna sit back, but, uh, But it\'s all good. He can, uh, this way he can watch it as many times as he liked.

Cory Miller: Exactly. Then he can\'t throw tomatoes and different things at us

Well, okay. So thank you for that. And then I wanna come back as we wrap up and talk about what you\'re doing, what you\'re excited about, uh, with Wpm U as well, and, um, one of the, you know, pioneers in the space and WordPress and the product space. Um, but I wanna take some time and I wanna get your thoughts on some things.

Okay? Sure. So, and with all this experience and what you\'ve seen, the evolution and all, you know, the ups and downs of entrepreneurship as well, but you. What\'s your, what\'s your outlook today? And this is the, I\'m gonna just start with the big one, the word press. You\'ve seen, you\'ve been there

Cory Miller: No, no, I like it cuz I, I want one because I\'ve just got a static one. You\'ve got one that moves, but, um, so, [00:22:00] As you look at, you see you\'ve been there. Uh, I think we were talking like early on with WordPress, even before mu uh, mu, excuse me, was like rolled out and stuff. And I think I came in, I was telling you before we were, we started recording that.

I think I came in somewhere in the two range, you know, when it was still blue and why, and it was like just one little horizontal menu and I was like, this is the best thing on earth. But you\'ve seen a lot. And so the first thing I wanted to ask out of the gate, Um, what do you think right now where WordPress is?

What\'s your outlook on where we are today, how it\'s grown, and any thoughts around just WordPress today?

James Farmer: Ah, yeah, so. I mean, you know, it\'s, it\'s, every article about WordPress starts with WordPress powers. X percentage is a web. And you know, it does this and it does that. And I, I think if I was a, if I was a betting man, not besting man, but if I was, I would say that, um, where we\'re at now in [00:23:00] terms of saturation is probably about where we\'ll be.

I think it\'s, um, I don\'t think there\'s gonna be, um, um, a, uh, any necessary kind of, um, growth, um, apart from, you know, general growth as a web and people trading sites and so on, um, in a percentage market share. And I think that that\'s basically down to, um, the, uh, Squarespace, uh, Shopify reification of, um, of, uh, of, of the world.

I mean, um, there\'s more and more people who. Able to use both because it\'s easier and because it\'s more accessible and know about tools like Squarespace, you know, everybody pretty much does. And, you know, and even, you know, MailChimp and so they\'re trying to come out with their versions of it, and they do a pretty decent job.

Um, so if you are, um, a small business, which, or then, which is, like I said, Members, their clients, um, their clients are looking at like a kinda square space setup for , say, [00:24:00] might cost them two or 300 bucks a year. Or they\'re looking at hiring a web developer and getting this done and this done, this done.

And that\'s like, I dunno, say let\'s say three to 10 grand a year. Then it\'s, it\'s like, well, I\'ll just put in the yards and figure it out myself. And I think that\'s a lot of that\'s gonna be happening and continuing to happen. I\'m optimistic in terms of WordPress pertain its market share because of course, you know, these third party platforms just don\'t have the flexibility or the options.

And, um, also because, you know, they\'re heavily debt funded and, uh, they need to make money. And in doing so, they need to offer the kind of support and different levels and so on and so forth, which means that your square space, your square space, basic decent site with maybe a shopping card on it, is going to go towards five, $6,000 a year.

Um, possibly more, you know, maybe even kind of like two grand and then all of a sudden it starts to be, Oh, actually, well this is a more comfortable kind of [00:25:00] area. And we\'re, um, we are trying to make, um, one of the things we\'ve got rolling out next year is we\'re trying to essentially allow our. Members to create a kind of square space type automated provision environment with funky templates and all the cool things and WordPress built into it all their own templates so that, um, they can, you know, essentially have a, kind of build your own site option, which they can offer for their particular niche or area or those sorts of things.

So I\'m hoping that we\'re doing our bit to, uh, to help us keep, keep up with the, um, with the Super Bowl ad buyers , but it\'s still, you know, it\'s a rough and tumble.

Cory Miller: So this, this is something I\'ve seen change in piggybacking on what you did. You know, when I started Ithe in 2008, um, it was the Wild West with themes because they wanted that kind of, you know, experience to be able to find a good theme and kind of do it themselves.

Or a builder, a freelancer, kind of take it, mold [00:26:00] it. , and it\'s interesting over time, particularly with I Teams, we go, Okay, themes are getting saturated, and then you see this dynamic you talked about with Squarespace starting to come in going, and it felt like to me, James, that it, those players out there that didn\'t exist when WordPress was for sure getting, its like upward momentum didn\'t really exist and WordPress became an option.

Then over time, I was like, Golly, if you look into even web. Come into win flow and thinking that the tools around in the competitive landscape have gotten way better. You know, there\'s great experiences and it seems like it\'s shifted the market where it\'s the focus is a little bit more like, You\'re serving small businesses, for instance, and this web designer freelancer comes in and goes, Okay, you want this experience that\'s a little bit more complicated than you would, you could probably get on your own right now.

Yep, yep, yep. It seems like, like the agencies and the freelancers I talked to, they\'re, it\'s, it\'s like, I wondered the other day, I was like, Okay, what, What happened to the, [00:27:00] you know, $2,000, $5,000 website? Mm-hmm. and back in the day, You know, you could get, like, that was, that was, that was the heyday of that.

But I\'m, I\'m interested in your thoughts there too, like from those trends in WordPress, have you seen that too? Where it\'s like, there\'s really good options out there now? You said freedom and I, I\'m, I ring that bell as well and I, that\'s why I love WordPress. Cause I can do whatever I want with, and I\'m not locked in, but Yep.

You know, some of those trends that you\'re seeing too out there with WordPress and its position in the market. I\'m, I\'m curious to hear your thoughts. That.

James Farmer: Yeah. Yeah. It\'s, um, it\'s, uh, it\'s, it\'s fascinating. Um, and we, we talk to our members a lot. We do a lot of, um, surveys and where, where they\'re heading out, and I, I, there\'s a lot of very healthy businesses and there\'s a lot of people going in, in, in for it.

But there\'s also, um, a lot of people who are receiving pushback from people in that are looking at that part. Kind of like, um, dollar bracket, if you will. I mean, when you\'re, when you\'re talking about, you know, [00:28:00] kind a kinda a medium size business, you know, of someone who\'s actually looking for, you know, a whole range of different things, and of course they\'re gonna need WordPress means patiently obvious.

You know, you can\'t, um, have the, um, you know, the capacity to, um, offer anything near or even. Or even match the, um, how would I put it? The kinda regulatory, uh, requirements, um, that, um, you would be looking for and the level of support and the level of those things. And that, that\'s, that\'s, that\'s tied up.

That\'s not going anywhere. But, um, it\'s the, um, it\'s the people. Say for example, um, I mate who runs a gym, You know, he\'s very much, his position is, ah, yeah, I\'ve got a square space website. I don\'t particularly like it. It\'s a bit annoying and I have to learn all this shit, but you know, it\'s a couple hundred bucks, 300 bucks, and I\'m not gonna spend five grand on something.

That\'s the person, that\'s the segment that\'s gonna be a problem. And the that segment is, is huge. There\'s a lot more of them. Out there and while it might not be, uh, the big bucks, you know, [00:29:00] uh, well the medium bucks, the, um, the, uh, it\'s, it\'s, it\'s super important and we are really trying to find ways to help people actually, you know, have an impact on that segment.

So, for example, like, um, with, um, you know, say our hosting, I\'m gonna say like, we\'ve got this new hosting product called, Which is a $4 or $3 60 a month managed WordPress hosting, which is pretty damn good. If you ask me. It gives you your own IP address. It gives, but anyway, I\'m not selling it there, but it\'s just something I\'m really excited about.

So if someone runs up a quantum site with a, say photography portfolio thing for like a wedding photographer or something, and then they run it on our system, then the all that they would have to spend essentially is $3 60 a. Um, they could put the template, everything in place. Um, we\'ve got a domains thing that\'s running out next week where, uh, we\'re actually doing wholesale domain pricing for all of our members who are like on the, our agency package.

So $11 50 for like, um, a.com. [00:30:00] Every month. No. No stupid discounts, No nothing. They can sell that to their customer for 20 bucks. They can sell them the hosting package for another 20 bucks or 25 bucks, and they can have a support add on or an extra theme for another 30, 40 bucks so they can actually, and they can have that automatically deployed on their site.

For their customer who\'s then going to be paying them 80 bucks a month for their cost of under $15. And that\'s before you talk about support and all of those other different maintenance and things you can add to it. Um, and that makes it competitive to Squarespace.

Cory Miller: Yeah. Well in, and you look at across the industry too, and it\'s like, I saw that email by the way, and I was like, I remember the days where you could.

Hosting for that and try out your idea. Even if you\'re like, for me, it\'s like you said you had a couple domains sitting around, Well, I got way too many, but you know, you have an idea. Deploy it. See you can get it, get it going, but you\'re not, your [00:31:00] investment isn\'t big. Too big on that. And so I love that, uh, too.

Yeah. So I\'m curious, um, Getting down a little into WordPress too, cuz you\'ve seen a lot seen where it\'s gone and evolved is, you know, some of these big ones like Gutenberg, the code editor. Yep. Um, and I\'m curious, you know, the direction too of WordPress, uh, I, I don\'t like to say this, but in web terms, WordPress is ancient.

Like it\'s, it\'s code. That\'s what, 20 plus years here now we\'re talking about, you know, and you\'re like, but in web term it feels young still to me. But in web terms you\'re like all these new startups, some of this technology didn\'t exist when WordPress rolled out. Yep. But I\'m curious about your, your thoughts on the direct.

