[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, build it and they might come, bridging the gap between WordPress plugin development and marketing success.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today, we have Muntasir Sakib. Muntasir, has been active in the WordPress space since 2018, working with well-known plugins and companies such as Tutor, LMS, Droip and more. He’s played a key role scaling products from their early days helping them achieve wider adoption.

He’s also been active in the WordPress community more broadly at events such as WordCamp Asia and Word Camp Sylhet.

The focus of today’s episode is a crucial, yet often overlooked topic, especially if you’re a plugin developer. It’s a chat about the moment when plugin development ends and the real success can begin. In a WordPress marketplace that’s more crowded and competitive than ever, simply build it and they will come, does not mean that users will. Muntasir wants to bust the myth by digging into why marketing is essential from day one, and not an afterthought left until launch day.

We start by learning about Muntasir’s journey through the WordPress ecosystem, and his approach to balancing development and marketing for plugins. He explains the key differences between marketing in the WordPress ecosystem versus the SaaS world. In WordPress, you don’t control the full stack and your users expect openness and interoperability, making community focus and support critical.

The discussion then turns to the practicalities of launching and growing a plugin. Why throwing new features at a product isn’t enough, and why listening to users and building community relationships is often more valuable than racing to add features no one has asked for.

We talk about the dos and don’ts gained from Muntasir’s experience, including the pitfalls of relying on lifetime deals for early revenue, and why a recurring revenue model is key for long-term sustainability.

We also talk through the role of community, partnerships, and events like WordCamps, not just as marketing opportunities, but as places to build the relationships and collaborations that can help plugins thrive.

if you’re a WordPress plugin developer wondering how to turn a finished product into real success, or you’re trying to figure out where marketing fits into your roadmap, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Muntasir Sakib.

I am joined on the podcast by Muntasir Sakib. Hello.

[00:03:47] Muntasir Sakib: Hello, Nathan. How are you doing?

[00:03:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Very nice to connect with you. We’ve had a long chat prior to hitting the record button. And we really touched on all sorts of things in life. But that’s not the purpose of the podcast today. We’re going to keep it firmly on the WordPress side of things, and particularly about marketing, I guess maybe a good way to sum it up, which is a topic that we don’t often get into.

Before we get into that, Muntasir, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind just introducing yourself. Just tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do. How come you’re connected to the WordPress community? Whatever you think fits the bill.

[00:04:18] Muntasir Sakib: Thank you, Nathan, for giving me the opportunity to talk about myself a bit, and it’s nice being with you here.

Well, I’m Muntasir, I’m Muntasir Sakib and I have been with WordPress since 2018. So you can say over half a decade. And throughout my career, I worked for some really, really amazing plugins and companies such as Tutor LMS, Droip, EasyCommerce, Core Designer, ThumbPress.

So when I joined JoomShaper, like premium, back in the days, I was talking about 2019, we had Tutor LMS and Tutor LMS had probably 15,000 or less active installations back in the time. And then within three and a half years, with the help of the amazing team we had back then, we all worked together day and night, and with our beautiful clients and customers all around the globe we achieved 100,000 plus active installations within three and a half years. And that was a phenomenal number to mention in the WordPress industry, in the WordPress ecosystem.

And then there’s Droip, the first ever true no-code website builder for WordPress, and that was born. It got a traction that we ever expected it to be that much. So we were overwhelmed about it as well.

And then during my tenure so far, I, along with my team, represented Tutor LMS and Droip at WordCamp Asia 2023, WordCamp Sylhet 2023 and some other WordPress meetups as well.

And why did we join WordCamps? That could be a question. It’s because we sponsored those events to show our gratitude to the WordPress community and the ecosystem. Because there’s a thing in WordPress, which we say Five for the Future, as per Matt. So every product companies and every business that do business in the WordPress industry should contribute in the WordPress ecosystem, contributes in the open source market so that it get better every day.

Because we are working in the ecosystem, we bring some real value for our clients. So what if our foundation is not strong enough to get those clients, to get those correct tractions? Because in the SaaS market nowadays, there are lots of, plethora of SaaS products, but we have to bring something together, stronger and better than SaaS, so that people believe in us and they come together to work with us and use our products.

[00:06:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. So you’ve been working with a variety of different clients in the WordPress space. And when I put out a message saying, I’d like to chat with a variety of people on this podcast, you reached out and you mentioned that you wanted to talk about essentially the gap where development finishes and success begins. Because I think it’s fair to say that if you were to rewind the clock, I don’t know, maybe 15 years or something like that, maybe 10 years, it was much more straightforward to build a product as a developer, put it out into the marketplace, and because you were potentially the prime mover, the first person to have such a thing, you might succeed just off the basis of build it and they will come. That old chestnut.

Whereas now the marketplace is much more mature, much more saturated. And so the idea of build it and they will come. Oh, really, I mean unless you are incredibly fortunate, or maybe you’ve already had some success and so have, I don’t know, your company has notoriety or what have you, that really isn’t the case anymore. When development finishes there needs to be this whole marketing piece that swings into action to alert the community.

So how would you differentiate between the plugin marketplace, in terms of marketing, and the SaaS marketplace? What makes those two things different?

[00:07:59] Muntasir Sakib: Well, that’s a pretty important question that we mostly overlook. Nathan, thank you for bringing that out. We need to be very specific. When it’s about WordPress product marketing, it’s more like ecosystem driven than SaaS. When we’re talking about SaaS, you control the entire environment, your onboarding journey, your analytics, your pricing model, your customer journey. Everything is under the one umbrella.

But when it’s about WordPress, then you are selling inside an open ecosystem where users make dozens of plugins together. So you cannot give your customer some boundaries that if you use my product or my plugin, you cannot use others. It doesn’t make any sense.

So they’re going to use as many plugins as they want to, and you have to be compatible with every one of those. So you don’t control hosting, themes, PHP versions or the user’s technical setup, all of which impact your product experience, right?

And in wp.org, wp.org acts as a distribution channel. So you need to think about it. It’s more of like app store, which influence reviews, support expectations, and growth. In most cases, all the products start from wp.org, which provides a free version of every plugin.

So the founders and the marketers mostly overlook the thing that free plugin often becomes your biggest acquisition engine. So your marketing depends heavily on the documentation, the on point documentation, and the onboarding journey inside your WordPress dashboard. Your operation, the smoother it is, the better it’ll be to get the traction of the pro customers and the continuous updates, and your community presence. If you have no community presence in the ecosystem in your WordPress community, then you are just gone.

[00:09:50] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so curious, when you sort of say it like that, the idea of logging into the WordPress backend, if you’re a plugin developer or a regular user of WordPress, you’ll be really familiar with this. If you go into a website, there’s often dozens of different things. And maybe a lot of them are kind of overlapping, so there might be things which integrate with other things. And as a plugin developer, that kind of overhead is something that you just don’t really need to worry about with SaaS, because you just build the thing, and you make sure that it works and everybody logs in, and it works because it’s yours and you control the infrastructure and the hardware that it’s on and the servers and all of that kind of stuff.

Whereas the WordPress thing, it’s just so much more complicated and you’ve really got to be thinking all the time about sticking to coding standards to make sure that at least you know your thing is doing it right. And if there’s a conflict and something breaks, well, you can be fairly sure that it wasn’t your fault, it might be somebody else’s fault. So it is much, much more complicated.

And then throw into it all of the other bits and pieces that you’ve just mentioned, community and all of that kind of stuff. I mean, it really is a very complicated picture, and I think getting more and more complicated year by year.

So have you, in your previous work, have you kind of identified this moment where the development cycle ends and the marketing cycle begins, if you like, but the plugin developer has basically made no preparation for the marketing piece? They’ve just built things and then have an expectation that, oh, it’ll just sell itself. Do you see that? Is that a real thing?

[00:11:22] Muntasir Sakib: Yeah, that’s definitely a real thing. And the thing is, I don’t give the blame to the developers actually, because they were supposed to build the product, they were supposed to follow the compliance issues, and they’re supposed to build fresh code so that the thing cannot break when people are using it massively.

But it’s mostly from our and from the marketers end that we need to tell them beforehand, like what to do and how can we get the KPIs? What are the things that we need to sell to our customers that going to help them to solve their problems?

Because the fun fact is, in most cases, when our founders or a developers is planning to build a product, a plugin, they were thinking from their end like, okay, fine, I want to build a product so that the product going to be that much good that everyone going to use it. But it’s not the case, because we have almost like 59,000 plugins right now in WordPress directory. So in every category, in every niche, there’s a plethora of products, plethora of competitors. So there were some big competitors and there are some upcoming competitors who are small.

So how they compete with someone who has already hundred thousand or a million of active installations, millions of happy users. We cannot compete them with just everything they have. Whether if we come with some specific niche, like some specific problems that they’re facing from our competitors, and we can add value to them, to our clients, they would be happy enough to try our product.

So you need to give something to the customers first so that they can rely on you. And if you have a good reputation beforehand, like if you are not new in this industry, you have some other plugins beforehand, and if have a good reputation and you are coming with another solution, they’re surely going to try it. And there’s the catch.

When people start using your product, they give you the feedback, and those feedbacks are gold mines. So you need to talk with your customers. You need to talk with the developers. You need to connect with them on regular basis. And that’s the job of us. That’s the real job of us, like the support system, the marketers, content creators. The documentations all need to come along and they need to figure out the problems, what they’re facing, and what the customers are asking for. What are the bugs they’re having? It can be a bug based on their environment, like everyone has their different environment, right?

But the thing is, when we speak to the customers, when we talk to them and when we try to figure out their issues and try to solve their problems, they’re going to do the best marketing you can ever imagine, the word of mouth. And WordPress is doing the exact same thing. WordPress is depending on word of mouth. Your 10 happy customers is way more important and valuable to you than a hundred thousand dollars.

[00:14:08] Nathan Wrigley: And I think that kind of speaks to what I would imagine, or at least what I would hope to be the case. When I look back at my time in WordPress and I go right back to the beginning of it, it felt like a really good, solid playground for hobbyists. There were an awful lot of people who were doing things for a hobby, and then now it’s become much more professional. In fact, when I joined the WordPress community, that whole thing was just beginning to open up. There were a few companies who were making a great deal of success for themselves, selling things into the marketplace, you know, they had a free version and a pro version. But it was still, it still felt like the beginning of that, the wild west of that.

And I think that still there’s a little bit of that hobbyist mentality still out there where, you know, you attend events, you hang out with like-minded people. You can see that this individual over here, they had success, I could do the same. But there’s that whole thing that you’ve got to have prior to building anything, and it sounds to me like you’re making a real difference between the marketing people and the development people.

And, okay, maybe you are this unique person that can do both. Maybe you are brilliant at developing and you are going to be an amazing marketer. I think it’s fair to say that most people are not that. They don’t have the time, they’ve got other things to do, their skillset is developing, their skillset is marketing, they’re kind of different entities.

But it feels like for many people, that realisation hasn’t been made yet, that you need to, before launching, so maybe even at the moment you think, I am going to build this thing, maybe that’s the moment where you think, okay, two thirds of my budget is going to go into development and one third into marketing, or 50 50 or 70 30, or whatever it may be. I think that’s what you’re saying is that you need to be thinking about this right from the beginning, not leaving it until the last minute if you want it to be a success.

[00:15:57] Muntasir Sakib: Exactly, exactly. You have to have a plan from day one when you started developing a product. How and where should I go? Who are my primary audiences? Whom to reach out. Which influencers should we work with? And when should I give them the beta version to test? I can give a beta version to like hundreds of peoples, who are willingly giving it a try. Tell us some beautiful insights, some valuable insights so that we can develop the product even more before going to the market. So that’s the thing.

In most cases, what developers are thinking, what mostly the founders who are mostly developers, they’re thinking like, well, I can develop the product like 80% and then for the rest 20%, we can start working with the marketing team. I can think of how to go to the market and how to have some early traction. Early traction is easy, but it’s not the kicker. Early traction is easy because if you have a freemium plan, you can definitely go for wp.org. There’s a free version so everyone can use it.

There’s a term, founder led marketing. So when you are a founder, yeah, you can just announce on your socials, like, yeah, I have a plugin. I developed it and I launched it on wp.org so you can try it. Everyone going to try it. No problem on that. But the thing is, there might be a hundred plus active installations on day one, but on day three it could go way below 10, 10 to 15.

So where are the rest of the people went? They just came here to try the product, you didn’t ask for anything. You didn’t know how to contact with them. You didn’t know how to collect the data, how to collect the information that you don’t have in your mind, in your head. What’s the fuss about? What’s the problem they’re having? So they didn’t even bother to share?

You need to ask first. Be the first person to ask the questions like, what are the problems you are having using my product? I eagerly want to know. I want to solve your problem. So when I am talking with each and every person, each and every client, as he’s valuable, we bring value to their life, they’re going to bring something for me too.

[00:18:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think the curious thing about a lot of the developers that I know who’ve brought a plugin to the market is that they’ve been focused a lot on the features. They’ve got this laundry list of features and they get really wrapped up in the features and they execute that, they build the features. And then maybe somewhere along the line they realise, oh, there’s this other feature that would be quite nice to have. Yeah, let’s do that. And then before you know it, the idea of launching the product just gets pushed back and back and back because, oh, there’s another feature and, oh, I’ve thought of another feature. And on it goes.

And the whole time you haven’t been doing exactly what you said, kind of trying to figure out how to build up an audience, trying to figure out how to get influencers involved, how to put it out on, in this case, wordpress.org or whatever it may be. And that whole puzzle, that whole jigsaw piece, inside that puzzle needs to be thought out, I think for many people, at a much earlier date.

I get quite a lot of email from people who would like to have some product or service distributed through something like a podcast. On some level, it’s amazing that the people would like me to help them, but also when you go to the property that they’ve got, you can see that the thing that they’ve built is amazing, but also the marketing side of things hasn’t really been taken care of. So the website is nowhere near the standard that the plugin is. Everything about it, you know, the documentation is nowhere near the standard that the plugin is and so on. So there’s this sort of real disconnect.

So do you have any like do’s and don’ts? Have you got any, like a list of things that you highly recommend people do if they want to market a plugin? But also some things which you think, actually no, stay away from that, that’s snake oil, people have tried that and it doesn’t seem to work. Any order of any of those things.

[00:19:35] Muntasir Sakib: Absolutely. If you’re talking about like developing features and releasing it every alternate week, these are the most common picture when we are thinking about WordPress ecosystem, or any other products. 80% people are doing that. But the problem occurs when, feature first development means you keep building what you want, not what your customers actually struggle with, right?

So when you release a product, you have the roadmap. You make it public. You show the customers like, well, these features are coming next, but people don’t bother about what features are coming next, they’re mostly bothered about what you have right now, and are those working properly or not? You might have, like when you were thinking of any e-commerce, you might have 20 or 30 payment gateway integrations with it. But I don’t need all the payment gateway integrations, right? I need specifically like one or two, like maybe I need PayPal integrations or Stripe integrations or Wise or some other integrations like Klarna.

The rest of the integrations you have are useless to me, so I don’t even bother whether they’re coming or not. I do bother about my product and I do bother about whether, as I am using your product, so even giving me the value of my requirements, like the PayPal is working fine, in the next update the PayPal is working still fine and it’s secured. When I click the update button, or if I enabled auto update, with an update the PayPal is not working. My business will go through the loss.

So it’s your responsibility to take care of my business because I’m using your product. So you have to make sure that every specific niche I am giving the solution for, are working properly after every updates and everything.

I often see companies who are trying to develop the update version, who are trying to give updates regular basis. They often consider giving it the quality assurance, the QA. The QA team mostly were doing nothing. They were just going through on the surface level. They bring the update, and then the people updated it, and the site crashed. And then they figured out, well, it might be your environment issues. It might be from your end because we are doing nothing. It’s working fine from our end. So let me see. Give me your backend credentials so that I can see what’s going on here. It’s a big no. It’s a big no for me. If you are talking about me, like it’s a big no. Why would I give my credentials to you? It’s your responsibility to take care of your product so that it’s working fine from my end.

These are the common things, and apart from that, when we are talking about feature first development, this leads to slower performance. The more the features, the slower the performance is, and it’s non-negotiable. The higher support workload and our roadmap, as I said, a roadmap that is reactive, not strategic. So strategic roadmap is important. Reactive roadmap means you are actually way far behind from your competitors. So many founders think that features is equal to value, but features are not equal to value. In reality, clarity, reliability, and use case fit, drive adoption and revenue.

[00:22:49] Nathan Wrigley: So the really interesting thing about this is that there’s really two completely different worlds in collision here. So if you are the developer, you are basically sat in a chair looking at a screen, wrangling code. And it’s this, you’ve got this small window on the universe. You’re just sort of staring into this thing. You’ve got complete control over it. And it’s clean and it’s, I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s all just right in front of you.

Whereas the other side, the marketing side is the exact opposite. It’s like, turn away from the computer and look at the entire planet. Every single human being in it, all of the messiness of that, trying to find them, trying to figure out how you’re going to talk with them, trying to figure out how you’re going to let them know that you exist. Trying to figure out how you’re going to let them know that your product is exactly what they need. Trying to figure out how to do the SEO piece, and we could go on and on.

There really are two very different universes colliding there. And I feel that in many cases, a really different personality type fits those things. Like, you know, the developer sitting in the chair concentrating on that code is a really different kind of personality type, if you know what I mean, than the person who can turn around, look at the world, cope with that messiness and figure all of that out. I’m not saying that they’re not possible by two people, I’m just saying they are very, very different things. One, much messier and harder to figure out than the other.

But from what you are saying as a developer, you have to do both. You have to turn around and look at the world in all of its messiness because your users are going to kind of, you know, they’re the people that are going to tell you whether or not what you’re building is a good thing or what they need.

[00:24:26] Muntasir Sakib: No, no, I think we got it wrong because I didn’t say that developers need to do both of the work, they need to code fresh and they need to look around all the users, what they’re saying and how their product is performing. It’s not their job.

We need to be very specific. If I’m a developer, my only responsibility should be to do fresh code and to make sure that my product is working fine on every environment. And it’s the marketer’s duty to talk to the customers, to talk to the world, and if as a founder, I don’t need to jeopardise my business, my company, then I need to align with everything, with every team possible. Like there’s sales team, there’s marketing team, there’s support team, content team, developer team.

The thing is, market research should be done by the marketers. Market research should be done, the customers should be talked with the marketers, with the salespeople. They need to come along with the ideas that, well, fine, these are the opportunities we have right now. So if we want to build a product, if we want to develop a product, we need to bring these three or four features before releasing the product in the market because these are the things people are having problem with. So I am giving you this list of features, or this list of things that you need to have in your product, and then it can go to the design team. The design team come up with a very beautiful design and then the developers start developing it.

And then we need to figure out the fact that, well, the product is almost 80% done, so we need to reach to the influencers, we need to reach to some YouTube influencers who have great audience so that they can use it. So we can give them the beta version. They can use it, they can bring some beautiful solutions, some beautiful suggestions to make the product even more mature before going to the market. And we can share the thought with the developers so that they can update accordingly.

[00:26:22] Nathan Wrigley: Right, I got it. Yeah, so I get the piece there. So really when I was talking about, you know, the developer facing one way and then facing the other way, the computer and the world, you are introducing then, in the middle, the developer turns around and instead of talking to the world, talks to the marketer.

And then the marketer absorbs those messages, whatever it is that the developer thinks, okay, it’s ready, it’s nearly ready, here’s the features. They communicate with the marketing people, the marketing people turn that into real world action. And then they themselves turn around and look at that bigger world and figure out how to do that.

I think the curious thing is, in our community, there’s so many of the solo developers who, when that thing that you’ve just suggested, gets suggested. That some of the budget goes to a marketer, it’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no, I can do it all. I’ll be fine, because we know it can work in some rare cases. But it’s not going to be as effective as getting somebody else on board.

But I think in our community, there is a, I don’t really know how to encapsulate this, but there’s a little bit of a divide between the marketing side of things, the sort of sponsorship side of things, the affiliate side of things, all of those bits, and the developers. And it’s not always an easy conversation to have.

I suppose, in the end it comes down to things like money and things like that, which our community is maybe not as comfortable talking about as other different communities.

So is there anything that you think is a bad idea? I remember in the show notes that you sent to me, there were a few things where you thought, for example, you mentioned things like the one-time revenue trap of lifetime deals and things like that. Do you want to mention some of the gotchas, some of the things in the past that you’ve thought, nope, don’t do that, that’s a bad idea?

[00:28:00] Muntasir Sakib: Yeah. You were talking about the solo developer. There are a lot of solo developers, I might say. I must say because they are a one person team, and every project they build, every line of code they write, it’s like their children. So it’s always normal to be biased to your product. Like, yes, my product is the best because I have developed it with all my passion, with all my hard work. Why aren’t people using it?

And you might have a tight budget because when you are solo developer, the budget’s going to be tight. So you might not have that much money to spend on marketing before going to the market. And that’s fine. Welcome the community because the WordPress community is so helpful that even if you go to the community people and you tell them like, well, I am working on a product all by myself, and I want someone to come up with me and test the product and give me some valuable insights about what I can do better, before going to the market. And they’re always helpful. There are like hundreds and thousands of people who can help you, making your product even better by testing your beta versions, by testing your RC versions.

The thing is you have to be vocal. You have to talk to the poeple. You have to ask for help because you are helpless, you are working day and night on your product, and you cannot let people know, you cannot talk to people. You are very shy to ask for help, to ask for a hand. So how do I know that you are building a very beautiful product? I am here to help you, you just need to ask me. You want to give it a try? Sure thing. I will definitely give it a try and have some suggestions for you if you may allow me. That’s it.

And about the question is one time revenue, you think? Yeah. And whether it’s a trap or not. It’s a trap. It’s a trap. Nathan, I can say to you, like many WordPress founders rely on lifetime deals, one time license and large seasonal discounts. I mean Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the year end sales. Might going to create some cash upfront, but that doesn’t bring sustainability.

Sustainability is something way more different than cashflow. Because sustainability comes with recurring revenue. Your support is recurring, but if you have only lifetime deals, then your revenue is not. So how can you go along with your support team year after year, when you are running just once from a customer?

Because once a customer has got something lifetime from your end, you have to give him support. You have to provide him top-notch support for the rest of your lives, for the rest of products life. And then every year, fixed cost goes up. Teams, servers, your support team will go along. Your team will be bigger than the last year, along with your product. So your fixed cost will always go up. And lifetime buyers often create the highest support load while paying the least.

So you have to have that in your mind that when I am working for a easy traction and I am giving them the lifetime deals, and I want to onboard thousands of customers, lifetime customers, you need to think that you need to give them support, you need to develop the product for these thousand customers who will not ever going to pay a single penny to you anymore. So this is a big burden for you.

So real WordPress companies that scale, focus on renewals, annual plans, and clear upgrade perks. So here are the things, you might have like three to four pricing plans for one site, for ten sites and for unlimited sites. And I bought the one site license. And then I fell in love with your product, and I want to upgrade to ten site plans. So there should be a very, like one click upgradation plan, upgradation system where I can just go from one site to ten sites. And if you can’t give me that opportunity, and if you going to tell me like, okay, fine, buy the ten site license, give me the one site license key, and I’m going to dispatch that. I’m going to deactivate that and activate your license manually, that doesn’t make sense because that’s a hassle to me. I’m your customer, so you need to give me the smoother way. This is the thing.

[00:32:09] Nathan Wrigley: When you’ve been working for some of the, I don’t know, agencies or companies where there’s obviously a marketing team which has been a part of the success. Do you know roughly, I mean, maybe it’s just a ballpark figure, do you know roughly how much of the wider team so, you know, think of Company X, which is a development company, but they’ve got in-house marketing as well. Do you know how much of the company, in terms of personnel or revenue, is given over to marketing as opposed to everything else? So, you know, is it typically like in the sort of 20%, 30%, 50%? What’s your rough estimate for those?

[00:32:43] Muntasir Sakib: My rough estimate is your marketing budget should always be at least 30% of your total estimation cost. Because marketers need to talk to people, they need to reach out to the people, and they need to collaborate with most of the influencers who going to work for you, and you have to give them the honorarium to do the work for you.

So if the budget is not standard enough, then they have the boundaries to not do their works. So you need to give them the free hand, explore the sides to work with the other WordPress companies, to collaborate with better partners, to collaborate with other companies and to onboard their clients as well, so that your client base will increase day by day.

[00:33:24] Nathan Wrigley: And in the old way, when I was talking about sort of 15 years ago, it felt like most things were driven by interaction with the WordPress community. Do you think that’s still like a viable way of doing things or, you know, in the case of, I don’t know, let’s say that you’ve got an LMS plugin or something like that. Your market really isn’t other WordPressers, your market is the entire world, you know, educators and what have you.

So do you put much stock in sort of turning up to events, and sponsoring WordPress stuff, or do you sort of advise, focusing on your customers? I’m just trying to figure out where the community bit might fit into all that.

[00:33:59] Muntasir Sakib: Well, the thing is, let’s talk about the sponsorship first because in WordCamps you need to be sponsored under your product. If we are talking about any LMS plugin that we have. We want to let the WordPress community know that, yeah, we exist and we sponsor to this event. And the most important thing is only in the WordCamps or the WordPress meetups you’re going to get along with other companies in person, so that you can connect with them, you can talk to them. You can figure out an opportunity to work with other companies. If I am an LMS company, I have an LMS plugin, my customer’s going to need some hosting plan. They might need some security plugins. They might need some SEO plugins.

[00:34:39] Nathan Wrigley: It’s more of a sort of partnership opportunity.

[00:34:42] Muntasir Sakib: Exactly.

[00:34:42] Nathan Wrigley: Figuring out who, in some curious case that you may not yet have imagined, how you could collaborate in the future. So like you said, you know, hosting or whatever it may be, or maybe there’s a form plugin out there, which you kind of get the intuition that, oh, we could use bits of your form to onboard people to our platform, or whatever it may be. So it’s very much not about marketing to the end user. It’s more about figuring out partnerships and things like that. But also being a good custodian of an open source project, I guess, as well.

[00:35:11] Muntasir Sakib: Of course, yeah. That’s true. Because in every other companies who are doing great in WordPress ecosystem, they have a very strong relationship with the other companies. They have the mutual connections with all the people, with all the companies their customers might going to need. And the partnerships, affiliates are the best way to do the marketing to grow, to scale your product in WordPress market. Because as I said at first, word of mouth is something that brings the most valuable customers in your back.

[00:35:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, you only have to look on Facebook and LinkedIn and things like that to realise that there’s a lot of people in the WordPress community who attend these events and hang out with other people at these events and make great friendships and partnerships and those kind of things. I presume they’re doing it because, A, it’s fun, but also there’s a real value to it, you know? I know all these people and so I know where to go when I’ve got a particular problem, or I just have an intuition that I want to spin my company off in a slightly different direction. I’ve now got some people that I know, some contacts that I’ve already made who might be able to help me with that.

Okay. What about the, sort of last one, and it’s actually alluding to your, one of the questions that you wrote here. Is there anything about the sort of psychology of this, the sort of mindset? Because I think with the best will in the world, a lot of people in our space, they kind of see marketing as a bit of a, an icky thing. Something that they really don’t feel comfortable doing.

Is there any kind of psychology here that you could recommend or some kind of mind shift that somebody like me, for example, who is terrible at marketing, that I might be able to undergo, some magic wand that you can wave to help me out?

[00:36:41] Muntasir Sakib: We all are learners. We learn every day. I’m still a learner, and most of the world famous marketers are learners, even the passionate developers. You still learn how to develop well, how to write fresh code in even a better way.

But the most important thing is there are some mindset differences. There are someone who is a builder, and there are someone who is a business owner. So the thin line between builders and business owners are builders think about features. They think about features, what to come along with next, what to give to our customers, whether they like it or not. But founders think, I build outcomes and value. I bring value to the customers.

Another mindset, if we talk about like the short term revenue and the long-term sustainability. So when we are selling lifetime deals, one time license, that’s the short term revenue that give me an early traction, a good traction within a few months. But it’ll never going to be sustainable. If you want to be sustainable, you need to have a recurring plan, you need to have recurring customers, you need to onboard more customers, but your recurring customers should be like around 70 to 80% or even more than that, so that you can sustain all along.

Then if I’m talking about another mindset that it can be the focus on the product versus focus on the user. Failing founders, like those who cannot scale, they think that what feature should we add next? But the scaling founders, if you talk to them, they’re going to think where my users are getting stuck, so I need to solve the problem first. I need to bring value to their life so that they come along with me. They’re going to be my best audience and they’re going to do the marketing for me.

[00:38:24] Nathan Wrigley: This stuff is so intuitive to you because obviously it’s something that you’ve spent a long time thinking about. I’ve got to say, for me, a lot of this stuff is kind of intuitive, but not at the same time. I’m definitely more on the kind of builder side than on the marketing side. I don’t know what it is about marketing, I just struggle to do those kind of things.

And you’ve written a lot of your thoughts up in three articles, which you’ve published on LinkedIn. I don’t know if they’ve been published elsewhere, but they’re definitely on LinkedIn. And they describe all of the different scenarios of, you know, what founders need to do, how plugins can have success, where the community lies, how you can get yourself involved in different things. But also quite a lot of work you’ve put into what not to do. So example, lifetime deals, which you don’t think are a particularly great idea.

I’m going to link to all of those different bits and pieces in the show notes so that people can go and read those, and then hopefully having been armed with all of that knowledge, they’ll understand better what it is that we’ve been talking about.

Where do we find you, Muntasir? Where do we go online? Apart from LinkedIn, obviously, where could we find you?

[00:39:28] Muntasir Sakib: I’m always available on Facebook, on Twitter. And I am always available on LinkedIn as well. These are the platforms you are going to find me.

[00:39:36] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I will link to the LinkedIn posts and I will endeavor to dig out your Twitter handle as well. So hopefully people can find you and if they’ve got questions, you are open to suggestions.

So thank you so much for chatting to me today. A subject of great interest to me because, well, as I said, there’s just great interest for me. I won’t say more than that. But thank you very much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:39:56] Muntasir Sakib: Thank you, Nathan. Thank you for talking to me. And it’s great talking to you and sharing my knowledge and expertise with you.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, enhancing Gutenberg with agency driven block editor innovations.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today we have Johanne Courtright. Johanne started working with WordPress back in 2011, moving over from a background in marketing agencies, Dreamweaver and Static HTML sites. Over the years, she’s become a skill developer, focusing on extending WordPress through custom queries, forms, integrations with APIs, and increasingly harnessing the power of the block editor and React.

Johanne talks about her journey from the classic world of agency WordPress development to embracing Gutenberg, and the challenges and wins along the way. She shares her experience in building custom blocks, and enhancing existing ones to better serve agencies. Things like improving break points, color palettes, responsive designs, and navigation, all of which aren’t offered in Core yet. These features come together in her growing open source project Groundworx.

We talk about the shifting landscape from classic themes to block-based themes, and why even in 2025, a lot of agencies and users are still hesitant to make the leap fully. Johanne explains where the block editor falls short for her use, and how Groundworx aims to plug these perceived gaps with a foundation of flexible, performant, agency focus blocks and templates.

You will hear about her approach to building modular themes with theme.json, the realities of client work and scope creep, and how the 80 20 rule shapes what belongs in Core, and what’s best handled by plugins.

We also get into the challenge of discovery in the WordPress plugin ecosystem, her wishlist for block editor improvements, and her take on the future of block-based businesses in WordPress.

Whether you’re a developer eager to modernize your workflow, or just curious about extending Gutenberg for real world use, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Johanne Courtright.

I am joined on the podcast by Johanne Courtright. Hello, Johanne.

[00:03:21] Johanne Courtright: Hi. Nice to be here.

[00:03:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, very nice to have you with us. I put a tweet out not that long ago, seeing if anybody wanted to come on the WP Tavern Jukebox podcast, and Johanne was very kind and reached out to me. And we had a little bit of toing and froing. Not a lot, but a little bit. And I thought that the topic of conversation that she suggested was extremely curious.

As you’ll discover in a moment, Johanne has been working hard trying to make the block editor, well, I’m going to use the word improved. Trying to add things to the block editor to make it more usable.

That conversation though, probably would benefit from us knowing exactly who you are, and what your background is. Maybe if we stick to the WordPress bits and pieces, but would you mind just giving us a little biography? Tell us a bit about you.

[00:04:00] Johanne Courtright: Sure. I got into WordPress in 2011, working for a marketing agency. It solved a big problem at the time coming from Dreamweaver, HTML static pages. My writing to that was a lot of convincing, but it was a very welcome change. WordPress made a huge impact on a lot of agencies.

And so we used it for, primarily for home builders, and it was great. Discovered Advanced Custom Fields, tapped into that. Custom post types. It was a lot of fun for many years and I’ve worked for other agencies after that too, and my specialty has always been around extending as far as I can. Custom queries and forms, tapping into CRM and with APIs and all sorts of things. Anything that can be done with WordPress I was doing it, pretty much.

[00:04:55] Nathan Wrigley: Are you self-taught then, or have you learned on the job? Or did you go through like a university program or something like that?

[00:05:00] Johanne Courtright: Just learned on the job. Just looking for solution, and WordPress felt like it was a great fit. A lot of support online, a lot of documentation, just a lot of people providing enough documentation to be able to explore was very helpful. And there was Joomla and Drupal that was also contenders, but I didn’t like Drupal’s interface, and I wasn’t a fan of how unstable Joomla was from updating versions to versions. So for me, it was a pretty fast decision to go with WordPress.

[00:05:35] Nathan Wrigley: I think WordPress is a really great thing to hang your coat on if you are learning, because there’s so much, like you said, documentation. So much of it is prebuilt, so you can just download a version of WordPress and dig in basically, and see how somebody else over many years, in the case of WordPress, 22 years, how that has been built.

Whereas I always found when I was digging in, so this is prior to me using any CMS, I had those PHP books, paper books, where you try to learn. And you’d always learn from nothing and you’d have to start building up and anything that you did wrong, you kind of really didn’t know what was going on.

And so I quickly moved into the CMS space, and probably a little bit like you, WordPress was able to scaffold my learning. And quite a lot of the things that I thought I wouldn’t be interested in, I could skip over. I don’t know, things like permissions and stuff. WordPress already did that, so I didn’t really have to worry about how all of that was taken care of. So it enabled me to learn more quickly. And then of course, there’s the whole community behind it, and knowledge bases and articles and that whole thing. So I well understand your story.

However, you’ve gone in a much more developer direction, I think, than I ever did. Looking at the bits and pieces that you are doing now, I think it’s fair to say that you have become a really competent developer, not just with things like PHP and JavaScript, but also I think more recently with things like React as well. How are you finding all of that, the new React based WordPress? Is it still maintaining the interest or are you banging your head on the wall a lot?

[00:06:58] Johanne Courtright: I started Gutenberg, I started to use it pretty much around the time it came out. I had a bit of a struggle because I had to learn React for it. I didn’t want to be left behind, so I really tried hard, took a course online to accelerate a bit of my learning. And then I faced a time where it was just too much work to be done.

But the last agency I worked at, I started I think like four or five years ago, they were open. They wanted to tackle it. And so we’re a team of three to start, and we made like a core foundation of blocks that we needed over time, building off projects and versions.

And so it was a lot of fun, but in the same time we were still stuck in the old world with ACF for some of it. And I wasn’t quite pleased on some of it, but I understand sometimes like the budget, because I’m allowed to be fully a hundred percent Gutenberg. So when I decided to start something on my own to solve those things, I went a hundred percent Gutenberg, Interactivity API, no jQuery as much as possible. I decided to dive in completely, a hundred percent, because I believed in it. I knew how to solve those issues.

[00:08:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, all of those things that you’ve mentioned, you know, things like custom fields and things like that, they’re really curious, aren’t they? I mean, they’re really interesting stuff that you can do there, and it’s very much time saving, but it does feel like in the future there are utterly different possibilities there. And blocks, and all of the different bits and pieces that we’ll get into that you are working on, afford the chance to build custom solutions for every single project, without necessarily relying on downloading a plugin. You know, writing a bit of code, which will achieve a bit of functionality for this particular block or that particular block.

However, all of that stuff being said, and the sort of rainbow version that we’ve painted of Gutenberg, it’s pretty obvious to me that during the last few years, there must be parts of the block editor that you’ve found to be lacking. Because as we’re going to discover, you’ve got a project called Groundworx, which is an endeavor in lots of different ways to bring features into the block editor which you feel probably, I’m guessing you feel, should have been shipped a long time ago.

And I think it’s fair to say that your endeavor here is not to create a new suite of blocks, which you would download and replace core blocks. You are trying to enhance the paragraph block or the whatever block it may be. So you’re taking the core block, adding functionality into it. Have I got that right? Is that the endeavor?

[00:09:34] Johanne Courtright: I have some extra blocks, but I did enhance quite a bit of what was already there, but not too much that it would interfere if they were to ever support. I mean, I have to be cautious on what I’m adding. But essentially, if you take WordPress as is, it’s good enough for somebody who’s starting, but it’s not good enough for an agency.

[00:09:57] Nathan Wrigley: What are the bits that you think are missing? And honestly, feel free to just dig deep here. I know for me what I found lacking, but it only maps to the things that I have had to do. But I’m curious what a different person having worked for agencies and built a suite of blocks, what are the, I don’t know, four, five different things that you really feel are missing?

[00:10:15] Johanne Courtright: You have to be pixel perfect with agencies, and they work with break points, and in containers and whatnot. And so you have to really kind of like stretch it further. And you have to also provide user experience efficiencies, for example, colour palettes and things like that. So you have to make it easier. So having presets of colours that already predetermined based on their branding, is ideal. So they can choose those presets, it already applies all the colours and your set. And then they can still override each components, which is amazing. That was something very important.

So efficiencies and ease of use was great. So a combination of some custom blocks, but a lot of pre-made templates that you can make for them, and colour palettes. So the more you embrace Gutenberg, the more you can make it happen. But if you have those solutions that are not quite fully Gutenberg, it becomes a little bit complex because you’re fighting Gutenberg.

[00:11:13] Nathan Wrigley: Did you build your suite of blocks? And we’ll get into what that means in a minute, and we can highlight the different bits and pieces that you’ve got. But did you build that out of frustration or were there, I don’t know, particular things that a particular project needed that was pretty edge case that you thought you’d build? Or is this more a case of, okay, everybody needs these things, it’s curious that they’re missing in Core? What’s the approach? Is it kind of edge case stuff or is it more, everybody could benefit from these?

[00:11:42] Johanne Courtright: It’s a little bit of everything. Most of the time, agencies would need those extra features I brought in. The problem is, I didn’t want to overwhelm normal users as well with so many options. And I think that’s where Gutenberg is shining essentially.

The padding system, for example. It’s got increments, but it doesn’t have an overwhelming amount of like, this is the padding for this break point, this is the padding for this break point. But you can still tap into it by using clamp on your padding to adjust based on your screen resolution. So you can solve that problem without having to specify all those extra padding for each break point.

So there’s a lot of different ways to set up your theme.json to compensate for the lack of extra features per breakpoint. And that’s what I’ve been doing. And my goal is to set up enough blocks and provide, I’ll have a theme.json that I want to share, so it’ll be easy for people to have a starting theme to start with. And I’m planning to release that for free. I was just, there’s a lot to be done and provide documentation. There’s just a lot. It’s hard to get everything done fast.

[00:12:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no kidding. I mean, have you built your own themes then from the ground up, or do you tend to rely on, I don’t know, a default theme and then modify that?

[00:13:06] Johanne Courtright: I actually prefer to use my own theme. In fact, coming from the old world, you would put everything in a theme. You would put just all your functionality. And then you learn over time that it’s probably better to have a plugin, but then you still had the crossover of the two dependencies. You have to be cautious to not crash your site if one wasn’t, like if you switched a theme or if you switch a plugin.

And then Gutenberg made it easier to create that separation because you can set up, if you set up your theme properly, you can have essentially 90% of your theme set up in a way where it’s accent one for colour, accent two for colour base, and contrast. So if you label your things, your keys properly, all you have to do is change the values. Don’t change the key names. And just create labels that are meaningful. You can create another theme super easy from that initial theme by just changing those labels and those values, and leave the keys alone. Sure, you’ll have probably more colours on certain other themes, but your foundation will help you get there faster.

[00:14:19] Nathan Wrigley: I know that many years ago when Full Site Editing, as it was called back then dropped, and so block themes became a thing. I know that there was a hope that it would, over a fairly short period of time, that it would replace what we’re now calling Classic Themes. There was this period of time where, you know, both were still massively in development. And I think the hope was that over time, Classic Themes would become more obsolete, and then block-based themes would become the default.

It feels from where I’m standing now, so we’re recording this in December, 2025, it feels as if that kind of hasn’t really happened. That promise is still, we’re still somewhere in limbo. There’s a few people out there in the WordPress space who are promoting Full Site Editing and all of the things that that can do, but I also feel there’s a lot of people who are not willing to make that leap.

And I guess part of the problem maybe is that it’s easy for somebody like you because you’re in it day in, day out. You know where every menu is. You know where to put the mouse to achieve the exact thing you want at the exact moment that you want. But I feel that for a novice user, maybe somebody who’s got the job of, I don’t know, finishing off a website or somebody who’s got the job of just tweaking a website once it’s been handed over, I think it’s really hard, and a lot of the interface is kind of counterintuitive.

And when you stand over the shoulder, as I have done, of people who’ve never used WordPress before, and you watch them, you see them flailing around trying to figure out how it works, and you see the constant butting up against a UX problem. I don’t know when that moment’s going to be, where everything is all tied off and perfect, but it doesn’t seem like in the year 2025, the few weeks that we’ve got left, or anytime soon in 2026, as if the Classic Themes are going to go away.

And I don’t know if that concerns you at all, because obviously you’ve really invested in all these blocks and theming and all of that kind of stuff. Does it bother you that this is still a problem that we haven’t solved?

[00:16:18] Johanne Courtright: I think what’s out there right now, the third party, what they’re doing, I mean, they’re solving some issues, but they’re adding a whole new platform on another existing platform, and that’s why I don’t choose those solutions. I prefer embracing the Core vision and try to expand what’s already there.

One of my struggles I have is that, let’s just pick Elementor. You have a lot of great options. I mean, for somebody who knows what they’re doing, it does a lot, but it also comes with a lot of extra bloat of divs and CSS that’s not quite built how I would’ve done it. You have to fight the styling. And WordPress does it so different now. With Gutenberg, it’s the opposite. It does very little, and it allows you to override all the classes. The way it’s built, it’s allowing you to override easily without having to use the important on the styling to override it.

And I think that’s a major change of how you think, and how you approach theming in general. This is the way. This is the way how it should be done. And once I stopped fighting how the new way was, and understanding where they were heading with that, something clicked and it just like, yes, this is what I want, this is what I want. And I made that call that I’m not going back.

No normal users want to touch Divi or Elementor. Somebody who doesn’t have the knowledge of basic CSS even, they don’t want to touch that. It’s overwhelming. They don’t know how to touch it. And in fact, they’re scared. And when you present them with Gutenberg, you give them an hour training over Zoom session, they are in love with it. They make edits themselves. They’re just happy. They rarely come back with more questions. They just know how to use it.

[00:18:12] Nathan Wrigley: I think we’re fast approaching a period in WordPress when a lot of the admin UI is about to change. So there’s a lot of foundational work being put in at the moment to really modify it. So maybe some of that dissonance that users might face in the near future will go away. And maybe those kind of block-based themes, and Gutenberg use in general will spike. There certainly seems to be a lot of work being done in that regard anyway.

Let’s just move on to some of the bits and pieces that you have been doing though. Because obviously there must be, well, dissatisfaction is the wrong word, but there’s obviously bits of the block editor where you feel that work could have been done differently.

And so I’m going to point people in the direction of your work. So if you go to groundworx.dev, and worx is spelt with an X at the end. So it’s the word ground, and then WOR and then the letter X, dot dev. If you go there, you’ll be able to find the product menu. And if you hover over the product menu, you’ll be able to see a bunch of things called Groundworx core and things like that, Groundworx navigation.

And I want to dwell on Groundworx core. So this is your endeavor to improve the blocks that WordPress offers, and offer some new ones and modifications to existing ones. Tell us what the philosophy behind this is then.

[00:19:29] Johanne Courtright: So some of the more fun blocks where they have like animation and all that are custom blocks. But they’re flexible in the way they’re easy to set up, intuitive. But I think for me, offering the capability to someone who wants those type of things that are not offered, it’s not necessarily a frustration for those because it’s just in addition to, it’s nice to have, it’s not a must have, essentially. They’re really nice, already pre-made blocks with the inner blocks and content that you can change.

One of the ones that are, I think, lacking, I know we have the accordion block that came in recently. Mine is different, where I can have an accordion, but I can also have a tab. A tab that can turn into an accordion based on a specific break point. So it won’t go from accordion, to tab, to accordion, back to tab at several different break points, but it will have one point where you’ll tell it to break.

So you can have a tab that can turn into accordion, which is nice to have because, I mean, tabs are not very friendly, but you still want them. You still want them. They’re useful visually at larger desktops, but you don’t necessarily want to deal with tabs at a mobile, unless they’re very small text and very few. So you need something to shift that. And you want to keep consistency. With accordions that you already have, so it looks good altogether. So that’s what I created. I have an accordion, and a tab, but the tab can fall into an accordion as well. And when they do fall into an accordion, they all look consistent and the same.

[00:21:13] Nathan Wrigley: So currently if you, I’ll put the link in the show notes by the way. So if you go to wptavern.com and you search for the episode with Johanne in, then you’ll find all of the show notes. It’s probably easier than me reading out URLs and what have you.

Your kind of block suite falls into two main categories, as far as I’m concerned anyway. So you’ve got your purpose built 11 kind of custom blocks where you are doing something that Core didn’t do. Although we might discuss how Core might tackle some of those things in the near future.

But then also, the bit that I find really interesting is the whole section where you’ve got extension to Core blocks. So as an example, I’ll give you some examples of things which, dear listener, if you don’t use Gutenberg, you may be surprised to know that the block editor currently does not do these things.

So for example, you have the capacity to reverse the order of a stack, which is really nice. So you might want to just, I don’t know, put an image above something on a desktop. And then on mobile, you might just want to flip that, or you might just want to flip it because you are doing, I don’t know, copy and pasting rows, but you want the image left, image right, image left, image right, that kind of thing.

You’ve also added in break points for certain widths. So for example, a tablet break point might be in there. You’ve got a full height sticky for the group block, which is nice and interesting as well. Three breakpoints for WordPress headings and paragraphs. That’s nice. So you could, I don’t know, change the font size or something like that depending on what you’re looking at.

Column counts. So you’ve got the ability to have different breakpoints in the Core list block as well.

You’ve got a whole thing about performance optimisation for the video block, and then you’ve got a responsive setting for any break point that you may set. I probably butchered all of that, but you get the idea. You’ve got a ton of stuff that you’ve built on top of Core WordPress blocks.

Why do you, because I mean, all of that I guess is given away to everybody, but there’s got to be an expectation, I suppose, that some of this stuff will ship in Core. Does that bit worry you? Does it worry you that you put in all this hard work and then somebody maybe in the Core project thinks, oh, that’s a good idea, let’s add that to the roadmap and what have you.

[00:23:16] Johanne Courtright: I mean, it’s always a worry when you release something for WordPress because everything is GPL, but it’s just part of the ecosystem. I mean, I reverse engineered their blocks to learn what I know now.

[00:23:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah.

[00:23:28] Johanne Courtright: And if they think it’s great idea then, you know, as long as they give me credit, I guess it’s fine.

But I say, not everyone will need break points. I mean, this is really more like, I’d say agency type things that usually you want those things, those features. They’re nice to have, but break points are not necessarily, I have to have it kind of thing if you are just a normal user. It’s more, if you want fine tuning for, like if you’re a designer and you really want those fine tunings, then they’re there.

[00:24:03] Nathan Wrigley: Does it kind of surprise you though that we are now, oh goodness knows how many years we’re into the Gutenberg project, but it’s many, many years. It’s more than you can count on one hand. Does it surprise you that this stuff is still missing? That somebody like you needs to build this functionality and, well, needs is maybe the wrong word, but desires to build this functionality. Does it surprise you that this kind of thing wasn’t in it when it shipped, that a layout system with all the break points taken care of and all of that completely customisable, does it still shock you that that isn’t there?

[00:24:34] Johanne Courtright: I have not done a whole lot of research, but based on what I’ve read so far is there was no intention to support it. So that’s why I decided to do it because I was like, I’m not going to wait for them to do it because they’re not going to do it.

[00:24:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So it was never something that was intended that was missing. It was just, it was never, literally never intended. So somebody needed to ship it. It’s kind of like that WordPress 80 20 rule. That’s the other curious thing about WordPress usage. Somebody like you and somebody like me who is constantly in there and fiddling the entire time, you kind of have this expectation that a lot of this stuff, oh, everybody would need this because I need it.

But the reality is, I guess most people are just logging in, changing a piece of text, maybe uploading an image, writing a blog post, clicking publish, and they’re done. And they’re relying on their agencies who’ve got the CSS, JavaScript, all of that React expertise that can build all of the different bits and pieces for them. So maybe it’s just me obsessing about these things because I’m in there all the time and I can see how they’re missing.

[00:25:36] Johanne Courtright: I think the way I build themes these days is like extremely light. It’s like, there’s a theme.json, there’s very little CSS and very, very little JavaScript. Everything is moved towards plugins. It’s really meant for colours, font types, branding type things. I have very little things in my themes these days because I believe that somebody who has a website and tomorrow they want a different theme, even for Christmas, and they decide, oh, I want a Christmas theme, should be able to do it easily by just swapping the theme.

[00:26:13] Nathan Wrigley: Clicking a button and it should all work, yeah.

[00:26:14] Johanne Courtright: Click a button, and all of a sudden it’s the new font, it’s the new palette colour, and it just works with minimal effort to just change anything or tweak anything. That’s how I see it. You shouldn’t have things that are baked in your theme where if you change your theme, now all of a sudden it’s not available for that theme. Don’t lock your clients into essentially a theme with features, and then they’re stuck with your theme.

[00:26:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that’s an interesting way of kind of spinning my question around in a sense. That whole thing that we have with clients where we have scope creep, you offer something, they agree to it, and then there’s this whole thing after you’ve built what they wanted, where they say, oh, but can we have, and then can we have, and what about this? We’ve got this idea as well. But that’s not the intention. The project was what we said it was going to be.

And so in a sense, the WordPress project is a little bit like that. You know, it’s not trying to be every feature for every human being who ever thought a thing could be achieved. It’s more, here’s the foundational stuff, and if you really want those things, well, either build it yourself or go and find somebody who has built that for you.

That kind of makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? You know, if you’ve got this foundational platform, and I know the 80 20 rule, like I said, applies within WordPress. If 80% of the people need it, then it comes onto the scope of Core, and if it doesn’t reach that then it really doesn’t belong in Core. That’s kind of interesting because that reframes the whole thing and makes what you are saying true.

Most of the things that you’ve got, that you’ve built on top of Core, and again, I’ll direct people to the URL on the WP Tavern website. They probably aren’t for 80% of the people, they probably are for the 20%, the people like you, the developers, the designers who are building websites. The inexperienced people, the 80%, maybe they don’t need this stuff. That’s an interesting reframing of it.

[00:28:07] Johanne Courtright: Yeah, most people will probably be satisfied with just the basic theme that comes with WordPress. It’s got enough patterns at this point to have a good starting foundation. We need to get away from overbuilding our blocks in such a way where they’re rigid, this is the only thing it can do.

So when I build my blocks, I build in such a way the HTML can be moved around with grid system CSS, where I can move things because I built it in such a way that it’s very flexible. So all you have to do after that is just you create like some styling to accommodate that other different behavior that you want.

[00:28:51] Nathan Wrigley: So we’ve spoken just then about the bits and pieces that, you’ve extended WordPress Core and we described all of those. But there’s obviously bits that you felt were entirely missing that you thought might be useful to have. As I said a moment ago, some of these maybe are things that, I don’t know, maybe you’ll drop in the near future, or perhaps you’ll tweak in different ways because you did say that your accordion block behaves differently. But I know that the accordion block is coming to Core and what have you.

But you’ve got things like an Accordion Block, you’ve got an Accordion Panel Block, a Tabs Block, Tabs Panel Block, Media Section Block, Media Content Split Block, that’s interesting. Card block, Card Reveal Block and many others. This is, I guess, is this you sort of dogfooding projects that you’ve had in the past where a client has wanted a particular thing and you’ve thought, oh yeah, I’ve now built that, let’s see if we can sort of make it more generic and add it into your suite of blocks?

[00:29:43] Johanne Courtright: Those are pretty much blocks that keeps happening and being reused over and over and over. And they kind of become your basic foundation, if that makes sense. And they usually solve 90%, 95% of what you need for a site is essentially what’s part of the Core, is how I solved it. Another one that I solved that is very similar to what WordPress does was the Core Navigation.

[00:30:09] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you’ve got a whole other thing there, haven’t you? Yeah, that’s interesting.

[00:30:12] Johanne Courtright: Yeah, this one is completely free, so I mean, my navigation falls very similarly what WordPress does, where I have a custom post type, I have blocks in it, and essentially it will use those menus that I can reuse in different parts of navigations. And the major difference is that WordPress is only this big modal and then you have very little customisation. It can go left or right, I think center.

[00:30:43] Nathan Wrigley: That’s more or less it really, isn’t it?

[00:30:45] Johanne Courtright: Yes. And it is annoying because if you choose left or right, well, it also affects your desktop versus modal, I didn’t like that. But I did like the idea of having the blocks sitting into a custom post type. So mine in that way does that too. But I didn’t want to interfere with what WordPress had done, so I created my own custom post type for it. But I’m still following the same principle where I have my blocks sitting in that custom post types be shared so I can reuse them.

[00:31:18] Nathan Wrigley: So you can use Core navigation blocks containing the pages and the posts and things like that. How do you build them up?

[00:31:25] Johanne Courtright: Well, I essentially copied over the link and the sub menu and I brought over some of their features, because I did like how they were, but I changed the HTML in it and what it’s capable of doing. Had a couple different things. That allowed me the flexibility to create accordions, and all sorts of different things without having to worry about having, you know how some sites will have a mobile menu, but they’ll have the same menu for the desktop, but it’s like a clone, but you don’t see it. I didn’t want that. Everything had to be done from the same HTML structure, and all it had to do is just essentially fall back gracefully into that other mode. And what was important also for me was that it was all Interactivity API.

[00:32:20] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. Okay, you’ve been leveraging that.

[00:32:23] Johanne Courtright: Yeah. So they’re all leveraging that. I was inspired also by Gutenberg Times website to do the vertical menu.

[00:32:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yeah, they’ve got the, I don’t know which theme they’re using, but that I think was a default theme. Was it 2020?

[00:32:37] Johanne Courtright: I was like, this is different. I want one like that. So I did support it too.

[00:32:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I see that. So on your navigation block, one of the options is to have this kind of full height column, which you can invoke and the menu, I guess slides out, but it then collapses back into that full size column. Have you had much feedback on that? Because it, I always worry that that’s going to consume quite a bit of the real estate when it’s not being invoked. Whereas, you know, a little hamburger icon, which is sitting at the top of the screen is obviously not consuming anything once you’ve scrolled past the navigation menu. Does it stay there all the time? If you’re not using the menu at that moment, does it live there all the time or, how does it work?

[00:33:14] Johanne Courtright: The bar stays there all the time. It’s up to you to add links that are useful in terms of what you’re doing. But, yes, it does stay there. It takes a little bit of the space, but it’s fine. You can choose also at what break point it will be sitting at the top instead.

[00:33:34] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. Got it. Right. There is an option to remove it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

[00:33:38] Johanne Courtright: Yeah. So you’re not, let’s just say you wanted to stop doing that at laptop or something, or tablet, then you just choose the option and it will just break to the other one at the top instead.

[00:33:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And you’ve built a suite of blocks, so six at the moment that work in concert together to build that. So you’ve got the Navigation Block, which I’m guessing is kind of the wrapper for that, I’m not sure. But then you’ve got the Branding Block, which I presume holds logos and things like that. The Menu Block, which is the responsive bit where you can display stack menu items and things like that. Sub Menus, which I guess allows you to create those accordions where there’s a parent item, but things hidden underneath. A Link Block where you can just add a single thing, which I guess isn’t inside any other navigation anywhere. And then a spacer block, just something to create a bit of breathing room to separate one thing from another. And those six things, you just build in your custom post type, and once you’ve built them there, you can then invoke it and construct it entirely in the block editor.

