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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. 

I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions on TorqueMag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app. You can also download the episodes directly from WMR.fm. 

Now, I have to tell you, I am extremely excited about today’s topic: Data portability. I’ve been blogging since about 2004. Back then, if you wanted to migrate your content from MSN Spaces to Blogger, you pretty much had to manually copy/paste every post, every title, and every accompanying image and just go through and do that. 

Now, luckily, I only had like a dozen posts at the time, so it didn’t take that long. But in 2006, when I migrated my site from Blogger to WordPress, I was blown away by how easy things had gotten. Blogger had this export function, and LaughingSquid, the WordPress host I was using at the time, had an Import From Blogger function. 

It was super easy and seamless to move, and I honestly took it for granted. I just thought, “This is how it’s going to be now. I’m just going to be able to move things from one place to another.” And, obviously, the things didn’t work out that way.

As the years progressed, it started getting harder and harder to export your content and move it elsewhere. For example, you wouldn’t even dream of migrating your posts from Facebook to Elon Musk’s X and vice versa. But you also might have some trouble going from one CMS to another these days. Enter the Data Liberation project, announced by Matt Mullenweg at the State of the Word in 2023.

This open-source initiative aims to break down the barriers of content migration, making it easier and much more seamless to move your precious content from one platform to another. So joining us today to shed light on the challenges and aspirations of the Data Liberation project is Jordan Gillman, a Happiness Engineer at Automattic and the shepherd of this groundbreaking endeavor.

Jordan, how are you doing today?

Jordan Gillman: I’m doing well. Doc, how are you doing?

 Doc Pop: I’m doing so well. Right before the show, I asked you this, and I just want to kind of get this—I want to brag about it: This is your first interview about the Data Liberation project, right?

Jordan Gillman: It is. I’ve done one written interview, but this is definitely my first podcast, hopefully of many, about the Data Liberation project, which I’m very excited about.

Doc Pop: And I’m excited too. This is one of those things that there’s a lot of fascinating technology out there right now. And it’s kind of funny, at the State of the Word 2023, this is the thing that got me most excited. I was the most excited about it. So why don’t you tell us about the Data Liberation project, what your goals are, and the history of the project?

Jordan Gillman: Yeah, sure thing. Well, you’re right. Matt did announce it at the State of the Word late last year. And at its core, the Data Liberation project is a community project by the community, for the community, and for an open web. Imagining a time where you can move your content with a single clip, bring it into WordPress and take it out of WordPress.

Ultimately, our mission is to democratize publishing, and what that really means in terms of content is having the power to move your content freely to WordPress from wherever. The freedom to move your WordPress site to another host with a minimum of fuss, but also the freedom to export your content out of WordPress in a format that’s usable however you want to use it.

So I’m excited about the potential of that in freeing people’s content from walled gardens.

Doc Pop: As you alluded to there, this isn’t just about importing from one platform to WordPress. This isn’t about a Squarespace to WordPress importer. This is also trying to unlock even migrating from WordPress. We’re not trying to lock people into anything, right?

Jordan Gillman: I think that’s exactly it. I mean, as much as we, we want everyone to come to WordPress. That’s obviously, you know, a huge goal of the project, but we don’t want to be doing that in horrible ways. We don’t want to lock people in. We don’t want to free them from somewhere else only to feel locked into us.

So I think it’s an important part of this conversation, an important part of this project, to be talking about what freedom of content coming out of WordPress looks like.

Doc Pop: And if we were to go to, wordpress.org, wordpress.org/data-liberation, we would find a lot of the guides. 

And that kind of feels like what the current state of the Data Liberation project is right now. Is saying—I might be wrong—but it looks like instead of saying, “Here’s the tools, it’s a little bit more about like, “Hey, here’s a guideline. If you want to go from RSS to WordPress or Wix to WordPress or Drupal to WordPress or WordPress to WordPress, here’s some guides, well-written.” Is that kind of the current state of the project right now?

Jordan Gillman: That is the current state of, I guess, what’s user facing, for the project so far. And a lot of that happened around the timing of the State of the Word and a lot of that was “let’s take a look at what existing resources we have,” so a lot of those guides from the support documents from wordpress.org, a lot of the tools that are kind of in another section there existing tools that people have linked to. And so at that stage it was really a case of, well, let’s pull together a resource of information we have to use as a starting point.

I’m hopeful that those guides will continue to be really useful, even as we see more tooling introduced, because the nature of things at the moment in terms of migrating to WordPress is: Even when we have importers and we’ve got a range of core importers that are available. Many of those still require a little bit of user work.

You know, so we’ve got the guide to how to export your content from Squarespace, which gives you a WordPress import file. Or we’ve got the guide to use RSS. And so some sites will give you an RSS record that you can download and then import that with an RSS importer. 

So at the moment, there are some solutions, which are part manual work and then part a tool to finish the job, and that’s really what those guides are for. So we’re hoping to build those out further, but ultimately, by the end of the project, I’d love to see those guides be integrated in a way where they’re part of the tools and if there’s any manual steps required by users that we’re guiding them through those kind of in real time as they’re needed.

Doc Pop: And that’s what I’d like to know about. Like looking long term, is the goal for the Data Liberation project to be to create a tool or to create some sort of standardized data structure that everyone adheres to or is it. 

Or is it…I don’t know, like, currently right now, it’s just like, everything’s so different, you’re sharing the tools and the resources, and it’s just a nice hub for learning how to do that.

What are the long term goals? So for the project.

Jordan Gillman: That’s a really good question, and it’s something that ultimately I’m hoping that the community as a whole will help drive exactly what that’s going to end up looking like. 

There are a few ideas that have been floated. So we’ve got a GitHub repository where kind of the work and discussion is happening at the moment.

One proposal in that discussion is centered around the idea of maybe a plugin, like a generic import plugin that you might install on your site. And you would give it the source URL, and it would detect the kind of site, the platform of your existing site, and then it would walk you through the steps that might be needed.

So it might show you the guide, and then it would direct you to the plugin that you’d need to install to then use whatever you’ve been able to export. So that’s, I suppose, an idea that fits kind of within the existing paradigm of WordPress plugins and importing. We’re just kind of putting a neat front on it to tidy it up.

There’s another proposal which kind of goes a step further and imagines almost a hosted service on WordPress.org itself where that would happen seamlessly behind the scenes and so you would provide the URL of your existing site. It would detect what platform you’re using and then it would get the content however it needs to, and it would roll up a new playground site for you, you know, within a couple of minutes, so that ideally with one click you have a playground site of your content in a WordPress install. And then once it’s in playground, we have options of how you might want to export or migrate that in a WordPress format to kind of use as you wish.

So they’re both really interesting proposals. It may be that they are different phases of the same kind of idea. But I suppose to answer the second part of your question as to what the end goal is: That’s really something that I don’t see it as my job to decide. Which is why I consider myself a shepherd of the project.

The current phase we’re in is really just about facilitating discussion amongst the community. We want to see brainstorming, we want to see ideas, and then we want to see people, you know, challenge those ideas and together come up with what the actual work might look like and what our actual end goal might look like.

Doc Pop: And I imagine part of this is also not just about creating resources and creating tools. I imagine there’s some sort of political element here where we’re trying to call out services that aren’t allowing exporting. I feel like Squarespace does have an export option. So if you’re in Squarespace, you’re not locked in as a consumer, you can export to WordPress.

Wix, on the other hand, doesn’t, and I feel like part of maybe what’s going on here is sort of trying to get people on board. And as you get those numbers, then you have an easier time saying, “Wix, everybody else does this. Why aren’t you allowing your consumers to migrate off of your platform?”

Jordan Gillman: Yeah, I mean, it’s not a current goal to make this a political or social statement, I suppose. It really is about empowering WordPress users as a first step. However, I won’t deny that I can imagine that a successful project of data liberation within WordPress certainly does start to ask those questions.

And yeah, if our, again, if our mission is to democratize the web, then perhaps those are good conversations to be having. But I should say that it’s, you know, it’s not a goal of the project to be starting those bigger, broader conversations and lobbying and pressuring, I suppose, other organizations to have to be on board with that.

] Doc Pop: It is fun though, when you look through seeing how RSS comes to save the day with so many of these projects. If they don’t currently support any sort of migration, data portability, there’s always that RSS feed, which is this open-source thing that everyone still uses, thank God. 

And so, worst case—it seems like with some of these—the worst case scenario is, “Hey, at least you still have your RSS and you probably still have to build a front end, I suppose, but at least you’ll have all that metadata and blog posts and titles and images and alt text that’s in the images.” 

All that stuff should hopefully get sucked up in the RSS and be very easy—that’s a very easy format to move around from one place to another, right?

Jordan Gillman: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I think in my head I’m actually building out as part of my role, building out a list of basically the current state of migratability of a whole bunch of platforms and what we’re going to see with the potential of roping it into WordPress is there are going to be some platforms which we have, you know, we’ve got API access. So with the right development, we can actually probably make API calls and pull the content in a very similar format. 

Or we might have services like Squarespace does at the moment, which allow you an export of content. And then so we import that XML file, and you’ll get the content, but you’ll lose some fidelity of the experience.

And then we’ve got RSS, which of course you’re still going to be able to get your content, but you’re not going to be pulling in a layout. You might have troubles with some of the media might not come across. So I think there’s going to be like a differing level of fidelity or parity of display of how we might be able to migrate things.

And for me, that’s one of the reasons that I’ve been very much thinking about the Data Liberation project at this point about content portability. So getting a full migration of my site looks like this on Squarespace. To my site looks like this on WordPress is an admirable goal, but it’s a big shot.

And I think what we definitely can do, and this is, you know, this is the open web kind of side of it is that we can definitely say, “well, you created this content, you should own it and take it where you want, and it may not look exactly the same, but they’re your words, they’re your images. It’s your video, your audio, and you can take it with you.”

Doc Pop: We’re going to take a short break and when we come back, we’ll pick up our conversation about data portability with Jordan Gillman. So stay tuned for more after the short break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This. Today, we’re talking data portability with Jordan Gillman, a Happiness Engineer at Automattic who’s also a shepherd of the Data Liberation project. 

Jordan, before the break, you were talking about the different places that we can migrate from and how We currently have this resource center for learning how to migrate from one place to another.

And part of that, and part of the data liberation, is not just for making it easier to import to WordPress, but even making WordPress easier to migrate to other platforms, including a thing that’s kind of surprising: WordPress to WordPress. There’s challenges that some people have migrating from WordPress—one WordPress host to another.

Can you talk a little bit about that? Maybe what y’all, what thoughts y’all have heard so far about that process?

Jordan Gillman: Yeah, absolutely, I’d love to. It’s actually very fresh in my mind. I was lucky enough to attend WordCamp Asia a week before last, and I spent a lot of time in the sponsors area talking to hosts there about the challenges that they have with migrations, because for many web hosts these days, you know, they offer free migrations for sites, and it’s a big part of their kind of onboarding for users.

So, one of the bigger things that came up is just, in many ways, the shortcomings of the WXR support format that WordPress uses natively. It has served us really well. It is, you know, it’s done a fantastic job. But there’s no denying it has shortcomings when it comes to a full-site migration.

There are challenges with filtering what content you want to export. It doesn’t natively bring the images with the export. Kind of the source site still needs to be live to fetch those images. So, in speaking to hosts, very rarely did they use the native WordPress features for migrations. They were most often using third-party plugins and tools to kind of do a full migration of basically the WP content folder and then bringing the database over. 

And so, there was very little work using native import-export tools. And speaking to them, they had a lot of troubles when it came, usually, to just dealing with access to the source site.

So trouble with credentials for logging in or two-factor authentication being active. Clients who wanted to migrate and had already pointed the DNS, so the domain was pointing to the new site instead of the old one, so they couldn’t access it. And issues with existing hosting, like timeouts and memory issues.

So a lot of the time, the biggest successes they had when doing migrations were using these third-party tools, which are really great. They do a good job, but I don’t think that means we shouldn’t try and bring some of that stability and ability to migrate site to site into WordPress itself. 

Cause I think part of part of democratizing publishing is that if you, for some reason, want to move hosts, you shouldn’t be locked into a WordPress host.

You should be able to very freely shift to whoever suits you best.

Doc Pop: I haven’t really thought about WXR in a while, that’s the—I just had to look that up. The WordPress extended RSS, that’s the export/import file that’s usually used for WordPress. Is that correct?

Jordan Gillman: Yeah, that’s correct. So if you are doing an export from your WordPress site just using the native tools, it will download an XML file in that specific WordPress export format. 

It contains all of your content, it contains references to your media, but it is a little bit limited in that it’s just a single file, so it doesn’t bundle media. And of course, it doesn’t include your theme or your plugins or any of those things that kind of make your site visually and functionally your site. It’s just a content export.

Doc Pop: So what does the Data Liberation project mean for WordPress migration plugins?

Jordan Gillman: You know, that’s a great question. And the answer is at the moment, we don’t know. 

I think there’s—it’s a highly competitive space in the kind of WordPress migration plugin space at the moment. And I think there’s plenty that core WordPress can learn from approaches there. But I don’t I don’t think we’ll be aiming to, you know, overtake any of those.

But I think it’s fair that native WordPress allows a bit more flexibility of migration than it does currently.

Doc Pop: I understand why maybe there’d be a plugin to help you import to a certain tool. I guess, is there any reason that plugins or—I don’t know how to phrase this.

But I’m thinking about how, when we’re exporting and importing, we’re oftentimes given options of both sides. Like, where are you importing from? Where are you exporting from? 

Why is that? Why can’t we just have one type of file that we export as, and then maybe have that interpreted to whatever platform it’s going to in whatever way it needs to.

Jordan Gillman: You know what, I think that’s a really great question. The short answer is I don’t know. I think that the, I mean, it sounds like the question you’re asking is perhaps a little bit around like a standardization of format for migrational content. Which I think is another thing that’s—it’s not off the table, but it’s a very big conversation.

So I do know that, kind of, over the last year, there was a working group amongst learning management systems, kind of the LMS plugins in WordPress, to standardize their format so that there was greater interoperability migrating between, you know, Sensei and LearnPress, and those kinds of learning plugins.

And that was really successful, but it was also in a very specific small niche. So I think there is some precedent there, but aiming to standardize that is not, at the moment, part of the goals of the project. Certainly, you know, like I said we’re in the stage of discussion, and so if that’s a discussion that grows and interest is fierce then we’ll need to consider that.

But I think that approaching it from that point of view runs the risk of getting bogged down in conversations about what the standard is before we actually provide anything useful to users. So I’m very strongly in favor of let’s give users some tools. Let’s make life easier for them. Let’s make it easier for them to get onto WordPress.

Perhaps at the same time that does raise questions about a standard, but it’s certainly not where we were looking to start.

Doc Pop: It’s early days for the project and I keep asking you about, like, the end goal, and I apologize for that. You’re still figuring this stuff out as well. 

One thing I’d like to hear though is maybe just your personal opinion so far about some of these companies might not ever want to quote unquote opt into allowing users to export their data. Maybe they have some sort of a user agreement saying “hey, once you’re with us, you’re not allowed to use some sort of content migration tool.”

 And I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts about, like, do platforms need to opt into this or is it okay for us to work around when platforms are being selfish with our content?

Jordan Gillman: Obviously, it would be great for people to opt in. That’s always going to be the preference is if we can be encouraging a broader environment in the web where this idea of content portability is the norm, but we’re not always going to get everyone on board with that. Our first approach will be definitely to try and be using, I suppose, open methods of doing that.

And so we’ll be looking at places that do already offer exports. For those that do not offer exports yet, it may be that we start to be in a position to, you know, have that conversation with them about opening it up, but I do fully expect that there will be many of platforms for which we’ll have to figure out, you know, workarounds to try and, you know, liberate the content for people.

And I say we, in the very broad sense of the word we, because I’m not from a development background, I’m from a kind of design and front end background. So the work of doing that kind of thing is exactly why I’m talking to the community and looking for folks to get involved who have much more experience in those kinds of areas than I do.

Doc Pop: We’re going to take one more quick break. And when we come back, we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Jordan Gillman about the Data Liberation project. So stay tuned,

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This. We’re wrapping up our conversation about the Data Liberation project with Jordan Gillman. 

And 2023, Matt Mullenweg said the following at his State of the Word. He said, “Imagine a more open web where people can switch between any platform of their choosing. A web where being locked into a system is a thing of the past. This is the web I’ve always wanted to see.” 

When he announced this project, I was extremely excited about it. And I know it’s still the early days for the project, but I just wanted to hear how is the project doing amongst other key projects in the WordPress space, such as marketing and site editing and feature polish? Like how do you think this Data Liberation project is kind of currently doing compared to the other projects within WordPress?

Jordan Gillman: Yeah, that’s a great question. I suppose in terms of the goal for the project it is one of the key projects that has been earmarked by Matt and Josepha, the Executive Director of WordPress for 2024. 

So in terms of the plans for the year, it’s a really major part of that. One question I’ve had from a few folks in the community has been, why are we focusing on this instead of X?

You know, why are we starting this new project rather than fixing the editor more? Or why are we doing this rather than working on user management more or any of those things? And I think the important thing about the Data Liberation project is it’s not in place to try and take resources away from any of the other work that’s being done on the project.

We are a huge community of people. There are a huge amount of people working on the project, but there’s always room for more. So part of what we’re seeking to do is really hopefully activate people for whom this is exciting, people who are passionate about content freedom, people who have skill sets in those areas.

And so rather than taking resources from other important work, like working on the editor, like, you know, the existing teams within Make WordPress, whether that be the marketing team, or the meta team, or any of them, we’re seeking to really engage with and activate potential new contributors back into the project and really kind of resource things that way. 

So in terms of the overall goal it’s a big goal for the year, but it’s something that we’re starting at a really grassroots level, I suppose.

Doc Pop: We’re running low on time. I have two questions for you. Maybe we can wrap them together. 

I’d like to know if any organizations outside of the WordPress space have volunteered to contribute to this project. And I’d also like to know what organizations have currently been the biggest contributors to the Data Liberation project.

Jordan Gillman: Sure. So the short answer for the first one is that we’ve not got any resources coming from, kind of, outside the WordPress space at the moment. Again, as when, as we’re not at this stage, kind of seeking to make it a more political, broader statement. That’s not too surprising to me, but it’s definitely something that I’m open to.

And in terms of the second one, the shortest answer is that there has been a little bit of discussion within—in terms of within the WordPress community—within the Data Liberation Slack channel, there’s been some good discussion which has come from, you know, a variety of organizations, obviously, in the Make Slack instance. There’s also been a little bit of contribution by members of Automattic who are also full-time contributors towards WordPress particularly from the meta team.

Some of the proposals that have been raised for discussion have come from those sources. But what we’re really seeking to do is get more eyes and a more diverse set of opinions into that conversation at the moment, which is part of, a major part of what I’m working on at the moment.

Doc Pop: Jordan. I really appreciate your time today. Where can people learn more about what you’re working on?

Jordan Gillman: Awesome. That is the best question you could have asked. The best place to head right now is to go to WordPress.org/data-liberation. That will get you to the existing tools, but there’s also a couple of notes at the top about where you can get involved and join the discussion and join the planning.

A secondary place that I would recommend is if you are in the Make WordPress Slack community—which you absolutely should be, it’s a great place to be—the Data Liberation channel within Slack is where most of the brainstorming and thinking and on-the-fly stuff is going to happen. And I’ll be increasing, kind of, the activity in there over the coming weeks.

Doc Pop: That’s awesome. Thank you so much for your time today. And thanks to everyone who’s listened so far. 

Press this as a WordPress community podcast on WMR. You can visit TorqueMag.io to read transcribed versions of these podcasts, plus more WordPress news and tutorials, that’s TorqueMag.io. You can subscribe on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or download directly from WMR.fm. 

I’m your host, Dr. Popular. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and I love spotlighting members of that community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: Data Liberation appeared first on Torque.

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. 

I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions on torquemag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app. You can also download episodes directly from WMR.fm. 

Now, the media landscape has always had its ups and downs, but the past few months have felt particularly grim to me for journalism. Prominent newspapers like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have had massive layoffs in January. 

And since then other sites like Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, Pitchfork, and Vice—that’s a big one—have had their newsrooms gutted, turning them effectively into ghost brands. These companies will still exist as a brand, but just without the journalists. 

In the wake of all this, we’ve seen a few successful worker-owned sites like Defector, Flaming Hydra, and 404 Media popping up and doing great journalism. We’ve also seen the rise of independently owned newsletters powered by platforms like Substack, Patreon, Ghost, and yes, WordPress. 

I wanted to learn more about the future of publishing so today I’m talking with Ryan Singel, the Co-Founder of Outpost Publishers Cooperative, which helps subscriber-driven newsletters and sites thrive with independent tools rather than using the VC funded platforms of the olden times. 

Now, Ryan is, like I said, the Co-Founder of Outpost Publishers Cooperative. He’s also the founder of Contextly, which is one of my favorite WordPress plugins and a former editor at Wired Magazine, Ryan, how are you doing today?

Ryan Singel: Great! Thanks for having me on, Doc!

Doc Pop: Yeah. Yeah. With that big bummer intro hopefully you’re gonna brighten things up today. I know that you came from the world of journalism. Why don’t you give us a little bit of your just a brief rundown of your WordPress origin story.

Ryan Singel: Yeah so I had had my own kind of blog sites. I think the first one I had was on MovableType, and then when I was working at Wired, which was part of a, you know, owned by Condé Nast, a big publishing, you know, conglomerate, we were stuck on sort of terrible magazine-centric CMS that we all hated, and we kind of had an internal revolt and managed to sort of get Wired to be allowed to run WordPress and it was a liberating experience for us. 

So I think that was, maybe that was fairly early on. I wanna say like 2007-ish maybe I wanna say. And so just, it freed things up, launched a bunch of just sort of like standalone blogs that did really well. Folks like, and the biggest one people might remember is Danger Room, which is, was led by Noah Shachtman, who then became, you know, Editor in Chief over at Rolling Stone as of late. 

But we were able to sort of, you know, it sort of freed us up and then as we were working, you know, working on it, I got frustrated with how we picked related stories for our posts and and eventually created my own solution and then left journalism to start Contextly, which kind of like makes it easier for people to show great recommendations back to their own content, whether that’s algorithmic or editorially picked.

So, WordPress, you know, both changed my daily life publishing and also changed my life in terms of turning me from a journalist into an entrepreneur.

Doc Pop: You know, I’ve talked to you several times on this show and a few others. 

One of my favorite plugins, Contextly, is a WordPress plugin that allows people to have a way to keep visitors on their site longer. Like, they read an article and Contextly helps suggest another article, hopefully to keep them sticky and, hopefully to let you know what people are interested in. It gives cool daily information and analytics that are pretty different and more useful, I think, than Google’s analytics.

And we might talk about that later. I don’t know if that’s really relevant to today’s conversation, other than the fact that, I think, right after you left WIRED, you started thinking about the issues you faced in the times of journalism and publishing and kind of wanting to find solutions for it.

How do you keep people sticking around and using things like WordPress to use those tools? Currently you’re working on a project, the Outpost Publishers Cooperative, I don’t know if it kind of fits that vibe or not, but why don’t you tell us what’s going on there?

Ryan Singel: Yeah, so one of the things we really wanted with Contextly was, you know, you get somebody to come into your site is you want to get them to read more so that they come back, right? Or, you know, kind of become a subscriber or a loyalist. The goal we were trying to build there was really like how do you build a loyal audience, right? Not just, you know, getting sort of a viral hit.

But that was, you know, during the days of, the fire hose of Facebook traffic. So most publishers were just fine. You know, we didn’t care if we got people’s email addresses. We don’t care if they come back as long as we kind of just keep pumping stuff out and we’ll just make money off of the, you know, the Facebook ads and, you know, the Facebook traffic.

And that was a little frustrating. And then, you know, what we’ve seen is a change over the last few years, you know, where people are starting to sort of want to be loyal, they want to, you know, support the people whose stuff they like, right? Whether that’s on Patreon or or Substack or, you know, there’s a number of different platforms for that.

And then we started looking at Ghost, which is an open-source publishing system. That’s a little, that’s more sort of like, has membership and newsletter sending kind of baked into it and decided like, this was the, you know—felt like there was kind of a mixture of the zeitgeist of change in the world and people wanting to do some, you know, wanting to sort of build publishing, you know, sort of, I don’t know—build a publication that is sustainable and people being willing to pay for things. And just seemed kind of the perfect storm of sort of social, economic, and then technical changes.

It just became easier to run a site that is subscription driven. So I feel like it’s a continuation of what we were doing with Contextly and it’s an interesting moment to be in because it’s both full of peril and bad news and also lots of opportunity.

Doc Pop: You mentioned Ghost, it is an open-source platform. It seemed like it started off as a competitor to WordPress. I didn’t follow it very closely, but it feels like it then pivoted to, sort of, you say subscriber-based; I tend to think of them as powering a lot of newsletters while still having kind of a front-end kind of WordPress-y website.