Of the platform too, and things like, I\'m gonna, I\'m gonna put in the buzzword, but it\'s a good buzzword, which is Gutenberg and the code editor and get your thoughts around that. And where, where direct, you know, how does it best WordPress best [00:32:00] position itself to continue to democratize the web.

James Farmer: Yep. Um, yeah, it\'s a great question and, um, I think it, it bears a lot of challenge for the future growth.

Um, in, in, in my, in my opinion. I, it\'s a kind of, Not necessarily a very popular one, but, um, I think I, I would say that the, um, WordPress has succeeded cause, well it succeeded cuz it was open source in the first instance and yeah. As it has in beer, um, compared to, you know, your movable type competitors. But also it had this, it succeeded because of plug-ins and themes.

Because of its ease of integration, because of the simplicity, because of the way that things held together. And it, uh, because it allowed people to create these sorts of websites that, um, you know, you could play around with and do it, it achieved critical mass really quickly from that, and it just grew, which is why it\'s gonna dominate that more complex website space forever, because it allows more complex websites and more playing.[00:33:00]

Now Gutenberg, I don\'t know a great deal about Gutenberg, apart from the fact that I tried to make Guten. In 2014, I gave it a red hot Go. I was like, Okay, Squarespace, these drag and drop editors, these wicks web.com are actually really, really dangerous. Good platforms that have got a problem here.

WordPress has these wonderful themes that are out there like ims. Absolutely, and you know, and all of these other stuff, but none of the, All of these are developer friendly. All of these are short code functioning. All of these are requiring to do CSS and these things. We need a simple drag and drop suite, um, theme that, that anybody can use in a straightforward way, and we try.

I had a go, It was called upfront. Remember, we spent absolute fortune on it. I spent an absolute time on it and I discovered that. I\'m not talented enough. , and I think we were, we were, we, we didn\'t those us two [00:34:00] problems. The first was in terms of design and concept, we were fairly close. Like we were okay-ish.

We had some things and I look at Gutenberg now and I\'m like, Oh yeah, I remember that. That\'s, that\'s a really cool challenge. And this, I really like how they\'ve done that and it reminds me of very much of up front. And we had some really talented people working on it. Got Victor, who I used to work with, was like leading end.

It was really cool stuff. But we definitely didn\'t have the technical skills. We were nowhere near, like, we, we just couldn\'t, we just couldn\'t iron out the bugs. We couldn\'t put it together. We couldn\'t make it work seamlessly. There was too much, um, load on it. It was started in such way, didn\'t know how to project management, you know, It was just too hard.

So we failed with it. Just a shame. And because it was, we had to go, we gave it a crack. And I see the same thing happening with Gutenberg because it, it looks like exactly the same things. My problem with Gutenberg, Isn\'t, um, isn\'t how it works or what it does. Cause I, I think it\'s really pretty cool. It\'s really interesting and I\'ve spent a lot of time, I have a lot of [00:35:00] amazing people working on it.

I think it\'s got a really good future. My problem with Gutenberg is it is baked into WordPress and the WordPress has succeeded because it\'s been an open place where you have a marketplace and a selection of people innovating and trying and creating new things. Themes, for example, across those different things.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that element or divvy or whatever is coming after them. Those guys. Would, or perhaps, perhaps still will, who knows? But would be much better. Z berg vastly better, purely because of competition, because of range of, uh, people going at each other, because of financial incentives, because of capitalism.

Call it that, you know? Right. Um, it, it\'s, it\'s, and, and cause that\'s what\'s happened in WordPress since, um, and that\'s what\'s very WordPress. And so the baked in nature of Gutenberg, um, you [00:36:00] know, versus, you know, these other options is, um, and I think, you know, that\'s the, that\'s the problem. It\'s a bit sad, really.

I kind of, you know, it, it, it\'s, I, I, I wish it had just stayed as a theme that, you know, um, Maybe automatic could have made it a competitor to these things, you know? And they tried to grow it in the same way as they\'re doing jet pack and those things. And that\'s great. And I think, um, it would\'ve had a better chance as well because it would\'ve been pushed by other people in that competitive space and direction and just make it a purity commercial model rather than, this is the thing as well.

I mean, as a commercial model, like the stuff I\'m doing, obviously WordPress is, is, is great and it\'s wonderful. And the open source community and the way that they work through it and the way that it\'s learned and matured is brilliant. And I. Everybody\'s on it with all my heart because I wouldn\'t have a business otherwise I wouldn\'t be able to do this stuff without them.

It\'s absolutely brilliant. But cause I\'m a, I\'m a private company. I am, we are a private company. We don\'t have investors at share those sort of things here. We [00:37:00] can make decisions that are unpopular. Or that, um, that people don\'t like. We kill 90% of our plugins. You know, we, we, we can do things that you can\'t do in an open source community because like, well, you can do them, but everyone will leave or hate you or just have a huge palava and things there.

I, I, I think innovation doesn\'t happen. That well in that environment. I think lots of great things do, but I think innovation happens when we are competing against each other and trying to do cool new things and get stuff out there. Yeah, I totally see that end ran .

Cory Miller: No, I totally see that. I think that\'s such a good perspective to share in, in the space in our ecosystem or community.

Um, if you don\'t mind, uh, we were talking before and you\'re like, I, I think it should have stopped at this version. And I was like, What do you, what happened to that version? And would you share that too? Because I think

James Farmer: I, I think I said, I think I said that. Well, yeah. [00:38:00] Just before, I think I said that WordPress peaked at 0.72.

Yeah. , and I, I heard obviously WordPress now is vastly better than North 0.72, but, and, and I\'m not entirely sure. It\'s no 0.72, Please fact, check the hell outta me. Whoever\'s out there. But essentially as soon. As soon as, um, the, uh, integration, the seamless, beautiful, amazing integration of plugins and themes and the hooks and everything that allowed that to, it rolled into WordPress.

That was the peak of WordPress innovation, and it was brilliant. And it has been led to all of these different things here. Um, and. Since then, WordPresses has not been revolutionizing things, It has not been transforming things interesting in the way that you talk about interesting Emberg name. Cause of course Emberg, you know, was a revolutionary technology.

I don\'t think it\'s a revolutionary theme or revolutionary, you know, way of processing or making things. Um, because I think that\'s when, that\'s when WordPress kind of peaked and with, [00:39:00] has just been kind of evolving since otherwise, um, whereas the innovation\'s been happening on the side.

In the product space, particularly with plugins around wordpress.org and things with our product members at post status. And I think that\'s so compelling to say too because I, I really appreciate there\'s a, in that, is that there, the ecosystem, the product ecosystem. We might have called them premium one day, but another commercial, whatever name we\'re gonna put on \'em.

But, um, and, and when this conversation came around that, around the active installs, um, data, you know, my first question was, and this is one I want to kinda ask you too, is our plugins, our plugins, themes, third party stuff, whether they\'re free, paid, whatever in between, essential to WordPress, Past and essential to WordPress future.

And so I\'m gonna submit that to you because I wanna hear your thoughts on that. I have [00:40:00] my own opinions, but I wanna hear

James Farmer: your . There\'s a lot of opinions aren\'t there, about the, um, the in-store thing? I, I, I have to admit, I\'ve been, uh, I\'ve been lurking quite actively in those discussions and yeah, we\'ve been having a few internal chats about it as well, because of course, it\'s important to us, you know, we want to know how well our or, or not, how well our plugins are doing.

I mean, we, for example, we\'ve seen. Uh, SMASH recently, um, over the last year or so was one of our, our leading plugin. It\'s the big thing that, you know, people really like. Um, and actually started to lose, um, some market share to, um, some of our competitors like, uh, u and um, short Pixel and those things. And these are, these are fine plugins and they do great job and, you know, but I was.

Hang on. You know, I thought we were really good at this and we\'re doing this really well. Why are we losing this? And the reason we were, And so we looked into it, we did a huge amount of discovery and um, we, we found some things which we thought, Oh, okay, our bulk must limits too low. Okay. [00:41:00] Alright. Our background image optimization isn\'t working.

We\'re having to have people keep it over. Our new user experience for the first, like kind of five clicks, um, things. There isn\'t that. Compared to these guys. And so we dived into it and we worked our butts off to improve it. And we\'re rolling out improvements at the moment. And just, just as the, uh, the plugin active install growth stuff disappeared, we were back to level, like up from North Point one to North Percent and we were all cheering.

We were like, every week we\'d see it update on Sunday and we\'re like, Yes. You know, And it started to get towards positive territory. We\'re back baby, and. Yeah, it was, um, it was pretty gutting to kind of suddenly have it go and to not get that kind of feedback loop that we were doing good things and creating good things.

I think the reason the most, the most the reason for the active installs being removed, which was [00:42:00] given in the track ticket or whatever things, there not enough obs. Not sufficiently obs. If I pronou, I can\'t remember. It\'s one of those words. I can never, I can never get out. No, not sufficiently hidden.

Let\'s say that, let\'s translate it to there. I think that\'s, um, a good reason to get rid of it. I think that, not to get rid of them to improve, I think that, um, I think that a good way to think about this is think about what the internet would be like if Google published their algorithm, like literally published it.

I mean, they, they will say, We do publish it. We\'ve got a page guidelines and 60 pages, 90 pages. I\'m. Yeah, that\'s good. And that\'s a guide and we go by that, and that\'s really helpful. But I wanna see the actual algorithm, the actual code that shows how you display these things here. I will tell you what will happen if that happened.

If that happened, the entire internet would be destroyed because it would be immediately dominated by a bunch of machine [00:43:00] learning bots going through Google\'s algorithm and spitting out things that matched it. The people who were able. When it updated the people who were able to more quickly respond. So this would be why.

It\'d be machine learning AI stuff and change their sites to fit into this new algorithm would be the winners. And so you would have an internet that was basically written by computers for computers and it would be absolutely rubbish. And that\'s why. Google don\'t publish one of the reasons, but that\'s a very, very good reason for Google not publishing its algorithm.