You see this kind of stuff is really cool and really clever. Just the idea that you can build that in a, in this GUI, the block editor. Build it, style it, do all of the bits and pieces that you need to make it look nice inside the settings panel. It’s so great. The promise of Gutenberg delivered, really. This is the kind of stuff that it was always supposed to do, but people only seem to be getting to it now.

[00:34:57] Johanne Courtright: You know, you did ask me a few times if there was a feature I wish was in WordPress, and I do have one right now. Theme.json, you can specify specific colours for your buttons and your texts, your background, but I wish there was a way for us to set up other variables or some other things to specify more colours. So for example, my navigation, I have a lot more colours than two. I wish there was a way for me to set those up instead of using CSS and then the variable name and then manually injecting those.

[00:35:34] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Overriding things. Yeah.

[00:35:36] Johanne Courtright: Allow me to have custom keys or something where I can just say, oh, put your colours here, and then it will just generate whatever it needs to do. So if there was a way for me to have a block and specify, say, this is going to be the selector, this is the selector and this is the key. And then in the theme.json, all the person has to do is set up the key and the colour and it just applies it. That would be a nice feature.

[00:36:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s curious, you know, if for example, I was to go to, I don’t know, Squarespace or something like that and build my website with their technology, I guess there’s an expectation that what you get is what you get. This is it. You know, you pay your $20 a month or whatever it may be, I have no idea, and the features that you have are what you have. Maybe you can put in a support request somewhere and ask for another feature, but basically it’s very unlikely, I imagine, to happen.

Whereas just about everybody on the developer side of things, fiddling with WordPress, is constantly coming up with new ideas and different ways it can be adapted. And so there’s always this sense of, oh, I could build this thing into it, or I could do, and so it kind of breeds, not dissatisfaction, that’s the wrong word, but a curiosity for what it could do.

So you’ve just given a perfect example there. You’ve got this use case, which I don’t think I would probably make much use of. I think I’m probably happy with the two colours, but clearly in your scenarios that’s a way that you would like to adapt it.

And that’s why the platform is so cool. Maybe at some point somebody will listen to that request and will implement that for you in Core. If not, you maybe have to suffer the CSS load that you’ve got in the meantime. But that is really what separates it. You know, we’ve got this idea that, if you contribute, and you put your ideas in and you show up and you, you know, you offer your time, then that kind of stuff can be changed.

[00:37:28] Johanne Courtright: I have to say, I know that it creates a lot of friction at the moment and how they’re guarding and guiding very specifically. And they’re clear in their vision and they want to follow that vision, and it creates some frustration for some people who want things done differently. But I appreciate that they’re doing that because it was a long term project. The frustration probably comes from, I wish it was there, what it is today, many years ago, when it came out. But I do appreciate that there’s somebody with a vision who stick to their vision because I think it’s the right way.

[00:38:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and interestingly, everybody else’s vision can also be lived. So, you know, there’s a variety of different page builders, and I know that’s not your thing, but it is the thing of many millions of people. They love that, and that’s their preferred way of doing it. You can’t do that on these other proprietary platforms. There isn’t a different entire UX and UI that you can inject into it, but we have that, you know? And if you want to use a page builder, or you want to use whatever it is that you want to use, that’s the way it is.

I suppose the only thing we’ve got to be mindful of is the flame was that sometimes occur. You know, people saying, well, my tool is the best tool. Anybody else that’s using anything else is missing out or what have you, or maybe stronger language than that. And just recognise that, well, the reason that you can do that is because there’s this foundational stuff, the WordPress Core.

[00:39:00] Johanne Courtright: They’re allowing it.

[00:39:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and it’s allowing you to have that, and you don’t have to use Gutenberg. But it does feel, it really does feel as if in the latter part of 2025, it does feel as if there’s a little bit more excitement around the Block Editor and the different bits and pieces. I don’t know if you’ve picked up on that, but there seems to be more stories. There seems to be more people shipping products that latch onto the block editor. Yours obviously is an example of that.

[00:39:24] Johanne Courtright: The biggest hurdle is to learn it’s a different mindset, different language, it’s different in so many ways. There’s just too much to learn to jump from old way to new way. And it’s very overwhelming for a lot of people. It’s very, very overwhelming.

[00:39:45] Nathan Wrigley: Genuinely don’t know how we bridge that gap, to be honest, because I think you’re right. If you’ve been familiar with using WordPress in its classic form, then it is, it’s seismic. But more or less, every developer that I know has at least some curiosity in Gutenberg and things like that, so probably.

[00:40:00] Johanne Courtright: Once people fully decide to embrace it and take the time to reverse engineer and understand it, they’re like, oh, wow. All the cool stuff I can do. Yes. You know? And they change their mind completely. It’s a bit challenging because I mean, even like, let’s just say Tailwind, which is the CSS framework. I mean, it’s great. Tailwind is amazing, but when you start trying to use it with WordPress, that’s another one that fights WordPress. I stopped using it. I’m just going with SCSS and I build my own stuff. Now I have very little CSS into my blocks and it’s just, there’s no real point to have CSS framework in WordPress. You don’t need that.

[00:40:44] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to pivot the subject a little bit, and it’s because of a tweet that I saw yesterday, I believe it was. A friend of mine tweeted that he’s yet to see a block solution. So I don’t think that those were the words that he used, but he’s yet to see an out and out successful business built on top of blocks. So the example might be that, for example, on WordPress Core, you’ve got all of these really successful products. So you’ve got things like Gravity Forms and things like that, that have made real, they’ve got a real stable business going on. And he was questioning, have we seen that with blocks yet?

So you are trying to make that happen. You are trying to sell a commercial product. I know that there’s, free versions and things like that, but you’re trying to sell a commercial product. How is that? What is the landscape for that at the moment? Because I’m guessing it’s not like you are printing money at the moment. I don’t know how difficult that is and whether or not it’s been the fountain of cash that maybe you’d hoped it would be.

[00:41:44] Johanne Courtright: I don’t expect it to be a fountain of cash. I love what I do. I do it for myself first, and if other people happen to enjoy it, then But if they don’t, that’s fine, I’m using it.

[00:41:59] Nathan Wrigley: That’s very sanguine approach. I think his thought when he made that tweet is that maybe we’re on the cusp of something. Because it feels like there’s a certain speed that the flywheel needs to achieve before people become really interested in it. I’m not sure that that has yet happened. But give it some more time, give it some more interesting products, some more attention, some more marketing and what have you. And definitely a lot of the stuff shipping in 6.9, which is actually coming out today. And then 7 next year, and all of the AI bits and pieces that are going to be put in as well. You never know. Maybe with a fair wind, we’ll be printing money for you.

[00:42:38] Johanne Courtright: I do have a message for Matt if he listens. He needs to work on his plugin and themes website. It’s not usable at the moment. It doesn’t leave room for new development, new plugins to be seen. It needs to be feeling more like a community.

I come from a background where I did a lot of desktop customisation. We had featured skins and themes and wallpapers and there was, people were excited. There was somebody reviewing. Think about it about how Apple does their Apple store, where they had like featured apps. Somebody went and tested a few of those plugins and featured them. They pick them. We need more, something like that.

We also need to have a better search. Search is awful. It’s all stuffed keywords. And if you’ve been around for a while, if you’re new, there’s no way for you to rank for anything. There needs to be true categories and easier ways to find what you’re looking for.

[00:43:37] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know, that’s a whole interesting other conversation, isn’t it? Maybe we’ll have that one time. But I get what you mean. When the iPhone came out, don’t know if you sort of remember or go back that far, but when the iPhone came out, it was this curious but beautiful object that had a lovely screen and could play songs and things. But the moment the app store came along for the iPhone, that’s I think when it became really interesting.

And it does feel with the advent of blocks, like there’s an opportunity similar to that in that WordPress is no longer just these plugins and themes. We’ve got this whole other thing now, these blocks, these mini applications if you like, which really in many ways have full capabilities like plugins would do. And being able to surface those and find a block or a.

[00:44:26] Johanne Courtright: You should be able to set, are you supporting Gutenberg? Is it using jQuery? Is it using those basic little things like check, check, check? And if some people are looking for those things, they should be able to find you.

Right now it’s useless. It’s very useless, even for me looking for a plugin. Most of the plugins I found these days are because I use Google or AI, or there’s other means, but it’s very hard to find. I don’t even rank in the first 40 some pages for my navigation, so it’s ridiculous. Look for navigation, you won’t find me.

[00:45:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so maybe that’s work to be done in 2026. But hopefully somebody has heard your plea there and you never know. If they have and they want to reach out to you, well, obviously we know that you’ve got the Groundworx with an X, .dev website. Is there another place where you hang out online that people could find you if they wanted to have a chat?

[00:45:23] Johanne Courtright: I’ve been hanging out a lot on X these days. I get a lot more response there. It seems to be WordPress community hangs out there a lot, so I think that’s going to be my platform of choice for a while.

[00:45:36] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. In which case, into the show notes, along with the links to all of the bits and pieces that we mentioned, I will bury the link to Johanne’s X profile as well, so you can go and connect there.

Thank you so much for chatting to me today. It’s really interesting getting your insight into all of the bits and pieces that you’ve done extending Gutenberg, but also all of the bits and pieces that you’ve done with new stuff as well. Go check it out. It’s Groundworx.dev. Johanne, thank you so much for chatting to me today.

[00:46:01] Johanne Courtright: Thank you for inviting me. Thank you so much. It was great.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how public contributions can shape careers in WordPress.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today we have Topher DeRosia. Topher is a web developer with over 30 years of experience, and he’s been deeply involved in the WordPress community for the past 15 years. He’s attended nearly 80 WordCamps around the world, contributed to projects like HeroPress, and has made it his mission to highlight the power and value of open source and remote work, especially in the WordPress ecosystem.

In this episode, Topher joins me to talk about the value of working in public, and how sharing your work openly can create unexpected and lasting opportunities. Whether that’s boosting your career, finding a sense of purpose, or building connections across the globe.

We start with Topher’s personal journey, discovering the WordPress community and the profound impact it has had on his life and family. The conversation explores what makes open source communities, like WordPress, so unique, and while working transparently can lead to moments of serendipity and even job offers from people who have seen your contributions many years before.

Topher shares stories about giving back, the motivation that comes from helping others, and the long-term satisfaction that comes from being generous with your time and expertise.

We also discussed the tension between the philanthropic and commercial aspects of WordPress, and how individuals and companies navigate that balance.

Towards the end, Topher reflects on building a body of work over time, trusting in the slow and organic process instead of seeking instant influencer success. He explains why he still chooses to create and share resources for free, motivated by the hope of helping the next person just starting out.

If you’ve ever wondered about the power of sharing your work, finding meaning in open communities, or how to make a difference over the long term, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Topher DeRosia.

I am joined on the podcast by Topher DeRosia. Hello.

[00:03:19] Topher DeRosia: Hello there.

[00:03:20] Nathan Wrigley: It’s very nice to chat to Topher. We’ve done this before. We’ve had many chats online, but I just want to pay a special thanks to Topher for reasons I won’t bore the audience with, Topher has sort of joined me at extremely late notice, like minutes of notice.

We had a bit of back and forth yesterday about topics that we may cover, and the one that’s going to be covered today is the one that we decided. But he wasn’t expecting this, and so he’s arrived and I’m extremely grateful. So firstly, my deepest thanks for carving out a bit of your day unexpectedly.

[00:03:50] Topher DeRosia: You’re very welcome. This is always fun, and fit my day perfectly.

[00:03:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. Thank you. So what we decided to talk about was, and I’ll encapsulate it in a sentence that Topher wrote to me, and then we’ll just sort of get into it and see where we go. Topher said, he’d like to talk about the value of doing things in public, and how this can come back to you later as a way of potentially, I don’t know, boosting your career or just offering some guiding light to the community and what have you.

So first of all, in order to give us some idea, I’m sure that there are people who know you, having listened to the things that you’ve done or consumed the HeroPress website or what have you. Will you just give us a little potted bio of yourself related to, I guess the WordPress community, makes most sense in this context?

[00:04:30] Topher DeRosia: Sure. I have been a web developer for 30 years, which is old, but I got into WordPress about 15 years ago and I did not know there was a community for several years. And Brian Richards said to me, hey, we should do a WordCamp. And I said, what’s a WordCamp? And then of course, my life changed forever after.

Oh, you know what? We started with a meetup, but like 2 weeks later he said we should do a WordCamp. And he said, we should do it this summer. And we were talking, like we were talking in June. So we went from never hearing of it before, to having a WordCamp suddenly. And I’ve been in, all in on the community ever since. I’ve been to nearly 80 WordCamps, all over the world. I’ve been making stuff, building stuff, meeting people ever since.

[00:05:12] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.

[00:05:13] Topher DeRosia: It’s pretty great.

[00:05:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, 80. Gosh, that’s profound. I mean, I don’t consider myself to have a high attendee account, but 80, that really is remarkable.

So I think it’s fair to say that the profundity of the effect of discovering that community is pretty important in your life. You know, it’s had a material impact in every way.

[00:05:31] Topher DeRosia: Hugely. My wife got into the community. My children, both my kids have spoken at WordCamp US. My wife has spoken. My kids have friends in other countries that I don’t know because of the WordPress community. Every parent has that fear of, what if something happened to us? What would happen to the kids? And we have family that would take care of them, you know? It’s nice to know we also have that backup where there are people all over the world who would say, hey, we got room, come on.

[00:05:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. I joined the WordPress community, so I’d been involved in lots of open source projects, things like Magento and Drupal and things like that. And I know that Drupal has, there’s definitely stuff in the Drupal space that you can attend. But I never did.

And to be honest with you, I didn’t know that that stuff existed until after the fact. And then in about 2014, something like that, I discovered WordPress. And just like you, I had no conception that it was more than some downloadable bit of software. Honestly didn’t even know that it was done by volunteers. I just had probably some assumption that there was an organization or a company behind it that in some way monetised it and made it free and what have you.

And then just got this intuition, I guess, with social networks, the way that they were at that time, you could find groups and discover that there were all these ancillary groups of people doing things with WordPress, you know, groups focusing around page builders and groups focusing around plugins.

And then for me to discover that there were actual events that you could attend was, just like you, really remarkable. And I attended the first one and I kind of thought, oh, we’ll just see how this goes. I’m a bit of an awkward character in person, so I sort of stood around at the back. But it didn’t take me long to sort of be welcomed in. And just like you, completely changed my life. And ever since then, a sizable proportion of my free time has been devoted to curious WordPress things. It’s amazing.

I can’t quite work out what it is about a project like WordPress that inculcates that, fosters that, makes that possible. Because I imagine if you attended, I don’t know, a Cisco networking conference or something like that, it’s not going to have the same feel. So I don’t know if you want to speak to that for a little bit, why you think the community works.

[00:07:36] Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I have two thoughts about it. One is that I think it’s absolutely because of the people. And it may be chance that the right people found WordPress and got together at the same time. But to that point, that it’s the people, I recently went to two non WordPress conferences in one week.

I went to one for higher education in technology. The people who attended were from universities and colleges, and they were looking for ways to manage web stuff on their entire campus. So do you offer a blog to all 24,000 students, you know? That kind of thing. It was my first time there, but I saw a number of people who were greeting each other and not having seen each other since last year, and the year before, and the year before. And it was very much like a WordCamp. And people talked about how this group is so wonderful and they wait all year long to come back here. And I thought, oh, okay, so this is WordCamp.

And then while I was there, I met somebody who worked at Umbraco, which is an open source .net based CMS. And they’ve been around for 20, more than 20 years, but it’s a very small community, like 0.01% of the market share. And I told her, you know, who I am, what I do, and she’s like, oh, we would love to have you come to our conference this weekend in Chicago. Can I pay you to come? I was like, oh wow, sure.

So I went and it was about a hundred people and it was WordCamp. Everybody there loved the software, loved the community, everybody was friends. It was the same. And expanding just a little more, HeroPress says it’s about people leveraging WordPress to make their lives better. But in actuality, what it is, is open source and remote work combined. It allows people in Malaysia to pick up software and compete on a relatively equal basis with somebody in New York. And in our world, that’s WordPress. But it’s exactly the same with every open source remote work option, Drupal, Umbraco, anything.

[00:09:45] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe open source then is, forgive me, the secret sauce. Maybe that’s the component, the bit that binds those communities together in a way that perhaps, I don’t know, something where a proprietary thing or something was locked down, or profit was the whole point, maybe that is the bit. The fact that there’s a bunch of people gathering together in a kind of philanthropic way. You know, there’s no expectation that my attendance will definitely lead to finance, let’s put it that way.

Like I said, I don’t really have much experience outside the WordPress world, and so my assumption was that there was something a little bit unique. But from what you’ve said, this same exact thing is happening probably a thousand times over throughout the globe, but your expectation there is that the open source component is the bit, the bit that unlocks it.

[00:10:32] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, I agree. WordPress has the advantage of a very large user base, which is good and bad. There are certainly more wonderful people in it than if there were fewer. But at that scale, you are just as likely to have really terrible people. I know people that have left the WordPress community because they’ve been treated horrendously, abused, and it breaks my heart. And I want to say, oh, WordPress is different, you won’t find that here, but you will. It’s too big a community to not have that.

[00:11:01] Nathan Wrigley: I wonder what it is then about that sort of spirit of giving back that creates some kind of, I don’t know, hive mind, for want of a better word. You know, there’s just this ethic that you’re all combined on this slightly higher purpose. So in the case of WordPress, and you mentioned Drupal and you mentioned the other CMS with the small market share, the principle there is that you’re working on something, and I guess publishing is the point. You are enabling people who may or may not have a voice to get on the internet and do something, publish something, write something, put images, videos or what have you.

There is some kind of higher calling there. It’s very hard to sort of grasp that, and to really understand it. But do you know what I mean? You’re doing something which, at the end of your days, you can look back and say, there was something there. There was something meaningful, there was something significant and important. And that feeling, that thing, whatever that thing is, is important, and enough to propel people to give up hours and weeks of their lives to do this.

[00:12:04] Topher DeRosia: I think most people enjoy making other people, I don’t know, so many things, more successful, happier, more stable. And there are open source projects that will shrivel up and die because no one ever says thank you. People work on a project for years and years and they think, you know what? Nobody cares. I’m going to go play Frisbee.

But I think the WordPress community is large enough, and we have these events that everybody goes to, that you run into people who have been impacted by the work you do.

There’s a, boy, can’t remember his first name. Heisel. He’s Dutch but lived in England and now he lives in Malta or something. Anyway, I met him for the first time at WordCamp London and he walked up to me and said, hey, I need to shake your hand. I said, okay. He said, a few years ago I lost my job and I didn’t know what I was going to do and I needed to support my family, and I got on OS Training and learned WordPress from your videos, and now I support my family with WordPress. I about broke down in tears right there.

And that kind of thing happens to lots and lots of people. People who say, you know what? This plugin you wrote, it changed my life. I make a living with this now. I support my family.

[00:13:19] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know what’s kind of interesting there is that, I guess you did none of it with the expectation of that person wandering up. You know, it’s not like, Topher, you sat down and thought, the more thanks I get, the more I’m going to do. There isn’t that kind of expectation. But it certainly helps, doesn’t it? When somebody does come up and express those thoughts to you. I bet you that carried you through the next days, weeks, or months. You know, the capacity to drag that out of your brain.

[00:13:42] Topher DeRosia: It still is. That was years ago.

[00:13:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. Isn’t that interesting?

[00:13:45] Topher DeRosia: I do think though that you don’t do it for the thanks, but it’s a lot easier to do if you think it matters. When people say thank you, it feels good, but it lets you know that what I’m doing matters. It’s making a difference. It’s making somebody’s life better. It’s making the world better. That’s a huge motivator.

[00:14:04] Nathan Wrigley: That’s the big thing. So this is a curious question, right? And it’s not really related to WordPress. Did you have those same intuitions at an early age? Was there some part of you can remember even as, I don’t know, let’s say a 15-year-old or 17-year-old or something like that. Where you had already made the leap that life is better when you are being helpful? Or did you learn that later?

Because I kind of have the intuition that quite a few people in our community probably figured that out at some point fairly early on. And it enables them, I’m obviously not suggesting that people who didn’t make that intuition early on can’t join the community or what have you. But I’m surrounded by people who seem to have this almost bottomless capacity to give. And I’m always struck by how did that begin for them? Where did that start for them? So because I’ve got you on the line, I’m asking you directly.

[00:14:58] Topher DeRosia: When I was in college, I just randomly became interested in motivations. What makes people do things? What makes somebody mean all the time? What makes somebody happy all the time? What makes somebody be kind?

And I thought through the process of how gratitude is an influencer. If you say to somebody, thank you for what you’re doing, it makes them feel good. It makes them want to do it more. If they’re, you know, working at a food pantry and you say, hey, thank you for what you’re doing, it’s changing lives, just feeding children. It makes them want to do that more. If that person at a food pantry were faced every day with angry people who abused them verbally and stuff like that, they’d be a lot less inclined to do that.

[00:15:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I listened to a podcast not that long ago, and I actually can’t remember which one it was because I listened to several in this line. But essentially it was trying to peel back the latest studies in what causes some people to be happy. And I am not going to explain this and have the expectation that everything I say is true, nor that this is the limit of that. But a fairly reliable indicator of happiness, whatever that means, but on a fairly profound level, happiness can be boiled down to these two things, apparently.

One of them is that you are giving of your time. So it may be that you are, as you say, working in a soup kitchen. Or that you are doing something in the community. Or you are just putting into your children or what have you. There is a real connection apparently between the capacity to give something from which you expect nothing in return. Humans apparently find great, deep satisfaction from that.

And the other one is friendship. If you have people that you regard as friends, on a deep level. So obviously acquaintances, we can all have many, many thousands of those, especially online nowadays. But it’s that core little group of really impactful, meaningful people who in the time of crisis, you know are going to have your back.

Those two things apparently are a real predictor of one’s happiness. And both of them seem to stray into our community, you know? Although it’s an online thing, you’re still giving your time, and you know that in a fairly ephemeral way that you maybe can never grasp, people will be benefiting from that. And also you make friends. So there you go, it’s the root to happiness.

[00:17:19] Topher DeRosia: It is.

[00:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: So all of that, having said all of that, you have this wealth of experience in the community. You’ve done so many projects in the community. And as I said at the top of the show, the thing that you wanted to talk about was, not just the mere fact of doing things in the community, but about the fact that you are doing things in the community in a sort of public way, and how that can sort of impact in the future. So just tell us a little bit about why you wanted to get into that, or maybe some anecdotal evidence of how that’s helped you.

[00:17:50] Topher DeRosia: Very little of it in my life has been deliberate. I’ve done some things and then later thought, oh, wow, I didn’t realise that this would be the consequence. I made videos for OS Training for a lot of years, they’re behind a paywall, they paid me by the video. I wasn’t thinking, oh, I’m going to go teach the world. It was a client, I made videos.

And years later, Brin Wilson from WinningWP got a hold of me on Post Status and said, hey, I want to start a YouTube channel. Would you make videos for me? I said, sure, but why me? He said, well, I’ve seen your work. You’ve done this, you have given evidence to the world that you know what you’re doing. And that was a good contract. And I got it because I had previously done something else.

With HeroPress, I didn’t set out to become a relatively known person. I was just doing it. But I remember the first time I talked to a stranger from India and introduced myself and they said, oh, of course we know you. I said, what do you mean of course? You live 5,000 miles away from me. How on earth would you know me? And, boy, it is just stuff like that.

I have some plugins on wordpress.org. I think cumulatively they have 12 installs. They’re not big plugins, but they’re there. And people look and say, oh, Topher knows how to make plugins.

I contribute to the photos project. And people who aren’t necessarily contributors don’t necessarily understand the different kinds of contribution. They just see my name on the contributor list like, oh, Topher builds WordPress because I take a lot of photos or something. But just the fact that I’m out there doing that makes a difference.

I’ve been blogging for years. I did blogs in the GoDaddy Garage back in the day, I wrote on OS Training, I wrote all over the place. And recently I thought, boy, I wish I had had all that on my own site.

And then it occurred to me that WordPress does a lot of RSS, and so does YouTube. And so I built a site called topher.how. Found everything I’ve ever done and just used WP All Import and pulled it all into one place. So now at topher.how you can see stuff I’ve done decades ago, and it’s nice. It’s a place to say, look, here’s stuff I did. But I have gotten, no, you know, I’m not going to say I’ve gotten jobs, I’ve gotten consideration, interviews, interest because people who know who I am, because I did something once long ago.

[00:20:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess the interview phase, to get yourself over the line, you’ve still got to sort of show your metal, haven’t you? But that whole thing of just being represented by your past, it’s really curious. We live in a world which is so dominated by, I don’t know, the financial motivation for this, that, and the other.

It is curious when nowadays you can have a legacy which is not the CV, it’s not the line items on the CV. It can be much more ephemeral stuff. Things that you did, videos that you made, blogs that you contributed to.

The people out there making the decisions about who’s going to get those jobs, well, you have proved that that kind of history of being online definitely works, and in unexpected ways. It’s not like there’s always a through line between, okay, I’m going to make these YouTube videos so that in a few years time I’ll have this credible body of evidence that will make it so that anybody can employ me. It’s much more ephemeral than that. It’s more, I’m doing this video because I think itll be helpful, and then serendipitously that then leads to something in the future.

[00:21:14] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, very much so. Before we started recording, you mentioned my background here. It’s a piece of fabric on a photo stand. And I bought it just the other day because, you know, I’ve been making videos for years, I’ve never appeared on camera. Always been a screencast. And I recently got a client that said, well, we want you on camera. And so I got this thing.

But the interesting part is that the client is a company in Bangladesh. And I know them quite well, they know me quite well because of stuff we’ve done together in the past in the WordPress community. And when they needed videos, they came to me, because they know me and they know that’s what I do. That wouldn’t happen if I hadn’t been out doing stuff years ago. What are the chances I would know somebody, me in Michigan, I would know somebody in Bangladesh?

[00:22:01] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Right, I mean, the world of 50 years ago, it’s tending to zero basically, you know, unless you’d been on plane or somebody had been on a plane in the opposite direction and you’d met where you are. The opportunities afforded are amazing, and it’s that kind of long tail that you’ve got as well. That I suppose is going to be hard for somebody that’s younger to listen to because, you know, they kind of see this mountain that they’ve got to climb and this great body of work that they’ve got to build up over decades. I guess that’s, it’s not all about that either, it’s about sort of just chipping away at it and doing things piecemeal.

[00:22:31] Topher DeRosia: I have a funny story about that. Early in my WordPress career, I got to know Pippen Williamson. You may remember him.

[00:22:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I do.

[00:22:39] Topher DeRosia: And he was very well known in the WordPress community. I got to know a few people who were very well known. I was like, man, that’s cool, everybody knows these people. Wonder if people will ever know me? We were talking about it, he and I, and he quickly urged me, do not seek to be known because that will only lead to tears. If you’re doing it for the wrong reason, then it will just turn out badly.

And so I thought, well, you know, maybe in 10 years. Well, here we are. And I didn’t set out to be known. I’ve never bought a banner ad saying, look at Topher. I just went to WordCamp and spoke. I wrote blog posts, I made videos. I shook a lot of hands. I listened to a lot of stories.

[00:23:18] Nathan Wrigley: It’s about sort of spreading the network organically really, isn’t it? Which I suppose in a sense leads to, okay, rather than the word fame, I’m going to use the word notoriety because I think they’ve got two very different endpoints. But the idea of seeking fame is tied up with, you know, you just want random people to know you because they know you, and that’s the kind of end game, you know? Oh, you are famous because you’re famous, that sort of flavor to it.

Whereas notoriety for me has much more, there’s a body, a corpus of work behind you that leads to that understanding that, okay, that’s Topher. I know Topher because he did this, this, this, and this. It’s not famous because they’re famous. It’s more, there’s the guy who made those videos that I watched. Or there’s the guy that wrote that blog that I read all the time. That kind of thing. And so it’s not fame for fame sake, it’s accidental fame more, if you know what I mean?

[00:24:10] Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I heard the term not too long ago that I like called community known.

[00:24:14] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That’s nice.

[00:24:15] Topher DeRosia: Within a community, you you could say famous, very well known. Outside that community, people do not care and have no idea who you are.

[00:24:22] Nathan Wrigley: That’s right. Yeah, it’s curious, inside of our community, there’s this one person whose name kind of precedes all others, and it would be Matt Mullenweg. But I’m willing to bet that if Matt was walking down the street, more or less anywhere, that his life is just the same as yours and mine. Nobody’s going to know who he is unless randomly they happen to be a WordPresser. But he’s fairly thin on the ground. You know, it’s not like he’s Scarlett Johansson or George Clooney or something like that, where that fame is probably quite an oppressive thing in their life. You know, the capacity to just walk down the street.

So yeah, anyway, the point being that you’ve done stuff over time without the intention of it being this fame for being famous. It’s more about being community known, as you said. But that has had amazing consequences.

And that kind of leads me to this next thing. I wonder, this question comes up all the time, but I do wonder if it’s more material now than it ever has been. I wonder if the community can always cope with the commercial pressure that is being born by the community?

So for example, you know, you up to events and there’s a lot of people trying to sell you things. And maybe WordCamps from 15 years ago would’ve felt very much more a room full of like-minded individuals. Whereas now if you go to WordCamps, maybe there’s more of a feeling of, okay, that bit over there is more commercial, that bit over there is less commercial. But there’s always that kind of commercial angle.

I don’t really know where I’m going with that, but the commercial side of things, I don’t know if you’ve got a feeling on, or a intuition on that?

[00:25:54] Topher DeRosia: Sort of. Something I’ve noticed over the years is that it’s entirely possible to write a plugin, start selling it, have it be successful, build a business, hire people, maybe get a relatively large business, maybe hundreds of employees. And it feels good, it looks good, it’s great, it’s wonderful until it starts going, or getting hard. And then people who never thought this would happen start having to make difficult decisions that hurt people.

If things aren’t going well, we need to let some people go. Maybe we need to let a lot of people go. Maybe we need to reorganise, whatever. And people look at this golden company, the pinnacle of WordPress, open source, love, family, peace, blah, blah, blah, and they’re letting people go. And you think, what? They’re just another business. They were just in it for the money. And they’re not, but it can feel that way when you’ve been let go.

And at some point it has to be about the money. If you’re building a plugin because you love it and you’re selling it because people need it, that’s cool. If you’re running a business and people are depending on you for their livelihoods, you have to make the decisions. You have to do some hard things sometimes. And it’s never going to be comfortable. And at some point it’s going to look like you’re just another company. I’ve never been in this position, but I think it can be incredibly difficult to maintain a culture that we associate with the stereotype of WordPress community, in a full on company.

[00:27:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do know exactly what you mean. I think we, let’s say for example, let’s go back to Cisco. I used that example a minute ago. Let’s say that I work for Cisco. It’s pretty obvious what the goal there is. The goal is to ship loads of units of networking hardware all over the world, and then next year ship more than we ship this year and innovate more and.

[00:27:45] Topher DeRosia: And you have investors that are going to hold your feet to the fire.

[00:27:47] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Okay, so make money, make the investors happy, make the shareholders happy, and so on. That is so straightforward a bargain. But we in our community have this extra layer underpinning it of this philanthropic bit, which forms the basis of it. It’s literally the bedrock of it.

And so that whole thing is propping everything else up on top of it, which I genuinely don’t know how the shifting sands of that all work. We’ve managed to get through 22 years plus, of that building up slowly over time, there being arguments here, there and everywhere. Minor arguments, some bigger arguments. We’ve somehow worked it through.

But I don’t suppose that will ever get perfectly resolved. It’s going to be just part of the understanding that if you’re in open source, there’s a commercial bit. And if you can’t cope with that, well, that’s something you’re going to have to think about and look at. But also there’s going to be this whole philanthropic side, and that has to carry on and has to be funded, and figured out, and made important and advertised and all of that. I don’t have the brain to figure all that out, but it’s part of the jigsaw puzzle.

[00:28:52] Topher DeRosia: Yeah. It’s truly something I’ve never had to deal with, and I hope I don’t, the scales of money. I had a job once when I was very young. We’re at home, we were newly married and money was tight, and we were talking about where to get $20 for groceries and things like that.

And at work I was allocating hardware for new employees and, oh, let’s pick up two or three extra computers at $4,000 each because we might need them. That scale of money is, it’s something I’ve tried to be aware of.

I look at a WordPress plugin company that has employees and I think, oh man, you have so much more money than I do, so much more. And maybe they do, but they also have so many more bills than I do. Just because they have several employees, and they’re doing well and things look great on Black Friday, doesn’t mean that they’re super wealthy or anything.

[00:29:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I genuinely struggle with this component. I don’t think I’ll ever resolve it. I’m just aware that it exists. I’m aware that there’s people who are very polemic about it. There are people on the far this side, and there’s people on the opposite side who maybe are kind of struggling to shout across the gap. But then there’s people sitting in the middle who are somehow managing to figure it all out, or at least be sanguine about it, and not worrying too much about it. Time will tell. In the year 2026, I’m sure that it won’t get figured out, but it will probably carry on.

I’ve got every hope that WordPress is exciting enough to carry on and that people will continue to use it. So I don’t worry too much about that. It’s just more whether or not the two sides of the argument, in an increasingly polemic world, whether the commercial side of WordPress and the non-commercial side of WordPress can figure out some way to walk upon the same path.

[00:30:28] Topher DeRosia: There’s an element to WordPress that I think will carry on, even if it looks like WordPress is starting to fail. And that’s going to be the earliest people, the smallest contributors. Things have been really shaken up in WordPress in the last year or two, and I have friends who’ve left the community. And business is getting bigger and WordPress itself is changing. Gutenberg is a big thing now and AI is moving in and all that. So much is changing.

And I have people say, why do you stay? Why do you keep doing WordPress? Specifically, why do I keep doing HeroPress? And I think my experience tells me that there will always be a 17-year-old picking up a computer at the library for the first time and discovering WordPress and starting a new life. And I want to be there for that person.

[00:31:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So it’s going back to the 17-year-old you as well. You know, that bit that we had earlier where you figured out you had this intuition that there were some things in life which mattered more.

One of the things that I think is really, like it’s so difficult to square this argument though, the whole thing where you see incredible wealth being generated by WordPress and you see incredible endeavors being put into WordPress by people who are really struggling to make ends meet. And I simply don’t have the capacity to figure out the solution to that. I cannot square that circle. But that is such a bit of cognitive dissonance that so much wealth is generated, on the one hand, and yet so much of the foundational work is created by people who may be struggling to put food on the table and what have you. And that is really challenging.

[00:32:12] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, it is challenging. I don’t think it’ll ever be solved. I think it’s a universal problem of humanity. But similar to other areas, I think WordPress does better than other communities. There have been a bunch of discussions in the past about inclusivity, diversity in the WordPress community. And even people who point out the problems and say, look, we messed up here, this is bad, we need to change it, will say WordPress is probably the best of the IT world. There are problems. It’s bad. There are things we need to change, but we’re way ahead.

[00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that’s a really, sorry to interrupt. I got really caught up in what you just said then. I wasn’t expecting that to hit me quite as hard as it did. That was really interesting. That sort of sanguine approach to it. It’s never going to be perfect. We’re probably going to have division and factional fighting, I’m going to do air quotes around the word fighting, but you know what I mean, like infighting and what have you. But we do all right. Given how it could be, it’s okay. These things are just a part of the evolution of it. It’s a journey, not a destination. Yeah, that was interesting.

[00:33:18] Topher DeRosia: We do have to take care though to not rest on our laurels, as it were. To say, oh, you know what? It’s okay, we’re better than everybody else, and so we don’t need to work on it. As soon as we do that, then we will not be better than everybody else.

[00:33:30] Nathan Wrigley: And it’s curious because I think the people that I end up talking to when I attend things like WordCamps have that intuition. I think some, on some innate level, they get the bit that you just said. They know that it’s not perfect. And they know that work needs to be done. And they’re there for that thing. They want to fight the good fight, and make it so that this platform is available to the 17-year-old that you just described, so that they can pick this stuff up and publish their own stuff online, and have their own voice, and create their own identity and all of that. And it’s, yeah, really interesting.

I think I have one more question. So we were talking about the impact of you doing stuff in the open. You obviously did all of that stuff in the open. You did everything, you put everything online, you got HeroPress and all of that kind of stuff. Would you still advocate that in the year 2025, 2026? Do you still think that’s probably the best way forward?

The reason I’m asking that is because we see so much out there in the world, beguiling stuff. TikTok, YouTube, all these people getting YouTube famous, making giant amounts of money and all of that kind stuff. They’re doing it kind of purposefully in order to gain wealth. So it’s less that philanthropic side.

If you could replay your life, would you do that? Is there any part of you which thinks you’d go down that route of being the kind of influencer, or are you happy that your life would replay in, if you were the youngster that you were many, many years ago and you were now that youngster, would you still do it the same way, do you think?

[00:35:00] Topher DeRosia: I think I would. A couple years ago I did a video tip of the week on HeroPress. It was a video on YouTube. And people would say to me, you know what? It’s good that you offer this free stuff. You should put something behind a paywall and make money off it. And I think, oh, you know, that’d be cool. I could make money and pay the bills. But then I think, anything I put behind a paywall is not going to be able to help a 17-year-old who’s making a dollar a week. And that’s where my heart is. And I struggle.

I’m doing a project right now that I would love to tell you about. Over the years, I’ve done support a lot. And I, early on, made a rule, if I get asked a question more than three times, I’m making documentation. And so I can just say, oh, here, go check this out. And over the years I’ve had many clients come back to me three months after I built a site and say, you know, you taught me how to use the WordPress admin and I don’t remember, can you show me again?

So, I don’t know, a year ago I thought, I’m going to make a course for beginners, and it’s going to have videos that are one minute long about how to make a link, how to put in a picture, how to edit your form. Stuff that we all take for granted every day. But somebody who just got a website three months ago and used it once, they don’t remember.

So I started down that road. I got MemberPress, I set up a site, and I made a list of videos to make. I was going to sell it to my clients as part of, you know, you bought a website, for an extra X dollars, here’s all this documentation you can have. A WordPresser at that educational conference said to me, I want to sponsor you to make those videos. You pick the topic, but do it on our hosting platform, just so that our name is there.

And she gave me some money to do it. And she said, I want you to put them on your own YouTube channel. I didn’t have one. All these years, I didn’t have my own YouTube channel for my own videos. I want you to put them on your own YouTube channel, and once you get 2000 subscribers, I will pay you for every video you make. Just to put them on my own YouTube channel. I get to pick the topics. It’s just to get their name out. And I thought, wow, okay.

So I pivoted, rather than make a course behind a paywall, I am doing this thing, but they’re all going on YouTube. And I started three weeks ago, and I’m putting up a video Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I have 57 subscribers.

[00:37:19] Nathan Wrigley: There’s a little road to go. That’s so nice.

[00:37:23] Topher DeRosia: But this goes back to doing stuff in public so that it’s more significant later. Maybe in a year or two or five, I’ll have thousands of subscribers. And life experience has shown me that I need to not assume that I’m going to have thousands of subscribers within a month. That’s not how this works. You do stuff now, you build your foundation and you grow it. And eventually it gets big.

HeroPress happened that way. You know, I did a few essays, and I did a few more and I did a few more. And then one day I thought, oh, I have 200 essays, and now I have 300. I never set a goal of how many or anything like that. I just did one at a time, and then suddenly there’s this big site full of stuff.

And so that’s my current project is to make these videos, helping people figure out how to use WordPress. It’s not going to be just the beginners, it’s going to be, well, have a heart for beginners in any area, so I’m going to do some beginning programming stuff. I’ve built some cool stuff like WP Podcasts, aggregates podcasts. It wasn’t hard. It’s WP All Import, pulling them into the posts type. It’s not that big a deal. But I can make a 10 minute video on how I did that, and some developer’s going to go, wow, I never realised you can do this kind of stuff. So I’m pretty excited about it.

[00:38:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, your life seems to represent that kind of long term approach, and I can completely empathise with that. Obviously my thing is podcasting, and I have the same sort of story that I just began it and kept doing it and kept doing it, and people obviously, you know, found that there was something there for them, or they didn’t.

But there was something that kept that propelled. And now I look back and there’s a few episodes that I can look back to and, it’s pretty amazing what that brought in its train. Most of it completely unexpected, most of it never intended, and now podcasting in the WordPress space is kind of what I do.

And it just goes to show, if you do things with the right intention, and you do things for the long game, there is a way to make it work. You know, obviously you’ve got to keep the wolf from the door, and if you live in a part of the world where it’s incredibly important that you earn lots of money in order to just meet the bare essentials, then you’ve obviously got to take care of that at the beginning. But then after that, there’s these opportunities on top of that to sort of grow who you are, grow the community that we’re in. And maybe in the long term, over 2, 3, 5, 10, in your case, probably approaching 20 years in the WordPress space, it has an impact. It’s slowly but surely. Slow and steady wins the game, as they say.

[00:39:57] Topher DeRosia: It does, yep.

[00:39:58] Nathan Wrigley: In which case, I will say thank you for that conversation. It was very unexpected and really, really powerful in some regard there. You really made me think on a couple of occasions as we were chatting there, and I really appreciate that.

So, Topher, where can we find you if somebody wants to see some of the stuff? You’ve already mentioned one. It’s probably topher.how. I don’t know if that’s the one you want to drop again.

[00:40:17] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, let’s say topher.how. But if you search Google for Topher1Kenobi, you’ll find me pretty much everywhere.

[00:40:24] Nathan Wrigley: Love that.

[00:40:25] Topher DeRosia: I’ve never found anyone else use that name.

[00:40:26] Nathan Wrigley: And it’s the number one, like the numeral one.

[00:40:29] Topher DeRosia: Yeah.

[00:40:30] Nathan Wrigley: Not the wan.

[00:40:31] Topher DeRosia: My personal blog is at topher1kenobi.com. There’s HeroPress. I did an episode the other day with Christos Paloukas, and he said, hey, send me your links.

[00:40:40] Nathan Wrigley: An essay.

[00:40:40] Topher DeRosia: I sent him 15 links.

[00:40:44] Nathan Wrigley: Do that to me as well. Whatever you do send me, then I will put them into the show notes. wptavern.com, search for the episode with Topher. It’s T-O-P-H-E-R. If you just look for that, you’ll probably find it. And thank you so much for chatting to me today. It was very pleasurable. Thank you.

[00:40:59] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, I had a really good time too. Thanks.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how CloudFlare outages impact the web, and WordPress performance solutions.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today, we have Saumya Majumder. Saumya is the lead software engineer at BigScoots with a deep specialization in high performance WordPress engineering and advanced CloudFlare powered architectures. Throughout his career Saumya has built large scale systems ranging from custom caching engines, to migration tools, worker based automations, and edge computing solutions. He’s played a pivotal role at BigScoots overseeing enterprise customers, and developing scalable developer friendly solutions that push the boundaries of hosting for WordPress.

We begin our conversation with a timely discussion about a major CloudFlare outage that recently rippled across the internet. Saumya explains what happened behind the scenes, the nature of these kind of global infrastructure hiccups, and why, even with the most robust systems in place, some downtime is simply inevitable. He offers valuable insights into how BigScoots is able to mitigate these issues for their customers, even automating rapid failovers to keep sites online during outages.

We then move on to explore some of the innovations that the team at BigScoots have been working on. They focus upon site speed and reliability. This includes CDN level page caching, and their close integration with CloudFlare Enterprise. Saumya breaks down how this caching differs from traditional server based caching, and how it ensures that users around the world get fast, local access to website content.

If you’re curious about how hosting companies manage such advanced caching strategies and how CloudFlare might fit into the hosting jigsaw, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Saumya Majumder.

I am joined on the podcast by Saumya. Hello, how are you doing?

[00:03:04] Saumya Majumder: Hey, I’m doing well. How are you doing?

[00:03:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, very well, thank you. So this is going to be an interesting conversation. I got put in touch with Saumya via Tammy Lister, who has been communicating with Saumya over the last period of time. I don’t know exactly for how long. But the idea is that we’re going to talk about what they’re doing over at BigScoots and the interesting innovations that they’ve got.

By pure coincidence, the day before we recorded this, the Cloudflare, I’m going to call it fun, the fun that Cloudflare had with the entire internet happened. And so I think we’ll digress for a bit at the beginning of the podcast and talk a little bit about that as well, which was unexpected. But given that you are working heavily based upon Cloudflare, it’ll be interesting to talk that through.

Would you mind just spending a moment though, just introducing yourself. Just tell us who you are, what it is that you do at your current role, that kind of thing, and then we’ll get stuck into our conversation.

[00:03:55] Saumya Majumder: I’m Saumya. I work as a lead software engineer at BigScoots, specialising in high performance WordPress engineering and advanced Cloudflare powered architectures.

I also build large scale systems from custom cache engine to migration tools, worker based automations, edge computing and whatnot.

I also look after our enterprise customers, all of our internal WordPress projects and plugins and IPs. And I also build scalable, developer friendly solutions for our clients to ensure that they are getting the best service product out of it.

[00:04:29] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much indeed. Now, I’m just going to dwell on that for a little bit. A lot of that seems extremely technical, but also it kind of feels like that you went very much down a particular road very early on.

How is it that you ended up doing all of that interesting, but quite specific stuff? How is it that that happened? Is it something that you pursued out of college or something like that? How is it that you went down that path?

[00:04:51] Saumya Majumder: It’s an interesting question actually. So I remember, back in my second year of college, I started doing projects, like outside projects. So I started dabbling with PHP, like at the very early days of WordPress. So I get into the WordPress and I was like doing coding, changing things, pushing things to the core, tinkering with the WordPress. That was like way back in the days of the WordPress ecosystem.

From that, I was dabbling with PHP and other stuff. So that was like back in the days when I started, and then slowly I started seeing problems and how to solve the solution. So for example, a lot of the companies today, like CDN page based page caching, in today’s 2025 it’s like a very, pretty much common thing across the world. If you go to any premium hosting or any premium package, you kind of expect like CDN based page caching.

You know that that wasn’t the case, even like a few years back. It’s like this level page caching or RAM level page caching, like it’s all on the server. So me and one of my friends, whom we met online due to the WordPress coding things, we actually invented the CDN level page caching. So it wasn’t a thing before that. So there was a plugin that we created called Super Page Cache for Cloudflare that got later acquired by a different company called Optimal.

In that plugin we actually looked at like, okay, all the current solutions, like if you break down how the request is happening or how internet works, like you make a request from wherever in the world, that request then travels through across optical fiber cable, blah, blah, blah, to the ISP data center. Then from there it goes to the data center, well, then it reaches the server from there on. If you don’t have cache, then the server has to populate the entire thing, get the response, give it back to you, if you have the cache.

So we were saying that, you know, this is adding like a huge amount of latency, especially if you are, like the distance between the server and you is larger. Back then there was like MaxCDN, KeyCDN, and all of this provider who are like focusing on static files being served from the CDN.

So that was like already a thing, but we were like, okay fine. But like if static files coming from CDN, that’s great, but the main leap frog forward is if we can move the page. Like, literally serving the page HTML from the CDN itself. So if you are in Australia, the request doesn’t have to come to the US. Like, if it’s cached, it’s literally coming from your neighborhood.

So caching was one of the most complex problems that I kind of always loved solving because it was one of those unsolvable problems in the computer engineering world. So that’s how I like get into it, and then started. I broke a lot of things and fixed them and it’s like a journey. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like a journey of a lot of failure and a little of success, I guess.

[00:07:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I can imagine. Do you ever get the sense that you are approaching the destination or is this whole thing just, I’ll do this and then I know that in a week’s time, there’ll be something else that I can optimise. Is there ever a moment where you’ve thought to yourself, okay, that’s it, we cracked it for now? Or is it always just, no, there’s another thing?

[00:07:55] Saumya Majumder: It’s always a process, right? The technology is evolving. There’s way, way more to dig deeper. So one of the things we recently released was end DB protection caching. I’m going to talk about it in a moment and also login user caching. Both of these things were in my bucket list for years, and I have done like R and Ds, and R and Ds, and R and Ds to figure out exactly the way to do things. So again, you know, like it’s a process, right? And it takes time.

[00:08:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s lovely. Like you say, we’ll get into those bits and pieces. But as I said at the top of the show, by pure coincidence, we had this, let’s just call it a real collapse in a sense of what Cloudflare provides to the internet as a whole. And I think, depending on where you were and when you were awake in the world, I think for Europeans and maybe the part of the world where you are, it hit us right at the time when we’re all awake. I think maybe if you’re in North America, especially on the West Coast, you might have missed much of it.

But for most of the day here, everything on Cloudflare just declined to work. And it was really interesting how profound that was. And we’ve all heard this problem before. We’ve seen the little drawing of the great big tower built of Lego bricks, and there’s the one little brick at the bottom holding the whole thing up, and it’s called Cloudflare, or it’s called AWS or what have you.

Can you explain to us what the heck happened yesterday? Are you able to sort of get into, do you understand it at this point?

[00:09:15] Saumya Majumder: Yeah. So internet is a magical thing. It works by magic. If I get into explaining how it works, it’s going to be another thing. But the way it works is, and especially in case of Cloudflare, right? Like, a lot of people look at Cloudflare, that it is a CDN provider, like MaxCDN or Akamai or like any of these providers. But CDN is just one bit of Cloudflare. Cloudflare is like a, such a gigantic service that is like built on top of it.

So as a result, what happens is, when you have such a big system working together, there are lots of critical dependencies that happens. You have all these boxes, but all these boxes are depending on one of these config file, or one of these things that is coming from the layer below that, right?

And if anything happens in that one thing, the things at the top are working fine, but it cannot work because the one thing that is below it is gone.

I would also like to say there is no such thing in the world of internet that just works. Everything is supposed to break at some point in time. There’s no such thing. Be it Google, be it Azure, be it AWS, Cloudflare, anything it is. Even if you have your own data center and everything like that, like we have, there’s no way that, like a lot of things can happen even after you are prepared to mitigate all of those things, like you have follower, and a follower, of follower and all this backup system, still things can go wrong. Maybe that didn’t turn out, maybe that didn’t happen.

I saw a lot of memes yesterday on Twitter, like a lot of people was posting like, hey, I just joined as an internet Cloudflare. I pushed a code and that happened. And I understand that it’s funny, but when you look deeper into it, it is actually not funny. It is really like a code red scenario. And trust me, no one, no company wants to get into that code red scenario. Because you have to understand, all of these companies also dealing with a lot of enterprise customers to whom they have promised like 100% percent SLA or 99.99% SLA. And so when they don’t meet that, they have to pay a hefty amount of credit back to them.

So it’s not just the downtime and bad reputation and marketing and all that, it’s literal money being bled out of the company because of that. And it’s like all of those systems.

But at the same point in time, the way technology works, things can mess up. You can do multiple tiers of review of the code, you’re still going to miss a certain edge case scenario, which will only occur if this happened and that happened. And the probability of that happening is probably 0.00001%. But that 0.00001%, it’s not zero. It can happen.

In the world of engineering, we call certain things that are super low priority, like it’s never going to happen. I’m not saying that it cannot happen, it can happen, but the probability of that is so low that spending engineering hours on that at this moment, where we have much more critical things to do, it doesn’t come up, right?

But sometimes things happen. And as a senior engineer, it happens like this. And in case of Cloudflare, what happened is as this is like a such a big system, even if they identified the root cause, let’s say that takes some amount of time for the engineers to figure out, and they push that. And you have to understand, a lot of people are sending requests, requests are going down, and they figured out the root cause. They’re pushing the fix and then like a boatload of requests is coming to Cloudflare.

So it takes time for everything to stabilise, you know? So it is bad. It is bad, but anyone who is thinking like, oh, Cloudflare is bad, if I move from Cloudflare to, I don’t know, X, Y, or Z, or something like that, it won’t happen. I haven’t seen, like a Tweet yesterday where somebody said, send cold emails to people saying, Cloudflare is down. But we don’t use Cloudflare, we use our own VPS and dedicated server for that. And I was like laughing out loud. I’m like, I understand that, you know, your data center did not go down, but that does not mean that it can never go down.

[00:13:06] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of guaranteed. I think one of the interesting things that I saw was in the mitigation, the sort of summing up posts that Cloudflare created, there was this whole thing about this unexpected file which kind of doubled in size. It was supposed to be this size, but it doubled in size, and that got propagated. And then for a period of time, the ripple effect of that was that it looked like a DDoS attack. For a period of time it looked as if it may have been malicious actors.

And so the Cloudflare engineers, I think kind of went off, as it turned out, wrong headedly. They went off in the wrong direction, searching for the problem, which probably added a number of hours to the mitigation, and then kind of figured out what was going on. And then, like you said, the whole ripple effect is, it’s not like you turn off a computer, switch the computer back on, and Cloudflare is restored. There’s this whole propagation thing where you find the problem, mend the problem, the problem mitigates, and that is presumably going to take hours and hours and hours. And then you could just see the sort of downtime reports slowly repairing themselves over the internet.

[00:14:08] Saumya Majumder: And you have to understand that, as I said, Cloudflare, people think of Cloudflare as a, either a security company or a CDN company. But Cloudflare is way, way, way more than that, right? The CDN backbone that they have, it’s literally their backbone, the powerhouse on top of which Cloudflare builds their own thing.

So anytime they find a fix of which they call their control plan, you know, pushed the fix to their control plan, that has to get propagated across all of their end edges. And Cloudflare has the highest number of CDN PoPs, you know? So it has to get pushed across all of these places, rebooted and all of these crazy things has to happen in order for everything to go properly. And then all the burst of traffic that is coming on that it has to handle that. It is a crazy thing.

But one of the things that I liked about Cloudflare is that, it’s not that this is the first time Cloudflare had a global outage. They had global outage before as well. There are two things I really love about Cloudflare.

Number one is that they’re super transparent. So anytime things go wrong or situation like this happens, they always push like a detailed blog article explaining exactly what happened, what they did to fix it, and how they’re making sure that this does not happen again in the future. And it never happens in the future.

So if you look at the previous global outage that they had, I think back in June, it was caused because there’s a thing called Cloudflare KV, which had a dependency on GCP. So when GCP went down, so KV went down and as a result the system went down. And from there on, they’re now working on to remove that dependency, building things internally in house to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Previously, there was another, I think last year or something like that, another global outage where the entire main data center went down. There was like multiple failover but the generator didn’t start and then this didn’t start and that didn’t start. And that caused like a huge failover scenario, I think, if you remember that, right?

And from there on, they make sure that, okay, we now have to make sure that we have multiple, that scenario is never going to come back. So they always work towards to make sure everything that happening never happens the second time. And it really does that. But at the end of the day, in the world of technology, things can go wrong. It’s just how it is.

[00:16:11] Nathan Wrigley: What’s kind of curious though, from an end user’s perspective, and you are going to explain to us some of the complexities of the inner workings of BigScoots and how it combines with Cloudflare in a minute, and that’ll be really interesting. But from a non-technical user’s point of view, it just feels like the sky is falling in because so much of the internet has collapsed, so many things that they’re familiar with.

So just a couple of examples which many people would be familiar with. So for example, if you were a user of the social network X, that completely failed. There must be a dependency on Cloudflare at some point there. Also ChatGPT, which is now becoming almost, it’s just a thing which almost everybody at some point of the day is plugged into, that went away.

But then it just rippled out across so many other things. News organisations go down. The ability to log into a variety of things went down. So it may be that your platform itself worked, but you might have had the the Turnstile sort of capture system, which Cloudflare run, enabled, and nobody could log into the proprietary platform that you got because the Cloudflare portion, the Turnstile wasn’t working and so on.

So it just had this enormous effect. And the sort of chilling effect of that is that people then, erroneously I think, sort of view Cloudflare in some way as a bit of a, I don’t know, a giant that needs to be brought to heal in some way. You know, we can never let this happen again, there’s too much dependencies on these small group of massive organisations and what have you.

But by today, everybody’s forgotten that, you know, they kind of moved on with their lives and we’re back to what it was like on Monday. And so there’s no question in there, but I think there’s some insight that I’m sharing.

[00:17:41] Saumya Majumder: Oh yeah, absolutely. So there are a couple of very important things to understand here, right? So first of all, as you said, the people who talks about these kind of things on the social media, trust me, either they’re not engineers, senior engineers, or they don’t understand the problem.

And so these are the people who talks about this exact same thing where a few weeks back AWS went down, and then a couple of months back, GCP went down. And then they were like, well, Facebook went down, they literally just use this exact same word every single time something goes down. But things can go down. That’s like, you have to accept that and move on.