Is that, is that kind of a fair thing to say is that they, you know, started off as a competitor to WordPress and pivoted to a slightly different model that focused on subscribers and newsletters?

Ryan Singel: Yeah, I didn’t follow them super early on so, you know, I think early on they wanted to be kind of the, you know, a fast, React-based alternative. We’re doing a lot of stuff to, like, help, you know, people run headless websites. I think a lot of their early clients, we saw a lot of, sort of, corporate blogs, you know, startup blogs that were running on a different-ish platform. 

And they have kind of a different underlying architecture, so it’s more API-driven rather than plugin-driven. And I think it was about three, maybe three or four years ago now, they started to move to more of a sending out newsletters. And I like to think of it less as the, sort of like, you know, I like to think of sites as being sort of like—what I think Ghost is really good at is the subscription part.

The newsletter is kind of nice, you know, that it’s very easy to sort of write a post and send it, but I think, you know, with subscriptions, what you’re really kind of talking about there is sort of like the community-ness of it, right? Being able to easily get someone and sort of, like, have them, their member, I don’t know, their member-ness being like very much a part of your publishing system.

So, yeah, I think they’re less of a sort of a general attempt to be a general replacement, you know, in the way that I think WordPress feels like a Swiss Army knife where it can, you know, you really can make it kind of do everything, to being a very specialized tool that’s focused on publications that are really about getting members and distributing, you know, distributing via newsletters or being, you know, paid or graded content.

Doc Pop: We’re going to take a quick break here. And when we come back, we’re going to pick up our conversation with Ryan, and we’re going to talk about some of the journalist-owned publications that are kind of filling the gap and using these small tools to, like I said, fill the gap in the news space.

So stay tuned for more after this quick break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This. Today, we’re talking to Ryan Singel, a Co-Founder of Outpost Publishers Cooperative. 

We are talking about how journalists can use new tools to hopefully fill the gap that’s left when these larger journalistic empires are now gutting and getting rid of their staff. I think of some of the successful stories that have happened in the past year: we’ve got Defector, Racket, Flaming Hydra, 404 Media, which is a personal favorite, Lever News, and Tangle. 

These are just some examples. I don’t know if they’re all worker-owned, but they are all small publishers that are focused around finding sustainable ways to bring journalism to readers. Ryan, can you tell us a little bit about some of these sites and what they have in common?

Ryan Singel: Yeah, so I think what we’ve seen is, you know, we’ve got people who have, you know, journalistic experience right? They know how to write stories, they’re hungry, they want to move fast, and they’re looking for independence and so that they’re not at the whim of, you know, in the case of sort of newspapers, right, you get private equity that just buys up the whole chain or just bad corporate decision making or the reliance on advertising, you know, that’s where you just need tons and tons of page views in order to pay the bills.

And so I think what we sort of, the common thing is like, you know, everybody’s trying to do something new, but they want to do something journalistic, right? You know, they want to report news, they want to build a community. 

And so I think we’ve largely seen is like most of them, you know, the main focus is build a loyal community, sending out things via email addresses, but, you know, can also be having their paid members get the paid version of their podcast, for instance, or join their Discord community, right?

So it’s just very community-focused, and then other sources of things like ads or even events, are kind of, they’re secondary to that. So I think what we really see is like a mixture of sort of a frustration with the current world, trying to do something new, and a tenaciousness to sort of fight their way to the point where they’re sustainable.

Doc Pop: Now, when I think of a few of these publications that we just mentioned, it seems like they are shifting from the days of ad-funded news and leaning in more towards subscriber-paid funded news. 

And oftentimes it kind of, brings to mind paywalls. I don’t know if necessarily all of these are paywalls, even if they are kind of raising money from subscribers. But It definitely feels like we have the shift in how journalism is getting funded, but also in how people like you or I might interpret someone asking us for money up front for news, where I definitely two years ago would have been like, “why are you sharing paywalled articles?” And now I’m probably guilty of sharing articles that I’ve paid for without even thinking about, like, the old me trying to read them.

Is there like a shift in how this is being funded?

Ryan Singel: Yeah, there is a shift, you know, and especially on the small side. You know, I think you’re starting to see it, you know, we’ll see a mix of, you know, I think what a lot of people do is a mix of like, the majority or half of their stuff is not behind a paywall. We’re seeing more stuff that is behind, kind of, a registration wall, so you have to give your email address to read it.

And then some portion of the site being, you know, for paying subscribers only. And it’s definitely a tension, you know, because nobody really wants to paywall their stuff. But they, you know, at some point you kind of have to—there’s, you know, the calculation of like, “how do we get someone to go from being free to paid, right? How do we do this?” 

In the kind of local news space, there’s a large portion of the, sort of new sites that are out there that are on a nonprofit model and don’t do any of the sort of, you know, sort of the hard paywalls. And then the memberships, they are generally kind of, cast as more of a, kind of like a donation model, you know, sort of a public broadcasting-ish model.

But that tends to mean they’re more reliant on grants and other sorts of funding because it’s just they just tend not to get as much membership money that way. But they see themselves as being, you know, a public service and, you know, often bringing news to communities that just don’t have any other source of news.

But there’s definitely been a change in the number of things that have gone behind paywalls that, you know, used to be only the Wall Street Journal could get away with it, and now, yeah lots of small indie folks are finding out that, you know, that can work for them as well.

Doc Pop: Emotionally, there’s a difference between me landing on a Washington Post article and being asked for money, and me landing on a 404 media page, where I know there’s literally four journalists who are getting paid with that, right? 

It’s not like a whole staff-wide thing, it’s like, “oh, this is going to pay for your writing,” which also kind of goes hand-in-hand with, like, why I might be more likely to subscribe to a newsletter is because it’s like, there’s a person and there’s a name and there’s a human connection there. 

Where if it’s a large company, at a certain point, and they’re asking me to pay for something, but there’s still ads and, you know, product marketing happening inside there, I’m a little less likely to do that.

Ryan Singel: Yeah, I think there was just, there’s just definitely been a shift, you know, and I don’t know if it started with Patreon, but like, there just seemed to be a cultural shift where, you know, we’re just more willing to hand over money to people whose stuff we kind of, like, we just want them to be out in the world, right? 

We want their stuff to exist. We want them to be able to do what they’re doing and, you know, make a decent living doing it. You know, because, the amount of content you’re gonna get for, you know, ten bucks a month from a newsletter from someone who you really like, you know, you’re going to get a lot more from the Washington Post, at least in terms of volume, right?

You give the Washington Post ten bucks a year, you get tons and tons of stuff, but you may not get, you know—but that misses the person whose, like, perspective you love, or who is writing about a niche topic that you care about, or someone who’s writing about your local community. So I feel like there has been, you know, a aort of a cultural shift. 

And then we’ve just also seen the tech tools have made it easier to do that. So, that smaller site, the 404media, has, you know, a membership system that I would say is as good as most mid-range publishers, you know, mid-sized publishers, you know, or even better. You know, some of those, some of the larger tech sites, larger news publishers have terrible tech.

So, it’s—there’s been a democratizing function of, I think, open-source CMSs and, and even some of the corporate-funded, well, you know, VC-funded ones that kind of goes hand-in-hand with that. 

Doc Pop: On the subject of tech. If someone was running a WordPress news site and they wanted to get it funded, one alternative, we mentioned Patreon. Patreon has a really good plugin for WordPress that allows you to connect it and paywall basically articles so you can have your Patreon site, but you don’t have to just publish on Patreon.

You can still have a WordPress site that has, like, “Oh, to have access to this section, you need to, you need to do this.” And it might be like, some of your articles are free, but there might be bonus content or podcasts or things like that. I think bonus stuff is a way a lot of these people are doing it.

Like we’re providing a lot for free. But if you want a little bit more, or if you want this free without ads, here’s a way to do it. 

Another alternative in the WordPress space is something you told me about. I haven’t heard about this, it’s called Newspack. Can you tell us about that?

Ryan Singel: Yeah. So Newspack is actually, I think, I believe they’re an offshoot of Automattic. So Newspack essentially bundles together vetted plugins that basically all kind of like local news people basically need, right? 

So kind of including advertising analytics, ways to send newsletters, etc. And then there’s kind of a flat fee that you pay per month for them to provide all of these sort of vetted plugins and help your site run, etc.

Newspack has been around for a while, you know, and it tends to be used by smaller local publishers mostly. There’s money out there trying to help all the, especially around local news, trying to survive and come back, cause there’s been such a decimation of newspapers.

So the Knight Foundation, which is this gigantic foundation based out of Florida is now—has been traditionally giving money and giving grants and so forth, and now they’re going for a big push to essentially try and figure out how to make all of this sustainable and how to get local communities to get funding.

So they’ve got 500 million dollars that they’re wanting to spend over the next few years to try and revitalize local journalism, both by supporting individual publishers, organizations that help those publishers, and then also some of the tech. So NewsPack got, I think, something like eight million dollars from them to help build out this, sort of, like, this tech stack.

And then there’s a, yeah, and there’s a number of other tools. I think there’s Memberful, which is, I think also from Patreon in the WordPress space.

Doc Pop: And in the Ghost space, there’s Tiny News Collective?

Ryan Singel: Yeah, so they’re a little bit different. So Tiny News Collective would be one of those organizations that gets funded to help publishers. So they work with people that want to start something up, maybe, you know, who, especially in communities that just don’t get any representation, or in communities that just don’t have anything.

And they help them, sort of, launch something, right? So folks that, you know, maybe don’t have—don’t know what to do in terms of the tech, and so forth. So they’re big, sort of like, they help folks there. 

And then they have their publishers that they work with use Ghost. So, and they’re kind of, they’re separate from Ghost, they’re their own organization, they—Tiny News Collective also got money from the Knight Foundation to help. So, Ghost is kind of off on its own sort of like, you know, in the same way Automattic is largely separate from all the things that you can do with it and the people helping it.

So Tiny News Collective…Yeah, so essentially, like, help people get launched, get them on Ghost, give them a nice-looking theme, and then give them kind of ongoing support in, you know, both on the tech side and the sort of strategy side.

Doc Pop: You know, we’re going to take another quick break and when we come back, we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Ryan Singel and talk a little bit more about CMSs such as WordPress and Ghost and talk about how they can help the future of journalism. 

So stay tuned for more after the short break. 

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, the WordPress Community Podcast. My name is Doc. I’m talking to Ryan Singel, the Co-Founder of Outpost Publishers Cooperative. 

And Ryan, early on in this interview, you mentioned your days at Wired and how there was an internal revolt about the CMS, and it kind of reminded me—and this was the CMS before they switched to WordPress—it reminds me, though, that I think just yesterday I heard an interview with Nilay Patel, the editor at Verge who said, I’m going to read his quote here.

“Boy, I’d like the reporters who work here to write for us in the text box that pays us money instead of over there in the text box that extracts value.” 

Now what Nilay is saying there is that he’s seeing his writers having more fun publishing on, you know, Twitter or threads or wherever. And he’s like, “why can’t it be fun to publish here?” And he goes on in that interview to talk about some of the changes that they made to the CMS to, I guess, streamline it, to make it more fun. And I guess that just kind of seems relevant to what you’re talking about. 

If it’s painful for a writer, if it’s literally painful to write on a CMS, then obviously they’re going to want to go to Facebook and write their post or somewhere else. Did you find that to be true? 

Ryan Singel: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. So, you know, we had sort of the one main CMS and the workflow all worked through that and it was very slow and it involved the art desk. 

And then when we moved to WordPress, you know, we ended up being, you know, I think we were actually like 10 different WordPress sites. So we had, we kind of changed things so that, you know, each sort of vertical had its own like WordPress site.

And so we could just do fun, quick posts. We could, you know, and one of my favorite ones we did back in the day is we—I remember when the Homeland Security had its threat level color-coded things, and every once in a while we would just make a fake version of that, you know, we did like a hot dog version, you know, with a, you know, Tijuana Danger Dog being at the top, and then a vegan pup being at the yellow color. And, you know, we could just write that, send it out, it was fun, right? And then we would still go do the real journalism kind of stuff.

But we couldn’t, you know, when we didn’t have access to the CMS ourselves and, you know, couldn’t press publish, you know, ourselves. We had to wait to go through, you know, four levels of editors and the art desk. So it did make things a lot more fun and things got a lot more experimental and we were able to try things about what would happen if we, you know, published ten posts a day really quickly, you know, little short things, or, you know, should we focus on long form? Or so forth.

So it was just a really fun time, you know, sort of putting that publishing power more towards, you know, in a large organization, pushing that down so that, like, individual writers and editors could make decisions and do things quickly really did revolutionize what Wired was like in the 2000s.

Doc Pop: You’re mentioning experimentation and how y’all could kind of play around more quickly. I do hope that maybe something that happens from all of this, I do worry about, not the sustainability of these smaller sites, but like the fact that they are not going to necessarily hire as many people as ou know, previously it’s, you know, all of these collectives we’re talking about are still pretty small. 

But the one nice thing about having a small group is that they can experiment more and they could create their own Mastodon instance or whatever. And that way, when they’re writing in the small box that that isn’t the official website, it could still be like their Mastodon instance or something like that. 

You know, maybe we’ll see people kind of trying different things and experimenting more and still owning more of the content as a result, and not just willy nilly sharing the content around onto other platforms that are extracting value from them.

Ryan Singel: Absolutely, yeah, I think we’re going to see some fun experiments with that and so, you know, I would love to see more of, you know, even when you do sort of like share out there doing that sort of like “POSE” thing, you know, the “publish once, syndicate everywhere” idea from the IndieWeb, where even if you do share your stuff out there, it’s still live somewhere on your own site, right?

And you can do more fun, interesting things. So if you want to do your snark it can be over there on the, you know, in the sidebar or in a different part of the site, right? 

You know, the main homepage still looks serious, right, but then there’s the the fun places, you know, the places for people to do things that are a little more fun and not, you know, necessarily, you know, the kind of thing that you’re going to have show up in Google News, right?

Doc Pop: And on that note, Ryan, where is a good spot for people to follow your snark online? 

Ryan Singel: Yeah my snark these days is mostly over on Mastodon. I am RyanSingel, all one word, and that’s S-I-N-G-E-L @writing.exchange. And then the sort of the fun stuff we’re doing to help publishers on the Ghost Platform build their businesses, you can see what we’re up to over at outpost.pub. 

Doc Pop: Outpost.pub, and here I see the list of services you’re proudly powering, including The Atlantic, 404 Media, Tangle, Future Crunch, a lot of great stuff here, Vallejo Sun. So that’s super cool to see that, you’re part of those awesome networks. 

Well, thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Please visit TorqueMag.io to see transcribed versions of these podcasts, plus more WordPress news and tutorials. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or download it directly from WMR.fm. 

I’m your host, Dr. Popular. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine. And I love spotlighting members of that community each week on Press This.

The post Press This: WordPress and the Future of Journalism appeared first on Torque.

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. 

I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions on TorqueMag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app.You can also download episodes directly from WMR.fm. 

Today we’re diving deep into a topic that’s not only cutting edge, but also crucial for making the web more inclusive: AI and accessibility and how those two things can work together. 

I’m thrilled today to be joined by Amber Hines, the CEO of Equalize Digital, who recently impressed our audiences with her keynote at DE{CODE} 2024 on the potential of AI and making websites more accessible.

In today’s conversation, Amber and I will be exploring those promises and perils and how you can leverage generative AI, large language models, and everything else to enhance accessibility on WordPress websites. Amber, thank you so much for joining us today.

Amber Hinds: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Doc Pop: Let’s start this off with that DE{CODE} talk that happened last week as we’re recording.

And I got a chance to watch the whole thing. I really enjoyed it. I’m just wondering if you can kind of summarize: what is DE{CODE} and what was your talk there?

Amber Hinds: Yeah, so DE{CODE} is of course WP Engine’s developer-focused conference, which is one of the few WordPress conferences that’s fully focused on developers, which is neat. 

And I gave almost like a five-minute lightning talk as part of the keynote presentation, which the whole of was about AI. And of course, me being an accessibility advocate, I spoke about AI’s impact on accessibility, good and bad.

Doc Pop: Yeah, and before large language models and generative AI were the hot new thing, there were many tools out there that claimed to easily fix accessibility issues and, in particular in the WordPress space, there was a lot of accessibility overlays or all sorts of tools that claimed to be quick fixes—just download this plugin and you’re all good.

And those were criticized often for not really fixing issues, for just giving the website owners the feeling that maybe they had done something, but not actually fixing things for users. Is AI likely to be the same, or is this going to be different for us?

Amber Hinds: Yeah, so I mean those, the accessibility overlays, you know, I think we almost talked about they’re criticized in the current tense, right? They are currently criticized because they make a lot of really bold claims. And the biggest challenge about accessibility is that not every problem can be detected automatically with an automated testing tool.

And so, if you can’t find all of the problems automatically, how can, you know, something come out and fix it? And that’s sort of what’s leveraged against the overlays. 

And I think to some degree, that is a challenge that AI models are having. So, you know, these large language models are trained off of millions of pieces of content—billions of pieces of content on millions of websites around the world. 

But the vast majority of websites have, if you look at the WebAIM report, they do a report every year called the WebAIM Million, where they scan the top million websites by—it was Alexa ranking—and check them for easily detectable accessibility errors. And 96 percent of them have easily detectable accessibility errors. 

So this becomes a problem because we are training our AI models on inaccessible code and inaccessible content. And, you know, we’ve all probably seen where ChatGPT—what do they call it, hallucination? It makes things up. And, you know, if you don’t give it the exact right prompt, it might give you just something that’s a little bit wrong.

And if you aren’t trained enough to know that, you might not catch it. And so unless you’re really specific, like if you’re using some of these tools like GitHub Copilot to help you code, you could potentially get out of it inaccessible code. For example, it might use divs instead of buttons because a lot of websites use divs instead of buttons. So I think that’s a challenge that we really have to figure out on the AI front.

Doc Pop: In the space we call this garbage in, garbage out. And in the context of AI, I think that’s often associated with when the models are trained on biased or incorrect data, then they’re gonna repeat that data as fact.

And in your presentation you mentioned, you know, Copilot is trained on sites that aren’t necessarily accessible. So if you’re using GitHub Copilot to help you build a site, it’s likely to repeat those errors. 

And I just—I was hoping to get an example of one, and you just mentioned one: buttons versus divs. Can you just quickly tell us about, like, why is that different? Why is that important to note?

Amber Hinds: Yeah, so one of the most important things for accessibility is using semantic HTML, which means HTML elements that have meanings in and of themselves that the browsers can interpret and do certain things with. 

So, when we talk about buttons on websites, there’s a couple of different kinds of buttons. In WordPress, we have the button block, which adds buttons, but they’re not actually buttons. They’re links that are styled to look like buttons. And then we have elements that control functionality, and these are true buttons. 

And so, these are things that might change a slide in a carousel or a slider. Something that might submit a form or something you can click to trigger an accordion to open and close. This would be a button. 

And in semantic HTML, we use a literal button tag. So it’s like, you know, the <button> and there are different things you can do with it. And button tags can receive keyboard focus.

So you can tab to them with your tab key without using a mouse. You can use both the return or enter key and the space bar to open and close them. Now there are ways that a lot of developers will make things that don’t have semantic meaning. 

So something like a div or a span function like a button. So we see this a lot in carousels or accordions where they’ve added JavaScript, which is using an element that is not a button, maybe it’s a heading on an accordion or a div on a carousel, to actually open and close the thing or to move to the next slide. 

But because these don’t have the semantic meaning, they can’t be reached with a keyboard and they only function with a mouse.

Doc Pop: Thank you so much for clarifying that. I always learn a lot when I talk with you about this and I appreciate you diving into that. 

One more thing I kind of want to talk about that you brought up in terms of cautionary things—and I think later on, we’re going to be talking about maybe some of the things that are working really well—but one of the cautionary things is a lot of these models might have biases in them and if they’re creating alt text, there might be mistakes.

Not even necessarily mistakes based on bias that it has in its training data, but maybe just because it’s missing the context of what the photo is being shared for. And it’s probably important as with, you know, being able to not just generate the code, but actually look at it and understand what it’s doing and if it’s doing best best practices, it’s probably also good if you’re using it to write alt text for images that someone goes through and, and reviews it.

Right? Like everything you’re talking about, it sounds like it comes down to, you can use this, but it’s not going to replace anybody. Someone still needs to double check it.

Amber Hinds: Yeah, alternative text is so interesting. There’s a lot of WordPress plugins out there that are connecting and trying to auto-generate alt text. I did call out one in my talk, alttext.ai, which one thing that they’re doing that is slightly better than some of the other ones is it’ll reference, like, maybe what information you have in your Yoast SEO details, it’ll look at the post title when it’s trying to generate the alt text instead of just sending the image over.

But alt text is so contextual. I have tried a lot of them, including that one, and every time I try them thinking it’ll save me time, I end up being like, “no, it gets it wrong.” 

You know, if it’s, if it’s pictures of specific people on my team or even on my personal blog and it’s a picture of my family or something like that, I don’t just want to say “woman,” I want to name myself, right? Like the alt text should say “Amber standing in an office” or something like that. 

I’ve tried it on product images. And like t-shirts where there’s literally words on the t-shirts and almost none of them do a good job of saying what the words are on the t-shirt. 

And you’re thinking, “well, if somebody wants to buy this and they can’t see it, they have to know what the words on the t-shirt say to decide if they want to wear the t-shirt or not,” right? 

So those are pretty challenging, but I feel like there’s some possibility there where it can—there can be some quick advancements and where that can end up helping site owners even if it just gives them a head start and they have to do some editing along the way.

Doc Pop: On that note, we’re going to take a quick break, Amber, so that our sponsors who are probably t-shirt sellers with great text on their t-shirts, so they can get in their messages. 

But when we come back, we’ll talk more about some of the tools that you might recommend that are AI-powered, accessibility related. So stay tuned for more after this short break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, the WordPress Community Podcast. My name is Doc, and today I’m talking to Amber Hines, the CEO of Equalize Digital about accessibility, WordPress, and AI.

Amber, you’ve been in the space for 15 years—in the accessibility space for 15 years. Are things radically different now that AI is on the scene?

Amber Hinds: Yeah, I think so. I mean there’s, there have been a lot of advancements. I don’t know. Are you a Super Bowl watcher, Doc?

Doc Pop: No.

Amber Hinds: No, okay. So to be honest, I’m not much into football either, but I did see part of the Super Bowl, and there was a commercial, which is definitely worth everyone going and finding, for Google. What they have is what they’re calling “guided vision,” and basically, it was a commercial that was taken from the experience or the perspective of a blind man, or I would say low vision, so not totally blind.

And he was using his camera on his phone to take selfies. And, When he would hold it up, it would tell him how many faces. So if he didn’t hold it in the right angle for himself, you know, it would say like, “no faces in the picture.” And then he could, like, move it and it would say it. But it was very sweet because it goes from one face in the pictures to two faces in the pictures. And then you see what looks like it might be a hospital. And it ends, of course, with three faces in the pictures. 

But I do feel like in the last few years, there’s been a lot that AI has been doing, in general, to enhance people’s experience on the web. I know before the break, we were talking about alt text. There’s some stuff where some of the generative language models can do summarizations of things.

So there’s a version of ChatGPT called ChatPDF and you can upload a PDF and it will summarize it for you. Which could be helpful, because a lot of people a lot of people don’t create accessible PDFs, and so being able to upload a PDF and get a text explanation of what it is or what information is contained in it might be really helpful for a screen reader user or maybe someone who has a lower reading level and is having a hard time with, you know, more complex medical knowledge or something more detailed in that PDF, it can explain it to them at a reading level that makes sense for them.

So I do feel like there’s a lot that AI is doing that is positive.

Doc Pop: Have you seen anything specific in WordPress that’s using AI to help increase its accessibility to, like, a specific plugin that users could check out or, or multiple plugins?

Amber Hinds: I haven’t, to be honest. I don’t know if I really have a good WordPress-specific recommendation on the literal AI front. I will say, you know, our Accessibility Checker plugin does some automated testing. 

It’s not AI-integrated, but we have some plans for some areas where we are likely going to integrate it with some of the generative AI models that are out there to improve our testing rules. But I don’t know of any good ones that I super recommend people check out, unfortunately. I feel like we’re still in the early days on that.

Doc Pop: Yeah, it’s early days. And that brings me to my next question is: If someone is building that tool or if someone’s building AI onto their website, what are some of the best practices that they should be keeping in mind while they’re moving forward?

Amber Hinds: That’s a great question. I mean, I think in general, no matter what you’re doing, of course, accessibility is really important. 