And the same is true for plugins and plugin pages and all of those different things. If we know exactly as a, as a business owner, if I know exactly how it is, I can get my plugin to rank above yo and get smarts. That position. Yes. Well, I\'m damn well gonna. And I\'m gonna do it hard, and I\'m gonna actually devote probably most of the resources of the company to figuring out how that happens and how we can quickly respond things there.

And then all that we\'re gonna get is a sea of plugins [00:44:00] with solitary purpose is to rank hires and yos and not immediately use a users once they install them, or at least get them to create an API key or give me a lead or do whatever it is, these sort of things. And that would not be good for WordPress or plugins.

And essentially what they\'re saying is that the plug. Code for ranking the code for, you know, kind of making plugins, appearance things. There wasn\'t actually, it was a bit too obvious. And there are people out there who are a hell of a lot smarter than I am. Lots of, not very hard. There\'s lots of people out there, lots smart than I am who have essentially cracked the code.

They\'ve figured out how to do it, and they\'re constantly cracking the code and they\'re constantly going through it. I think I remember, um, one, there was something about how many support tickets you had and how many support tickets you closed, and so people were creating support tickets for themselves, and then I swing them with somewhat general things and stuff and attaching it to the plugin, all sorts of sketchy.

Happening left, right, and center. And [00:45:00] essentially, yeah, the, It was too obvious. It was too, there. People were gaming it and this was gonna produce a world of ship plugins that are basically existing in order to just climb the charts and do the machine learning thing. Now, what would\'ve been better would\'ve been if they\'d just improved the algorithm.

Or made it to the point at which ally Google, you know, back in the day in 2002, you could game Google. You could SEO hack. Yep. You could do, You could do these things. You can\'t anymore. Right? You can. You can. I mean, there are bits and bobs, but you wouldn\'t want to because it\'s too dangerous. You might get caught.

And also it\'s just a bit too challenging and it\'s too clever in these thingss here. What would be great would be just, they just, they just improved that they just had a big ass project to improve the plug, the plugin algorithm, I don\'t care if it\'s open source community, I don\'t care if it automatic, writes every single part of that code and contains its proprie information and never lets anybody see it.

But then that would enable those stats to stay in place. And that\'s my complaint. That\'s my complaint about it, is like, [00:46:00] Guys, you just pulled something. It was so bloody important and I know why you pulled it. It makes perfect sense why you pulled it. Like, couldn\'t you have just, you know, been done something better?

Yeah. Could you have been smart enough to actually solve it in another way? And they, they say that they will, um, you know, this is, the intention is to come back with the bigger and better and things here, but like, man, was it, was it that bad? Was it that much of a problem that, Cause it wasn\'t, we weren\'t like machine, like I said, learning.

We were. We were checking out our onboarding process. We were reviewing our complaints by users. We were doing deep surveys. We were doing third party like kind of um, user testing.com, things where people actually log in and you watch them talking through the process and the problems we have to improve our stuff.

And now we are like, Oh know if this is working . And I\'m like, I mean like we could a shooting in the dark and that\'s the majority of people. And there might have been some people who were getting an advance and screwing around with it, but couldn\'t you have just spent the time to [00:47:00] improve the algo and then just switched it rather than dumping us on us, which feels horrible and draconian and alienates people, and stops me from improving smush like I\'d.

Cory Miller: Yeah, and I go back to what you said, which is, you know, the, the what, the third part, you know, the plugins and themes out there have done is helped WordPress innovate and continue to say simple enough as a core, and then you extend as you need it for those complex things that you might have. And you know the question I ask.

It. I think, I hope when I say our plugins essential to WordPress is continued growth and health. I think that, I hope the answer is, uh, resounding heck yes. The second question that I think this particular issue illuminates is how do we continue to better support, and this is part of the role post status, is how do we continue to support plugin, the plugin ecosystem.[00:48:00]

Uh, even better, you know? Mm-hmm. is take this as an opportunity to say this is essential. This is why WordPress has grown. It will continue to grow. Mm-hmm. , and it will continue to innovate. And then the question becomes, how do we continue to foster and grow the health and support of those vital plugin developers out there creating the next whatever thing it is.

James Farmer: Well, yeah, go ahead. I mean, I, I dunno, it, it\'s your business and I, I, I, you know, there are loads of different ways to do it. I didn\'t wanna straight off just answer it, but I, I think what you could do in this first instance is you could look at a community project, um, where people actually collect, um, plugin, um, install.

And pool it so that you are able to have a bunch of people sharing data to say, This is how things are going, and this is how things are not going. I mean, if wordpress.org won\'t do it, then why don\'t we? Yeah, that\'s, that\'d be, that\'d be my thought.

Cory Miller: Well, I [00:49:00] know we\'re, we\'ve run it over time actually, but I really appreciate this.

Maybe this\'ll be part two is where we dig into some of these things too. Cause I really wanted to, I think you got to, um, to share some of the things you\'re doing, but I wanted to talk about. Wmu and your future there and what you\'re planning. Um, but maybe that\'ll be part two. I know we\'ve kind of gone along, but James Farmer, thanks so much for this.

I think this was our teaser for part two, by the way, . Oh no, I\'d love to. Thank you. Uh, we gotta talk more often cuz uh, uh, we\'ve got a lot to talk about still, but, uh, James, thanks so much for being on the, uh, post status draft podcast and, uh, I appreciate your time and it\'s good catching up with you and hearing your story, sharing some of your thoughts too, I think are, are really critical for our ecosystem as a whole.

James Farmer: thank you. Ah, it\'s, it\'s been a pleasure. Thank you for having me, Corey. You bet.

Cory Miller: Thanks James Farmer. And by the way, tell, um, Wpm U Dev, uh, check out what they\'re doing. Um, cool stuff they\'ve got going on there. You got so many things going on that they, I can just say go [00:50:00] check it out. See what they\'re doing.

James Farmer: Yeah. Yeah. A we\'ve got a, yeah, we\'ve got a free level. People can play around with stuff as well, so give it a go. We didn\'t used to have a free level. It\'s a have fun, have a, have a, have a tweak.

Cory Miller: Will do. All right. Thanks everybody for being, uh, listening in and, uh, we\'ll be talking to James I\'m sure very soon.

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

Conversations about Woo running Tumblr payments, the WordPress enterprise space and return of WooCommerce Developer Office Hours.

This Week at WordPress.org (November 7, 2022)

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This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

WordPress’ Create Block Theme plugin, which is used for creating a new theme, blank theme, child theme, or style variation, has a dedicated screen for managing fonts. It lists and previews all the font families and font faces embedded in the theme and allows users to embed Google fonts, embed local font assets, and remove unused font weights.

WordPress theme developer Carolina Nymark commented on Twitter yesterday about how useful it would be to have this as part of the Site Editor. Gutenberg lead architect Matías Ventura responded with links to the roadmap for font management in core.

In June, Automattic-sponsored core committer Tonya Mork organized a ticket for tracking the ongoing roadmap for the Web fonts API. It includes the vision for how the API supports typography features and the necessary tasks for creating a “font library.”

“This API’s job is to provide the backend capabilities to support the “font library” to include font management and dynamic building of the @font-face styles,” Mork said in the ticket. The purpose of the font library is to manage and catalogue fonts and provide users an interface for selecting fonts to use on their sites.

All fonts coming into WordPress would be “registered fonts” and would be available through the following methods:

Mork highlighted a few risks the Font Library feature might introduce, which will need to be addressed during the development process.

“There are potential performance risks such as enqueuing too many fonts,” she said. “A separate issue will consider impacts and propose adding a filterable throttle to limit the number that can be enqueued.”

Another risk outlined in the ticket includes the potential for plugins programmatically removing a theme’s fonts.

“With remove being publicly exposed for consumption, a plugin could remove any or all of the theme’s font declarations and replace them with their own, i.e. without user interaction or awareness,” Mork said. “This could potentially create inconsistencies with typography UIs and previews.”

The API is being developed to handle locally hosted web fonts out-of-the-box but would also provide the means for plugin authors to build methods for handling remotely hosted web fonts.

Automattic-sponsored designer Joen Asmussen has also opened a ticket exploring the possibilities for managing font sets in Global Styles → Typography. He created mockups for an interface for picking font sets (a primary font for headings and a secondary font for body text), as well as for managing the set properties. Users would also be able to manage font weights via a modal panel for the selected font.

His designs suggest a basic interface for uploading fonts, accessed through the ellipsis menu:

The roadmap for the webfonts API and the font management interface tickets will be an exciting project to watch, as Gutenberg contributors work to offer another level of creative control to users. It’s still in the exploration phase, but the Font Library feature is intended to be built, refined, and stabilized over multiple WordPress releases as it materializes in the Site Editor.

We chat about NitroPacks history, WooCommerce and performance, choosing a cloud-based SaaS vs hosted and a last-minute Black Friday tip.

WooCommerce 7.1 was released yesterday, delivering on time with the highly anticipated custom order tables feature, which was renamed to “High-Performance Order Storage” (HPOS). This is a major undertaking that implements custom tables for orders, products, and coupons, and promises significant performance gains for stores.

Contributors have been working on HPOS throughout 2022 but have been discussing its implementation for years. It is now available behind a feature flag, which can be enabled at WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > Features using the checkbox under Experimental Features titled “Custom order tables.” The feature is not yet turned on by default, as there may still be compatibility issues with plugins sites may be using.

This is another major milestone on WooCommerce’s journey towards improved scalability and reliability as an e-commerce platform. As HPOS adoption grows throughout the ecosystem, WooCommerce core team lead Peter Fabian said it could become the default experience for stores by August 2023.