And that’s why when you get onto these enterprise deals with these big companies, they have this SLA agreement, like where they say, we grant to you, as I told you about earlier, right? So all of these companies, GCP, AWS, Cloudflare, if you are like a big enterprise customers of them, you have like an SLA agreement with them. Where they say, okay, we are going to guarantee that we’re going to give you 100% uptime, or 99.999999% uptime. And anytime they miss that mark, they have to pay back a huge sum of money as a credit to the customers saying, okay, we missed on our contract, so this is that credit back to you.

So you have to understand that anytime situation like this happen, it is not only a bad thing on the companies, on the marketing front of it, but it is also a bad thing on the financial side of things. Because you have to understand like all of these big companies, there are these smaller clients who are dealing with companies like, there are smaller clients and there are like giant clients, the enterprise customer who companies are really worried about. And for these giant clients, they have to pay huge amount of money back as credit because things didn’t come back within time. So it is not something that they are not worried about to fix immediately. They’re literally trying as hard as possible to fix that.

So that being said, now talk about the other points that you brought up, the turnstile, the WAF and the other things, right?

So as I said, Cloudflare is not just a security company. It’s like a huge thing. Cloudflare has a thing called Developer Platform where you can literally deploy your own APIs, your AI workload, your workflows, your entire React or entire application on Cloudflare, which is amazing. I use it. I love that platform.

And then that is one side of using Cloudflare, and then there’s another side of using Cloudflare like, for example, using BigScoots. You have let’s say a WordPress website that is hosted on BigScoots, but it is being proxied via Cloudflare to leverage their CDN, their security and all of those features.

So in a scenario like a WordPress site where you are not using Cloudflare as your host, so your Cloudflare is just there as a proxy, making sure that your origin IP is not there, your site is super protected and performance and CDN and whatnot. In that scenario, anytime this kind of problem happens, you can kind of, when this outage was there, the API was still working and we actually, for all of our customers, we leveraged our API to make sure that any request does not proxy via Cloudflare, but instead it just goes directly to our server just for the moment in time until Cloudflare is back in the game.

[00:20:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so you could turn the proxy off via the API.

[00:20:45] Saumya Majumder: Via the API, yes.

[00:20:46] Nathan Wrigley: Right. So the fact that the rest of us couldn’t log in because Turnstile was down, we couldn’t authenticate into the Cloudflare network on the web. The API was still available, so you could turn the proxy off for a variety of your customers, and the domains and the websites that they had.

Oh, that’s really interesting. So they had a few minutes of downtime. Okay, that’s fascinating.

[00:21:04] Saumya Majumder: So what we did is when we saw this outage happening, anytime requests are coming in, it was a code red scenario on our end as well. All hands on deck. So anytime requests are coming in, like people are having problem, we immediately turned on the proxying API to make sure that this site is up and online.

So that way the request is not going via Cloudflare anymore, it’s coming directly to us for the moment, until CloudFare is back on track. And that helped us to mitigate the downtime as much as possible for the customer, even though Cloudflare was technically down.

But if you would have been hosting your Nuxt or React or Next.js kind of application on Cloudflare, where you are using Cloudflare workers and things like that as your host, in that scenario, you couldn’t push anything.

[00:21:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the API is not going to help you.

[00:21:51] Saumya Majumder: Yes, yeah. It was bad but it’s going to happen. It can happen.

[00:21:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that’s kind of the message, you know? Nothing that humans create is immutable. Everything has a moment of breaking. But, you know, if you were to cast your mind back until, well, just Monday when everything was, you know, just plain sailing, Cloudflare was working as normal, then everybody was entirely happy. We had this period of time, it was maybe something like 8 hours where everybody’s kind of throwing their arms in the air and, you know, moaning on whatever social networks are still working.

But now we’re onto Wednesday, that whole thing is long behind us. That ship sailed, whatever, move on. Confidence, I think basically what you’re saying is you can be confident in Cloudflare. They’re going to have hiccups because they’re like any other company, things will go wrong.

[00:22:33] Saumya Majumder: Everything can have hiccups. So it’s not just, so you have to understand this, right? Again, I’m saying that Cloudflare is not just a CDN provider, but if you look at Cloudflare and all the things that they do, the complexity of it is like mindbogglingly crazy, you know? Like it’s immense, immensely complex. It makes things super easy for you. Okay, you just toggle this on and it’s done. But if look at under the hood, and all the things and chains it has to go through, and that happens in a blink of milliseconds, it’s crazy complicated.

As I said, right, like I’m not saying that Cloudflare is bad. I think Cloudflare is amazing because two things, they have super transparency, so anytime anything happens, the blog article that you are like referencing here, they didn’t hide behind anything like, oh, it was not my problem, like not doing the blame game thing. No, no, no. Like, it was our problem. This is the problem.

For example, in that blog article, they could have completely, don’t talk about the DDoS thingy, right? They could have just said, oh, this was the configuration file problem. We fix this, it’s done. But no, they actually literally walk you through how exactly they process the problem, which is really great. And then they actually learns from their mistakes to make sure that particular mistake never happens again, while they are like growing rapidly and building things, pushing things like crazy, like always pushing new things, which is like amazing to me.

[00:23:50] Nathan Wrigley: I think the article even started, if it wasn’t the first set of words, it was definitely in the first couple of sentences. It was something like, we let you down. It was full ownership, I think. So bravo to them.

And you’re right, the complexity behind it, you know, like you said earlier, the internet, the fact that anything works on the internet is an utter miracle of engineering, of computer engineering.

You know, the fact that we’re on a platform that we are staring at each other. I can see your image, you can see my image, you can hear my audio, I can hear your audio. You are on the, a different side of the planet, but it’s happening like you’re stood next to me. And the millions of packets of information that have flown during the course of this conversation, it’s insane. And Cloudflare add a whole layer of other stuff on top of that, which makes it even more insane.

[00:24:33] Saumya Majumder: Yeah. And you have to ask the question, like, why all these big companies are using Cloudflare like if it is so bad. Because they are doing things that nobody else even think about doing at a scale. And it’s like mindblogglingly crazy. It’s crazy.

[00:24:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah, it really is. So we’ll leave that for another day. But obviously over at BigScoots, you’ve really attached your wagon, if you like, to Cloudflare. And when you agreed to come on the podcast to talk to me, it became obvious to me that the pay grade that you are at is very different to the pay grade that I’m able to keep up with.

So we’re going to talk about what you’re doing over at BigScoots. I’m going to try to keep up, but if I misunderstand something, or I have to ask you to repeat something, I hope that’s okay with you. But I’m just curious because Tammie Lister, like I said at the beginning of this episode, she’s somebody whose opinion I respect a lot, and she said that you are doing some really innovative, interesting things with your connections to Cloudflare at BigScoots. So just lay out some of the interesting engineering work that you’ve been doing. I’ll try to hold on.

[00:25:30] Saumya Majumder: First I’m to Tammie is great. Tammie is amazing. But yeah, I mean, I think BigScoots have been one of the first to utilise Cloudflare Enterprise in the hosting world. I know we didn’t do any kind of huge marketing like other hosts, but we have been the first to leverage Cloudflare Enterprise in our hosting ecosystem. And it was such early days, like back then, all of these things, this market wasn’t there. So we were building things that people didn’t even test it out.

So as I said in the beginning, like I, along with one of my colleagues, we invented the CDN level page caching. This is way before APU and all of that. So all of those things actually build upon the architecture systems as we build on, including APU and the workers and stuff.

So at BigScoots, the Cloudflare thing, especially the Cloudflare Enterprise thing opens up a whole new door for us because it now allowed us to provide CDN level page caching for every single user at a super high cache hit ratio. I mean it’s like, every time you hit a page, chances of that getting, coming out of cache is much higher, compared to if you are, or like a free plan or any other plan, right?

So that was the beginning. And on top of that, we build our own proprietary plugin called BigScoots Cache, which allows you to not only leverage and take advantage of the Cloudflare page caching, but giving you the ability to fine tune every aspect of page caching that you would like on webpage.

[00:26:56] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to pause you right there. Firstly, because I’m sure that almost everybody in the audience, because their WordPress aligned, is going to understand what a cache is. They’re going to understand this process of kind of, okay, let’s remember something for next time so that when we need it next time, it’s kind of ready. But they may not understand how Cloudflare does this on their Enterprise plan.

So what is it that’s different? Because we may be familiar with, I don’t know, a WordPress plugin and we’ve got some idea that there’s a cache. It’s sitting on the server somewhere in a file, it’s an HTML file or something like that. You are describing something not in one location, but like really just spread globally so it’s ready at the point of least distance from wherever somebody is. So tell us a bit more about that.

[00:27:35] Saumya Majumder: So let me explain that with like an analogy, right? So before CDN level page caching, I think pretty much everybody would remember, like we used to have caching plugins. I’m not going to name anything, but they were caching plugins. So when you turn them on, what they essentially did was they would create like an advanced-cache.php. You have everything of that file inside your WordPress installation.

What that used to do is, when you send a request, let’s say you are in Australia, right, and your server is in US, so you want to open example.com, and that requests flows through under the ocean, it goes to the data center, it goes to the server, the server receives the request, it started processing that, run all the database queries and all of that, and then it got the HTML to show it to you.

Back then what it used to do is then, advanced-cache.php would kick in, it would create a copy of the HTML, store that locally on the server so the next time if someone requests for that page, instead of asking the server, hey, please process the PHP and database and all of that, it would require much less amount of server resources because it’s just like, WordPress is like warming up. The request goes to advanced-cache.php, then it says oh, I have that cache file, sends that cache response back to you.

But even in this scenario, if you are making this request from Australia and your server is in US, you have to understand that the latency is very high, because the request has to go from Australia to US and then whatever gets there is, you know, response from there and come back from US to Australia. So the traversing time is pretty high.

From there on, and back then we are thinking about MaxCDN, you know, KeyCDN and like putting static files on the CDN so that, yes, the page is being generated by the server, but the static files are being served literally where you are. Like, if you are in Australia, in Sydney, so maybe the CDN PoP in Sydney is like, when you make a request for that, the static file is coming from Sydney.

That’s where we thought about, what if we can put this page HTML, instead of in the server, we can put it on the CDN? There were two benefit out of this. First, it is in insanely fast. Because if this page HTML is across the world, so if you are in Sydney making the request and the request is like, oh, okay, I have this page cache to me, here you go, the response, you get that in like less than 100ms, you know?

Same thing happens for someone sitting in India and Germany and some other places of the world, because it’s cached across the globe. So it’s not just coming from a single place. And anytime it is not cached, the request goes to the server, HTML processed, and by the time the response is sent out, it got cached. It’s cached across the world.

Now, that was the page caching part of it, right? And then there’s other things, the object cache and OPcache, that’s like whole another different level. But I’m not going to get into that. I’m just going to stay with, because then it’s going to get way too long.

So that’s where this object caching and Cloudflare Enterprise came into play, right? Cloudflare Enterprise then allowed us to make sure that we can cache all these pages across the globe with a very high cache hit rate. Cache hit rate means, when something gets cached somewhere, let’s say someone makes a request to that file and that cache is expired from there and it’s not there. So the request, again, has to go to the origin and get processed and come back to you.

So that is generally the case with the lower tier plans with Cloudflare. So with Cloudflare Enterprise you get a very high cache hit ratio. So when it’s getting the cache, it stays on the cache for a very long time. On top of that, we got tiered cache and regional tiered cache and all of those crazy things.

Which that means is, we have tiering systems. So when you make a request, the request first gets cached in the upper tier. And when a lower tier, so let’s say, how can I explain this to you? So let’s say you are in Phoenix, okay? And in Phoenix there’s a data center, or a PoP that is called, in case of CDN, a PoP is there in Phoenix but the upper tier PoP is Chicago.

So let’s say someone made a request from Chicago, the page was cached in Chicago data center, okay? Now, as we have this tiered cache system, when you, from Phoenix, is making the request, instead of that PoP directly sending the request to the origin, it would first internally within the intranet of Cloudflare, not the internet, okay? The intranet of Cloudflare. The internal network like, hey, does anyone in the upper tier has this page cached to you? And if they say yes, they would fetch it from the upper tier, which is like crazy fast because there’s no traffic, and it’s like a internal network of Cloudflare.

And if it does not, then it pass on the request to the upper tier, because the upper tier is the only one who has the power to pull the request from origins. It goes to the upper tier. Upper tier pulls it from the origin, creates a copy, and it’s upper tier, and then send it back to the lower tier. So in that way, in the tiered architecture, it makes sure that the cache hit ratio is insanely high.

[00:32:24] Nathan Wrigley: Let me just sort of read that back to you just to make sure I’ve understood. And I’m imagining that, the simplest way my head is understanding that is a bunch of concentric circles. So in the center is me, and I wish to find something on, let’s say, the outer circle. So the first thing I’m going to do is go to my inner circle, and if the inner circle doesn’t have it, we need to go to the next circle out, and the next circle out, and the next circle out.

Now in the old world, if you like, or the non-enterprise version of Cloudflare, at some point we have to go further out of the circles in order to find what it is that we’re looking for. But what I think you are saying is that on the enterprise level, that outer circle is constantly pushing things towards the inner circle on a much more local basis. So rather than having to go out circle, another one, another one, another one, it can just hop one circle out, get what it needs, and then hop right back. In other words, every single thing is always closer, geographically, than it would be in any other setup.

[00:33:22] Saumya Majumder: Yes, and on top of that, if you look at the opposite architecture of this, right? So imagine you are in Phoenix, Phoenix doesn’t have it in cache. Phoenix sends a request to origin, now someone from Mississippi makes a request, they don’t have it in cache, their PoP makes a request too.. So all these PoPs are making requests to the origin because they don’t have it in their own local cache, which is bad because that would then mean the request to the origin would increase dramatically, which we are trying to reduce.

But in this sense we have, imagine like a fixed set of upper tier data center, then we have like a middle tier and then the lower tier, right? So if lower tier doesn’t have it, it asks the middle tier, middle tier checks if any of the middle tier across the world have it. If they do, immediately send it. And that’s happening within the internal network of Cloudflare and not on the open internet, okay? It’s like crazy fast.

[00:34:11] Nathan Wrigley: Right, okay. So again, forgive me, I’m going to make a leap of faith here, I could have this wrong. I’m guessing that on the Cloudflare side, they have their own bespoke hardware to route all of this stuff. So like you said, you described it as an, it’s like an internet intranet, almost, the scale that they’re on. But they’ve got their own hardware, which will be able to route that information presumably more quickly, and with less, I don’t know, less latency than you and I might have.

[00:34:36] Saumya Majumder: Yeah, it’s a intranet, it’s not internet. It’s a private channel, right? So no one talking there except for Cloudflare. And the best part of that is, so imagine let’s say you are making a request from Mississippi, and there is like a upper tier data center in Mumbai, India, right? So what happens is, even though it’s not cached in US, it’s going to see that, okay, I have it cached in Mumbai, let’s take it from there instead of making a call to the origin, reducing the call origin, yeah.

[00:35:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that bit I didn’t understand. So the entire network is aware of where the closest thing is even before it needs to have it. I got it. Okay. That’s fascinating. And do they own the cables? Do Cloudflare own the cables connecting these things?

[00:35:18] Saumya Majumder: Yes. Yes, they have their own data center, their own backbone, all of that. And on top of that, like at BigScoots we even have direct physical connections to Cloudflare service. That’s called CNI. That’s like a next step. So again, let me kind of paint a picture. This is you as a user, right? This is Cloudflare sitting in the middle, acting as a reverse proxy, and this is origin, okay?

So the way it works is you make a request, right? So let’s say you, a request is received by this in a reverse proxy Cloudflare. Then it process that thing, whether it has to show you a WAF page, whatever the logic is, right? Does it have it in cache and all of that? You know, if it is not being blocked or challenged, do I need to show it in cache? Do I have it in cache? You’re talking to the internal network, all of that. And that’s happening in this middle tier, right?

And this middle tier is now connected to their entire Cloudflare chain, right? So if, let’s say Mumbai has it, and it pulls from Mumbai, give it back to you. So the request never goes to the origin, right?

Now, for whatever reason, you make a request to Cloudflare, Cloudflare checks it’s internal network, it doesn’t have it itself, so it has to make a request to the origin, right?

There’s the interesting part. This bit of connection that is you and the Cloudflare, that’s happening over the open internet, right? Because like you making and the request goes by the open internet and lands to Cloudflare, right? And then this is your origin, so your Cloudflare to origin, right, that also generally happens by open internet. Cloudflare then makes a request, and that request goes by the internet and, you know, lands on the data center.

But here’s the magical part that we have done. As we run and own our own data center, what we have done is we have connected a physical cable, like literally optic fibre cable with super insanely high bandwidth with the Cloudflare servers, with our servers. So what happens is, anytime Cloudflare has to fetch something from our origin, instead of sending that request by the open internet, which could be slow, there could be congestion and whatnot, it then sends via that private network that we have created, that private optical fiber cable and lands directly to our origin. Like, oh, this is hosted on BigScoots. We need to talk to BigScoots. Okay, send via this channel, which is not part of the open internet. And boom, it gets there, comes back, it’s like insanely fast.

[00:37:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. How did that happen? Like, is that some sort of agreement that you have struck up directly with Cloudflare so that you can tap, you know, in a sense it feels like you’ve become a third party piece of their network infrastructure almost.

[00:37:47] Saumya Majumder: Think of like, if Cloudflare is like a one gigantic network, our systems are also plugged into their network so that they can use the intranet system to fetch data directly from us, instead of using the open internet, which is much slower, there could be congestion and whatnot. To making that request between the Cloudflare, the proxy and the origin, making that instantly fast.

[00:38:10] Nathan Wrigley: So how did that whole thing come about? How is it that you fell into this agreement? Because I don’t know if many other organisations do this, you know, outside of the web hosting space, maybe this is a typical thing where you could follow a roadmap from another company that had done it. I’ve not heard of this, so that’s kind of interesting. How did that relationship come about?

[00:38:26] Saumya Majumder: If you don’t run your own data center, it is very hard to do this.

[00:38:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do not.

[00:38:30] Saumya Majumder: Yeah, because you have to literally connect your servers and routers and everything to the Cloudflare network, you know? So most of the hosting companies out there, they don’t run their own data center on their own space. They actually lease, what I call lease their hardwares and services from other cloud providers. Whereas we run our, you know, our private cloud, our private system, our own data centers, you know?

So like, for example, some company could use AWS or GCP or Azure and then create their own flavor of it and run Cloudflare through it. So they actually don’t have physical access to those data center’s other servers. Whereas we do. If we see something, we can literally pull up the drive, we can do things at our data center, we can change things, we can attach those things physically, which pretty much none of the hosting provider that I know of has access to.

[00:39:19] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so interesting. Honestly, we could go on about this for absolutely ages. But basically, the long and the short of it is, you’re making things as fast as it’s possible for electrons to be. In a distributed network where some things don’t know things, and other things do know things. It’s all an enterprise in trying to figure out how to make it so that everything knows everything as fast as it is possible for electrons to fly around through the optical cables that there are spread throughout the world.

[00:39:47] Saumya Majumder: I haven’t even described the servers.

[00:39:47] Nathan Wrigley: I’m nowhere near finished because I want to get into what it’s like for somebody using, we’re a WordPress podcast, so I guess at some point we need to sort of grind it into that. So how would it benefit just some normal human being who’s got a WordPress website? What does all of this clever technology that you’ve created and that you’ve combined with Cloudflare over at BigScoots, what does it bring?

[00:40:09] Saumya Majumder: It brings insanely fast speed. Insanely fast speed, super improved Core Web Vitals, and super DDoS products and all of that. It brings all of that. And I don’t want to talk about this kind of things, which I know the audience might not be interested about. I want to talk about more other interested things that the users can use.

So I was talking about BigScoots cache, which is our own IP, right? So we created our BigScoots cache plugin, top two are manage this entire Cloudflare caching system to work with that. And not just that, it gives you, if you are an advanced user, it literally gives you the ability to fine tune and manage every aspect of caching system that you want, every aspect of it.

So let’s say for example, we by default set the cache TTL, CDN cache TTL to let’s say X, but you have like a bunch of pages where you want, I want the TTL to be lower. There’s a hooks for that. You can use that.

Or maybe, let’s say whenever we have intelligent cache purging systems. So whenever you push up to create a post or update a post or something like that, what happens is anytime you push that button, like publish or update, behind the scenes the BigScoots cache plugin intelligently, not only clearing cache for that particular page, but it also knows all the other important pages like taxonomy pages, like archive pages and all that, like author pages that are linked to that article, and then clearing cache for those as well.

So you can also use other hooks. So let’s say you have some fake archive pages that we have seen a lot. Let’s say you are using a theme where you are showing list of articles on a page, which is like technically a page where you are using like a short code, which is not like a real archive page. So the system doesn’t recognise it as an archive page, but you want to clear that page cache whenever something of this tag or this category is published. There’s a hook for that. You don’t have to do that yourself. If you come to us and tell us like, this is our problem, this is the problem, we can actually write the code for you and do it for you. Like, we can literally just set that up for you. We provide like fully managed system.

[00:42:10] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m guessing that the level that you’re at there is you’ve got to have a fairly deep understanding of the sort of caching infrastructure, or would what you are offering be available, not necessarily to deploy, but could anybody understand this with a rifle through your documentation or is it fairly, propeller hat, tinfoil hat stuff?

[00:42:28] Saumya Majumder: We have like a proper documentation for every single hook there is. At the very top we talk about, like this is for the advanced audience. And if you don’t know what hooks are and things like that, it is going to be hard for you to understand what’s going on. But if you know, if you are familiar with actions and filters and things like that, it is going to be pretty straightforward for you.

So that’s why I said, if you don’t know, but you have a problem, and that happens a lot of time, people come to us, we just literally just write a snippet and just make that happen for them.

So you don’t have to know all of that crazy things, you know? It’s there if you are an advanced user, the documentation is there, but if you are not, it’s also there. On top of that, BigScoots cache has its own REST API, which you can use to clear cache, like you can literally use BigScoots cache REST API to clear cache. Imagine you have built like a Laravel system, or some backend system where you are adding something to your e-commerce site and you want to clear cache. When that happens, you can literally leverage BigScoots cache REST API to do that. So that’s like the, on the end of BigScoots cache. Then inside our BigScoots portal.

[00:43:34] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, that was where I was going next actually. Go on, yeah.

[00:43:36] Saumya Majumder: Yeah. We have, I think we have the most advanced and fine grain control to Cloudflare Enterprise that no one else in the industry provides. So I don’t know if you got a chance to look at our enterprise settings page. We really allow users to fine tune things exactly the way they want. So for example, let’s say you, do you want to protect your login pages from bad bots and actors, so that they can’t DDoS that? There’s a toggle for that. Turn that on, it’s done.

You want to enable our own advanced hardening production, which is not using Cloudflare hardening production, it’s using our own proprietary algorithm for that. You want to use that, feel free. Turn on, that toggle is there.

You want to change your image optimisation settings, do that. You want to enable Rocket Loader to every single thing starting from cache settings, speed optimisation settings, there are like bunch of things that you can play around with. You want to block AI bots, do that. You want to block bad bots, like manage, challenge bad blocks altogether, just turn a toggle, it’s done.

So we have so many settings there. I think, if you go take a look at just that settings, you would be blown away. Like, all the things that we allow our customers to customise and fine tune.

Let’s say, for example, you want to block requests from certain countries or continents, and now settings is there. Just choose the countries or continents, requests are blocked. You want to manage, challenge, you don’t want to block, you want to challenge the request from certain countries and countries, you can just go to the settings inside our portal, choose the contains and countries from where you want to challenge. So you could have a combination. So you want to block requests from these countries and continents, challenge from these continents and countries and don’t do anything for the rest of them. So you can play around with this to a whole new level, like you can just do anything you want.

[00:45:19] Nathan Wrigley: It’s absolutely fascinating. And it kind of makes me feel that your target audience would not be really the bricks and the mortars shop, the mom and the pop website?

[00:45:27] Saumya Majumder: There actually are. Yeah, like you you won’t believe how many times we have got a request like, hey, you know what? In our analytics, we are seeing that we are getting a lot of requests from Thailand, and that’s like broken our tools like that, so I want to either challenge or block that. So we are like, you go to the settings, choose the Thailand, click save, it’s done. So it’s like as simple as that.

[00:45:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’m kind of imagining though, that you are kind of ideal customer, for want of a better word, maybe that’s the wrong wording, but would be kind of agencies, WordPress agencies, that kind of thing, who could obviously make use of this. They’ve probably got teams of people who can dedicate time to figuring out how BigScoots works, and maybe having a constant conversation with you to optimise the websites that they’ve got and, you know, maybe some of their clients are what we might call enterprise clients and things like that.

If that’s the case, there’s always this merry dance of agencies trying to find the perfect host and kind of figure out, okay, which company do we want to go with this year? And all of that. Do you make it straightforward for people to sort of come to you and say, okay, we’ve got 150 websites, it’s really important that we don’t have any downtime? Do you have some sort of onboarding, migration, something along those lines?

[00:46:30] Saumya Majumder: So we have a lot of enterprise customers, and for every single one of them we have a proper systematic onboarding flow. So that’s making sure that they do, we do migrations with zero downtime, have multiple peer reviews. Then if they have taken our performance optimisation packages and things like that, we would actually optimise their performance and speed metrics for them. And then if they have taken our engineering and services projects, then we would actually do all the, like if they have any technical problems, we would actually go on write code for them, solve their problems.

So we go very hand in hand with our enterprise customers doing onboarding call, making sure they’re happy from end to end. And whether that’s agencies or just normal enterprise customers, it’s for all of them.

And I also want to talk about the settings that you just talked about. So we build all of these things, keeping in mind that they are dead simple to use for anyone. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to do it. A lot of the times customers comes to us and like, hey, we want to do this. As we provide managed support, we actually go into the exact same settings and do that. And that actually solves the problem a lot because now anybody can go to the settings and just do this. Be it our own team or, because it doesn’t have to be escalated, it doesn’t have to come to a specific team. Anybody can do that. And we are constantly growing the more things that people can do to leverage that out. And yes, agencies and enterprise are taking huge advantage of that.

[00:47:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, honestly, it’s absolutely fascinating. You never know, hopefully you and I, our paths will cross at some point in the year 2026. Maybe I’ll see you in Mumbai or something like that.

But what I’m going to do is I’m just going to say, if you’re curious about any of this, I will provide links to everything that we talked about. So if you head over to wptavern.com and you search for the episode with Saumya, so S-A-U-M-Y-A, you’ll be able to find it over there. Honestly, I feel like we’ve just scratched the surface. I feel like there’s another 8 hours in the pair of us, really could get into the weeds of it.

But thank you so much for peeling back the curtain a little bit on what you’re doing and how it all works with Cloudflare. Thank you so much.

[00:48:28] Saumya Majumder: No problem. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, leading Jetpack, the past, the challenges, the vision, and the future.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today we have Devin Walker. Devin’s journey in the WordPress ecosystem spans many years, with experience in development, design, marketing, and customer support. He is best known as the co-founder of GiveWP, which he built and scaled before it was acquired. During his time there, he touched a variety of prominent WordPress brands, including iThemes, Kadence, LearnDash, and The Events Calendar.

Today Devon is starting a new role leading the Jetpack suite of services at Automattic. It’s a position with hefty responsibilities as Jetpack powers millions of WordPress sites, and integrates deeply across

I talk with Devon about why he took on this challenge. The divisiveness and complexity surrounding Jetpack, and his vision for refocusing the plugin and simplifying its user experience.

We start by hearing about Devon’s extensive WordPress background, and the choices he weighed up when deciding to join Automattic.

The conversation quickly moves to the scope of Jetpack, its evolution, the struggle to be a jack of all trades master of none, and the recent efforts to bring greater focus and polish to key features like forms and SEO

Devin gets into the organizational changes at Automattic. How Jetpack’s development teams now collaborate more fluidly with other product teams, such as WooCommerce, and the balancing act of shipping improvements to a 4 million strong user base without breaking things.

AI emerges as a massive new frontier, and Devin shares behind the scenes insights into Jetpack’s current, and future, aI capabilities, giving us a glimpse at content creation, block building, and how AI might reshape user and developer expectations in WordPress.

Throughout we hear about Devin’s approach to product marketing, and the need for more of it, the importance of listening to user feedback, and his plans for a more coherent and compelling Jetpack experience.

If you’re a WordPress user wondering where Jetpack is headed, what’s working, or how AI fits into the future of site building, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Devin Walker.

I am joined on the podcast by Devin Walker. Hello, Devin.

[00:03:34] Devin Walker: Hello.

[00:03:35] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. Devin has a shiny new job. Up until a few weeks ago, Devin was not an Automattician, or at least I don’t think you were maybe at any point in your past. But you are now an Automattition, and you are doing what?

[00:03:47] Devin Walker: My official title is Artistic Director of Jetpack, but basically product owner, or head of Jetpack. Whatever you want to call it.

[00:03:55] Nathan Wrigley: So when it comes to Jetpack, the buck stops with you. I guess that’s a pretty important role in the WordPress space over at Automattic. And if anybody hasn’t heard of you, I suppose it would be important to just lay the groundwork, who you are, what you’ve done in the past.

I know you’ve got a long and storied history, but just maybe a one minute little short bio telling us who you are and what you’ve done.

[00:04:14] Devin Walker: Yeah, sure. I’ve been using WordPress for all sorts of things, development, design, blogging for 16 years now. Really made my name known, I guess you would say, with Matt Cromwell. We co-founded GiveWP together, and we grew it for seven years, from late 2014, all the way through 2021, which then we were acquired by Liquid Web and was there for a little more than four years, and touched a lot of brands from there, from the iThemes rebrand to SolidWP, to Kadence, to LearnDash, Events Calendar, and of course GiveWP as well.

And left there in early August of this year, 2025. I also built WP Rollback throughout the years, that has quite a few active installs. So yeah, that’s a bit about me. Developer, design background, definitely well-rounded with marketing and supporting customer success.

[00:05:05] Nathan Wrigley: So you’ve had a lot of experience working with WordPress products, which I guess is what you are doing over at Automattic, because let’s just call it head of Jetpack, just to make it easy. It’s a curious title, by the way. Artistic Director is kind of a really.

[00:05:17] Devin Walker: You know Automattic loves that title.

[00:05:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, they love that, don’t they? But head of Jetpack, and obviously you’ve got a long and storied history kind of growing products and making sure that they succeed and customer support and all of that kind of thing.

And I feel like Jetpack, no matter what time you dropped in on Jetpack in the last, let’s say decade, I feel that half of the community felt like it needed a lot of love.

And I’m just wondering when you were interviewing for this position or when this position was offered to you, I don’t know how that process went, but what the kind of broad brush strokes are in what you’re hoping to do over there?

We’ll get into the weeds very much, but roughly speaking, what’s the scope of the new job? What is it that you are hoping to do in the next three, six months, years, something like that?

[00:05:57] Devin Walker: Yeah, so when I left Liquid Web, I wrote a long, well, not long, but wrote a blog post about closing that chapter of my career and really being open to what’s coming next for me. I knew that I wanted to stay in WordPress and I was having fun building on just my own products at the time, and having full control of everything, the whole lifecycle of a product.

And I did some work with Matt in the past on some of his nonprofit sites with Give and the VIP team and the concierge at Automattic. And so Matt called me up one day, you know, we stayed loosely in contact over the years, and said, we have some interesting opportunities here at Automattic, and one of them that I think you’d be great at is Jetpack. And in my mind I’m like, Jetpack, this is a doozy.

But, you know, he said, give it some thought, work on your own pace and give me a call back whenever. And so I thought about it for a week and, maybe two weeks, talked to my wife about it. And really it comes down to, I was either going to start my own business again, and try to grind again and strike lightning twice, like GiveWP, and see if I could grow something and eventually sell it in five to seven years, which takes a lot of hard effort, sacrifice, money. A lot of your own money, and almost no guarantee. And the WordPress marketplace has changed so much that it’s not immediate impact right away, and you’re really out on your own.

It worked well once, but I was in my early thirties, just turning 30, and now I’m 40. So life’s changed quite a bit for me. And Jetpack, it is a very divisive product, we can get more into that in the future, but really it came down to having that impact. Being at Automattic, a company that I’ve respected since I came into WordPress, and always wanted to go behind the scenes and work as an Automattician, so going full circle from where my career began to the opportunity and the challenge.

If I succeed at this, it can really open some other doors at Automattic. I’m head of this product, which touches almost everything on Automattic as far as the WordPress business goes. I just thought about it long and hard, talked to Matt about it, and made sure I would have the levers for success also. And that’s what made me choose to say yes and come aboard.

[00:08:08] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of curious because if you just discount all of the stuff you just said about, you know, wanting to fight and build your own product up, I can well imagine how grinding that can be, and there’s no guarantee of success. It could be a real failure.

But stepping into a huge product, I’m going to put my neck out on the line a little bit here and say, I actually can’t think of a product or a plugin, let’s go with that, in the WordPress space that tries to cover as many bases. Covered by any organisation, whether that’s a third party development team or what have you, I can’t think of one named product that tries to cover as many bases.

And the fact that it’s divisive and I’m sure you’ll get into this, but there’s lots of room for improvement, I’m sure you’ll agree. You are walking into something exactly as you say, where there is a chance of great success here. If you pull this off, and you pull the right levers, and in six months time, a year’s time, two years time, the arc is going in the right direction, there’ll be measurable success. So really interesting.

So what was the bit, when you had that, oh, moment, what was the bit about Jetpack which made you think long and hard about it over two weeks, as opposed to immediately saying, yeah, I’ll do it? There must have bits about the project, Jetpack as a plugin, whatever it may be. What were the bits that concerned you?

[00:09:18] Devin Walker: Well, I’ve used it over the years on and off. I wouldn’t call myself a power user at all, but I come from the community, 15 years of being in the community. I’ve gone to, I don’t even know how many WordCamps and always kept tabs on it, especially when, I don’t know when it was. I think it was pre 2020, when they did like a bit of marketing push that Jetpack does donations now, accept donations with Jetpack. And it was through Jetpack forms. I didn’t know that at the time, so I installed Jetpack. I was like, where’s donations? You’ve got to find your way through this tangled web. Oh, it’s part of forms. Okay, let’s go into forms. Oh, it’s like a template now and you have to, the connect flow was terrible. The whole flow was not a great experience.

And the donation form itself, I was like, oh, we have a pretty serious competitor now with Give, we’ve got to like step our game up. But then I left that, I was like, okay, don’t worry about it guys, we’ll be fine now, nobody’s going to use this. That’s where that, oh, moment comes from where like, jack of all trades, master of none type of thing.

[00:10:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think probably encapsulates it perfectly. It’s kind of jack of all trades and master of none. So I’m just going to rattle off some of the things that I know it does. I’m probably missing quite a lot here. So for example, you know, it does stats, think something like Google Analytics, it will offer that for you. Backups. It will do protection. It will do speed and optimisation things on your website. Social sharing. It will do forms. There’s VideoPress thrown in there as well. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that I’ve missed out there, but it really is encapsulating a lot.

And the jack of all trades, master of none, bit kind of fits because when Jetpack came out, I’m imagining it was a really, it was probably at the forefront of many of those things. The things that it did, it probably did as well as everybody else. But now, 10, 15, whatever years later, there’s now been real amazing products delivered by third party developers that have become the standard of forms, of backups, of speed and optimisation services and what have you. And so Jetpack now has to kind of compare itself to the very, very best. And I think that’s hard. You know, for one plugin to try and be the best at everything. Nigh on impossible, I would imagine.

[00:11:16] Devin Walker: You’re right. Like, we can’t compete. I’ve been preaching focus for the last, since 2016 when our mentors said, what the heck are you doing all these other plugins? Sell them off or sunset them and only focus on Give. And that’s when our business started taking off. Now, what I’m trying to do is bring focus back into Jetpack.

We do some things very well, and we need to make sure that, I’m not going to say we’re going to compete on the level of a Gravity Forms for our form solution. It’s going to come very close. And for 98% of the users out there that need forms on their website, I think it’ll fulfill that need.

For that special 2% that need like calculation fields, they need super customised form capabilities, then it might not get to that level. But we really want Jetpack to be your go-to solution so that you can have these products work well together as well.

It’s very generous too, the free version. You get a free CDN, you get VideoPress for free, and bringing people in the door and showing them that. Some folks are seeing the light of that, of what it can actually do and do pretty well. But for instance, like SEO. Yeah, Jetpack does SEO, but it’s the most rudimentary, basic version. I want to make that a bit better there. But also things that it doesn’t do well. Either get rid of those, if they’re just going to sit on a shelf and grow with age, what’s the point of it?

So yeah, a lot of realignment with that and understanding that teams that are fully focused on one specific part of what Jetpack does, it’s really hard for us to compete with that.

[00:12:46] Nathan Wrigley: Do you envisage a future for Jetpack now that you are at the helm, if you like ? And I don’t know how the structure of the people that are working on Jetpack works. In other words, do you have a forms dedicated crew where you’ve got, I don’t know, a bunch of people who just work on forms? You’ve got a bunch of people working on VideoPress and VaultPress and all of these different bits and pieces. Or is it, you work with Jetpack and you kind of move from team to team? I’m just curious as to what it looks like inside of Automattic and the different bits that make up Jetpack.

[00:13:14] Devin Walker: Yeah, so this is really an interesting time at Automattic, where they’re going from that functional organisation where it’s product focus. Where Jetpack did, a year ago, have a dedicated development team, designer team, and the person that was in my role before, it was just like a classic company structure in a way, within Automattic.

Now it’s shifting to more of a matrix organisation where there’s one architecture team. They handle .com, they handle Jetpack, they handle a bunch of other products like WooCommerce within that. And the designers as a product are outside of that.

And so what that means is we, as the product team, we have a shared roadmap where, if you ever use .com, a lot of what brings that special sauce to it, what makes it unique outside of the self installed WordPress is Jetpack. So for instance, forms is getting a massive upgrade. And the 15.2 that just came out, it has quite a big upgrade. 15.3, we’re going to have even more. So there’s a dedicated team right now that’s, some of the best engineers, I’ve been really blown away with the level of engineering at Automattic, are working on bringing forms up. And I’m leading that initiative, putting myself into that place where I can then shape forms in the future.

But that does mean that some other elements of Jetpack aren’t getting taken care of right now. AI’s going to become a big thing. We have to pick and choose based on our resources, what are the most important things for our shared initiative? But what that means is they work better together. I think you’re going to see in the future a lot more benefit of running WooCommerce and Jetpack together.

Now, we’re not going to force you to log into wordpress.com to use WooCommerce, but to get some of that benefit, you will need to OAuth in to using Jetpack. And that is a requirement, because a lot of the Jetpack, what you get for free and the secret sauce is based on our cloud servers. You basically are starting to use our infrastructure for free. And Automattic is huge on privacy. And so I don’t quite understand that whole conflict of folks that don’t like that. There’s just some people out there that will never really like Automattic and they will not OAuth in or double sign in to use Jetpack, you know what I mean?

[00:15:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of curious. So if I’m parsing it right, it sounds like what you were saying was that in a recent restructuring of Automattic and over the last 18 months or so, I think there’s been a lot of that. It sounds like Jetpack is more of an amorphous thing. It’s not like these particular people are dedicated to Jetpack Forms and these ones are for VaultPress or whatever it may be. It’s more liquid than that. We’re going to do a dedicated sprint on Forms, for example. It sounds like that’s getting an update. So probably has had people on the seats having a look at that.

And then once that’s put away and tidied up, then move to something else. But also, I guess an interesting thing that you mentioned there is that because it’s in this wider organisation of which WooCommerce, it’s pretty big, that you can also communicate with those folks. So there may be some overlap between what Forms can do in Jetpack and something that you might wish to do with WooCommerce, those kind of things.

So have I got that right? It’s not like dedicated people doing dedicated products within Jetpack, it’s much more liquid and amorphous than that.

[00:16:23] Devin Walker: Absolutely. Rather than having silos we have one large organisation that works better together. And our vision is really that all the WordPress products should be very similar to Apple and how when you’re using iOS or MacOS, there’s a lot of similar fields and they work well together and they tag team off of each other.

And prior to this reorg, that wasn’t happening so much. And we experienced this at Stellar as well. They purchased a bunch of plugins, brought them all in, the vision was for them to all work well together. We went from functional organisation to this matrix type of organisation. And so this isn’t my first rodeo doing it, I know it can work. But it does take a concerted effort, and it’s still ongoing right now. It hasn’t been 18 months, it’s been like six months. And we’re still trying to figure things out. So me stepping in at this time, I’m really trying to figure it out.

I have a blog post called, or a P2 post called Connecting the Dots, where I’m just trying to find which experts and which products on Jetpack they know better. I’ve been having so many one-on-ones just to try to get to know these folks, understand their history with Jetpack and put it in this kind of glossary of what I have here, and keep that updated as my time progresses here.

[00:17:35] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of hard to get a grip on what Jetpack is. Because it’s trying to do all these different things, I think it is quite hard for people to understand what they’re installing. So they install Jetpack, okay, I’ve heard that Jetpack’s a thing, I’ll go and install it. There’s loads of free stuff available. And then all of a sudden there’s bits which do work, there are bits which you can extend and upgrade and, you know, you might have to log in with .com to make that bit combine with this bit.

And then there are bits where, you know, it feels like the classic themes work well in some areas, and then if you’ve got a block-based theme, other things don’t work quite so well. I’m thinking like social sharing and things like that. And it’s bit of a, mess is the wrong word, but it’s incredibly confusing, I think, to a novice user. And so I’m, I’m going to put words into your mouth, I’m guessing this is one of the challenges that you are going to try and tackle to take that confusion away. Because, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter how many times I log into Jetpack, there’s always a bit of a surprise. Oh, okay, it works that way. That’s curious. I wasn’t expecting it to do that. And I’ve been doing this for absolutely ages, and I’m still surprised by the way things work.

[00:18:33] Devin Walker: You’re not alone. So one of the things that Matt’s been saying since I’ve come on board is we don’t really need to build much more new things. We need to focus and improve what’s already there, especially in Jetpack and .com. And simplifying it and making it make more sense to the end users. And Jetpack is a prime candidate for a really fresh look at how that can happen.

We’ve been doing exercises as the product team for a framework called Jobs to Be Done. You put yourself in the shoes of that customer and you experience it through fresh eyes, based on what they are looking to get out of it.

For instance, the classic, I guess, analogy is, folks don’t, they don’t want a quarter inch drill bit, they want a quarter inch hole, and that’s just the tool they use to get that quarter inch.

And it’s the same thing with Jetpack or any other software product, and it’s a reforming in thinking. It’s only my fifth week here, but it’s been really a refreshing way to think about how we build product, and how I can then work with the designers to then smooth out those wrinkles of which there are many.

[00:19:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting that you say that, because pretty much everything that Jetpack has, well, there’s one notable exception, which is of course AI, which we’ll come to in a minute. But more or less everything that’s in Jetpack has been available in some form or other for a decade or more. You know, forms is, it’s not a new thing. There’s some interesting ideas that people have come up with that maybe we’d want to integrate, but backups, it’s not a new thing.

So the idea of not having new, well, features is probably the wrong word, but not having a new product and just finessing what you’ve already got, I think that would be music to any subscriber to Jetpack. One of the paid plans that you got, I think they would absolutely love that. Just finesse what you’ve already got. We’ve already got this thing, we know what we’ve got, we know how it works, but finesse it, give us a few more features here and there in the bit, like for example, forms or what have you. That seems like music to my ears.

But I’ve said it. The cat is out the bag in this episode now, AI. AI is smuggled into Jetpack in the most, it’s kind of hidden. It’s almost entirely hidden, and yet incredibly profound. I don’t know if, dear listener, you’ve experienced Jetpack and it’s AI features, but if you switch it on and you just go, I don’t know, make a blog post or something like that, when you go to publish, it will just helpfully write your excerpt and your featured image, it will create that for you on the fly. It all happens in the background. It’s really incredible. How did that get under the radar? And is that going to be a big feature?

[00:21:02] Devin Walker: That is going to be a huge feature. I just came back from New York with our AI engineering team led by James LaPage, who’s one of the brightest, young stars, I want to say, in WordPress. And he’s one of the reasons that I’m so excited for what AI can become with Jetpack, and where it’s going to go from here. It’s really great that you are already like what’s there? But that’s just scratching the surface from what we’re going to be doing in the near future.

We’ve got quite a large team working on this. This is a 50 plus engineering team. It’s a huge focus of Automattic. And Jetpack’s the way we’re going to bring a lot of what we’re bringing to .com to self-hosted users. And it’s not going to cost you really much at all and it’s gonna be done in the WordPress way.

Right now it tries to be your content companion, is kind of how I call it, but it’s going to do that a lot better, and it’s going to reach outside of the post editor and do a lot more helpful items for you in the WP admin. And not only in the WP admin, also provide some tools for you in the future for your visitors and how you can convert them, how you can get them to sign up on your newsletter, or you can get them to ask presales questions, or fill out forms or what have you. It’ll be very moldable and shapeable.

So I delightfully was at several demo presentations at this meetup where I was just blown away. Sat down with Matias, James, a lot of the key stakeholders and players here at .com on how and when we can start bringing this into Jetpack.

And what’s there right now is good. It’s almost going to be entirely rewritten and thrown away for what the foundation now is going to become. And so that’s one of the more exciting, more immediate, roadmap items that I’ll be really working on the next 8 to 12 months. You’ll see a huge change.

[00:22:54] Nathan Wrigley: I feel like at the moment the AI implementation in Jetpack is about content, the content that you’re creating right at this moment. We’re creating, I don’t know, SEO fields and we’re creating excerpts and things like that and featured images and what have you. But if you haven’t had a play, again, I’ll link this in the show notes, Automattic’s Telex, which is the capability to, you write a simple prompt and it will create a block for you. I feel that something like Jetpack with something like Telex, just hidden in the sidebar of a WordPress blog post would be really kind of interesting. You know, the idea that, I need a block for this.

[00:23:26] Devin Walker: Are you reading my DMs? Because, exactly. You’ve already sort of got a crystal ball right there. And with Telex, that’s a huge opportunity for site building, for imagining anything that WordPress could be, and having it created there.

Right now it’s great. It creates separate plugins, you can download and install them, you can’t sync them per site. It’s kind of annoying how there’s all these plugins there. There’s not much management updating over time. Jetpack can be that bridge for you, and that’s really an exciting future where it needs to go.

[00:23:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because at the moment, if you are an inexperienced WordPress user, if you’re not technical, let’s put it that way, then you are constrained entirely by what’s there or what the developer has built for you or the range of plugins that you’ve installed. And I feel like in the near future, you reach that point of frustration and you suddenly realise that, oh, there is no block that does that thing. Well, why don’t I just make one?

And you’ll write a small prompt, I don’t know, I need a real estate block, or I don’t know, I need a block because it’s coming up to Christmas. I need a block which is going to show snowflakes falling on this particular post. Please don’t do this by the way, but you get the point. I’m just going to go ahead and make it, and it’ll be this entirely disposable thing. And when I’m finished with it, I’ll probably just throw it in the trash or maybe keep it until next year.

But the point is, your WordPress becomes like this, how to describe it, it’s almost like the scaffolding for an infinite arrangement of possibilities. Whereas before, WordPress felt a bit like a box. If it wasn’t in the box, it couldn’t be done. But now the box got opened and there’s all this scaffolding everywhere and it can do a million more things. And as Matt Mullenweg said, you know, it’s becoming like the OS for the web or something like that.

And the fact that AI is binding to the abilities inside of WordPress, so with the Abilities API and things like that, it knows everything that your WordPress website can do. You know, create users, create posts, delete posts, all of these kind of things. And Jetpack seems really aligned to doing that. I don’t know how it would fit into the bigger Jetpack picture, but, yeah, interesting.

[00:25:27] Devin Walker: Yeah, well, I think AI can be the glue that binds a lot of these individual products together and really paint the picture on how they work well together, and work within your WordPress Core to make it the Jetpack that is supercharged, right? I mean the WordPress that has a Jetpack strapped to it.

There is a great number of, kind of mission statements and taglines over the years for Jetpack. None of which I think have been fully fulfilled. So I really want to revisit that, revise that, and you’ll see a lot of updates coming to the website soon, soon-ish. Telling and bringing people along this journey.

If you look at the website and a lot of the marketing right now, it’s kind of on idle. So that’s another big part of what I’m being focused on, and that will help change the perception in the community and outside of it, of what Jetpack is and what it can do for you is, pulling up the curtain, if you will, on all the cool stuff we’re doing here.

You could read P2s all day here and many of them are so impressive and I feel like a lot of them should be public. There’s so much good content here that is really impressive. For somebody like me who’s been in the community for 15 years, like, oh my gosh, we have the best engineers, the best designers, and it’s all in this P2. Like, let’s get some of this published.

[00:26:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well, that’s curious. So I was reading your mind a minute ago, you’ve just read my mind, because the next little bit was going to be all about marketing. Because it doesn’t matter, with the best will in the world, the best product in the world will probably fail, if not marketed correctly.

And it feels as if, when Jetpack began, because it was kind of the thing, a long, long time ago it was the thing, it had that success kind of built into it. You know, it was an Automattic thing, it was a WordPress thing, it became popular because it did so many things that nothing else could do.

Fast forward till today, it feels like the wheels have come off the marketing a little bit, or the train has completely pulled into the station and not moving at all. You know, I can’t remember the last time I saw something engaging, like a YouTube video or somebody experimenting on their YouTube channel with a Jetpack thing.

Whereas with third party plugins, it’s happening all the time, you know? And so it feels like that’s going to be a very big part of where you are, you know, you’ll build hopefully some amazing things, but then trying to turn the tide and get people to be engaged and interested and see the utility of it. I’m guessing that’s going to be a part of the job which is separate to the technological part.

[00:27:46] Devin Walker: It will, absolutely. I think for quite some time it was almost build it and they will come here. And for many, many years they did come. And now it’s harder because the marketplace has expanded quite a bit. There’s a lot of other folks out there doing really cool things with WordPress and have a lot more focused marketing efforts behind them.

I mean, point and case was GiveWP, we were just, people weren’t turning to Woo or Gravity Forms because we made it that it was the number one solution you had to go do it. We just hammered that point through WordCamps, through videos, through podcasts, whatever it was, that was our mission.

And for Jetpack, we really need to refocus on that and do that a lot more. It’s very engineering led organisation. I think marketing to some point is built into their roles and they’re not doing that part as much as I would like.

And on another aspect, I think we definitely just need more marketers. I’m not going to say the exact numbers, but it was a surprisingly low number of marketers to the size of the organisation when I came in. I’m used to a much better ratio.

So I’m going to be hammering that point a little bit more home as I get through the door, but it’s something that I’ve mentioned a bit already in my 5 weeks here.

[00:29:02] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t know what the install base is specifically. It’s a lot, right? Jetpack has a lot of installs and so presumably you’ve.

[00:29:08] Devin Walker: The core is 4 million.

[00:29:09] Nathan Wrigley: 4 million. Okay, so, wow, gosh. So presumably that means anything that you do do, you’ve really got to tread carefully. So for a start, you can’t break things. You can’t just ship a brand new UI in let’s say the forms aspect of it overnight. And I presume that’s kind of like a bit of a noose around your neck in that, you know, you want to move fast and break things in some respects, but with 4 million installs, which is really right at the very top in the WordPress ecosystem, that’s big, big numbers. You are going to constrained in what you can do and how fast you can move things and how quickly you can break things.

[00:29:40] Devin Walker: Somewhat. Somewhat I agree with that. Right now we are on a monthly release cycle and there’s definitely a lot of caution around that. And Jetpack touches a lot of .com too, so there’s that extra added user base, which is humongous. So there is that bit of treading carefully.

But I want to balance that with being aggressive. We just shipped, prior to me coming on board, a new onboarding for getting connected. It’s just through the connection segment, getting connected to .com, and that really had positive results and saw an uptick in connected successful sites. I think we can take that to the next level and explain what Jetpack is, what they need it for, and really optimise it for the best use case based on what that particular site wants or needs.

Going beyond onboarding is then getting into the product UI itself, making the navigation much more clear and understandable.

You know, there’s three different areas in Jetpack right now where you can toggle on and off different modules or products.

[00:30:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I’ve discovered many them.

[00:30:41] Devin Walker: Yeah. So I think we need to consolidate that at least. And there’s more Easter eggs. I don’t even want to call them Easter, I don’t know what you’d call that, but interesting quirks that we can clean up.

And for the most part I think we do have to be a bit careful because it’s such a massive user base. Breaking things, just look at some of the Jetpack reviews. Breaking them and lack of support. Those are the two main cause of one star reviews. And with that many, I really want to get that review base above 4.0 stars. But with 3000 or whatever reviews it is, it takes a long shift to get that. And we’re not going to do that by continually breaking things, so it’s a balance.

[00:31:19] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting that me, a relatively inexperienced user of Jetpack, I was able to discover many of the quirks that you’ve just mentioned almost immediately. You know, just being curious. And I’m the kind of person that when I download anything, I go and look at every single menu item and kind of think, well, what does that do? How would that work? It really didn’t take me long to discover, well, hang on, that is somewhere else. If I engage that, does that mean it conflicts with this thing over here?

And I saw this over and over again. And so I think that, as you imagine, would be some of the very, very brilliant low hanging fruit. To just have a UI which does, you know, there’s one place for one thing, it works as expected that you don’t, I’m sure you know where I’m going with this, basically, just simplify things, make it elegant in the same way that we’ve seen with so many third party plugins.

Because at the moment it kind of feels like a whole range of different things that have been slammed together and forcefully told to get along with each other, as opposed to like a happy family that, just everything works and everybody’s happy and there’s bliss and rainbows everywhere. It feels a little bit like that, if you know what I mean?

[00:32:21] Devin Walker: Oh, I completely agree. I think we used in the pre-show and it’s a bit of a Frankenstein. We need to change it from that. If I had a nickel for every toggle in Jetpack, I don’t know if I’d need to work anymore. There are quite a few toggle on, toggle offs in just a row. You can imagine how this interface could be much more elegantly put together.

And we’re going to use user feedback for a lot of this and ask, hey, what do you guys think of this? Because we can’t do it successfully in a bubble.

[00:32:52] Nathan Wrigley: Well, and the other thing is, given the perfect UI, it does so much stuff. If you just had Jetpack, if you had a vanilla version of WordPress and you installed Jetpack and everything was easy to navigate and worked as expected first time and maybe there was no dependency on having a .com account or what have you. It does all the things. It would take you from like zero success to broadly speaking, okay, you’ve got a credible website. Maybe there’s going to be some interesting cases where you want a little bit more SEO finesse or something like that.

It would get you to the races, you know, it would get you to put your horse in the race and have a good go. And there’s not much like that out there. There really is nothing that I can think of in the WordPress space. But it’s a leviathan and it’s got many heads. We need it just to have the one head, I think.

[00:33:35] Devin Walker: Very much so, and that’s the challenge that I’m in here to work with this entire team and put a lot of thought behind it.

[00:33:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it’s all on you. So if Jetpack is a success in two years time, we know who to thank for that. And it does genuinely seem, for somebody with your obvious interest and capabilities, it does seem really, really enjoyable. I’m sure it’ll keep you awake, but an enjoyable challenge. Something that you get your teeth into. Something where the success can be measured fairly quickly. You know, does the discontent diminish? Does the UI improve? Tick, tick, tick. We did a good job.

And also, there’s loads of room for improvement. So you’ve entered on a, you’ve definitely got yourself into a position where you’ve taken on a project where the improvements are evident everywhere. I hope that you managed to grab hold of them and wrestle this to the ground.

[00:34:21] Devin Walker: Well, I really appreciate that, Nathan, and why don’t we have a check in in 12 months and see where we’re at on this journey. I think that would be a good way to keep us honest, follow along in this journey along the way, we’ll see how far we’ve gotten.

[00:34:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, well, for now then, go and install Jetpack. If you’re listening to this, we’ll be back in 12 months time, so go and have a play with Jetpack as it is now and see.

It sounds to me that Devin is like all ears. If you’ve got some quirks and you found something that’s curious or unexpected or dissatisfying or just downright annoying, where do we get in touch with you? Oh, also, I suspect Devin’s more than happy to receive positive commentary as well.

[00:35:01] Devin Walker: Yeah, I mean the positive stuff’s great too. Right now feedback@jetpack.com is a good place, but we’re going to make this a lot more public in the near future. You can also just tweet at me @innerwebs, I-N-N-E-R-W-E-B-S, or go to my website devin.org. But jetpack.com, jetpack.com/feedback is also a great place. So that’s a bit about me and where you can find the Jetpack information.