If you’re trying to come up with ideas, though, and you’re trying to think, like, “how can I use AI to enhance accessibility?” I would think less about the toolbars or that sort of thing, but maybe thinking about “is there ways that we can build websites to be smarter to maybe recognize certain things about people’s systems?”

So for example, we can actually detect whether or not someone has their system color mode preference set to dark mode on their operating system. And potentially having the website—obviously there’s CSS where you could just code the website to have dark mode—but there might be certain scenarios where, beyond the CSS coding, you’re actually using AI to change some of the other experiences.

I think you have to be careful about that, because there’s there’s possibilities that it won’t, you know—it could remove, and there’s been a lot of conversations in the accessibility community about this, like recommendations on whether or not we think that it’s a good idea to say, “oh, I can tell someone’s in dark mode,” or ‘I can tell someone’s using a screen reader, I’m going to give them a more simplified version of the website.”

Like, that’s not a great idea, but I think there are some, maybe some creative things people could do. I think having chatbots could be really helpful as a stopgap, assuming the chatbot is well-trained on your content and actually provides decent information. 

If you don’t have a really good search or something else about your website is not accessible, having something that allows someone to just ask a question and get an answer back right away, especially if you’re a smaller team and you can’t have a human available to chat with them 24/7—that could potentially do a lot to help with accessibility and getting people where they need to go and getting around issues that you are maybe still working on remediating in your website code itself.

Doc Pop: Yeah, and if you don’t mind, I’m going to toss out some that I think might be important, cause these are just kind of broadly important for anyone using AI, and I imagine it would still be true here. 

Transparency: I think if you are—if you do have an AI solution on your site, be transparent with it. Like, you know, as an example, chatbots, let them know that this is, this is a chatbot and not like try to trick them into thinking that… 

Amber Hinds: It’s not a human.

Doc Pop: Right, not a human, you know. But just, just be transparent. I mean, in, in a lot of cases, I think that could be like, this text is AI-generated, even if that’s like a text in a post or alt description, or if you’re doing generative image AI—I think that that sort of stuff is always important to just be transparent that this is not done by a human.

And similarly, we’ve got accountability. Accountability in terms of, if you are using AI as part of your solution, like a chatbot again, just acknowledge that if it says something wrong, you’re willing to still back it up or whatever. 

Like you’re not giving people bad information or if you are, you’re hopefully saying, “okay, well, our chatbot said this, so I guess we have to give you that discount.”

I just feel like accountability is a thing that some people might miss out when they’re doing AI. Like they just think, “oh, it’s AI. So obviously it’s going to sometimes be wrong and people should just expect that.” But if you’re implementing that tool…

Amber Hinds: Yeah, I actually saw a court case about this very recently where someone—a company’s chatbot told someone that they could get a full refund. And they’re like, “well, our Terms of Service said no,” and the court said “it doesn’t matter. The chatbot is your agent, and they are operating as your business, and therefore, the customer has, you know, has the legitimate expectation that they’re going to get correct information from the chatbot.”

So I do feel like if you’re using these things, you need to really be aware of what the implications might be of using them on your business as a whole.

Doc Pop: Yeah. And then the final thing I was going to mention is just user input. 

As always, that’s important to have. Listen to your users, hear how they’re using the experience and how it’s working for them. And I have to say, some folks that I’ve seen rolling out AI are unhappy with how users are interpreting the thing instead of listening to the feedback and being like, “oh, maybe this isn’t doing the right sort of thing that what they want” or something like that. 

So those three things, transparency, accountability, and listening to users, that’s important for any business, but I think it’s important for folks who are trying to use these AI tools. 

Amber Hinds: I think on that line, like, it’s really important to talk to your real customers, but also don’t forget to include people with disabilities, because they’re,—one in six people worldwide, one in five U.S. adults has a disability. 

They’re very frequent users of websites, sometimes even more than we think, and we want to make sure that everything we’re building works for them as well, and not just typically abled people who are using a mouse and a keyboard.

Doc Pop: Absolutely. And on this topic, is there anything outside of the WordPress world in terms of how AI is being used to make sites more inclusive that you’d like to see brought into the WordPress space that you think “this solution works here, we should adopt that.”

Amber Hinds: I do know, and I’ll throw a link so you can put it in the show notes. But I saw in January, Ohio State University, in their news, they were talking about some of the researchers that, at Ohio State, have been working on trying to use AI to create agents that do really complex multi-step processes for people.

So, for example, if I wanted to fly to WordCamp Europe, and we know that there’s really a lot of challenges around booking an airplane ticket, having an agent that could be voice-controlled. So we have very basic, right, like we could say to, “Hey Alexa, order me more laundry detergent.” And she would just go do that, right?

But, but being able to do really complex things where we could say to our agent, “I need to book a trip to Italy in June for WordCamp Europe,” it would know what the dates were, it would go out, it would tell me the fares, then it would say, “okay, yes,” and then it would, you know, fill in all the forms, enter my credit card information and do everything for me automatically.

I think that is something that would be really interesting to see more tools in the WordPress space to try and, like, automate these very complex processes for people.

And to be honest, you’re going to see even typically abled people use them because it’s nice to not have to fill out, you know, you know, eight different steps in order to get your airplane ticket or whatever it might be.

Doc Pop: Well, yeah, as true in the real world, it’s also true on the web that accessibility makes it better for everyone. Not just not just certain groups of people, but we all benefit when the web is more accessible. 

On that note, we’re going to take one final break. And when we come back, we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Amber Hines about AI and accessibility.

So stay tuned for more after the short break. 

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, the WordPress Community Podcast. We’re wrapping up our conversation with Amber Hines about AI, accessibility, and WordPress. 

And as we, I think, established pretty clearly, AI is not a Band Aid. There is no, there is no Band Aid that you can just slap on and fix everything. But there’s a lot of possibilities for things that could be done.

Amber was just talking about, like, the potential of being able to easily book a trip to a WordCamp and have all sorts of stuff just handled for you and make it really smooth. And you know, it’s hard for us—because it’s so early, it’s hard for us to see exactly what AI and WordPress and accessibility, what those are going to mean together.

Hopefully this time next year, we’ll have lots of cool examples, but as we said, it’s not always a Band Aid and it’s important to be able to check for accessibility issues. And I’m sure there’s not one thing that you can just run that just automatically checks every possible issue. But I do know that Amber, you have the Accessibility Checker plugin.

Can you tell us a little bit about that and how that works?

Amber Hinds: Yeah, so our plugin is open source, it has a free version that you can get off of WordPress.org or paid versions, and basically what you can do with it is it will check draft pages even before you’ve published them and or published, already published content, and it will scan them and it will come back to you and say things like, you know, you have a, link that doesn’t have meaningful text.

Let’s say you’ve used the words “click here.” You have images missing, alternative text, you aren’t using headings in the right order, oh you put in a link to an audio file, but you don’t have a transcript, those sorts of things. 

So it’ll flag common accessibility problems and put that report right in the WordPress dashboard. And we’re really trying to make it easier for content creators to create more accessible websites and learn accessibility as they use the plugin.

Doc Pop: And where can people find the Accessibility Checker plugin?

Amber Hinds: Yep, so beyond WordPress.org, if you just go to our website, equalizedigital.com, that has all the information about the plugin and you can also download the free version off our website.

Doc Pop: And on that note, where can people find out more about what you’re working on online? 

Amber Hinds: Yep, so, outside of equalizedigital.com, you can most commonly find me on Twitter or X, and I am @heyamberhines, I’m occasionally on LinkedIn and Mastodon, but that’s probably the best place to find me.

Doc Pop: Right on. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Amber. I really appreciate it.

Amber Hinds: Thank you for having me. It’s been fun.

Doc Pop: And thanks to our listeners for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Please visit TorqueMag.io to find transcribed versions of these episodes, plus more WordPress news and tutorials. 

We’re also in the middle of our Plugin Madness competition, so you can go support your favorite WordPress plugins there. 

You can subscribe to press this on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or Overcast—my favorite. You can also download directly from WMR.fm. 

I’m your host, Dr. Popular. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and I’d love spotlighting members of that community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: Can AI Make The Web More Accessible? appeared first on Torque.

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week, we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop, I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions on Torquemag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you find your favorite podcasting apps. You can also download the episodes directly from WMR.fm. 

Now, WP Engine has recently announced DE{CODE}2024, the company’s annual developer conference. It’s a virtual conference that you can attend from anywhere, but it will be happening from March 19th to March 21st. 

And joining me today is one of the guest speakers from DE{CODE}, Miriam Schwab, the head of WordPress relations at Elementor. Miriam, how are you doing today?

Miriam Schwab: I’m great. How are you?

Doc Pop: I’m doing super well. Thanks so much for joining us. You just arrived back from, I’m assuming, back from WordCamp Asia. So we will be talking about that later on in the show and talking about your talk at DE{CODE}. 

But before we get into that, Miriam, why don’t you start off with just a little bit of your history in the WordPress space.

Miriam Schwab: Okay. So I’ve been in the WordPress space for about 17–18 years. I got into it actually after my fourth kid was born and I wanted more flexibility in my work life. Discovered WordPress, fell in love with it, and started offering it as a service.

That eventually developed into an agency providing custom development solutions for WordPress websites for businesses, generally larger organizations, a lot of high tech and big nonprofits.

I did that for about 13 years, and through my work in the agency became very familiar with the pros and cons of WordPress. So, you know, the pros being open-source flexibility, extensibility, and an amazing community. And the cons were, you know, struggles around performance and scaling and security. And I was looking for a solution.

And based on trends that were happening at the time, particularly around something called Static Site Generation, I came to the conclusion that if we could publish WordPress sites in static architecture, that would solve everything. 

So, actually started working on that as a venture, sold the agency, built that up as a startup, and in June 2022 Strattic was acquired by Elementor, and I am at Elementor until today.

Doc Pop: You have this experience of coming from the agency side, doing a startup afterwards, and now working for Elementor, which is a powerhouse in the WordPress space. You’ve kind of, I guess, seen the three different types of businesses that I think can survive in a WordPress space, and you’re going to be talking about business and ways for entrepreneurs to kind of work within WordPress at DE{CODE}.

And again, that’s going to be coming up March 19th through March 21st is going to be DE{CODE}. You’re going to be on a panel with James Hall, who’s going to be the host, Sujay Pawar, the CEO and co-founder of Brainstorm Force, and Leslie Sim, the co-founder of Newsletter Glue—we love Leslie here, huge Leslie fans here.

And so you’re going to be talking about entrepreneurial solutions for WordPress. Was just wondering if you could tell me how things feel now compared to previous years as for entrepreneurs in WordPress.

Do you think this is a great place to be for entrepreneurs?

Miriam Schwab: I think that we’re at a really interesting place for the WordPress industry where on the one hand, I think in some ways it’s more challenging. 

In the old days—I’ve been around long enough to say that—if you created a plugin and it provided value, it got attention. People were excited about it and it gained traction. And I think in some ways it was easier back then. 

Now, the ecosystem has grown so much that if you are bringing something new to the table, I think that the efforts needed to gain awareness for it and gain traction are much harder. 

On the other hand, I think that the industry has matured in a way that, I don’t know if any of us saw it actually coming, where it’s become much more business-oriented and there’s an awareness of the importance of the businesses in WordPress in terms of keeping it sustainable, supporting it, and taking it forward.

So, that newer business-y type of perspective I think is actually healthy for the industry. From that perspective, it does make it more viable for people to come and be like, “I want to build this product and bring this product into the space, and it’s going to be a proper business.” And I think there’s more respect for that and more appreciation for it than there was in the past.

Doc Pop: You mentioned something interesting about that professionalism or business kind of shift in WordPress. It seemed like you could just roll out a plugin and if there was a need for the plugin, people would find it. 

And now, as you said, it does definitely feel like you have to be a little better at like, maybe having—you have to have a social account or maybe even have a Discord. You have to market it. You have to do a lot more. 

So it seems like the investment is higher, but the payoff—there’s a bigger pie now for all of us to have. 

Do you think that investment in startups in the WordPress space has changed with that, or is it still like it was before, but people have to put up a little bit more of their own capital now to start their own company in WordPress?

Miriam Schwab: I think from what I can see and what I’ve seen—so for a long time, there wasn’t investment into the WordPress space. And then there was like a few years where people started to be like, “Oh, WordPress is huge. Like that’s a ginormous addressable market, and so that seems like a good place to invest.”

And so hosting companies were taking on investment, whether from venture capital or private equity. And there was a lot of movements around that and acquisitions and, you know, Elementor took on investment at one point. And of course, Strattic, the company I co-founded, we were venture backed and we took on funding.

But I think there’s kind of been a slowdown around that. I think we will start to see more investment over the next 6 to 12 to even 18 months coming back. I do think that the slowdown in investment in the WordPress space has a lot to do with the general trends in the overall market where, you know, there was a kind of tech bubble that kind of burst.

And so investors are being more careful in general in the downturn of the economy, so that’s affecting the WordPress space. But I am hearing chatter and conversations of some WordPress companies that are actively working on raising funding. 

And I think they will be successful and I really hope they are. I think it’s better for everyone. So I think if we all keep our eyes open, we’ll see some of that coming back soon.

Doc Pop: Yeah, and I’m thinking there’s folks like Yoast and Marieke who have left Yoast and are doing venture capitalism now in, presumably, investing in WordPress. So these are folks that have seen the WordPress space from both sides and are looking to invest in it. 

Aside from outside investment, what are some of the advantages someone might have if they’re developing within WordPress, if they’re starting a company? 

There’s obviously open-source tools that we have. Is that something that young entrepreneurs can use to start their WordPress businesses?

Miriam Schwab: I think WordPress is a great place to start for a few reasons. 

One is, because it’s open source, your kind of startup costs can be pretty low. You know, you don’t have to license software and all sorts of things like that. And you can get up and running with some amazing tools that exist for developers and otherwise and, you know, just start working on your thing.

So getting an initial product to market, in terms of the costs and resource intensiveness of it, I think it’s pretty low in the WordPress space, and so that’s an advantage. 

And then, once you get it to market, because of the cohesiveness of the community and the accessibility of the community—meaning the community is accessible to you pretty easily—you can start a feedback loop, which is super valuable, especially at the beginning of, you know, trying to get people to use your product, test it out, and give you feedback so you can make it better. And I think you might be able to have a tighter feedback loop in the WordPress community and potentially in other spaces.

So those are two pretty big advantages of starting to build a product in the WordPress space.

Doc Pop: So obviously we’re all giving back to the WordPress ecosystem and trying to contribute to core kind of on top of what we’re doing. 

Do you see many businesses that are not just asking for feedback, but also, like, maybe a small business actually asking for contributions, you know? Like help us translate this or, you know, help us fix these bugs.

Is that also part of what businesses are doing now?

Miriam Schwab: I hope so, because the nature of the WordPress community is that people are just, are doing that anyways. 

So Elementor is an example of that. So we’re contributing to the WordPress space, we’re contributing to the performance, core performance team, and to the plugin review team, and we sponsor the big flagship events, which we see as an important contribution to making sure that they happen and are well supported.

But interestingly, we, you know, our core plugin, like the free one, it’s in a GitHub repository, and people submit PRs to us to review and consider merging into our product all the time, and they don’t have to. 

And, with regards to our translation, also, we have active translators, many of whom are in the company, but also not—people who just care about making sure it’s accessible in their language. 

It’s quite amazing, actually. It’s remarkable. So I hope people, you know, set themselves up for that type of feedback, because the community wants to give it.

Doc Pop: You know, that’s a good spot for us to take a quick break. I definitely want to come back to talking about getting community involved, but we’re going to take a short break, and when we come back, we’re going to pick up our conversation about the business of WordPress with Miriam Schwab, head of WordPress relations at Elementor.

Stay tuned.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. 

Today I am talking to Miriam Schwab, head of WordPress relations at Elementor, about Miriam’s upcoming panel with several other greats in the WordPress space about the business of WordPress. 

And right before that break, Miriam, you touched on something that I think is very interesting, where you said that sometimes folks do—you put, you put stuff up on GitHub, right? 

Which is kind of different than the ways we used to—we used to have a landing page and you know, here’s the final product and download the zip file—but now things are kind of different. And sometimes people like to be involved in a project and maybe even make a pull request, like you said, to help contribute.

How do WordPress businesses now—what are some ways that they can kind of keep those passionate users or make users more passionate and turn them into not just people who use the product, but advocates of the product?

Miriam Schwab: That’s a very good question. I think there’s a technical side and the communication side. 

So first of all, make sure that you’re set up with easy tooling, easy instructions and directions, so that people can contribute with as little friction as possible. So you want to make their jobs—not that they’re their jobs, but their tasks—easier for them. You know, as easy as possible.

So that’s, you know, the GitHub repository, making sure you have documentation in there, how to contribute, how to submit different types of issues, etc. So, that’s number one. 

And the other thing is communication. You know, in the end, people don’t understand the value of just saying “thank you.” People think everyone wants, like, some kind of reward, but very often, people just want to be recognized and given credit for their work and their contribution. 

So I would say make sure that you have, you know, a good cadence of communicating with your contributors, talking to them, seeing how things are going, asking for feedback, and just saying thank you and giving them credit one on one. 

But also, there’s ways to give contributors credit more publicly, like, you know, in a post or in different ways, like a more public forum, like saying, “Hey, Doc Pop, thanks so much for everything that you’ve been doing in the last month. You submitted 10 PRs, you know, pull requests or whatever issues, and we really appreciate it.” And, you know, sometimes that, that just means so much and it’s really important.

Doc Pop: I think now it would be a good spot for us to switch over a little bit. And this year has felt so much different than these last few years, just in tech in general. And you, you talked about some of those changes that have happened globally. 

I’m wondering, what trends are you seeing on the business side of WordPress these days?

Miriam Schwab: I think we’re seeing a lot of consolidation with the bigger companies emerging as the main companies in this space, they’re, you know, picking up the smaller products and plugins. And those bigger companies tend to be hosting companies. 

I think that there’s a positive aspect to it, which because those companies are so big and have so much volume in terms of revenue and resources, it creates greater stability.

Also, in the host—in the WordPress space, the hosting companies play a very important role in terms of how users experience WordPress. Because, whatever you do, your WordPress site needs to be hosted somewhere. How is that experience for you? It’s just, it’s equally as important as the WordPress experience itself. So, you know, strong hosting companies play a big role, and I think we’re just seeing that kind of consolidation. 

My one concern with that, you know—and I think this is in any industry—is that there might be a stifling of innovation because of that. You know, creating something new is very risky and it might feel more comfortable to kind of just find a home in a hosting company.

And sometimes when products get picked up by larger companies, they kind of stagnate. So, that’s a concern, but I think with the right attitude and the right approach, even in this kind of era of consolidation, we can still encourage innovation in the ecosystem.

Doc Pop: I remember when that wave of acquisitions within the WordPress space started, I want to say like four years ago, but maybe more recently. 

It felt like, well, in a way, this is nice because some of these folks did start something very casually and, you know, they were providing a service that people liked, but they didn’t have health insurance or, you know, they had a hard time, like, you know, being able to pay rent and they still had to kind of do other stuff.

And so that definitely, that first wave, at least, felt sort of empowering or kind of like a nice safety net. Like people had to—they didn’t have to be so reliant on generosity and they had a little bit more predictability and they could focus more on just building the product and not having to maybe worry about marketing or HR or anything like that because other folks were working on it. 

And you are kind of touching on this thing where as it’s been going on, there’s this fear, maybe, that by having these acquisitions, things start to kind of go under these pillars and maybe be a little bit less usable by everyone or feel, just, I don’t know—

It’s an interesting…the vibe of those acquisitions has shifted a little bit where in the very beginning, it felt sort of like, “Oh, good for them.” And now, there’s a personal part of me where if somebody does get acquired, you know, there’s that little part of me that’s like, “Oh, I hope that this isn’t the end of that product or something. I hope this isn’t just a way to kind of stop that competition.” 

Are you seeing any changes even in how acquisitions are happening now? Are they, is it, am I—am I being a little nervous about these acquisitions or is it still going pretty well as far as you’ve seen?

Miriam Schwab: I think it’s going well. I think we’ve seen some companies do acquisitions in a really good way where the plugins or products they acquired definitely continue to develop and provide value and that’s amazing. 

So I think there’s enough of that. There was this recent news about Quickly, you know, shutting down. And so, you know, it can go either way. A product you love can be acquired and then kind of just disappear because nobody actually is investing in it. 

On the other hand, if a product is standalone, that’s also risky, especially at earlier stages. And so if you love a product, it can also end up disappearing just because it’s so—I don’t know the reasoning behind Quickly, so just, I know that it happened—but in general, because running a business like that is so hard.

So, you know, if you go either way—and I just really hope that the companies in the industry, when they acquire something that people really love, do their best to try to keep it running and developing it and, you know, continuing to provide value. 

But again, nothing, nothing’s guaranteed one way or the other. Yeah, that’s just how I see it.

Doc Pop: That actually kind of has me wondering if you think there’s any mistakes that companies might be making now in the WordPress space. 

We’ve talked about how they could leverage different tools, but is there anything you’ve seen companies doing that you think maybe they shouldn’t be focusing on as much?

Miriam Schwab: No, not that I can think of. What I find to be very hopeful and I love to see is that, you know, in the last few years—and that to me is pretty new—there’s been some really cool companies that have risen up in the space. 

Entrepreneurs who are really trying to make excellent products that provide a lot of value, they’re innovating. They’re even kind of pivoting or creating new angles to their products. And it’s really cool. And I think mostly they’re doing it right. 

It’s a struggle, you know, there’s not exactly a right recipe for anything. So, everyone has to kind of get advice and hear what other people have to say, but then you also have to figure it out for yourself.

And overall, I see that these types of companies—and maybe that’s why I know about them—they’re very community oriented, which is great. And so then it gets on the radar of people like me and others, and I think that also is helpful. So, I’m seeing good stuff happening. 

It’s a good thing to see because WordPress is over 20 years old, right? Almost 21. And you could think that it’s, you know, legacy and maybe people aren’t excited to innovate in the space anymore, but I’m seeing quite a lot of innovation. It’s great.

Doc Pop: We’re going to take one more short break, and when we come back, we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Miriam Schwab. So stay tuned for more after the short break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, the WordPress Community Podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today, I’m talking to Miriam Schwab, the head of WordPress Relations at Elementor. 

And at the beginning of the show, I talked about an event happening virtually: DE{CODE}. It’s a free event that WP Engine is hosting. It is a developer’s conference and it’s going to be happening March 19th through March 21st, 2024. 

As you’re hearing this, that might be tomorrow. That might be today. That might be yesterday. Either way, good news. This is still something you can find if you are listening to this after DE{CODE} has happened, these episodes—the talks will be available for folks to watch. And Miriam’s going to be part of a panel called the Business of WordPress.

And I’m wondering, as someone who just came back from WordCamp Asia, which I’m so jealous of, Miriam. Did you see any business trends specific, kind of, happening at WordCamp Asia that stuck out to you? 

Maybe something unique either to that area or something unique to that moment in time of where we are, that’s a little different than the last WordPress WordCamp that you went to.

Miriam Schwab: I know that we had some really great business meetings while we were there. Less, like, business-y, but more product oriented. There were some companies demo-ing their products, like new features and new directions, which is really cool. 

My sense of the flagship WordCamps—Asia, Europe and US—is they each have their own kind of vibe.

And I would say that the WordCamp Asia vibe is pretty developer oriented, meaning a lot of the people who come to this conference are people who are developing with or for WordPress. They either, like, have their own little plugin or they’re providing WordPress development services.

So they’re there very much to learn. And there’s—this is just how I see it, and I may be wrong—but my sense is less to, you know, conduct business. Which is okay; it’s great that each event has its own kind of style and focus. It’s just, you know, a matter of being aware of that. 

But definitely business was happening there to some extent. It’s just less business-y than, let’s say, Europe and US.

Doc Pop: Yeah, well, that’s fun. That sounds kind of neat. Less of the hallway chats and more people taking notes during the talks I can imagine. That’s pretty cool.

Miriam Schwab: Oh, totally. Yeah. They’re very enthusiastic audiences for talks at this conference.

Doc Pop: And let’s wrap this up since I have someone from Elementor here, why don’t you tell me a little bit about what y’all are working on this year? Like what trends that you’re jumping on and taking advantage of this year.

Miriam Schwab: Well of course there’s AI. So we launched our AI integration and we have an early launch of our next feature which is called AI Copilot, which is basically like an assistant for you while you’re working on your site, whether in terms of layout or content. I think that will be pretty cool and, in general, you know, we’re super excited about AI. 

Also, we’re branching out with new products. So obviously, you know, people are most aware, familiar with our page builder, which is—we actually just crossed the 16 million active install mark which is super exciting. And we have hosting, but we’re also releasing what we’re kind of calling “apps.”

So we have a new plugin called Image Optimizer and the adoption there has been really great. We’re seeing it providing a lot of value for people. And stay tuned for more of those; there’s some others that will be coming along over the next few months. 