Version 7.1 also introduces cross-sells on the cart block, a feature that went into testing in September in the WooCommerce Blocks plugin version 8.6. It allows store owners to identify certain products as cross-sells and have them displayed to customers in the cart.

This release adds a new product spotlight tour to help new store owners through the process of creating products, highlighting each step within the product form.

As a complement to this release, WooCommerce Blocks includes six new header and six new footer pattens. The headers come in minimal, essential, and large variations with light and dark color schemes. All of them are visible on GitHub in the WooCommerce Blocks discussions, with desktop, tablet, and mobile views.

WooCommerce 7.1 also includes several new actions and filters, including a filter for the place order button label. No database updates are required (unless users enable HPOS), and the release should be backwards compatible with the previous version.

Gutenberg 14.5 was released today with a modest set of enhancements and dozens of bug fixes and code quality improvements. The highlight of this release is the new “Document Overview” panel, which combines what was previously found under separate icons in the Editor toolbar under “List View” and “Details.” This popup was where information like words, characters, headings, time to read, paragraphs, and blocks used to be found:

The new Document Outline panel can be opened using the List View icon in the toolbar. Characters, words, and “time to read” have been moved to the bottom of the panel. This makes the entire panel cleaner, as the document stats were overly prominent before and the details popup had become even more crowded after the addition of the “time to read” stats.

This release also improves block spacing controls to make them more visual so that users can immediately see how changing the controls will impact the surrounding blocks. Gutenberg contributor Nick Diego demonstrated this update in a video:

Check out the release post for a more detailed list of all the bugs fixed, documentation updated, and code quality improvements in 14.5.

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox 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 the future looks like for WordPress developers.

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If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, well I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured on the show. Head over to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form.

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So on the podcast today we have Fränk Klein. Fränk is a self-taught developer. He started out learning PHP in 2011, and from there found his way to WordPress. Over the years he’s worked for Automattic at wordpress.com, and WordPress VIP, and is now a principal developer at Human Made, an enterprise WordPress agency.

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Today on the podcast we talk about how Fränk decided early on that he was going to start developing with blocks and, more recently, with the full site editing capabilities now built into WordPress Core.

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We talk about the four phases of the Gutenberg project, content editing, site customization, collaborative editing and multi-lingual, and where full site editing fits into this.

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Fränk explains how he sees the adoption of Gutenberg as inevitable. WordPress is moving away from the classic approach of content creation, to a more visual, block based experience. He thinks that it’s important to become an expert at building websites and custom solutions for clients, and for taking the time to learn the new tools that this future will require.

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He’s not suggesting that the journey towards expertise in React and JavaScript will be easy, but he does see it as essential for those wishing to continue to use WordPress as their CMS of choice. He also makes the point that now is a great time to invest in yourself as there are more resources than ever, which can assist you in this learning path.

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As you’ll hear, Fränk is all in on WordPress, and is very optimistic about the future for experienced WordPress developers.

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If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, and you’ll find the other episodes there as well.

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And so, without further delay, I bring you, Fränk Klein.

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I am joined on the podcast today by Fränk Klein. Hello Fränk.

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[00:03:34] Fränk Klein: Hey there. How you doing?

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[00:03:35] Nathan Wrigley: I’m very well, thank you. It’s very nice to have you on the podcast. We typically at the beginning of the podcast orientate the listeners by asking a very basic and simple question just to tell us who you are, what your relationship is with WordPress, how long you’ve been working in the space, possibly the company that you now work for, and all of that goodness. So, Fränk, it’s over to you.

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[00:03:54] Fränk Klein: So my name is Fränk Klein. I live in Luxembourg in the heart of Europe, and I got started with WordPress in 2011. So that’s when I started programming. So the background is that I’m actually a print designer, which at that time, wasn’t really that much of a bright career path. So I switched to programming, bought myself a PHP book, and then discover WordPress, and that’s been my passion ever since.

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And, I kind of have a varied background because I was in a small agency, still in Luxembourg. Worked for Automattic as part of the wordpress.com theme team. I worked at WordPress VIP, and then now I’m at Human Made, which is an enterprise WordPress agency where I’m a principal engineer. And so as part of that is my passion has been WordPress, but I also have a big interest in the wider web ecosystem, and so that’s why there is my interest in everything block related.

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[00:04:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, and that’s going to be the basis of our conversation today. So Fränk’s here to talk about Gutenberg in general, but more specifically about full site editing. And I think probably a good way to begin the conversation to, again, provide a bit of orientation, is just to run through the history of the Gutenberg project and now full site editing. So I don’t know if you are willing to do that. Run through the history of when it all began and what the phases are and so on.

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[00:05:17] Fränk Klein: Yeah, so, I think when we talk about full site editing, we cannot forget the wider picture, and that is that full site editing is part of the Gutenberg project, which Matt Mullenweg, the WordPress lead started back in 2017. And the idea behind Gutenberg was really that WordPress ran its course in the way that it was at that time, in that there needed to be a ground up reimagining of a lot of the core components that make up WordPress.

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So therefore, there are four phases. The first one is content editing. So that was in 2018 when WordPress 5.0 introduced the block editor, or the content editor how I prefer to call it. Then the next step is site customization. Part of it was in 5.8, but most people will know it from 5.9 when full site editing was introduced.

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Then the next phase, which they are starting right now is collaborative editing. So Google Doc style editing of different people on the same content. And then there will be multilingual. So that’s the big picture of the Gutenberg project. And so, full site editing is just part of this. And so the thing about these phases is that the content editing phase that was, by now four years ago, but it’s not really finished because the content editing experience still gets upgrades. It gets stuff added to it. And so that’s how this project is laid out. And even if we now roll into the collaboration full site editing isn’t done, and they will continue to work on it for the future.

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[00:06:43] Nathan Wrigley: If we were to roll back the clock prior to Gutenberg, so let’s say, 2015 or something like that, and there were people at that point who were using just the classic editor, they were maybe putting just content in or short codes and page builders and so on, came along. What do you think was the point of having all of this in core?

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In other words, it could be left to third parties, it could be plugins or it could be themes that took on the job of the way that your site was presented. What is the promise? Deep down, what’s the sort of kernel of Gutenberg? What is it offering? Where are we headed with it?

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[00:07:18] Fränk Klein: This is kind of where the, the bigger picture comes in because, when we just talk about full site editing, it’s called the site customization phase. It’s not called page building phase. It’s not called theme building phase. Those are all things that you can do with full site editing. But really the idea behind full site editing is, there was the customizer, right? So that was the way that you interact with your theme, and that didn’t work out. I think the promise that the customizer had in the beginning didn’t pan out to be what people wanted to be. And so then the idea was that we have something better, which is built up on this concept of blocks.

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And so the thing that makes full site editing and then, the customizer very different is that, the customizer, the idea was there was this tool and there are only minimal controls available, and if you want to have your own, there are just APIs and a builder. And so the problem was that everybody built their own controls, and then there was other confusion for users, and themes weren’t compatible with each other.

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And then the site editor, or just say the Gutenberg project in general takes a very different approach, in that it says, we’re going to give you a lot of customization options, controlling fonts, controlling colors. And beyond those options, this is like the full menu of everything you can do, we give you the APIs to preset these things, to remove them, to customize them. And so the bigger context here is that this is a customers replacement for the moment, but it also allows you to build new templates.

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And the idea is that many of the menus that we have in the WordPress admin are going to be rolled into the site editor. So for example, reading, settings, things like that. There are definitely concepts already exploring how that could be part of the site editor. So really, when we talk about even collaborative editing, that’s going to require changes.

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Multilingual is going to require changes. That all is just wrote into this Gutenberg project, of which full site editing is one part. The promise is kind of that based on this concept of blocks, we are going to be able to reimagine how people interact with WordPress, both as users and also as developers. And it’s going to be done much more through visual interfaces that are a lot easier to understand and to work with.

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And that way really we’re going from the old word of WordPress to the new WordPress, which is then going to be able to be around for a decade or more. So that’s the big picture vision behind the whole project.

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[00:09:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, sort of future proofing if you like. Given all of that, let’s just put the conversation about blocks to one side and about what they offer, we can come back to that in a few moments. I want to talk just for a moment about how it is that such a large proportion of the community, and when I say large proportion I don’t really have any figures. Not claiming it’s 10, 20, 50, 70, whatever. Percent, but there’s been a certain amount of people within the WordPress community who have not got such an optimistic approach to full site editing and the Gutenberg project more broadly. In many cases, they don’t really want to have much to do with it.

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They’re happy with the tools that they’ve got, and they’re happy with the systems that they’ve got in place, whether that be a page builder or whatever it is. I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts on how the communication went, introducing Gutenberg and full site editing. Do you think that the promise was explained from the beginning? Maybe the promise wasn’t fully realized. Or do you think that there were some PR missteps along the way.

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[00:10:49] Fränk Klein: Well, yeah. There’s several parts of it. I think that when Matt introduced it, he wrote this post called we called it Gutenberg for a reason, and that very much painted a broad picture. In my opinion it went a little bit overboard comparing it to the invention of the printing press. It’s just my personal sentiment about it, that’s maybe overdoing it by a lot. But he definitely had this vision where he explained what problems this project was trying to solve.

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And that was around for a bit. And then we went right into the details. So the block editor was introduced, all these APIs, and so at that point we just focus very much on the what, and not the why. Why is this there? And instead of just saying, hey, here’s this paragraph block, and it works this way. There never was really a step taken back in where there was an exploration of, here are these tools and these are all the possibilities that you now have with these tools.