[00:35:27] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. So definitely a challenge out in the public for Devin to get his teeth into WordPress’ Jetpack, and see if he can figure it out and make it better. Let’s check back in 12 months time and see how we’re going. Devin Walker, thanks for chatting to me today.

[00:35:38] Devin Walker: Thank you.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how we might reimagine sponsoring WordPress contributions.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today we have Roger Williams. Roger leads community and partner engagement at Kinsta, a company specializing in offering managed hosting for WordPress. His role involves bridging the gap between Kinsta and the wider WordPress community, working closely with agency partners, technology collaborators, and open source initiatives.

Throughout his career, Roger has been deeply involved in community efforts and has recently played a key part in Kinsta’s implementation of a sponsored contributions program, helping to funnel time and resources back into WordPress and other open source projects.

Many longstanding members of the WordPress community have contributed out of passion and a spirit of philanthropy, but as the project has grown to power over 40% of the web, the need for sustainable funding and sponsorship has become more pronounced.

Roger joins us today to explore this shift. He shares insights from his WordCamp US presentation titled Figuring Out Sponsored Contribution. Discussing how companies can start funding contributors, why that matters, and how to balance the business need for a return on investment with the grassroots spirit of open source.

We begin with Roger’s background, his work at Kinsta, and how he became involved in WordPress community sponsorship.

The conversation then gets into the ever evolving dynamics of sponsored contributions. How businesses can approach funding contributors. Ways to surface and support valuable work, and strategies for aligning company goals with broader project needs.

Roger breaks down the practical arguments companies can use to get internal buy-in, and the importance of clear processes for both organizations looking to sponsor, and individuals seeking support.

Towards the end, Roger reflects on the challenges and opportunities of connecting those both from the philanthropic and commercial sides of WordPress, and he shares advice for anyone hoping to get their organization involved in similar programs.

If you’re interested in how WordPress sponsorships work, how business and community might collaborate, or you’re seeking practical advice as a contributor or company, this episode is for you.

If you’d like to find out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Roger Williams.

I am joined on the podcast by Roger Williams. Hello, Roger.

[00:03:46] Roger Williams: Hey Nathan, how are you?

[00:03:47] Nathan Wrigley: I’m very good. We could pretend that we’re recording this at WordCamp US because that was the plan, but it never happened for one reason or another. So we took it offline. And several weeks ago, WordCamp US finished, but the intention was very much to talk about what you were presenting at WordCamp US. So we’ll get into that in a moment.

Before we do that though, Roger, would you mind just telling us a little bit about who you are, who you work for, what your role involves, all to do with WordPress, I guess.

[00:04:14] Roger Williams: Yeah, no, absolutely. So my name’s Roger Williams. I work at Kinsta, managed hosting provider for WordPress. Currently my position is partnership and community manager for North America. Very long title. What does that mean? My job is to interface with the public, with the WordPress community, with our agency partners and various technology partners, and just make sure that we’re all on the same page, and that whatever’s going on outside of Kinsta is getting communicated inside of Kinsta, and whatever’s happening inside of Kinsta is getting communicated outside. So I’m basically boiling the ocean. So a very easy thing. No problem at all.

Truth be said, it’s one of the, this is like the highlight of my career, I have to say. I get to travel, I get to meet a lot of neat and interesting people, I get to make amazing friends, and I get to talk about technology, the web, WordPress and Kinsta hosting, which are all things that I’m very passionate about and enjoy talking about this ad nauseam. You can ask my wife, that I am probably too much, need to turn it off a little bit.

But specifically talking about community and WordPress, gosh, it was January of this year, 2025, that we implemented our sponsored contributions program, and I played a role in that. I played a role in getting the conversation happening around that inside of Kinsta. And then once we got budget approval, actually figuring out, hey, who do we want to sponsor? What projects outside of WordPress? Because we also sponsor various open source projects that affect us directly and indirectly.

And so that has been a whole new aspect of my career that has really opened up new doors and opportunities and discussions and friendships that I’m still feeling like a bit of an interlocutor. I’m an outsider trying to understand how to best do this, and play a part in helping the projects that we all depend on to do all of our work.

[00:06:17] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Thank you. Yeah, there’s a lot in there to unpack, isn’t there? It sounds like a full and varied role, but also you kind of sound a little bit like you’re figuring this out over the course of 2025 and into 2026 and who you are sponsoring and what have you. And that was very much the tenor of the talk.

So the title was very simple. The presentation that you gave was simply called figuring out sponsored contribution. But I’ll just read into the record the blurb, not all of it, but much of it because it will give everybody who’s listening an idea of where you were going with that. So it says, open source software runs on passion, but passion doesn’t pay the bills. WordPress powers over 40% of the web, yet many people maintaining it aren’t funded. That’s starting to change and your company can be part of it. In this talk, we’ll explore how sponsored contribution works, why it matters, and how companies big and small can participate. We’ll walk through my experience, AKA your experience, working with companies to sponsor contributors from promoting the idea internally, identifying key areas of the WordPress project to support, finding and interviewing contributors, and building an internal framework for long-term sponsorship. And there’s a little bit more, but that basically sums it up.

So basically, I guess my first question is, what exactly are you trying to do here? Are you kind of regarding this as a sort of philanthropic thing? What I’m really kind of asking is, do you kind of expect things in return? So if Kinsta, for example, sponsor somebody, do you have like a tick list of things that we need to see that you’ve done? Or is it more, you are a trusted person, we’ve seen you interacting in the WordPress space for many years, here’s a bunch of cash, go off and just do whatever you like?

[00:07:53] Roger Williams: Yeah, excellent question. And thanks for reading that blurb. I don’t think I’ve read that blurb in quite a few months and it sounds really good.

[00:07:59] Nathan Wrigley: It was a great talk.

[00:08:00] Roger Williams: Somebody really put something together here. Really interesting question and I think this kind of gets to the core of what I was trying to talk about in this talk, in the exploration that I’m trying to figure out in my own head, figure out inside of Kinsta, and possibly figure out in the larger community.

There’s a lot of humility involved in this Nathan, I hope you can appreciate. I feel a lot of the times very, the imposter syndrome, right? Wow, I’m coming into a project that’s over 22 years old. Many, many thousands of people have been involved. Many, many companies have been involved in this. Here’s this new guy, you know, I mean I’ve been around for a little while, but relatively new guy on the scene just coming in trying to tell people how all this is done. And I really hope that it doesn’t come across that way. I’m really trying to explore this topic and understand it better for a few reasons.

The first one is the most immediate. How can I get Kinsta involved in contributing and sponsoring WordPress and other open source projects? And so there’s a combination of things happening there, right? And you brought it up in terms of, are there tangible things that we’re looking for here? Or is this simply just philanthropic, hey, we’re giving money away and everything will work out?

And I think that there’s a spectrum. And we’re playing on the spectrum with it. Traditionally, and this is something that I talk about a lot in the talk is, traditionally in open source the argument has been that I’ve seen, hey, you’re using this software, you should give back to the software and to the project.

But then you have on the other side the business that is very much, hey, we need to generate revenue from our activities so that we can remain a business.

And so they’re a little bit at odds in some ways, right? But it doesn’t have to be that way. And I think that’s what I’m exploring in this talk, and I’m exploring in this conversation, and as many conversations as I can have with people is, how do we play on that spectrum of finding a happy medium where for a company, a lot of times you go to the executives and you’re like, hey, we need to be giving back to this thing that we get for free? And you get a very perplexed look. And so I think we need to adjust that conversation.

I think that the people that are inside of the project, it’s very obvious. Hey, we put a ton of time and effort into making this happen. Whether you give back in terms of time and actually help us work on the project, or give us money so we can sponsor people and pay for hosting costs and different things involved in it, to make the project happen. I think it’s very obvious for people inside of the project how that works.

It’s less obvious, and I kind of see there’s three groups in all, right? You have the people inside of the project, very obvious. There’s very little argument needs to be made.

You have the second group, which is somewhere like, a Kinsta will fall into, or someone like myself, who I’ve used open source software for many years, but I don’t necessarily see exactly how to contribute back, or the immediate benefits, or the need, right? Hey, this thing’s already here. I can go to the website, click download, and I’ve got it. There’s that group that kind of see it but they need a little nudging.

And then there’s the general public or people that just don’t really interface with open source software directly and just have no idea. They’re just like, whoa, what is going on over there? People are just working on stuff for free and giving it away for free. That’s crazy. And so there’s another conversation that needs to happen there.

I think with this specific talk, the group I’m trying to get to is that second group. The people that are just right there, it’s just in a little bit of nudging of like, hey, you’re really close to understanding the benefits of sponsoring and contributing back to the project. What are we missing in the conversation to really get them to understand it? So the answer I’m proposing is we need to talk more about return on investment and ROI, and how do we frame that?

So really long-winded answer here, but I think that there’s a mixture of what are the things we’re trying to achieve by giving back? How can we bring that back in a business sense to show executives, hey, look, the money that we’re putting out here is benefiting us in certain ways?

But then also being like, hey, there’s also just kind of this nebulous aspect to it of, if you help contribute to it, it will give you some benefit. So how do we balance and how do we find the spectrum here to land on? I hope that that made some sort of sense.

[00:12:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it does. And it’s interesting because where you got to about a third of the way through the answer, I think you said the word tension or conflict or something like that. But I think that’s a really interesting part, because if we were to rewind the clock to, let’s say 19 years ago when WordPress was still relatively new. I wasn’t around in the WordPress space, but I was involved in other open source projects at the same time. And philanthropy was the word.

There were just people donating loads of time because it was more or less this hobby thing. And then in some cases the hobby thing collapsed and nobody ever heard of it again. And in the case of some software projects, WordPress most notably, it took off. It just absolutely skyrocketed and became the underpinning of, as you say in the presentation notes that you made, kind of 40% of the web. It became this critical piece of the puzzle.

And so during the last 18, 20, 22 years, whatever it may be, the project has evolved. It’s become critical. Like it or dislike it, companies both big and small are now relying upon it. They require it as part of their business, Kinsta being one of those companies. And so this tension exists. How do the companies do their bit and how do the individuals do their bit?

And the tension that I feel is, on the one hand, the people who’ve got that heritage of the more philanthropic side sort of saying, can’t we just go back to how it was? Can we never talk about finance? Can we not think about money at all?

And then on the other hand, you’ve got places like where you work, who are, with the best will in the world, it’s about making some revenue, and making money, and paying the bills and all of that. You’ve got to figure out, how the heck do you make contributions? How do you justify that to your bosses? How do they communicate what they’ve done effectively?

And presumably part of your talk as well is about finding people that you would like to just give some money to as a helping hand to say, okay, off you go. You’re not a part of the Kinsta organisation, but we would like to help you. And in return, presumably there’s a bit of mutual back rubbing. We’ll pat your back, you pat ours, and so on and so forth. So hopefully I’ve parsed that about right?

[00:14:39] Roger Williams: Yeah, no, I think you’re laying it out very much as I’m going through in the talk is, we need to talk business. And I know that for a lot of people inside of open source, this can be cringey and not pleasant and not what we want to do. And my argument is we have to get over that phase. We have to learn to start talking business and thinking business, thinking about return on investment.

And so to me it’s becoming practical, right? We have this optimistic idea of like, well, people will just come to their senses and realise that if they sponsor and contribute to the project, it’s going to help them. And we need to be much more strategic and more practical about it. And I break it down into three reasons to start kind of looking at when you’re talking to executives, you’re talking to businesses. And so there’s strategic, operational and second order benefits.

So when I’m talking about strategic benefits, I mean this is where it’s just obvious, right? For a hosting company that does WordPress, it just makes sense. Like, if WordPress isn’t working well, then we’re going to have trouble with our product. So strategically, it makes sense if WordPress works well, if it’s performing, if it’s secure, this is going to lower our cost as a hosting company. So those are arguments to be putting forward there.

From an operational perspective, you can start talking about technical debt, right? And this is where the CTO’s eyes should light up, because technical debt is a real problem for any company that builds software. As you’re building software, you now have to maintain that software. Well, if you’re able to offload part of that software into the open source project, it now becomes something that the open source project maintains. It’s the technical debt of the project.

That now creates a vicious cycle, or not even vicious, but just a cycle of, you now need to contribute to the project to help maintain that technical debt. But you’re now, as an organisation, offloading that to a larger organisation and having more people being able to help maintain that software. So I think from an operational perspective, those are arguments that you can hit people with.

And then finally, the second order benefits, and this is really where it kind of encompasses the arguments that have been traditionally the philanthropic argument, the just maker taker argument and stuff like that. With second order benefits, you start seeing these additional benefits that maybe you can’t exactly measure.

This is where networking is happening. People are meeting and talking to each other. Maybe your developers are talking to their developers, or in the case of sponsoring contributors, those contributors can come into your organisation and help the organisation maybe understand how to use WordPress better and these different benefits.

And so breaking it down into these practical arguments, these practical reasons for contributing can really help people who are not necessarily as well versed with open source or don’t directly see the benefits, see that a little bit better.

And then getting into what you’re also talking about, finding contributors who, maybe they align with your values, making sure that they’re working on the stuff that you need them to be working on. The parts of the project that could use attention as far as your organisation is seeing.

And then also, you know, one of the big things I look for is contributors who are mentors and are helping other contributors get into the project and help to grow the project’s contributions overall.

There’s direct, tangible things. Hey, there’s this ticket, could you go work on this ticket? I’ll be honest, I’m not that in depth yet. I’ve had contributors be like, hey, usually organisations are that pointed. And I’m like, okay, well there’s a goal for me to achieve at some point.

But for me it’s more like, hey, are you doing good work? What are other people saying about you in the project? And then, are you mentoring people and helping other people do their first bug squash, and do their first push and commit and things like that? And I’m butchering the language of course here but, you know, I hope that that kind of helps answer some of those questions.

[00:18:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting because I fear that there’s a possibility that the community kind of bifurcates along these lines at the moment. So you get the people, and I was using the word philanthropic, so the people that have been contributing their time for gratis, just because they saw that as a useful thing to do for humanity, let’s put it that way.

So there’s that on the one hand. And then on the other hand, you’ve got people such as yourself who are talking about the necessary things in order for your job and your institution to function, the money. And I suppose I’m kind of worried that we will have these two sides that kind of can’t figure out a way to communicate with each other, that can’t see across the chasm that has been created. And so figuring out ways to make those work to sort of have a happy balance so that the two sides can communicate, that they can be back in touch with each other.

So that’s kind of a concern that I have, this sort of two tier system. The fear more broadly is that, if the money side of things becomes more prevalent, and people find that intolerable, that ultimately will push people away who have been philanthropic and amazing in the use of their time and pushing the project forward. They’ll see this as something that they can’t cope with in the future, and they’ll wish to step away, not contribute to it. That would be a shame.

[00:19:52] Roger Williams: So I can absolutely empathise and understand the argument that you’re putting forth there. I think the way I would counter that is to say, hey, currently if we’re only going to talk in a philanthropic sense, are we just going to exclude everybody from what you’re talking about, the second tier, right? The more money focused. So we’re just not even having a conversation in that case.

[00:20:15] Nathan Wrigley: Right. That’s the concern, yeah.

[00:20:17] Roger Williams: So what I’m trying to argue is, hey, by bringing in more people into the project and maybe starting to talk in these practical ROI business terms, were now at least having a conversation that before wasn’t even happening. Because just to kind of back up a second, the way I’m looking at it is, if the only argument is, hey, this is philanthropic, you’re doing it for the good of the project, kumbaya, then we’re just going to exclude a lot of the business community who’s going to go, well, yeah, I volunteer time on the weekend at my church, or do different things, but I need to do business during the week so I can buy groceries and pay the rent.

And so I think what I’m trying to suggest is, hey, if we expand the conversation beyond just philanthropic, beyond just the second order benefits, and we talk about operational and strategic benefits in addition, we’re now adding more people to the conversation that weren’t in the conversation before.

And eventually we’re bringing them into the second order conversation, but we have to start by bringing them in with the strategic and the operational, because that’s where their mindset is in the nine to five. And so to me, I think this is the opportunity to actually expand the pie and expand the amount of people in the project and talking about the project.

The concern I see that is a fair argument and concern is, are we going to turn open source projects into just commercial enterprises? That is definitely a concern. I don’t see that happening because you still have the core people in the project. They’re doing it because they believe in what the project is and they have passion for it. And if they are able to expand and have these conversations, these larger conversations, or additional conversations, about strategic and operational benefits, we’re going to bring more people in and hopefully help to influence those people to see the second order benefits, and hopefully eventually it’s all just philanthropic, right?

But I think right now, the argument that has been put forth by different people in open source and in the WordPress community, is that we don’t have enough people contributing. We don’t have enough sponsorship money coming in, and so we need to figure out how to bridge that gap. And my suggestion is the way to do that is to expand the conversation beyond just the philanthropic, beyond just the second order, and talking about strategic and operational in addition to those.

[00:22:40] Nathan Wrigley: I have so many thoughts about this. So the first thing that comes into my head is trying to bridge a gap between the people out there at the moment who have been contributing. But you go around on Twitter, X, I guess, and you see people, don’t you? You see it all the time. They even sometimes change their Twitter handle to, you know, seeking sponsorship or something like that.

But periodically you’ll see somebody who you know has been in the WordPress space for many years and, I don’t know, maybe they have been contributing in some way, shape, or form, but it’s pretty clear that they would like to be sponsored for this particular rabbit hole that they’ve gone down. And so building a bridge to them is something I think really useful about what you’re saying.

Because maybe there is no way of these two sides talking to each other. Maybe there is no kind of like a la carte menu, if you like. If you are one of these philanthropic contributors, and you’ve never sought sponsorship before, but you’d like the idea of, well, wouldn’t it be nice if, for these two days a week that I typically contribute my time, wouldn’t it be nice to get some finance? I’ll do the exact same thing, but I’ll actually receive some money for that.

But I don’t have the time to go out to a hundred different companies with my, I’m going to use the word begging bowl. That is probably the wrong term, but you get the point. To these a hundred different companies saying, look, I’ve been doing this for ages. Can you help me out?

That kind of feels, there’s something quite icky about that, isn’t there? I think we can all identify that going out and sort of saying to companies repeatedly, please can I have some money? And then getting the inevitable 99% pushback. No, we haven’t got any money for you.

But I think what you are saying is you are going to build a system where that kind of stuff will be more obvious. Where you’ll say, these are the kind of things that we’re looking for. Here’s the application form if you want to sponsor. This is the kind of process that we’re going to go through. These are the interview questions that we’re typically going to answer. This is the pot of money that we’ve got available. This is how many people we want, and so on and so forth.

So it’s kind of bridging the gap, so that the people who have been contributing, who are maybe nervous or don’t see a way forward, can suddenly step into something more obvious, more a la carte, more straightforward and easy to kind of cherry pick.

[00:24:46] Roger Williams: Yeah. I think that, you know, this is getting to the heart of it, right? How do you individually sponsor people? How do individuals find sponsorship? And how do we make this all work? And backing up just for a second , there’s two ways to look at contributing to open source projects.

We’re talking a lot about sponsoring individual contributors, which I would argue is the best way for an organisation to get started, because it’s the easiest way in some sense, right? There’s an established person who’s working in the project. You are giving them cash to do that work.

The other way to contribute to the project is to actually spend time working on the project, right? So maybe you’ve got engineers inside of the company and you’re like, okay, 10% of your time is, or 5% of your time you’re going to actually work on this project. That’s a much bigger ask, right? Because usually when you hire an employee, you have a very specific set of tasks that you need to work on them for the company.

And so asking the manager to figure out, hey, how can this person give 5% of their time to something that’s outside of the company? That’s a bigger ask. So I think, for companies and organizations that are starting to dip their toe into contributing to open source, sponsored contributions is a great place to start.

So that was a long way to get around to the question that you’re posing here, is how do you actually do that? There’s a chicken and the egg kind of situation that you’re bringing up, right? At what point does an individual contributor know that, hey, Kinsta is a company to reach out to, and ask for sponsored contribution. And then on the flip side, how does Kinsta know who to reach out to to sponsor?

And so my suggestion is to create a couple of different systems. So first, from the organisational perspective, really understanding, what are the priorities for the organisation? What would benefit them the most by sponsoring individual contributors?

My argument is it’s a pretty wide swath. A lot of people get focused on core contributors and, actually working on tickets and things like that. I think it’s a much broader effect. I think sponsoring people that are on the Polyglots team, Kinsta, over half of our customers don’t speak English. So having WordPress in non-English versions is huge for us. So sponsoring the Polyglots team.

The documentation team is huge, right? People need to be able to use WordPress . So are they going to contact Kinsta support for how to use WordPress, or can they just go to the WordPress site and look at documentation?

So as an organization, you can get really strategic on this, but my argument would be, don’t overthink it at the beginning. Just get started. And I think that’s how I kind of end my talk is, my biggest piece of advice is don’t wait. Just get started. Set aside some budget that you’re comfortable with, that your executives are comfortable with, and then go and find some contributors.

And then have kind of a process, right? Have an intake form. You mentioned having an intake form. Have an intake form. Ask them questions about, what do they currently work on? What have they worked on in the past? What are their hopes and goals and aspirations on the project?

And then, you know, some very practical questions. Hey, would you be open to doing a blog post about your work and how Kinsta has helped with this? Very low level asks, right? We’re not trying to ask people to get a tattoo of the logo on their forehead or something insane. It’s very low effort, and my argument to companies is be very cautious. Step lightly into the marketing aspect of all of this. That should not be your primary focus.

The primary focus is contributing to the open source project, not getting all this marketing benefit out of it. And so, you know, make sure to frame it that way.

From the individual contributors thing, one thing I do point out is, up until recently, I’ve never actually been formally approached by somebody asking for sponsorship to contribute. You kind of talked about, hey, if someone needed to spend a time reaching out to a hundred different companies, you don’t need to go that crazy. Just reach out to like the major hosting companies to start.

But my argument is you need to do more than just say, hey, I work on WordPress, you need to sponsor me. You need to put together a little bit more of a pitch of, hey, I work on X, it accomplishes Y. I see this benefiting your organisation in these specific ways. And if you’re approaching it that way, that’s going to catch someone’s attention much better.

You know, and then just ask also just simple questions. Hey, do you have a formal sponsorship contribution project for WordPress? And if they say no, maybe, hey, would you like me to help you set that up? If they say yes, then it’s, hey, what’s the process for getting involved in that?

These are just very simple questions. It’s just a conversation, right? I say this, I’ve been in sales for decades now. It’s second nature to me. I understand that for a lot of people, this isn’t second nature for them. And that’s also what I’m trying to help with in this conversation is, it’s not just the organisations I’m trying to educate, but it’s also the contributors and the people that are in the project. Helping them to understand how to speak business a little bit more, so that they can get the businesses to really understand the benefits of this.

[00:29:58] Nathan Wrigley: There was a few things that you said a few moments ago where the implication was basically just get started. So put aside some cash, decide that you’re going to do it, so this is from the business side, and then just begin and see what happens. I don’t suppose you’re going to be able to simulate the perfect system first time around. It’ll be an iterative process, but just commit to it.

But the ROI thing was also kind of interesting because you know, if you are senior management in Kinsta or whichever hosting company you want to imagine, there’s got to be I suppose some aspect of that in the back of your mind. Okay, we’re going to give away, I don’t know, a hundred thousand dollars this year, but we’re not going to ask anybody at all, at any point to sort of mention our company name. That’s probably unrealistic, but I like what you said there about the gentle approach to it, the write a blog post about it.

But there’s something to be explored there because there’s got to be a way of surfacing good work. So it doesn’t have to necessarily be a big clarion call. Look, I did this because Kinsta paid for it. More tangentially, I did this great work and I did this, and WordPress benefited as a result of this, and I would just like to thank Kinsta for making that possible.

I guess we’ve just got to figure out what that piece looks like because, you know, you can’t give away money for free. There does need to be some ROI, but we have to figure out how gentle that approach is, and how gung ho it can be or not. That’s going to be interesting to figure out.

[00:31:22] Roger Williams: Just to kind of elaborate on that for a second. So the way I would say to companies to approach looking at this is, this is branding, right? And so when you’re doing brand marketing, it’s very nebulous, right? You’re kind of putting stuff out there and there’s a little bit of goodwill to it, I guess, you know, the philanthropy part plays into it a little bit. This definitely, I would say, falls under your branding budget. And so you should treat it as such.

I think that there’s a few different ways that the marketing, and I’m using air quotes around marketing here, because I understand that for people in open source this can be a little bit of kryptonite, a little bit repellent to talk about it this way. So I’m trying to be cautious or gentle here.

But I think the marketing benefits are, there’s a ton of indirect benefits, right? So if I’m sponsoring a contributor, and they’re working on the project, it means they’re interacting with other contributors of the project. They’re going to mention, oh, hey, by the way, Kinsta is sponsoring me, in conversation.

And now you’ve got that one-on-one marketing, as it were, happening where that’s getting put into the project and that gets noticed. And I think that’s my big urge to companies who really want to step on the pedal of ROI. Like, hey, we need to really maximise the ROI here. Is it’s like, hey, the community notices as soon as you do something, good, bad, or indifferent. But as soon as you start sponsoring people, it gets noticed inside of the community right away, whether you immediately see it or not.

So allow that to happen, for sure. I think from like the blog posts and things like that, there’s two ways I approach it. I love it if a sponsored contributor writes a blog post on their blog and mentions Kinsta. That’s amazing. I’m not expecting that. So instead what I’ll do is I’ll invite them onto the Kinsta Talks podcast and, hey, let’s spend 20 minutes and just talk about what you’re doing on the project.

I mentioned Kinsta at the beginning of it, in the fact that that’s where I work. Other than that, I don’t talk about Kinsta at all. It’s all about this individual and what they’re doing on the project, what they’re excited about, how they would suggest people get involved in the project. And so using that as a promotion, and again, the indirect branding benefits. My fingers are crossed, I’m sure my CMO’s watching this and going, either he is loving it or he is gritting his teeth. I get the sense everybody’s very happy. Hey Matt, how are you?

The way I am approaching this is very much as an outsider and I’m trying to be very respectful of the fact that this community’s been around for a very long time. I am sure this is not the first time that these conversations have happened. I’m not the first person to bring these things up. I just see it as, I’m here as a unique person in this point in time and I see a need and I’m, we’ve gotten our organisation to help, start helping. And what I’m trying to promote is getting other organisations to also realise this, and also start promoting and sponsoring and contributing to the project.

[00:34:13] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the things that will be really interesting is if, let’s say that you become the fulcrum for all of this, and so Roger Williams is known at Kinsta. He’s the person to go and speak to. Having that clarity is going to be really beneficial. So you don’t have to go through those email hoops of, okay, you just use the contact form on the website and then get put through nine different people who all say, actually it’s not me. Knowing who you’ve got to speak to, and having that clear process, that contact form, whatever that may be, that intake form that we talked about earlier, that’s really interesting.

I’m just going to pivot it slightly, and I’m wondering what the kind of contributions that might fall into scope for you at Kinsta. So obviously the software itself, the core project, WordPress Core would I’m sure be in view.

But what about other things like, oh, I don’t know, people who write documentation, you mentioned Polyglots? There’s obviously people who do event organising. There are people who do content creation, podcasts, YouTube channels, those kind of things. Do you have any constraints around the kind of contribution that you’d be interested in looking at, or will you listen to anybody?

[00:35:16] Roger Williams: Excellent question. And before I dive into that, I want to make sure that I’m not the only person taking credit for this at Kinsta. I have two amazing colleagues on the front lines with me. Marcel Bootsman, as you’re very familiar with, I think he’s been on your show before, he handles for Europe. And then Alex Michaelson, who is in APAC region. These are both amazing individuals who, we all three of us are on the front line, talking with contributors, sponsoring them, figuring all of this stuff out. So I definitely don’t want to take all of the credit here and make it seem that way.

As far as figuring out who to sponsor and who to contribute, this is the big question. The amazing thing is that this point in time, my bosses, our bosses at Kinsta have given us amazing leeway to really choose who we want to be sponsoring, and who we want to be working with.

And so there’s a bit of objective focus for who we’re sponsoring. Core contributors obviously, like they’re directly impacting the project by actually changing the code and adding features and fixing bugs. So that’s obviously very important.

But just as important is these other groups that are making sure that when a new person wants to use WordPress, there’s documentation that explains how to use the WordPress. When they want to go to a WordCamp and meet somebody, I mean Aaron Jorbin has a great story about meeting someone at one of the first contributor days that he went to. And they then became a core contributor within a short amount of time. And so that contributor day didn’t just happen, right? Like, people had to make that event happen, and organise it and have coffee and treats and lights and all of the things that go into that.

So I think that there’s a lot of levels here. Whether it’s directly sponsoring a contributor inside of the open source project. It’s sponsoring WordCamps, it’s sponsoring amazing podcasts that help to spread the word and market WordPress.

There’s people that have brought up that WordPress has kind of a marketing issue because it is this open source project that has just benefited from just a ton of people realising, wow, this is amazing software to build websites with. And they just started doing that, and 40% of the internet runs on WordPress.

That’s happened very, very organically. And I think though that we’re now at an inflection of the internet and the web where we maybe need to start becoming a little bit more intentional about the marketing and the promotion of WordPress.

[00:37:44] Nathan Wrigley: What I’m gathering from this is that, certainly from Kinsta’s point of view, you just want to make this whole bi-directional thing just clearer. Kinsta’s got some intention to sponsor, and we know who the people are, we know the kind of things that they want to sponsor. Maybe there’s going to be some sort of landing page for that or some intake form. And so hopefully people who have it in mind that they wish to be sponsored, they’ll be clearer on what kind of things are in scope, what kind of things are out of scope. How many people they need to jump through the hoops to get that sponsorship sorted out. So that kind of thing is really interesting.

What do you think about the idea of, so we haven’t discussed this, I’m just going to throw this in there. Do you think this is a company by company thing? So in other words, is Kinsta always going to be siloed in its approach to sponsoring? Or is there any kind of, I don’t know how this would work, but some kind of more overarching approach that may be required? So let’s say for example that, I don’t know, Kinsta do, they sponsor person X, person Y, person Z, as we say in the UK, but obviously that leaves all these other myriad people without sponsorship. Is there a way that you could communicate to other organisations?

Look, this person, they came to us, it was very close, but we didn’t manage to get them on the sponsorship roster this year. But we feel that they were really credible. Here’s somebody else that you can go and talk to. Do you know what I mean? Something just a little bit, a bigger umbrella organisation above Kinsta, maybe. Organisation, substitute that word for any kind of structure or governance as you like.

[00:39:12] Roger Williams: Yeah, there is a lot of stuff already around this. Courtney Robertson has WPCC.

[00:39:18] Nathan Wrigley: WP Community Collective.

[00:39:20] Roger Williams: Thank you. And so the idea with that group is kind of to create an organisation that handles the mechanism aspect of distributing funds and finding people to sponsor and contribute. I could see a consortium of hosting companies coming together and somehow working on this, but that adds additional complexities, right? You have now more organisations, you have more bodies deciding things and making decisions.

And again, going back to what I propose at the very end of the project is, don’t wait, just get started. My worry about having consortiums and larger organisations is it’s going to slow the process down, it’s going to complicate the process.

That’s mostly just because I have a big phobia of organisations and meetings. This is a personal kind of thing rather than, you know, I’m sure there’s ways to figure this out more. I have a job, right? I have to balance all of these things between working on what I need to actually work on inside of the company. Working on sponsoring contributors and focusing on the open source. So there’s a lot of balancing that goes on. I am open to having these discussions with people and organisations and seeing what can come of it.

Again, going back to feeling like an outsider and knowing that there’s already a ton of people and a ton of organisations involved in doing all of this work. I’ve reached out to many of them. They’ve given me great advice. They’ve really helped me get our program organised the way it is. They help me with my presentation and kind of figuring out what to talk about in here. And so I want to remain mindful that I don’t have all the answers, I’m not the only person that’s doing all of this, and I welcome people to come to me with suggestions and ideas, and I’m always open to talking.

[00:41:03] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t think there’s one size fits all really, is there? Because the WPCC feels like a really great initiative. It has more of a kind of escrow kind of service feel to it. In other words, Kinsta, you put in your X amount of dollars and then the WPCC will figure out where that might go. But it may be that, you know, you guys at Kinsta would like to have more of a kind of one-to-one relationship with the people that you are sponsoring. And so that’s fine.

Maybe you will have back channels to the people who do similar work at different companies. And so it will be more kind of laissez-faire than something a little bit more organised. Maybe it’ll just be more back channel kind of thing.

But that’s really interesting. Honestly, the time has got away with us. We’re at 45 minutes so far, so I think we’re fast approaching the amount of time that we’ve got available for us. Is there anything in this that we missed out? Was there any kernel, any little nugget somewhere that we failed to mention, or do you think we’ve covered the whole thing off?

[00:41:57] Roger Williams: You know, I think the one thing that maybe we skipped through a little bit is how to get your organisation bought into this. We’ve talked about the reasoning. We’ve talked about how to sell it from the outside. We’ve talked about how to deal with the individual contributors. Inside of your organisation there’s, again, three ways that I approach this. I like the number three, I guess.

So when you’re making your internal pitch, this is all in the slide deck as well, understanding your organisational goals. So understand like, hey, we’re a hosting company, what’s important for a hosting company? Well, performance and security are pretty top things. So maybe that’s where you want to focus.

Again, also we have a ton of customers that are non-English speaking, so Polyglots makes a lot of sense. Understand the organisational goals so that when you go to your executives, you go to your leadership, whoever’s got the money, you’re framing this out in terms of how it benefits your organisation.

The second one is being patient, but being ready. So I started this conversation, I want to say late 2023, inside of Kinsta. And then about a year later, suddenly, out of the blue, hey, here’s your budget, go get to work. And so I needed to be ready. So we all needed to be ready. And we were. The good news is Marcel and Alex and myself, were already out in the community talking with people. We already were having some conversations about, ooh, who would we like to sponsor, who could use the sponsorship?

And so as soon as the budget was given to us, we were ready to go. And the reason that I recommend being ready is, these can be fleeting, right? Just because the executive has approved it this month doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to be there the next month.

[00:43:37] Nathan Wrigley: And also the contributor might not be, you know, I’ve got two weeks now, I can do something right away.

[00:43:42] Roger Williams: Yeah, so be ready because they’re going to want to see results. And the results should be, the way you framed it, the results should just be, hey, we’re sponsoring contributor X, they’re doing Y and Z, oh, and I had them on a Kinsta Talk, and here’s actual proof of we’re doing stuff. So have all of that ready to go. Have a spreadsheet that tracks everything so you can track where the money’s going and it’s all clear.

Understand how your organisation wants to handle these things, right? Is it going to be as simple as, hey, here’s a credit card and here’s a GitHub sponsorship page? Is that going to be okay? Or does it need to be a little bit more, I say complicated, involved, right? Do you need to have a non disparaging contract, right? So that it’s understood, hey, we’re sponsoring you, it’d be best if you didn’t say bad things about us, please. Get that cleared, like figure that stuff out.

And then be ready for common objections, right? So they’re going to immediately come to you with, hey, why would we spend money on this? It’s something that we get for free. And be ready with that strategic and the operational and the second order benefits conversations. And know which of those is going to land with which manager, executive best. So getting that internal pitch ready and really creating the project so it’s ready for success from day one is really important.

[00:45:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really interesting because a lot of it, most of what we talked about in this conversation didn’t really dwell on that. It was more about the nuts and the bolts of trying to connect the two different sides. But you’ve obviously laid out the groundwork inside Kinsta to have this ready. And then the minute that the CEO or the CMO or whoever it is, says, right, Roger, here’s some money, you’re off, you’re ready to actually go and start seeking this stuff out.

I very much doubt that this conversation is going to have a perfect outcome. I don’t suppose there is a perfect system, but I appreciate the fact that you’re giving it a lot of thought over there, and you’re trying to figure out how to make these two sides collide in a way that is mutually beneficial. Because it certainly seems that with WordPress at 40% of the web, the money question is not going away, the philanthropic side of things is not going away, and we do have to have ways for these two sides to communicate successfully with each other.

So, okay, I will put links to anything that we have mentioned in the show notes. So if you go to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Roger Williams, you’ll be able to find everything there.

Just one last thing, Roger. Where can we find you apart from kinsta.com? Is there a place where you hang out online if somebody wants to pick this conversation up and run with it?

[00:46:11] Roger Williams: Yeah, absolutely. I am a big user of LinkedIn. I post there pretty regularly. If you interact with me in the comments, I will love you forever, you’re my best friend. I love it when people ask me questions, or challenge me in the comments like, let’s have conversations there. Feel free to reach out to me and let’s talk, I wanna figure this stuff out.

[00:46:30] Nathan Wrigley: Roger Williams, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:46:34] Roger Williams: Thank you very much, Nathan. I appreciate everything that you do for the community and thank you for the time and letting me be on.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how Dow Jones is supercharging WordPress editorial workflows.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today we have Joshua Bryant. Joshua works at Dow Jones, helping power some of the world’s largest publishing sites, including the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and MarketWatch, all on a WordPress Multisite platform.

His background with WordPress started, as it does for so many, by inheriting a site and slowly peeling back the layers of what the CMS can do, from page building to infrastructure and custom workflows.

At Word Camp US, he delivered a presentation called Reimagining WordPress Editing: How We Embedded Gutenberg Into Our Product Ecosystem, which digs into how his team decoupled the Gutenberg block editor from WP Admin. And embedded it in a standalone React application, all while keeping content stored in a traditional WordPress database.

This episode is a journey into why time, down to the second, matters in the publishing world, and how headless solutions can address those needs.

Joshua explains how editorial workflows were rebuilt so that breaking news can be published, or updated, with lightning fast speeds, removing distractions and page reloads for editors, while retaining the full power and extensibility of WordPress behind the scenes.

We talk through the technical architecture, planning, editing, and rendering are split into separate applications with Gutenberg customized down to just two or three essential blocks, living outside the typical WordPress environment.

Joshua talks about the challenge of simulating the global WP object, keeping business logic and proprietary plugins intact, and interacting with the rest API for Instantaneous content publishing.

If you’re interested in headless WordPress, editorial workflows at scale, or how Enterprise newsrooms leverage open source tech for real world speed, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Joshua Bryant.

I am joined on the podcast by Joshua Bryant. Hello.

[00:03:25] Joshua Bryant: Hi.

[00:03:26] Nathan Wrigley: Nice to meet you. This is the first time that we’ve ever met. We’re going to be talking today about, well, the Dow Jones website, but also about headless, I guess is probably the best way to sum it up. So strap in. This is going to be a tinfoil hat episode. I am also going to say at the beginning that this is an episode for which I am supremely unqualified. So I hope that you are going to be able to shepherd me and call me out when I ask a silly question. So let’s hope for the best.

The reason that I’ve got you on is because headless is an interesting subject, there’s that, but also the fact that it’s Dow Jones that you are dealing with, and the profound importance of that. The fact that, of all the websites I can imagine, there’s not many which have that requirement to be alive a hundred percent of the time. So that whole piece is going to fit in as well.

Before we get into that, would you mind just telling us a bit about you? I mean, we know where you work now, but other than that, tell us about your experience with WordPress and so on.

[00:04:18] Joshua Bryant: Right. So, I mean, I started, I think like most WordPress people started, I inherited a WordPress website knowing nothing about web development at all. And so I struggled my way through Googling, what is DNS? What does that even mean?

And the WordPress offered me the opportunity to grow, and there’s always something new to learn. So from day one, I started learning about building pages, and then themes, and then plugins. And then I got a job where I was building themes and plugins. And then I got a job where I was really working on the infrastructure behind it.

As I continue to grow, I keep learning that there’s always another layer to WordPress. And I think I’m getting close to the bottom, but that’s what I thought every layer. So I did a little bit of contributing last year when I was here at WordCamp, and I’m just excited to keep growing and keep learning more about the power that we have in that WordPress environment.

[00:05:18] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for that. So you’re at WordCamp US, obviously, you’re talking to me, we’re in the same room. Presentation that you did or doing?

[00:05:26] Joshua Bryant: Did.

[00:05:26] Nathan Wrigley: Did. We’ll get to that in a minute. It was called Reimagining WordPress Editing: How We Embedded Gutenberg Into Our Product Ecosystem. I might read some of the blurb in a little bit, but first of all, how did it go?

[00:05:37] Joshua Bryant: I think it went well.

[00:05:38] Nathan Wrigley: Good.

[00:05:39] Joshua Bryant: Yeah. I told the story in the presentation that I teach teenagers a lot. And it was a couple years ago, I’m in the middle of a lesson and I looked down and nobody’s paying attention to me because one of the students had gotten so bored, he had started ripping apart his styrofoam cup and he had been eating it. He was halfway through eating the cup. Halfway through my presentation, I look and nobody had done anything sort of like that. So I felt like the presentation went well, people were paying attention. That’s kind of my benchmark.

[00:06:08] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a good one.

[00:06:08] Joshua Bryant: I think I’ve gotten better.

[00:06:10] Nathan Wrigley: So here’s the blurb. And I won’t do it all, I’ll get maybe through the first paragraph and hopefully, dear listener, it’ll give you some context for what’s going to come in the next 40 minutes, half an hour or so.

What happens when you take the Gutenberg editor out of WordPress? This talk explores how we decouple the block editor from WP Admin and the Loop, embedding it in a standalone React application to power custom editorial workflows, while still saving to a traditional WordPress database.

Now there’s a lot in there. And I think that subject would be curious if it was just, you know, the mom and pop website, but the fact that you are actually dealing with, forgive me if I get this wrong, dowjones.com. I don’t know if it is dowjones.com, but it’s certainly the Dow Jones.

[00:06:50] Joshua Bryant: So Dow Jones as an entity, a fun fact, they no longer own the Dow Jones market. They sold it. But they do own a lot of publishing websites. So they own websites like the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Mansion Global. We’ve purchased more, I don’t know if I can say any of the other names right now, but we own all of those entities and so they are on a Multisite.

And so right now our publishing system, all of our editors publish from those websites in our WordPress Multisite environment. And all of that, we can talk about headless, but all of that actually goes into this all knowing database in the sky, where our front end systems pick them up. So WordPress itself doesn’t render wsj.com. We have a mobile team that does that. One way, we have a web team that does it a different way, and they all read from this all knowing database.

But we use WordPress and our editors use it, we call it NewsPress, and we use it to publish all of our content. Our editors find it easy to use, and we like all of the features that WordPress offers. So we’ve leveraged the power of WordPress to do those things.

[00:08:03] Nathan Wrigley: Some of those names were really enormous entities. Did you say the Wall Street Journal, or?

[00:08:08] Joshua Bryant: Yeah.

[00:08:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, these are ones that I’ve heard of and I don’t live in this country, so that’s pretty profound. So I guess they’ve got an incredible appetite for traffic, but also an incredible need to be there a hundred percent. Not this 99.8% of the time. This is 100% of the time, I’m guessing.

[00:08:26] Joshua Bryant: Right. And the topic that we’re going to talk about today, and it applies to all news, but when there’s breaking news, being first to market matters. Being 10 seconds ahead of your competitor when Taylor Swift gets engaged is an important amount of time when you’re sending out a push notification. Or in the case of MarketWatch, when there are going to be fluctuations in the market and we have editors listening in on board meetings, being able to send that information out and get that to our readers as soon as possible is the most important thing to our publications.

[00:08:59] Nathan Wrigley: So is this a project, or an infrastructure, let’s go with that, that you inherited or were you bought in to build this?

[00:09:06] Joshua Bryant: Both. In the most simple terms, I can explain it, we’ll say we have three systems. We have a React based planning tool. We have a WordPress editing tool, where we actually write the articles, save the content, control user permissions, lock and unlock posts. And then we have the front end that then takes what they publish and display it in any way that they need across all of our publications. So we have planning, editing and rendering. And those are three completely separate buckets that have been there for quite some time.

[00:09:43] Nathan Wrigley: So we’re at a WordPress event and we’re surrounded by WordPressers, so it is kind of a bit of a bubble that we’re in at the minute. Everybody in this hall, in this place, kind of would understand what you’ve just described. However, dear listener, hopefully I’m not besmirching you, but there’s going to be a bunch of people listening to this who, what you just said went completely over their head.

They download WordPress, they pay a few dollars a month to pop it on a host that they believe is reliable, and they know there’s a database somewhere but they’re kind of using the front end. And that’s all that they need to concern themselves about. Just explain in more detail what you just said. This React, this editing and this front end. What even is that?

[00:10:20] Joshua Bryant: Right. I mean you can think of them as three separate applications on your phone. You might use one app, like your calendar, to plan things out. That’s what our planning tool is. It essentially lets us coordinate with each other and say, hey, we need to have a steady stream of stories. And we also want to attach, our photographers are going to put some images in those stories, so we might add that to the calendar invite description. Those are the kind of things we do in the planning tool.

And then in the WordPress tool, it’s a lot like what anybody does in WordPress. We’re writing posts, we’re adding images, and in the case of the newsroom, they might do a couple things around SEO, and add some metadata that we want to show up on Google. And I think everybody should be familiar with creating posts.

And then a completely different system picks it up and says, okay, I’m going to show everybody what it looks like. And that part is not really important because that’s the headless part. But you don’t really need to understand that there’s another system that does this thing differently, to understand what we’re going to talk about as far as, we moved our editor into, let’s say, a very simplified tool.

One example that I like to think about is, when we have done this project, we did it very specifically for the newsroom’s needs. So we tailored it very, very specifically. But I like to think of the applications of, I like to collect people who have great quotes. When I hear a great quote, I’m like, oh, I need to write that down. I don’t want to forget it. I like to think of it as, I want to pull up something like Twitter or Bluesky, and I want to just type in a field, hit send, and then it publishes a post on my WordPress dashboard. It’s a custom post that says, here’s a notable tweet. And it posted it.

That way I don’t lose that and I can have it in my WordPress, which is where I keep most of like, I keep my recipes, and my notes, and my blogs, and everything that I want to remember. It’s like my personal online notebook. But now we’ve created a mechanism where we can kind of take that and extend it anywhere we want outside of just the WP Editor, and be able to pull something up and say, hey, there’s a different application. You type it in, you hit send, and then it all runs through WordPress itself.

[00:12:48] Nathan Wrigley: What are the reasons why that needed to be done? So just sort of going backwards a bit, really. Obviously that is what is possible, but why is just a default version of WordPress on red hot hosting not something that is suitable in this situation? What affordances does it get you? What performance does it buy you? What UI does it allow you to create that makes this possible? And I think you said you built your own proprietary system. What did you call it, press news or news?

[00:13:15] Joshua Bryant: NewsPress.

[00:13:15] Nathan Wrigley: NewsPress, sorry. Wrong way around. So, why? What are the limitations in WordPress that were unignorable that required this?

[00:13:22] Joshua Bryant: I don’t think there were necessarily limitations. We are talking about shaving seconds off the editor process. And so there are a lot of things in our WordPress system that we want editors to do before they publish a normal article. We want them to have certain SEO titles listed. We want them to have fallback images for headline videos. We are okay with the way everything operates inside of WordPress, but we’re talking about shaving seconds off by putting it, first of all, in a tool that the editors are already in. They’re planning their day, they’re planning their month in the planning tool. And it’s a single page application. There’s no page reload. It’s all in React. There’s no calling a database that we have to worry about.

We’re literally just pulling up the Gutenberg editor, typing out a breaking news or a market watch, we call them pulse, some update that we need to get to our readers. And if there’s a bunch of information that comes in, we need to be able to hit 10 posts with as limited information as possible and get it to publish all the way to the front end, and do 10 in a row as quickly as possible.

[00:14:37] Nathan Wrigley: So the raison d’etre there then is time. It’s all about shaving seconds off because in the industry that you are in, if you’re five seconds late, you might as well not publish.

[00:14:46] Joshua Bryant: Right. It’s time, and it’s also distraction for our editors. They don’t have the full editor experience anymore. They don’t have the sidebar, and all the tabs because we have a lot of stuff in our editor.

[00:14:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so in this three step process where you’ve got the React, and we’ll talk about ripping out Gutenberg and pushing it to this React app in a minute. But we’ve got the React app where the planning is done, then presumably when the planning is finished, and I’m going to use the word publish, maybe it’s not publish, but you hit a button, presumably that pushes it down the funnel towards the WordPress install, which then pushes it to the front end. So there’s this kind of like one way cycle.

But the idea of the React, Gutenberg bit is that it’s fast, really fast and distraction free. There’s just no clutter. It’s just, you’re familiar with that interface. Because with the best one in the world, WordPress, there’s a lot of things going on. When you click publish, quite a lot can happen at that moment. You don’t want any of that. You just want publish. Boom. Done.

[00:15:39] Joshua Bryant: Right.

[00:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So you’ve pulled the Gutenberg editor out of WordPress. And, okay, I think it’s important at this point to say, Gutenberg is an open source project. We’re mostly familiar with it sitting inside of WordPress, but it doesn’t belong there. And you’ve put it inside of this React app. How have you customised it to get it there, and what have you stripped out, what have you added in?

[00:16:01] Joshua Bryant: Yeah, great question because part of the reason we decided to continue to use Gutenberg instead of some other React tool is that we’ve already invested so much time and effort into the business logic around our custom plugins and around the workflow, and we’ve put so much into our WordPress environment that we asked ourselves, how can we maintain all the equity we have in WordPress and leverage the power of WordPress, but put it in a slightly different place where we can take care of all of our editor’s needs? And so that was really the driving factor behind, okay, we’re going to move it here, but we still want all the things we have there.

And so what we did is we limited the number of blocks. While we might have most of the Core blocks in our regular editor, we have the paragraph and list block in our planning.

[00:17:01] Nathan Wrigley: That’s it?

[00:17:01] Joshua Bryant: Yeah, because that’s all we needed. That’s all we needed. And we have a couple custom plugins that we’ve moved into our planning tool. For instance, in MarketWatch, if you’re writing a story about Target, you’re going to want to tag the Target company, and we call it tickers, the stock tickers. And that lets our front end know, hey, this is a story about Target, let’s put the real time stock ticker information into this article, so it’s not like, when I wrote it a week ago, this is what the the stock ticker looked like.

It’s, when I’m looking at it right now, this is the real time stock ticker data. We put a lot of time and effort into building that plugin for WordPress, and so we wanted to find a way to not have to rewrite any of that code, not have to redo any of that work, but take what we’ve already done and just move it to the planning tool and have it work in both locations in the same code base.

[00:17:55] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m just trying to understand what that looks like. So let’s say that I’m in this planning tool. Somehow I get to that planning tool. I don’t know where it lives, whether I’m on a desktop or a website, or an application which lives on Mac OS. I don’t know. I probably don’t need to know, but I’m in it. And it looks like Gutenberg, yeah? I mean it is Gutenberg. Everything’s the same, except you’ve got this tiny limited arrangement of blocks. So paragraph, list, and then a couple of others, bespoke ones which you obviously need.

So what happens then when I’m doing that planning and then I click, I’m going to use publish again, I don’t know if you’ve overhauled the UI to make it something else, but let’s click publish. What happens at that moment? Where does that go? And how does it fit into the whole flow that we talked about?

[00:18:36] Joshua Bryant: Right. So everything that you do in a normal WordPress editor, you can also do using this thing called the REST API. And they’re just endpoints that exist that you can call to do things like lock a post, save a post, publish a post. And so when we do anything like that inside of our planning tool and we hit publish, it just hits this backend location that says, hey, post number 1, 2, 3, I want you to do what you normally do WordPress, and publish that post for me. And it doesn’t have to load anything inside of WordPress, it just hits that endpoint and WordPress says, well, I know how to publish. Okay, I’m going to publish.

And we didn’t have to load the page, we didn’t have to hit the WP Admin. It just skips all those steps and says, okay, I’ll publish for you. And then that sends it off downstream and they all do their thing. So it’s essentially the same, we just skip some steps.

[00:19:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So again, just to emphasise, the whole point of that was to save time.

[00:19:39] Joshua Bryant: Yes.

[00:19:39] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating. That’s fascinating that time is such an important commodity. I’ve never come across a scenario, I mean I just don’t live in that world. I don’t have a scenario in my head where the amount of time it takes to hit publish and wait for WordPress to do its checks and balances and what have you, or load it up and all of that. But those few moments is important enough.

So you build the React app, it looks like Gutenberg, you hit publish via the REST API, it goes to WordPress, but it misses out all the intermediary things that may happen, and we can get into that in a minute. And then it just hits, it just publishes it immediately.

[00:20:15] Joshua Bryant: Right.

[00:20:15] Nathan Wrigley: That is fascinating.

[00:20:16] Joshua Bryant: And the great thing about keeping WordPress in the loop there is that if there’s a breaking news article, we do as rapidly as we can. We’re going to publish that article. But now it exists in the WordPress database, and we can go back to it and do all of the things that we normally do, but it’s already published.

So it’s out there, but now we can go and, just like the regular WordPress editor, we can add images, we can add SEO data, we can do all of those things we’d normally do. We can post updates, but the post is already out there. So we’re no longer in a rush, but we still are going to make that story more robust.

[00:20:53] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m just trying to be clear, because in your, the blurb for your presentation, you used this phrase, which was custom editorial workflows. I think we just went through that. So React app, WordPress, it gets published, we’re on the front end. But then at that moment, any modifications, let’s say, I don’t know, there’s an update, somebody has to modify something about it. At this point, you’re in the middle step. You’re going to the regular WordPress site and you’re updating it in there. Have I got that right? You’re not back the first step.

[00:21:20] Joshua Bryant: Right. We’re doing all of that in the planning tool. And then if you’ve been to some of our websites or I think any news website, you’ll see, last updated, and it’ll give you a timestamp. That’s when you get that notification that, hey, this has been updated. It’s because we’ve gone back into WordPress and we’ve added more information that our readers are going to find interesting or important. And we sent it down and there it goes again. Version two is out.

[00:21:45] Nathan Wrigley: Is this kind of standard practice in the journalism industry to have something akin to this because time’s so important? Or is it something of an affordance that you can have because those publications are already so successful?

Because I’m imagining it’s not all that cheap to put that together and maintain. Presumably there’s got to be developers surrounding it all the time and making sure it’s updated and kept alive. So I was just curious as to whether or not this is typical or something that you think is pretty unique.

[00:22:13] Joshua Bryant: Well, I’ll tell you this. This is the first time ever in my career that I have tried to Google things and got zero results. So I don’t think that it happens a lot. I think it’s pretty unique. I know our parent company, they own a bunch of other publishing corporations and none of them have done anything like this either. I think this is something that we pioneered and that it’s great, it was very unfortunate for me to try to figure it out.

[00:22:38] Nathan Wrigley: Were there headaches along the way? Was it really quite a challenge? Have you learned things which other people listening to this podcast, they may think, okay, I need to talk to Joshua. I have a similar crisis on my hands. Was there a lot of learning along the way?

[00:22:51] Joshua Bryant: I think the main thing that I learned was that WordPress has a lot of really good documentation for using it the way that it should be used.

[00:23:01] Nathan Wrigley: The normal way.

[00:23:02] Joshua Bryant: Yes. And so if you want to learn how to use WordPress, the documentation’s great. If you want to learn how to misuse WordPress, there is not a lot of good documentation out there. And you’re going to have to read a lot of Trac tickets and GitHub issues and Slack threads and, you know, read through the code.

And so, yeah, I will say that, pro, WordPress, great at documenting, but if you’re going to do something out of the box like this, you’re going to have to find those alternate sources of documentation, which is just, and how they built it. That was a good lesson and a good learning curve. And I learned a lot about the contributor process through that.

[00:23:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh yeah, I’m sure you did. Did it deliver, or does it deliver in the way that was anticipated at the planning state? So when the stakeholders were sat down and the green light was given to this project, did it come out exactly as expected, or were there things where suddenly you figured, oh, we cannot do this particular thing? Maybe it worked out better than you had originally intended.

[00:24:00] Joshua Bryant: Yeah, so actually, we rolled it out for MarketWatch first and it worked, and they have not complained, at least to me about it. But it was so good that they rolled it out to wsj.com next, and we developed it in such a way that it would be very extendable. And when they rolled it out to wsj, I didn’t know about it. So it really was a seamless transition. Now we have two of our biggest newsrooms using it, and I think we’re going to roll it out to Baron’s next. I don’t anticipate having to do any work for that either.

[00:24:32] Nathan Wrigley: I find this so curious. I think you maybe made yourself fairly indispensable.

[00:24:37] Joshua Bryant: I wouldn’t go that far.

[00:24:38] Nathan Wrigley: It certainly sounds it. So let’s get into the sort of technical bits and pieces about it, because I’m reading, cribbing from my notes here. You mentioned in the talk, simulating the global WP Object. And whilst that sounds interesting and is no doubt complicated, what are the critical components of the doing that? How did you replicate it? What was the biggest challenge? Stripping out the editor and making it work somewhere else.