So it’s exciting. It’s exciting to see, you know, new approaches within Elementor to our product suite and how we want to better provide value for our users.

Doc Pop: And on that note, where can people find what you’re working on online? 

Miriam Schwab: So a very active place where we provide detailed updates about what’s coming or what has been released is actually our Facebook community. So I think it’s called Global Elementor…something. I would join that and stay tuned for what’s shared there. 

And other places you can definitely follow me on Twitter. I try to make sure that I’m updating about our releases @MiriamSchwab, and we have the Elementor account as well. 

And our blog. We actually have two blogs. We have our main blog, but we also have a developer blog at developers.elementor.com which provides a detailed breakdown of every release, what went into it, and, you know, that’s a really good place to stay on top of what’s coming and what was released as well.

Doc Pop: Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Miriam. And just one more reminder that folks can check out your talk about the Business of WordPress at DE{CODE} happening March 19th through March 21st. You can go to wpengine.com and just find the label that says DE{CODE} and click on that to be able to find those talks.

And that’s it for this episode of Press This, a WordPress community podcast. Next week, we’ll be talking to Ryan Singel about how WordPress and other open-source CMSs can help save journalism. It’s a very noble topic. We’re excited about that one. 

Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Please visit us on TorqueMag.io to see transcribed versions of all these podcasts, plus more WordPress news and tutorials. You can also subscribe on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or download directly from WMR.fm. 

I’m your host, Dr. Popular. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and I love spotlighting members of that community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: The Business of WordPress appeared first on Torque.

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week, we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop, I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions on Torquemag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you find your favorite podcasting apps. You can also download the episodes directly from WMR.fm. 

Now on Press This, we often talk about how new technologies can change your WordPress business, but today I’d like to switch things up and talk about how technology can help fuel creativity and culture, and how those things can all go hand in hand. 

Joining me today is Lawrence Edmondson, a Founder at Eat Big Digital, to talk about what happens at the intersection of culture, creativity, and tech.

Lawrence, how are you doing today?

Lawrence Edmondson: Hey, Doc, I’m doing well. How are you?

Doc Pop: I’m doing really well. Thanks so much for joining us. Why don’t we kick this off with just; I’d like to hear your WordPress origin story. 

Lawrence Edmondson: Yeah, sure thing. So, first and foremost, Eat Big Digital is a software consultancy. We’re a small group based in New York, and we’re ex-agency folks that understand technology and love technology, but really see an opportunity where technology and creativity intersect, especially when culture is involved as well.

So our, you know, our technology story has actually been two and a half decades in the making, right. And the first time I got into content management, per se, I think it was early—well, later 90s, early 2000s, right? 

This is when content management was in a very brutal state, you know? When there was no such thing as headless, everything was a monolith. But that’s kind of when I got into it. 

But then ‘03, when WordPress came out, you know, we jumped on that. So my WordPress origin story is I’ve been using it since day one, literally, right? You know, at the time, as I mentioned, there were other tools, but they were very brutal and nothing was open source.

Nothing offered the flexibility of WordPress, which I’m really happy that WordPress has stayed true to its roots to this day.

Doc Pop: And thinking back in terms of the early days of websites and early days of WordPress and thinking about it with creativity in mind, I actually kind of think of how technology inspired creativity in its limitations. 

Back then it was all about “you can’t really do much, but let’s kind of figure out what we can do” with, you know, with GIFs or things like that.

I feel like technology in a way has always kind of fueled creativity in its limitations, and now it’s kind of switching around a little bit, and it’s becoming much more open as websites can become easier for anyone to build and to be able to really build the website that they envision, not just, kind of like “stick around to a template.”

So yeah, let’s just start off with that. What’s, what’s coming to your mind there?

Lawrence Edmondson: Yeah, that’s a good point. I mean, I have an exercise for the audience. And I definitely, you know, like you mentioned, right, what happens at the intersection of culture, creativity, and tech? 

Let’s talk about websites, as well, right, as a tangible output of that thing, of technology.

But for the audience, if you’re able to take out a piece of pen and paper, I want you to write down the past three decades. And if you want to do this on your phone, or however you want to do it. But let’s start with 1990, so write that down, then put 2000, and then 2010, and then 2020.

So we’re looking back at three decades, right? Now, what I’d like to do is start with each I’ll—let’s throw it back to 1990, right? 

Let’s jump in the time machine and go back. Let’s go back to when Gen Z were born, so Gen Z is anyone born between 1997 and 2012. Let’s go back to 1990, right? That decade. And let’s talk about something that you touched on. Websites, and how creativity and technology and culture kind of blends together. 

Now, the reason why I love this topic is because I think something really interesting happens when culture, creativity, and technology all kind of merge and blend in and play off of each other.

And I’ve been watching this for a while, and I think that something really interesting happens at that intersection. Technology moves at its own pace. Technology, as we’ve seen, empowers businesses, sometimes creates entirely new business opportunities, right? We’ve seen that a few times and I’ll mention a few of those.

Which sometimes, you know, technology oftentimes fuels creativity, right? And then, as a result of those two things coming together, we have cultural shifts. 

So, we have things in culture that sometimes weren’t there before that are created. We have different perspectives or different ways of people engaging with things as a result of technology and creativity coming together.

Make sense?

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm.

Lawrence Edmondson: Cool. So, let’s start back to 1990. So, 1990 gave us—the 1990 decade gave us, I’ll talk about these three buckets. 

Tech gave us the internet, gave us Java, Google, and Amazon, right? Back then, a website was very simple. There were a few things you could do on websites, and we were all scrambling to figure out “how do you get your content on a site? How do you get video on there?” 

This is pre-YouTube, right? We had GIFs—or JIFs, the debate still continues. The proper way to say that word—but, you know, any kind of motion graphics was very 2D. Right? There was no 3D, really, at the time. There was, but it was very limited to desktop computers, not really the web, per se. 

Culturally, this was the rise of hip hop, right? Grunge was a huge part of that. Sitcoms, indie films, all happened culturally. And then creativity-wise, we had Photoshop. That’s when Photoshop was born, which gave room to web design, right? And everything started to happen at that point where web started to challenge print.

So going back to your question, that’s when website design was an actual thing, right? And a lot of people came into it because the technology was now there that fueled the creativity, which made a huge impact on culture. 

Who are some of the winners that we saw that came out of that decade? Obviously, Google and Amazon, and Amazon started as a very different company back then, right? There was no Amazon Web Services at the beginning. Amazon was a place where we’d go to buy books, right? And then they started to, you know, they were delivering things it was—it just grew, right? 

So Amazon, Google, Oracle, Intel, and Microsoft, I think, were the biggest winners because all of those companies realized that this technology that they were sitting on allowed them to affect some societal change and change culture in a way that the later decades with everything that came later on would be a direct result of that. 

At that time, Apple was barely surviving, right? In the 1990s if you look at the Fortune 100 list from that time, Apple was at 96, like on that hundred of, you know, the fortune hundred list. They were near death, right? This is when they had fired Steve Jobs and he had come back and he started to breathe new life into the company.

The next decade. So, going on along in our paper, 2000s, right? The new millennium or the dawn of social media and mobile.

As I like to call it, the Golden Age of Tech, right? That was the decade of disruptions, you know, according to Walter Isaacson.

From the tech perspective, that’s when we had WordPress, right? ‘03. Python, Git, Open Source, YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb, and Uber, right? Netflix, Airbnb, and Uber were all created, again, based on technology unlocking brand new sectors. 

If it wasn’t for the technology that’s mobile and, you know, and web services and things like that—like having this decentralized model—Airbnb and Uber would not have been possible. A hundred percent.

And Netflix, as we all know, came about and kind of killed Blockbuster. So the technology, the, you know—shipping DVDs right through the internet was a way to create this cultural shift. And as we all know, like, Netflix moved away from DVDs to streaming once bandwidth wasn’t an issue anymore.

So again, technology and culture kind of blending in and creativity being a byproduct of that. You with me so far?

Doc Pop: Yeah, absolutely. We’re in the 2000s now, Golden Age, and coming into 2010s, right? 

Lawrence Edmondson: Right, 2010s coming up. 

So in the 2000s, right? We—this was the age of social media. So this is when all these social media platforms came about and really started to take hold.We started to notice them then.

That’s when hip hop culture became pop culture, right? So everything changed then in terms of just music. Spotify—Spotify came a little bit later, but it was the dawn of things to come, right? 

From a creativity standpoint, remember, Flash? This is when everything was 2D. Flash made that possible for us to move into 3D on the web, something that wasn’t possible before. You’re a big gamer, so game consoles, right? The game console wars was around that time.

And from a brand perspective, what that unlocked creativity-wise, was reality TV and everything was unscripted. So authenticity became a big deal because now people were on social—influencers and celebrities were on social—so they didn’t need an agency to tell their story anymore. They could just go online and just tell and connect directly with their fans. Right? 

So it all changed, again, creativity, culture, and tech all blending together. Apple, Cisco, Walmart, and Nokia, I think, came out as big winners around that time, oddly enough. 

Because Facebook and those companies, the F.A.N.G. wasn’t—they were just starting. So they didn’t come out as big winners until The 2010 era.

Doc Pop: Let’s take a quick break here and we’re going to come back and pick up on 2010s. Is that all right, Lawrence? 

Lawrence Edmondson: Okay let’s do it.

Doc Pop: All right. Well, we’re going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we’ll pick up on this interesting discussion on the intersection of creativity, tech, and culture. 

So stay tuned for more after this short break.

Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. My name is Doc. Today, I’m talking to Lawrence Edmondson, the founder at Eat Big Digital. 

Lawrence was walking us through a lot of interesting points of technology meeting culture and creativity from the 90s to 2000s. 

And speaking of 2000s, we had Chris Messina on the show last week talking about how he created the hashtag, which you know, started off in the 2000s on Twitter and it’s now everywhere.

And Lawrence, you were about to bring us into the 2010s. Why don’t we pick up there?

Lawrence Edmondson: Yes, yes. So this is—the 2010 from a tech perspective is when we saw social media now really started to dominate and take shape. 

So that’s when Instagram, Snapchat came out. I forgot we had the iPhone. The iPhone came out in the previous decade. So that really made social media take off because now everyone was mobile, right? And the smartphone was out.

2010 gave us the iPad. And 2010 also gave us this notion of headless commerce, right? From Dirk Hoerig, the CEO and Founder of Commerce Tools.

Headless commerce was now a thing. Obviously, WordPress was on fire, right? You know, we’re creating content left and right. UGC was a huge deal.

But also, now, there is a need to tie content and commerce together. And that’s when WooCommerce was born: one of the most popular WordPress plugins out there.

Microsecond Trading, Brexit, Occupy Wall Street, all those things were happening around the same time. So culturally, there was a lot of uprisings and things of that nature.

Black Lives Matter actually started in 2013. And I think if it weren’t for social media, and the access to data and the ability to connect people, movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter would not have been as successful, right? Because there was no way to connect and mobilize people.

Every movement that we’ve seen since the civil rights—from the civil rights movement until now, there’s always been two major components. One is getting the word out. Right? Just communicating, letting people know. 

And the second aspect is mobilizing people, right? Once the word is out, how do we mobilize people? So social media made that a possibility during that time. 

One of the most interesting things I realized from that era, from that decade, is that because of the iPad now, there’s this whole need to have responsive web design, and that’s when responsive web design was born. Everything was now going to a flat design system and things were not as 1990s, 2000-ish.

The 2010s had its own identity, right? That decade had its own identity. And that’s when we saw the F.A.N.G.: Facebook, Apple, Netflix, and Google. They dominate. 

So the previous decade, they were just getting started, and 2010 is when they dominated industry and became the big four that they are today. 

2020 until now, right? We had to grapple with everything from COVID to God-knows-what from 2020. But from a tech perspective, AI, I think that’s when AI became a thing that started to pop up on a lot of people’s radar. 

NFTs, Blockchain, and Web3 all became huge things in tech that were happening. But more importantly, targeting and personalization with third-party cookies started to go away, right? It’s been a while now, but you know, hopefully they will eventually go away.

Getting that first-party and zero-party data for marketers was super important. Because now we couldn’t rely on third-party data anymore—the cookie, hopefully going away. So targeting and personalization, especially when it comes to NFTs and Web3—like everyone wanted to be in the Metaverse, but no one knew how to get there. I can’t tell you how many brands came to us asking to create some Web3 experience in the Metaverse. And 9 out of 10 times, they ended up in Roblox, you know? 

But it all goes back to personalization and wanting to create this extended experience, right? You’re a gamer, you know. At that time, you could purchase an outfit for your avatar in whatever the, you know, your game of choice was—Fortnite, for instance.

And you know, we dream of a world where you could actually—if I were purchasing a pair of jeans in the real world, it’d be dope if I could actually purchase a pair of jeans for my avatar in the Metaverse. 

Never really quite came to fruition. I mean, we saw different brands—Gucci for instance did some interesting stuff in Roblox—but it was all very campaign-based.

But again, this was tech kind of driving culture. This is when we saw—in the past four years is when we saw the dominance of social media overtaking TV, right? It eclipsed TV. 

In the past four years, the average user spends 30 percent more time on social media than they do on TV, right? So TV is, while still relevant, it’s not as important for big brands to reach an audience as social media is.

That goes back to WordPress and content management, right? And UGC. Now, the past four years, headless content management has become a thing.

It actually started in the 2010s, but really picked up steam, I would say, the last eight, nine years, probably, right? Where now we have these decoupled experiences where it wasn’t just headless commerce anymore, but actually there’s headless content management.

So there’s an omnichannel play that brands have been hoping for for years. Now, an omnichannel experience is actually possible. Why? Because of the technology. 

So those are just some of the things, you know—and obviously, I’d be remiss, I know everyone’s been talking about AI lately, so I’m not going to beat a dead horse—but I think from a creativity standpoint, the biggest thing in the past decade has been AI.

And in the past few years, the past two years, it’s been generative AI. So, I’ll take a pause right there.

Doc Pop: Well, I feel like you were talking about, like, some of the changes that have happened and how they shaped culture. 

And I think there was a few moments where culture, you know, came back and shaped technology. Like you mentioned Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter starting in 2013, and, like, people kind of using their phone more, and Twitter was the place to kind of follow news. 

And as a result of that cultural shift, all websites were now going, “Oh, we need to be mobile. We need to have responsive web design.” 

So that seems like a very good example of the web reacting to a cultural shift versus, you know, just causing “Oh responsive design came around, thus people went on the web.”

No, it was the opposite way. The, you know, the culture forced it.

Lawrence Edmondson: It’s interesting you say that because I think as technologists, sometimes we create a solution that’s seeking a problem to solve, right?

And I think what happened, you’re exactly right, right? All those movements that happened around that time, and then responsive web design and the ability, well the need, to now deliver content independent of the—to have content not being tied to a monolith, right? So independent of the business logic, to sort of separate those concerns.

And that’s why one of the reasons I love WP Engine and WordPress is because of that, right? Now, you could kind of decouple it and have a very lightweight content management system that’s not very overbearing. 

So for the first time during the 2010s is when we actually saw that promise fulfilled of having content being pushed out independent of, “Oh, I’ve got to have this thing installed to render my content,” you know what I mean? It made a huge difference. 

A few things that we’ve seen also in the past decade is—as many advancements as we’ve had in AI, there’s also been some course correcting that needs to happen and that’s still happening right now. 

So obviously AI went from just creating, from being a chatbot to like—when I say “AI,” I’m painting in broad strokes—but speaking about ChatGPT specifically, right?

You know, being a chatbot, to creating images, to now with Sora and creating video. And now I think audio is like the next threshold, right? 

And when you put all those things together—it’s funny, Tyler Perry just halted production on his $800 million expansion to his studios, his Tyler Perry Studios, because he actually got wind of what AI could do in the production space, like creating AI-generated video.

So I think this technology is causing a cultural shift, causing people to pay attention and go, “Wait a second, how can we use this thing as opposed to running away from it? How can we leverage it?”

Doc Pop: I want to take a quick break here and when we come back, we’re going to wrap up our conversation and I want to pick up on the advice, Lawrence, that you have for people who are navigating this intersection of culture and technology. 

So stay tuned for more after the short break.

Welcome back to Press This, the WordPress Community Podcast. 

Right before the break, Lawrence, you were talking about the complexities of merging culture, creativity, and technology all together. What advice do you have for creators or website builders or agency owners who are trying to navigate the complexities of technology and culture and where they meet?

Lawrence Edmondson: So, great question. I think the advice I would give would be to be in tune.

So for brands, specifically, because a large part of what we do at Eat Big Digital is partnering with agencies and platforms such as yourself. By the way, shout out to Wes and the entire WP Engine partnership team, they have been great partners.

Doc Pop: Right on.

Lawrence Edmondson: But we either deal with platforms or we’ll go in with an agency or sometimes we go client direct. 

One of the things that we’ve seen is that brands are often—there’s not a lack of data. The problem is understanding how to interpret the data and how to make use of that data, right? 

So oftentimes we’ll have a client that’s sitting on a mountain of data. Or there might be data silos within their organization, and they typically run the risk, if they’re creating campaigns, they run the risk of being tone deaf, right?

Or not understanding what they need to be talking about when they’re speaking to certain demographics, right? If you’re—if you want to reach Gen Z, two thirds of Gen Z are fans of hip hop culture, okay. 

Hip hop culture transcends the music. Hip hop culture is the music, it’s sports, it’s fashion, it’s the lifestyle, it’s your attitude and thoughts on, you know, society on a whole.

But two thirds of those people, two thirds of Gen Z, are fans of hip hop culture. So, typically, we find brands that are trying to reach Gen Z, but are just struggling because they really have a hard time interpreting the data. 

So, the advice I would give brands, specifically, that are trying to understand and best leverage culture, creativity, and technology is: Hire people that represent the audience that you’re trying to reach.

If you keep hiring the same type of people over and over that fit the mold, you’re going to be getting the same type of results, you know? DE&I was a huge thing a couple years ago, and then everyone started laying off their head or chief diversity officers, right? So now we’re back to where we started.

Currently, what’s happening is there’s a lot of cultural cues that are out there. But brands are just not picking up on them. So they have to pay attention. And the way to do that: Get a more diverse talent pool in the room, number one. 

Number two: Start listening to these folks. 

And number three: Innovate. Innovate or die, right? Innovate or die. Make use of this new technology that’s coming out, right? And don’t be afraid. Commit at least 20 percent of your R&D budget, if you have one, or your product development budget, commit 20 percent of that to innovation.

So that would be my advice.

Doc Pop: Well, thanks so much for your thoughts there and your suggestions, Lawrence. If people want to find more about what you’re working on at Eat Big Digital, what’s a good place to find y’all online?

Lawrence Edmondson: The best place would be LinkedIn. So on LinkedIn, Lawrence Edmondson on LinkedIn. And then our website, weeatbig.com. Those are the two places that you could find me. 

Thank you so much, Doc. It’s been a pleasure.

Doc Pop: It’s been a pleasure. Yeah. 

And thanks to the listeners for listening to this episode of Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Please visit Torquemag.io to see transcribed versions of these podcasts, plus more WordPress news and tutorials. You can also subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts.

I’m your host, Dr. Popular. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and I love spotlighting members of that community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: What Happens at the Intersection of Culture, Creativity, and Tech appeared first on Torque.

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week, we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop, I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions on Torquemag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you find your favorite podcasting apps. I love Overcast. You can also download the episodes directly from WMR.fm. 

Now, today’s guest is Chris Messina, the inventor of the hashtag, as well as an early author on OAuth, which is an open standard authorization protocol, and ActivityStreams, which is the predecessor to ActivityPub, which we talk about a lot on this show.

Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Messina: Hey, thanks, man. I’m glad to be back here.

Doc Pop: Man, I am super excited to have you on for many reasons. And later on, we’re going to be talking about WordPress plugins and open web formats and hashtags and things like that. Let’s kick this off. I have a little bit of a trivia for you. Twitter launched in March of 2006 and a few months later, you wrote a tweet asking if anyone was working on a Twitter to WordPress bridge, and that actually is the very first mention of WordPress on Twitter, a big round of applause for you at the time.

Chris Messina: Thank you

Doc Pop: And I guess that’s a way I’d like to kick this off. What is your history with WordPress?

Chris Messina: Wow. I appreciate you starting there in a way, because my history with WordPress does go way back, you know, I was an early user of WordPress, but one of the things that I think is more meaningful to me was that when I first arrived in San Francisco, in the Bay Area, way back in 2004, some of the first people that I met included Matt Mullenweg.

And so Matt was one of the first people that I met. I knew what he was working on. I believe he might’ve been working at CNET at the time. And he and I and several other early web folks would get together and just talk about the future, talk about building the open web platform, talk about building social applications.

And it was through those connections that we organized something called Bar Camp, which of course, if you’ve been to a WordCamp, you have been to one of the descendants of that. And so Bar Camp first came out in 2005 as an event that was organized and put on by the participants, by the people who showed up, and it sort of spawned a global movement that kind of gave rise to in-person interactions with people who you otherwise might’ve only known through the internet.

I guess my early experience and exposure to WordPress was that it was this amazing and relatively accessible platform for, of course, publishing whatever you wanted to on the internet without any gatekeepers or without having to get permission from anyone.

And of course it was extensible through plugins and it was also open source. So it had a number of these elements that made for, I guess, a generative type of software that allowed newcomers to expand it into, you know, what it ultimately has become today.

Doc Pop: Back then, 2004 to 2007 in particular, it felt like the web was very unsiloed or becoming unsiloed. It felt like it kind of went from being one place. You went to spreading out to a whole bunch of sites that you could visit, and then new social networks were popping up and everything felt really kind of distributed.

And WordPress was part of that. Twitter obviously was part of that Web 2.0. And then it felt like those silos kind of appeared again. And it felt like all of a sudden, we were being funneled back into the same kind of four platforms, and it feels like that’s changing again. Are we going back to like a decentralized web? Is WordPress maybe going to be part of that web? Or is it maybe going to be a whole different way the web works?

Chris Messina: You know, there’s so much history that I could share, but I don’t want to bore you or the listeners. I think the way that I would look at it is there was definitely a period of exploration, experimentation, try new things. There was an assumption that building software that could be social and that had the presence of people and not only that, but people with faces was this kind of crazy innovation from a behavioral and societal perspective, you know, prior to, 2006 and seven, the internet was still something that was kind of awkward and hard to use. People were afraid. I was afraid to put my real name out there. I mean, it took me years. I mean, I started out on the internet as Factory Joe, and that was my WordPress blog because I wanted to have a separation between my internet identity and my real world identity.

And over time, there were moments where that internet identity became more well known than my real name and my real self. And that I think was the moment where it started to be clear that the internet and the web was going to be something that was going to become commonplace, as opposed to something that was somewhat esoteric or, you know, only for nerds.

And so I think as a result of the popularization of these tools and technologies, a need to make these things more easy to use and especially easier for people to find their friends and connect with their friends. And then there was a whole layer of privacy and privacy expectations that was harder to support in a decentralized fashion, because while decentralization is incredibly important for freedom and for exploration and experimentation and for pluralities of you know, ideas of how software can work and behave, you also need interoperability so that people on two different platforms can actually connect and focus on, you know, just being there and commenting on each other’s stuff or seeing each other’s stuff.

So, that’s one of the real challenges of decentralized innovation. And I guess what I would say is that we’ve kind of gone through a period where there was a bunch of internet malls that were created, which was, you know, Facebook and Instagram, and platforms like that, where, yes, there was social content, but then it became commercial in nature and a lot of patterns for how people interact or want to interact or are able to interact on these platforms became well known, such that now, we can take all those product patterns and then put them into open source, decentralized products, and we can standardize them.

So there’s kind of this breathing process or man, what’s the word, it’s pendulation, where you move from one end to the other, you go from decentralization and experimentation into centralization, where you figure out the patterns that work. And then you kind of get into this ossification where everything gets kind of boring and the same, and then you move back in the other direction towards decentralization. And I believe that we’re in the period of decentralization right now, because we’re getting kind of bored with, you know, the gatekeepers that have decided what is allowable, what is okay, what are the right ideas to think. And I think people want more plurality and diversity.

Doc Pop: I mentioned earlier that you were an early author on OAuth and ActivityStreams, and I feel like both of those tie into what you’re talking about. In the early days of decentralization, these decentralized services needed ways to be able to authenticate and give permission to access and talk to each other while still keeping some level of privacy.

And I know that the OAuth is still around and thriving. OAuth 2.0, I think, is the big version now. And you check in WordPress plugins, you’ll see a lot, everywhere, for connecting your Facebook to your WordPress or WordPress, your Facebook or whatever. Right. It’s still around and hopefully, it’ll come back or is it already here and just people don’t know that they’re already living in this kind of decentralized world already?