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And to adapt that to the different profiles that we have in the WordPress space, because we have end users, we have power users, we have theme developers, plugin developers. And kind of this translation from the nitty gritty to the bigger picture and also let’s say the potential that is there, because there definitely is a lot of potential. That was missed, unfortunately, and I think that’s why, if all you just see is a bunch of stuff getting thrown in your face and nobody really explains to you what you’re supposed to do with it, and why they’re adding all it. Then unfortunately that’s, I think the situation where we were in where just a large part of the community didn’t see the point. And so the project is doing a lot more of trying to fix these mistakes. So they are a lot better about showcasing the things that you can do. So I’m very hopeful in that, that we’ll get to those bigger picture conversations.

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[00:12:37] Nathan Wrigley: I guess, for me at least, when Gutenberg rolled into Core, it came with some default blocks, which you could use. But they very much were the kind of things that you could have done and could have achieved in all the previous versions of WordPress. So you could put in a paragraph and whilst you could move that paragraph independently, it was still a paragraph. And so not tremendously exciting. And the same with images. You’ve always been able to do something similar to that. I’m just wondering if there was a wow moment that got missed there.

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In other words, when that came into Core, right at the beginning, if some bizarre, let’s use that word, some bizarre, extraordinarily clever block could have been shipped, just to give everybody that aha moment. But it didn’t happen that way. We just got a fairly ordinary pallet of blocks to choose from. And so people perhaps got disinterested and never came back. And now we’re in the process of trying to show people what those aha moments are.

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And certainly from my point of view, I’ve. Implementation’s left, right and center of really incredibly difficult and complicated things built inside a really small, tiny UI in the block editor, and it is amazing. But I, I do wonder if that moment was missed and it’ll be difficult to ever get that excitement back?

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[00:13:52] Fränk Klein: Well, I think there are two parts with it. I think that one might discuss the point at which the block editor was introduced. So for sure, in the beginning it was a bit rough. And so if already having trouble to have the time to find polish, to polish this product, they probably didn’t have the time to build a lot of showcasing tools because they were just trying to get this done to include it into Core.

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Okay, this was the situation and it is how it is. They could at least showcase the potential of in, blog posts after the release. But I think the big opportunity that was lost is just to look at the ecosystem and just to go out to agencies, product companies, whatever, that were using blocks and to take the things that these people were building and then to show it.

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I think that’s a big missed opportunity. Just a case study. This was the problem and this is the solution that was developed, and this is the reason why it was developed. And these are the outcomes. Right, so talking much more in business language, not really in they used this API and that API, which might change and which is really not interesting.

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There was a lot missed on that. I know we have the state of the world and then there is a maybe three second slide for some project which was super impressive. But all it gets is this three seconds in the presentation. Frankly speaking all people don’t even watch. So I think that was a big opportunity which got missed.

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[00:15:12] Nathan Wrigley: In your learning about the construction of blocks and all of the different technological pieces that you had to acquire along that road. How difficult has that journey been for you? So, Let’s say, for example, there’s somebody listening to this, and by the end of this they are indeed convinced that this is the way to go. What’s the learning path like? Did you find that to be a fairly difficult experience? Was there a lot to learn that meant that you couldn’t progress until you’d got over several hums? Was it easy, was it hard? What was it like?

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[00:15:39] Fränk Klein: Well, I was lucky enough to already know, let’s say modern JavaScript in quotes and React, before I start with blocks. So that’s definitely a big hump to get over if you are coming from a traditional PHP background and you, you know, maybe write jQuery, some of it, but, uh, you don’t really have a lot of JavaScript affinity. That’s actually one big issue.

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Just building the blocks was rough when I did it, because it was so early. I think the first project that I did, it was still with the Gutenberg plugin, like it was before 5.0. But I think that at this point it’s a lot easier. It’s just that the documentation has got a lot better. There are tons of material for people to learn this. But over time my thinking has shifted on that, because if you would know how to build a block, like technically speaking, that’s good, but this is really just the base level. The challenge really is to, how do I design all the experiences for my users, my end users, so that they fit into this paradigm.

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So you can have a custom blocks that works, that’s entirely PHP rendered. You might have JavaScript run in the editor. You might add a plugin to the editor. You might have a custom control. You might have customizations of core blocks. And that’s really knowing all of these tools that are available and when to use them, how to use them. That’s really the difficult part.

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That being said, I think that, for me it’s always, even when it’s difficult, I kind of have the opinion of this is why I get paid. I get paid to solve the hard issues. And so if there is a hump to get over, I am, I’m ready to do it. But I think just in the wider picture, you need to just start doing it, and just keep doing it, even if it’s frustrating, because that’s just how it is with anything. If you try and learn the guitar, I’m going to tell you it’s not going to be easy. But you just need to keep with it. And then over time this will just become second nature.

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Because that’s also the question, you know, it’s the chicken and egg problem somewhat, is well, how do I become a JavaScript developer? Well you write a lot of JavaScript. You know, honestly, that’s how easy it is. It’s just like doing pushups. You wanna be good at doing pushups, you need to do a lot of pushups. That’s pretty much the solution. And once you accept that there is no magic solution that will just come down and allow you to continue to write PHP, and take advantage of all of these new opportunities. That doesn’t exist.

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I know a few projects out there say that you can write PHP and you will have will all of the capabilities to build blocks, but that’s definitely not the case. So it’s just a matter of taking the decision to learn it and then sticking with it. But I have a actually a tutoring program for building blocks. All it takes is six weeks, but it’s going to be intense, six weeks. But after that you know the basics. Then we can move on to the more important things, which are the experiences that you should build for your end users.

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[00:18:27] Nathan Wrigley: I will definitely link in the show notes to your WPdevelopment.courses website, where you can go and check out what Fränk’s got on offer there and, the six week program. I think there’s a couple different things on the website, but we’ll definitely link to that. But do you feel sanguine now that there’s more information out there that, it is now possible? And in the day when you were doing it, it was probably more of a slog than it is now. Where do you turn to when you’ve got problems? Is it colleagues? Do you turn to friends, relations? Who are you looking towards when you are trying to solve the problems in your own work?

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[00:19:00] Fränk Klein: Colleagues, so I’m very lucky to have a lot of colleagues that are a lot better than I am in different things. And that’s really the magic of being in a larger company. I know that if I struggle with this piece, I go to this person. If I struggle with that thing, I go to this other person.

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So I’m very lucky with that. That being said a lot of the problems that I encounter very much also React or JavaScript problems, so there’s always the wider ecosystem for that. I do think though that even if you are alone and all you have is just the official documentation, it is entirely possible to learn this. And I’m very upfront with, when I have a program or a course, I’m just selling you a time saver. I’m saving you time and frustration, but you definitely could do it with just the default stuff that is out there.

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And I think that the WordPress learn website, they’re adding more and more stuff to it. Of course, it’s not as polished as something which is really starting to end a learning path. That’s just the downside of this being free documentation. But it is definitely possible to learn. And especially when we talk about just the people that want to get maybe deeper into JavaScript and React. There’s a ton of courses out there where people teach you that stuff, which are great and not very expensive.

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So I think the difference between, when we got started, 5.0 and now, it’s night and day. It’s not even comparable how much easier it is to learn blocks right now. And, we mustn’t forget that. I see it every day, inside of Human Made and also in community. There are people learning it from all kinds of backgrounds.

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Even people that would say that they aren’t really developers. So it’s not like there is some secret source or something that you need to be born with to learn. This is very achievable. But again, you need to put in the work and the time to achieve it.

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[00:20:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, achievable, but there will be some element of struggle along the way. But it’s nice to know that there are options out there. And you mentioned Learn, and like I said, we’ll link to the bits and pieces that you provide as well. You are clearly very into all of this. This is something that you’ve staked your future on, I guess to some extent. You’ve learned all of these skills and how do you feel about the broader picture for people in the future?

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So agencies, freelancers, and what have you, who have yet to embark on this journey and are still doing things in the way that they have been doing. Do you see that the future for them is going to be more difficult in the work that you do? Do you see that the potential is paying off? Are clients coming to you and you are able to build things more quickly, potentially have a user interface which they like more, and so on? I just wondered what your thoughts were about the future for freelancers, agencies, and and so on.

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[00:21:33] Fränk Klein: I think that when we talk about the work that I do, we have the chance to work with bigger budgets, so that gives us a lot more, let’s say free space to build out certain things. But, the thing inside Human Made is that Human Made hasn’t built a website without blocks ever since the block editor got introduced.

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That was just the default, because we saw the problems that this was solving. Because the classic editor, for our clients, even the clients in the publishing industry, like it didn’t work. We were having solutions to deal with certain issues, the workarounds that we all knew, but these were just not up to the task. And so when we saw the block editor, not only what was there in terms of the starting blocks, which is paragraph and image, which wasn’t very exciting, but the whole framework surrounding it to build a custom blocks we said, okay, these and these, and these are going to be the problems that we can solve with this.

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And it’s going to take us a lot less time. It’s going to be more efficient because we can reuse certain things a lot easier. And also it’s going to be a lot better experience for the end users. And the thing that we need to understand is that, as I alluded to in the beginning, full site editing is just one part of the bigger picture.

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So you can say, maybe I don’t want to use this part of full site editing, or I don’t want to use that part. And that is fine because we are in a transitionary phase, where we are transitioning really from a very classic theme development approach to this new paradigm of building themes. But if it just flat out say, I don’t want to use blocks at all, never ever, then probably, at least as I see it, then you’re going to need to stop using WebPress at one point or another. Which is fine because I think a lot of the careers in WordPress are incidental in that people just found WordPress and then they started using it, but there was, for most, not a point where they said, this is really WordPress and this is why I use it.

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And so WordPress is just a tool, if at a certain point a tool doesn’t work for you, then choose something else. I think that’s just something where you need to be honest with yourself. The other part is that when we think about what an agency is, if you choose WordPress because you say this is the best solution for us, then you need to be all in with it.