[00:24:59] Joshua Bryant: Well, that’s one of the great things that I learned about the way WordPress works behind the scenes. When you’re building plugins, you import a lot of WordPress packages that do very specific things. And my assumption was always, when I build my code, it’s putting all of those packages into the code in one file and then ships it to my website. And that’s how it works.

That’s not exactly how it works. The bundle process for WordPress actually pulls all of those scripts out for speed and efficiency. You don’t want 20 plugins to have 20 different versions of the same code. And so they’ve pulled all of that out and it just uses one version of that code. Whatever version of WordPress you’re on, if I’m on six three, it’s going to run the six three version of all of the scripts.

And so when we moved our code over into the planning tool, there is no six three in React. It doesn’t know that these scripts are supposed to be there, and so it was referencing this global object, this Global WP. And if you’re familiar with doing things in the console, it’s, you type wp.data.select Core Editor, and you get a bunch of stuff back, right? It doesn’t exist in React or in Gutenberg. And so that was our first hurdle.

What WordPress is doing for us, building this object that all the code runs through, we’re going to have to manually do in React. We’re going to have to import those packages and set them at the global namespace level just so that the WordPress code will run.

[00:26:38] Nathan Wrigley: And how challenging was that?

[00:26:40] Joshua Bryant: Well, discovering it was the challenge. Implementing it was the easy part. We went through many iterations of, why is it not working? How will it not communicate? Before we realised that WordPress is doing this for us. And then once we had that realisation, the implementation was rather simple.

[00:26:59] Nathan Wrigley: To me, that would’ve been quite a frustrating process. Going backwards and forwards there. Why isn’t it working? Why isn’t it working? And then sort of suddenly realise, oh, it’s not working because, as you’ve just described. Yeah, that’s really interesting.

But you are happy that you went through that process. There’s no bit at which you thought, okay, we’re backing out. We’re not going to use WordPress. We’re going to use some sort of custom CMS that you can buy off the shelf, any of that.

[00:27:22] Joshua Bryant: Right. Oh yeah. I mean, if you had asked me a week into my back and forth, I would’ve said no. And it gives me a deeper understanding of WordPress too, and a deeper appreciation for the decisions that the contributors made when they built it to make it efficient. I never thought about how the WP build process helps developers build efficient websites, even if they don’t really know what’s going on. You type in WP scripts build, and then a lot of things happen. But the developers don’t need to know everything that happens. It just happens. And that’s great for developers.

But when I went that step further and I’m like, why is this happening? I went down the rabbit trail of figuring out what does WP scripts build do, and how can I break it? I want to do something else with it. And then coming all the way back to realising, no, they’re doing it the right way, the good way. And now that I understand what it does, I can design our system to be in alignment with that.

[00:28:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it sounds like you kind of went full circle there.

[00:28:28] Joshua Bryant: Oh, I did.

[00:28:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really interesting.

[00:28:30] Joshua Bryant: Circle, spiral.

[00:28:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah, I’m sure there was a few spirals. So without giving anything away, how do your stakeholders that need to be a part of the first stage, the planning tool, how do they get to that? Can they access that with their phones? Can they access that with their desktop? How do they interact with that?

[00:28:46] Joshua Bryant: Yes, two things are important for us. We want to be able to access it in the office, on a desktop, plan out things. But we also want our reporters to be able to give us breaking news in the field, wherever they are.

[00:29:01] Nathan Wrigley: Right. That was where I was going with that, yeah.

[00:29:03] Joshua Bryant: Right. And so that is one driving factor for the decisions that we make when we make these design decisions, and make these application decisions. We need to remove as many barriers from our editors to publishing.

And sometimes that’s, how can we reduce the number of clicks to get a full fledged story out the door? Or it’s, how do we make this work with as few distractions as possible on a mobile phone when somebody’s sitting in the back of a boardroom?

[00:29:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So available on everything, everywhere. Where there’s an internet connection, you can get to this.

[00:29:37] Joshua Bryant: Yeah.

[00:29:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. One of the curious things, and again, we’re going to go into the technical details here, so forgive me if this question is misplaced, because you specifically mentioned replacing Core / Editor with Core / Block Editor. I’m not really familiar with what that distinction is, but the fact that you mentioned that kind of gave me an intuition that there was something there. So why was that important? And you are going to have to go slightly gently on me cause I don’t really understand.

[00:30:01] Joshua Bryant: I will gently wade into the weeds here. When we’re building custom blocks in our process here, a lot of times we use the data stores. And there’s an editor data store, and a block editor data store. What does that look like in the WP admin? When you pull up a post the block inserter, when you hit the plus on the top left, or you hit add, all of the blocks that show up, that’s one part of the Gutenberg editor.

The big chunk in the middle is the second part where you do all your typing, you put your post, you add your images. And then the sidebar on the right, where you make adjustments, is the third part. All three of those components are the Block Editor. Everything that exists outside of that is the broader editor. Think of that as like a giant wrapper around the entire thing. That has like the save button, the publish button. It has information about the post and all of its attributes.

And so it has much more information. The Block Editor just needs to know what blocks exist on the page. The Editor needs to know about a much broader context inside of WordPress. When we moved the Editor, we moved the Block Editor. So the save button isn’t there. We’re not using that. We wrote our own save button that hits the API.

[00:31:23] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just pause you there? So when you say the Block Editor, you are describing the three things. The panel on the left, the central area where you create the content, and the sidebar on the right, if you like, where the settings for those might be. But not the wrapper.

[00:31:36] Joshua Bryant: Right. And we actually went one step further and said, we don’t need the left or the right. We just need the part in the middle. We want to make it as distraction free as possible and move it over. So we have the option to put the sidebar there, and the sidebar works, but we have chosen as a business decision, we don’t want it.

And since we’re headless, whether they change the font or the colour, none of that actually affects our front end. We don’t want editors to be able to bold and italicise and make all the text red that they think is important because they would go crazy. They think all my text is important.

So yeah, we moved all of just that middle piece, just that Block Editor is what we moved over. And we have a save button, and a publish button that don’t interact with the WordPress Editor, they interact with the WordPress API.

[00:32:28] Nathan Wrigley: The REST API pushing it to the regular WordPress site. Okay, and again, just harking back to what you mentioned a moment ago, when we began this conversation, I was imagining a different thing. I was imagining that you pulled the Block Editor in its entirety out. So I’ve learned something there. So this is just that content creation area.

And by stripping out the left, and the right, and the publish and all of those things, that’s where the time saving comes, is it? Is that where the few seconds can be shaved off because it’s the bare bones of what it requires to create some text on a screen.

[00:33:00] Joshua Bryant: Yes, exactly. Because a lot of times it’s headline, paragraph, send. That’s it for the first iteration of that article.

[00:33:07] Nathan Wrigley: So one of the questions that I had, which now appears to be not necessary, but I’m going to ask it anyway. I was asking about things like, for example, manually editing the content that you would make in the React app, undoing things, history, and so on. That’s not really what’s going on. You’re doing it this one time in the React app, then everything after that is happening in the WordPress website.

So the history and everything is stored in the regular way, the bolding, the italicising, the, I want to make it red, that’s all done posthumously after the fact, once it’s been published, or at least shunted via the REST API to the WordPress, you know, the database, the regular WordPress website. So that all happens there. The amendments happen there.

[00:33:49] Joshua Bryant: Right. And we still have access to all of the toolbar options. So if you want to add a link, you would do it the exact same way that you add a link in your WordPress post. So we have some of that available to us, but we’ve locked it down. Not because it won’t work, but because we don’t want it to be a distraction for our editors.

[00:34:09] Nathan Wrigley: So is there any type of content that, I’m trying to imagine a scenario where, presumably not everybody needs the React app. So for example, if I’m writing a piece about, I don’t know, gardening or something, you know, it’s really not time sensitive. I could write this next year and it’s just as important, or a recipe or something like that. Do I need to be in the React app? Or is that just for the kind of, the journalists out in the field who need things quick? So have you got like this two tier system of editing, the, I need it extra, specially quick, you are in React, but the gardening post is just done as a regular post?

[00:34:41] Joshua Bryant: Yes. And that’s the majority of our posts, are all regular posts, and they’ve had time to plan it out and gather their assets, which they do in the planning tool, and all of that information syncs over to WordPress. But they don’t do any editing other than our breaking news.

[00:34:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. It’s the breaking news React app then basically.

[00:35:01] Joshua Bryant: Yes.

[00:35:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s curious. Sorry, this is sort of sidestepping slightly. So they just create text. They create text and lists and that’s it. Paragraphs and lists. That’s all they’ve got. And when they hit the REST API, does it publish automatically or do they hit some other editorial workflow where somebody more senior gets to look at it? Because I’m guessing in this scenario where Taylor Swift got married, you just want to go straight to front end.

[00:35:28] Joshua Bryant: Yeah. It goes straight to the front end. They have a paragraph and list, that’s for the core, but they also have some of our proprietary plugins that, like we have a correction, and we have a ticker inserter, and there are a couple ones that we moved over, like our byline. We have a author database, and so they can say, hey, I wrote this. And so that’s a block that we wrote, and it works in WordPress and it also works in the planning tool, but it’s very limited what they can do because that’s all they needed. So we said we’ll strip everything else out.

[00:36:00] Nathan Wrigley: Is it a common workflow then where the same author who’s written this really time sensitive piece will hit publish over there, it goes from React app, REST API, to WordPress, to the front end? They would then almost immediately, do they at that point let go of it or do they then almost immediately go back to the WordPress website and think, actually, do you know what, I do want that bit bold, I would like to underline that? So yeah, I’m just curious what that workflow looks like.

[00:36:26] Joshua Bryant: I think it depends on the situation. And so in one case, while it is a breaking news story, as long as we don’t convert it to a full article, we can make updates in the planning tool. So he can go back, we can edit that and say, well, I wanted it bold, I’m going to do it in the planning tool. But if you wanted to, you could also do it in the WordPress environment. When we say convert to an article, we mean, this was breaking news, but I’m going to click a button and that’s going to let other editors know, we’re about to make this a full fledged article.

[00:36:56] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see.

[00:36:57] Joshua Bryant: Yeah. Because a lot of times we have multiple editors working on the same article. And so we need to be in coordination, especially around breaking news. Hey, this is happening right now. I’ve pushed it out. I’m going to pass this off to you. Can you go in? Hopefully there are no typos, but fix any typos, or change the headline, or add SEO data. So they really work as a team, especially around breaking news and then pass that off to other editors.

[00:37:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess because you’re in the weeds of this, it’s so self-evident what this workflow is. It’s just for me, it’s so curious that there’s all these interesting little steps, and behind it all is this desire to save seconds. And it really is absolutely, this is nothing like a WordPress site that I’ve come across in the past. Hope you’ll forgive my ignorance for keeping asking the same kind of question. But I find that really fascinating.

So the gardening post is done on the website, the important timely post is done in the React app, and yet there’s a convert to, I don’t know, regular content or something like that, button that an editor can go in and, yeah, it’s wheels within wheels. It’s absolutely fascinating.

[00:38:01] Joshua Bryant: Yes. This is why I said earlier, there were so many business rules and so much time spent into building our WordPress system that we didn’t consider another tool very seriously. Because we have so much invested in there, and there’s so much power in the WordPress system that we’ve, first of all out of the box, but second, what we’ve built on top of it that we said, we need to leverage this in this use case here.

[00:38:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Honestly, I think we could probably spend all day talking about this, but we probably should move on.

I’m curious as to whether any of this knowledge that you’ve acquired building this, because I know that in the WordPress community, most people don’t do headless, but there is a hardcore of people like you who just love this stuff.

And I’m just curious as to whether the knowledge that you’ve gained in the building of this, whether or not any of that gets put back into the open source project, whether there’s a commitment on your side, on the Dow Jones side to make this available, to open up a repo, to give away the content, the way that you’ve done it, the knowledge that you’ve acquired along the way?

[00:39:02] Joshua Bryant: Yeah, I think that is ultimately my goal. I started a repo just to show how we moved Gutenberg. There’s a lot of proprietary stuff that I had to take out of there. This is just my repo at this point. It’s lacking a lot of the, how do you get a custom block to work over there, at this point? I want to continue to add to that, but I think I’m also considering what, does this do for the broader WordPress community? How can this be applied to help Core, or to help contractors, or to help people who have a lot of clients.

One thing I’ve thought about is, if we have clients who may be difficult, right? I think we’ve all run into people at one point or another that said, I don’t like WordPress. I’ve heard the word React. I want React. People say, React is cool, right? Or I want a Vue project, or I want it to look like this. I don’t want to go to WordPress backend.

This is opening up a whole different set of opportunities where we can say, okay, I’m going to throw together, I’m going to vibe code, which I hate, but I want to vibe code a one page React application, and rely on the WordPress API to give me database, to give me user management, post saves, revision history. You can use WordPress as its own complete system and then just slap React on top of it, and have the full Gutenberg editing experience and save all of your information and still do all the things that you know how to do in WordPress, and your client’s happy and they don’t know anything about it.

[00:40:38] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of like WordPress without the WordPress. It’s the look and feel of WordPress without the overhead of WordPress.

[00:40:43] Joshua Bryant: It’s the power of WordPress. And what I say is the power of WordPress at the speed of breaking news. But it’s the power of WordPress at whatever the client wants. And so if they want one thing, you can give it to them there. And if you have a lot of clients and you have people spinning up different interfaces, maybe it’s React, it’s Vue. You have eight different clients, you can put them all into one Multisite and you can use WordPress as the backend for all of them. And each application looks completely different, tailored to those needs, and it all just goes through the same old WordPress functionality.

[00:41:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess that the way the interface looks is kind of the key bit there. You could make it look like Gutenberg, you could make it look nothing like Gutenberg. It could be anything that you liked. Simple, complicated, whatever.

I’m guessing this is really enterprise stuff, though. I don’t think we’re ever going to be straying into, I don’t know, I’ve got a dog walking service and I would like to offer that in my town of 3,000 people. We’re not for that. This is kind of enterprise, publishing, big pharma, that kind of thing.

[00:41:46] Joshua Bryant: Enterprise or people who deal with a lot of particular clients. Or people who want to build something cool for themselves, like I want to collect quotes when I hear them. I might build that application so that I can just pull up my phone, send out something like a tweet. I can say, Nathan Wrigley said this. It was really cool. Send. And now it’s a custom post type on my website called notable quotes, and it’s just your quote attribution.

[00:42:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. I guess the beauty of the open source project, and thank you for honoring the commitment there, hopefully we’ll get the knowledge distributed, is that the first time around you doing it, it would’ve been very expensive because you’re a developer, your time is valuable. So presumably all of that got wrapped into this project. The company that you are working for could afford that. But maybe now it’s going to be a slightly easier bridge to cross. And I guess communicating with you might make that a little bit easier. I don’t mean to open up your calendar or anything, but would you potentially make yourself available through email or Slack or whatever? And if that’s the case, where would people find you?

[00:42:54] Joshua Bryant: Of course. I would say that I would love to pass this off. I try to tell myself, when I do something new, I always say, this is going to be the worst it ever is. And so when I’m looking at this, I see a lot of potential, but I also realise that this state that we’re in right now is the worst this idea is ever going to be. And I would love for people to come and make it better, and tell me what I did wrong and tell me what I can do better. And to say, but what if we did this instead? And that’s the beauty of open source. We want to see it grow. We want to see all of the possibilities that we can do with this.

And so please, first of all, take it, run with it, make it better. And second of all, yes, I’d be glad to meet and talk with anybody about it. And if I could save somebody the two week spiral, or the two week loop, I would love to do that as well. So yeah, I will absolutely make myself available.

[00:43:47] Nathan Wrigley: Where can you be found? What’s the best place to find you?

[00:43:50] Joshua Bryant: The best place to find me would probably be at my personal email address, which is j b r y a 0 2 9 at gmail dot com. And that is a carryover from my college years, so it’s a little weird, but it’ll work.

[00:44:06] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll make sure not to put that into the text on the WP Tavern website, but it’s in the audio now, so hopefully people can find it. Anything that we’ve talked about, if I can find a link to it, I will put that in. So listeners, head over to wptavern.com, search for the episode of Joshua Bryant. That’s Joshua, J-O-S-H-U-A and Bryant, B-R-Y-A-N-T. Search over there and you will find all of the bits and pieces.

I’ll link to the presentation that Joshua gave at WordCamp US, and maybe that’ll be on WordPress TV by the time you come to consume this. Anything else that Joshua wants to send me, I’ll put on there as well. So, Joshua Bryant, thank you for shepherding me through something that was much harder to understand than I’m capable of. So thank you so much.

[00:44:49] Joshua Bryant: No, thank you. You ask great questions and I appreciate it.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how AI is taking on the burden of troubleshooting website issues, and making suggestions for improvements.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today we have Arnas Donauskas. Arnas is a product manager at Hostinger, with over five years of experience in the web hosting industry. His journey began during college while working on his bachelor’s degree, when he needed to create a website and discovered WordPress as a beginner.

His first foray into website building sparked his interest in the industry, eventually leading him to a career where he now develops products that help others launch their own online presence. Recently he’s been working with a team tasked with delivering tools and improvements to WordPress users to ease their journey on starting and maintaining websites.

In this episode, Arnas shares insights from his presentation at WordCamp US in Portland, Oregon, where he discussed the future of fixing and optimizing websites with AI. For many WordPress users, managing site performance and troubleshooting errors can be time consuming and complex. Arnas and his team have been developing AI based solutions that not only help onboard new clients by automating website creation, but also proactively monitor and remediate website issues as they happen.

We get into the details of how Hostinger’s AI tools identify, and automatically fix, critical website errors such as HTTP response issues, and how they’re pushing site optimizations through automated performance enhancements.

Arnas explains the engineering challenges involved, the current state of success with automated fixes, and how user feedback is shaping the roadmap for new features like SEO analysis and accessibility improvements. He provides a behind the scenes look at how Hostinger tests and iterates on AI models, what kind of data is fed to those systems, and how the team balances automation with user control.

If you are curious about how artificial intelligence is transforming WordPress hosting and site management, and what this means for the future of the web, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Arnas Donauskas.

I am joined on the podcast by Arnas Donauskas Hello.

[00:03:41] Arnas Donauskas: Hello. Thanks for having me today.

[00:03:43] Nathan Wrigley: You are so welcome. We’re here at WordCamp US in Portland, Oregon. It is day two of the, kind of the conference, but it’s the first day of presentations and things like that. You are one of the presenters, and during the presentation you are going to be talking about fixing and optimising websites with AI.

I wonder if we begin the podcast with an introduction to you. So I’d love to find out more about what you do, what your role is at Hostinger, and how you’ve got yourself in the whole AI space.

[00:04:12] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah, would be glad to give a short overview. As Nathan introduced me, I’m Arnas Donauskas and I’m a product manager at Hostinger. And the whole web hosting industry, creating a website, I’ve been for more than five years. Well, I think my first interaction with WordPress was actually in my college when I was writing my bachelor’s degree. I needed a website at that point of time and I thought, okay, what should I do? What should I use? And I was very green back in the day. Everyone has to start somewhere.

And the WordPress came in as one of the first results that I searched on Google. I gave it a go. At first there were some challenges, interesting cases, what should I do with it? But then website got up and running. I finished my bachelors degree, so that was nice.

And at Hostinger I have a team, a squad, where we build various tools for clients who are using WordPress to make their journey smoother, to make their websites management easier, to make a whole, interacting with the online presence easier. So they would have tools that could assist them, you know, on day to day basis, how to get things done and how, you know, to get their first website started and running as fast as possible.

[00:05:24] Nathan Wrigley: So it seems like the hosting space, this is a really perfect fit for AI, because you presumably are onboarding clients and they have no website. I mean, in many cases maybe they have and they’re migrating something from one place to another. But I imagine a lot of your clients are brand new, they’re starting a new project, a new business, or whatever it may be, and they want to get a leg up in building something quickly.

And five years ago, no chance. You had to hire somebody, everything had to be done by a human being. And nowadays we’re seeing the rise of AI in these kind of onboarding processes where you go through some kind of wizard, and at the end it will spit out some approximation of a website which is suitable for your niche or what have you. And then you go in and you tinker and you make sure it’s exactly what you want.

Is that the kind of tooling that you are doing, or are you doing something slightly different to that over at Hostinger?

[00:06:12] Arnas Donauskas: Yes, we do have tools that are able to, and capable of, creating a website with AI prompt. You would tell what your website would like to be, and we have like a WordPress AI website builder that will build you a blog, an e-commerce based on a given prompt. So this is already a really head start of all of the things.

But also looking from another perspective, it’s totally understandable to see people who don’t want to build the website with AI, but would like to get guidance how things get done. From one perspective, you can get guidance, how to build the website itself. From another, do I need to make any DNS zone changes on my website? And at this point of stage, AI can help all the way through. You just simply ask what you would like to do, what are the settings you want to tweak? And AI can give you a really, really detailed step, you know, how to change those things.

One of the really nice examples I have, at Hostinger we have a Kodee, it’s a chat interface assistant that helps clients with various questions, and it does have information about the client itself and, you know, what actions it can do. And what trend I started to notice that clients know it’s an AI, and they start asking specific questions. Like, hey, here’s bulk text, can you edit that for me? Or can you give me more detailed steps how to do this and this? And the AI just gives those steps and clients just like, thumbs up, thanks. Have a nice day. And they just go on their thing.

So I see this trend, and it’s really nice that the users like utilising these tools, because at the end of the day, it helps save time, maybe additional money and, you know, it’s a win for the user.

[00:07:44] Nathan Wrigley: So I’ll just read the first sentence of the blurb. So the title of your presentation here is fixing and optimising websites with AI. And then the first sentence goes like this, and it encapsulates exactly what you’ve just said. This talk explores how AI can be used to automatically fix detected website errors and boost overall site performance.

So we’ve got this whole side of AI, which is the onboarding, we’ll help you build the site. But then it sounds like you’ve also now got tooling to, okay, you’ve got a website, let’s fix it up. Let’s make the improvements and adjustments along the way.

So, okay, then if we are allowing AI to crawl our website in some way, how does that actually work? What is going on? What is your platform doing to find the errors? I realise that’s a very broad question, but I’m going leave it like that.

[00:08:31] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah. So actually why this idea to create such tool came into the light, it was actually one of the feedback points we gathered from one of the WordCamps. Maybe it was Europe. But then to add up to it, we saw the problem when clients, let’s say a website starts receiving an error, or it starts to load slowly, they are not sure where to start troubleshooting this. And we have thought, why not make this process automatic and remove this hassle step for the client?

So how this tool, for troubleshooting the error, how it works. So at all times we are tracking all of our clients’ HTTP status. So basically, if there is no error, it’s 200, in most of the cases. There can be a permanent redirect HTTP status. But at all times we are tracking if it changed to an error code or no. If it did, then we are promptly informing the client, hey, we found an error on your website. It could be a 403 forbidden access, or 500, or a critical error. And we start informing the client, hey, an error was found, you can use our AI troubleshooter to automatically fix it.

So when the client lands to the interface itself, we already gathered all of the logs, we removed all of the information that should not land for the AI, that he’s not using it to troubleshoot the error itself. And then AI has a list of actions it can do, whether it’s troubleshooting or optimising.

And then based on the logs and our AI custom given prompt, it determines, this is the most likely action that will fix the site’s error. Or when it comes to optimising, here are like the listed settings you need to tweak to make that website go faster. And then at the end of the day, the client gets the error fixed or the website optimised.

[00:10:21] Nathan Wrigley: So that’s really interesting. So here we’re talking about some sort of critical error. So your tooling is going out, in the same way that an uptime monitor would’ve done in the past. But the difference here though is that the uptime monitor traditionally just tells you the problem. You might get an email or a phone call or something, but then you’re kind of on your own. You do the troubleshooting.

So the difference here is the AI then, it determines there’s a problem and then it offers suggestions. So you log into your control panel and it’s saying, okay, this is the most likely cause, here’s some things that you can do to remediate that problem.

[00:10:53] Arnas Donauskas: Yes, but those suggestions are also being applied automatically because it’s totally normal, you could just go to ChatGPT, you say, here I have this error, what could I do to fix it? And the AI troubleshooter however, it does not suggest, it gives the action that can be applied on the spot. So if you had a one o’clock, 403 error, at one o’clock, five minutes, you could have it resolved without your actual manual input. So the tool itself automatically applies those fixes and does that for you.

[00:11:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s really curious because traditionally, I mean, obviously, I guess website hosting companies have had tooling around uptime monitoring and things like that in the past, but because your identifying piece, and the remediation piece, can access server logs and all of the infrastructure that you’ve got, it can identify the problem, figure out if that’s true, and then just crack on and do it.

So you can implement it, well, without implementing it. You just wake up at eight in the morning, maybe get an email to say, well, at one o’clock this thing happened and then we did this so you were able to have another seven hours sleep, that’s fine. Yeah, that’s really interesting.

[00:12:02] Arnas Donauskas: So one thing that we are also constantly working on is what automatic fixes we are capable to do. Because those are the ones where, you know, our developers work and make them so AI would have more, let’s call it options to pick from, based on the data it has, what went wrong. And this is, you know, where we have a mini roadmap, what we want to implement further, so we could increase the success rate of the fixed websites automatically.

Because this is something we also track about. And I will mention this in my speech. So at this point of day, we have 70% success rate on fixing the website. And how it’s being calculated, that when a first fix was applied, it was an actual success and that error got resolved. So at this point of day it’s 70%, and roughly, in absolute numbers, we are fixing per month 16,000 of the websites.

What’s the nicest part for me is that for 16,000 of websites some time was saved. Clients did not have to dig through a lot of information, and they got the problem resolved on the spot. Because imagine you have like a working business running, or you expect clients to come in and you get an error. What is the first thing you do? Like, it takes time. So this tool, you know, can prevent these problems and shorten the fixing journey.

[00:13:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, not just time, but it presumably stops you losing revenue, and the sort of slightly unquantifiable emotional distress that comes with having a website which isn’t working. And obviously if that’s your industry and your business is, I don’t know, e-commerce or something, it’s very important that comes up.

So 70% sounds good, but obviously it means that 30%, there’s not the ideal outcome. What do you do in those scenarios where the thing was not solved? Do you log that and presumably your team then look at that and figure out over time, okay, how can we get that 30 to 20 to 10 and so on? And do you kind of roll back the remediation so that the thing which didn’t work, we unpick that and we just go back to where you were when the error occurred?

[00:14:00] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah, so very good follow up question on this. So with the 30% that we do, we still run additional fixes. So when we do the first fix, we tracked what changed, and then the further success rate can happen, that the fact the was fixed either on the third try or like the fourth try, so that 30% lowers.

But there are cases that none of the fixes helped, and it’s totally normal. Bigger website could be more complex problems, things like that happen. So then we proactively forward the user to our success specialist team who will assist on the spot. And they have all of the logs, what happened, what was tried, and what fixes were applied on the website on the spot.

In any case, there are backups that can be reverted without any of the fixes applied. So those 10 to 15% that nothing helped at the end of the day, gets a direct help from our success team so we could still solve, or help solve, the problem for the user.

[00:15:03] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of incredible that if we were to just rewind the clock five years, the stuff that you’ve just mentioned was nonsense. It could not happen. And yet we’ve got to the point now where you’re saying there’s a 70% success rate. I’m quite surprised it’s as high as that, so that’s amazing. And presumably, the ambition is to drive that up to 80 and 90 and what have you.

But just the mere fact that it’s possible is pretty remarkable, that there’s a technology which, it’s kind of got your back, it’s this agent running in the background whose job it is to figure this stuff out and you don’t have to think about it.

And I guess for your industry, you know, hosting in general, I presume a lot of the other companies are doing these kind of things. Over time, this will become the norm. It will just become a laundry list, one of the ticket items on the sales page. It’s, you know, we’ve got your AI agent monitoring the uptime, remediation is guaranteed. Maybe you’ll even get to like 99% of fixes or something like that in time. And it just kind of pushes what we’re going to expect from hosting companies like you. That’s fascinating. Really interesting.

[00:16:04] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah. And as you’ve mentioned, five years ago, it could have been a lot of, let’s say problems or issues making this happen, because at that point of time you need to chew up a lot of information and, you know, do the thinking on that received information. But now when AI does have quite a powerful approach on this, and it’s able to handle such high amount of information, that’s when you know the heavy lifting is taken to that part, the end user is now getting the fixes done.

As per norm on all of this fixing, I really would like to see that happen because it just helps out. You can spend your time on expanding, moving your business further, thinking of the new ideas what you could do, instead of maintaining the website. You know, there’s like a saying, it’s more fun to buy new parts to your car than replace the old ones or do the maintenance parts. So this is, I think, the same thing the website itself.

[00:16:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it really does feel like this is going to be the future. And obviously you’ve now got these technologies which can make, well, it’s approximating intelligent decisions. Whereas before it was just sort of, I guess you were going through a binary, is it this? Yes. Okay. Move to the next step. Is it this? No. Okay. Go back to this step. Whereas now there can be this whole load of things that you can throw at it.

And that brings me to the next question really. So you’ve just talked about all the critical things, so the website collapsing. So we do something to remediate that. What about the more, I don’t know, let’s say soft things.

So for example, maybe it’s SEO. You know, we have gone around your website, we’ve scraped it a little bit like maybe Google Bot might do, and we’ve identified SEO problems. Or it could be accessibility problems, or it could be, goodness, I don’t know, you’ve just used inappropriate language here, we’ve got a better idea for a UVP at the top of the webpage. Does it stray into that as well? Is it more than just critical failure problems?

[00:17:50] Arnas Donauskas: At this point of day, it’s more critical problems when the website is just full on down. But like, how I like to view the tools that we are building is whenever you build one tool, you receive clients’ feedback, you receive WordPress community feedback, where you can build more tools on top as a continuation to the first one. This is what I really like about all of this feedback culture.

This is the upcoming thing, and I think it’s only a matter of time when our troubleshooter and the optimiser will appear in the WordPress admin panel, where it will be able to tell you, I see an image has disappeared on your website, just upload it to me, I will fix it to you. Or I see some SEO problems. Or like you’ve mentioned, accessibility problems, or that some of the grammar mistakes were found in some of your posts. Something like that. So this is only a matter of time.

And why such approach was taken at this point of time is, we want to give users a tool that they could trust and be comfortable on using when it comes to the most critical problem or critical matter with the website related errors. So they know, okay, I can trust and use this tool, and fix my problem right away. And when that’s put on, then we can move to extensive features to the troubleshooter and optimiser as well.

[00:19:09] Nathan Wrigley: Would it be fair to say that you are developing solutions like that, though? Is that the kind of thing which is on your product roadmap to get those kind of tools, the SEO, the image fixing, the alt text identifier, the I know, the accessibility identifier, those kind of things. They’re in the background? You are building those? They’re roadmap items are they?

[00:19:26] Arnas Donauskas: I would say they are currently planned. Right now, what we have in the more recent backlog is how to reach my personal goal on this is 90% fixed rate. If you already have some plans, how it’ll be done. So a short sneak peek on it. We basically want to build like a way back machine on our AI troubleshooter, so it would know at any given time what happened to each of the file the customer has on their website. And it would be able to tell you, okay, I see that on this specific date, this single file was changed and that’s what led to a 500 error. I have a safe backup copy for it, I will restore it for you. User confirms. We do the restoration.

Or AI will be able to determine, I have a fully working website backup of your site, these are the orders that could be potentially missed if that is an e-commerce case. And if you want to, we can go ahead and restore the website to a fully working version and get your site back up and running again.

[00:20:26] Nathan Wrigley: We do live in interesting times, that’s for sure. You mentioned in the blurb for the talk, and I read the bit at the beginning, but I’ll just read it again. So your talk explores how AI can be used to automatically fix detected website errors, I think we’ve covered that, and boost overall site performance.

Now that’s a different piece, isn’t it? So if we’re now looking at site performance, presumably we’re talking about from slow to fast. Something wrong to fix. So basically, I’m asking the exact same series of questions, but from a performance point of view, not the site has collapsed and there’s an error. What are the things that you’re looking for there?

[00:20:59] Arnas Donauskas: To be fair with you, everything. So we look at everything when it comes to website performance. So we do like a benchmark result where we have our starting ground when it comes to optimising the website. And we are using Google Page Speed scores. I think it’s one of the most popular tools to benchmark the website to see what is loading slowly on it, what could be the potential problems with it. And then for each website individually, automatic fixes to images, JS, CSS minification are being applied, and the client then sees the improvement, whether it’s 10%, 20%.

So right now what we currently have from the data itself, I believe it’s been running for two to three months right now, and we’ve been gathering data, how the websites are being optimised. So on average, mobile page speed score is being increased by 20, and the desktop is by 10%.

But there’s a catch to it. These optimisation steps are safe. It means nothing bad will happen to the website after the optimisation steps, and the next step would be introducing risky steps that can affect how the website looks.

What I have in mind by that is, lazy loading sometimes can mess up one of the images, it appears slowly or after a while. So these things could happen, but this will be like a separate step informing the client, hey, we did the safe part, but we could push this further with some of the risks. No worries, you will be able to revert everything on the spot if something bad happens. So this will be the next step of it, and I’m really intrigued to see how fast the websites can be.

[00:22:35] Nathan Wrigley: Can you modify your hosting environment to be specific to my website, if you know what I mean? So if my website, for example, is, I don’t know, a brochure website, I’ve got five pages, you could cache that entirely. Really easy to do. But, okay, this website over here, a different one that I’ve got, it’s a WooCommerce website, there’s a whole different load of caching that might go on, there’s a whole different load of optimisations that go on there. Do you take that burden on, or is it more of a, okay, we’ve got this thing, you tick a box and now we’re going to do the performance thing? Will it figure all that stuff out, or are there tick boxes where I can go, do this but don’t do this, do this but don’t do this? How does it work?

[00:23:13] Arnas Donauskas: So each optimisation step to increase the performance is being applied to each website individually. It checks loading slowly. Right now, there is no possibility to customise the optimisation steps that you can do, but we are planning to integrate logic to the AI, or like past information for each type of website type. What caching should be applied on specific pages if the image is a landing one, or is it like a product image? So to give more extensive knowledge to the AI so it would be able to better determine how to approach different website types. But for now, what we check, still settings are unique to each website, but not to such extensive customisation.

[00:23:56] Nathan Wrigley: You’ve laid before us a really interesting engineering challenge. These problems exist in terms of performance, we’ve got to put a bunch of engineers on it, and they’re going to figure out this AI way of solving that. But how do you communicate the work that the AI is done to the people that want to know it’s been done?

Because in a way, I kind of want to know that’s happened to my website, but at the same time, I kind of don’t. I don’t want to be getting six emails a day saying, okay, we updated this image, oh, and then another email, we did x, and we did. But you’ve got to let me know that that’s happened. In some way, you have to communicate the value to me that, look at all this fabulous stuff we’re doing. But I kind of want to know, but I kind of don’t want to know. So it’s a difficult tightrope to tread. I’m just wondering how you manage that.

[00:24:36] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah, yeah. So at the end of each optimisation, client is getting an impacted result, did it increase, and by how much? And they are getting a full log, what was done on the website. And we are also trying to display that log to as most simple things as possible to understand, because some of those settings could sound, you know, very big words. But there’s actually very simple things that were done on the website. So we’re communicating that part to the users at the end of each optimisation as well.

[00:25:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so you’re kind of making it easier to understand basically. You’re hoping to use normal language to explain something fairly technical. Yeah, okay. And summarising it, not sending an email for every single thing. And presumably over time the email’s become less and less anyway because, let’s say I migrate a website to your platform, the AI gets involved, and I’m imagining there’s more at the beginning, it’s front loaded. Oh, look, there’s this and this and this and this. And then slowly over time, oh, there’s less. We did it. It’s done. But, oh, new plugin, new thing. I’m guessing that you communicate less over time.

[00:25:37] Arnas Donauskas: With such optimisation things, yes, via email. I would say it’s less via email, more via interface. And I would say that at this point, it’s enough for a user to grasp the idea of what was done.

Why I say this? Because the amount of time the clients spend in the interface reviewing the optimisations and how many of them interact with it is quite high. I believe with optimisations it’s 70% of the users that actually started the migration, completed, you know, all of the interaction with the interface. And they’re spending approximately like from 10 to 15 minutes with it.

So I would say these are pretty good numbers. But you gave a very good point for the users’ clients who are more advanced. And perhaps it would be a good improvement point to give them an option to download all extensive logs, what was done, to see just what happened actually in depth, not just rephrased wording for some technical parts.

[00:26:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think it’s a really difficult tightrope to tread because every time that your AI does something and it had a beneficial impact on my website, that’s good for me, but it’s also good for you because it builds that relationship, doesn’t it? You know, oh, look what the platform’s done. It’s brilliant. I didn’t have to lift a finger. Just came as part of the package. Fabulous. I’m happy with that.

But you just don’t want to overdo that communication because at some point it’s like, oh, you lose sight of it. And then the critical one will arrive where the website’s collapsed and, yeah, it’s another one, it just goes in the bin. So I guess there’s a tightrope to tread, which is kind of interesting.

How do you actually find these errors then? Do you have something akin to Google Bot, which is going and looking at the front end of the website as a human being would see it, if you like, and sort of scraping around inside the DOM, looking at screenshots and, you know, okay, yeah, we see that image isn’t, I don’t know, so just an open-ended question really.

[00:27:28] Arnas Donauskas: Since each of the website that we are troubleshooting are hosted with us, we are able to, you know, detect. Because the primary source that we are using to determine that something bad happened is the HTTP response.

[00:27:41] Nathan Wrigley: Right. That’s straightforward. Yeah.

[00:27:42] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah. So whenever that changes, we are able to know because each of the website is hosted with us on our infrastructure. So this is the most, the quickest and most straightforward approach we can use to determine that something bad happened. So this is the one we are running with. And quite good accuracy, unless there’s like a, some CDNs in that case. And this could be sometimes a problem because not always the true error will come out. But yeah, this is the method we are using.

[00:28:09] Nathan Wrigley: But on the performance side, presumably that’s slightly different because, you know, you mentioned lazy loading images or something, you’ve got to have some metrics and telemetry to say, we’ve got lazy loading images, okay, how do we deal with that?

[00:28:20] Arnas Donauskas: So with the performance part, clients are able to, you know, at any given time to initiate the optimisations. We will do the performance test to see if it actually needs an optimisation, because sometimes clients have very perfectly optimised websites, and they’re working like a speed. But we are occasionally running page speed performance tests, on weekly basis, I believe. And if we detect, okay, this website could be improved, then clients are being informed that, hey, you can do some optimisation steps that are automatic and you can go ahead and start the optimisation process.

[00:28:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, got it. Thank you. Curious thing that you are in this game of tennis, I presume, with the AI models. I’m presuming, I could be wrong, but I’m presuming that you are using AIs that we are familiar with. So I’m just going to drop a few names that I know. Things like Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT and things like that. I’m presuming there’s some connection that you’ve got with those. Maybe you have your own, I don’t know.

Given that they seem to change at a breathtaking pace, and in some cases the changes that they seem to ship kind of seem to degrade their capacity to do things. We’ve had a recent ChatGPT 5 update, which I think many people felt perhaps in certain scenarios was a backward step. How do you keep up with this?

[00:29:33] Arnas Donauskas: Testing, straightforward testing, but very good point on the whole different models and the providers on it. We simply do tests with each of the models. We scout around, we see, or it looks very promising, we test how it performs, and there are several points. How fast it can grasp the information and return back to us. So how long the request took time. Some of the models took like 10 seconds, some of them took 5. So we want the client to get the faster result as fast as possible.

And then there’s the second part, it’s the accuracy of the returned information. Because one of the learned lessons I will be sharing in my speech is that, we noticed that when newer models came in, how their accuracy was way better and the time to handle information was very shorter. So since we have like developers who are working on the AI models itself, we just always test to see if there’s something better that we could ship to our users so they would have better outcome on their end as well.

[00:30:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s fairly straightforward, isn’t it? It’s testing, testing, more testing, and go with the thing which provides the best tested answer. But curiously though, you must have applied a ton of engineering time into this endeavor. So there’s a load of people on the ground, that must cost Hostinger quite a bit of money. And then presumably there’s quite a lot of money being sent to these AI agents. But I’m guessing it’s hard to justify a price increase to your end users.

So it must be kind of a fairly difficult business decision. How much of this can you do? Because you could AI forever, you know, and just keep going and going and going and endless cycles. So I’m guessing from a business point of view, there’s a, again, another tightrope to tread. How much can you do? Or is this more a case of, is this stuff a premium thing that you offer? Do you have to pay an additional fee to get access to this stuff?

[00:31:21] Arnas Donauskas: No. No additional fee. AI troubleshooter and optimiser is pre included with all of the hosting plans we offer for our clients base. And the price for that did not change because this tool was introduced.

You’re right, it took some time to deliver final versions of the products, approximately seven to eight months. But it was all worth it, I think, because clients can now automatically do things and don’t have to spend time themselves.

And from a company point of view, we just want to deliver best user experience they could have and, you know, that they could trust us even when the website is down with an error and how we can solve it, and what we can do the quickest or how to, you know, assist user on optimising the site.

[00:32:08] Nathan Wrigley: It’s the market at work, isn’t it? Essentially. You’re trying to make your offering different and unique and offer something which adds value, and so you take the hit, I guess.

Do you want to get to the point where everything is completely automated? I mean, is that a desirable outcome? Would it be something that you’d like to see where the human is completely out of the loop? Or do you always want to have an option for a confirm button or a roll, not rollback, we always want the rollback.

But it always feels like the light at the end of the tunnel here is that the human doesn’t need to be involved at all. It would be desirable if I could get up and be a hundred percent confident that my website, for all of the things that you did overnight, is better. And I don’t have to involve myself in that at all. But equally, there’s a bit of me which always wants the confirm button. I want to be able to see, well, not that one. Yes, that one. We’ll do that.

[00:32:56] Arnas Donauskas: I think confirmable actions will be there all the time, or most of the time. Because at the end of the day, this is the user’s website that the changes are being applied to, and the user is in control. Would you like to do those changes, would you not? One of the thoughts, I believe we discussed with our colleagues, what we have 100% fixed rate? Should we give users an option, just run everything, I trust this completely? It could be an option. But still, at the end of the day, this is the user’s website. It’s their business, it’s their blog, and we want to give best suggestions, but the user is the one who’s saying, yes, I would like to do that, or, no, I don’t want to see this.

[00:33:39] Nathan Wrigley: I guess you’re trying to get to the point where the confirmed decision is just really obvious. You want to go in and be entirely confident that, yep, I’m going to confirm it because I have this trust, but equally, there’s an option to not confirm it. That seems to be where the whole AI thing is going. The humans are always in the loop somewhere and it’s always that final confirmation step. And I think if we lose sight of that, we’re probably in a bit of trouble.

One of the questions I have as well is about WordPress, obviously, we’re at WordCamp US, this great big open source thing. And it brings to mind the question about these models, and the fact that they are entirely proprietary, you know, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and all of these things. They’re having a lot of our data, we’re allowing them into the backend of our websites, but they, I don’t know if they have any open source models which are using. Are you shipping data to them? How does it align with the whole open source thing that WordPress is so keen to promote?

[00:34:31] Arnas Donauskas: Oh, very good question I can say. And it’s true that different models look like different silos. Different companies, they have different approaches what they do. But I really liked one of the comments, I believe I read on the Reddit, on all of the AI stuff. And it applies also on such websites. So for example, you’re a user who likes to explore things, and you want to try and fix websites with AI and do that automatically. A free model for the ChatGPT or any other AI model will be more than enough to run, as long as you have your prompt.

It will take some experiment times, that’s for sure, but everything could be actually run free on this part. So this is more, you know, into the open source area. But of course, when there are paid models and stuff like that, this could be, you know, one day could be tricky.

Perhaps we will have a fully open source that anyone could be willing to use without any additional charges. Time will show on this. But now, a lot of companies, people are creating tools that they allowed to do free trials or free for some time. So I think this is a matter of question on this as well, yeah.

[00:35:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean it really does seem like a really exciting time, in tech in general, but also WordPress in general. But it’s kind of really interesting to see the way that WordPress and hosting company’s interfacing through AI. And it does seem like there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening on your side.

Yeah, it’s been fascinating talking to you today, trying to explore this a little bit more. Where can we find you, Arnas? If we want to reach out and discover more about you or Hostinger, where’s the best place to go?

[00:36:05] Arnas Donauskas: So if you want to reach out directly to me, I’m always happy to do that via LinkedIn. I have my full profile set up so we can reach out through there. If you’re a Hostinger client and you have some feedback, just drop it to our support chat. I’m the one who always reads them, and I might even get directly in touch with you via one of the forms because I always keep an eye of our client’s feedback and I try to contact them as often as possible to follow up on some of the feedbacks they share.

[00:36:32] Nathan Wrigley: Well, Arnas, thank you so much for chatting to me today and prizing open this subject. I feel that this conversation is going to get more and more in depth, and more complicated as the years go by. But in 2025, good to know where we’re at. Thank you.

[00:36:43] Arnas Donauskas: Yeah. Thank you for inviting me. It was an honor.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, block composability, what it is and how it’s shaping WordPress’s future.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today we have Seth Rubenstein. Seth is the head engineer at the Pew Research Center, where he leads a team of developers managing the organization’s WordPress based publishing platform for its news site. Passionate about open source, Seth ensures that everything his team builds not only meets the Pew Research Center’s needs, but also benefits the wider community. By actively contributing to the Gutenberg project, he strives to share their solutions, always asking how their work can be given back to help others in the WordPress ecosystem.

Seth shares fascinating stories from the work he’s been doing recently. He breaks down what block composability means, the ability to build modular, reusable, and even interactive blocks that work seamlessly together, empowering both developers and end users to create sophisticated web applications within the familiar WordPress block editor.

The conversation gets into some of WordPress’s newest, and most promising, features including the Block Bindings API, Block Bits, which is still very much in development, and the Interactivity API. Seth explains how these tools open a world of possibilities, like building interactive quizzes, dynamically updating content, or even prefetching data, all using blocks, without having to rely on custom React front ends, or heavy server side processing.

Seth also talks about the path forward for democratizing these advanced capabilities, discussing current limitations, the potential for new UI tools, and what’s still missing in the quest for truly responsive device contextual blocks.

Throughout the episode, Seth makes a compelling case for why now is a golden opportunity for developers and plugin builders to start experimenting, get involved, and shape the next evolution of WordPress as a cutting edge web application platform.

Whether you’re a developer curious about the future of Gutenberg, or an editor dreaming of more drag and drop web app power, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Seth Rubenstein.

I am joined on the podcast by Seth Rubenstein. How are you doing, Seth?

[00:03:40] Seth Rubenstein: Very good. How about you?

[00:03:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Nice to have you back.

[00:03:42] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, second time.

[00:03:43] Nathan Wrigley: This doesn’t happen too many times. I’ve got to be perfectly honest with you, the audience, I’ve already said this to Seth. Each time I come to WordCamp US, I’m always confounded by how remarkably clever people are, and the depth of the content is sometimes beyond me. I think this is one of those examples.

I think there’s a high chance that you are going to have to shepherd me. There’s probably going to be a lot of editing, when I pause and you explain what you are talking about. So let’s get into it. First of all, tell us a little bit about you, where you work, what you do in the WordPress space.

[00:04:10] Seth Rubenstein: Sure. So I work for Pew Research Center. I’m the head of engineering there. I manage a team of four other developers, and I like to tell people that we work with and on WordPress every day.

We manage a publishing platform for a small news site in the US, Pew Research, but we also contribute to Gutenberg. Everything that we do, everything that we build day in and day out, we try to do from a perspective of how can we open source this? How can we contribute this back to Gutenberg in some way? What can we build to fulfill our needs that would also fulfill other people’s needs?

[00:04:39] Nathan Wrigley: You said a small organisation, the Pew Research Center. I don’t actually know what they do.

[00:04:44] Seth Rubenstein: We are a nonprofit, call ourselves a fact tank. What we do is we survey the American public on a variety of issues. Where are they on things like abortion, or religion, or crime, or the economy, or the use of AI, whatever. And we like to kind of say we hold up a mirror to the American public to tell them what they believe back to them.

[00:05:04] Nathan Wrigley: And so is the WordPress website that you have with them, is that a mechanism to distribute that data back to the public?

[00:05:09] Seth Rubenstein: Yes, yes.

[00:05:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s interesting. So it’s a data heavy industry that you are dealing with.

[00:05:13] Seth Rubenstein: It is. It is. We’re very, a kind of academic research institution, but we publish in kind of a news oriented way.

[00:05:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So we figured out a little bit about you, however you are here at WordCamp US to do a presentation. I actually don’t know if you’ve done it

[00:05:28] Seth Rubenstein: I have, yeah. I did it the other day.

[00:05:29] Nathan Wrigley: How did it go?

[00:05:29] Seth Rubenstein: It went okay. I had a problem with my speaker notes, so I had to ad lib a good bit of it. So it might not be as coherent, or clear as it should have been.

[00:05:41] Nathan Wrigley: Well we’re here to fix that. You can ad lib all you like here. So it was called, and forgive the pronunciation if I get this wrong, Block Composability: The Past and The Future. I’m actually just going to read the blurb into the record. And I’ll also make sure that there’s a link in the show notes to the page at the WordCamp US website where you can find out about the content. And also if by the time this comes out a WordPress TV episode with your presentation has landed, then I’ll mention that as well.

Gutenberg excels at crafting beautiful static content, but what if you could empower anyone to build dynamic, interactive web experiences directly within the Block Editor? This session dives into block composability, a powerful concept that enables the creation of rich, interactive content using blocks, making advanced web development accessible to even less technically inclined users, which begs the question, what is block composability?

[00:06:31] Seth Rubenstein: Block composability, I guess let’s define composability first. Composability in computer science and in software development is the idea that you can create and assemble web applications with reusable components in a modular way. That’s really all that means.

If you’ve ever used React, if you’ve ever written in React, it means React Component, really. It’s a self-contained modular unit that can act on its own, but when plugged in with other units, it becomes something new, or extend its functionality or changes its functionality in some way.

[00:07:01] Nathan Wrigley: When Gutenberg dropped, I had this notion that we were going to see mini apps inside of a block. So for example, I had this notion that right off the bat, so I’m going back to 2018 or something, when Gutenberg was still a, so prior to when it was in Core, let’s go with that. And I had this notion that you would drop in, let’s say a real estate block, and that block would encapsulate all the information about this particular house. And you would drop in the block and it would ask you a bunch of questions about the house and out would come a house custom post type, if you like.

However, what happened was we got paragraph blocks, and we got an image block, and we got these fairly, well, useful, but they do one thing. They do a paragraph. They do an image, and that seems to be kind of where it ended. Are you trying to draw a line in the sand where it’s possible to go beyond that simple, does one thing, paragraph, image, to more the, we have a real estate block with loads of different facets and capabilities?

[00:07:57] Seth Rubenstein: That’s right, yeah. I think where we’re at now is we’ve reached a point where the block editor, Gutenberg, in both its block editor and site editor kind of flavors, is you can build web applications. Blocks can do something now. They’re not just presenting text or an image and they’re kind of static and, you know, maybe you can style them differently from one post to another, but now they can actually do something.

And more importantly, they can communicate with one another. You know, one block is adjacent to another. It can tell that block what to do when you click on it. If it’s inside of it, it can change its functionality accordingly. So you might imagine, we have a quiz builder. That’s actually one of our, probably our most technical product.

And the way it works is there’s a results block where you can build out your results page for your quiz, but if you were to drop in a special block for, we have a special quiz that does scoring a very specific way, well, it changes the scoring functionality in the quiz builder. It doesn’t overwrite that. If you take that block out, the scoring functionality returns back to normal.

So now we’re at a point where it’s very much possible to build web applications in the block editor with blocks.

[00:09:00] Nathan Wrigley: So this little quiz block that you’ve described, if I was using, so ignore the developer experience and everything that you have built, the technicalities of all that. If I was somebody that was working for the Pew Research Center and I was, I don’t know, an editor and I needed to create a quiz, would that be my process? I drop in the quiz block, and boom, I have a quiz.

[00:09:20] Seth Rubenstein: It’s really simple. You would go into, we do kind of store it all in a nice post type. So there’s a quiz post type. And then you open that up, you say, I want to go make a new quiz. And by default, there’s a quiz, we call it the quiz controller block that’s there first. And we have a few templated things in there for you. So like a start page and a question, an answer, and all of those things are block. So a question is a block, and inside of that question goes the answers for that question. That’s a block.

Go further than that, we also have these kind of bindings. So you drop an answer in, well, there’s text for the answer, right? What if you want an image in there? What if you want a chart? What if you want a video? What if you want some other interactive piece of content to be corresponding to that answer? Well, you can drop that in too. And you can kind of freely move all these things within an answer, while still having that text bound to the answer block.

So it’s a highly technical product, but for the editors, for the designers, it is literally just drag, drop, drag, drop, drag, drop. Create a page, create a question, type in your answer.

[00:10:16] Nathan Wrigley: So in the world of 2018 that I alluded to a moment ago when the block editor launched, it feels like there were big missing pieces that prevented what you’ve just described. And maybe they’re APIs. I think possibly in some scenarios they are. What are the bits more recently, I don’t even know if it’s more recently in all honesty, but what are the bits that have enabled the features that you’ve just described?

[00:10:38] Seth Rubenstein: Sure. So I think it’s funny that you bring back to 2018 because we built Quiz Builder in 2019. I think I’ll go on the record here and say, I think it might be the first kind of product in Gutenberg that was drag and drop building web applications. So I think we kind of pushed really early on the idea of composability inside of Gutenberg.

And I see it as, there are kind of three waves in Gutenberg. First was, okay, Gutenberg is a CSS generator. That’s how I first kind of imagined it. You’re creating content and you have a style system and that outputs some CSS for your site.

And then we got, I think the kind of HTML part of that a few years later. With the site editor and the theming inside of the block editor and things like that.

And now we’ve gotten to the JavaScript part of Gutenberg. Where WordPress has the Inactivity API. And so this is a WordPress native JavaScript framework, so blocks can do something on the front end. And I think that is really the key innovation that’s really opened this up in just the last 12, 16 months.

[00:11:35] Nathan Wrigley: Are there any APIs that have enabled you to short circuit? So again, in 2018, I would imagine there was quite a lot of heavy lifting that you needed to do order to pull that off, to innovate in that way. Are there any things which have fallen, I think quite recently actually, that have enabled it to be more available to developers who don’t have the time available that you did?

[00:11:56] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, I mean, so in 2019 when we did this, you know, all we really had was this ability to kind of scaffolded out these quizzes. The were pretty static in their layout. You drop a question and there were the answers in there, and you could type them in and that was it. No images inside the quiz, nothing like that.

Now, thanks to things like block bindings, block bits, which we can go into in a little bit.

[00:12:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we’d need to I think.

[00:12:19] Seth Rubenstein: And the Interactivity API, you know, it is, everything is less static. Everything is less set in stone now. With things like the HTML Tag Processor, you can say, oh, this answer has this flag on it so we’re going to change out some of the HTML in it, in kind of real time before it gets to the front end for users. That just really wasn’t possible before, without a lot of work. It wasn’t very performant.

Now all those things are in place for developers to really tap into. And the documentation and examples are there too, because that was the problem before, I think, is that a lot of people had to figure out how to do this, and now there are real world examples out there.

[00:12:52] Nathan Wrigley: So you mentioned, quickly skirted over three things there. So there was Block Bits, Block Bindings, which I think the full title would be Block Bindings API, and the Interactivity API, which I think is like a child of the HTML API. I’m not entirely sure about that, but.

[00:13:07] Seth Rubenstein: It utilises the HTML components.

[00:13:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Let’s just go through what those three things are in whatever order suits the purposes of this podcast best, because I don’t know which one you’d start on.

[00:13:16] Seth Rubenstein: Let’s start with Block Bindings API. I would actually imagine a good number of people are familiar with this. This has come up a lot in the last year in the Gutenberg project. What that really lets you do is use Core blocks more effectively.

For example, before, if you wanted to have a button and you wanted to do a very specific thing and look a very specific way, well, good luck. You had to make your own button. Sure there was the Core button and you could style it to some degree, but what it did was it went to a link.

Now with things like Block Bindings, you can say, okay, well, I have my Core button and I’m going to style it however I want, but the interior text, you know, what it says, what it does, well, that can be done kind of programmatically on the backend. That’s where the Block Bindings API comes in. It lets you use Core blocks and change them, well, not Core blocks, any blocks, really, and change them to fit your needs.