Chris Messina: Yeah. I guess I’d say there’s sort of like different measurements of decentralization. You know, there’s obviously the completely centralized and closed to interoperability platforms. Apple tends to be, you know, more centralized where everything kind of has to work well within their ecosystem, all the way from the hardware into the software and services layer. Then you go to the web, and there’s a lot of interconnectedness between different platforms, to the degree that it’s decentralized. That has to be evaluated based on the type of interoperability and the degree to which people are on their own little hosts, let’s say, or their own servers, and that those things interact or connect without, I mean, with some degree of coordination.

So, Mastodon as a network is a good example of decentralization where you can have many different instances or services or servers that connect to one another without knowing that the others existed beforehand. All you have to know is that there’s a domain name and you use DNS and you can find the other servers and you can mention people who are on other servers.

That’s decentralization, to answer your question, though, I think it’s worth going back to the origin of OAuth, which was originally called OpenAuth, but it turned out, I think Yahoo was using that name, so we couldn’t use that. So we had to shorten it. And what, where all these things came from, was as Matt was working on the early versions of WordPress, I worked on the launch of Mozilla Firefox, and that was in 2004. And I kind of came to this conclusion, and I’m sure many other people were thinking about it, which is that the browser should become social. The browser should understand who your friends are, because at the time we were using a lot of social apps.

There were apps like something called Upcoming, which maybe today is similar to Luma or Eventbrite. We were using Flickr, of course, which is the predecessor to Instagram. We had a number of these apps that kept asking us who our friends were every time we’d sign up and create a new account. And it was like, well, the browser is the place that we were using to access all of these different services. And so let’s put it all into the browser as the user’s agent. And so that led us to realize that we needed to have a number of new technologies to enable that to happen. And one of those technologies was OpenID. And so that would be your identity. Essentially, you needed some way to identify a person. And the thought was, let’s build that as a URL. And that could be your WordPress blog. And so I started a project called the DiSo project, D I S O, to essentially create a number of WordPress plugins that would implement formats that would allow you to decentralize a social network on the back of WordPress.

Now, this was before BuddyPress and those types of products existed, but we were mostly focused on how to build protocols to make this possible. And along the way, we realized that just sharing your password on every different website that you wanted to connect to, first of all, it was insecure. And secondly, it just created this maybe false sense of safety and we needed to solve for that.

And that’s where OAuth came from. OAuth was a way for you to basically generate a kind of on-the-fly password that could be used for a single application or website, and that would also rotate itself over time. And so that’s basically how that came together. And in the beginning, it was just for a bunch of small startups and founders, and then eventually we were able to get people like Google and others to adopt it.

Doc Pop: That’s a good spot for us to take a short commercial break. When we come back, we’ll pick up our conversation with Chris Messina. Stay tuned for more. 

Welcome back to Press This, the WordPress community podcast. I’m your host Doc Pop. Today I’m talking to Chris Messina, the inventor of the hashtag. We haven’t even talked about the hashtag yet, and I know it’s a short show, right? We have so much to talk about and there’s so many exciting things to talk about right now, as federation is catching on, on the web, hopefully, and as the web is maybe swinging back, as you say, in the pendulum back towards decentralization. And you mentioned DiSo before our break, that’s the distributed social networking app that you were working on, and I wanted to say that Matthias Pfefferle, the creator of the ActivityPlub plugin for WordPress, he heard you were coming on the show and he wanted me to, I guess, thank you for your work on DiSo. He says that the DiSo project was a huge inspiration for him and motivated him to work on the IndieWeb slash Fediverse plugins on WordPress, which I use and love.

So, shout-out to that. It was also, I know a huge growth for the IndieWeb community. Is there anything you want to say about about the state of DiSo now?

Chris Messina: You know, a lot of the things that I started or, or helped to get off the ground, because certainly these were collaborative efforts were, were the seeds or, or sort of like, you know, germs of ideas and concepts that I believed in. And worked on long enough to kind of till the soil for these things to take root.

But then it turns out I’m not an excellent farmer. I kind of like move on to the next thing, maybe a little more like Johnny Appleseed, I guess. And I just hope that these things grow into whatever they’re going to become. In so much as, you know, when I saw that Automattic was going to be adopting ActivityPub and that Matthias had actually worked on this, you know, one, there was just a sense of like, you know, pride, you know, sort of like my children have grown up and they’ve turned into something real.

But also like the fact that they were raised by, you know, a village and a community of people after I’d long moved on. So I think it’s on the one hand, important for me to kind of hold the torch of the origin of where these things came from and to reflect on the reasons why we wanted to do these things and what was causing us to create them in the way that we did.

But then also to embrace open source as a way to allow these things to sort of lay fallow is too negative, but essentially to sort of take root, and then when the time was right to sort of spring forth from the ground and to turn into something wonderful and to blossom into what they could become. And so, you know, I’m just so stoked to see that, you know, Matthias was able to do this and to do it in a way where he’s going to bring it to the entire WordPress ecosystem.

Like that is exactly what we wanted to do, but when we were doing it, it was too soon. People didn’t understand why this type of decentralization was necessary or important. And now we have a lot of examples that I think lead people to understand why one, you know, I don’t like the idea of like owning your audience, but having a more durable connection and relationship to people over time through software that you have control over is important, and that these underlying protocols and technologies that we came up with were all about enfranchising people to have those relationships in a long term, meaningful way.

Doc Pop: Switching gears a little bit, we’re talking about owning your audience and maybe how audiences find you and they might find you like you might have a newsletter that you maintain and you send links out to sites, or you might use social media and send links out to sites, that seems to be driving less and less traffic these days.

But the number one way to discover a new site or, you know, to surf the web, still, is Google. That’s clearly not going to change anytime soon, but a new… 

Chris Messina: It might change, but go ahead.

Doc Pop: Yeah, a new study by German researchers states that Google search results are getting worse. It’s not our imagination.

The year-long study showed that highly optimized, low quality, basically spam articles are dominating search results. And similarly, sites like 404media found that Google news was boosting AI-generated versions of 404media’s articles. In other words, people were using AI to copy, paste, and slightly change words and then just flood.

And Google News was promoting those instead of the original source articles. One last thing that’s happening on top of all of this, because there’s always been this war between spammers and Google, but the last thing that’s happening is Google and Bing are now adding AI-generated articles when you do search results.

They’re kind of like, I don’t know, taking away that promise that they had to help connect sites. And instead, it seems like they’re starting to kind of keep them there. So, okay. That’s my long-winded speech about how I feel. Chris, I want to hear how you feel about how small websites can continue to be discovered in the next coming years.

Chris Messina: Well, I will share a feeling, and the feeling that I have in the current moment, I think is one of, to some degree, bewilderment, but also excitement and enthusiasm, a little bit of trepidation and also optimism. And I don’t think optimism is a feeling, but I’ll go with it. The question that you ask presupposes that the way that the web is and has been needs to be the way that the web persists and will continue to be. And this arms race that you mentioned presumes that this battle over attention and access to audiences is somehow the purpose of the internet and the web, and I hate to tell you, but it’s not. It’s really about creating connections between different people with different perspectives and experiences or products and resources.

And we’ve been spending the last 15 to 20 years, largely creating a lot of text based content. You know, one, because of digital storage the efficiency of that model. We are coming up to a point you know— we use the singularity, I think, to describe where, you know, humans and computers kind of, you know, become one or sort of where there’s an overlap where computers overtake human intellect.

And I think. It’s important to recognize that, I guess I would say like the flora and fauna, or like the microbiome of these small websites can and will persist, but the way in which they pursue success probably is going to need to change and be different than it has been in the past. And I’ll just say like, If you look at, there’s a new search engine called Perplexity, which aspires to be an answer engine, and Google, for a very long time, I mean, I worked at Google for three and a half years, also wanted to be an answer engine. They wanted to, you know, index all the world’s information to make it useful and available and accessible. And in a similar way, that doesn’t mean that getting you to some other website through the internet is the most efficient way to make that information useful or accessible.

So where we’re going in the future will be that you will have a number of different agents and bots and services that you conversationally interact with, you know, just like you text a friend a photo, you’re like, what is this? A computer is going to be able to look at the things that you send it and respond with a relatively detailed set of information without you having to go to secondary or tertiary sources, unless you want to. 

From a capitalist perspective, we’ve made it very, very efficient to create low-quality information calories. And we’re pumping out all sorts of junk food through the social media networks because they’re very cheap, essentially, to spread information through. And it’s starting to cause a kind of like information obesity, where we need to fight back with better quality information and better quality relationships. Now, what does that mean for small producers of, let’s say, artisanal content? Well, in a way it means it’s a golden opportunity for you.

Especially if you have a relationship with your audience and especially if you’re developing that relationship over time. You know, it’s funny, a couple of years ago, I think back in 2016, I coined this term “conversational commerce” to explain how we’re entering into a world where the ways in which we have conversations with computers literally is a conversation that creates a bi-directional channel where we can kind of get to shared understanding by going back and forth to arrive at some greater sense of clarity or knowledge about the other person or the other entity and that commerce in the future. It would be less about going to, you know, Amazon and putting in some generic phrase or product name and then seeing a list of all these different products that are basically ads, trying to bid for your attention, to get them to, to get you to buy them. But instead, you kind of talk about what your need is and through that you could reason with a computer and it would sort of point you to a number of solutions that might be better for you.

In a similar way, I think people that are writing better content have expertise that hopefully they can then offer through higher-value transactions or I don’t want to say courses, but like where going deeper is going to be a place where humans are able to provide a lot more value than just sort of like creating thousands of pages on a website for audiences that are completely unknown.

So maybe this is not a great answer for you know, your audience, but I have a very hard time imagining that just creating content farms is going to be a long-term sustainable business relative to creating high-quality differentiated content that you just can’t get anywhere else.

Doc Pop: I think that’s another good spot for us to take a short break. And when we come back, we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Chris Messina. I have one more bit of hashtag slash WordPress trivia for you. So stay tuned after the short break. 

Welcome back to Press This. We are wrapping up our conversation with Chris Messina, and I’ve already mentioned Chris, your hashtag credentials as the inventor of the hashtag. And you were the first person to mention WordPress on Twitter. I have one more fun bit of trivia for you right now. Did you know that if you go into WordPress, just a vanilla version of WordPress right now, and in a post or page, if you type a pound sign and then text, it will automatically create a hyperlink, functionally a hashtag, that searches your site for other hashtags.

So if I typed on my blog post, “Hey, today I have. #ChrisMessina on the show today. What questions do you have?” And if you publish that and click on that, it’s now a clickable link. Did you know that that exists?

Chris Messina: I was not aware of that. So thank you for letting me know.

Doc Pop: I mean, it’s kind of everywhere now. And this actually does bring me a little bit back to this idea of discoverability and connectivity. We’ve talked about ActivityStreams, which you worked on and it was the predecessor to ActivityPub. I’m wondering if maybe the way that this works, web links get a, I don’t know why, they get a bad reputation, but people always say web links and then they laugh.

And I’m wondering if we’re going back to this era where maybe using this functionality, right, this hashtag functionality or any sort of tags, maybe my site, my WordPress site could federate with other sites, right? Maybe I’m just sounding like I’m trying to sound smart or something here, but like, maybe I could choose to federate with other sites.

And when you click on a tag on my site about cooking or about Christmas or about whatever, it could actually show you basically a web link search result. Do you think this is something that’s useful and that might help keep sites connected? Or is this the wrong direction to be thinking right now?

Chris Messina: No, I think that’s a great idea. And let me explain why the purpose of the hashtag when I proposed it all the way back in 2007, again, you know, Twitter came out in 2006. The iPhone came out in January of 2007. And having gone to South by Southwest in March of 2007, you know, where some people had iPhones, but most people did not, we were using Twitter as a real time network for finding out what was going on and where to go to find other people and to meet up with them.

And there was a backlash from people who were not at South by Southwest, basically saying, we’re getting all these spam text messages—because Twitter was a text message service back then—sent to our phones at all hours of night while you guys are out getting wasted in Austin, you know, how do we filter out all of your stupid tweets?

There were a number of different solutions that could have worked. One of them that I was trying to propose was well, I wasn’t proposing this, but there was a suggestion that maybe Twitter should have groups, you know, kind of like news groups. And so you’d create a group and then you could choose who’s in the group and who’s not in the group.

And you know, it would work kind of like Flickr groups and as a text messaging-based service, I was like, that’s not going to work. Like, I have to be at a bar drunk and you know, know how to use whatever the group functionality is here. And so it just occurred to me that we could use IRC style prefix, like hashtag prefix, and then word. And that could create what I call the tag channel. And so that’s kind of where the original idea came from. It was certainly inspired by IRC, but it was built for mobile social networking. And so the first real use case was actually for the Bar Camp community, which I mentioned before, and that was for us to find each other.

And so that was an early, small, relative distributed or decentralized ecosystem of events that were happening all over the world, you know, with maybe thousands of people, you know, not hundreds of thousands or millions of people. So to your point, I do think that there’s an opportunity in the future where there are a number of ActivityPub compliant servers, some WordPress, some Mastodon, maybe even Threads, that are emitting activities and in those activities, you can use hashtags as a way of coordinating activity between these decentralized actors. I’ve been having this argument largely with Meta about Threads’ lack of use of hashtags.

In fact, they resist them, although they use the hashtag symbol to create these tags and they call them topic tags. I call them Franken tags. It’s fine. So just in the way that you can create a tag in a post, like you can in WordPress, you can create a tag on Threads. However, Threads will remove the pound symbol prefix, and so it’s very hard for downstream. I’m going to show you how to do that in just a second, but first, let me show you how to add a tag.

So in the case of Bar Camp, like the prefix of the pound symbol is actually important. It’s a signifier to everyone else who’s on your federated network to use the same symbol to talk about the same type of event. The point is you can come up with whatever arbitrary tags you want to use. And then, if you use hashtags, that actually creates more freedom and more ability to decentralize and still have coherent conversations.

So that’s why what you’re saying is exactly the point of hashtags and why I’ve been fighting for them for most of my career, because people misunderstand. The coordinating value of the tags, like all the complaints about hashtags are reasonably valid from a purely aesthetic perspective. People say they’re too ugly or like people use too many of them. They abuse them or they use irrelevant ones. Those things are all true, but that has to do with the behavior, not the technology. So when we think about this applied to, I prefer the social web over Fediverse. But if you talk about the Fediverse, hashtags are an intrinsically useful way to allow people to run to the edges of the internet and to build up their own little outposts and yet stay connected through these type of carrier pigeon messages that cross pollinate across the entire network.

And I think hashtags is a way to sew all those things up. Just like when you mentioned someone, you know, you have an identity for a person that lives at a domain, a hashtag actually is a global identifier that works across the entire social web.

Doc Pop: That’s well put. And I actually even realized as I was describing that to you, I was still thinking pretty old school, pretty myopic. If I wrote post on my WordPress blog and I included a hashtag on there, people couldn’t click on it and maybe see other people in my federated world, but maybe also they’d have a tab that shows other people they follow that mentioned that same thing, and that could include other WordPress blogs as well.

So that, wow, that really blows your mind. It’s not just me connecting to my friends, but also my followers. 

Chris Messina: Look, I mean, the whole idea is that it’s a way to slice through a number of different contexts and to bring together a conversation where you choose. It’s not exactly moderation, but where you choose what is inbounds and what is out of bounds, right? So if I want to see Doc Pop’s friends and what they’re talking about, this hashtag that I’ve never seen before, and suddenly it explodes this conversation about something that I’m actually interested in. That’s super valuable. That’s an amazing discovery tool that no one had to create. 

You don’t have to register or check in with some authority and they can’t shut you down, right? And if people start spamming the tag, that’s not a big deal because you don’t follow them. right?

So there’s a self healing aspect of the Fediverse that I think we’ve lost and that is worth fighting for. And like, obviously I’m biased, but I think hashtags are very and should be used as a way to re-enfranchise people when they want to connect with networks that are off of the mainstream sort of, you know, mall-based social networks.

Doc Pop: And on that note, Chris, what is the best place for people to follow you online right now? 

Chris Messina: So you can always get to my website. Chris Messina dot me. I’m in the process redoing it, but you know, we’ll see. And then I’m also actually on Threads. So, you can find me, at threads.net/@Chris. I have left X slash Twitter, so those are the two places where I’m most active these days.

Doc Pop: And thanks to everyone for listening to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast on WMR. Thanks, Chris, for your time today. if you want to learn more, you can follow TorqueMag.io on RSS. You don’t have to go to a social network. Subscribe to torquemag. io or just visit it as frequently as you want.You can find transcribed versions of these podcasts plus more WordPress news and tutorials. You can also subscribe to the Press This podcast on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or directly from WMR.fm. I’m your host, Dr. Popular. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and I spotlight members of that community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: The Creator of the Hashtag Talks About The Future of WordPress and the Open Web appeared first on Torque.

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week, we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop, I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions on Torquemag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app. You can also download the episodes directly from WMR.fm. 

And boy, I’m just gonna say I feel like I’m breaking the fourth wall here or whatever, but this is my nighttime voice. It’s 10:00 PM here, and my guest, it’s early in the morning for them. So I’m super excited we were able to make this work.

But I’m just hearing myself and my energy. It’s just different than usual, and I’m gonna go with that. So today I have the privilege of talking with Jonathan Bossenger, a full-time contributor to the WordPress project, sponsored by Automattic. Jonathan is working with the training team on learn.wordpress.org on the launch of Structured Learning Pathways and a Learn WordPress redesign.

Jonathan, how are you doing today?

Jonathan Bossenger: I am doing very well, and may I just say that your nighttime voice is very energetic, so I can only imagine what your daytime voice is like.

Doc Pop: Yeah, it’s a little less perky. It’s a little bassier or something. When I’m editing this, this is gonna be a trip. And, Jonathan, it’s 8:00 AM your time, something like that?

Jonathan Bossenger: Correct.

Doc Pop: And I was just mentioning as we’re recording, it is Super Bowl Sunday here in San Francisco. So, I would have trouble going to sleep anyway with all the fireworks going off. So this is totally fine. So we’re gonna dive into it. 

Like I said, Jonathan, you’ve been working on learn dot WordPress— a couple projects there, and I definitely want to talk about those. But before we get into those, everyone I talk to in WordPress seems to know you, like, personally, they send you correspondence all the time. It seems like you’ve kind of been around the space for a while. Can you tell us about about how you got into WordPress and how long you’ve been in it?

Jonathan Bossenger: Yeah. So, I haven’t been around as long as many other folks in our community. I only joined the— I officially joined the WordPress project around 2015, 2016. I went to my first WordCamp in Cape Town. I met the folks in the local community. There were a bunch of folks visiting from around the world. Pippen was there. Jenny Wong was there, Drew James was there. And I got to meet all these folks and I vividly remember having a conversation with Jenny Wong about contributing to WordPress and how to get involved, which led me to my first contributions to the Documentation team.

At the time, the Documentation team was busy doing a massive migration from the Codex to what is now known as Help Hub and DevHub, you know, all the official documentations on wordpress.org. And my first contribution was literally just copying text from a Codex page into a Google Doc, and then ticking it off in a box somewhere to say that it has been copied into the doc.

So that’s where I got started. I think the reason that a lot of people know me is because I’ve had a fairly public relationship with the WordPress project. I tend to be very interactive. I tend to get involved in conversations. And so I’ve interacted with a lot of folks over the years. I’ve been very blessed to have worked in positions where I’m allowed to interact with folks. So I’ve sort of managed to make a name for myself, if you will, over the last few years.

Doc Pop: And all of that makes sense with what you’re currently working on over at Learn WordPress, it seems like the perfect place for someone who is used to working with other folks and kind of reaching out, being social with them, and helping ease them into the project. It sounded like you had no trouble getting into the WordPress project.

I mean, was there, when you first contributed, were you already very familiar with kind of open source ethos and contributing, or was it a learning experience for you when you first contributed?

Jonathan Bossenger: Only enough. I was very new to the concept of contributing to open source. I knew what open source was from a user or a consumer point of view. I had been working with PHP for a number of years. I’d worked with JavaScript, I’d worked with jQuery I was using the Ubuntu desktop, so I knew about open source. But it was only when I really started talking to people at WordCamp that I understood that there was this concept of contributing back to open source and that contributing back didn’t just mean writing code. That was always the thing that I struggled with the most because I am a developer. I’m writing code all day. The last thing I want to do in my spare time is write more code. And that was the conversation that I had with Jenny, and I said, you know, I want to give back. I want to do something, but at the end of the day, the last thing I wanna do is write code. And she said to me in that conversation, well, there’s docs, there’s, there’s this, there’s that, there’s all these other areas that you can contribute to. Why limit yourself to only contributing to code? And so that’s how that journey started. Getting into that process, I consider myself very lucky that I had that first person to speak to and ask questions of. And when I got started, you know, I signed up for things like. Slack and that kinds of things. There was a name that I could reach out to. And so that’s something I’ve always tried to be for other people, you know, I’ve said this to Jenny many times. She was that person that I could reach out to and ask questions of, and, Hey, where do I find this? And how do I do that? So whenever I meet folks and I sort of invite them to contribute, I always like to be that for them because having that first point of contact is so super important.

Doc Pop: Mm-Hmm. And I wanna talk about the things that you’re excited about right now with the Learn WordPress team. And I wanna make sure also that I hopefully, I might have a habit of sometimes being like, if I’m interviewing you, I might make it sound like this is your thing, but obviously this is the team effort. So feel free to give them shout-outs. Obviously, you will. But for now, I want to talk about the launch of progressive user-friendly learning pathways. What I was a little confused in the terminology there, the learning pathways. Can you describe what you mean by that?

Jonathan Bossenger: Hmm, sure. So—and thank you for mentioning the fact that it is very much a team effort. You know, I am but one person on the team. I’m fortunate that I’m sponsored to do this work, but there is a great group of contributors that are working on all of this and I wanna definitely let them know that they are appreciated.

So learning pathways in late 2022, early 2023, the training team put out a learner survey, an individual learner survey, asking the folks who are using learn.wordpress.org, what is working, what is not working, what do you want to see, what don’t you wanna see? One of the highlights that came out of that survey was that the learning process, the way that we find information, the way that we learn things was very random.

It was very unstructured. There was not a clear pathway for somebody who is either new to WordPress or new to designing with WordPress or new to developing with WordPress where to get started. What are the tools that you need? What are the things that you—what are the bits and pieces? And I’m sure you’ll have seen this, there’s been a big explosion over the last few years of structured courses online, taking you from zero to 10 or to 20 or to a hundred or whatever.

When we say learning pathways, we really just mean a structured process to learn a thing. In the case of Learn WordPress, that thing is either using WordPress as a user, designing with WordPress as a designer or as a theme creator, or developing with WordPress as a plugin developer, as a theme developer, or as a more generalist developer.

So what are the fundamental pieces of information that you need to learn? And then what is the next level on top of that? And then what is the next level on top of that? I always describe it as, if you could send somebody to a WordPress University and they had a two-year diploma or a three-year degree or whatever, what would they learn in year one?

What would they learn in year two? What would they learn in year three? And that’s the information we’re trying to bring together in a more structured way so that anybody learning any level of WordPress knows where to start, knows where they’re going, knows what the end goal is, as opposed to the scattershot random, oh, here’s an interesting thing. Oh, this might be useful to me. I don’t know. Let me figure it out.

Doc Pop: I see that just on the description on your website, you describe yourself as having a focus on developer-related content, and I feel like that’s an example right there where somebody might want to contribute to translations or something, or editing videos or things like that, and they’re all maybe getting funneled in. I’m assuming right now they’re getting funneled into the same thing. Or when they land on Learn WordPress, or if they wanna contribute to Learn WordPress or make WordPress they might have a hard time figuring out the topics if they need to get help.

Because there’s so many different things. Is that maybe what the pathways are that you’re talking about, or am I totally on the wrong page there?

Jonathan Bossenger: No, no, that’s, that’s very much a part of it. Contributing is a perfect example. Let’s say you decide you want to start contributing to WordPress tomorrow. You’ve been using WordPress for a while. You’ve been working with it as a user, as a builder, as an extender, whatever the case may be, and now you want to start contributing.

So you go and you find this thing called Learn WordPress, and you think, okay, I’m gonna learn. There’s gonna be, you would assume there’s going to be, at least a header or a menu item that says start your contribution journey here, and you’re gonna click on it and it’s gonna take you to a series of lessons or a series of videos or a course or something and take you through that process. At the moment for somebody to find that it’s very, very difficult. At the moment, the design is very much focused on what we used to call tutorials and lesson plans, and then the courses are kind of secondary. There, there’s no specific order to them.

They’re just sort of, the most recently published courses. So if you’re somebody who needs to have a specific path ahead of you to get started, you’re going to find it extremely overwhelming. You’re not gonna know where to click around what to do. And as we all know, when things are difficult, when things are overwhelming, then people get tired and they move on.