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You can’t really say, I’m going to choose WordPress, but not these and these parts of WordPress, which I don’t like, which are just key to experience. And how content is edited and how themes are built, that’s a very key part of the CMS. So you can’t just ignore those. But the difficulty is, what I alluded to before, is that you need to really understand how a block theme works, how the site editor works, how I guess the end goal works.

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And then once you have understood what that experience is, then you can come back and say, well at this point, for this project, I don’t want to have full on block templates. I’m going to use more hybrid approach where maybe the users can change this part or that part to the editor. And that’s all fine because you are making a very conscious decision of choosing features that fit best with that specific project.

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But you know what the possibilities are, and you know what to pick next, once you get over that initial phase where we just build partial websites. For example, landing pages are something which you can already build now with blocks and you could for a while. Now it’s just a lot easier to do. So it really depends a lot on your specific use case.

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And for that, if your work is building websites with WordPress, you need to have the experience of making the right choices. So if you’re just pushing the point at which you do the switch in the future and into the future, into the future, there’s going to be a time at which somebody comes in an agency that says, well we have been building with this since 2018, and you only started in 2024 for some reason.

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That’s a lot of time and a lot of experience that you’re missing out on. So it’s just like with building blocks. You have to jump into the pool, and wobble around with your legs and arms and try to swim. And you will see, it gets easier and easier. But, I think what we need to just understand that, WordPress has been the same for so long, and we think that’s normal, but it’s definitely not. Because the wider web development space has changed so dramatically just in the last five years.

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And so we cannot expect to keep the same solutions that we’ve built always with meta boxes and what have you, and then expect this to be a solution which is competitive in two years, in five years. It’s not going to be the case. The world is moving on whether we want it or not, and we just need to get onto the train if we want to be a part of that.

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[00:26:03] Nathan Wrigley: Couple of questions from that. The first one is you mentioned that there’s a competitive edge to be had here. I’m just wondering if you can give us some sort of insight into that. I realize you can’t talk about particular clients or anything like that, but what do you feel the advantage is that you can offer to clients? Are there conversations that you can have where the full site editing picture, the Gutenberg picture, the blocks picture, you can explain that promise to the clients, and you believe that they are persuaded by that?

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[00:26:31] Fränk Klein: Well, I think that there are a couple of things. You need to start somewhere. I started early when it was still in the plugin and my colleagues at Human Made weren’t far behind. And so the thing is always that when the first project, we kind of had to convince the client, but not really, because we showed them the editor and it was like miles better what they had.

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They say, Oh yeah, you know, we definitely like this with visual previews, because I mean it wasn’t even up to the classic editor, what they had before. So that was an easy win to be honest. And maybe that was luck, but. Then when the next client comes around and they ask what’s with this new editor thing? And we’re like, oh yeah, we did this project for this client and these are the custom blocks that we built, these are the problems which we solved. That’s an easier conversation because it doesn’t feel super outlandish to them anymore because, well this client did it, then, it seems a good solution, then why shouldn’t we do it?

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And so you need to build up that repertoire of just social proof to be honest. And so when a new client comes around and we having these sales talk, and they are explaining a problem to you. I can always say, we had this client, they had this problem, we built this solution. And so, when you just not only explain it to them, also show it to them, which we like, you know, we like to demo stuff. Then they definitely see it.

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And we are not even talking about this is a block and this is an extension of this default control because the client doesn’t care. They don’t know what is in Core and what isn’t. If it’s custom not. If it takes you an hour to do all week, you know, in a sense, they don’t care. They just want to have a solution that fits their needs. That’s just the competitive advantage of really knowing this thing very well. Which is why I said, if you don’t understand what full site editing is trying to do, you cannot really apply pieces of it.

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The other part is of course, that maybe you are reluctant to learn JavaScript and React, but honestly it’s a very good thing to know, because if you ever were to get out of WordPress, a JavaScript developer, React developer, tons of jobs available. That’s also for me, when I look at my personal career, I always need to prepare for the case when WordPress might disappear overnight, for whatever freakish reasons. Then I’ll be fine. I just go and do a JavaScript, which I also enjoy. But I think that’s something which maybe a lot of people are missing it or they don’t want to think about it that much.

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But the run of the mill WordPress developer with just a non WordPress development skills, is quite far behind the larger web development ecosystem. And that is fine if you say well, I’m not really a developer, just, maybe I’m a marketer, salesperson and I just build websites because I need one. But that’s not really what my core skill is.

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If you say well, I’m a developer and I build custom solutions for my clients, that’s really, my core skill is what I sell to my clients, and you are not able to work with what has been in WordPress for by now four years, custom blocks and this whole system that has been introduced. That’s not a great situation to be in.

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So unless you want to be tied to a specific page builder, theme, and you want your stake, your fortune to the fortune of that company, then this is something which you just have to get with because, it’s very important for your own career and it’s very important for your own business. If you want to stay around for the next couple of years, this is not something that you should be sleeping on.

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[00:29:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting. I feel that there’s probably quite a lot of people who are fearful of some of the things that you mentioned. Learning React and learning JavaScript deeply, and they’re struggling just to use the time that they’ve got to output the work that they need to output to make ends meet. And so all of this extra, that they’ve suddenly got to learn becomes a little bit daunting. But it’s nice to hear that you feel at least that there’s opportunities there and perhaps in your imagination at least anyway, the window of opportunity is bigger, looking forwards with full site editing. And it’s closing with the old way that things have been done with PHP and themes and all of that kind of stuff. So that’s interesting.

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You kept saying the word custom solutions which I found curious. I’m guessing that on the enterprise level, the kind of clients that you are dealing with, that is the kind of work that you are involved with. You know, they come to you with websites which have a heavy burden of, it needs to be very custom. It’s got to be exactly what we want. The budget can accommodate that, and so you can really spend time drilling down. And so your knowledge of what’s possible with blocks and so on and so forth can really assist them.

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You know, you might have a block for some very specific task within the broader website, that you can build and there’s time and what have you for all of that. Whereas, I would imagine quite a lot of people listening to this, they really aren’t going to be doing that. It’s just a simple website. It’s a brochure website, four or five pages and that’s kind of it. And maybe they feel that they still don’t need it. But, anyway the custom solution piece I think is interesting. Can you talk to us about that?

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[00:31:09] Fränk Klein: Ah, yeah, sure. I just wanna take the opportunity to circle back a bit to finding the time. And this comes from Brian Gardner, so thank you, Brian. He said there’s is five for the future, which WordPress says you should invest this time into the project so that it can sustain itself. And he proposes these five for your future, which just means well take 5% of your time and invest it into learning because that’s going to make it possible for you to have a sustainable future.

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So I think that’s a very important concept. Cause I definitely do understand the need to make money and stay up to date on all of these things, and it’s not different when you are in an enterprise agency as when you are in a small agency. I mean, the struggle is always the same. I mean, everybody needs to make money, and the way to make money is to produce work for your clients.

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But I think just if you are aware of the fact that you need to stay up to date, and you make it a priority. It’s the same as with any other thing in your business. It’s like accounting, everybody needs accounting and you can just not do it. And at some, you’re going to be screwed or you say, yes, I need to do my accounting and I need to take the time it takes to do it right.

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I mean, everybody needs time to write their invoices. And so people make time for that. And if you make this the same level of urgency and importance as writing invoice so you get paid, then learning is just going to be a natural part of that.

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There’s a piece of learning where you just need to get the basics, but then there’s a lot of learning on the job where you run into an issue and you figure it out and then you work some more, you run into another issue. So a lot of learning that you’re going to do is pretty much on the job. So that’s how it was for me. And to come back to the question of custom solutions. In general, when we talk about a website project where they cost $5,000 or $500,000, the challenge is always the same. There are certain pieces in the website that you need to have, so there needs to be navigation, there needs to be a list of content, posts. All these things are there, and it’s the same whether it’s small budget or big budget.

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The challenge is what do you focus your energy on in that budget? And so that’s a conversation which we have with our clients where, for example, it’s a stupid thing, but we get the mock up, right? And there is this pagination on the bottom. And this pagination kind of looks tricky. I would say, look, that pagination, if we build it that way, it’s going to take us like a day to build it.

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And honestly, nobody cares what your pagination look like. We can switch it out with just the full pagination. We got all the functionality. It doesn’t look the same, but who cares about the pagination? And most clients, if we don’t say it that way, if they say little bit more nicely, most clients will be like, yeah, okay, understand, the pagination. because for them, they didn’t even see the pagination, right? It just slipped their mind. And so there’s this negotiation where you need to take all of the pieces which you can simplify and use something which is pre-done, that you do this way. And then you really have the time to focus on the pieces that are important to your client.

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Because I always talk the language of money. What makes you money? How do you make money? How can we help you make money? And that is the point where you’re going to invest a lot of your energy, and that is where the custom solutions come in. So we had a client that problem was that. They had a CMS, and it took their editors 25 minutes to just enter the content into the CMS because it was so complicated. They need to manually resize images, all of that. So we just took WordPress. We did some custom work, not a lot to be honest, just for that specific piece. And we brought it down to five minutes. At top, takes them five minutes to get an article entered into the system, published on the website, has all of the metadata for social media and everything like that.

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And that’s a case where you can present to a client how you make them a lot of money by saving them time, because they still have the same editors, but the output is a lot bigger. The important thing is to not be tied to things that you think should be custom, because let’s say a menu, a main navigation. Do you need a custom menu with all this and that, or can it just be dropdowns? Normal dropdowns. It’s a question. Maybe the answer is no, because you have, I don’t know, an e-commerce website and you need to have a more complicated menu. Or the answer is just yes. Just a menu, as we all know, is going to be fine.

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And so that’s really the struggle that you find the things that you can standardize and WordPress is going to help you with that. Because a lot of the things that we needed custom solutions before now are standardized, or at least the way that you build it is standardized. So custom blocks are really difficult to build.