[00:14:07] Nathan Wrigley: Can you give us a concrete example of that? So you’ve just talked about the button, you mentioned a sort of, I was struggling to grasp what you were meaning about changing the text programmatically. How would you do that? What would be an example?

[00:14:18] Seth Rubenstein: Let me give you an example of that, Core paragraph. Very useful with block bindings. And I mentioned answers. So we have this answer block, right? And before it just had a text field in it. You would type in the answer and that was it. That was all you saw. And that meant that you couldn’t do anything inside of the answer. You couldn’t provide any other content inside there, because that would then get rolled up as the answer.

So now with Block Bindings, what we have is we have this core paragraph binding that you can drop into the answer, and it is a text field still. You can type into it. It’s storing that on the answer block and then you can put other stuff inside the answer block because we’re not reading what’s in there as the content.

What that meant for us is that we didn’t have to go make another block called answer text. We have hundreds of these kind of scenarios in our system where, yeah, we need a very specific use case, and it’s usually just some text, right, somewhere. Why would I make another block that’s just a paragraph block, really?

So bindings, it makes blocks way more extensible. So one block can perform multiple functions if you need it to.

[00:15:19] Nathan Wrigley: So my takeaway from that, it may be ignorant, it kind of adds a layer where you can add more features into any block, Core or otherwise. So in the example of paragraph, it’s like paragraph plus. It’s extended paragraph if you like, and you then get to decide. And that is the binding bit. You bind things to the block.

[00:15:39] Seth Rubenstein: You bind attributes in a block.

[00:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: Attributes.

[00:15:41] Seth Rubenstein: That’s what it really effectively comes down to, is you bind attributes. So you could say that the text, the content attribute, in Core paragraph, well, that’s not coming from whatever you typed in there. It’s coming from some other programmatic interface somewhere in your system, your plugin, whatever.

So that lets you use Core paragraph as a layout element, put it wherever you’d like, but then what’s inside of it, and perhaps even what happens when you click on it, well, that’s decided elsewhere.

What’s nice about that is it lessens the number of controls that you need to present to the end user, to the designer, to the editor. For them, they just drop the block in there. The plugin handles the bindings. The plugin handles, okay, the text for this paragraph inside this answer should come from here. They don’t have to think about all that. So it’s less settings for them actually. It’s more just drop blocks in.

[00:16:27] Nathan Wrigley: You are very much in the weeds of all this, so I suspect the fact that you’ve done this and done this over and over again renders it fairly straightforward. How available is this? Is the documentation there?

[00:16:38] Seth Rubenstein: Oh yeah. The documentation is there. The WordPress Dev Blog has a number of tutorials on Block Bindings. And I think once you get started with it, it’s extremely easy to work with really.

[00:16:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that was Block Bindings. Next one was Block Bits. Now I’ve only heard this phrase a couple of times, so you’re going to have to go 101 on this.

[00:16:54] Seth Rubenstein: Sure. So Block Bits is, this is an API that is very much in development. It’s a concept more than anything else right now. So with Block Bindings, we can kind of take over a whole paragraph block and change it all out. Well, what if you just need to change one word inside that paragraph? That’s where Block Bits comes into being.

So this could be you have typed out your sentence, and maybe there’s a name in the sentence. And you need to change that name dynamically based on whatever the user’s choosing in this front end interface. Well, Block Bits, you just select the text, you go to the toolbar, you say, I’m going to bind, quote unquote, this to this thing.

And Block Bits, the concept is, okay, we’re going to look inside of a block, down to a bit, maybe just a character and do something with that. Change it, make it a button, whatever. That’s really all it is. It’s a fancy name for taking Block Bindings to the next level, which is kind of inside a string of text.

[00:17:50] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So it is, again, forgive me if I’ve parsed it incorrectly, but a Block Bit is a binding inside of some other thing. So in the example you gave, swap out this string for a different string, or it could be swap out this image dynamically for a different image, or, I don’t know, insert a dollar sign here instead of a pound sign or.

[00:18:15] Seth Rubenstein: Well beyond that, beyond just the switching things out, the other kind of powerful part of the concept, and that’s where I think the API part is really still in development, and this will take a little bit further is, one of the examples used in the Gutenberg project is things like ISBN numbers.

So you can imagine that, you know, maybe you’re running some sort of library like site, you type in an ISBN number. Well, what you want to happen on the front end is maybe a little bit more complex than that. So you type in your ISBN number and the block bit could see that that is an ISBN formatted number, and maybe on the front end it becomes a link with a little popup that goes to the Library of Congress, point to that thing, right?

So it’s very analogous to Block Bindings, but it’s very much very specific small string inside of a larger string. So they give it as sub block bindings. Maybe that’s even a better term for it. Maybe that’s what would be called in the future. But I really think of it as sub block binding.

[00:19:10] Nathan Wrigley: And presumably then you can just chain these together inside, well, let’s go with a paragraph. You could just have a one sentence just full of these block bits. So one followed by another, followed by another. Okay, that’s really interesting. So you could have a whole sentence, for example, just made up of bits from all over the place.

[00:19:28] Seth Rubenstein: Well, and you could imagine that, beyond just like pulling information, it could be really useful when what we’re using it for currently is templating, right? So you want this string, this sentence to have these parameters. Maybe it’s got the format of your post type, and then maybe it’s got the title in there, and then maybe the date. But maybe that’s all on one line and not three different blocks.

One of the things that drives me crazy right now is, let’s say I want to do a post date, post type, kind of above the post title. I insert a row block, and then I insert my date block, and then I insert my meta block. That’s like a lot of divs, that’s a lot of markup for that. It’s like, why isn’t that just one paragraph line with that bit of information in there? That’s where block bits comes into play.

[00:20:08] Nathan Wrigley: So it feels like, again, forgive me, it feels like the kind of thing that we would’ve used custom fields for in past. And we would’ve had, I don’t know, dozens of custom fields, each containing their own discreet bit of data, and we would’ve had to have figured out a way to drop those into this paragraph. Now this is all handled natively.

[00:20:25] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, and visually in the editor.

[00:20:26] Nathan Wrigley: Visually in the editor. And so it could be anything. It could be markup, it could be text, it could be an image, it could be, I don’t know, XML, anything you like. That’s really powerful.

[00:20:36] Seth Rubenstein: It’s exciting. It’s very powerful, and it’s the API that I am most looking forward to seeing completed. I think it will really, without getting too technical, you go a little bit further, Block Bits, Block Bindings. These things I think are kind of critical for responsive blocks. If we’re going to change attributes at kind of a micro level based on certain conditions, like those are the kind of frameworks that we need to be able to do that.

So beyond just like the content and templating stuff, there are deep technical reasons that these APIs continue to be developed out.

[00:21:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, I think I’ve grasped what that is. Just running the clock back a couple of minutes, you imply, no, I think you said that this is in development more so than Block Bindings. So the block bits is ready to use.

[00:21:20] Seth Rubenstein: No. There’s very much in a conceptual phase, and I think there’s a lot of other technologies that need to be finished out. There are work on the HTML APIs, even though they’re really well advanced now over the last couple years, there’s more work being done on those. I think those things are kind of blockers to keep pushing forward with the Block Bits. But you can start doing Block Bits today. And I do go over that in the presentation.

What it really comes down to, fundamentally today is, it’s a rich text custom format, which you can do today. You can go in and make your own kind of custom formats inside the rich text component. You know, that might be bold or italic, a custom format. So it’s really simple as like, okay, well, I have a custom format that adds a class name to something, and then the HTML tag processor, I look for that class name and I change it out. Bingo, bango. So simple.

But of course, like I said, Block Bits is much bigger than that. There’s an idea of kind of like a library of bits and, you know, you can plug it into different data sources and post meta and this and that and the other thing. But right now at least, you can start to experiment with this idea, with templating and kind of getting dynamic bits of content into a string.

[00:22:28] Nathan Wrigley: This feels very much to me, like the kind of thing that needs more eyeballs.

[00:22:31] Seth Rubenstein: It does.

[00:22:31] Nathan Wrigley: It’s one of those things where you let loose a thousand developers and suddenly some curious thing that nobody thought of occurred and it was like, oh, it does that.

[00:22:40] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah. I really want to get people to experiment with this concept further, because I think we need to push it further because it’s just so powerful.

[00:22:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really interesting. Okay, so we did Block Bits. We did Block Bindings. I think the final one that we mentioned was the Interactivity API.

[00:22:55] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah. So the Interactivity API, that is about, it’s probably about two years old, I think, at this point. I won’t go into all the history of that, but it is effectively a WordPress native, Preact framework. It’s really easy to work with. You kind of just write basic HTML and the JavaScript is very easy to get into.

And what that allows you to do is really add interactions at an atomic level to blocks. You can write all sorts of functions. So you might imagine you have a form block, and it has an on submit action. Not every form does the same thing, right? So maybe you have another block, could be send to Firebase. You drop that in there and it changes, it can actually hoist up its own on submit function into that blocks interactivity. And so it makes it really easy to kind of swap JavaScript functionality in and out, and extend functionality across all your blocks.

[00:23:47] Nathan Wrigley: So it, I guess the easiest way that I parse this was it enables you to have things doing things to other things. That was profound. Things doing things to other things in the same interface.

[00:23:59] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah.

[00:23:59] Nathan Wrigley: You click a button and, I don’t know, the cart increments by one or something like that. So this kind of thing that really, in the year 2025, given that we’ve had mobile phones in our hands for decades, this sort of stuff feels like it should have been in websites for decades, but it wasn’t.

[00:24:12] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah. And the other exciting thing about it is it’s not just about telling blocks what to do. I find it very interesting that it can communicate data across blocks. So I’ll come back to Quiz Builder as a really good example. We just rebuilt that with all of these things, Block Bits, Block Bindings, Interactivity API. That just got completely revamped in the last couple months. Before that, what we were doing is we were building out a custom React front end for every single quiz.

So the users would go in, they would drag and drop, you know, build up these quizzes. And then on top of that, we were recreating all that for a new front end interface. And we had all this service side processing to kind of build up a data model for the quiz and then score the quiz, and we made a performant as we could be, but it wasn’t.

[00:24:55] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a lot.

[00:24:55] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, it’s a lot. And it’s a lot of like duplicative work and you’re like, what for? With this, it’s now the Interactivity API. Those blocks actually, you know, the answer block just hoists its answer into this larger data model using the Interactivity API.

So now all that happens client side. So now all these things that we were doing server side, we can do client side with the Interactivity API, and that saves us money, that saves us performance. It yields a better experience for the end user.

[00:25:19] Nathan Wrigley: So over the last 10 minutes or so, we kind of atomised these three things, Block Bits, Block Bindings, Interactivity. We kind of talked about them as separate things, which I guess they are. But from your experience, I’m guessing that they work in concert really well. In other words, if you understand, if you get into the weeds of those three things, and maybe some other things, you prize open capabilities in WordPress which are pretty profound.

[00:25:43] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, well, obviously one of the things that I love most about WordPress is it’s flexibility. Let’s use Block Bits as an example. This kind of pseudo block bits I’ve just described, where you register a custom format and then you use the HTML Tag Processor to switch that out. Well, the way that we’re switching it out is using the Interactivity API.

So all we do is we say, okay, we look for that class name, we use the HTML Tag Processor, and we add the Interactivity API bits that we need to it. We just say, well, the text value should be this, state dot button text, right? That’s really easy. But you could do it with block context too.

So there are all these tools in WordPress, all these different APIs related to blocks that once you start to connect them together, you get composability. I mean, that’s what it really comes down to. This ability for developers to build blocks that can be, one, reusable, that’s really important concept for composability, two, stand on their own, right? A button block should do something if it’s on its own. It should go to a link or something. But if that button block is dropped into another block, it’s nestable, well its configuration changes. Now it submits for the form, right? It doesn’t go to a link.

We’re at this place where just, there’s all these tools available to you when you start plugging them all together, really powerful stuff happens.

[00:26:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And I guess it’s like anything, once you’ve made those connections in your own head and done the hard work to understand them all, suddenly ideas begin occurring to you that maybe in a podcast like this, you get to the very edge of that, but you don’t get into the weeds of that. But once you’ve peeled it back and understood it, suddenly, aha, I didn’t realise WordPress could do all of this.

One of the things that I’m curious about, because I’m no developer, I kind of have a desire for this stuff to become available to non-developers. And at the minute it feels like you would really need to be a developer to build this stuff. Obviously you can surface it in a way that a non-developer can access. So your quiz, for example, I’m guessing I could interact with that almost immediately and understand it. Would there be any utility in building a UI for this so that these kind of things can be accessed?

[00:27:36] Seth Rubenstein: I think so. We have our own UI for this. We have an Interactivity API panel that we actually have on all of our blocks that have interactivity enabled. And what it does is it does allow us some interesting things for end users that they don’t have to know about.

So one of those things is you can drop a block into a block that supports interactivity. And the panel shows you all the blocks in the hierarchy that you can connect to. And so you might say, okay, well I want to connect to this, and then I want to pull this action from that interactivity store for this block.

So now we’ve enabled it so that it’s not the developers making all the Interactivity API connections. You know, this does this when it’s in this block. Actually, you can go in there and decide that for yourself if you want.

Now obviously that does still require a developer to hook that all up, but what you already see today with Block Bindings is a very similar panel. When you go use a Block Binding today, there’s a little panel called attributes. You click it, it shows you all the attributes you can connect up to a binding. That’s part of Gutenberg and WordPress Core right now.

So I think that interface is already there, and I think as more Block Bindings and plugins start to utilise that, the interface is already there for really people to kind of make these interactivity connections themselves.

[00:28:50] Nathan Wrigley: I suppose I’m kind of thinking back to the day when WordPress shipped for the first time, custom post types. I presume lots of people made use of them. It might be analogous to where we are at now with this, you know, people who are experienced can use it. But then somebody, some bright spark, came up with the idea of a custom post type plugin with a UI, and this way of just making it visually appealing and straightforward.

And when you were talking about this sort of, it felt almost like a flow chart that you were building there, where you’ve got, here’s the options, just sort of clicking on them with a mouse and dragging it so this feature now goes to this feature, and I’m binding this to this, that’s what I was imagining. You know, something really straightforward. Drop dead simple, non developery.

[00:29:29] Seth Rubenstein: Well, I will give a plug for my friends at Automattic. Part of my session was also sharing a product that we’ve built called Remote Pivot Table, which lets you kind of make really quick pivot tables out of Google Sheets so the data’s not living inside of WordPress, so that our researchers can really quickly update these data sets, and we don’t have to do a thing to get the updates. Well, that’s built on Automattic’s new Remote Data Blocks. And it actually does exactly what you’re saying.

You go in there, you tell it what your data sources are. Airtable, Google Sheets, Shopify, Custom HTTP endpoints if you want, and it will go create the blocks for you. It will create the bindings for you, and it’ll create the interface for you so that you can select, okay, well, when I’m building out my interface, you know, this text goes to this binding. It should pull from this value from that Google sheet. So that’s actually already out in the wild right now.

[00:30:18] Nathan Wrigley: What was it called?

[00:30:18] Seth Rubenstein: Remote Data Blocks.

[00:30:19] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:30:20] Seth Rubenstein: It’s on the WordPress plugin repo. I think they just published it this week.

[00:30:23] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll remember to put that into the show notes. I will dig that out and make sure that that gets into the show notes.

Yeah, I kind of feel like, even if we were to build the perfect UI, I still feel for most people this may end up being the domain of, get the developer to do it.

[00:30:38] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, it is very much in the domain of the developer. These are all developer APIs for them to build out tools for others. And I think ultimately what these APIs allow is for developers to make products that are easier to use for the end user. Like I said, less settings, less controls, less all these sidebar panels and stuff, and more just, you drag and drop the block in and in the background, through the Interactivity API, through Block Bindings, through Block Bits, you’re configuring how that application should work. So it’s more of just drag and drop for the end user.

[00:31:09] Nathan Wrigley: The features exist, you’d need to sort of go and figure out how to make it work. I guess we’ve got all these Block Bindings, we’ve got all these Block Bits, we’ve got this enormous complexity that we could get into. How performant is all of this?

[00:31:22] Seth Rubenstein: Extremely.

[00:31:23] Nathan Wrigley: So my fear is you just get carried away and you bind everything to every other thing, and where a bit is available, you make a Block Bit. I can’t summon up an example, but you get the point. You just get totally carried away. The performance, I would assume there is some hit, but it sounds like not so much.

[00:31:40] Seth Rubenstein: I don’t think so. I think the performance is actually better for a lot of these things. All of our Interactivity API projects, like technical performance is substantially better than if we had just built out a React frontend ourself.

Because think about the weight of that. I mean, React is pretty heavy, one. Preact on the other hand, which the Interactivity API is built on is very lightweight. But additionally you have this, I guess the other element which we really kind of haven’t defined is the HTML Tag Processor. That is what underpins all of these things, all of these APIs, even the Interactivity API, even though that’s JavaScript,

When you are writing in the Interactivity API, you can write state and context and all these values in HTML, the HTML tag processor that’s reading that, that’s processing it. And it does it so extremely fast. You know, if you’ve worked with a PHP DOM document, it’s slow, it’s very bad. This is not that. This is extraordinarily fast.

In addition, on the technical performance, when you’re using the Interactivity API, you get speed on the front end as well, because what you can do is you can pre hydrate information into your JavaScript application before it even loads, on the server side, which is really exciting.

You can see this today actually. Core query, the query loop, and the pagination. Those use an Interactivity API. When you hover over the two or the next page, what’s happening is there’s an Interactivity API function for prefetch. So you’re prefetching the next page of results. So for the user, boom. They click on it, boom. The results are already there. You go a little bit, further, you can cache that information. So now the user has pre fetched the next page and they’ve cached it for the next person to come to this page. That just really wasn’t possible before.

[00:33:18] Nathan Wrigley: No. Is that kind of leaning into sort of core browser technologies as well?

[00:33:22] Seth Rubenstein: Oh yes.

[00:33:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’m just thinking of things like.

[00:33:25] Seth Rubenstein: Well, the prefetch thing is part of the browser technology. I’ll give you an example. We have this very large religious census we do every decade called the Religious Landscape Study. It’s extremely complex database with a lot of querying, and a lot of SQL logic. If we were to, you go to a page on this database and there’s maybe like 12 charts. Well, if we were to load all those 12 charts on page load, like it would take a couple minutes to load the page. The site would probably crash.

But what we do is, as a user hovers over a chart before they click on it, we prefetch, it and we cache it. So for them, they click it, it’s instantaneous. But also we’ve now done the extra work of waiting for the next person, that’s already waiting there ready for the next person. I cannot state how important this innovation has been for the performance of our site and the Interactivity API.

[00:34:12] Nathan Wrigley: That is actually fairly profound, isn’t it? Yeah. Sometimes when you are explaining these things, the penny kind of half drops. And then a moment later, the penny drops fully and that one’s just hit. That’s actually really profound, isn’t it? Especially on a high traffic site where you don’t really want to be doing that thing a thousand times a second, just do it once, more or less.

[00:34:34] Seth Rubenstein: I have a philosophy of if I can offload it to the end user, I’m going to. You know, I’m going to use your computer if I can.

[00:34:41] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating. Okay, so pivot slightly. Do you think there’s a opportunity here? I expect there’s a bunch of developers listening to this who either haven’t experienced this before, haven’t played with it, and are thinking, okay, I want to wrap a UI around that. I want to build a plugin to make this stuff available. We kind of alluded to this a minute ago. Do you think that there is an opportunity there for developers to kind of neaten this interface up?

[00:35:02] Seth Rubenstein: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I would be very excited to see where the future of this lands for the WordPress ecosystem. You think of plugins like Advanced Custom Fields and what that did for WordPress, right? It was obviously possible to register post meta and all this stuff before, but what a hassle. It just was. And it really opened up WordPress as a content management system in a way that no other plugin had really done before.

So some very smart person, some enterprising person out there, there is an opportunity here to kind of build out something that would do that for the Interactivity API and empower less technically inclined people and maybe just not technical people at all to use this.

[00:35:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Because despite the fact that you’ve explained it really clearly, and I’ve got a grip on it, I suspect that I wouldn’t want to go through all of the weeds to connect all of those pieces. And I don’t want to open up a code editor. I want everything to be point, click, type, inside of WordPress, in a really straightforward, well-designed, beautifully thought through interface. Kind of like gold rush territory I think. Maybe there’s an opportunity here for someone, maybe multiple people.

Yeah, and it’s what you said before about these kind of custom post type plugins, there’s many of them and I think without them, nobody would’ve been using custom post types, well, not nobody, but a tiny proportion of the people would’ve started to use them. And I feel the same a bit here. I feel like the things that you’ve described, they’re fabulous, technically, conceptually brilliant, but if somebody was to come up with a UI that made them not just conceptually brilliant, but drop dead easy to use, we’ve got something really incredible.

[00:36:35] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, look, when I first started in WordPress, I didn’t know how to do custom fields, custom post types. You know, ACF helped me out there. And I do them all by hand now, right? I register all my post types and my post meta by hand. But those sort of plugins that make it easier for, well, not even if you’re less technically inclined, you’re busy, you don’t have the time to learn all these new APIs, it really does help out adoption down the road.

[00:37:00] Nathan Wrigley: And also you can imagine scenarios where people build out pre-configured versions of a thing. So that you might have templates for, I’m struggling to conceptualise that but, you know, you download this plugin, whatever it may be, and they’ve pre-configured useful scenarios that are repeatable. And you just, okay, click a button, that gets me 90% of what I want to do and then I go from there, kind of thing. Yeah, that’s interesting.

In terms of the bits and pieces that you’ve described, is there anything which you think might be missing? I know that’s a difficult question to answer because I’m asking you to stare into a crystal ball and come up with the future. But is there any kind of concept in here that you’ve thought, you know what, it’d be really handy to have that?

[00:37:37] Seth Rubenstein: I think it’s responsive. Responsive blocks, responsive attributes.

[00:37:41] Nathan Wrigley: Describe what that is because in my head, as soon as I hear responsive, I think viewport width.

[00:37:45] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah, and I think that’s exactly what I’m talking about. You know, I think all of the APIs are here. All the bits are in place to make that happen, the work just needs to be done. There’s actually a function in the Gutenberg source code for, I think it’s called update attribute on screen size or something like that, where you can kind of, desktop, tablet, mobile changes attribute to match for that viewport size.

I think this has been the Achilles heel for Gutenberg. It’s the constant complaint that I hear out of people. And I think that is really the missing link, the, last thing that would really make Gutenberg perfect.

[00:38:19] Nathan Wrigley: So scenarios where you could literally change anything based upon, I don’t know, we’re on a tablet now, so what we had on a desktop is no longer appropriate. Again, I’m struggling to conceptualise what that might be, but again, the same on mobile.

[00:38:32] Seth Rubenstein: I’ll give you a good example. We have our own grid block, columns block. We made our own grid block because we do this responsive attribute stuff. You might have three columns that are x width on desktop, and then on tablet, well, you might want that middle column actually to move to the first position to be 100% width, right? That’s a really easy example, but doing that right now is next impossible without having a developer build out that system for you. That’s just one thing I can think of, but there are a myriad of instances like that.

[00:39:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the domino fell a bit there. I understand what you mean. So yeah, it could be width, it could be background colour, it could be font size or content, anything.

[00:39:09] Seth Rubenstein: A number of things, yeah. Well, it could be also in the Interactivity API. It could be that, you know, on tablet, actually I want, when you click on this thing, I want it to do something else entirely.

[00:39:16] Nathan Wrigley: The button does a different thing.

[00:39:17] Seth Rubenstein: Yeah.

[00:39:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. That’s really interesting.

[00:39:18] Seth Rubenstein: Well, I’ll give you another example. We do that. Well, not to that degree, but Core social links. We wrap that in another block called Navigator Share Link. So when you’re on mobile and you click on the Facebook button, we’re not taking you to the Facebook share little window. We just open up the little native browser share thing. You just send it off to your app or whatever, friends, your iMessage, whatever you want to do.

So I think that kind of device contextuality is one area where there’s not a lot of guidance or APIs or anything, and that is kind of entirely on the developers to figure out themselves. But I think that’s probably what’s missing most from Gutenberg, is that kind of idea of screen or device contextuality.

[00:40:01] Nathan Wrigley: I just think this is all so fascinating. Essentially, during the last 40 minutes or so, you’ve prized open, I think a really different future for WordPress than I had previously thought. I knew all these things existed. I hadn’t really connected the dots. And it feels to me as if suddenly you go from building a bunch of websites to anything. Literally anything. If it’s possible to put in a browser.

[00:40:27] Seth Rubenstein: It’s a web application framework.

[00:40:28] Nathan Wrigley: Right. There you go. Yeah. A web application. Build anything inside of WordPress, which is not something that I was all that familiar with. Gosh, the future is bright.

[00:40:37] Seth Rubenstein: I mean, we have blocks where people are, you know, drag and drop them together and they’re building out little calculators. You know, one of our more popular content types is like, put in your income and where you live, and then we’ll tell you some information about you, you know, about your area or whatever. That’s a web application. That’s not a blog post. That’s not content. That’s a web application that someone just drag and drop built.

Yeah, we’re at a place, you know, the content management stuff of WordPress, man, that’s rock hard. That’s settled. Now we’re going into another era, a new direction where WordPress is this web development framework, first and foremost. For you, the developer, but also your end users to build web applications with, inside of.

[00:41:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, absolutely fascinating. So my intuition that I alluded to at the beginning of this podcast, in 2018 or whatever it is, that promise has now become reality. The year 2025, we got there. And now it just needs a bunch of developers, hopefully, dear listener, if you’re listening to this, get on board and try to figure this out and make it straightforward so people like me can use it.

Seth, I think that’s probably the sweet spot to end it. That’s a very optimistic future you’ve painted there. Where do we find you, if somebody’s listening? I would imagine that there’s a bunch of people listening to this thinking, I need to speak to Seth.

[00:41:51] Seth Rubenstein: You can find me at sethrubenstein.info. And you can find me on Twitter or Bluesky. Please find me on Bluesky, though, I hate Twitter.

[00:41:57] Nathan Wrigley: We will drop the links into the show notes. So if you head to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Seth Rubenstein, that’s S-T-E-I-N, search for that and then the links will be there for Seth’s socials, plus anything to do with the talk that we’ve been mentioning as well. Seth Rubenstein, thank you so much for chatting to me today.

[00:42:15] Seth Rubenstein: Thank you for having me.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how WordPress Core continues to strive to unlock greater performance.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today, we have Weston Ruter. Weston is a longtime WordPress user and contributor. He has been a core committer for 10 years, and he co-led the WordPress 4.9 release. He worked in the WordPress agency space, and has also been sponsored to work on the Core Performance Team. He lives in Portland, which as you will hear, was quite handy for this interview.

We start the conversation by getting into the big picture, why website speed matters more now than ever, and how WordPress performs out of the box. Weston shares details about measuring true performance. Revealing, for example, that achieving a perfect Lighthouse score isn’t the end game, and that real user experience metrics like Core Web Vitals and Largest Contentful Paint should shape how developers and site owners think about optimization.

Throughout the episode, you’ll learn about the advances made by the WordPress Performance Team, from lazy loading and new image formats, to speculative loading that shaves precious milliseconds off page transitions. Weston explains how many performance improvements are designed to work automatically, democratizing speed, so that even casual WordPress users benefit without needing to be technical experts.

The conversation also touches on the balance between adding features and avoiding plugin bloat. The hidden impact of browser and device differences, and how large companies, like Google, are working hand in hand with WordPress to raise the bar on speed and usability.

Weston offers practical tips, deep technical wisdom, and a glimpse of where WordPress performance is heading next, and it’s sure to inspire you to think differently about how your sites load, how your users engage, and how you can squeeze out every last drop of speed from the platform you love.

Whether you’re a developer, designer, site owner, or just someone curious about what keeps the web running smoothly. This episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Weston Ruter.

I am joined on the podcast by Weston Ruter. Hello.

[00:03:28] Weston Ruter: Thank you for having me.

[00:03:29] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. I’m quite jealous of Weston because we’re in Portland, Oregon at WordCamp US. I had to get on a plane, which was no hardship really in the grand scheme of things. Nevertheless, it was a lengthy plane journey. You, on the other hand, had to get on some public transport to get here because you live in Portland. That must be nice

[00:03:45] Weston Ruter: I live about five miles to the east of here, and so I jumped on the bus and I got off and walked to coffee shop and over to the conference center.

[00:03:53] Nathan Wrigley: And twice, two years in a row as well. You’re very, very lucky.

[00:03:56] Weston Ruter: I was very happy when I found out.

[00:03:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So Weston’s here today because of a presentation that he’s giving at WordCamp US. I will read into the record the title of the presentation that you’re giving, The Site Speed Frontier with Performance Lab and Beyond. So it’s all about performance, this episode essentially.

This is one of those subjects where I feel you have to tell us your credentials so that we understand that what you are saying is true. Because I think there’s a lot of snake oil, certainly from my point of view, quite a lot of ignorance. I don’t really understand this topic inside and out. So would you mind, a minute or something like that? Just tell us about you and your history with, well, WordPress, but also performance and so on.

[00:04:32] Weston Ruter: Yeah, sure. I have been a WordPress Core committer for 10 years. And I was in the agency space working at XWP, working on enterprise WordPress sites. And then I joined Google and I was a software engineer working on developer programs engineer, then develop a relations engineer working on the AMP project, which is all about making webpages faster using the AMP framework. And from there I transitioned into working on the Core Performance Team for the past couple years. And we are focused on making WordPress fast for everybody.

[00:05:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, great. Thank you so much. So the topic at hand then is going to be about performance. Why are you interested in this? I know obviously there’s a career in it and what have you. Is this something that you lie awake at night thinking about? Do you obsess about this kind of stuff?

[00:05:28] Weston Ruter: Yeah, it’s a passion of mine because who likes a slow webpage, right? So it’s fun to eke every bit of performance out of the loading of something. There’s a lot of little technical details and things to know and best practices to observe. And so it’s a fun challenge to be as fast as possible and there’s always room for improvement.

[00:05:52] Nathan Wrigley: And it kind of feels as if the mantra over many, many years has basically been that, you know, if you can make your website faster, it will be successful. People will visit it, people are getting weary of page load time or what have you. And so maybe we’ll get into the weeds of all of that.

How does WordPress, if I was just to go, okay, ignore the hosting that it’s on. Let’s just imagine we’ve got a good host, we’ll just use that term. If I was to download a vanilla version of WordPress and use the default theme, currently 2025, and do nothing else with it, I’ve written a few blog posts, maybe that’s it. How does it do out of the box like that?

[00:06:25] Weston Ruter: Yeah, it turns out my talk is exactly about this, and it uses the 2025 theme as a test case to show how the performance of WordPress fares out of the box. And if you were to load up a site running 2025, the theme and nothing else, and you run it through Lighthouse, the performance testing tool from Google, you’ll most likely get a 100 score, performance score. And you would think, I’m done, there’s nothing else to do. But if you dig into it, just because you get a good score, that doesn’t mean there’s still not room for improvement. And there’s still head room even after 100.

But yeah, WordPress Core does great out of the box, but there are still many opportunities to make it even faster. And as you had Felix on previously to talk about speculative loading, that’s one example where the performance is improved yet further. And in the performance lab plugin, which the performance team maintains, we have different performance feature plugins that implement additional optimisations that address different scenarios and use cases that WordPress doesn’t do well out of the box.

[00:07:40] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting, and I’ve never heard it framed that way. I’ve never heard that there was a ceiling above 100. It kind of feels as if that is the ceiling. If you score 100, all bets are off, game over, you’ve succeeded, hooray, have a party, kind of thing. But no, there’s still room to be squeezing a little bit out here and there.

[00:07:57] Weston Ruter: Yeah, if you look at a Lighthouse audit, Lighthouse is an example of a lab metric. It simulates a page load for a user, but it’s not an actual page load for an actual user. It’s just a simulation. And if you really want to know how your site is actually performing, you need to measure those visits from actual users.

And if you load up a popular site in Google’s page speed insights tool, you’ll see there’s two different sections on the page. At the top, you’ll see what users are experiencing, and then at the bottom you’ll see lab data. And the top is coming from actual site visitors through what’s called the Chrome User Experience Report. And that tells you how the site is performing in terms of the Core Web Vitals that Google has spearheaded.

And one of those is called the Largest Contentful Paint or LCP, and that measures the time it takes for the largest element that is most likely going to be the main content of the page to be rendered, from the time you start navigating to the page and that element finishes rendering.

And a good LCP value is considered from 0 to 2.5 seconds. And so you can have, within 2.5 seconds there’s a big range in the user experience. So if it’s just under 2.5 seconds, it’s considered good, but that doesn’t mean a 1.5 second page load is actually way better, and a 0.5 second page load is even better yet, and a 0.05 second page load is great, is perfect. That would be the perfection. And that is what we’re working on.

[00:09:36] Nathan Wrigley: There’s gradations of it, okay. So within that 100 there may be room to do, aspects of the 100 can be improved. And in this case, by taking the LCP time down.

We’re at a conference event. There’s over a thousand people. There must be designers, developers, SEO people here. There’s everybody. There’s the whole gamut of people that use WordPress, probably some people that are new to the whole platform as well. Do you think that performance is something that everybody needs to worry about or are you happy to be one of the few that obsess about it? Is it basically better to leave an expert like yourself to worry about it, or is this something that we can all have a little dabble at and be successful about?

[00:10:14] Weston Ruter: Well, that’s what we’re concerned about with the Core Performance Team is making it so that the regular WordPress user doesn’t have to worry about this, because nobody’s got time to spend learning like, what is LCP? What is time to first bite? What are these different metrics? And nobody has time to worry about optimising for all these. So WordPress Core should do all this out of the box, and the WordPress ecosystem should implement best practices so that users don’t have to worry about it.

[00:10:44] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting. I remember, I’m thinking it was about six years ago, but I don’t really remember the date. But Google kind of informed everybody that in a period of time, a year’s time or what have you, these metrics, LCP and, Core Web Vitals basically were going to come in.

And it felt like everybody in our industry was running around like a headless chicken, trying to understand something that they knew, there was this sword of Damocles moment, this date in the calendar where the SERPs were going to change. It didn’t feel like a comfortable time. In some senses, it felt like Google was kind of poisoning the water a bit because they were alienating developers who suddenly had to learn this new thing, because they realised their client websites were going to probably tumble in the SERPs.

And so they had to upskill in this thing that probably they didn’t want to be involved with. So it was a curious time, but the dust seems to have settled. I don’t know too much about, you know, whether they were penalties that really were paid by people because they didn’t have these fabulous Core Web Vital scores. But it definitely put the cat amongst the pigeons for a while anyway.

[00:11:38] Weston Ruter: The factors that go into ranking pages and Google search are, I never knew what they are, so the knowledge I have is that the performance of a page contributes to the ranking in some way. And basically, as I understand it, all things being equal, you have two sites with the same content and same relevance to the user, and one has better performance, then in theory that would rank higher.

How much value you get in terms of your ranking is debatable or unknown. I don’t know. But what is important is the user experience and the benefits that you get for your users. And if they have a good experience on your site, then they’re more likely to come back. More likely to result in a conversion or a purchase, or whatever you’re looking to get out of your site. So that’s where I would focus the concerns.

[00:12:34] Nathan Wrigley: If this were the Squarespace or Wix podcast, which of course it isn’t, it would be much more straightforward to have a conversation about why your site was quick because, you know, it’s this proprietary platform. There’s constraints about what you can do on that platform, and they run the whole thing, you know, they’ve got their arms around everything.

WordPress, you download it from .org in most cases, and start to pile things on top of it. And very quickly we get the problems developing I guess, you know, the more things that you throw into it, the more plugins and what have you. Would your advice simply be circumspect about what you throw in, or can you, for want of a better phrase, can you concentrate on additional tech to mask over any problems that you have?

You know, with the best one in the world, if you’ve got an LMS, it’s probably going to slow your website down because it’s doing a lot. If you’ve got WooCommerce, it’s probably going to slow yourself, the website, down from the vanilla install with using the 2025 theme that you just mentioned.

But there’s this whole marketplace of hosting companies and performance companies who are selling you things that kind of undo the, and I’m doing air quotes, the damage that you did by putting the plugins in.

So I don’t know if you’ve got anything to say to that. You know, the whole thing about bloating the website, slowing it down, unpicking it with different tech.

[00:13:49] Weston Ruter: Yeah, well, the WordPress ecosystem has a problem with the kitchen sink issue and a plugin that has more features is somehow valued more highly than a plugin that does one thing and does it really well.

And so in the Performance Lab plugin in our suite of plugins that we feature, we have the goal that a plugin should do one thing and do it really well. And if you don’t like what the plugin is doing, you deactivate it and switch to another one that is doing that one issue and doing it well.

But if you have plugins that do so many things, then you’re really kind of, your hands are tied and it’s difficult to switch. And maybe that’s a strategy by some plugins to lock you in to their ecosystem, but it’s a difficult problem, yeah.

[00:14:39] Nathan Wrigley: And we also have a, you know, we have plugins which are performance plugins. I mean, there’s dozens of them. I’m sure we could rattle off, whose job is to fix the problems that you may have created elsewhere in the website. If you’re in the weeds of it, like you are, you’ve probably got some vague understanding about it. You understand whether something is snake oil or not, but for the rest of us, that is a Pandora’s box, and there’s only chaos in there.

I don’t know what will slow my website down. If I download, I’m going to use LMS again, if I download an LMS platform, I’m going to hope that the work has been done successfully. But I’m probably also going to be thinking about, okay, now do I need to talk to my host, get a different hosting environment, get it set up so it’s perfect for that? Do I need a performance plugin? Caching layers, putting things on the edge.

And on and on it goes. It makes WordPress a difficult thing for many, many people to use. And so this idea of democratising publishing sort of goes out the window a little bit because it’s really extraordinarily hard to use.

[00:15:34] Weston Ruter: Yeah. And I think that in addition to democratising publishing, WordPress should also be as part of that democratising performance. And again, making it so that users don’t have to worry about that.

And what we’re doing in Core, we’re doing exactly that where as one of WordPress’s core philosophies is decisions, not options, and things should work out of the box.

But when it comes to the ecosystem, it’s a open source environment and there’s no top down control over what a plugin does. So I think there’s opportunities with projects like the Plugin Check plugin to do more analysis on the performance, in addition to the security and the best practices for being accepted into the directory.

But if there’s also a surfacing of performance issues or additional audits that are done on the impact of installing a plugin, that could be really valuable for site owners to get a sense of, this may cause problems if you install it.

[00:16:37] Nathan Wrigley: How long has the Performance Team been a thing? I feel like three years or something like that, but I could be really wrong.

[00:16:43] Weston Ruter: About four years I think.

[00:16:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, yeah. And could you just run over the history of that? I was going to say organisation, but let’s go with team. Could you run us through the history of that team and what you’ve been able to do?

Each of the little steps, some of them are quite profound. Some of them feel less profound, but very important. But over those four years, a lot of really incredible work has been done actually. Certainly from my perspective, it does seem that without that team we’d be in a very, very different place.

[00:17:15] Weston Ruter: I hope that’s true. I think it is. Yeah, well, it started out focusing on, I think lazy loading of images was one of the first things to land through this team. And with that we also then uncovered that actually lazy loading everything, which while great for reducing the weight of a page, because you’re not downloading images that aren’t actually shown. If you lazy load images that are in the initial viewport, that actually hurts the Largest Contentful Paint metric because the browser wastes to start downloading those images until it knows that they’re in the viewport.

So out of that came work to not lazy load images that are in the initial view port, and then also moving on to this attribute called fetch priority, which you can have the value of high, for example. So if you add fetch priority high to an image, then the browser’s going to prioritise loading that first. And so a lot of work was done to add sensible defaults in WordPress Core so that, for example, the featured image of a post gets fetch priority high, so that it gets loaded sooner over images that are not going to be the Largest Contentful Paint, most likely.

So there’s that. And then there was also an issue with like emoji in posts where, on every page load there’s some JavaScript that runs in the head of the page, and it computes whether the browser supports the emoji, like all the emoji. And if the browser doesn’t support all the emoji, then it loads the Twitter emoji library to render them. And that JavaScript was causing a long task in lower performing browsers, or devices, that was hurting the largest contentful paint as well. So that was fixed as well.

And then work has been done to add support for new image formats, like AVIF and WebP so that site owners can upload those image formats instead of JPEGs, which take longer to download.

We talked about speculative loading, and you talked about that with Felix. So that landed in 6.8, which by default will start prefetching the HTML for a page when you mouse down or tap or click, pointer down on a link to give the browser a bit of a headstart. But then the API allows you to be more aggressive about starting that process, just when you hover over the link, for example, and then not just to prefetch the HTML, but to actually render the whole page.

And so in my talk, which I gave earlier today, I showed the difference between no speculative loading, speculative loading as in WordPress Core right now, the default, and then moderate prefetch. And then lastly, moderate pre-render.

[00:19:57] Nathan Wrigley: Is that done with the plugin? Well, I guess you could do that with code, but there’s an option to, if you download the plugin, you’ve got a UI for that as well.

[00:20:04] Weston Ruter: Exactly. There’s a UI in the plugin that allows you to opt into moderate eagerness, or to use pre-render instead of prefetch. And in the example I showed, let’s say your time to first bite is a second. Then in the initial example, like on a slow, or on a fast 4G connection, you’re going to get like 2.27 seconds to load the page. But then with conservative prefetch, that shaves off like 50 milliseconds because the amount of time it takes to mouse down and mouse up is just a little bit of time that it can shave off that’s just a little bit to the loading of the page.

But then when you go to moderate prefetch, then the browser can load the page fully in the background. And so then the time to first bite in that case becomes zero because the whole page is already in the browser’s cache. And that can reduce it to like one second because you totally eliminated the time to first bite.

And then with the moderate pre rendering, then when you’re hovered over that link, the browser not only downloads the HTML, but also all the images, builds out the layout, runs the JavaScript. And so then when you click on that link, the page can load instantaneously.

[00:21:12] Nathan Wrigley: So literally instantaneous.

[00:21:14] Weston Ruter: 0.05 seconds.

[00:21:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It’s instantaneous. I mean that’s pretty incredible. All of that is available inside of WordPress, but just to rewind, probably about 50 seconds, the default is not aggressive. The default in WordPress in order to satisfy the kind of 80 20 rule and what have you, the default is to make it so that there has to be some interaction. The mouse has to be invoked. There’s a click involved.

That’s fascinating. So if you really want to get into the weeds of that, you can basically make the next page load almost instantaneously, should you wish to do that.

One thing that I did get into with, I believe it was Adam Silverstein not that long ago when I had a podcast episode with him. And I don’t mean to go deeply into this, but there’s a curious balancing act here, I think with the environment and all of this speculative loading. Because it wouldn’t be desirable to load, I don’t know, there’s 12 navigation links and the mouse happens to go across all of them. And suddenly 12 unnecessary pages were entirely pre-rendered and what have you. So yeah. I don’t know if you’ve got any thoughts on that, whether there’s a balancing act between performance and environmental concerns.

[00:22:23] Weston Ruter: Yeah. By default, speculative loading only operates on pages when you’re not logged in. And so when you’re not logged into WordPress, that is most of the time when you’re going to have a page cache that can serve it from the cache. And so as long as you have page caching in place, then the server isn’t going to be overly taxed by those requests.

In the newest version of the Speculative Loading plugin, it has an opt in to speculative loading for logged in users as well. But there’s a warning that shows up if you don’t have a persistent object cache active, for example. So, yeah, it’s important to have good caching in place, good best practices for scaling.

However, in addition to pre rendering, which the speculative loading plugin enables, there’s a much older technology for instant page loads that browsers all support, and that is the back forward cache.

And WordPress sites, by default when you’re logged out, will benefit from this most of the time. But as soon as you login or if you’re navigating to like a shopping cart page, or an account page, or checkout page in an e-commerce site. Oftentimes the plugin will invoke this no cash headers function that tells the browser, primarily tells the page cache, hey, don’t hold onto this response because you don’t want to cache the shopping cart for one user and then serve it to another user, because then you would be seeing something embarrassing potentially.

And so that is one of the benefits of sending that header. But it also has the effect of preventing the browser from holding onto that page as well. So if you navigate back and forward from the shopping cart, then you’ll notice that it doesn’t load very fast. It loads slow, because the browser has to re-fetch it all from the server, and has to rebuild everything from scratch.

And so there’s a effort underway for 6.9 to stop doing that. To allow the browser to hold onto that in memory. And then to address, one of the issues that turned this off to begin with, allowing the browser to store the pages in the cache. Is if you aren’t logged in, for example, into WordPress. You’re on some sensitive page maybe putting some API key in or something, and you go to log out, with this back, forward cache, you could hit the back button to go back into the WordPress admin as another person, maybe on a shared computer and look at that page, even though the user had logged out.

[00:24:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really not good.

[00:24:51] Weston Ruter: Not good. So there’s a ticket for 6.9 which would solve that problem by invalidating those pages from bfcache so that that privacy concern isn’t there. And this issue is not just about, well, these back, forward navigations are very common. So the Chrome team found that one in 10 navigations on desktop are these back, forward navigations?

[00:25:15] Nathan Wrigley: A tenth?

[00:25:16] Weston Ruter: Yeah. And on mobile, I think it’s one in five. So 20% of the time on mobile, you’re going back and forward using a gesture instead of hitting a link.

[00:25:25] Nathan Wrigley: That maps to my life, but I hadn’t thought about it.

[00:25:28] Weston Ruter: But the benefit here is not just in that you get a faster page load, but also bfcache, this back, forward cache will preserve the entire state of the page. So in my talk, I showed an example where you, if you have BuddyPress installed, you start typing in an update, a status update, and then you click away to a separate tab, and then if you hit the back button to go back to that initial tab, then you’ll find without this back, forward cache that your update’s gone because that input field was constructed with JavaScript. And when you don’t have back, forward cache, then the entire document object model has to be rebuilt. All the JavaScript has to re-execute. This is also an issue for the block editor. If you navigated away from a page and you didn’t save a draft, then everything gets lost without this back, forward cache.

So back, forward cache not only improves performance, giving you the possibility of these instant page loads, but it also preserves that important state on a page that could be lost otherwise.

[00:26:25] Nathan Wrigley: You have a plugin if memory serves, recently in the repo.

[00:26:30] Weston Ruter: Yes. And I got some feedback that it’s a terrible name, which I agree.

[00:26:32] Nathan Wrigley: What’s the name? I’ve forgotten.

[00:26:33] Weston Ruter: It’s called no cache, bfcache.

[00:26:36] Nathan Wrigley: That was it, yeah.

[00:26:37] Weston Ruter: But if I were to rename it, which I probably will now, it would probably be called Instant Back Forward Navigations or something. It’s not so short, but.

[00:26:43] Nathan Wrigley: So is the intention to take, are you spearheading that basically? is the intention to roll the learnings from that plugin into Core?

[00:26:50] Weston Ruter: Yeah.

[00:26:50] Nathan Wrigley: And I’m just going to read this into the record so that everybody understands. You are talking about backwards and forwards by using the buttons, which I guess typically live at the top left of a browser. Those buttons, the arrows that point backwards and forwards.

[00:27:03] Weston Ruter: That’s right, or the navigation in like the gesture on Android to go back.

[00:27:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so swipe typically and swipe right. okay. Yeah, that’s really interesting because I do that all the time. It really hadn’t occurred to me that was something that could be cached. And if, as you say it’s 20% on mobile, or 10% on, that’s a lot of time that you’re saving.

Because you do, it’s a journey, isn’t it? And sometimes you get to a dead end, and so you just back three times, because you know that you wanted to go back to that product that you saw a minute ago, but you kind of got lost along the way. So that’s kind of almost like a roadmap item. That’s 6.9, hopefully. Are there any other things coming in 6.9 that are interesting?

[00:27:39] Weston Ruter: Well, one of the new features in WordPress Core is this Interactivity API.

[00:27:44] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so nice.

[00:27:46] Weston Ruter: And one of the great things about the Interactivity API is one of its key design principles is server side rendering. So let’s say you have a navigation block, or you have an image block with a lightbox. All of the HTML and the CSS needed to render those blocks are output on the server. There’s no need for JavaScript to construct the user interface.

Nevertheless, there’s JavaScript needed because there’s interactivity involved in these interactive blocks. And so with each of these interactive blocks, there’s a script module that gets added to the page, and it’s added in the head of the page. And browsers download those script modules with a high priority. And the impact of that is, well, the browser doesn’t know that these aren’t important. It could be important, it could not be important.

But by loading them with a high priority, they compete with loading of more important critical resources like the Largest Contentful Paint image, for example. So by having these modules in the head, then they cause the LCP metric to degrade. And so there’s a ticket to add fetch priority low to these script tags, which causes the browser to bump them down in priority so that the Largest Contentful Paint image has a chance to load sooner.

[00:29:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It seems like a game of tennis, this whole thing. For example, the Interactivity API, what a fabulous thing that is, but smuggled into that with something, it sounds unexpected that nobody foresaw that one and okay, need to address that. And here we are, 6.9, that gets addressed.

[00:29:21] Weston Ruter: Yeah, and one of the great things about the Interactivity API as well is that it has really pushed forward the new Script Modules API in WordPress, where what are also called ESM modules or scripts. And these are a new way of writing JavaScript and they are, by default they don’t block the rendering of the page.

Whereas if you have a classic script like jQuery in the head of your page, as you start loading the page, the browser has to stop parsing the HTML, it has to fetch the JavaScript, it has to execute the JavaScript, and then because that JavaScript may be doing something like document.write, where it like adds HTML to the page as it’s executing. Then only after that’s all finished then the parser can continue and continue laying out the page. So it’s very bad for performance to have any external, or even inline sometimes, JavaScript in the head.

And so one way to solve that issue is to slap a defer attribute on that script tag, or an async attribute, and that causes the script to then not block rendering, and it will be executed once the page has finished loading.

And a nice feature of script modules is that they’re deferred by default. You can’t have a blocking script. And so the thinking was, oh, they don’t block rendering, so we can just put them in the head. But it turns out that they do impact the network, because there’s other things on the network than just the scripts. And we need to make sure that the critical resources are prioritised, like the LCP image and not just load everything with high priority.

[00:30:55] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of curious because the past of WordPress has been about, you know, you click on links and you generate, I don’t know a post, a page or something, but you’ve got this static piece of content, largely. You know, there may be some JavaScript or something, which is doing something fun.

But the interactivity, API suddenly presents a page which, I don’t know, you might be stuck on that page for quite a while doing other things. I don’t know how that leans into the whole performance thing. I don’t know we could search and filter a bunch of houses or real estate or what have you, and update things. And we are on this one URL but everything’s getting changed in front of our eyes. So I don’t know how that whole LCP thing gets bundled into that. It suddenly becomes a much more difficult problem to identify and solve, I guess.

[00:31:35] Weston Ruter: Yeah. So with LCP, it is for that initial page load. So as soon as you interact with the page, then whatever is the largest element then going to be.

[00:31:47] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that ceases there does it?

[00:31:48] Weston Ruter: Yeah, it stops at that point. However, there are other problems with performance that can arise after that Largest Contentful Paint. So one of the newer Core Web Vital metrics is the Interaction to Next Paint, and that is this INP value. And that is all about how much JavaScript is executing on the page. And JavaScript functions can do a lot of work, so much work that they cause the user interface to appear to halt.

[00:32:19] Nathan Wrigley: Hang.

[00:32:20] Weston Ruter: Yeah, hang. And so that’s called jank. And it can cause animations to stutter, it can cause a user interface to be sluggish, and you click a button and then nothing happens and then all of a sudden it opens up. And so that’s an example of a metric that is still very relevant with the Interactivity API. And there’s been work to establish best practices to make sure that the event handlers for these interactive blocks are using the best practices. Like, it’s called scheduler.yield, and it allows you to break up a long running task to give the browser a chance to catch its breath so that it doesn’t cause those long tasks.

And then another important metric, which continues to matter even after the page is loaded is called the Cumulative Layout Shift or CLS. And that is a very common issue with, where you have ads or something that will just expand as you’re scrolling down and you lose your place in the page and that hurts your cumulative layout, that CLS score.

[00:33:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You end up with your finger in entirely the wrong place just as you’re about to click on things.

[00:33:23] Weston Ruter: That’s exactly right.

[00:33:24] Nathan Wrigley: Old TechCrunch website. I don’t know if you’ve ever came across that one. That was a WordPress one, I believe. And I don’t know how many times I click entirely the wrong article because it just shifted just at the moment that my finger was descending.

[00:33:33] Weston Ruter: Very aggravating yeah.

[00:33:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really annoying. We’re really in the weeds here and what’s kind of fascinating, obviously you understand it all, I’m just holding on for dear life here. But it feels as if there’s a dance between what we’re expecting the browser to be able to do, and what it actually can do. And I don’t know if that’s the case.

You know, I don’t know if the fact that I’ve got a shiny new Mac means that my experience of the web in the future will be better than my 8-year-old Mac over there. That never used to be something that I worried about. It took time to boot that machine, but once it was up and running, that machine was probably just as good at displaying the web as the shiny new one. But now it feels as if that’s maybe not the case.

[00:34:13] Weston Ruter: It’s funny you say that because this emoji issue that I described earlier where it was causing this long task as the page was loading, I only discovered that as a problem because I was using a Chromebook as development device.

[00:34:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, notoriously low on specs.

[00:34:27] Weston Ruter: Relatively, that one was even a fast one. But yes, much slower than one of the newer Macs. And so it’s important to always be testing in an average device, and not always just use the latest and greatest. Because you’re going to miss performance issues that are probably impacting a lot of users.

And one of the issues with emojis is, going back to what I described earlier with this long script in the head, now there’s just an inline script, and even with an inline script, there is still a performance impact where it will stop, because the browser has to stop parsing the page, execute the JavaScript, and then keep going.

And so I used my new Mac to analyse the performance of that and I didn’t see a problem. But then I tried the CPU throttling in Chrome Dev Tools where you can emulate low end, low tier device. And in that case, then all of a sudden I saw this 100 millisecond long task pop up, I can’t remember how long exactly, but it negatively impacted the LCP because it had to spend that time with this underpowered device.

So, yeah, there’s many opportunities for optimising things that, if you’re using devices that people are actually using.

[00:35:41] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t really know what the expectation is from WordPress over the next decade, but it doesn’t feel like it’s going to be limiting itself to websites. It feels like that’s a portion of it, but Matt Mullenweg often has talked about it being almost like the operating system for the web. Whether or not that will transpire, I don’t know.

But certainly for me, a lot of the things that I used to associate with a downloaded app that would run on MacOS or Windows or what have you, I’m now fully expecting that to be in a browser. And so I expect that the same would be true of our websites. We’re going to be doing more with them. They’re going to be requiring more grunt in the background, you know, more interactivity, more filtering, more searching, more database queries. And yeah, I guess WordPress has got to try and keep up with all that.

[00:36:29] Weston Ruter: In improving web performance, it’s a top down and a bottom up problem. Browsers are working to get faster. They’re competing with each other, trying to be as fast as possible for all the bragging rights, right? But oftentimes it’s impossible for the browser to know, even if it’s as smart as possible, what to prioritise when loading a page.

So that’s why when I was working at Google, we were prioritising improving the web at scale through WordPress to implement best practices in how WordPress builds pages so that Chrome doesn’t have to figure out everything because it’s impossible for Chrome to figure that out from the top down.

So if you look at the, over time these Core Vital Metrics, they all consistently are going up and improving, even if a CMS isn’t necessarily focused on a performance. They all are inching upward. And that’s because the browser is getting better at performance as well. But when a CMS like WordPress also invests in improving performance, then you can start to see it edging out other CMSs in terms of the relative improvement in performance.

[00:37:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. Let me just parse that. So whether WordPress is at the top or the browser is at the top, you’ve got this top bottom thing, and it’s kind of inching in from the top, coming down. Maybe that’s the browser, and then WordPress at the bottom inching up, if they happily meet in the middle.

So what you’re saying is that even if no performance work was done by a Performance Team in WordPress, there would have been in recent years a performance improvement, But the fact that there’s those two things in symphony with each other means that there’s a greater performance improvement.

Given that WordPress, I don’t know what the number is right now, but the statistic of 43% was always banded around. So it’s a huge proportion of the internet. Does WordPress have a voice toward Mozilla and Chrome? Does it get to say what the future of browsers might look like? It feels like with that market share, It ought to have a big voice, but I don’t know if it does.