We had some great feedback from a contributor who joined us at the WordCamp Europe Contributor Day last year. She had just joined the company. And her role was to, I think write about WordPress. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but she was an experienced writer.

She was experienced in putting together content, that kind of thing. But she was brand new to WordPress and she said to me, I’m actually kind of cheating here today. I want to use this time to learn about WordPress. And I said, well, that’s perfect. I’ll tell you what. Here’s Learn WordPress. You want to learn about WordPress?

I’m not gonna tell you where to go. Sit down and tell me if you can learn what you can learn about WordPress by the end of this day. And I mean, contribute today, as you know, is a whole day, and halfway through the day, she said to me. I’m getting lost. I dunno where I need to go. I dunno what I need to do.

I dunno what’s important for me as a learner, as a brand new learner. And that was the feedback and that was kind of the general feeling that we got from a lot of folks is yes, the information is good, the content is great, the quality is great, but the process of how we learn what we’re looking for, how we search for things, how we find things is just not where it needs to be.

And that’s what our focus is on now, is creating these pathways. For users, for contributors, for developers, for whoever that they can sit down in front of Learn WordPress and go, right, today I want to, or at least today, next six months, whatever it is, I want to learn how to do X. What are the things that I need to know to learn that X?

And then we take them along that journey.

Doc Pop: And I think that’s a good spot for us to take a quick break. And when we come back after these commercials, we will continue our conversation with Jonathan Bossenger about improving the learning pathways on Learn WordPress. So stay tuned for more after the short break.

Welcome back to Press this, the WordPress community podcast on WMR. I’m your host, Doc Pop chatting today with Jonathan Bossenger, who just told us about the concept of improving the learning pathways on Learn WordPress, meaning that if you need to learn anything and you go to learn.wordpress.org, you will be able to find that process better than in the past.

Now, this is something that I believe this kind of update to how Learn WordPress worked. I believe it was announced in October of last year. And Jonathan, can you tell us how long do you think this update’s gonna take? Including the web design? The website redesign and how far y’all have gotten so far?

Jonathan Bossenger: As you mentioned, it was announced October last year. It, as I mentioned earlier, it’s something that we’ve been working to get going since the beginning of the year. The current goal of the redesign is obviously part of the process. You know, you can’t have structured content without a structured layout that actually guides the folks where they need to go.

So that is one of the first things that we’re going to be doing. The goal there is to have that redesign and the relaunch happening around midway this year. So June, July this year. At the same time, we would like to be able to have the first set of structured learning pathways up and running as part of that relaunch.

So when I say the first sets, the beginner user learning pathway, the beginner designer learning pathway, and the beginner developer learning pathways, at least. I think there are some more. I think we wanna have some of the intermediate-level ones done as well. I can’t remember that offhand right now, but basically, we want to have that content created, that structured content, created, reviewed, ready to go.

So we’re looking at midway this year, roughly as we’re aiming for the relaunch. As for the rest of it, it’s kind of a big project. It’s kind of a long-term thing, so we’ve kind of given ourselves this year. This year our focus is, you know, the redesign and the learning pathways projects.

So by the end of this year, we’re hoping to have the rest of the learning pathways that we have set up ready to rock and roll. Part of the learning pathways includes contribution learning pathways. We’ve got some courses already that exist around contribution. We wanna bring those in.

So the goal for that to sort of be, I’ll say in big quotes, “wrapped up” is by the end of this year. But it’s definitely an ongoing project. It’s definitely something that I think is going to go into 2025. As we get feedback from the community as to what’s working, what’s not working. But 2024 is our big year, and we’re hoping by the end of 24, 24 at least, the main body of work is done and looking amazing and everybody’s loving it.

Doc Pop: You mentioned earlier that some people have different things they might be looking to learn, and also some people have different ways that they like to learn. And one of the things that comes to mind for me is some people love consuming education through video. And some people hate video especially, I mean, some coders I know actually prefer video.

But it seems like largely, if they’re gonna be a developer and they’re looking for some sort of question, they want to be able to skim text and look around. And I’m just kind of wondering how y’all are figuring that out. Are you focusing just on one or the other? Are you trying to cram, you know, if anything comes out, it has to be in video, audio, and text, what’s your thinking around that?

Jonathan Bossenger: We’re definitely aware of those learners. I personally, myself, am actually the kind of person who prefers a combination of both. So I like to watch a video. And then when it comes to the part of the code that I’m about to write, I like to be able to pause the video and copy that code from somewhere and then stick it in my editor and, and play around with it.

So all of our content is going to have both an audio and a text component. Sorry, not audio, a video component and a text component. So there will be a video that you can watch and go through, and there is an associated text component that goes with that. That is for two reasons.

First of all, because some folks like reading text. And secondly, because it makes the content more accessible. We also have subtitles on all of our videos. And we’re also doing something that is fairly new. We are going to be leveraging the WordPress YouTube account to embed the video into our platform so that we can include chapters.

At the moment, WordPress tv unfortunately doesn’t support chapters, YouTube does. So the content’s going to stay on WordPress tv and those who want to watch the content through that medium can. But we are also sort of syncing it to the YouTube channel, and we’re embedding that YouTube video into Learn WordPress so that we can make use of the chapter. So if you want to jump ahead and you’re just looking for that one specific part of the video, you can go straight there and you can go and use it there.

Doc Pop: Yeah. Chapters are such a cool feature of YouTube. I’ve hacked them in different ways. You can get really creative with them, but even if you’re just being straight-up like instructional, they’re very great. People can go to the description underneath the video and click to the point that they want.

Or as they’re watching the video, if you kind of mouse over the timeline, you’ll sort of see the chapter split up. So if you’re already kind of familiar with the concept that’s being introduced, and you can just skip over that, like two minutes of introduction and just skip into the first part of that.

One other thing, Jonathan, this is we’re really in the weeds, but I just love hacking on YouTube. Some people are using subtitles and they’re adding annotations and corrections to their videos by using clinging on. So YouTube supports clinging on for subtitles. And I don’t think it’s an accessibility issue.

I’m very sorry if this is not the case, but I think that some people playing around with accessibility with, subtitles using clinging on to be like, oh, I misspoke. It’s actually this or whatever. It’s a really clever hack and I don’t see y’all…

Jonathan Bossenger: Very clever.

Doc Pop: It’s, it’s very cool. Because, I mean, with YouTube that’s one of the downsides is you put a video up and you gotta point to it, but you can’t edit it. The only thing you can do is crop out stuff. You can trim it, but you can’t go back and like, upload a different version with like, you know, different audio where you say the name correctly or something, right, it’s like kind of permanent. If you want to not have to change the…where everything’s…okay. We are in the weeds, Doc. Come back. All right. So, you, we talked about the pathways and how people are learning.

There’s some redesign stuff on wordpress.org that we’ve seen in different places. Have we already kind of seen some of the Learn redesign?

Jonathan Bossenger: So I’m gonna be perfectly honest with you, my focus has been on content, so I followed the redesign conversation sort of tangentially. But it’s not something I’ve made a point of focusing on. I kind of, when I see an update, I’ll make a comment and I’ll you know, sort of have my two cents here and there. As to the best of my knowledge, there is a design thread. If you go to the make wordpress.org slash training site, so the training team site, and you click on the Learning Pathways project, there is in that thread somewhere in one of the comments, there is a link to the design which is currently on Figma, I think it is.

So it is there, we are obviously discussing it. There is also, as you’ve rightly mentioned, there have been some redesign things going on in the rest of the WordPress project. We recently had the documentation redesign that was launched. So that is the redesign. The way the redesign is working is we are requesting certain things and then the design folks are coming back and saying, well, we need to not allow certain things because it’s gotta stick with it, you know, the new design and the new layout and those things. So it is there, I don’t have the link. Oh, wait, I’ve got the link here so I can send it to you if you wanna pop it into show notes so it is out there. Folks can come and see it and comment on it.

But it’s not something that we have had a lot of posts about, because we are still in the process of getting to a point where we have what we want as a team in terms of learning pathways and the design folks are happy with the design that it matches the rest of the site. So there are some links there that you can go and check out, but nothing as actively public has been happening with the design in terms of conversations as has been doing with the content. So you have to just go and find that markup and go through there.

Doc Pop: Well, that’s a good spot for us to take one more break, and when we come back, we’re gonna wrap up our conversation with Jonathan Bossenger. I’m gonna switch gears a little bit and talk about video games and about a WordPress video game if we have time. So stay tuned for more after the short break.

Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today I am talking to Jonathan Bossenger. So far, we’ve been talking about learning and how to improve Learn WordPress, learn.wordpress.org. And after all that, I just want to switch gears a little bit and relax. I love video games.

I love talking about video games, and I was really happy to see a project that Jonathan, you made called Dodge that combines WordPress with video games, and when I say combines WordPress, you literally built a video game using the WordPress Interactivity API, right?

Jonathan Bossenger: Yes, that’s correct. Not, not only the Interactivity API, but also the Custom Post Type API and a few other internals.

Doc Pop: You know, it just occurred to me, we mentioned BuddyPress briefly. You could even integrate into BuddyPress for your high scores. Maybe there could be like a forum. We could, but then you gotta get into content moderation. Nevermind. This is a terrible idea. Forget that. That’s the worst idea I’ve ever had.

Jonathan Bossenger: But buddy, you say you say that though. But my next, my next gaming project that I’m thinking about doing is something that I want to be a bit more social and BuddyPress is the perfect platform to build that on. So it’s definitely not something that I haven’t thought about.

Doc Pop: The game that you built and we will include the link in the description, but I think they can probably also find it on your website, which we’ll tease at the end of the show. But it’s JonathanBossenger.com. 

The game is called Dodge and you play the WordPress logo and you are trying to avoid the logos of other CMSs and you use the WASD or the arrow keys, I believe.

So, you know, keyboard control and just trying to move around and every 10 seconds the game gets slightly more difficult. I think every sense seconds, everything speeds up. By X percent probably, and maybe more logos get added. But that’s the fundamental game. And there’s a record tracking score where you can see the top players for each day.

Jonathan, before we get into how this was built, have you seen anyone taking advantage of the name screen, getting a high score, and like plugging their plugin or anything like that?

Jonathan Bossenger: So I definitely have seen folks and I expected this because the process of submitting your high score is simply a WordPress REST, API mission. It is not behind any kind of authentication other than the specific user that I’ve created to submit it. But because I’m using the REST API, any kind of cross-site scripting that might be attempted is automatically cleaned up by core WordPress functionality. So I have seen some folks try and submit, you can see they’re kind of trying to submit something to try and inject some JavaScript or something like that, and I have seen that. I’ve also seen folks use it to effectively just get the best high score for that day. And there is a little bit of an algorithm to the high scores that if you play it enough, you’ll be able to work it out. But I can see straight away when somebody is trying to hack the high score, if you will. So I just, I just unpublish those high scores.

And so, yes, it has been interesting to see. I don’t judge folks who do it, but I do find it interesting that there are some folks that do try and just get the high score for the day.

Doc Pop: Yeah. It’s interesting you mentioned the hacking. Obviously hacking something like this is always fun to do and you’re building a product and being like, Hey, look at the weird way I’m tweaking this. And then people like me are like, oh, I wonder how I can break that. Is there, when working with the WordPress Interactivity API, did you find that there are things that people need to watch out for in terms of, like you mentioned injecting CSS. Are there things people need to watch out for when they’re working with this? Like, did you learn anything that you wouldn’t do again, I guess when building this?

Jonathan Bossenger: The interesting thing about using the Interactivity API was, it was purely a bit of chance that it all worked out. I was just running a workshop because one of the things that I do is I run workshops about upcoming WordPress releases. And I’m gonna be doing a few of those soon for, for 6.5. And the Interactivity API has been something that I’ve known about for awhile. And I knew that it was going to possibly be included in 6.5, so I thought it’d be a good idea to get into it and understand how it works. Fortunately, the Interactivity API doesn’t do any kind of storing of data or posting of data or anything like that.

It literally just allows certain interactive elements on a page, on a block, or whatever the case may be. But I was very glad that some time ago, I’d actually done a workshop around WordPress user roles and capabilities. And so when I built the user that allows you to post your high score, I was able to implement those user roles and those capabilities correctly, and sort of only allow someone to post that data.

And the great thing was, because I was using the REST API and posting it through the REST API, I didn’t have to worry about any sanitization. The REST API handled that all for me. So just by using, and I’m sure you’ve said this before, to many folks, you know, don’t write something when you can use a core API. So just by using those core APIs, I was able to ensure that the game was secure.

Doc Pop: Mm-Hmm. Well, that’s a great spot for us to wrap up today. Jonathan, I really appreciate your time. I really appreciate you getting up early and setting some time. I enjoyed chatting with you. If people wanna learn more about what you’re working on, what’s a good spot for them to be able to follow you?

Jonathan Bossenger: The best place to find me is on my website my blog, jonathanbossenger.com, which you’ve already mentioned. I am on Twitter. I will not call it anything else at John underscore Bossenger. I am also on Mastodon. But I think I’m on the Foster on Network and I can’t remember what my name is, but you can find me there.

But all my links to my social media accounts are all on my homepage, so you can find them all there. And otherwise, if you wanna ask me anything about what we’re doing with Learn WordPress or anything else like that, the best place to find me is in the WordPress Slack. Because I spend a lot of my time there and I always welcome folks to connect with me there.

Doc Pop: And I also wanna give a shout-out to your podcast. I believe it’s opensourcerypodcast.com. And I look forward to hearing more of those. Did, did I get that? 

Jonathan Bossenger: Yes. I do believe that is correct. I’m actually just checking now as we speak. Yes, it’s basically a relaunch of a podcast that I was running a number of years ago. It used to be called the WP Hacker. I opened it up to be more sort of open source focus. So there’s three episodes there already from about two years ago, and I’ve got one in the pipeline and one that I’m busy trying to set up. So I, like you, I also like speaking to people in the open source space. And so that’s where my podcast comes from.

Doc Pop: Right on. Well, it’s been great speaking with you. Thank you so much, Jonathan. And thanks to everyone who’s listened. Next episode we are gonna be talking to Chris Messina, the creator of hashtags and we’re gonna be talking about something kind of surprising and interesting, I think for WordPressers.

So stay tuned for that. Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. You can follow my adventures on Twitter at The Torque Mag, but the best place to follow us is TorqueMag.io, where you can find transcribed versions of each of these podcasts as well as tutorials and more.

So that’s TorqueMag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Popular. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and I love spotlighting members of that community each and every week on Press This. 

The post Press This: Improving Learning Pathways on Learn.WordPress.org appeared first on Torque.

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week, we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop, I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions on Torquemag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app. You can also download the episodes directly from WMR.fm. 

Now, we have a lot of great conversations with WordPressers on Press This. One of the things we don’t talk about often is what it’s like for educators to teach WordPress and what lessons those educators might have figured out or opinions they might have on how WordPress can be improved to make it more accessible to a lay audience.

So today I’m going to be talking to Nyasha Green, a LinkedIn Learning Instructor, a full stack developer, a WordPress Core Contributor, and a Co-rep of the WordPress Marketing Team. We’re going to be talking about Nyasha’s newest LinkedIn Learning class, all about how to build custom WordPress blocks, which I think is a blockbuster topic, bam, blockbuster right out the gate, coming strong with the puns. Nyasha, how are you doing today?

Nyasha Green: I’m doing well. How are you doing Doc?

Doc Pop: I’m doing well. Thanks for asking. Nyasha, why don’t you tell us how you got into WordPress? And then we’ll talk about your LinkedIn Learning course. 

Nyasha Green: Yes. So years ago now, I can’t believe it’s been so long, I was in insurance. I was a saleswoman or salesperson, and I really did not like it. I had been experimenting with coding on and off, and I decided that I needed a full career change. So I learned coding. I did a bootcamp, or it was longer than a bootcamp.

I did a program at a community college and I learned how to code and PHP was one of the languages I learned, and once I learned, I was like, what am I going to do with this? Around that time I met Shambi Broome and Kenneth Elliot, my two mentors. And Shambi had a, she still has a WordPress business, where she builds websites, but also she teaches girls how to code. And she said, would you like to be my intern and I’ll teach you how to use WordPress? 

At the time I thought WordPress was for blogging. Like, I had a WordPress blog in college that was pretty embarrassing. I hope it’s gone now. And so, I didn’t know you could build websites with WordPress. And she was like, yeah, I’ll teach you. So she taught me WordPress. I learned using my PHP skills to get into WordPress through her. And I did it part-time for a really long time. My main coding was database programming for the State of South Carolina. And then I got this good opportunity to go full time with my company that would eventually become MasterWP. And that’s how I got into WordPress development.

Doc Pop: Nice. So you got started at community college. You learned one stack, then you learned another stack and you learned a couple more, I guess, I really don’t know, but I’m assuming that’s how full stacks work, but now you’re teaching a class. Is it anything like the class that got you into PHP coding or is your class totally different? Is teaching WordPress totally different than the sort of classes that you took in college?

Nyasha Green: Hmm, that’s a good question. To me it’s totally different, but as you asked that, I’m actually thinking of just different similarities in the courses. But, overall it’s completely different, because WordPress, you’re not really, you can teach a WordPress course and it not have anything to do with coding, which, Allie Nimmons, who is a WordPress LinkedIn Learning instructor as well, has a really great course on an introduction to WordPress. And it’s getting in and it’s learning the WordPress ecosystem and it’s really, really good. And Ali is not a coder, but that course is for everybody. I took the course and I thought it was great. 

So with my course, I wanted to approach it as, yes, I’m going to be teaching code because there are coding aspects, but I want to teach non-code as well because there are people who do not code and they use WordPress and there are developers who are talented coders that do not know how to use WordPress either. So I wanted to reach as many different people as possible.

Doc Pop: I like to imagine there’s an intro to WordPress workshop somewhere out there that’s, Capital P, Dang It! Chapter one, make sure to capitalize the letter P in WordPress. 

I was wondering, Nyasha, how you decided to focus on blocks for your LinkedIn Learning class. Was that something LinkedIn Learning suggested or was that your own idea?

Nyasha Green: That was actually something I suggested. When I interviewed with them, they asked me if I would I be interested in teaching and I did research. I took a look into see what they needed, and they needed quite a few courses that needed updating and they didn’t have a block course at all. They had like a block theme course, but nothing really about blocks.

So I said, Hey, why don’t I get a block course out here? I see people talking about it all the time, how everybody’s like, using blocks. This is how we use blocks. This is how you do this, this is how you do that. But there’s nothing really to teach them. There were no beginner courses anywhere. So I thought it would be a great opportunity for me to take advantage of one, one thing the market was lacking, and two, just something that would benefit a lot of people.

Doc Pop: You mentioned there’s other LinkedIn Learning instructors that are teaching WordPress, and I assume that blocks was maybe one of the available slots that they haven’t started focusing on yet. What are some of the other categories that WordPress instructors might focus on? What are some of the noteworthy categories like SEO, or maybe that’s too small, but what are some of the different topics and potential for WordPress education there?

Nyasha Green: Those are a few. There’s courses on APIs, WordPress, APIs. There are courses on doing eCommerce sites like how to build one. Actually, Allie Nimmons just released one on that as well. There are. What are some other ones? Marketing, so another non-coding WordPress course. They’re very broad and very vague, and they’re vague and broad enough where you can’t come in even though there’s other WordPress teachers, you can have your own lane. So that was something I was worried about, but then they reassured me like, Hey, no, it’s, it’s plenty of dessert for everybody. So that was good.

Doc Pop: Now, this is a broad question, and I think after our break, we’re going to come back and talk about the lessons you learned while teaching,

Nyasha Green: Mm-Hmm. 

Doc Pop: But for now, I’m curious about how you choose the level of education that you want to be giving. For instance, okay, I’m going to bring this back to yo-yoing, because I was a professional yo-yoer once, and I guess I can never not bring that up in conversation, but I wrote a book, a trick book for yo-yoing, and in there, I had to decide where I was going to start that education. Was I going to assume that the reader had never thrown a yo-yo before or that they were using a yo-yo that only goes up and down and doesn’t sleep, or was I going to assume that they maybe were quickly going to move up to intermediate and had a yo-yo that could sleep, right? I had to make this decision when I was writing the book and it was a little tough to figure out which voice I was going to use for educating them. So bringing this back to WordPress, when you are doing WordPress tutorials, do you assume that they already know JSON or PHP, or do you try teaching them the bits that they do need to know in order to move through the class?

Nyasha Green: I start from the basics. I want to create something, even if they don’t know anything. I think that’s a big issue within the WordPress learning ecosystem. There’s this assumption that you know a lot of things already and that you’re coming to this course just to learn one specific thing. And I mean, that’s kind of true, but that’s also the issue. 

If I wanted to learn block building, I would have to go to several different resources because they only specify one thing. And that was something I didn’t want to happen with my course. That was actually something that my producer brought up as well. He was like reading through, because we write our own courses, you have to completely write it yourself, your script that you say. And he was like, you know, this is good. You have how to set up a WordPress environment, you have all the programs we need to download. You teach people how to, you know, install node and things like that. He was like, but when do we get to building the block? And I told him, I was like, if you don’t know how to set up an environment, how are you gonna build a block if you don’t know how to run node? NPM, how are you going to compile the changes if you don’t know? It’s like, it’s so many things we skip past because we’re assuming people know this, and that was just an issue for me when I was learning WordPress. Yes, I had like a mentor at first, but most of the WordPress development I’ve learned is having to scan YouTube and Google and Stack Overflow, and I’ve had to learn from people’s mistakes. That, to me, does not make the best learning environment. 

And trial by fire and WordPress runs people off. They don’t want to get burned like that. So I was like, no, I’m gonna start from the basics. If you don’t know anything about WordPress, you can come on to this course and I’m gonna teach you how to build a block from scratch, and that’s how I’m going to approach everything.

I don’t want you to have to take 10 courses to get to mine. You’re probably not gonna want to take mine after the first two or three.

Doc Pop: Well, you know what, Nyasha, we are going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we’re going to pick up and I think we’re going to talk about how you decided to structure your class. But I really want to get into the difficulties that you might’ve found and maybe some solutions that you found while teaching WordPress.

So stay tuned. We’ll be right back for more Press This after a short break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. I’m your host, Doc, Pop. Today, I’m talking to Nyasha Green, a LinkedIn Learning instructor, whose newest course, An Introduction to Custom Block Building, is available on linkedin.com. Now, before the break, we were talking about, how far back do you go when you’re teaching someone a skill?

Do you teach them from the very beginning or do you assume that they have certain knowledge, and Nyasha, looking at your course’s structure, it looks like you’ve got that intro to WordPress blocks and that’s maybe like five or 10 minutes or so. And then you’ve got another five or 10 minutes about setting up your development environment. And then you get into custom block building without code. 

So you do teach how to set up environments and things like that. And then the next section is custom block building with code. So it looks like you have all the chapters for people to learn what they need to know.

Can you talk a little bit about how the course is going now that it’s out in the wild? Have you gotten any feedback on, it? I see here you have 4.9 stars out of five on LinkedIn, but have you come up with any ideas of things you might change if you were to do another course like this?

Nyasha Green: Yeah. So most of my feedback was people want me to do harder blocks, more complicated blocks, like dynamic blocks. And I thought that was funny. When I was writing the course, I was like I hope this is not too basic, but I was like, I really want it to be for beginners. But people all over have taken it, and even people who already know how to build blocks and it’s still been overall good feedback. People are saying, well, you know, you explained things to me about Gutenberg I didn’t really know before. So that’s really great and it makes things make a lot of sense. 

So my biggest feedback is to make it harder, which is funny, I didn’t think my first official teaching course would be harder, harder, make it harder. But I took that as a good thing because it’s like I taught in such a great way that they, you know, they completely understood everything. Nobody has said this has been too difficult. So yeah, I’ve been really happy about that. And I hope I can make the next course not difficult, but more challenging for learners.

Doc Pop: Now, I’ve been in the WordPress space for a long time as a blogger, not as a coder. But one of the things that I’ve heard a lot recently is how much harder it is for web developers to use WordPress, the web developers who have been working on WordPress for a long time are saying now it. is more difficult to build on.

You can build more powerful things with Full Site Editing, but the learning curve is harder. So Nyasha, I’m wondering what your experience and feelings are about that. 

Nyasha Green: I have mixed feelings about that because one, a little thing about my background is I came in when Gutenberg was introduced a little bit after it was first introduced. So people were saying the same thing then. And for me, I had nothing to go off of. I, of course, I dealt with sites that used the Classic Editor because you know, Gutenberg was new, but most of my learning was like, Hey, you need to learn Gutenberg.