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You know, a bunch of stuff is already there. A lot of components are there. And the challenge is that when we talk about the smaller budgets, the $5,000 project’s not going to go away, what you need to deliver for that amount, that’s going to go up. And so here, when we talk about full site editing, since a lot of the pieces already predone for you, you can assemble these pieces, you can customize them, and that will allow you to build a solution which corresponds to the needs of your clients. And it doesn’t take you a lot of time to do it.

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So that’s the big idea behind is that, previously WordPress was very much, I give you these APIs, but there wasn’t really much in there. So now it’s completely different way. There’s a ton of stuff in there, but you need to really curate the experience that fits for your client and then you add the stuff that is not by default in there onto that. If it’s a plugin that you can use, great. We use tons of plugins at Human Made that just do things that we always do. And if it’s really a custom piece, then that’s where you write the custom code. And so through combinations of these factors, you’re going to be able to achieve the results for your clients.

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[00:36:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do like the piece that you mentioned there about having the client suddenly realized, that must have been a real aha moment. Something previously took 25 minutes. So if you did that twice, you’re approaching an hour to do, whatever that task was twice. And with the custom solution that you built, perhaps that was a block with the fields arranged differently, I don’t know. But the principle that could enter the same amount of data, you could do that twice in 10 minutes, you really have sold it I think at that point.

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Nobody’s going to deny that’s a better experience. And if it can, in the background, be doing things like creating the images and creating all of the metadata that goes with those images for the different social networks and so on and so forth. All of that stuff can be built inside of this custom solution. Yeah that’s fabulous. Like you said, the budget may not allow for it, in which case there’s still going to be a, the $5,000 website.

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I do think you are right as well that the expectation for what that $5,000 will buy you is only going to go up. It’s going to continue to be, $5,000 this year will get you this amount of functionality. And now that people are building with custom blocks and what have you, I imagine customers are going to be able to determine for themselves that, well, actually, no, for my $5,000 I’m expecting there to be a lot more on the back end that I can play with and for it to be customized just for my use case exactly.

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[00:37:56] Fränk Klein: Right, and I think that, when we think about a traditional website project, there’s this waterfall model where development is at the very end. And if you approach it this way, you’re kind of ready, all of these decisions have been pre-made for you because, there is this custom pagination, I don’t know, but pagination is one of my pet peeves, so there’s this super expensive pagination, this weird menu, like stuff is all over the place. But those are the mockups that the client said, we’re going to build this, and now you are having to deal with the task of, okay, how I’m going to build this, in this amount of time? And then we just are at the same starting point where everybody else is, like, we have a website that pretty much looks like all other websites, because usually, unless the design is very expensive, it’s pretty much going to look like a lot of other stuff, obviously.

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And so If you think of yourself as an engineer, you know, maybe that’s your title, but that’s not really what you are. You need to come in very early in the process and then already talk to the client in the very beginning, in the discovery phase, and find out what the pain points are and then try and make a note of these and also come out with a few possible solutions that you might deploy to do this.

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And then you go in and you need to collaborate with the graphic designers. I need to collaborate with the client on how you put this website together. So since we now have a framework, which is WordPress, where we have all of those pieces to build a website. We need to be involved a lot earlier and also explain to designers what these pieces are. How far it can be customized and all of this. Because the approach as we did, by now maybe 15 years ago, where really we sold websites by the . Page and it was this mockup and that mockup, and that was how websites were sold, right, by the page. You paid this much per page. That is just gone. Now we need to build up these small pieces and we assemble them into bigger pieces and bigger pieces, and that’s how we build out the whole website from the small components.

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That is both the case in terms of the design. So we start with the button, which is done part of a larger pattern, which is then part of the whole page design, or a call out box, whatever. You build up the design out this way, but it’s also the functionality. And a lot of the functionality that you build out, you’re going to have to deal with the data.

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How do I model the data? How is it stored in the database? How does it get accessed? How do I store it in way that is all performant? And so, you as an engineer, you kind of need to talk the language, both of the client and the designers. And still know all of the background of what you need to do when it comes time to write code.

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Cause let’s not kid ourselves, at a certain moment, you’re going to need to open that editor and start writing out code. Even when you’re dealing with, you know, full site editing. Then at that point you have everything lined up in the way that you can deliver the results that the client wants, within the time, and then also the budget that they have.

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So that’s really the big challenge, and it’s going to require us to step away from a lot of that old waterfall thinking because, really when you have projects that I tend to do tend to be quite long. You know, sometimes three months, six months, a year. So if you have a project that runs a year, you’re not going to come in with a list of all the stuff that you’re going to do in a year.

\n\n\n\n

So it’s a constant, discovery, negotiation, building stuff. But at each point you are building something which already has value. And so if at the end of the project the budget runs out, and maybe we missed a few nice to haves, the client’s not going to, they’re not going to care, because they’ve got everything which they wanted and which is producing the results for them.

\n\n\n\n

So that’s really the idea that we need to take forward. And to be honest, I don’t have all the answers on that. It’s just, I think that a more iterative approach where you build out pieces one by one in order of priority, and we have something which is working, which is going to produce results at any point. That’s the way that we’re going to do it, and it’s a lot easier to do that, just assemble pieces and then you add your little custom stuff to it. If you just start everything from scratch and it already takes you three days to come up with, you know, the basic site layout, I think that’s just outdated.

\n\n\n\n

[00:41:58] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. So it almost feels like you are using bricks to build a wall. You might substitute the word bricks for blocks, which is a nice metaphor. Just before we end, it sounds like you’ve decided that this is the way that you’re going to do things in the future. You’re fully into this. The promise with new technology is always, we’re going to make your life easier. I do wonder, and maybe you can speak to this, have you simply swapped a bunch of problems that you used to have, for a new set of problems that you now have? So whilst in the past you were wrangling with different things, templates and themes and so on and so forth, you’re now just wrangling with a different set of problems.

\n\n\n\n

What I’m trying to say is, is your job easier now, harder, or just the same?

\n\n\n\n

[00:42:42] Fränk Klein: It’s the same, but it’s not. I think that we shouldn’t be, how can I say that, we shouldn’t look back on the past and, oh, imagine when we didn’t have to do this and didn’t do that and paint the pretty picture of how it was. Because the past, it wasn’t great. I’ve been in web development for a while now, and there never was this super bliss that somehow got destroyed with everything that is here.

\n\n\n\n

But the thing is that it’s been the same. But for me, the way I look at it, it’s that you are always going to have problems, but I want to have bigger problems and better problems. So there’s a myth that, oh, a thousand dollar client is going to bicker and then a $10,000 client just going to wire the money.

\n\n\n\n

And I don’t know where these people come from, but that’s definitely not the case. All clients are difficult at all price ranges. That’s just how it is. You’re trying to build this thing together. And there’s going to be a few confrontations, and that’s just normal. But the thing is more is that, how can I say that? If I have to write one more stupid post list, I’m just going to be out of this. Who wants to go into an editor and be like, oh, this is going to be a list, and then I will get the title. I have zero interest in that, doesn’t interest me at all. It’s just I don’t want to do the same thing over and over.

\n\n\n\n

If I can abstract that away, great. And that’s really the idea behind is that I want to go to the things, just in terms of my career, I want to get closer to where I can produce outcomes for the client and rewriting a list of posts, how much of an outcome are you producing? I’m not really sure.

\n\n\n\n

And so everything that I take, all of these tools is just, I want to deal with bigger problems, better problems, and that way I’m going to be able to make more money, frankly speaking. And so if you just get bogged down into this small, kind of, small thinking where we need to say, oh, I need to write everything from scratch. No you don’t. there are huge parts of projects that I didn’t write myself, but I know which solutions are out there. And so, I don’t come up with an SEO framework. I use a plugin for that. I don’t come up with a bunch of things. But because I have solved all these problems, I can then have better problems.

\n\n\n\n

That’s the idea that I want to take. I want to get to the really hard stuff and yeah, definitely full site editing helps with all of that. It abstracts away a lot of the theming stuff that’s very repetitive. Blocks are a lot more portable. Even if we do write custom code, there’s a way to make it more abstract so that we can pull in libraries and things like that.

\n\n\n\n

So that way you are kind of building up, project by project and not only building up experience, but you’re also building up your toolbox so that when you come to a problem, you’ll reach in to the toolbox, you pull it out, you can solve the issue, and then you’re onto the next one. Which hopefully is going to be more interesting than how does the pagination look.

\n\n\n\n

[00:45:20] Nathan Wrigley: Nice answer. Fränk, I’m afraid we’re probably just going to have to knock it on the head because of the time. But just before we do, just before we call a close to the podcast episode. I’m wondering if people have listened to this and have been inspired and would like to get in touch with you, what other best ways or way to do that?

\n\n\n\n

[00:45:36] Fränk Klein: First, it is my website, so WP Development Courses. So check that out. Feel free to email me like there’s a contact tab. I like to hear from people. I don’t have all the answers for sure, and I like to hear from people and understand all the different backgrounds.

\n\n\n\n

And then I’m on the WordPress.org Slack. If you wanna DM me. And of course you can find me on Twitter. So if you have a question, if you have a problem, if you have a viewpoint, if you disagree, let me hear it. I’m very interested in hearing all of your perspectives and your struggles.

\n\n\n\n

[00:46:04] Nathan Wrigley: Fränk Klein, thank you very much for chatting to us on the podcast today. I really appreciate it.

\n\n\n\n

[00:46:09] Fränk Klein: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Fränk is a self-taught developer. He started out learning PHP in 2011 and from there found his way to WordPress. Over the years he’s worked for Automattic at WordPress.com and WordPress VIP, and is now a principal developer at Human Made, an enterprise WordPress agency.