[00:38:26] Weston Ruter: Well, I remember back when responsive images became a thing, and as I recall that it was WordPress implementing these responsive images that caused browsers to say, okay, we’re going to implement these now as well. So I think Chrome, I can’t remember which browser did at first, but it was kind of a catalyst that caused everything to get going.

And similarly, recently with the speculative loading, it being adopted by WordPress has, I think, caused other browsers to say, okay, we’re going to implement this as well.

And yeah, I know that when I was working at Google, and still I’m in contact with people at Google who work on web standards work, there are initiatives that they’re working on that they want feedback from WordPress developers to know like, is this going to work for WordPress? And if WordPress can leverage this, and going back and forth between what works for WordPress and what works for browsers and there’s ongoing conversations, yeah.

[00:39:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it is kind of interesting. I was talking to somebody from Google, from the Site Kit team, they obviously put up quite a lot of money to be marquee sponsors, if you like. I don’t know what the word is, you know like a top tier sponsor often at these events. I don’t know if they’re sponsoring this one, but there does seem to be some interest from Google.

I know that Mozilla doesn’t have the deep pocket, so we’re not really expecting that. But it’s nice to hear that, even if it’s kind of back channels, and it may not be that WordPress gets asked all the time, that there is some sort of symbiosis there. That’s nice to know.

[00:39:55] Weston Ruter: Well, I remember also seeing recently that Site Kit was voted one of the most trusted WordPress plugins.

[00:40:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, 5 Million plus installs in under five years. And I was kind of surprised by that actually. when I did that interview, I didn’t realise the numbers were so big. And then after the interview I went out and asked a bunch of random people whether they’d used it, and a hundred percent of the random selection of 10 people that I asked used it on everything.

[00:40:20] Weston Ruter: Yeah. I use it for sure.

[00:40:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. It’s kind of amazing. So just sort of rounding it off a little bit, I’m guessing that if you were to have your performance hat on, I could be wrong about this. You would be advising people to step away from the classic way of doing things in WordPress with, you know, the classic editor, the classic themes and things. I genuinely don’t know if there’s a performance improvement in full site editing, block-based themes, and what have you. Over to you really, it’s an open ended question.

[00:40:46] Weston Ruter: Yeah, there definitely is a performance benefit to using block themes, and that is because the way that classic themes load, they load progressively where they will print out the head, head tag in the page and then before they render any of the template, they basically locked in the scripts and styles that the page is going to need even though that doesn’t actually know what’s going to be in the page for sure. It can make some guesses, but it doesn’t know for sure.

And so for classic themes, you’ll have these massive style sheets that are printed in the head, you’ll have a whole bunch of scripts that you may or may not use. And as we said before, those scripts may be blocking the rendering and causing all kinds of problems in performance.

But with block themes, the way that a template is rendered is completely different, where it actually will render all of the blocks in the content first before it goes about rendering the head, the links, the style sheets and the scripts that go in the head of the HTML. And so because of that, a block theme is able to selectively load just the styles and just the scripts that are relevant to the blocks on that specific page. And so the amount of CSS and JavaScript that’s on a page can be greatly reduced, which greatly improves performance.

And also, one of the initiatives that we’ve been working on in the Core Performance Team is related to these responsive images that we were talking about. Where a responsive image, it has all of the different intermediate image sizes that are available. When you upload an image, it’ll reference all those different image sizes in the source set attribute. And then there’s the sizes attribute that says which of those intermediate image sizes should be loaded for that image in the page. But because WordPress doesn’t know classically, in the classic themes, how big an element is going to be, it uses by default the image that is the width of the view port.

And so on a mobile device, that’s often fine because images are often the full width of the content. But on a desktop you often have a center column with margins on either side, and maybe the image is going to be in a column or floated to the right. And so oftentimes on desktop, you’re going to download a much larger image than is relevant to that container on the page.

And so there’s a, one of the plugins in Performance Lab is called Enhanced Responsive Images. And what it does is it leverages the block structure in block themes to be able to figure out what the width is for the container of a given image. And then it can craft that sizes attribute to be much more accurate compared to the default sizes attribute. And in my talk, I showed that the performance gains from that enhancement alone are one of the largest that you can have, much more than just using AVIF or a modern image format.

[00:43:51] Nathan Wrigley: Really?

[00:43:51] Weston Ruter: Yeah because, for example, in my test page, I had a jpeg and then I tried it again with an AVIF and the AVIF was 20% smaller, so maybe I could compress it even further. But the Largest Contentful Paint improvement for that was only 2%. But with the Enhanced Responsive Images plugin active, it was able to use a much smaller image size, which is much fewer bites, even as a jpeg compared to the AVIF. And that improved the LCP by I think 45%. So a magnitude and a half higher.

[00:44:28] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like this work is never, ever going to come to an end. There’s always going to be little things to tweak and squeeze out here, there and everywhere. And there was a really good example just there.

I think somebody listening to this podcast, if they’ve got to this point, it’s kind of really fascinating that most of this stuff would go under the radar for most people.

I’m sure almost everything that you’ve mentioned, for the casual WordPress user, they would never know that that happened. Not many people are going to read the change log or delve into the weeds of what the Performance Team are doing. And yet there it all is, laid out in front of us over the last 40 minutes or so. Yeah, absolutely loads and loads of work. and never ending. You’ll be here this time next with new things to say.

[00:45:06] Weston Ruter: Hopefully. I don’t want to work myself out of a job.

[00:45:07] Nathan Wrigley: That’s absolutely true. Where do you go to find information about this? You know, who are the scholars, or the YouTubers, or the blog post authors? Who are the people that are pushing the boundaries here?

[00:45:20] Weston Ruter: Well, I have recently been loving the WordPress newsletters that go out, like the Repository and Remkus de Vries, his WP, I forget the name.

[00:45:32] Nathan Wrigley: It’s okay.

[00:45:33] Weston Ruter: It’s something in, WP in the name. I think, Within WP, but don’t quote me on that.

[00:45:36] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it is, Yeah Remkus, Within WP, you’re right.

[00:45:39] Weston Ruter: Yes. So I subscribe to his performance blog. So Jono Alderson, Jono or Jono?

[00:45:46] Nathan Wrigley: I think Jono. Yeah, we’ll go with that. And apologies if it’s not.

[00:45:49] Weston Ruter: Yes. And so all of his posts are brilliant, so yeah. And then, yeah, following just the newsletters, because I don’t have time to keep up on social media anymore, but I really am thankful for those newsletters because it really saves me a lot of time. It gets me what I need to know.

[00:46:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I will, link to the ones, the three that you’ve just mentioned.

Yeah, that’s amazing. Thank you. Honestly, it seems a bit trite, but I’ve been following what the Performance Team have done for the last four years now, from the capacity that I have to understand it, which is pretty low in all honesty. You know, most of what you’re saying, I can get a purchase on the overarching idea, but as soon as you were to draw back, if you were to show me what you were doing, the code and so on, I would immediately lose my purchase.

I’d just like to express how profoundly happy I am that people like you are taking the time to do it. I don’t know how much thanks you get for stuff like this, but for my part, thank you.

[00:46:42] Weston Ruter: Well, thank you, but no thanks are required because I enjoy doing it, so.

[00:46:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, great. Well thank you. anyway.

[00:46:46] Weston Ruter: I’ll do it anyway.

[00:46:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well Weston Ruter thank you so much for chatting to me today. It’s been a pleasure.

[00:46:51] Weston Ruter: Thank you very much.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case teaching and using WordPress with low vision.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today we have Bud Kraus. Bud was diagnosed with mascular degeneration, a condition often associated with old age, when he was 37. Affecting both eyes, this gradually eroded his central vision, making it difficult for him to see straight ahead, recognize faces, drive or read.

Despite these challenges, Bud’s peripheral vision remained intact, sparing him the need for a cane or guide dog, and allowing him to continue to navigate daily life. Through perseverance and adaptation, Bud continues to live fully, facing the hurdles of vision loss with resilience and optimism.

Bud opens up the podcast by talking about his experience living with legal blindness, how his central vision loss has shaped everything from everyday activities to his professional routines. He explains the practical ways he adapts his devices and workflow, including tweaks to operating system settings, using screen zoom functions, and relying on pattern recognition to teach coding, write tutorials, and even host his Seriously, Bud? podcast. His unique perspective sheds light on the often overlooked nuances of accessibility, reminding us that every user interacts with technology differently.

Bud also chats about the broader impact of accessibility in the WordPress space, from frustrations with hard to navigate interfaces, to the importance of not excluding users who may become your audience or customers. His reflections reveal how living with low vision pushed him beyond mere acceptance, helping him discover new opportunities, hone his teaching skills, and even find humour in daily challenges.

Bud’s story serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of designing with empathy, embracing adaptation, and viewing accessibility, not just as a technical requirement, but as a source of creativity and connection. It’s full of real world tips, personal anecdotes, and a dose of inspiration.

Whether you’re a designer, developer, educator, or simply passionate about building a more inclusive web, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Bud Kraus.

I am joined on the podcast by Bud Kraus. Hello, Bud.

[00:03:35] Bud Kraus: Hello, Nathan. Thanks for having me.

[00:03:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’re very welcome. This is not the first time we’ve spoken, but it is the first time we’ve spoken at an event because we’re both at WordCamp US in Portland, it’s 2025. We’re in a corridor, so I’ve got to say at the very outset, if it ends up being quite noisy, there’s not a lot we can do about that. But we’ve done our best. We’ve found a nice quiet little alcove, and we’re going to be chatting today to Bud about his experience online. Before we do that, Bud, do you mind just telling us a little bit about yourself? Give us your potted bio, if you like.

[00:04:01] Bud Kraus: Yeah, sure. So I create WordPress content for WordPress businesses, articles, blog posts, tutorials, videos, and I am the host of the podcast called Seriously, Bud?

[00:04:14] Nathan Wrigley: And the talk that you’re doing at WordCamp US, which I guess you haven’t yet done, because we’re on the first day of presentations and it’s fairly early on. You haven’t done it, right?

[00:04:23] Bud Kraus: No, I actually, no, I haven’t done it yet, but I’ve done this a couple times, so this is not my first time doing this talk.

[00:04:29] Nathan Wrigley: So you know how it’s going to go. It’s called using low vision as my tool to help me teach WordPress. Now, that kind of leads us into the subject at hand really. We’re going to be talking about how it is that your experience of the web may differ from other people.

Are you willing to just tell us a little bit about your experience in the offline world as well as the online world? What is it that you are dealing with on a day-to-day basis?

[00:04:50] Bud Kraus: Sure. So I have macular degeneration, which is a condition of old age, which I got when I was 37. And it’s the leading cause of legal blindness in the United States. It’s a destruction of your central vision.

I have the condition in both eyes, which means I really have it. And it makes it very hard for me to see straight ahead, recognise faces, reading. I can’t drive a car, which is okay. So anything that’s straight ahead.

Now, my peripheral vision’s perfectly intact, so that means I don’t need to have a seeing eye dog or a cane, or I don’t bump into things because the peripheral vision’s fine. But the very fine vision that we all use to see straight ahead, like to thread a needle, that’s what I’m missing.

[00:05:30] Nathan Wrigley: So are you able to describe what you are seeing in that area. And is it like the central portion of your site?

[00:05:38] Bud Kraus: It is the exact central portion of my sight. So I tend to see elliptically, which means I move my eyes around to get a better picture. Like, when I’m looking at you right now, I’m moving my eyes around so I can see better because of the destruction of the centre part of my vision.

[00:05:52] Nathan Wrigley: And does that rule out certain tasks? So for example, you mentioned reading there. Obviously I do not have what you have, and so it’s a given to me that when I’m staring as I am doing at the moment at my laptop, my eyes, the bullseye, if you like, of my eyes go straight to the letter looking at. And for me, it’s hard to imagine deploying my peripheral vision to do that, but can you, for example, do things like reading or is that out of the?

[00:06:16] Bud Kraus: You can’t, peripheral vision is not a, it’s not even close to being a perfect substitute for central vision. So the answer is no. You cannot read with peripheral vision. You cannot understand. You can see, but you can’t understand. And it just makes things difficult.

[00:06:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So how does that affect your real life? So obviously you mentioned things like being unable to drive a car or things like that. Is there anything else that might give us a frame of reference for just how profound it is?

[00:06:44] Bud Kraus: Well, I like to look at it differently. So I have a different approach to this. So when I first was diagnosed with this when I was 37, I thought, oh, this is the worst thing that could ever happen. And that makes sense, but it is not the worst thing that could ever happen.

And having lived with this for quite a long time now, I look at this not as a curse, but as a blessing. Because what it’s done is allow me to have so many different opportunities, experiences, ideas, thoughts, whatever that I would’ve not otherwise had.

So that process of going, it’s the grief process when you start from, you know, this is the most horrible thing in the world, to acceptance. I’m actually beyond acceptance. It’s like, I like this. This is okay with me. And do I wish it on other people? No, I don’t. But like I said, it’s not the end of the world. There are conditions and diseases that are far worse than this.

So I do think of, and in fact in my talk that I’m giving, at the end I talk about why this is a blessing and not a curse. I mean, like for example, you can get as inebriated as you want at parties because you’re not going to be driving the car home. So there’s lots of that, okay. Or you don’t see your friends get older because you can’t see the detail on their face. When I go in a grocery store, I don’t see all the junk food, so that’s good. Is it inconvenient? Yes. Do I have a hard time finding people at a large event like this? Yes. But I manage.

[00:08:09] Nathan Wrigley: So in the wider world, you can obviously deploy your peripheral vision. So we’re sitting in a, I don’t know, it’s maybe this room’s about 10 meters by 10 meters. There’s a lot of space. Whereas the thing that we’re talking about, WordPress, building websites and so on, it’s usually this constrained little, well, let’s say rectangle. It could be something that we’re holding our hands, a mobile phone or a computer, laptop, something like that. How does your situation, how does it get impacted by this then? Are you doing this peripheral vision, glancing left and right and trying to figure out what’s going on? Or do you have other tools, mechanisms, things that you deploy?

[00:08:39] Bud Kraus: I do, and that’s what my talk is about. So, for example, I’ve taught WordPress and I taught coding for a long time. And people say, well, how do you do that if you can’t see?

Well, one thing is I’m always very prepared. So when I go into a class, I can’t wing it. I just have to know exactly what I’m going to be doing. And in code there’s a lot of patterns and I recognise patterns.

And, yes, I do use Zoom. I use audio. I use touch. Now, touch is not really relevant here, but I’m able to, with the technology as good as it has become for me, I’m able to Zoom in and out of the screen and I’m able to read things out loud. And then I have to do a fair amount of memory. But that’s okay.

[00:09:22] Nathan Wrigley: So do you have adaptations that you make, let’s say for example, you go out today and you purchase a new computer, do you have adaptations that you make on an operating system level?

[00:09:30] Bud Kraus: Yeah, I do.

[00:09:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I’m curious to hear about these because I make no modifications when I purchase, so tell me more.

[00:09:35] Bud Kraus: Yeah, good question. So one of the things I do, and I’ll be demonstrating, is my resolution is a low resolution, meaning 1024 by 768 would be low today. In the olden days, that would be high. But it makes the screen, it makes it easier for me to see the screen. And then I make all kinds of adjustments to make icons bigger, letters bigger, so that it’s just works for me. And yeah, I don’t have a problem with it.

Now, it does cause me to do things maybe a little slower because it’s just harder for me to maybe find something. But I think I mentioned that patterns is a very important thing to me. So if I’m going to a website and they change the UI totally around, that’s going to be a pain in the neck for me, because then I have to relearn where everything is.

It’s sort of like changing the furniture if you were blind, I mean, really blind, which most people aren’t. So I’m legally blind but, you know, I’m not like lights out blind. If you change where things are, then it’s going to make things very difficult for me, whether it’s in the real world or in the virtual world. I have to relearn everything.

[00:10:35] Nathan Wrigley: A sort of curious question that’s just occurred to me. When you buy a new computer, is there a process whereby you have to combat the regular default icon size and default tech size, just for a moment in order to wrangle it into the version of the OS that you need?

[00:10:50] Bud Kraus: You’re absolutely right. So if you’re booting up for the first time, it’s a hole in the whole process, which is at least the last time I did, which is there’s no audio, there’s no nothing, and you’re seeing like little tiny print to, you know, configure the language and the location and the time and all that stuff that you do when you work with a computer for the first time. That is a real problem, yeah.

[00:11:11] Nathan Wrigley: You would imagine that there’d be some mechanism to invoke that as the first thing that happens?

[00:11:17] Bud Kraus: I think so.

[00:11:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s interesting.

Okay, so we’ve talked about the wider world. We’ve talked about a computer that you may modify. Let’s get onto the bit which we are all here for, which is WordPress. Are there any adjustments or tools, or this could extend to the browser, so it may be browser tools, what have you, but for the internet, let’s say, what are the modifications that you are making to make your life possible there?

[00:11:37] Bud Kraus: You know, I don’t think there’s anything really any different than anybody else makes. I mean, the biggest thing is I will either zoom in or out of a webpage. And it’s really funny because, if you’re using a certain screen size with a certain resolution, things can get very hard to work with. I don’t think enough companies, like I’m thinking of even LinkedIn, for example, that I was using today. Sorry to call them out, but it’s just like their chat areas were just really, I just had to do all kinds of crazy things to actually see the text. And then the text was really small.

I think because I’m a stress case, that they don’t always test down to my level. And I think it’s, I just accept it. But that’s the way it is, I guess. But I think that you don’t want to exclude people from anything really, because they may be your customer. And if I can’t buy something because it’s really hard to do, and that is something, I don’t know if I’ve ever talked to you about it, but other people, that if I am discouraged from buying something because it’s just, the UI is just too hard to work with, I’ll just find an alternative. I will. Or I’ll ask my wife.

[00:12:39] Nathan Wrigley: I guess you’re in a curious space as well in that we hear a lot in the accessibility space about things like screen readers and those kind of assistive technologies. I guess you are not deploying those because you have enough sight to not have that as a, something to lean upon.

[00:12:54] Bud Kraus: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I have not, and don’t use JAWS or any of those big fancy screen reader technologies. I just use what’s built into the macOS and I just highlight the text and I press a button and it reads. I think it’s called voiceover, or it’s text to speech, or whatever it is. And it’s in the accessibility part of the settings.

I don’t use technology beyond what I need it for. It’s just overkill. What do I, those are complicated systems to master, so I stay away from that because they don’t need it.

[00:13:22] Nathan Wrigley: So when you are building websites, is there anything unique about the way that you do that? Is there any sort of, again, a tool that you deploy? Or maybe you are relying on other human beings to sort of cast their eye over it a second time after you’ve done the work. I don’t know, just talk us through that whole thing.

[00:13:37] Bud Kraus: Well, I don’t make websites. No, I have, okay. I’ve done everything, but I don’t make websites because I don’t like to make websites. It’s not because of my vision. But yes, if I am working, in the past like I have, I would ask people to help me with, particularly with colour because I have a very, I think I have a poor colour palette. And I think that’s either, it’s because of me. So I have to ask, does this go good with this?

It’s just something that I, either I’m not good at, or I’m not interested, or my vision, or whatever it is. So I do have a problem with colour in that regard. But because of the technology and the tools that are built in, it’s not as difficult as one might think.

[00:14:15] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. Yeah, okay. We’ll get into that. But you do make a podcast, and there’s lots and lots of different spinning wheels that have to done there. You know, you’ve got to book people onto the show, you’ve got to have calendars, you’ve got to have posts and pages and things like that on the website. Is there anything uniquely interesting about, I understand the process of making a website from my perspective, there anything that would be different to my process than would be for yours?

[00:14:36] Bud Kraus: Yes, I think one thing I could think of is like a lot of times I won’t, let’s say in WordPress, you can write into the editor, you could write a page or a post right into the Gutenberg, the block editor. I choose not to do that. What I do is use a notepad, or not notepad, what is it for a Mac? I forgot.

[00:14:53] Nathan Wrigley: TextEdit.

[00:14:54] Bud Kraus: Yes, TextEdit. Thanks. I’ll use that and I’ll have the font blown up bigger than normal, and I’ll just edit in there, and then I’ll just take that and then I’ll copy that and paste that into WordPress. It’s just easier for me to do it that way. So I just like it that way. You know, everybody has their own little thing. That’s my little thing. And I think it’s because of my vision.

[00:15:14] Nathan Wrigley: And in terms of kind of getting the recording software to work and things like that, how do those UIs function for you?

[00:15:19] Bud Kraus: Yeah, pretty good. The problem I have with learning something new and complicated is that, I think it’s like everybody, quite frankly, I get confused and try to figure out where’s what. And like I was using, I use Descript, and it just took me quite a while to figure out, how do I do this? How do I do that? But like anything else, once I learn it, it’s pretty solid and it gets easier.

Now I do tend to blow things up to make it bigger. And my wife is always telling me, I can’t use your computer because stuff is too big. Now, I don’t think it’s too big, but she does. And when I look at other people’s computers, then I realise, no, it’s bigger than theirs.

[00:15:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so we’re in the era of Gutenberg. It sounds like you’ve been using WordPress for a fairly long time, presumably before Gutenberg. What’s your opinion on whether or not that was a move in the right direction? In other words, is it favorable? Is it more straightforward for you to create a post? I know that you said in the scenario for a podcast, you’re writing it elsewhere and copying and pasting it in. But with other things like, I don’t know, laying out content and writing paragraphs and things, do you think it’s a good experience? Did we go in the right direction there?

[00:16:18] Bud Kraus: That’s a very hard question for me to answer. I’ll answer it in a couple of different ways. One, as far as accessibility goes, I’m no expert in this. I am not an accessibility expert. Am I a stakeholder? We all are. But I can’t answer it in that regard.

But from a more technical standpoint, because I write technical articles for Kinsta, Hostinger, others, that I find it to be difficult. I know I was told it’s not supposed to be easy, so it certainly doesn’t match the easy. Yeah, and that has nothing to do with my vision. It’s just, I feel it’s just complicated, even though I’ve learned quite a bit of the technical side of this stuff. I’m not trying to be cute here, but I’m trying to be cute, and I just can’t answer that question that’s going to provide any value so.

[00:17:06] Nathan Wrigley: I was kind of wondering if there was a thing which, if you could click your fingers and make it appear in the Block Editor or the Gutenberg interface, which you would, and I don’t know that you’ve got got an answer to that.

[00:17:15] Bud Kraus: I, let me think. No, I don’t think so. No. And I use Elementor too. So I think from a logic standpoint, Elementor seems to be easier for me. What I just don’t like is a lot of confusion. Too much information built into a UI is a real problem for me.

Nathan, the funny thing is I feel like I have a special filter on the world that other people don’t have. This is another one of these blessings, that gives me the ability to understand what works and what doesn’t work without having to ask somebody because it’s just built in.

Now, the thing about disability or this field in general, which is huge, it’s very idiosyncratic. So my setup is good for me, but it may not work for somebody else. And it’s very hard to, as those who keep accessibility in mind, and hopefully it’s everybody. It’s a very difficult subject because how do we design our systems, our content so that the greatest number of people can access this information, or whatever, on the largest number of devices. I mean, that’s what accessibility to me is about.

[00:18:24] Nathan Wrigley: It’s curious that you said, I think you said at the beginning that your condition is one which will deteriorate over time.

[00:18:31] Bud Kraus: Well, macular degeneration, generally, can get worse over time. But fortunately, for reasons that we don’t need to get into, since 1992 it’s been very stable, which I’m really fortunate because trust me, I don’t want it to get any worse than this. I don’t need another, that much of a blessing.

[00:18:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was wondering from that, whether or not the accessibility side of WordPress is something that you lean into. Do you attend those kind of, I don’t know, WP Accessibility Day, those kind of events?

[00:18:59] Bud Kraus: No, it just doesn’t really interest me. You know, back in like 1999, 2000, I was teaching a course at Pratt Institute in New York called Accessible Web Design. And it was way ahead of its time. And the concepts I was teaching were basically concepts because the browsers and technology just wasn’t there yet. So you’d have to say, well, one day, and one day did happen in large measure.

And then I started realising, I just didn’t want to like make a career out of teaching this or testing or, you know, I started to meet people in the field and I just said, I don’t really like this. I mean, just because I’m, I have a disability doesn’t mean I have to like the field of accessible design, you know, accessibility.

[00:19:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s interesting. You are wearing a WordCamp Montclair t-shirt, which kind of tells me that not only are you attending this event, WordCamp US, but you’re also attending other ones as well. Is that a big part of your life? If it is, how accessible are things like this event? Do you come here fully expecting of yourself that you’ll have a full experience the same way that everybody else does?

[00:19:59] Bud Kraus: Well, I have a good experience, but it is not the same way everybody else does. For example, I can’t see the screens at all. And when they’re doing stuff, the slides, I’m just listening, okay. It’s sort of like, I watch TV a lot that way too. I hear things. Unless I got really close, I’m not going to be able to see what’s on the screen. If I took a picture of something that’s really important, yeah, that’ll help.

But generally speaking, that doesn’t work for me. And then it could be kind of a, yes, I’ve gone to many WordCamps, but they’re all sort of the same in terms of the issues. And I don’t even think of them as issues anymore. I just think of it as like, we’re all different. This is the way I’m different. And talking about this stuff, quite frankly is like talking about being right-handed. Would you do an interview of me being right-handed?

[00:20:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, fascinating. I guess, from my perspective, because I just don’t, I can’t prize that open my own life, it’s really intriguing to sort of try to have some sort of understanding of how it differs from my experience to your experience. And I guess for you it’s, this is how I live.

[00:20:58] Bud Kraus: Yeah. But Nathan, you know, vision is a spectrum. It’s a continuum. It isn’t just everybody looks at things the same way. No. So I don’t think, alright, I’m like sort of on one end of the spectrum, I get it, but everybody looks at things differently. And I don’t mean that figuratively, I mean that literally. So I don’t think of it anymore much as a handicap, you know, other than the fact that, yeah, that’s a pain in the neck sometimes. And sometimes you find yourself doing some foolish things.

And I think the hardest thing for me at these events is that I won’t know who I’m talking to until about five minutes after I’m talking to them, and I figured out by looking at their shape, stuff like that, that I can, oh, I’m talking to Nathan Wrigley, or your accent, or something like that.

[00:21:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You’re obviously quite keen on the sort of education side of things though because you’re writing tutorials. I’ll link in the show notes to one that you wrote for Smashing Magazine, which is no mean feat. Getting in there is really rather impressive. So well done for that.

But you’re also obviously turning up two events like this. And it sounds from what you said as if this is content that you’ve done before. So very keen on that, even though it may be talking about, you were describing there, it’s like talking about whether you’re right-handed. You’ve put together this presentation in which you’re going to share these different bits and pieces about how you make amendments and adjustments to WordPress and the operating system and so on. So do you enjoy the education side of it?

[00:22:16] Bud Kraus: Oh, absolutely. I’m a teacher at heart. I mean, you know, that’s what I’ve been doing for 25 years. And even in the writings that I do, they’re basically, it’s a different way of teaching. Now the talk that I’m giving though here, the funny thing is, as I’ve said, I’m sort of like cool to the idea to be honest about it. There are other talks I’d rather give than this one, but this is the talk that everybody seems to be interested in. And I get that.

And when you come up with a topic called using low vision is a tool to help me teach WordPress, that’s a winner because you got two things in there that everybody loves. One, we love disability, and two, we love teaching WordPress. So two weird things got put into one title.

[00:22:57] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a hit.

[00:22:58] Bud Kraus: It got to be a hit, right.

[00:22:59] Nathan Wrigley: What would be the presentation that you would do?

[00:23:01] Bud Kraus: Ah. The one that I’m threatening to do instead of this one, because I keep saying, I don’t wanna do this one, let me do another one. There’s two.

One is, burnt out on web design, what your future career could be, which is my story.

And the other one is, show me the money, how to get sponsors to financially help with your podcast, event, whatever. I like that topic, show me the money.

[00:23:24] Nathan Wrigley: Paraphrasing, just a minute, what are the nuggets? Because I’m curious about that one.

[00:23:27] Bud Kraus: Oh, come on. You could teach me, okay?

[00:23:30] Nathan Wrigley: What are the nuggets in there though?

[00:23:32] Bud Kraus: Well, in my case with my podcast, I’ve been sort of lucky in that they came to me and said, we’d like to sponsor you. Which is a shock because when I started the podcast a year and a half ago, or actually the idea was, it’s now two years old, I said, I didn’t care if anybody ever listened, I didn’t care if anybody ever sponsored. And then of course, over time, I did care.

But I never thought of my show ever being sponsored. I said, I’ll just do it. And then I started realising, hey, this takes a lot of time, should get paid for this. And, you know, I feel just, if I have a second or two say how fortunate I am to be a part of all of this because at my advanced age, to be in this community with such smart, brilliant, whatever, people that are friendly. When I talk to people my age who are generally retired or retiring and, their world gets smaller and mine gets bigger.

[00:24:24] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that’s interesting.

[00:24:25] Bud Kraus: So I’m really, really lucky about that.

[00:24:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I don’t know what your age is, but I am of a certain age, and I’m kind of feeling at the moment that there’s this whole thing which everybody wants to talk about, which is AI. And I’m kind of feeling as if that train has already, you know, that ship has sailed for me. Can’t invest all of the time and what have you to learn all of the different bits and pieces. It’s like there’s another bus coming. I don’t know what you think about that.

[00:24:47] Bud Kraus: Well, I’ll tell you what it is, for me, it’s been a career extender, because I am now writing at a level for Kinsta, technical articles that I could not otherwise write. And because of my use of, and if you will, mastery of AI, I’ve been able to code things that I could not do before. So I’ve always had sort of, for the longest time, because I taught great foundation of HTML, CSS, some JavaScript, whatever. So I know this stuff, okay.

But to elevate that knowledge, to create stuff now that is much more complicated, sort of like junior development oriented stuff or maybe a little bit beyond that. That is amazing. And it’s because of AI.

[00:25:28] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating.

[00:25:30] Bud Kraus: It’s extending what I can do.

[00:25:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you feel like you’ve got a new lease of life there.

[00:25:34] Bud Kraus: Yeah, a bit. So I don’t have to keep writing the same things over and over about how to create a post. You know, I’ve done that. I want to be challenged to learn new things, and AI is helping me do that. And we’re teaching AI, and AI is teaching us. So it’s really cool.

[00:25:49] Nathan Wrigley: Your presentation, is it today or tomorrow?

[00:25:51] Bud Kraus: Well, it’s tomorrow.

[00:25:53] Nathan Wrigley: I was going to say, you’re looking very calm for somebody that has a presentation later today.

[00:25:56] Bud Kraus: Well, you know, I’ve been around the block. I’m not going to be nervous. Now what I do have to do is I’ve got to do some more memorisation. And that’s what I talked about always being prepared. I just can’t go in there and read the slides. It’s not going to happen. So I have to really know what the slides are, what the order is, and what the words are on the screen. I don’t have to read those words, but I have to know the ideas behind all this.

[00:26:16] Nathan Wrigley: So in some sense, you’ve memorised it more or less. Oh, that’s interesting. So you’ve really applied thought to every, more or less, every sentence that comes out of your mouth.

[00:26:24] Bud Kraus: Basically.

[00:26:25] Nathan Wrigley: But you don’t get nervous.

[00:26:26] Bud Kraus: We’re with friends.

[00:26:28] Nathan Wrigley: I would get so nervous.

[00:26:29] Bud Kraus: At least I like to think so.

[00:26:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No, I agree. Every time I’ve been to a presentation, even when the person delivering it has been quite nervous, there’s always been a very positive sentiment in the room.

[00:26:39] Bud Kraus: I’ll tell you why I don’t get nervous, I don’t see their faces.

[00:26:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh.

[00:26:42] Bud Kraus: So if you don’t see their faces. There’s so many advantages of vision impairment. I know it sounds crazy, but if you don’t see their faces, then you don’t see their reactions. Now, of course, that’s a negative too. But then you don’t get nervous.

[00:26:55] Nathan Wrigley: Absolutely fascinating. Well, I wish you the best of luck with it. It will be out on wordpress.tv at some point. Typically now they come out really soon. These flagship events, they turn them around really quickly.

[00:27:06] Bud Kraus: Well, I don’t know when this is coming out, but this is going to be live streamed around the world.

[00:27:09] Nathan Wrigley: Is it?

[00:27:10] Bud Kraus: Yeah. So one person can watch.

[00:27:11] Nathan Wrigley: The point being, dear listener, that if you’ve enjoyed this episode and you want to follow on the talk, the presentation that Bud has given at WordCamp US, by the way, maybe the quickest way to do that is to just Google, either WordCamp US 2025. Or Google, using low vision as my tool to help me teach WordPress. That’s the other short circuit if you like. You’ll be able to see exactly what it is that Bud delivered.

I have no further questions, so unless you’ve got something to add, I will say thank you very much for chatting to me.

[00:27:40] Bud Kraus: Well, thank you Nathan. And you know I’m a big fan of what you do and thanks for having me on.

[00:27:43] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, making the web accessible, and the mission behind WP Accessibility Day.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today, we have June Liu and David Denedo.

Both June and David are key members of the WP Accessibility Day organizing team, a global, volunteer driven, event focused on improving accessibility in the WordPress ecosystem.

June serves as the marketing team co-lead, and works with sponsors, bringing her background in project management to keep the events efforts on track.

David, a web designer and content creator based in London, contributes to the marketing and post-event teams, with his interest in web accessibility stemming from his personal experience as a visually impaired user.

WP Accessibility Day has grown significantly in the past few years, uniting a large international group of volunteers, and organizers, to drive awareness and practical change in web accessibility.

The event is powered by a host of teams, marketing, sponsors, tech and vendor, post-event, translation, speakers, and more, ensuring that everything from live captioning to sign language interpretation is in place.

We begin by learning about June and David’s unique paths to accessibility advocacy. One through direct lived experience, and the other through supporting a loved one with cognitive challenges. Their stories highlight why accessibility can’t be an afterthought, and how events like WP Accessibility Day are raising awareness in this important area.

We discuss what attendees can expect at this year’s event happening from the 15th of October, 2025. It’s free, fully virtual, and runs for 24 hours, making space for a diverse range of speakers and topics.

Whether you’re interested in the moral, legal or technical cases for accessibility, there’s something for you here, including sessions on accessible design, risk management for agencies, legal compliance, and demonstrations of assistive technologies.

June and David share how the event format, a combination of prerecorded talks and live chat, mixes polished content with real time engagement. Plus how translation and community involvement are key to its growing impact.

If you want to learn more about how you can make your WordPress sites, and the web in general, more inclusive, or if you’re motivated by global collaboration or personal stories, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you June Liu and David Denedo.

I am joined on the podcast by two fabulous guests. I’ve got June Liu and David Denedo. Hello both. How are you both doing?

[00:03:58] June Jiu: Hi there.

[00:03:59] David Denedo: Hello. I’m doing all right.

[00:04:00] Nathan Wrigley: Well, it’s very nice to have you both with us. The intention of today’s podcast is to draw attention to something which well, I’m sure many of you will know about. If you don’t know about it, I certainly hope that by the end of this, not only do you know about it, but you are highly engaged, and hopefully going to attend and all of those kind of things, maybe even contribute some of your time, you never know.

It’s called WP Accessibility Day, and we’re going to get into that in a moment. Before we do that, I just want to get the little bio, the introduction from both of you, one at a time, just telling us who you are, what your interest is in WordPress and accessibility, I guess.

So we’ll keep it nice and short and sweet. So I’ll go to June first. Just let us know who you are, June.

[00:04:39] June Jiu: Thank you, Nathan. I’m June, I serve on the organising team for WP Accessibility Day as the marketing team co-lead, and I also work on the sponsors team.

My background is mostly project management, so my forte right now is helping the team coordinate tasks, and keeping the initiatives on track. Yeah, I coordinate between the sponsors and the marketing team to get the sponsor page prepared. So that’s basically my work with WPAD.

[00:05:08] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. That’s great. And David, let’s go to you next. Same question really.

[00:05:11] David Denedo: Hi, I’m David. I’m visually impaired, so that’s why I love accessibility. I work in London as a web designer and a content creator, and I’m part of the WP Accessibility Day organising team, as part of the post-event people. But I’m also in the marketing team, just jumping around, and at least trying to put as much as I can into web accessibility.

Yeah, I got into web accessibility mainly because of some talks I had two years ago from the WP Accessibility Day, and that just encouraged me. And then here we are two years later.

[00:05:53] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. So, WP Accessibility Day, one thing that just jumped out at me straight away from what you were both talking about there, you both talked about, I’m on the, and then you mentioned a team. That implies that there’s quite a lot of you in the background.

So just to give credit where credit’s due, I think it’s always important to make sure that we credit not just the two of you, because there’s probably a lot of people behind this as well. I don’t want to go down the route of missing anybody out. So I wonder if it’s possible for us to just mention the kind of teams and things like that. And if there are any people in particular that you’ve been working with that you do wish to name, caveat emptor, dear listener, I apologise on behalf of everybody on this panel. If we miss anybody’s name out, sorry about that. But let’s go for the, how many teams there are and how big an enterprise is this these days?

[00:06:39] June Jiu: I don’t think I’ve ever counted how many teams there are, but I’ll list some of them. And David, add yours if I miss any, please.

There is a volunteer team that’s, right now, pivotal. That’s their work right now in preparing the event. The event is on October 15th, so we’re just about a month away. So the volunteer team is very active right now in onboarding the volunteers.

Then we have the tech and vendors. And those are also very active. They work closely with the volunteer team to prepare the day of. So they’re the ones that prepare the Zoom platform for us. So making sure that it all runs well.

Then we have website, APAC, post event, translation, sponsors, marketing. What else? I feel like there’s a few others that I’m missing. But there is a huge team behind Amber, Bet and Joe, working and making sure that we can make the event as smooth as possible, and take some of the load off of them.

[00:07:36] Nathan Wrigley: The Amber, the Bet and the Joe that you just mentioned, we have got Amber Hinds, Bet Hannon and Joe Dolson. So there’s three names. Do you have any recollection whether they were the people that kind of kickstarted the event, whenever that was? Because if that was the case, it sounds like it’s gone gangbusters since then with lots of people joining on, and you two being some examples.

[00:07:56] June Jiu: We do have a pretty big team this year. And yes, you’re right, the history is that Joe Dolson did start WP Accessibility Day. I don’t recall all of the specifics, but I think the second year, Bet, I think it might’ve started with Bet and Joe, and then Amber also came on soon after that.

But we’re in our fifth year. It’s very exciting. I joined last year as an organiser and it was a point in my time where I was returning to work. So finding WPAD was kind of a sweet spot for me to test out my skill sets again, get used to being out in the public, so I have a soft spot for them.

[00:08:35] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Okay, so there’s a few that we’ve rattled off. David, I don’t know if you can fill in any gaps that might have been left there. If so, go now.

[00:08:42] David Denedo: Yeah, I think those are the main ones that were involved. And I would say Amber Hinds, when she came on board, she brought in a lot of organisation because, you know, with Joe, Joe understands the technical bits of things, but he’s not really so organised. So when she came in, that’s why the team grew exponentially from 2022, I believe when she joined. And then the year after, things just kept spiraling. And then now we have a massive team with lots of volunteers, everybody’s happy to help.

The other thing that is quite nice is that there was a nice spread of people who are volunteering. So it’s not just maybe from one region or one country. We are a very nice spread of people, so that’s really nice. So from different parts, from Asia, from Africa, from the Americas and all of that, they’re all wide base.

[00:09:33] Nathan Wrigley: That’s amazing. Everybody from all over the place. That’s really lovely.

David, in your introduction, in your bio, you described that you are kind of eating your own dog food a little bit here in that, I can’t remember the exact phrasing that you had around your eyes. How did you describe the condition that you have, if that’s the right word?

[00:09:50] David Denedo: Okay, yeah. So I am visually impaired, so I have very high myopia and high astigmatism. I also struggle to see myself, so that’s one reason why I got really interested when I saw how people are able to make the web more accessible. Because I grew up in a background where we had to adapt to so many stressful things, like there wasn’t really much help for people with accessibility needs.

So I didn’t really know there were ways to help people out. Until I came into the whole system and I realised that, oh wow, so you can actually do this to help somebody else. Because I was always struggling, most times I couldn’t see the screen. So I’m always like relying on other people to tell me what’s in front of me, what’s on the screen, and all of that.

But then when you start to see that, oh yeah, we can use a screen reader, you can use screen magnifier, you can do this, you can do that, you can just improve a little bit on your website, or even on the reality, makes things more accessible. I was like, wow, I’ve been living under the rock basically.

[00:10:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s absolutely fascinating. I’m just wondering, June, if you have a similar story to tell in that, is there anything that you would like to share in that regard?

[00:11:01] June Jiu: I do. My mother had a stroke, and from that she had vascular dementia. And being her caregiver for that many years, and seeing the decline in her loss of independence, because she wasn’t able to navigate the medical system by herself anymore. It was kind of, I learned everything in hindsight. I wish I had the knowledge that I have today to have helped her like 8, 10 years ago. But that drew me in.

I was telling you how I came back into the workforce, and one of the things that somebody said to me was, hey, there’s this free event. It’s online, you don’t have to leave your house, just try it out. And it was WPAD. And when I was listening to the talks, I was like, yeah, wait a second, you mean that websites can be laid out differently so that it would be easier for somebody to navigate it, even with a mental decline?

And it’s those simple, to us, it initially could be simple, but in the back end it might not be so simple. But just having her read through an online PDF, you know, it was difficult for her to hit the right area, because the PDF lines were so tiny. And her eye, hand coordination was reduced, so she’s not able to hit those lines to fill in the PDF.

So for me it was the acknowledgement of, oh my gosh, it doesn’t have to be this way going forward. So it’s me trying to learn as much as I can to direct my future clients into a direction that gives better accessibility to all, and not just their one demographic.

[00:12:41] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so curious that you’ve both got two stories where the end of it, the target, if you like, is the same, but how you’ve arrived at the things are entirely different.

David, a very personal story about your own life. And June, well, another personal story, but viewed through the prism of somebody else. Almost like standing over somebody’s shoulder and being able to ascertain, well, this person’s not getting what they could out of the internet.

And it strikes me that if you rewound the clock, I don’t know, let’s say 30 years ago before the internet was in any way, shape, or form common, but you could describe what would be available in 30 years time. And you could say, well, so many people, they’d have this little device in their hand, and there’d be these machines where there’d be screens on desktops and things like that.

At that moment, you would be thinking to yourself, this is literally the perfect technology to help people who, let’s say for example, are struggling to see. Are unable to get out of the house. There may be an aspect of their body which doesn’t function in the way that your body or my body might function.

You would describe that and you’d think, oh, this is like manna from heaven. This is the perfect thing. But it never turned out that way. The internet went in a way entirely leaving those people behind, I think, which was such a lost opportunity.

So we’re kind of 25 years or whatever it is into the internet, and we’re now going back and filling in all of the gaps that probably, with the benefit of hindsight, should never have been left.

I mean, I don’t know that there’s any question in there, but it’s curious that that one technology which could have made the lives of so many people so much more straightforward, really hasn’t serviced those people particularly well until events like this come along and educate the rest of us in how to do it.

[00:14:23] June Jiu: I think, Nathan, you hit two big points. Everyone’s journey with accessibility is very personal, and unless you experienced it firsthand, or even secondhand in my case, you don’t really see that impact.

And the second part is that the second nail that you hit is that a lot of times it becomes an afterthought. Accessibility becomes the afterthought. I think that with an event like WPAD, we want it to become the foundational, so we’re hoping to make that change.

[00:14:53] Nathan Wrigley: For example, I’m imagining, again harking back to how the internet could have been, we’ve now got a technology where a small rectangle held in your hand, with a few clicks of a few buttons can enable you to more or less have anything delivered to your front door, in a very short space of time. Which is like, how incredible is that, that that is even possible?

And so this is the perfect answer to people, let’s say for example, who struggle to get out of the front door, and navigate the shops and what have you.

And yet we’re faced with a situation where that sublimely cool technology is impenetrable, and unavailable, to many people because it never got baked in as a requirement, and we can come to that later. David, I’m sorry, I think I interrupted.

[00:15:36] David Denedo: Oh no. Yeah, what you said is quite right. There is an imbalance in the way things are getting better, but it’s getting better for a certain set of people, but leaving some other people behind. So that is the problem.

With the web, it was improving at a very fast rate in terms of how to build the web, but somewhere along the line, people forgot that the whole essence of worldwide web, the man who created the W3C consortium, who basically created the web, the father of the web, his whole idea was that the web should be accessible to all. That was his vision, his goal from the very start.

But as people are trying to push the boundaries, sometimes they forget, well, it is quite normal that sometimes unless you are experiencing a certain problem, you will not find a solution to it. So now that we are bringing the awareness to people, then they’re now finding out, okay, we forgot this certain set of people, let’s now incorporate them into our thinking, into our design, into everything.

So that is one nice thing about having a conference like WPAD, to help spread awareness to people. Because if you’ve never experienced a certain problem, for example, you’ve never been blind or you’ve never had something with your mobility. You may not really appreciate the struggles of those people. But when they’re able to express it out and explain to you in these conferences, then you can now get that third party understanding, and at least you can incorporate accessibility into your own lifestyle.

[00:17:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I have a question around that, because I am in the position where my eyes, despite the fact I wear glasses, once the glasses are on my nose, my eyes, functionally, I think you would describe them as normal, and I have good ish hearing, and my body functions. And so, David, you’ve basically just described me.

It can be, it has been hard to imagine, what is the lived experience of people who are not in the same boat as I am?

And I did wonder if a part of WPAD, I did wonder if a part of that was that educational piece? Whether it was explaining to people, web developers, people who may not be accustomed to what the conference is about, and what the summit will, you know, the educational pieces. I wondered if there was a piece where you explained, okay, this is the setup that somebody using a screen reader, this is what it feels like to them when they’re on the internet. This is what it would feel like, for example, I don’t know, if you are using a puff and sip system or something like that.

So I don’t know if you are providing content like that, but I’d be curious to know whether you explain what the lived experience would be for people who may benefit as a result of the tech talks in the conference.

[00:18:34] David Denedo: Yeah, so from what we have planned, there are a few of the conference talks that will reflect about accessibility. I think one of them is by Dennis, he’s going to show how a screen reader user will access a website. And then there are also talks about post-production of videos. So some people will incorporate the talks in, or at least talk about the experiences, but it may not be like a full on description.

But yeah, I’ve seen a few of the talks that will be happening and they will be incorporating some of the disabilities that we know, like colorblindness, and then like audio and other things. So that will help people to get an awareness of what disabilities are out there, and how to incorporate that into building a more accessible system.

[00:19:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s really interesting. I suppose the old adage is, you know, a picture says the same as a thousand words or something like that. And being able to perceive what’s going on. I’ve always found that incredibly motivating, because immediately I can see how the internet is a more difficult place than a thousand words could describe and what have you.

So, okay, so that’s interesting. And then moving on to the conference itself, I’m presuming that this is aimed squarely at people already using WordPress as their content management system, their website builder. But it is curious because, I don’t know exactly where you land on this, maybe what I’m about to say doesn’t fit at all, but I’m presuming the conference is designed to enable everybody to get some way along the road of producing an accessible website.

But presumably also the audience is a little bit of, trying to do what I’ve just described, make the case, the moral case, the legal case for needing to do it as well. So it’s the tech side of how to do it, as well as the sort of the moral and the legal obligations that might sort of follow that in train.

[00:20:32] June Jiu: Yeah, there is one session that I think you might find interesting along that line, is that it’s talking about accessibility as a risk management for agencies and for business owners. So I think that in particular, I have found it most interesting. With a background in project management, I’ve often had conversations where somebody will say to me, but why do I need to have it assessable? And then you’d have to take that pause and go, okay. But I think that to have the angle of risk management is certainly something that business owners will be able to relate to a little bit better.

We also have another one that is talking about what features you should be on a lookout for so that you can kind of mitigate the legal portion of it. I’m not saying that you can avoid it completely, but at least you’re more aware of it.

So there’s that one and, of course, our keynote speaker is Vitaly Friedman, from Smashing Magazine. He’s going to come at it from the UI, UX portion of it. So it’s not just all on the development, but it’s also on different aspects of website building and different viewpoints on business and ownership of a website.

[00:21:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting because there are many threads there aren’t there. If you were just to take the technical side, you could probably do a conference that lasted many, many weeks about the technicalities of how to do it.

But it’s curious that you’ve also leaned into the things like, well, the compulsion, the kind of maybe the advent of the ambulance chasing lawyer, dare I say it, who has realised, latched onto the fact that the European Accessibility Act over this side of the Atlantic is now a thing. There is no longer just a moral component to doing the accessibility work on your website. There is now increasingly a big legal hammer, which could be deployed.

And so that alone, I presume will draw a certain audience who, you know, if the only thing that they want to hear about is how to mitigate that problem, well, maybe that’s not the ideal motivation for it, but nevertheless, it is a bit of a carrot and stick, and it will bring some people into the arena, which is good.

[00:22:41] June Jiu: And here’s why I’d like to give a shout out to a team that I forgot, the speaker team. They’re the ones that put together the application, and they vetted through all the applications to see what would be more interesting for everybody.

The rating system is, when they go through the rating system, they kind of make it anonymous of who the presenter would be. So it makes it, you are really looking at what the topic is being talked about, rather than who might be presenting. And that gives us an edge in finding topics that might not be as well known and from areas that are less featured.

So we do have a couple of speakers that are coming from the continent of Africa, and those are always very interesting to hear. In the past, because of the location and the technical availability, there had been technical issues. But this year we’re having it so that the sessions are all prerecorded. So that will kind of help with the presentation of it, the clarity. But each of the speakers will be in the chat and they’ll be available to answer questions in the chat.

So I think that’s an interesting fold into this year’s event, to have that feature in there so that the speaker is not just presenting, but they’re in the chat room answering questions. I think that adds another layer to the event.

[00:24:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think what’s really nice about that as well is that if everything’s prerecorded, the speaker will get the chance to create and then re-edit, and then adapt and modify. And what you end up with hopefully is the best version of that talk.

With the best will in the world, some people are not as great as others at doing live things. You know, they go down rabbit holes, and they lose their train of thought or what have you. This completely gets rid of that problem. They can do it as many times as they like and give you the best version.

But also that lovely aspect of, they suddenly become available to have a conversation in the chat, whereas before, they was presenting, you know, and presumably needed to go and have a bit of a lie down afterwards. Whereas in this situation, much more relaxed, you can ask them the questions.

I really appreciate that format. I think that’s actually, that’s my preferred way of a summit, kind of like this, the Accessibility Day in this case, being put together. I think that’s very forward thinking. And I hope that you continue doing it that way because I think the presenters probably appreciate it. Your audience will appreciate it, because it will be polished, and also you get to chat with the person involved. Anything on that, David?

[00:25:11] David Denedo: Yeah. Another thing we forgot to talk about is the translation team. So as the talks are being presented, there are also some nice volunteers who are translating it into other languages to have as much diversity as possible. Because some people, English is not their first language, so we have a team trying to convert to like French. We have the one for Spanish. There are also some other ones, even like Hebrew and so many other ones. So it’s a very nice feeling to have so many translations and everybody is doing their bit.

That is one thing I love about WP Accessibility, the entire organising team is the fact that everybody’s skill level, it doesn’t matter your skill level, you can always put in something. So that is something great. Whether you are a web designer, you are just a business owner, you can sponsor the event. If you are good with multilingual, you can be part of the translation. You can apply to speak.

The whole talks is not all technical, like you already mentioned. The talks are varied, so we talk about risk management, we talk about designers can give their own bits. People who are in business can give the business case for accessibility. So it’s all, it’s a lovely spread and I really love it.

[00:26:30] Nathan Wrigley: There really is a lovely spread. I mean, firstly, one thing that I should have done right top of the show, which I didn’t, and I will mention it because I record a preamble before we actually start talking, one thing I will do is I’ll read into the record the URL. But I’ll do that now as well.

So the URL is fabulous, by the way. It’s just ideal. If you are returning customer, if you like, it’s wpaccessibility.day. Just one more time, wpaccessibility, the regular spelling, no underscores, no hyphens or anything like that, dot day.

And then as a subdomain you are going to put in the year. So in this case it’s going to be 2 0 2 5, 2025.wpaccessibility.day. And you’re going to find all the different bits and pieces over there.

And one of the things that I noticed about the getting involved side of things is, yeah, there’s the whole sponsorship thing. So you can become a sponsor if you’d like to do that. But also you can volunteer, you can become a media partner. If you feel philanthropic and you just want to donate some of your money into the project, that is also an option. And then there’s a whole tab for the attendees as well. It’s under community. There’s an attendee section as well.

So it sounds like it’s not just this little event which flicks on for a couple of days and then turns off again. I mean, certainly from your side, it sounds like there’s a whole fun community of things happening in the background.

And really that’s the glue that binds a successful project together. If it was all very uninteresting and dry and a bit boring and you were all feeling under pressure, it wouldn’t have so many legs, it wouldn’t be able to run for this many years. But I’m guessing that you’ve had nice experiences, right, in the background?

[00:28:04] June Jiu: Oh, yes. Yes. We have a lot of fun. But thank you for mentioning those links.

[00:28:08] Nathan Wrigley: No, I think that’s wonderful. So again, go and check that out.

The other thing to say though is, let’s talk about how it’s actually happening. Obviously you’ve described that it’s going to be prerecorded videos. How are you making that content available? What’s going to be the platform of choice, or how are you going to get it?

Is there a way that you can, I don’t know, for example, download all of the bits and pieces so you can watch them in your own time? Is it an event which is spanning a single day, you know, a 24 hour time?

[00:28:35] June Jiu: Yeah, we do say that it is 24 hours, but all the content and the videos, they’re going to be available for replay after we go through the post-event production. Either from each subdomain, as you mentioned, the 2025 will be available on the 2025.wpaccessibility.day.

Last year’s event is available on the 2024.wpaccessibility.day. So you can rewatch them. It’s also available through YouTube. So if you need some background noise, I often do it. I just turn on that and let it roll.

I have to say, it is a lot of information to absorb, but I do find it to be very resourceful. I know that one of David’s work this year is to put in chapters for these past event videos. So that has been very helpful to me when I find the relevant video from the past. And I said, I remember somebody saying something about that. Now with the chapters there, it’s much easier to navigate and find it. So good work, David. Thank you.

[00:29:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, indeed. Good work. But what’s this, in the show notes that were shared before we actually joined the call, it describes, it says here, and I don’t know which one of you wrote it, but it says, the event will be hosted through Zoom events. And Zoom is capitalised, so I presume it’s the platform Zoom that we’re all familiar with. I don’t know what a Zoom event is. Does that differ from a regular Zoom call? Is there some key difference?

[00:29:59] June Jiu: Yes. It’s different from like a Zoom webinar or a Zoom call. It’s a platform that has a lobby. You’re registering on our site, but then on event day you’ll be able to go into the Zoom event.

There’ll be a lobby and there’ll be a chat room, that’s where you can find all the information for the event. So, it’s not like a traditional webinar where there’s just one link in order to go and join it, to join that session, or that sector of sections. So now you can go in and when that hour pops up, that session would pop up.

[00:30:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. Right. So you go to this one central place, and everything’s kind of bound in this one, so as soon as you’re in, you’re in, basically, and you don’t have to keep clicking links in emails to find the latest session, which is going live.

[00:30:44] June Jiu: Exactly.

[00:30:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That’s really nice. Dave, anything to add to that?

[00:30:47] David Denedo: Yeah. And you also have access to like swag. Everything will be in the event, so you can get some of the sponsor swag, you can chat with the speakers, you can chat with other event members, all within the same platform. So not having to jump from one platform to another platform to chat and then come back. You can lose people that way, but now everything all packaged together.

[00:31:12] June Jiu: I wanted to give a shout out to the platform itself. It allows us to do live captioning. A lot of times with webinars, it is just automated caption. We actually do have live captioners typing into Zoom. That is another layer to WP Accessibility Day that is not a feature in other events.

[00:31:32] Nathan Wrigley: No kidding, yeah.

[00:31:33] June Jiu: Yes. And the other big one, expense for us is the American Sign Language interpreters. So they will be also on hand on event day, and there’s a team of them that will be available to us, and they do the ASL.

This year one of our speakers is from Australia and he will be bringing in Australian Sign Language, which is different from American Sign Language. So there’s another layer to the accessibility. We understand either British Sign Language or American Sign Language but, yeah, there’s Australian Sign Language too.

[00:32:08] Nathan Wrigley: You drop this as if it’s really straightforward, but when my head starts spinning on the technicalities there, the idea of injecting real time, typed transcriptions, somehow overlaying that into the video, there’s a whole technical piece there.