So I was like, okay. I personally, again, I’m biased. I think, I don’t think it’s harder for new people to come in and use it. I think it’s the opposite. I think it’s way easier, but that’s because I have been using Full Site Editing a lot. I think Full Site Editing is a game changer. And to get people who were afraid of WordPress to come in and use it, I think that’s it. As far as existing people, I agree that it is way harder to make tweaks now. Oh my goodness. Using Full Site Editing again, the code doesn’t live in the files. Most of it it lives on the database. And I feel like in WordPress, especially some of these agencies, so they want you to be a PHP developer or React developer, and now you might soon have to be a database developer. Why would I work if I had all this, I was this talented, why would I work for a small agency? Why wouldn’t I go out there and either start my own business or go after the big money companies? If I have to know all of this, and so I get it to that extent, it seems like, you know, people who have been doing PHP for awhile and now they have to learn a high-level JavaScript, which React is, it’s a higher level JavaScript.

It’s an issue and I get that. My only thing is, I felt like that this whole time. I felt like the technology is constantly changing, not just in WordPress but everywhere, and you have to keep learning or you’ll get left behind. And that’s sad and it’s unfortunate, but I feel like a lot of developers are dealing with this for the first time, not where people are asking them to change, where they have to change if they want to use the latest stuff.

And it’s, it’s unfortunate because a lot of people don’t like change, but. I don’t know, I’m all down for it. I’m a lifelong learner. I’ll jump into it, but I definitely feel for ’em, and again, I think that’s why it’s so important for us to teach the basics, because if you’re a developer who’s just been learning trial by error or just learning in pockets where you can, it’s gonna be really hard to jump into these new things and discover.

You have to go back to your basics. Why not start there? Why don’t we start people there and keep it there? 

Doc Pop: It is interesting that all iOS developers and other developers that I know, they’re expected to learn new stuff all the time. And they’ve just gotten really good at being able to look up things that they need to know. And that’s just part of their workflow is learning or being able to ask the questions or know how to ask the questions and find the answers they need.

So when we talk about WordPress, I sort of feel like a lot of the WordPress developers maybe are experiencing this for the first time, like they’ve been using their skills for a very long time, and this is the first time that they’ve had to learn a new set of skills where other developers are just expected to always be learning all the time.

Nyasha Green: Yeah.

Doc Pop: But do you have to be a master at all of these tools, or can you get by just using a little Stack Overflow to answer a few questions every now and then?

Nyasha Green: It depends on who you are. Most people can, they can use Stack Overflow. They don’t have to master React at this point. Me, I can’t. I have to know why this is happening. I’ve been learning well, I learned React in relation to WordPress. That’s how I was able to get more into learning blocks and segue in a little bit, there just aren’t a lot of resources for learning this stuff, and that’s why people are so frustrated.

It’s hard. I don’t care if people are like, well, if you do this, yes, we have learn. Learning goes to a point and that’s it. These agencies are not asking you to do, in my opinion, the basics of learning. They’re asking you to go deeper and it’s frustrating, again because there are no resources. They’re asking you to basically spin up things. For me to do these, this miracle-working that I’m being asked for, I need to know everything about it. So after I did my course, I actually started learning React. Also, I learned React years ago, but I didn’t retain the knowledge. I didn’t keep it.

That’s not the stack I went with. So I started learning React again and it made things make so much sense for me. So yes and no. There are people out there. Okay, I just need to know a little bit of this, a little bit of that. But like, people like me, I need a refresher on everything.

And I know that seems like a lot. I’m not gonna retain everything, but if I know why I can, I can get to the, you know how and the actual work.

Doc Pop: And on that note, your first class is live now. It’s about blocks. And you got feedback saying that one thing people were hoping for was some more advanced sections and tutorials. So real quickly, what would your next class be? Do you already have something in mind or something you’re working on?

Nyasha Green: So I’m actually, I just signed for a new course recently. So I do have a new course that’ll be coming out this year. It’s actually gonna be on Full Site Editing, building a site from scratch. 

So I’m gonna teach people how to get into Full Site Editing. Again, this is very new and I mean, the last two themes are Full Site Editing, well, core themes are Full Site Editing themes and people are very scared and they don’t want to jump into it. And I want to be that person to hold your hand and say, we hop into this. Full Site Editing is new, so it won’t be years before we get a basic course on it. I’m going to do it right now for everybody.

So definitely, of course, on Full Site Editing also, if my introduction to custom block building course does well, I will do a harder course and I will get into more dynamic block building and things like that. So those would be two of the courses that I would do, or one I’m going to do, one I hope to do.

Doc Pop: Nice. Well, we’re going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Nyasha Green. So stay tuned for more Press This after a short break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. Today, we’re talking to Nyasha Green about her LinkedIn Learning course, An Introduction to Custom Block Building, and Nyasha just told us about another course that’s in the works and it’s going to be coming soon to linkedin.com. 

We talked a little bit about the experience you had while teaching, and the way you built your course and how you decided to teach what fundamentals people may need to know. And I guess what I wanted to know is going back to what inspired you in terms of making your course. One of the things that you said that I thought was really interesting is that there’s not a lot of tutorials out there for people building custom blocks.

And I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about some of the courses that are out there and how they might’ve inspired you. There’s room to talk about learn.wordpress.org. I’m sure they have some tutorials. Let’s just hear your thoughts on what else is out there.

Nyasha Green: Yeah, so Learn does have a good, if they have a, a basically starter instruction course, or they have resources that show you how to start up a block that’s actually how I started getting into using the Create Block tool. It basically scaffolds a block for you and you could just go in there and actually make your changes and customize it to your own block. Prior to that, I was going in and like, all right, let me create a new folder. This is Nyasha’s Block that makes letters bigger. And then let me create the JavaScript file in here. Let me create this directory. All right, let me make sure I INQ my SaaS in here. And it’s like the Create Block tool takes care of all of that.

It cuts so much time off of it. And I would’ve never found that if it wasn’t for Learn. So that learning is great for shortcuts and you know, little things that make your process a little faster. And I also teach how to use that tool in my course. So, definitely, if you take the course, you’ll have access to that.

There are more advanced courses out there. Aurooba Ahmed does a really good one and Brian Cords, I used to work with them. They’re awesome and they do a lot of block building courses and they speak about it. So, those are some good ones as well. And then if you go there are different hosting companies. I think Kinsta had one just about dabbling in blocks. So different hosting companies, different WordPress companies, they have them. You know, the only thing with me, again, they’re kind of, I feel like you have to go to different ones to get different things, but that’s fine if you know where to go. So yeah, there are the resources out there and if you want to build harder blocks right now, before I come out with my course, I definitely say check them out. 

Doc Pop: One of our upcoming guests on Press This is going to be Jonathan Bossenger, who is part of the learn.wordpress.org group. If you had anything you’d like to ask Jonathan, what question would that be?

Nyasha Green: Man, I DM Jonathan all the time, so. Hmm. Yeah. I’m going to ask him. And he’s so helpful and kind. I don’t know. Jonathan does a lot and he actually does videos too. If you wanna learn blocks, because I’m a visual learner. That’s another issue that I saw and I was glad to do a course on. I’m a visual learner. I learn best by courses. That’s why I have YouTube Premium and, and Udemy. I can’t just go through documentation. It’s not me. I’m sorry if that makes me not a good developer or a real developer. I don’t care. But I need visual. Jonathan does a really great job of doing videos. I guess I would only say is when is he gonna make more videos? Because his videos are awesome. That would be my question to Jonathan.

Doc Pop: And on that note, Nyasha, can you tell us how people can find you and follow what you’re working on now?

Nyasha Green: Yeah, so my website is my first and last name, nyashagreen.com. So you can reach me there, you can check out some projects I’ve done. You can check out podcasts, places I’ve been, places I’m going. Most people can also follow me on Twitter or X, I hate calling it that, but. here we are. It’s NY the Creator. I do build in public on there as well, so I’m actually making custom blocks for a big website I’m going to launch soon. It’s my family tree website and I’m very excited to launch that. So if you wanna watch me build in public, sometimes you can catch me on Twitter/X and also LinkedIn. I do some building public on LinkedIn as well.

That’s where you can find out the latest about my courses. And you can just connect with me and we can see if we can find each other jobs.

Doc Pop: Awesome. So you’re also looking for full-time work now, right?

Nyasha Green: I am, I’m looking for full-time or part-time work.

Doc Pop: Right on. And hopefully, we’ll see more LinkedIn Learning courses from you later this year. And, people can follow you on your website or on Twitter. That’s it for this episode of Press This, the WordPress community podcast. We’re hoping next week to have Jonathan Bossenger on to talk about learn.wordpress.org, so stay tuned for that if you want to hear more about WordPress education. 

Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. You can follow my adventures on Twitter. We don’t tweet that often, but we are on there, @theTorqueMag, that’s at the Torque Mag, but really the best way to follow us online is TorqueMag.io. That’s where you can find transcribed versions of these podcasts, as well as other tutorials and news about upcoming WordPress events. 

Check out TorqueMag.io for those transcriptions and much more. You can also subscribe to
Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app. You can also download the episodes directly from WMR.fm. Again, I’m your host. Dr. Popular, I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and I love spotlighting members of that community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: Empowering WordPress Learners With Nyasha Green appeared first on Torque.

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week, we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop, I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions over on Torquemag.io. 

Each month on Press This, we like to do a segment called “Word Around the Campfire” where I like to invite some friends around and we catch up on WordPress news and share recent stories. 

And we’ve got some really fun topics today. We’re going to be talking about a new video game that’s built entirely within WordPress. We’re going to talk about potentially switching over from meetup.com to GatherPress, and we have a bunch of other interesting topics we’re going to bring up as well as some news about upcoming WordPress meetups and WordCamps. 

So stay tuned, but before we do all that, let’s introduce our guests. Today we have Mike Davey, a Senior Editor at Delicious Brains. Mike, how are you doing today?

Mike Davey: Not too bad. Doc How are you? 

Doc Pop: I’m doing well, we’re recording this right now on Groundhog day. So if I sound distracted, Mike, I’m just watching out the window, looking for groundhogs, trying to find out what the situation’s going to be like weather-wise, but I’m going to give you all my full attention for the next 26 minutes. 

So let’s move on to our next guest, Aurooba Ahmed, a Senior Web Developer at WP Engine and a co-host of the View Source podcast. Aurooba, thanks so much for joining us today.

Aurooba Ahmed: So happy to be here. 

Doc Pop: All right, well, we’re going to kick this off with some WordPress core news. A couple of updates are out there. Aurooba, before the show, you were talking about a new update with a PHP autoloader that’s been talked about in WordPress core. Can you tell us more about that?

Aurooba Ahmed: Yeah, so this is a really interesting issue because it’s been open for a while, but it has taken, and it was opened eight years ago as a way to make it easier to load WordPress core files into the system. But it took a long time to get this finalized, and there was lots of different reasons for why that was.

But now we’ve actually taken some steps and there is an actual solution that is ready. It’s been battle tested and could be used to create even further modernization inside WordPress. You know, with the fact that we have Gutenberg and the block editor, we’re seeing so much modernization happening on the content side, so it’s really nice to see modernization happening in other parts of WordPress under the hood as well. So that really excites me.

Doc Pop: This ticket was opened eight years ago. What, what happened? Was this a failure on someone’s part, or is it a really tough bug to crush, or did it just somehow fall through the cracks?

Aurooba Ahmed: I wouldn’t say that it fell through the cracks. It—there are other autoloaders out in the wild outside of WordPress already, And, you know, we in WordPress like to have backwards compatibility and we really care about building things that’s gonna work for all the millions of sites that are using WordPress. 

So it’s a contentious issue that was hard to come on agreement with. But then once sort of a path was figured out, building it, and then finding problems and hiccups, and then fixing those—I mean, all of that takes time and all of it is volunteers, right? For the most part, we’re all volunteers who contribute to WordPress, so having the resources to do it in something that isn’t necessarily fixing what’s broken, but rather an improvement, can take time.

Doc Pop: And I see here Ari Stathopoulos was the person who wrote this post on make.WordPress.org. And also shout out to Joost de Valk who did the review on the post. 

And Ari says adding a PHP autoloader to WordPress is a relatively trivial challenge as the pull request demonstrates. But it sounds like there’s also maybe some issues with overriding core classes and things like that that might have hung up this project a little longer than it should have been.

Aurooba Ahmed: Yeah. You know, there’s always the question of how much flexibility and openness do we wanna provide within WordPress to let, you know, people do not necessarily bad things, but not best practices. But one of the things that someone in the comments of that post said was, you know, when you have access to the file system, you can do whatever you want.

So this is something that people could do before and they’ll be able to do later too. We can’t control that outcome. So I think that took a little while to, you know, sink in for the team.

Doc Pop: Next, I want to talk about a WordPress proposal to test GatherPress on WordPress.org. And this is interesting for a whole bunch of reasons. 

First off, GatherPress is a really cool project. It’s built entirely, obviously, with WordPress. And I think it’s built on top of BuddyPress or kind of using BuddyPress to handle certain things like member signups and things like that.

But GatherPress is a place to list events and to find events and to say, “Hey, I’d like to go to that event.” So kind of an event management system. 

It’s very similar to meetup.com, but meetup.com is proprietary and meetup.com was recently acquired, so I think a lot of us in the past few years have learned that when things get acquired, oftentimes it could be the end and we start to panic and we start to wish that we had our own versions of things.

And if you look at WordPress, if you look at WordPress.org, WordPress.tv—any of the WordPress sites—they’re powered by WordPress, everything about them. Like I mentioned BuddyPress before when you’re on WordPress.org, if you have, like, an avatar and a username, that’s BuddyPress, that’s a non-proprietary system, that’s an open source system powered by WordPress.

And if you look at everything in the ecosystem, the one thing that’s going to stand out to you is meetup.com. Now, some people will say meetup.com being on another platform makes it more accessible for people to find meetups, to find WordPress meetups, which is, of course, the whole point. We’re trying to get people to find them.

I feel like when I go to the San Francisco WordPress meetups, it is largely people showing up who never knew about the meetups before. And they searched on meetup.com just for anything tech related. And they found this, they found something that they thought was pretty cool.

And so that’s, that’s, you know, here at least, it seems like meetup.com might be a place that’s worth hanging onto, but I’m saying that as someone who doesn’t really want us to be using a proprietary system. And if you talk to the GatherPress folks, they actually say that, anecdotally on their side, they do WordPress meetups, like real-world meetups, and most of the attendees there say, “Oh, we didn’t use meetup. We actually found this event in this city through the dashboard.” They were looking at the WordPress dashboard. They saw an event in their area and they went to it. 

Mike, do you have any thoughts on this?

Mike Davey: It seems to me that this is, this is a good idea just going into the sort of open source ethos that is WordPress. It seems to me as if maybe we shouldn’t rely on a proprietary third source for something that, you know, we tend to use a lot. 

And I mean that that proposal actually, like, kind of goes into the problem with meetups and other commercial apps is that you don’t own your data. Your data—it’s up to the owner to keep that data private. Right? You don’t get really—you don’t get control of the roadmap or in enhancements and you don’t even get to look at them a lot of the time. 

Whereas with something that’s more open source, you probably do. And if you want to, if you want something changed, you can probably become a contributor to that project, right? 

Doc Pop: Yeah that’s definitely it—it’s more in the spirit of the WordPress project. And I will say that meetup.com does have free services, but WordPress meetups, we’re actually benefiting from the paid level. So it actually turns out that WordPress community support PBC, which is an organization that holds the purse for a lot of WordPress projects, a lot of WordPress.org projects, they were paying for, they probably had a special deal, but they were paying for the next tier up so that we got those, those nicer advantages. 

And if people like me, if I put it together an event in San Francisco and I wanted all those features, I wouldn’t have to pay at that pro level, it was covered for me as long as it was a WordPress event. 

And you know, a lot of that is people are kind of nervous about what’ll happen after this acquisition. But Mike Atari, I believe is his name. Mike is part of the GatherPress team, and he was saying—now this is anecdotal—but he was saying that most WordPress events that he goes to or hosts—he’s a host himself—he hears from attendees that they’re attending because they found it listed in the dashboard and they’re not finding it via Meetup. 

And again, that’s anecdotal and I’m sure he’s, you know, very much listening every time someone says a certain thing that kinda lines up with what he says.

But I would say locally here in San Francisco, it’s the opposite. The Meetup definitely had people who had never been to an event, didn’t even know they happened. And you know, they just searched meetup.com for, like, tech events and they’re like, “oh, I’m into WordPress.” So they came to that. 

So it might be different in different areas, but it would be good to see a change like this happen and to see WordPress eat its own dog food, which is not a problem that we have—like we use all sorts of WordPress products within WordPress.org and all the other websites out there. This would be almost, if anything, rather than eating, eating our own dog food, it would be like, “Oh, we still use this one thing and we should figure out an alternative for that.” 

So, hopefully GatherPress will work and we’ll all be very happy. And you know, five months from now we’ll be talking about GatherPress officially being in WordPress core. That’s it for this first half of our Press This Word Around the Campfire edition.

We’re going to take a quick break. Get some marshmallows, get warmed up by the campfire again, and when we come back, we’re going to talk about a brand new WordPress-powered video game. So stay tuned for more after the short break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. 

I’m your host, Doc Pop. I’m joined today by Mike Davey and Aurooba Ahmed for our special Word Around the Campfire edition, where we’re just hanging out, talking about fun WordPress news. And when I think of fun, I definitely think of video games.

I’m a video game addict, and I was excited lately to see that Jonathan Bossenger has released a brand new video game called Dodge and it’s a WordPress game. And by WordPress game, I mean the game itself is powered by WordPress, and we’re going to get into that. Just a quick description, when you go to the website and play Dodge, you’re a WordPress logo moving around in a little tiny square, you kind of move kind of slowly with your up down left right keys, and you’re trying to avoid other logos.

So you’re the WordPress logo trying to avoid the Wix logo and the Squarespace logo and others. Joomla, I have to assume, is there. And if you touch one of the logos, the game ends and you get a little score. So that’s how the game works. I think it’s pretty cool. Mike, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about the game and then Aurooba will tell us how it’s powered. 

Mike Davey: I’m always excited to see what Jonathan comes up with because he’s very creative and he really knows his stuff. When I actually came back to the world of WordPress in 2021 after a very long absence—when I joined Delicious Brains—he was one of the first people I met that was actually working in WordPress because at the time he was working at Delicious Brains as the Senior Technical Writer. 

We used to teach each other quite a bit. I think I learned a lot more from him than he did from me, though. And it’s always good to see him, see what he’s built, especially when it’s a WordPress-related game. 

Like I’m very fond of this just because it is a WordPress game. And it kind of reminds me of another coworker of ours, actually, Ross Wintel, created WordlePress some time ago, which is a word game, a WordPress word game. But I don’t know that it actually uses as much of the WordPress APIs and so on that Jonathan’s Dodge does. 

And I mean, I would encourage anybody from any walk of life in any profession to spend a bit of time at least thinking about game design. Like I design tabletop games and it really sort of—just the way that it stretches my brain and makes me think of things from a new perspective has been really helpful in my professional and personal life. So I’d encourage anybody to at least spend a little bit of time just, just thinking about it and exploring what you might be able to do.

Doc Pop: I forgot about WordlePress. That earns points, not just for its timeliness, it was big when Wordle was big, but obviously it’s a pun too. And if you make a WordPress pun, I feel like you are legally obligated to follow through with it because WordPress is so easy to build around. So a working version of WordlePress, just, you know, it’s chef’s kiss; it’s beautiful.

It’s fun to see people get these ideas, you know, get a little bug, and you could see Jonathan talking about this on social media. You could see him, I think like January 1st, he was asking everyone, “Hey, how do games work? And how do you make games fun?” It was fun seeing him ask these questions publicly and not know what he’s working on at the time.

And, of course, it ended up being this really awesome game Dodge. And he was like learning it backwards. He already knew how to program and he figured out how to build it. Let’s talk about how he built it. Cause he actually built this thing in WordPress, right? I can, it’s fair for me to call this a WordPress-powered video game.

Aurooba Ahmed: Yeah, it definitely is. You know, it’s—one of the reasons why this is really cool is it showcases an API that is sort of in its fledgling form inside WordPress, but it’s very exciting, called the Interactive API. And it allows you to basically have frontend dynamic stuff going on in your block that basically talks to your WordPress backend, and it’s just a really easy way to add interactivity and dynamic, you know, user interactions to anything you might do inside the block editor as well. 

So John’s using Jonathan’s using the interaction API, and he’s using custom post types and the WordPress REST API—all these really core, really developer-y awesome APIs and functionalities that make WordPress so awesome. 

And he put them together into this really fun little game, which I had so much fun playing. And it’s just, it’s really impressive and such an innovative way to get you to think outside the box with what is possible with WordPress blocks nowadays.

Doc Pop: It’s funny looking at today’s high scores on the website. Last time I checked, it was just global high scores of all time. And now it’s daily high scores. Today’s high scores. Whoa, someone got 80 seconds today. That’s crazy. And Aurooba, I see. Your name here. I see Taco. 

It’d be fun to see. I know this sounds stupid, but it’d be fun to see brands competing to get the high scores on here.

You know, you see WP Engine and Automattic and Yoast, see all their names up here. I mean, I see Taco, right? And so, like, it’d be kind of fun to see people instead of, like, trying to buy premium real estate, they’re trying to score the best on Dodge just to get that higher placement. So that’s pretty impressive.

Mike, do you remember having a high score on this?

Mike Davey: I think mine was seven seconds. Hmph.

Doc Pop: And speaking of Jonathan Bossenger, just because this has come up, how creative he is and how he works on so many different projects. I didn’t mean this to turn into a Jonathan fanboy episode, but that’s what we do around the campfire, we just talk about people we admire. And Jonathan was working on the WP Notify project, which is something as anybody who’s been in the dashboard and bothered by notifications, this is something that you should care about. 

It’s a way to—the project was trying to kind of tame those notifications and control how they appeared and where they appeared. It was a really cool project. I don’t know what’s happening with that right now, but currently, Jonathan is going to come on to the show.

He’s going to come onto Press This, and he’s going to talk to us about what he’s working on now at learn.WordPress.org. Hopefully I’ll get a little bit of an inside the story of WP Notify, which I’ve been excited about for years, and see how that’s going, but I’m also excited about learn.WordPress.org and what Jonathan’s working on.

So stay tuned for him on a future episode here on Press This. Now I want to change gears a little bit and talk about Reddit drama for once. It’s actually WordPress drama on Reddit, and it’s not even really drama. Honestly, it’s just fun. 

I’m a subscriber to reddit.com, r/Wordpress (and WordPress has a lowercase p in it, but it’s not important, I’m not being petty). And so there was a thread on there, and this is honestly, to go back a little bit, the WordPress forum on Reddit is largely people who don’t know how to find Substack. They’re just asking, like, generic questions that they could find elsewhere. But occasionally you see a fun post, and there is a fun post on there right now.

Now the post is called “The client won’t pay, what should I do?” It’s a post by guaro_py. We’ll put a link to it in the description below. Basically the post is saying he worked on this website and he’s been waiting for five months to get paid for it. He’s owed, I believe, a thousand euros, and the client is just avoiding him. And, of course, we’ve all heard this sort of thing, but some of the, some of the answers on the thread are really fun as you can kind of imagine. It’s nice for people to get creative. 

Somebody suggested putting a JavaScript code that increases the opacity of the site every day until the client pays, which I think is kind of fun.

And on top of that, you could actually make it decrease 50 percent every day. And that, in theory, should work for a long time. You know, infinitely decreased by 50 percent. Maybe as that’s happening, you could have another counter somewhere. Like a little website counter, like a visitor counter, but it’s like, here’s how much you need to pay me.

Oh, that price has gone up a little bit. 

There’s all sorts of other answers too—some of them are serious, you know, some are saying to take the client to small claims court. And I think a lot of us have worked with clients on this side, the freelance side of things, and we know how hard it is to try to get things paid. And sometimes, sometimes you just got to let them go to small claims court. 

Sometimes, you know, even if it’s a thousand euro, thousand dollars, or two thousand, or whatever, sometimes you just got to figure out, is this going to be worth weeks of my time to get paid something that maybe it would be more? It’s real dark to have to do that math and try to figure that out.

Sometimes you just have to eat it. It’s something you’re not going to get back unless you just really need to be petty about it. And if so, I can totally understand that. I’ve been petty. Mike, you’ve said that you’ve had some experiences with roughing up clients. Can you tell us about that? 

Mike Davey: Yeah, I mean, I have been in that situation and I’m ashamed to say it’s been more than once. And I mean, I once spent about two and a half months tracking, like tracking down somebody who owed me $85 for an article that I wrote on spec. This was back in the nineties and it was a fairly small outlet.

So, but yeah, it’s typically, as you said, it’s very often not worth it, like to spend much of any time tracking down money that you’re probably never going to see unless you do take them to court. And very often even that’s not worth it. And I mean, one of the things that Reddit thread specifically mentions is that the client, or the so-called client, is the one that owns the site and they pay the hosting bills, like the renewals in their name and everything. 