We talk about the four phases of the Gutenberg project: content editing, site customisation, collaborative editing and multilingual, and where full site editing fits into this.

Fränk explains how he sees the adoption of Gutenberg as inevitable. WordPress is moving away from the classic approach of content creation to a more visual, block-based experience. He thinks that it’s important to become an expert at building websites and custom solutions for clients, and for taking the time to learn the new tools that this future will require.

He’s not suggesting that the journey towards expertise in React and JavaScript will be easy, but he sees it as essential for those wishing to continue to use WordPress as their CMS of choice.

He also makes the point that now is a great time to invest in yourself as there are more resources than ever which can assist you in this learning path.

As you’ll hear, Fränk is all-in on WordPress and is very optimistic about the future for experienced WordPress developers.

Useful links.

For the past few weeks, members of the Advanced WordPress Facebook (AWP) group have been discussing methods of combatting Stripe Card Testing fraud. WordPress developer Jon Brown opened the topic after seeing fraudulent charges on five different websites, including four using WooCommerce and one using the Leaky Paywall platform.

“All five were on Cloudflare with bot fight mode on when it first happened,” Brown said. “I’ve added CAPTCHA to all 5, I’ve enabled CloudFlare’s ‘Under Attack’ mode on the cart/checkout page.”

The WooCommerce sites didn’t have a reoccurrence but the Leaky Paywall site did. Brown said the client didn’t notice it, as he had Stripe emails going to his spam folder.

“It went on for two weeks until the load spike took the site offline and I noticed it,” he said. “About 1,200 successful transactions for $2.99, with 100,000 blocked.”

Brown said he doesn’t understand why Stripe doesn’t recognize and block the fraudulent charges since they all follow a similar pattern using a randomized Gmail address. His client had to dispute approximately 100 of these transactions.

“Each dispute costs $15 to resolve,” Brown said. “Each non-disputed refund costs $0.40 since Stripe (like PayPal now) keeps the fee.

“So 100 * $15 + 1100 * $0.40 = $1940 in lost revenue to fees and that’s obviously AFTER also refunding the $2.99 per fraudulent transaction. That means $3,600 in fraud ($2.99 * 1200) just resulted in a net loss of $1940 – that’s insane.”

Many other developers in the conversation have been hit with similar attacks, some with honeypots in place that didn’t prevent anything. One recommended using the WooCommerce Fraud Prevention plugin. It allows store owners to block orders from specific IP addresses, emails, address, state, and zip codes. This might help once attacks have started but doesn’t fully prevent them. Some developers had success stopping attacks using reCaptcha for WooCommerce, a commercial plugin that implement’s Google’s reCaptcha V2 (checkbox) and reCaptcha V3 to stop things like unauthorized login attempts, fake registrations, fake guest orders, and other automated attacks.

“We ran into this about a year ago,” WordPress developer John Montgomery said. “It’s a way for hackers/thieves to check a list of card numbers for ones that are valid. Once they confirm the card works on a site, they can use to purchase products for real. In the end, a big annoyance but honestly not a huge deal for us in the end because we have digital products and they weren’t really interested in those.”

Montgomery installed a plugin called Limit Orders for WooCommerce, developed by Nexcess, that disallows orders after a certain threshold is met.

“I set it up to x orders per hour ( above any historical numbers)…so if we get say 100 orders in an hour it will shut off orders,” he said. “It’s a bit of a sledgehammer, but it did help us once already.”

Although many store owners are hesitant to add any friction to the checkout process, technology consultant Jordan Trask recommends requiring customers create accounts before continuing and verify emails. He wrote a guide on dealing with card testing attacks.

“The gist of the rules is blocking all countries except those you serve,” Trask said. “However, for WooCommerce, I would put in a JS Managed Challenge for the cart and checkout.

“There is rate limiting built into Cloudflare that might help, but it’s more request based versus per order which is what you need based on IP potentially. If the requests come from the same IP address, you can look at limiting orders per IP since the email differs each time.”

The Checkout Rate Limiter plugin, available on GitHub, offers checkout rate limiting on WooCommerce checkout based on IP address.

Trask’s guide also recommends checking payment processor logs when investigating fraudulent charges:

WordPress developer Rahul Nagare recommends checking out Stripe’s Radar fraud protection, which uses machine learning to provide advanced protection and identification of fraudsters.

“This will let you setup custom rules on Stripe to reject suspicious transactions,” Nagare said. “This used to be a free service with Stripe, but they changed it last year. I’d look into blocking all transactions with risk score higher than the average, and maybe the region of the card testers.”

WooCommerce’s documentation has a section on responding to card testing attacks, which has many of the same recommendations discussed in the recent AWP thread. A CAPTCHA plugin is the first line of defense. It also recommends avoiding pay-what-you-want or donation products with no minimum, as these products are often targeted for card tests with small transactions that cardholders might miss. Swiftly refunding any successful fraudulent orders will decrease the possibility of disputes.

Please note the plugin is still in development, so we recommend running this beta release on a testing site.

The current target for final release is December 14, 2022. We would greatly appreciate your help making sure this next major version of your community engine is as good as it can be.

As usual, testing for bugs is the key to a safe upgrade $\"👉\"$ so please give us a few minutes of your time to make sure this pre-release behaves the right way with your specific WordPress configuration, your theme, and the other WordPress plugins you are using. Try to use a testing site which is very close to the one you are using in production. If you find something weird, please report it on BuddyPress Trac or post a reply to this support topic.

If you’re a BuddyPress plugin developer or a BuddyPress theme developer, please make sure to test this 11.0.0-beta1 release as we’re now only loading BuddyPress assets (JavaScripts and styles) inside BuddyPress pages.

Around 40 changes to expect in 11.0.0

You can check out this report on Trac for the full list of them. We only planned to ship one long awaited feature as a BuddyPress Add-on. At this stage, we’re staying silent about it to keep the surprise effect intact (truth is we are still not sure it’ll be ready for December 14 $\"🤫\"$ ).

This post was written in collaboration with Lauren Stein (@laurlittle) and Anne McCarthy @annezazu).

Twenty Twenty-Three is here, alongside WordPress 6.1! The new default theme offers a clean, blank canvas bundled with a collection of style variations.

Style variations are predefined design options that give you the opportunity to alter the appearance of your site without having to change your theme. This means that you can keep your template structure but change the visual details of your site with ease.

For a truly diverse collection, Twenty Twenty-Three’s featured style variations were submitted by members of the WordPress community, resulting in 38 submissions from 19 people in 8 different countries. From those submissions, a curated collection of ten was chosen and bundled with the new theme.

This approach to style variations ushers in the next generation of block themes, able to harness the potential of the platform’s latest design capabilities and tools directly in the Site Editor. Since style variations don’t require any code experience, you’re encouraged to tweak and/or create your own.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

This is an example page. It\'s different from a blog post because it will stay in one place and will show up in your site navigation (in most themes). Most people start with an About page that introduces them to potential site visitors. It might say something like this:

As a new WordPress user, you should go to your dashboard to delete this page and create new pages for your content. Have fun!

Who we are

Suggested text: Our website address is: http://localhost/unleashedwebservices.com.

Comments

Suggested text: When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

Suggested text: If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Suggested text: If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select "Remember Me", your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Suggested text: Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Who we share your data with

Suggested text: If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email.

How long we retain your data

Suggested text: If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

Suggested text: If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where your data is sent

Suggested text: Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

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Say hello to WordPress 6.1 “Misha”

State of the Word 2022 is coming on December 15

What’s new in Gutenberg

Team updates: Documentation Contributor Day, WordPress.org redesign updates, and more

Feedback & testing requests

Event updates & WordCamps

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WordPress 6.1.1 is now available

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How to contribute

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Transcript

Welcome to “Misha”

What’s Inside

Twenty Twenty-Three:A fresh default theme with 10 distinct style variations

New templates for an improved creator experience

Design tools for more consistency and control

Manage menus with ease

Cleaner layouts and document settings visualization

One-click lock setting for all inner blocks

Improved block placeholders

Compose richer lists and quotes with inner blocks

More responsive text with fluid typography

Add starter patterns to any post type

Find block themes faster

Keep your Site Editor settings for later

A streamlined style system

Updated interface options and features

Continued evolution of layout options

Block Template parts in classic themes

Expanded support for Query Loop blocks

Filters for all your styles

Spacing presets for faster, consistent design

Content-only editing support for container blocks

Other notes of interest

Enhancing WordPress 6.1 Accessibility

Improved Performance in WordPress 6.1

Learn More About WordPress 6.1

The WordPress 6.1 Release Squad

The WordPress Mission & You

Haiku Fun for 6.1

Expressing myself through WordPress

Life growing up with an enabling family

Discovering WordPress and blogging

“Writing freed my mind and soul from the pain and sorrow; it takes a person into a Zen state where one can understand their soul once they see their own thoughts on paper.”

Contribute to accessibility and WordPress

Sharing learning on accessibility can be a motivator

Share the stories

Contributors

Credits

Download Mad Libs:

References

Transcript

What’s in WordPress 6.1 RC3?

Plugin and theme developers

Translate WordPress

RC3, A Penultimate Haiku

What’s in WordPress 6.1 RC2?

Plugin and theme developers

Translate WordPress

Haiku Fun for RC2

This Week at WordPress.org (November 21, 2022)

State of the Word, New Dev Blog, and EOL WP 3.7 – 4.0

News

Community

Polyglots

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Online Workshops

WPTV

Related News:

Useful links.

Say hello to WordPress 6.1 “Misha”

State of the Word 2022 is coming on December 15

What’s new in Gutenberg

Twenty Twenty-Three:
A fresh default theme with 10 distinct style variations

$\"🙏\"$ Sponsor: Elementor

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