So I mean, personally I would be really leery about changing anything on that site that could be considered vandalism. It would be tempting to simply send ’em a message and saying, “look I’m sorry you’ve been unable to pay me. Until you do, I’m going to have to withdraw my design.” 

But again, I’m legally not sure what would happen at that point either. Like, it sounds like they might, like the client in that situation is in the wrong. Right? For sure. But depending on how—like you can, it—it’s perfectly possible that they do take you to court over that or take, sorry, take the redditer in question to court over it, and then the court decides in favor of the client and now you’re on the hook for, you know, vandalizing their site and probably court costs, right? Because it’s like, you know, it would depend on how, like, the judge looked at it, the case law, you know, there’s all sorts of factors there. 

So I would be really leery about—those suggestions on Reddit are very funny—but I, personally, I would be very leery about actually doing any of those things.

Doc Pop: Yeah, I hear where you’re coming from, Mike. I, I do. I have to say, I appreciate this one comment though from Specialist_Ad_5166. I always feel silly when I have to say a Redditor’s name out loud, but the comment is to just use Robots noindex. And I like that idea. It’s, it’s like, subtle vandalism, right?

It’s—it is vandalism, but it’s just, just make one little tiny change that says noindex on the robots file. And you know, just total tiny. It’s an old thing. I like that. I think that’s a fun one. 

Okay. I just ranted for a little bit. We’re going to wrap up this part of the Word Around the Campfire edition, but we’re going to just take a small break. And when we come back, I’ll have caught my breath, I’ll be done ranting, and we’re going to talk about some upcoming WordCamps in the US and Canada, so stay tuned.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, the Word Around the Campfire edition with Mike, Aurooba, and me, Doc.

We are wrapping up this episode and we’re going to tell you about some upcoming events happening in the WordPress space. There’s a few WordCamps coming up like WordCamp Phoenix, which might be happening as you’re listening to this. That’s happening February 9th and 10th in Phoenix, Arizona. 

The next big event that I think is coming up is going to be WordCamp Asia in Taipei, Taiwan, and I don’t think I’m going to make it to WordCamp Asia this year, but boy, I sure wish I could go to Taipei sometime.

That would be amazing. Taiwan just looks wonderful. WordCamp Asia sounds awesome. Aurooba, you are interested in going to WordCamp Asia. Have you made plans to go? 

Aurooba Ahmed: I really, really wanna go because from everyone who’s gone to WordCamp US, WordCamp Europe, and Word Camp Asia, everyone says that WordCamp Asia is so different in the best possible way. And it makes me really curious, you know, and it’s a—there’s so many people I know in the APAC area that I have never met in real life, and it would be amazing to see them. 

But obviously you know, it is on the other side of the world and there’s costs and scheduling and all kind of things to sort of take into account. So I am currently sort of crunching those numbers and figuring out some scheduling, and if I can get things to line up, then I am, really, I would love to go.

Doc Pop: Oh, right on. Yeah. Asia is obviously huge. And WordCamp Asia is one of the largest events, WordPress-wise, in the world. That being said, I still kind of think WordCamp Asia is like an underdog. And as such, I really want to support them. I always like to support the underdog. And when I say underdog, I don’t mean—obviously they’re large, right? They’re, they’re successful. And they’ve been doing this now for a few years. 

But when I say underdog, what I mean is that when they first started, it was, it was off to a slow start. It was a lot of work to get WordCamp Asia going. And then the first year it was supposed to happen was COVID. So I think in February of 2020, when their first event was going to happen, that was, that was one of the first events that I was going to go to that got canceled due to COVID.

And that must’ve been really tough for them. Like, anybody who’s organized an event knows that it’s tough to cancel that event, to cancel it at the last minute is extra bad. But I think on top of that when you have a very large event that doesn’t have momentum from previous years. You’re doing everything from scratch to get it started for the very first time, you’re kind of inventing these new systems to get things going, and then it gets canceled and you’re not really sure when it’s going to come back. Man, that must’ve been soul-crushing. 

So I am just, I want to go, I want to go to WordCamp Asia because I wanted to go in 2020 and I’m so glad that they’re back around now and hopefully someday I’ll get to make it.

Auroba Ahmed: Yeah, no. I can speak from personal experience that I’ve been an organizer for WordCamp Calgary here in my town three times, and I know how hard it can be to gather momentum when that flow is lost. 

Doc Pop: And speaking of Canada, WordCamp Canada is coming up July 11th through July 13th. I think this is the first WordCamp Canada, is that right?

Mike Davey: I think it might be. Like I, I went searching. Yeah, I don’t think we’ve ever had a national WordCamp. And frankly, like, I mean, I’ve been watching out for WordCamps for years now, and they’ve never been particularly thick on the ground here. 

Like I can’t remember the last time Toronto had one—it might’ve been 2019, might’ve been 2020. In 2023, we only had two and they were in Vancouver and Montreal. And the Montreal event was virtual. 

Now, nothing wrong with virtual events. They, you know, they do throw a wider net, more people can attend, and all that. I love virtual events, but you just don’t get the hallway track that you do at, like, a big conference.

So I’m really, really excited about WordCamp Canada. I’m really hoping it’s the biggest possible success and that we see more and more WordCamps in Canada going forward. And this will be the, the very first one I’ve ever attended, actually.

Doc Pop: Oh, your first WordCamp!

Mike Davey: Yes.

Doc Pop: And the hashtag for this is #WCEH, which is WordCamp Eh. Eh, right? I always, I always read that as eh, but it’s eh. 

And I was thinking if I were to celebrate WordCamp Canada, WordCamp Eh, what sort of sound do I make? Is there like an air horn like, WC-Eh *bawr-baw-baw-bawr*, or is there like a moose sound? What’s the Canadian celebratory sound I need to be making? 

Aurooba Ahmed: Oh my God. I mean, I guess it could be a badger sound.

Mike Davey: Just tell people you’re not their buddy guy. 

Aurooba Ahmed: Yes.

Doc Pop: And That’s it for this episode of Press This, our Word Around the Campfire edition. Mike, if folks want to follow you online, what’s a good place to keep track of what you’re working on? 

Mike Davey: They can always follow anything I’m doing with WP Engine, Delicious Brains, and ACF on Twitter @MediumMikeDavey.

Doc Pop: And Aurooba what is a good place for people to follow you online?

Aurooba Ahmed: I’m probably the most active on Mastodon and then on Twitter (X)—I never know what to say there. But the easiest to find, I’m @Aurooba everywhere, so that’s probably the easiest way to follow me. And of course, my podcast, which is View Source.fm. 

Doc Pop: So ViewSource.fm, but you also have another podcast too, right?

Aurooba Ahmed: Yes, it’s called the Daily Five. So the URL for that is the daily—The daily, and then the number five dot xyz. It’s a every single day podcast for a hundred days.

Doc Pop: Awesome. Well, thanks to both of you for joining us today on Press This, the WordPress community podcast. Next week’s guest is going to be Nyesha Green, talking about her LinkedIn learning course about WordPress. 

And after that, like I said, we’ve got Jonathan Bossenger coming on to talk about learn.WordPress.org. So stay tuned for a bunch of great episodes, coming up. And we are always looking for more guests, so if you have something you’re interested in talking about, I’d love to hear about what you have to say. 

If it’s a WordCamp talk you’ve always wanted to give, but you know, were too shy? Let’s help you kind of flesh it out. You know, and if you want, to talk about something weird, like if you want to talk about how AI is affecting search results and what a WordPress site’s going to do to be relevant if people aren’t coming from Google anymore, like these are the sort of things I’d like to talk about, and if you have something like that, feel free to hit me up.

Again, my name’s Doc, you can find me at Mastodon, but the easiest way to be able to find my Mastodon is to go to DocPop.org/about that’s got connections to all my social media stuff. 

And, of course, I’m blogging over on Torque mag where you can find more episodes of Press This and find out more about what we’re working on as well as transcriptions for each episode and live streams and tutorials and more, so that’s Torquemag.io. 

And that’s it for this episode of Press This. Thank you so much for listening. We’ll talk to you next week.

The post Press This: Word Around The Campfire February 2024 appeared first on Torque.

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week, we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop, I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions on Torquemag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app. Mine is Overcast. You can also download the episodes directly from WMR.fm. 

Now, today we’re turning our focus to a crucial aspect of the WordPress universe, growing a passionate fan base for your WordPress product. And I’m thrilled to have as a special guest today, Adam Weeks, the co-founder of Cirrus Influence, a PR marketing agency specializing in WordPress products. Adam, thank you so much for joining. How are you doing today? 

Adam Weeks: Doing well, sir. Thank you so much for having me on. It’s a beautiful day here in Northern California. 

DP: Right on. Well, I want to kick this off, I’ve been hearing your voice around a lot on Do The Woo podcast and probably some other places. I’d just like to start this off by hearing how you got into WordPress.

AW: Well, it was a dark and stormy, well, not really. Um, so I come, honestly, from the world of education. I was a school teacher and a school principal, but always had some type of WordPress project going on. Been a bit of a nerd for…ever, and it was this thing that I used from time to time when the school would want a new website or something like that.

But really where I jumped into the community was in my transition from a school principal up in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho in the U.S. I was trying to figure out what comes next. I started a small marketing company specifically for private schools. And that was going well. But I did this road trip and it was really neat.

We sold our house, and most of our stuff, bought a motor home, and did a year-long road trip. And on that road trip with my family, did the whole homeschool thing, started that marketing company. And then when that was over, what comes next? And my good friend Jonathan Wold. He says, Hey, so what’s, what’s happening next? Are you going to be back to being a principal or are you trying to make this marketing thing work? And, you know, I’d really like to try something else. I’m not ready to get back into education. And that’s when Jonathan invited me to come help out at Post Status, at that time Sponsorships. And, you know, that was sort of growing.

And so, yeah, I met a ton of incredible people through helping out at Post Status with Sponsorships, that turned into meeting Bob at Do The Woo and yeah, and then through all that, what’s currently happening is I found out that there’s a bunch of companies in WordPress, product companies, primarily, that are looking to grow their exposure.

They’ve built something incredible. And they just need eyeballs. And so, yeah, I started Cirrus Influence, Cirrus, kind of the high clouds, and that’s what we do, cloud computing, I guess, is still what we call it. That’s kind of the history and current state of my WordPress experience.

DP: So you’re co-founder of Cirrus Influence. And as I said, at the top of the show, it’s a marketing agency specializing in WordPress products. So your specialty is not just broadly marketing, but how do we market within the WordPress ecosystem, right? 

AW: Correct. And we don’t do a lot of work where we’re creating marketing materials or graphic design. We have access to that, but our main focus is the public relations, the PR aspect of this. Many people in WordPress, they may not love the public-facing part of this business as much as maybe other industries.

There’s a lot of need for, hey, how do I get exposure? How do I get our product, we built this amazing thing. We just need eyeballs on it, get some feedback and get some traction. So we build a plan for them and we create a strategy and help them make that happen.

DP: So I’d like to hear your thoughts on what makes marketing within the ecosystem unique. What are the challenges that WordPressers face that may not be in other software development kinds of marketing? 

AW: You have this interesting aspect of both B2B and B2C. So you’re oftentimes selling your product to agencies, and that’s one type of demographic. Then you may also be selling your product to end consumers who are building their own websites. That is a unique thing to this industry. In addition to that, there are different layers of our industry.

For example, when you think about our community and the people who actually care about WordPress and most of those people are listening to this podcast. They’re the type of people that are going to meetups and going to WordCamps. But that’s not a ton of people. At most, I’ve heard it estimated, maybe you can correct me if you’ve heard different numbers, maybe between seven and 10, 000 people actually active in the community. Would you agree? Is that about an accurate number? 

DP: I haven’t heard numbers, but when you look at the WordCamps and things, it definitely doesn’t feel like you’re seeing the 42 percent of the internet, you know, presence. It definitely feels like it’s more limited. 

AW: Yeah. It was, it was funny. The first one I went to I was like, wow, look at all these people. I’ve never met these people before. And then I went to the next one, like, oh, they’re the same people. And then again, oh, hey, my friends. And you start to build friends with these people at these events and you see them in Slack and you see them popping up on your LinkedIn or Twitter and all that X, and it is a fairly small community, so marketing feels different. For instance, there’s probably not going to be tens of thousands of people that we’re going to see listening to this podcast. I wouldn’t imagine. I mean, this is a great podcast, but Doc, I don’t think that your numbers are maybe what in other industries you would assume like, oh yeah, we, you know, we put something out there and we get, you know, 20, 000 people. That’s unlikely to be most people’s experience.

DP: Yes, absolutely. So, I think that most companies would feel like community was part of their marketing. Like, there’s nobody marketing out there that doesn’t feel that community is part of it. But I guess what you’re saying is that our WordPress community is kind of smaller in terms of the active people, but there may be more influential…so you definitely want to be part of that community, not just targeting the influencers, but part of the community. 

AW: Exactly. And so setting expectations accordingly, and you can have a certain plugin or certain aspect that is part of the business that, wow, I had a hundred people actually listening to a podcast that I was on because if you were in a room at a WordCamp with a hundred people, that would feel pretty good. Because you know, those hundred people are likely to be decision-makers.

But when you see a hundred people watched this YouTube video that you did, you’re like, oh, well, that’s not, our perception is really important. And I think sometimes we can get discouraged when, oh, we got, you know, a few likes, or we only got…you have to remember that our community is actually quite small, however, you can then contrast that with the larger group of people, the 42 percent of the internet, and you can have channels with thousands of subscribers, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and knowing which audience you’re talking to is important. 

DP: What about the open-source nature of WordPress? How does that affect it for marketing a product that may or may not be open source? 

AW: This is one of the most important parts where a company coming into WordPress, maybe they’ve started realizing that their market share, more people are coming from WordPress. So they say, Hey, we need to be more present in that community. And I see companies making mistakes. Maybe you’ve seen this before where they come to a WordCamp and they treat it as a big selling opportunity.

And it’s buy buy buy buy. And you’re like, wait a second, this thing was built on the backs of volunteers. That’s not really what this is. And there’s right now a lot of discussion about the value of WordPress and WordCamps and what we do at those. And is it more of a business? Yeah. What are your thoughts on that?

DP: I don’t know. I, I know that consumers when we’re dealing with our consumers in our space might oftentimes get used to things being free. WordPress is free. Hosting is paid. Well, unless they’re on WordPress.com, but there’s kind of a lot of expectations for the consumers who might be looking to pick up a WordPress plugin that other things might not have just because of the open-source nature. I feel like maybe we’re starting people off with kind of like this expectation that free or cheap is the way to go. 

AW: Yeah, we’re bringing them in with a free plan. And how does a product maker delineate from, all right, well, this part I’m willing to give away. I need lots of numbers, but I need to find that balance between functional for them and motivational. And then, let me gatekeep this important feature so that they’re willing to pay because at the end of the day, the people make these products in order to make a living. And how do you balance that?

DP: I think this is a good spot for us to take a short break. When we come back, we’ll pick up our conversation with Adam Weeks. So far, we’ve been talking about what makes WordPress special. Next, I want to get into maybe some common mistakes and some winning strategies for WordPressers. So stay tuned after the short break.

Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today, I’m talking to Adam Weeks, the co-founder of Serious Influence about marketing your WordPress product. So if you have a WordPress product, you definitely want to pay attention to this episode. And I think right now, we’re going to get into something that I like to kind of dive into just, almost kind of like a postmortem, you know, after a big video game comes out, I always like hearing the developers talk about mistakes they made and lessons they learned, and I’m just wondering, Adam, if you know of any common mistakes that the WordPressers make when marketing their products to other WordPressers.

AW: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think it’s important to, this time of year, to review where your sales, well, what amount of these are organic, what of them came from maybe affiliate links or particularly doing your own content, what social channels were working, and really identify what has worked.

The caveat to that is we don’t always actually know, especially if it is organic. Okay, well, if it’s organic, did they just think to type that search query into Google and just happened across ours? Or was there something else? And what I would like to challenge is that there is a compounding effect and there’s a term called top-of-mind marketing. So Black Friday is this interesting experience where, for a week, or some people are doing it for a whole month, but a short amount of time where they’re putting this thing on sale, putting their best foot forward. Hey, buy this thing. Now, this is the time to buy it. What’s interesting is that if you think about your own buying habits, when do you buy something?

Well, typically at the moment that you need it, you’ve done some research. Yep, I need that. And how often will that correspond to the sale that you’re doing on Black Friday? Well, out of 52 weeks of the year, it’s a very small percentage that happens to be the exact week that they need that thing. So we can think about that as like our own buying habits and, all right, I’m going to…this is the best time of the year to buy this. And I think I will need it at another time. Top-of-mind marketing says, make sure that whenever someone is thinking about the problem that you solve, that they think of you first. Let me say that again.

Whenever someone is thinking about the problem that you solve, they’re thinking about you first. In order for them to think about you first, you have to be repeatedly in their consciousness, over and over and over again, so that’s when you will likely get that organic, you know, that link with that, that’s when that purchase will come.

An example would be, I’m guessing that as people are looking back at their Black Friday listings, maybe you got on a couple of dozen Black Friday lists, but the sales didn’t come from there. Well, there’s a good chance that people were looking at those sales. Maybe you did this, looking at those sales. Ooh, I need that thing.

But you don’t buy it right there. You kind of think about it and then when it’s, okay, now I’m sitting down, I’m actually going to purchase stuff. And then you remember that thing because you saw it on 20 different lists. 

DP: Yes, absolutely. The whole repetition, seeing something a few times before you actually buy on it. It’s very rare some would argue that you hear of something and buy it maybe on that day, if it’s not something you needed, you know, if it’s an extra thing in your life, it probably takes a couple times of kind of hearing other people talk about it. And then you start to kind of ruminate on it and eventually the opportunity comes up and you click buy. 

AW: Mm-hmm, exactly. 

DP: Did we talk about a mistake that somebody does make? Like in, in terms of, you said, you know, maybe that we have to get people to hear names more often. Is there a mistake that folks might be making where they aren’t getting that conversation happening?

AW: So I think that a big mistake I often see products making is it’s difficult to remember what it was to not know something, and they assume that the person who is stumbling onto their product for the first time already knows a bunch of things. So here’s a few things that I see that I would like for people, when they’re marketing their product, to do less of. 

One is to the terminology you use, be careful with insider speak, you may speak a certain way, but simplify your messaging as though someone knows very little about your product and you bring them in that way. And then you take them on a journey where you’re kind of educating them about your product.

And as someone kind of follows your journey through that, maybe you can use more technical speak, but I see a lot of jargon. Another element that I would like to see, it’s this idea of the hero’s journey. Are you familiar with the hero’s journey in marketing? 

DP: Not in marketing. 

AW: So marketing essentially states it this way is that we want to say, look at me, look at me, look at me. I have an amazing product. It’s incredible. But that’s not really what your consumer cares about. Who is the hero of their story? In the mirror, they’re looking at their hero when they wake up and brush their teeth in the morning. That’s the hero. I like to think of it in this terminology where we can simplify our messaging.

It’s in three points. The first part is the identification of the problem. People want to know that you understand where their pain point is, Oh, you know, maybe you have an affiliate plugin or something, managing your affiliates can be really time-consuming. And then the next part is you tell them what you do to solve that problem.

Our plugin quickly manages your affiliates so that, and then you tell them the third part. And that’s how it’s going to feel so that you can easily manage all of your affiliate marketers in a way to grow your business. That wasn’t a great example. It was off the top of my head, but essentially I’ll go over those three again.

It’s what’s the problem. So state your problem, what you do to solve their problem. So be clear about that, and don’t list like 30 things, list the main benefit, the main thing that you solve, like what you do. And the third one, and we miss this oftentimes is, it’s about how you feel. People buy things more often from how it makes them feel than necessarily a logical, you know, argument that you might give them. It’s a feeling it’s how it’s going to make you feel, because at the end of the day, you want things to be simpler, faster, quicker, make more money. That’s essentially what you’re going for. 

DP: And as far as that field goes for WordPressers, it could be you’re not selling them something that makes eCommerce easier. You’re selling the idea that they might have more spare time because of all the ease that they’ll have, I’m just kind of guessing there, but like the more aspirational and less like, once you get this, you’ll no longer have to deal with spam and think of all the other stuff you can do. 

AW: Exactly. You’re going to feel great about the sales that are coming in. You’re going to feel more responsive to your clients. They’re going to sing your praises because you have bought our product.

DP: And, you know, just this time of year, we’re recording this shortly after Black Friday and before Black Friday, I’m sure everybody’s just thinking about like, how are we going to maximize this? Everyone’s getting ready to have their sales or whatever biggest day of the year, they’re going to have on their site, and afterward, I think we get very reflective, it’s the end of the year. And I do kind of wish that, like Google Analytics or Woo had a sort of, like the Spotify wrapped, where at the end of the year we could just be like, oh, look at all this traffic that came from here and look at what’s doing well.

And this product did pretty well this year or something like that. I’m sure there’s some issues that would come along with that, but I am kind of wishing secretly that I had something like that for Google Analytics or something on my site. 

AW: To give a little shout-out to Post Status and Cory, they’ve been doing a series on Post Status, which is building a product in public. And just last night I watched their, in their second series now, it’s basically they go back through their Black Friday, Cyber Monday sales and who actually bought their product and why.

And I would encourage, hey, figure out who’s buying your product and find, out why they bought it. See what metrics and data you have. And that is an important part of your postmortem for a campaign. You can even apply that for your year. Where did the sales come from? Why are people buying this?

And one thing I really appreciate about what Cory did was he had a hypothesis of who was buying their product. Then they actually looked at the data and said, Oh, wait, we were close, but this was a little bit different, you know, versus maybe if it’s agencies or more end users, who is buying your product and then take that information and use that to be more directive in your marketing approach. And this is a good time to start planning out your 2024 calendar. And one of the other things that’s unique about WordPress is our WordCamp schedule and being able to use our, your, the WordCamp schedule, your big tent events and maybe your local meetups to align with them as far as maybe another revision or another sale or something to catch the eye of people that are going to these WordCamps at that time of year and planning your calendar out and your social media calendar out accordingly.

DP: And on that note, we’re going to take our final break. And when we come back, we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Adam Weeks about marketing to WordPress users. So stay tuned after the short break.

And we’re back. You’re listening to Press This. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today, I’m talking to Adam Weeks, and we’re going to wrap up this conversation with just something I was kind of wondering based on what we were saying in the last segment. When you have a WordPress product and you have users, I don’t know, like, should you be focusing, and maybe this is too broad, but should you be focusing on maintaining your current users?

Because a lot of WordPress products do have like upgrades or subscription fees, or should you be spending your time trying to recruit new users and always kind of adding new users rather than maintaining? Do you have any thoughts on that? 

AW: That’s a great question. And what I would say is that your best marketing is honestly going to be at encouraging your current user base to be fans. And what I mean by that is providing value to the people who are currently using your product. There is no better marketing than word-of-mouth marketing and the difficulty with word-of-mouth marketing is that you don’t have much control over it, because you can’t buy it. However, what you can do is give your current people who are using your product, help them to create them into super fans where they love what you’re doing, you’re constantly providing them value and giving them talking points so that when they’re talking in Post Status Slack about whatever they can be, Oh, the customer service, you know, they had a problem here and the customer service I received for such and such a plugin. It was incredible. Definitely use that because that’s the type of marketing that you can’t buy.

I would focus your efforts on building your community, the people, and depending on what your plugin is, building a community and encouraging those people, thank you so much, uh, and then giving them the talking points that they need in order to share it with a friend. And of course that doesn’t say don’t look for new customers because we obviously need to grow those, but a lot of times what you, the people who’ve already bought your roduct have proven themselves as someone who was willing to purchase it and essentially do more of that. And they’re a great audience to go back to. And that’s, you know, be limited on this, but survey them, ask them questions and find out, are they happy and why did they buy your product? 

DP: And on that note, why don’t we wrap up by you telling us where folks can find you or reach out to you if they have any questions? 

AW: Oh, absolutely. Well, you can often find me in, in Post Status’ Slack, uh, LinkedIn is my social media of choice, but I’ve also got a presence there on the old Twitter X as well. And then, yeah, come find us at cirrusinfluence.com. If you have a product and you feel that, hey, I’ve built something really special here, I just need more people to learn about it and I need a partner, someone to walk alongside me and help get the word out, that’s what we do. And we’d love to talk to more people about it.

DP: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Adam, and I appreciate everyone who’s tuned in and listened. Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. You can follow my adventures on Twitter @TheTorqueMag. That’s TheTorqueMag. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or download it directly from WMR.fm. You can also find transcribed versions of these episodes on TorqueMag.io where you will also find lots of other stories about upcoming WordPress events and things like that. I’m your host, Dr. Popular. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and I love spotlighting members of that community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: Best Practices for WordPress Marketing appeared first on Torque.