And then you’ve got a sign language person. That’s a whole nother layer as well. That all needs, presumably, I don’t know if that’s going to be done live or filmed. Maybe there’s an opportunity.

[00:32:33] June Jiu: It’s live.

[00:32:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. So all of that, there are lots and lots of moving parts here.

[00:32:37] June Jiu: That’s why we have the technical and vendor team, and the volunteer team. They’re pivotal on event day to have those two teams in place.

[00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask, because I know there’ll be some people that are curious about the, how to describe it, the business status, let’s put it that way. And maybe this is not something that either of you can answer, I don’t know.

What’s the structure of WP Accessibility Day? So, for example, if I was to donate, in the UK we call these things charities. I think in the US the correct term is non-profit. So if I was to donate, do I have some sort of assurance that the money isn’t going to end up in some, I don’t even want to say the words because I know that nobody’s ethics are this poorly thought through, but I’m going to say it anyway. Just want to make sure that the money doesn’t end in somebody’s back pocket.

Where did the donations end up? How is the structure of this organisation ensuring that everything is out in the open and clear and easy to understand?

[00:33:28] June Jiu: Well, this year WordPress Accessibility Day was recognised by IRS as the 501 C3 public charity. So based upon that, a hundred percent of our income that comes in goes right back into the event.

Organisers and volunteers are not paid. Every one of us who are working on this is out of the goodness of our heart, and what time availability that we have.

The one caveat I will say, some of our translators are paid because translation is an income based business. And this is a recent development. In the past we’ve had to ask them to please donate their time to do the translation. But now we have a little bit more security to be able to pay them.

People who have the ability to speak multiple languages, look into the translation because if you aren’t able to participate as an organiser or a volunteer, donating your time to translate or being paid for be translators for us is a huge difference for us to bring all these sessions available to a greater audience.

[00:34:36] Nathan Wrigley: I think everybody would understand that there’s, that is how that industry works, isn’t it? When you go to a WordCamp, for example, and you see the people doing the live captioning, or you see the people standing on the stage and they’re doing the sign language, I think it’s understood that that is what they do for a living.

[00:34:51] June Jiu: And I would be remiss not to give credit to our sponsors too. We have many sponsors who are repeat sponsors year after year, and they support us with their sponsorship. We are very appreciative of that.

This year we have some new ones and a lot of repeating ones from every range. Our higher level are of course now closed, but we still have the bronze level, which is at a $500, or a micro sponsor which is at $150. And the difference between that is the Bronze has a webpage, a dedicated webpage for their company, and the micro sponsor has a logo on our sponsor page.

[00:35:28] Nathan Wrigley: So as of recording, and maybe that will keep going right up to the deadline, I don’t know, so if what you’ve heard has made you feel that you’d like to be involved on a sponsorship level, bronze is available, that one is $500, and there’s a micro one. And obviously you can go onto the 2025 Accessibility Day website and discover for yourself what’s available in there.

So we found out what’s happening. We found out why it’s being done. We found out some of the people that are being involved. I suppose what we ought to do at this point is drive people toward the schedule.

Well, you’ve announced it already, but let’s just make sure we’re doing it again. The date for this event is when?

[00:36:03] David Denedo: So it’ll be happening on October 15th to the 16th, and it’ll be 24 hour long event. So it’s going to go right up for 24 hours. We have the speakers all in the schedule, so you can go ahead and check it out. The link will be in the shownotes.

[00:36:19] Nathan Wrigley: It will. Yeah, that’s absolutely right. So the 15th of October, it’s a 24 hour event. So I don’t know if you start in the sort of Pacific neck of the woods, that seems to be the traditional way that things are done. So Australia, they’re the sort of first people to receive the content, and then it just goes around the globe. And maybe the people in, on the west coast of the US and Hawaii and what have you, they get the content more towards the end of the day. I assume that’s how it’s working.

But if you go to the URL that we mentioned earlier and just add forward slash schedule to it, you will be able to see through opening remarks from Joe Dolson right at the beginning of the day, right through the keynotes and everything, to the closing remarks, or at least the last presentation, which is happening some 23 or so hours later.

I think that’s all the questions that I had. Is there anything that you feel it would’ve been important to say that we didn’t say? If that’s the case, please feel free to use this platform now.

[00:37:09] June Jiu: The event is free, but we do ask that you register, so that we do have a good count of how many people are coming. So please sign up at 2025.wpaccessibility.day and you’ll find the registration link there.

[00:37:26] Nathan Wrigley: Is that a mere request or is that a requirement? In order to gain access, do you need to have, yeah, okay. So I’m getting a nod of the head there from June. So go and register in order to access the content as well. David, anything we missed?

[00:37:38] David Denedo: Yeah, the only thing is that I’m excited for Vitaly Friedman, because he has a very wide following, so he will bring more people into our event, hopefully. And he is going to be talking about accessible designs, which is something quite powerful. Because in this day and age, people always associate accessibility with very boring designs. But he’s coming to show you that you can have very beautiful designs in 2025 and still be accessible. So that’s a very important topic.

[00:38:09] Nathan Wrigley: Well, the WP Accessibility Day website is an example of that. It’s actually a really tasteful, beautiful design. I’m going to guess that it’s, you know, the accessibility credentials of it are fairly strong. Let’s just, make that assumption, but it’s beautifully designed.

Yeah, we didn’t really touch on the names of the speakers or what have you. But yeah, I’ll just go through a few just as I scroll through, just to give you some ideas.

So accessible design patterns is Vitaly. Being a colorblind designer, typography, readability, digital accessibility, building accessibility that works in the global south, hyper accessible web design for the blind, audio accessibility, accessibility lawsuits, gosh, we’re only like six or seven in, and we’ve run the full gamut already. So here we go. Why accessibility matters, video and media your post-production, guide making WordPress events accessible, gosh, that’s fascinating. Auditing WordPress plugin accessibility, demystifying screen readers, technical checklists. That means testing WordPress themes and plugins for accessibility. The future is automated, will it be accessible? Making Gutenberg blocks accessible. I’m going to stop there, but you get the idea. There’s absolutely loads of breadth and depth.

It’s very much the case that if you were to show up, I would guarantee more or less that there’s going to be something which will pique your interest and keep you engaged. The schedule, like I said, is at forward slash schedule.

Okay, if that’s the case, I will just say thank you so much for being one of many cogs in this very important wheel. Thank you for doing what is incredibly important work, making the web accessible to far more people. Thank you. That’s quite amazing.

So June and David, thanks for joining us today. Really appreciate it.

[00:39:46] June Jiu: Thanks for having us.

[00:39:48] David Denedo: Thanks for having us.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case Decentralisation, WordPress and Open Publishing.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today we have Dave Winer. Dave’s journey into the heart of Silicon Valley began in the 1980s when he left Wisconsin and moved to California with two products and a dream to achieve fame and fortune in the world of technology. Driven by a deep belief that real communication involves people truly connecting, he set out to make his mark.

Early on, he found himself in a memorable meeting with Steve Jobs. Both were in their early twenties, bursting with ambition and self-assurance. Their encounter was fiery and competitive, yet it marked the start of Dave’s lifelong mission to wire the world together, not just with technology, but by bringing people closer through it.

If you’ve ever subscribed to a blog, listened to a podcast, or shared your thoughts online, chances are you’ve benefited from Dave’s pioneering work. He’s the developer behind influential technologies like RSS, and a longtime advocate for open, user owned, publishing platforms.

He describes himself as someone who wrote the first versions of lots of software, wants to work with everyone, still has big ideas, he likes things to be open from top to bottom and doesn’t care for greedy people.

Today we’re talking about the vision, history, and future of the open web. Dave reminisces about the origins of today’s internet, the early days when idealism and collaboration were at the web’s core. He shares stories from his career, the rise and fall of early software startups, and how the initial spirit of community slowly gave way to the walled gardens of big tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

But the conversation isn’t just about nostalgia. It’s a call to action for reclaiming the internet’s potential. Dave explains what went wrong with the evolution of the social web, why he thinks blogging tech like RSS just need more love, and how the influx of money and centralisation stifled the creativity and interoperability the web was built for.

You’ll also get to hear about Dave’s latest efforts to reignite those original web ideals. He reveals the thinking behind Wordland, a minimalist and powerful writing tool for WordPress users that puts freedom, portability, and open protocols front and centre.

Dave also lays out his Textcasting manifesto, challenging platforms to truly support writers with features like unlimited length, markdown support, and true ownership of content, without the need for permission or platform lock-in.

Dave truly is a pioneer of the internet, and is certainly not finished yet. He’s putting WordPress at the centre of many of his future endeavors.

If you’re passionate about owning your content, deeply curious about web history, or looking for inspiration on how technology can empower rather than control, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes.

And so without further delay, I bring you Dave Winer.

I am joined on the podcast today by Dave Winer. Hello Dave.

[00:04:26] Dave Winer: Hey, how you doing?

[00:04:27] Nathan Wrigley: I confess, I’m going to get this out the way and I’m going to put it on the record because Dave Winer has been in my brain for about 20 years or more. And I’m going to allow Dave the opportunity to do a bio. He may lean into that and tell us many, many things, or he may not. But I would just like to offer my profound congratulations for many of the things that I literally have as the foundational bits of my working life.

Many of those bits are because of you, and I would like to express my enormous thanks for the way that you’ve done that, the stuff that you’ve built, the method in which you deployed that, and the way that you didn’t tie it up to a subscription model.

And, with that out of the way, I would just like to offer you the opportunity to introduce yourself. So do you mind just little potted bio, two or three minutes tops, something like that.

[00:05:18] Dave Winer: Wow. I didn’t realize I was gonna be doing this. Well, I’m a software developer and a blogger. I started software development when I was a grad student in the 1970s, at the University of Wisconsin. And I immediately knew that this is what I was going to do in my whole career. Up to that point, I didn’t know.

It just fit. Everything about developing software, and communication with software. I used to call it communication with a big C. So you talk about communication with a little C is like wiring everything together. But the big C, its people getting connected. And that was going back to the, I guess the early eighties.

I moved from Wisconsin to California to Silicon Valley, and I had two products. My goal was to go to California and achieve fame and fortune, and it didn’t happen all at once at least. One of my first meetings was with Steve Jobs, and we were both exactly the same age, 23 or something like that, and very arrogant and full of ourselves, and we ended up insulting each other, and I have a lot of regrets about that because I had the two products and he wanted the wrong one. And I told him, man, that’s the wrong one. You should want the other one.

And anyway, so I ended up hooking up with a company that eventually became the biggest software company in the valley and then exploded. And then I started my own company. And that was a pretty long haul. But we got there. We made software for the Apple 2, the IBM PC, the Macintosh.

We had a really big hit in 1986, product called MORE. It was a really good product, but it also hit the market at exactly the right time. And then I sold the company and then I started developing software on my own, because that’s really what I always wanted to do. I was a CEO because I had to be, because nobody else understood the idea, that we were doing there.

And that’s actually been the story of my life, is like when I start something, I tell everybody how great it’s gonna be, and then they look at me like, what are you talking about? I have no idea. Or, that’s not useful. Or AI, this is what they say today. Oh, AI is gonna do that for us. And I go, no, I actually, I don’t think it is.

And so one thing led to another. I started making software on the web. I saw the web as complete liberation. Because the tech industry had gotten so congested with the power of the big companies. This happens periodically by the way. You end up, they get, they lock themselves in, and then they just protect their lock in. And then nothing happens for a while, and then an explosion happens, usually. A new company comes along with a big idea, and the big companies don’t understand it, and all of a sudden. And that was the web.

And there were things before that. The PC was like that to some extent. The Mac was. Rock and roll was like that for sure. The Beatles fit into that pattern of things that fundamentally changed everything. And the web was one of those things too.

And it blew the doors off the tech industry. Whenever a big tech company tried to dominate the web, it just didn’t work. It didn’t work. Until eventually it did work, and now we’re pretty thoroughly dominated. We got dominated by Facebook, by Google. Twitter, very influential company, and a few others, and now it’s Bluesky. They’re out there telling them that everybody, that they’re decentralized and whatever. They say they’re on the web, they’re not on the web.

The web means something. It means that I can add a feature that hooks into your product and I don’t need your permission to do it. That’s what you have to have for the web.

You also have to have links. If you don’t give the person writing in your environment the ability to put hyperlinks in their text, you can’t say you’re the web. Because you’ve deprived the writers of the one most essential thing that they need, the ability to defer to somebody else as the expert on this topic, and build these structures. Twitter, took that out. They just said, we don’t need that. Or put character limits on it. Or they said no titles. Or you can’t edit your post, or you can’t put a podcast, you can’t put an audio on there, on a post. And they add an API and that’s really nice, but it’s still, you don’t get that freedom. There’s nothing like that there.

[00:09:40] Nathan Wrigley: I watched the internet develop in much the same way as I might watch a game of, we call it football, you may call it soccer, in that I’d be in the crowd and all of these characters are moving around on the field and doing important things and it just develops.

The game is afoot and it develops and it’s like evolution. Curiously, you were one of the people on the field kind of making these decisions. And so with the benefit of hindsight, looking back, it sounds like there’s a part of you which, not just a part of you, I feel like it might be a big part, which regrets a lot of the way that it has developed. The beginnings of the internet, there seem to be more, I don’t know, blue sky thinking, let’s put it that way.

[00:10:19] Dave Winer: We actually called it that. We actually called it that, believe it or not, a piece of blue sky. The clouds, sky is overcast and then there’s a little bit of blue sky and we’re all gonna go there. Yeah, it was like that, but what was wrong was my model was wrong. My model for humanity.

Our model, the early web people. We had this very idealistic idea of what humanity was, and how they would take advantage of the opportunity. And that includes the entrepreneurs, because they create structures where people can be very abusive to each other, and they don’t do anything really about that.

And then the people, and we still live with this, in fact, well this comes up sometimes people say, you’re being altruistic. I’ve heard that said, and I reject that. I’m not being altruistic. If anything trying to set an example for what we have to do collectively in order to have freedom.

If you don’t, if you don’t enable your competitors, you don’t deserve users, is my feeling. And in fact, you can see that playing out in the WordPress community right now, right? That is what the big controversy seems to be. I’m gonna step back from it. I’m not part of the WordPress community. It’s not that I’m not really, I’m not. And I’m an observer of all of this, and I see it all playing out in a sort of predictable way.

But as I think you said earlier, we end up in a pretty good place and I put this in one of the pieces I wrote recently about the whole why I am betting so heavy on WordPress, is that whatever you can say about Automattic and Matt and whatever, he didn’t lock you in. You have freedom of movement. All your data can move with you wherever you want. Anybody can add a feature to WordPress if they want. It probably won’t get into the main distribution, but you can build on it.

And I have proven that by building on it. I never hit any dead ends. What I also see there, this is another plus for this platform is, whoever it is that’s building this, and I know there’s some contention about that, it really believes in not breaking developers, and that is super important.

That’s one of the basic, also fundamental principles of the web, is that a website that you built in 1995, you should still be able to read it in 2025. And you can, except Google doesn’t think you should. Google as recently as 2014, that’s when HTTPS came along and became something that people wanted to use. Up until that point, HTTP was perfectly fine. And then one day Google and the EFF decided no more of this. It was very bad development. It set a bad precedent, but that’s a sidebar. That’s not the real thing.

What’s really going on here is, I think there is now an opportunity in the, what we call, I call the Twitter, like world, I won’t call it the social web, because it isn’t the web. That’s not fair, they can’t. They should support the web before they get to call themselves the web. And they’ve just inherited all the limits that Twitter put on there.

They had the opportunity to relax those limits, but they have no incentive to do it. I could sit there, like you said, as an observer. See, that’s what I’ve been too, for the last, whatever, 16 years. 2006, it’s 2025, 19 years, sorry, for the last 19 years. With all due humility. I’m a pretty freaking good developer, and I really work very energetically, and I love making products for users, and I’m stuck. There’s no place for me to go. And I can’t accept that. That’s all I want to say, is I don’t accept that, and I found a way to work around it, that’s what I’m doing. And WordPress is key to it, central to it.

[00:14:11] Nathan Wrigley: We’ll come onto that whole project in a minute, which is really fascinating. But I’m just gonna rewind the clock and go back to the very beginnings of what we might now call the internet.

An academic enterprise, really, it felt like. A bunch of academics. Maybe you’ll go back as far as CERN and have those discussions about just wanting to send academic documentation to one another, and, then the hyperlink came along, and then all of a sudden this world of possibility opened up, and it felt as if there was so much positive potential there.

I remember the beginnings of the internet, the burgeoning of it, people beginning to talk about it, people starting to use it on desktops and things like that. And there was this real sense positivity that it was, like it was, it was this blue sky thing. For the first time in humanity’s history everybody had a way to interconnect.

We don’t need to go into what happened, but at some point, through a whole series of dominoes falling, we get all these walled gardens, and now the internet seems like anything other than blue sky. It feels like there’s just these silos everywhere. You’ve got a Meta silo, and you’ve got an X silo, and you’ve got a TikTok silo, and a YouTube silo.

And I think, with hand on heart, almost everybody would be able to point to at least some downside to that. Sure, you might enjoy consuming YouTube videos, but there may be a flip side to that. You end up doing it at the wrong time of the day. I think anybody could agree that people’s passions get inflamed to the point of getting a bit out of hand on the internet.

This was never what it was supposed to be. And so going back to my question from a minute ago, where I was implying that maybe there’s some sense of regret. If you could go back and move the jigsaw pieces, or move the chess pieces differently, I expect you would. I’d expect you’d be shouting a bit louder about the need for things to be not walled in, and maybe things would be different.

[00:15:58] Dave Winer: I don’t think anybody hears that. I think I shouted it pretty loud. I repeated it over and over. I don’t have any regret about that, I think I did a tremendous amount of that, but the problem is, I can’t call it regret. I think that collectively there was a blogging community prior to WordPress. There was. There were competitive products. And then in 1999, it all clicked with RSS, and that gave us a way, we had ways, by the way, to find the updates on blogs before that.

We had a site called weblogs.com, and it would go looking around the blogosphere, had a list. There weren’t that many blogs, okay. So it would look at all of them, see if they updated, and if they updated it would put it at the top of the list. And so bloggers were just reloading that page all day long. And it worked. You still had to find the new post, but that wasn’t too hard because they were at the top of the page, right.

And then after that, with Netscape, we got RSS going. And that led to a whole other generation of that kind of stuff. We had it, it was going. But what killed it. Killed is too strong a word. What put a limit on it, what said that what you described would happen is that, do you remember the .com boom, right?

All of a sudden it wasn’t just a place for idealists to screw around and try out new ideas and everything. It was a place to come and get rich, and so it attracted all those people who wanted to get rich. That’s all they wanted. They didn’t care about what they had to do to get rich, and that attracted the professional investors, the venture capitalists. They want to get rich, it’s totally okay to do whatever they have to do to get rich. It just simply, it is their business to get rich, and it’s hard to blame them for that. And then, here’s the key point, they wouldn’t work with each other.

[00:17:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:17:50] Dave Winer: They would not work with each other. And I just wrote a piece this morning, on my blog, and it said in retrospect, it was a retrospective thing about RSS, because that’s becoming an issue again, and it said what RSS needed was love. It needed to be loved and nurtured, and fed and taken care of, and the users had to be given features that were collective across all the products. So that if you wanted to subscribe to a feed, you didn’t have to memorize a complicated process, involving pasting URLs or reading the HTML source, or all the crazy stuff that became, until Twitter, what choice was there, right? So people had to do it, but it was tremendous weakness.

And Twitter came in and just completely blew it out. Because in Twitter subscribing was a single click. And we’re gonna hit that again now. If I’m successful in what I do, we’re gonna hit it again, and we’re gonna have to answer that question differently.

[00:18:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was just gonna say, so many of the underpinnings that could have made the internet into a different place never went away, they just got ignored. Maybe that’s the wrong word, but they just got forgotten about. And so we wholeheartedly subscribed to X, formally Twitter. We wholeheartedly jumped in on Facebook, because they offered this amazing level of convenience. And of course, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see how maybe that was a catastrophic failure, but the time.

[00:19:18] Dave Winer: I have no regrets about that either, Twitter was amazing.

[00:19:21] Nathan Wrigley: It was so revolutionary, you could suddenly connect with people that you’d lost touch with many years ago.

[00:19:26] Dave Winer: There you go. You put your finger right on it. It wasn’t that Twitter was so great. It’s that look at all the people. One of the first experiences I had on Twitter that really, really showed me what the difference is, is that there was just this random guy. I would meet him. We had our own community too, by the way. And so we would go to conferences and, I watched the WordCamp conference from afar, right? And I said, oh, I know all those people. Because in our community we had people like that. Only there only about 30 years younger than I was, than we were, but I recognize it.

And, meet somebody at a conference that’s, now I know what he’s doing with his family. I know what his sports are, who his team is, what’s the weather like where they live. And how does he describe it? There’s all these inputs that you simply don’t get from seeing somebody couple of times a year. It’s nice and everything, but this was a different thing altogether.

And I still use Facebook. I don’t use Twitter very much anymore. But, I still have my account. I didn’t delete it. But I use Facebook. I will never stop using Facebook because my friends from childhood are there. Where am I gonna get new friends from childhood? That’s not happening, right. They have their advantages. But they’re a really good example of people that refuse to do anything to help anything other than their mission to make more money. I’ve had these conversations with executives at Facebook, and we’ve had a couple of, fits and starts a couple of them, twice.

They were gonna add RSS support in and out, to Facebook. Kind of like what they’re doing with Threads and ActivityPub, right? Or the Fediverse. Yeah, I’m trying to forget that because I don’t believe in it, to be honest with you, but I do believe in Mastodon. I think that’s what we’re really doing here. And I think they blow a lot of smoke at these things, and they, make them seem like, they shouldn’t make them appear to be more than they are because we need to have both of those things. There’s no reason we can’t have both, but that means you have to be a little bit altruistic to use that word. You may feel like you’re being an altruist, but then look at the times we live in.

In the United States, we are very worried about what’s coming or what’s here right now. And we’re all asking, what can we do? What can we do? One of the things you can do is let down, open up to your inner altruist, start doing things that aren’t just about putting food on the table or getting ahead in your career.

Do things that make connecting with other people a lot easier, and more free. Because those services are now owned by people that go to dinner with the government of the United States. You’ve never seen a more clear picture of what we’re up against. You think that somebody from the White House calls Mark Zuckerberg and says, get Dave Winer off of Facebook. I guarantee you I’m off Facebook in 10 seconds. That’s who we are, depending on their honor, I think that’s a really bad bet. We’re all gonna have that choice.

And at the same time, people who know how to work with WordPress are gonna have an amazing advantage, because I see WordPress as being comparable to the Mastodon server and the Bluesky server, and Bluesky doesn’t give you a server to install yet, but Mastodon does. And, I didn’t install it. I had a friend because I tried and I couldn’t get it to go. That is what it’s gonna take. And WordPress is a lot easier to install, and it’s a lot more mature, and it really works and the APIs aren’t gonna break. So we got a much better foundation to build on.

[00:23:04] Nathan Wrigley: Going back to what you said a moment ago about, it’s not either or. What we’re imagining here, I think is, you keep your Facebook, and you keep your X, and all of those things can go. Fine, carry on using those, but there’s an alternative, which many people may prefer. There’s a whole kind of ethos behind that, and a whole philosophy behind that. But underpinning it all, things like Mastodon, and potentially WordPress, and we’ll get into that, are a bunch of APIs and protocols and things like that, many of which you were very much involved in the creation of things like RSS, and thank you for that.

[00:23:38] Dave Winer: More altruism there, huh?

[00:23:39] Nathan Wrigley: This entire whole podcast thing sits right on top of it. It feels like we’re going back to those things to try and, not compete, but be alongside of these other walled gardens, if you like.

[00:23:51] Dave Winer: Oh, I think we’re competing. I’m not scared of competition. Let’s do it. There will be differences, however. There will be. There’ll be things that you can do in this world that you couldn’t do over there. But the opposite is true as well.

But the thing that we’re gonna do, if we’re successful, is we’re gonna influence those networks. And we’re going to get them to support markdown. That’s very specific. Just let me put markdown in my posts on Bluesky and get rid of the character limits and let me edit. And then we’re, we’re fine.

You have to support inbound RSS as well, not just outbound. I have to be able to stay in my space, and contribute, and write, and have anybody read it wherever they are. That’s it. It’s saying basically, let’s actually live up to the promise of the web. And that’s what the web promised. And if you’re confident in your users will find value in your network, and there’s no reason they won’t. I’m talking about Bluesky and Mastodon, then why wouldn’t you do it?

I think then we’ve outed you. If you don’t want to do it. Okay, they don’t want to do it now because they don’t see it as a way of attracting new users, or keeping the users they have. They don’t see it that way because it’s true. It’s not, and that’s what we have to do. We have to make it that. They have to be hearing it all the time. You have to support markdown, that’s what Textcasting was all about. I think markdown is the mp3 of text. We did podcasting too.

That was a fall out of all this stuff. I want to do radio. I love radio. I always have. And I always thought at some point I’m gonna do audio blogs. That’s what I was doing, getting ready to do that. And there we were, and one thing led to another and did I ever think about using something other than mp3? That would be crazy. It was a gift. They gave me the answer. Of course I’m going to use mp3. Why would I screw around with that? We’re gonna make it just as obvious that the other networks, if they’re gonna pretend to deal with text, they have to support a basic set of features, which are simply defined by the web. That’s it.

And WordPress does all that. WordPress documents are web documents, and that’s super important. That’s everything.

[00:26:15] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like in the last few months you’ve very much planted a flag in the sand and it feels like you’ve committed to following through on the promise that we’re about to get into. And the underpinnings of it, I’m gonna link in the show notes to this, so you want to head to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Dave Winer, and in there will be a whole list of things. Anything that discuss, I’ll basically link to.

But there’s a couple of pieces which Dave has penned. One of them was in 2024, November, 2024, called Textcasting. And the URL for that is textcasting.org, and we’ll go into that in a minute. But then much more recently over on scripting.com, published on 28th of August, 2025, so very recently, was a piece which kind of built a top of that called Think Differently About WordPress.

I’m gonna return to the Textcasting one ’cause this feels like the foundational technological underpinnings of what you are proposing here, this thing which would be a competitor to all of these walled gardens. It sits outside of WordPress.

[00:27:14] Dave Winer: It’s more of a, okay, for me, this is when I was planning this product. I hadn’t even begun to develop it yet. But I wanted to write down in one place, these are all the things we’re gonna do. And that’s it. That’s all it was. I keep going on and on about all the different things that I wanted that I wasn’t getting, as a writer. I am a writer and I feel like Twitter was the original one, said you can’t have all your writing tools. It’s like I’m designing a guitar. And I’m saying, you can have three strings if you want. You can play music on three strings, right?

The ultimate insult is the people who made this decision are not guitar players. They’re not musicians. They don’t have the slightest clue what the f they’re doing, and I’ve been told that even getting a new generation of products isn’t gonna solve this problem, because they are just as clueless about what writers need. And so at least I feel like upfront I ought to tell them exactly what I want from them. And that’s what textcasting.org is.

So when we give it to the people, they can say, they might say, why didn’t you tell us that’s all you want? Yeah, look at textcasting.org, and look at the creation date. I was very clear about what I wanted, but understand that I needed this for myself as the requirements document for the product I was making. I’m a blogger, so when I write a requirements document, I put it in the public, because that’s what bloggers do. It is just the knee jerk. I do write some private documents, I do, it’s true. But my impulse is to write them publicly. So that’s really all that it is. It’s just saying, this is what we’re gonna do.

[00:28:58] Nathan Wrigley: So right at the top, the goal is very simply encapsulated and it goes like this. It’s easy to get in your head and parse. Interop between social media apps based on the features writers needs, specifically the services of the social web, and there’s a link there, support these basic features.

And then you go on to describe the ethics behind the movement is. But then you list out the things that you would like as a writer. It’s surprisingly a short list. There’s only six things, titles, optional. Links, de rigueur, you’ve gotta have links. Simple styling, bold, italics, that’s probably enough. Enclosures making it possible to do other things like, I don’t know, podcasting and things like that. Unlimited length, that’s the big differentiator, isn’t it? Because more or less all the platforms that have gained success have stifled that in some way. And then the, this is important, I think maybe this is the bit that I think is most enjoyable, editable. Go back, modify it because why not? You wrote it, it’s yours. And markdown. That basically is textcasting encapsulated in just a few sentences. I’ve probably missed a lot of the nuance there, but that’s kind of how I see it.

[00:30:04] Dave Winer: No, I don’t think so. Actually. Notice what’s not there? You’ll kick yourself. Comments. I don’t give a damn about comments.

[00:30:12] Nathan Wrigley: Presumably the comments could be handled elsewhere.

[00:30:15] Dave Winer: Absolutely, and I have a new idea for how comments should work. I wrote that up. I did a podcast about that, I think it was yesterday or the day before. I’ve had this design for many years, but I think there’s a way around all the abuse, and all the spamming that goes on these networks. I think it’s time for another look, first of all. I mean, I had a look, okay.

But, second of all, it’s time to open it up so everybody can play in this game so we can try out lots of different ways of doing it. Which by the way is also part of what I’m doing. I’m making a, the thing Wordland. If you go to wordland.social. Go there and try it out.

It’s there. It works with your WordPress sites. And so you might think, okay, it is actually my business to make a new writing tool for WordPress. I made the writing tool I would like to use. The idea is that you focus all your attention on writing, so it has all the functionality that you need to write and nothing else.

Everything else that it does that’s in the WordPress, their command structure. And it was what I felt was in the way for me to be a writer using WordPress. Because what WordPress, I don’t want to call it a mistake, it’s just how it evolved, is that the writing functionality is intermixed with everything else. And it makes it a very intimidating thing to get started with.

And so if you look at the people that are the insiders in the WordPress community, that’s a very small number compared to the number of people who have tried to use WordPress. That’s a huge number because WordPress is it, right?

And the number of people who use it, but they might prefer a better tool because this isn’t really what they think about. The things that are in the WordPress command structure are things that most people never need to go to. It’s too complicated. Look at the feature set of Twitter, for example. And it does a lot more than Twitter does, but most people aren’t interested in that. That’s one.

Number two is, there are modes of working and writing requires severe focus. I don’t want to have to jump. Every time I have to go some random other place in the, that I have to devote my brain power to that, what I’m not doing, I’m not focused on the plan for writing. When I write something, I’m thinking three paragraphs ahead. And I’m trying to remember that because I don’t want to stop writing to take a note. I want to just go down the page and get my first draft out. But if in order to do this I have to go somewhere far away, that requires me to think, now I’ve lost my place.

And it creates a certain stress and programmers, if you say this to a programmer, most programmers go, oh, you’re just being weird. That’s not the way it works. Let me tell you how it works. I am also myself a programmer, so I understand the thought process, but you have to play. You have to have both roles in there. And that’s one of the things that makes me a fairly unique developer, is that I’m both a writer and a developer.

So I play on both sides of that fence. And so if I want a writer to test my code, I don’t do it right after I wrote the code. I come back a couple of days later, now that I’ve got a fresh way of looking at things and then I try to use it, and then I see the problems right off the bat.

[00:33:26] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll link to Wordland. I’ve had a good long look at the pages that you’ve offered up. I confess, I haven’t actually tried it out, but it’s a, it’s a very different take on a fairly minimal editing interface in WordPress. So I’ll make sure to link out to that.

[00:33:37] Dave Winer: It’s fairly minimal, but it does everything on the Textcasting page. It doesn’t have the limits that all the Twitter like products have. It’s all supported, you get to do all of that stuff. And plus you get categories. And I think categories are huge. I really do. And it has a very nice, simple interface for it, but a very powerful one for categories. So, have a look at that.

[00:33:58] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you.

[00:33:59] Dave Winer: And bookmarks. It’s very important for a writer. I have, I don’t know how many hundreds of documents that I’ve written over the years. I pretty much need quick access to all of them. Because I never know when I’m gonna have to make a change, and that’s in there too.

[00:34:12] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.

[00:34:12] Dave Winer: Oh wait, I forgot the actual main point. The main point I was gonna make is that I’ve also, all the work I had to do on the server side to set this up, I’m not gonna make anybody have to do. That’s all open source, and I’ll even run the server for you.

Yeah, because what I want is a development community to pop up here. And so if somebody looks at Wordland, says that’s not the way to do it, here’s how you should do it. Say, great, go ahead, do it. And what they’ll find is, just like with WordPress, okay, there’s nothing in your way. You get to do that.

And there’s more from that too, is that the user owns the documents, and all the documents are in markdown format. And so if you want to use a different editor on a document, just to work on it for whatever purpose, go ahead and it’ll still work in the place it came from.

And this is going back to the IBM PC and the Macintosh, where when you had those machines, you owned the documents and you could have any editor you want edit it. And this led to file format standards, because if you come along three years after Microsoft Word comes along in the Macintosh, you better read Word format documents.

Since I get to go first here, if this, if something happens, okay, that I have to say, maybe nothing will happen here, you never know. But because I got to go first, I chose markdown. Because markdown is the mp3 of text. It’s the obvious answer. And tell me why they don’t support markdown. Anything that works with text should support markdown in my opinion.

[00:36:00] Nathan Wrigley: It’s just a nice, easy to access. The keyboard does everything.

[00:36:03] Dave Winer: There’s more. I’ve written feed readers. All along have been writing feed readers, and we have to sterilize the content because people put all kinds of garbage. And so you basically strip everything out. I’m tired of doing that. What I want to do is give the writers the ability to put some bold face and italics, and put some links in there, and give it, all the things that are on the Textcasting thing.

So I don’t want to strip that out anymore. And so in Feedland and in Wordland, markdown is fully supported everywhere, and in RSS. It’s a key point. If I had that to do over again. I can’t do that one. I’m sorry, I’m going on about this but I really believe in it. I couldn’t do it over again. If I had to do over again in the beginning, I would’ve made markdown the text format in RSS, totally. I couldn’t do it ’cause it didn’t exist. RSS came first but I’ve taken care of it.

Now, Wordland produces its own RSS feed for every document, along with the one that WordPress produces. And the feed we produce has the markdown in it. And it has a couple of other things, and it, we will have more. As we think of more features to add. I’ve now got a place where I can add features. These are in a namespace, it’s totally non-controversial. I’m not modifying RSS, I have something called the source namespace.

And then at some point, again, it’s all prefixed by if it catches on, then I’ll go to the guys that do the feeds inside of WordPress and say, here’s some suggestions for features to your feed. And at that point we’ll be friends, I hope. And they’ll, love me and I’ll love them. It’s not impossible. There are people on the team that are helping us. That’s nice, I really love that.

[00:37:47] Nathan Wrigley: So taking it back a little bit, we’ve got the Textcasting framework that we described a little bit, a few moments ago. That kind of feels like the underpinnings to this other piece that I mentioned. And again, links in the show notes. Think Different About WordPress. Now, I confess, I’ve been following you for many years. really, in my head, collided you with WordPress.

[00:38:08] Dave Winer: I wasn’t, you interpreted

[00:38:10] Nathan Wrigley: And then suddenly you pop up with this piece about Wordland for start, which is a, an editor, which binds to WordPress. And then this whole piece about think differently about WordPress. Now this is really curious because, well you tell me what you’re proposing. I could try, try to interpret it.

[00:38:26] Dave Winer: I tried put the key idea upfront, okay. When I say Think Different About WordPress, I can tell you exactly what that is, what you’re supposed to think. I used the grammatically incorrect version that Apple uses.

[00:38:42] Nathan Wrigley: Think different.

[00:38:43] Dave Winer: Yeah, it was cute. I thought, what the heck, let’s do it. That’s the point, really. And it is just think of WordPress as the equivalent of the Bluesky service and the Mastodon service. And the reason you can do that is because it’s really comparable. They’re all text databases, that’s what they are. They have some different structures. That’s okay, we can add structures too. But it’s how good are they at doing that, and how mature is their code, this is very technical stuff, right? But what does the API look like, and how stable is the API? These are all the concerns that limit what people can develop on the platform. And if you do the check boxes, I probably should do that, but WordPress wins on every one of them.

[00:39:31] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a lot of life behind it and a lot of commitment to backwards compatibility.

[00:39:35] Dave Winer: It’s very simple actually. The reason it is that way is that whoever made the calls, they had a philosophy for the whole 22 years of the web will tell us what to do, and they did it. What else?

I know, I felt Rip Van Winkle, you know what I’m saying? It’s like, I was not paying attention to WordPress because I had all the wrong ideas. Now, they didn’t market to me. They never told me in 2017 they had a new API never. It. They didn’t tell me that they had a Node.js package for that API. They never told me. I was working in Node.js at that point. So I could have tried it out right away. They never told me. And all of a sudden, like I’m looking around, I need to add WordPress login to Feedland, because that’s running, we have a, at feedland.com people should try that too. Okay, because that’s a big part.

It’s the feed backend for the system that we’re talking about. And Feedland runs on the Automattic VIP server. So that thing scales. Okay. I learned how to write, I didn’t know how to write scalable software before I hooked up with them, in I guess it was like three years ago or something.

And the first thing we did is, and they were very generous about this in teaching me, and I kept finding things I had to change to make it so that you could support millions of users, right? It’s not mysterious once you learn how to do it, but there’s an art to it.

The bigger project is imagine Twitter with an editor that could support. Twitter has what I call a tiny little text box, okay? You get to type something in there and they’ve extended their limit, if you pay them money, 10,000 characters, that’s a pretty good character limit. I say in Textcasting, unlimited. 10,000 is unlimited, okay. For all practical purposes, if you’re writing more than 10,000 characters, there shouldn’t be a limit, but, okay.

So you got a text editor. Twitter has a text editor. We have a text editor. Our text editor does the web the way I want it to do the web. And it has timelines where you see messages in reverse chronological order. So imagine if that was RSS, instead of their server. That timeline. You could make a timeline in RSS look just like it came from Twitter. There’s no problem with that, and that’s what I’ve done. When you subscribe to feeds, what you get.

So anything that supports RSS plugs into this system, and guess what? RSS is totally replaceable. Everything that I do, you can come up with another one and it works just as well, because RSS is an open format. Yeah, it’s got a protocol with it too. There’s a RSS cloud, which I mentioned in that piece, which does the real time component of it. It worked great.

WordPress supports it in every one of the instances they do it, and so it may be more limited than the one, but I don’t know the one that’s in Bluesky or Mastodon. It may have features that are hard to do, but like I said, then it will do features. It’ll have things that they can’t do either.

One thing it’ll do is it’ll be very, very, very, very, simple. That’s the point.

[00:42:48] Nathan Wrigley: What I’m thinking here is, I think that the typical listener listening to this will be thinking, how does this differ from, let’s say, going to Twitter, but it’s got a different interface and it’s got a different character limit.

[00:42:59] Dave Winer: Not that different. whole idea is that it won’t be that different. I’m not actually running your server. Go, you could pick and choose. You don’t like my timeline, fine. Go get Joe’s timeline or Mary’s timeline or, Google might have a timeline or OpenAI might have one or. Do you need a license to create an RSS reader? No, that’s the point. The point is you get innovation, you get the doors blown off. You don’t have a silo. There’s no silo anywhere in sight.

If you want the users, you have to give them features, performance or price. They don’t have to stay with you if they don’t want to. There’s no import or export. It’s just there. It’s the feeds you subscribe to. That’s really, there’s not a whole lot of technology there.

[00:43:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I mean, it’s a fairly nice, simple, basic proposition. It sounds from what you were saying in the Think Different About WordPress, it sounds like, well I said you planted your flag in the sand a little bit before. It sounds like you are committing yourself to do.

[00:44:03] Dave Winer: I’ve already done the work. I’ll be demoing this at WordCamp Canada in October, hopefully that will all be webcast so everybody can watch it. And it’ll be archived and it probably will crash, because that’s the way these things work, right? And, but I will stay with it.

I will get the bugs out. It’s gonna be a process. It’s not gonna be done, on October, whatever, 17th I think it is. It’s not gonna be done. All I ask is have a look then, and then when there’s a new version, please come have a look then too, and I’ll come back on your podcast if you want. We can talk about it as it develops. Remember the things that we’re puzzling, and don’t mistake for a minute that I’m not confused too. I am.

I’m gonna tell you a little self-aggrandizing anecdote. Once in, I think it was high school or something, teachers said, somebody like to come up and solve this problem, it was a math class, solve this problem on the whiteboard?

I said, okay, I’ll go. And I go up there and I’m doing it, and I got the answer, and the teacher said, you didn’t know the answer when you raised your hand, did you? No. I, it’s like, I’m an old guy now, that was when I was young. What the hell have I got to lose? Nothing. Nothing. I’m giving you software, an approach to software that I believe in. And, I’m testing the idea of the assumption.

I was always told that RSS can’t do what Twitter does, and because I had not mastered server side scaled software, and remember until a couple of years ago, I had never done that. So I said, I have no way of testing that. They say you can’t do it. They know. I have my doubts about what they said, but I have no way of doing anything about it. And then I got the skill, and then I think now that it’s not true, I think that you absolutely can do it, and that they had a reason for telling me that, is that they didn’t want me to do it. Okay, that’s an invitation, a great invitation if I’ve ever seen one, right.

I mean go for it. Let’s go for it, but let’s all go for it together. You see, that’s the point. It’s no fun if I’m just sitting here going, oh, please, I beg you, would you please try my software so I can be a billionaire too?

[00:46:19] Nathan Wrigley: I was just gonna say, if you’re going into WordCamp Canada, and you’re demoing it all there, but at the moment, I’m guessing you’re doing all of the work, or you have done all of the work, by yourself. Are you hoping to create a community around this?

[00:46:31] Dave Winer: Yeah. I want a developer community, but in order to have a developer community, there better be some users, ’cause the developers don’t come until there are users. So this is something, if a user says, what can I do to help? I’m just a user. The answer is you could do a lot to help. You can use the damn thing. Your product, your content, the stuff that you write will be a magnet for other people. They’ll see the reality of it and they’ll say, oh wow, I guess you can use stuff like this.

[00:47:03] Nathan Wrigley: So the next question I have then is how does what you wish to do, how does that stand in relation to some of the currently existing things out there? So for example, the Fediverse, I know maybe that term’s not something you like to use, but let’s say Mastodon for want of a better word or ActivityPub, let’s go with that.

ActivityPub has a plugin which is under the custodianship of Automattic, so we’re obviously trying to bind our WordPress websites with the Fedi verse and being able to communicate in that way.

[00:47:31] Dave Winer: No, that’s good. That’s very good.

[00:47:33] Nathan Wrigley: How does yours stand in contrast to that? How, will yours differ from that familiar thing?

[00:47:39] Dave Winer: What that does is it’s wonderful. First, let me tell you why it’s wonderful, and then I’ll tell you, I don’t even know how to begin telling you what the difference is. But, it’s wonderful because it accomplishes at least part of the goal of bringing the Textcasting vision into Mastodon. So if I have a blog called daveverse.org, which is a WordPress blog, and when I post something there, it’s also cross posted to Mastodon. And as far as I can tell, there’s no character limit. And it has styling, and it supports links, and it has images, and block quotes. It’s got a lot of the stuff. It even has titles. That’s right, it has titles too. If you go look at the Textcasting list, that’s pretty good coverage, right? It’s a major innovation, it’s a major step forward.

So what that does, hopefully it gets it onto the radar of the developers of Mastodon. The more people want that, okay, they have to make that clear. And right now, I don’t think people even know it exists. There’s not a lot of awareness of it. I’ve tried the best I can to, and I’ll keep pumping it for this reason. And the more successful it is, the more it puts pressure on Bluesky to do the same thing.

So it’s having the same effect that I’m hoping to have and, so I like it. Remember, I’m wearing a lot of hats here, but one of the hats I wear is, as a writer who wants the freedom to use all the writing tools, I don’t want to be given three strings, I want all five strings, using the guitar anology.

So this, what I’ve done is create something that has the potential of playing the role that, the core of Mastodon does. The whole thing. The whole thing, right? It’s not comparable to a plugin that connects WordPress to Mastodon because that’s a plugin, and what they’re doing is heroic, that’s the word I use for it, Matthias and his team are doing at Automattic, are doing is heroic, because it’s a hard problem to solve. It’s taking ’em a lot of time and they’re working really hard, but those guys really believe, they’re really committed. And I, love that. It’s both heroic and love inspiring. These guys are great. And they won’t have to do that for my system. They won’t, it’ll just come for free.

[00:50:04] Nathan Wrigley: With the Mastodon system, obviously the ActivityPub protocol will bind to a server of your choice. So many people go with mastodon.social as the sort of the default. Presumably there’s gotta be some part of the architecture for your system, which in that way, some central place.

[00:50:20] Dave Winer: There is a server component to what I’m doing. Okay. It doesn’t matter where that server is running. You can run it anywhere, somebody has to run it, and it’s open source, and it’s not even a GPL license, it’s MIT licensed. So go have fun with this thing.

And it’s on GitHub right now. I’m not asking people to install it yet because I want to get a chance to like lock it down before we start cloning it. It’s going to, it is designed to be no lock-in. It is, does, require somebody to run a server

[00:51:00] Nathan Wrigley: So the bit that I’m reading off the scripting.com website where, you know the piece entitled Think Different About WordPress. You have this sentence where it says, a storage service and it says, I’m going to run the server for you to get the bootstrap going, my treat. That was the bit.

[00:51:14] Dave Winer: That raised the alarms, right? It should raise the alarms.

[00:51:17] Nathan Wrigley: Exactly. It made me think Twitter in a way, it made me think there’s this central bit.

[00:51:21] Dave Winer: No, it’s not, because I have the answer that Twitter never had, which is I’m giving you all the code you need to run your own server. I’m giving that to you. I’m not making you write it. In Twitter you can’t even write it. If I wrote a server that did what Twitter’s server does, that’s great, but it wouldn’t be part of Twitter. It wouldn’t be available to everyone. The availability here is the same availability as RSS. So can I subscribe to your RSS feed, even if your thing is on another server? Of course.

That’s all you need to know. Ultimately, that’s all you’re going to need is to be able to. It’s just RSS, that’s all it is.

[00:52:01] Nathan Wrigley: It’s RSS all the way down.

[00:52:03] Dave Winer: But let me just say this, is that’s also a strength of the WordPress community, the skepticism. You’re always, you guys are always watching for the lock in.

[00:52:13] Nathan Wrigley: We’ve spent trying to encourage the world that you need to own your own data, or at least have.

[00:52:17] Dave Winer: Right.

[00:52:19] Nathan Wrigley: Unfortunately the world, on the whole, didn’t listen, so we keep banging that gong.

[00:52:24] Dave Winer: Yes. But let me point out that you are the distillation of the people. You’re the group of people who care deeply about that stuff. So keep it up because, and that’s why I’m ready to answer those questions because, and here’s the punchline. Even though I’m not part of your community, we share that religion.

[00:52:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that’s nice.

[00:52:43] Dave Winer: Why do we share the religion? Because it’s the web. Because that’s what the web taught us. Maybe we believed, maybe we were very naive in the nineties and the early two thousands. We were, we’re not naive anymore. I think the last, the very last sentence in the Think Different, go read that, right now.

[00:53:02] Nathan Wrigley: They lied to the users all the time, over and over. No, I don’t object to you making money, but I’m putting it out there. You can compete with me. I want you to compete with me, as long as you don’t try to cut off the interop. I’m not naive. Believe me, I expect that will happen.

[00:53:16] Dave Winer: That’s just all the credentials I need to be in your community, right? Not all the credentials. I don’t know half the stuff any of you guys know about the how to do. I don’t do PHP for example. I don’t know how to set up a WordPress server. I have somebody that helps me with that. So I’m not qualified to be a member of the WordPress community, but that’s the beauty of the web. I don’t have to be to connect with that community, because that’s what the web gives. And that’s pretty awesome, don’t you think? And the other thing is that makes it even more awesome is that all the other people like me will be able to do it too. Why? Because in the end they played straight with you.

[00:54:01] Nathan Wrigley: Depending on when this podcast is released, it may well be that you’ve done your presentation. If that is in fact the case, then I will make sure to link to the WordPress TV, the video that will have been captured. I’ll link that into this post. But also I’ll link to the Textcasting document and, also the Think Different About WordPress document. And encourage you, if you’ve got any interesting kind of, I’m gonna say rewinding the clock and returning the world to a different era where the blue sky was there, and there was less cloud, than go and explore those different bits and pieces.

And I will definitely be coming back to you, Dave Winer, to figure out exactly how it’s gone and maybe call it months or something like that. And we’ll see where you’ve got with the WordPress community.

[00:54:40] Dave Winer: If we’re still here.

[00:54:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But we will, we’ll leave it there. And, I will say thank you for chatting to me today about this really important subject. Thank you.

[00:54:48] Dave Winer: Thank you much, it was great. Have a good day.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, switching clients from classic to block themes.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast, player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today we have Mary Ann Aschenbrenner. Mary Ann has been the president of Waterlink Web, a digital agency specializing in WordPress web design, since 2014. Her experience includes e-commerce and membership websites, websites for local nonprofit organizations, and starter websites for small businesses As a lifelong learner, Mary Ann likes to keep pace with the latest innovations in WordPress. She is a fan of block themes, and particularly the WordPress default themes.

We start by discussing the differences between classic and block themes, with Mary Ann offering practical step-by-step advice for anyone considering a move from a classic theme to a modern block-based theme. She talks about why you might want to make the switch, potential challenges to look out for, and stories from her own experience converting client sites.

We also chat about the evolution of WordPress, the diminishing need for third party page builders, the importance of client education, and the ongoing improvements in the block editor. Plus Mary Ann shares insights from her WordCamp presentation, and her experiences collaborating with the WordPress community.

Whether you’re a seasoned WordPresser or just starting out and keen to know how block themes are making site building more accessible for everyone, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Mary Ann Aschenbrenner.

I am joined on the podcast by Mary Ann Aschenbrenner. Hello.

[00:02:54] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Hello. Nice to be here.

[00:02:56] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. Thank you so much. You are the first interview that I’m carrying out at WordCamp US in Portland in the year 2025.

The endeavour here is to talk about classic themes and block themes. You are doing a presentation. I don’t suppose you’ve done it yet, because we’re right at the beginning of the main conference.

[00:03:12] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I do it this afternoon at 2:15pm, yes.

[00:03:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Good luck with that. Let’s just first of all find out a little bit about you. So if you don’t mind, would you just give us your biography, your potted biography, if you like. Who you are, what you do.

[00:03:24] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I’m from Portland, born and raised here. And the reason I got into website design is kind of a fluke and kind of really related to my whole ethos as a citizen of this great city.

Well, Pier Park is a North Portland park and it’s where my kids learned to swim. It’s where a lot of kids learned to swim. It was in a fairly low income neighborhood. And in 2005, the City of Portland decided to close the outdoor pool that was open in the summers. Just funding issues. And I worked with some other North Portland people and we gathered 700 signatures, which I don’t know if you know this, it’s a lot of work to get 700 signatures. And we took them down to City Hall, and we presented them and we talked about why Pier Pool needed to stay open.

And Sam Adams at the time said, we can find money for these folks. He was on the city council. And lo and behold, they decided to keep Pier Pool open.

Well, about a month later, I’m at a City Bureau meeting and was told that the reason they decided to close Pier Pool at the time, instead of Buckman Pool was because Buckman had a website. This was 2000 and five. I was like, oh, it can’t be that hard to get a website. I’ve collected 700 signatures, websites have to be easier. So Friends of Pier Park has had a website ever since and we, of course, keep our pool open with it. And that’s the long story short of how I got into it.

[00:04:58] Nathan Wrigley: That’s nice. That’s a real sort of philanthropic community endeavour that got you started on the road to WordPress. I’m guessing you built that site with WordPress.

[00:05:05] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I got someone else to do it because I knew nothing about building websites. In 2012, I had the opportunity to go back to school, and I actually went to PCC and studied web design. And I’ve been building websites, I started my own company shortly after that, and I’ve been doing it ever since with Water Link Web.

[00:05:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’ve been in the weeds for a fairly long time.

[00:05:24] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Yeah, well over a decade. 14 years or something like that.

[00:05:27] Nathan Wrigley: You’re obviously keeping up to date with all the different bits and pieces in the WordPress space, because the content of your presentation later today is, well, the title is Moving a Website from Classic to Block themes. Some examples, some live and learns. And so I’m guessing you’re going to be instructing people on, if they wish to make the move, how to go from what we call a classic theme.

[00:05:45] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It will be like the real step by step. This is what you do this first, you do this second, this is what it’s going to look like, these are the problems you may come into, and this is how to fix them. And voila, it’s going to be great.

[00:05:58] Nathan Wrigley: And so from your perspective, what’s the sort of, the single, well, maybe not single, maybe there’s a few things that you can mention, what are the most compelling reasons that you would ever want to move away from a classic theme?

Let’s say that I’ve got a website, it’s working perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong with it, but I’m kind of curious. I want to explore the option. What are the big ticket items why you would wish to move?

[00:06:19] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Well, a couple of reasons. Often the plugins that might be associated with your old theme may no longer being maintained. So there’s one situation where I mentioned in the presentation, they’re not being maintained, you won’t be able to update the PHP on your server and you could have a site that’s open to hacking and be slower therefore, because it’s running on a lower grade PHP.

So that’s one reason to do it. Another is once you start using the block theme editor, you don’t want to go back. And so, you know, I’ve always maintained my skills with WordPress. I’ve been active in the WordPress community. I’ve continued to learn. And, yes, I’ll admit when the block editor first came out, I was a little trepidatious. I didn’t use it that first year. But the second year I did, and the third year I did. And I have been using the latest theme every year, ever since when I build my client’s websites.

So I just don’t like going back to the classic and then like, okay, how do we do this? It just isn’t as intuitive. And as well, it’s easy to maintain, you don’t have as much opportunity to make changes as you do in the new block editor. So I’m just gradually updating my clients.

[00:07:33] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have a background in code or are you more of a kind of mouse driven builder?

[00:07:38] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Do I have a background in code? I did a little HTML. I understand CSS and I certainly use that a lot with the classic theme, CSS especially. But that isn’t really where I trained in.

Really where my skill lies is working with my clients and creating a website that is unique to them. Every website I do is original. And I look at what colours they want, what values they want to display. And we design based on that.

And my clients love me. I mean, I’ve had clients over a decade. Still same clients, still working with me. And they trust me and I know it’s like, it’s time to upgrade your website and then we do that.

[00:08:20] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the things about the classic themes was that having a deep knowledge of the code and the templating hierarchy in WordPress and those kind of things meant that it was available to some, but not necessarily to everybody.

Whereas the block based themes, the more modern WordPress, if you like, there is much more opportunity to get into the weeds. To do your templates and template parts and things like that with a visual editor.

So long as you can understand the UI, and where to find the menus, and where to construct the different parts of your website. And that promise of democratising publishing seems to be something that is being delivered, despite the fact that, you know, it’s a bit of a jump to go from classic to full site.

[00:08:58] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It is, absolutely. My daughter’s wedding photographer contacted me. She’d had a website on Squarespace, and she found out after 10 years of working as a wedding photographer in southern Oregon, she was only on page five of search results. And that’s ridiculous, but it’s because of where she had her website.

So she switched it over to WordPress and was confused, what do I do next? She had bought a photographer theme, and so it was going to work perfect for her. And I said, you know what? You see those three lines at the top of the page when you go to edit the page, hit them. And she did.

And then it was like, oh, the light went on. So she’s going to contact me again when she’s got that built out. But now she understands what to do. All she needed to learn was those three lines because then she knows she can edit every single block in there, and knows what to do.

[00:09:49] Nathan Wrigley: If you were to look at the growth of WordPress over the last, I’m going to say sort of 10 years, something like that, the uptick in WordPress usage up to kind of 40 plus percent, whatever it is now, I think there’s been a lot of page builders responsible for that uptick. So for example, the likes of Elementor or what have you.

And it was curious that in the blurb that went with your presentation, you particularly pointed out, I think the quote was, no page builder is needed, or something that. Is that a big part of it for you, that you don’t need to rely on any third party tool, often which have a fee attached to them for an annual or a recurring license or something like that? Is like that a big part of it?

[00:10:22] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I’ve never used page builders. And I have friends in the industry who love page builders, rely on page builders, and I have happy clients and I’ve never used a page builder. And the site is unique to them. I don’t feel like adding on another layer.

I’ve had to change over websites where a page builder was used, and it was very heavy, and slow because there was so much code. And back in the day, an individual who was vision impaired couldn’t use it because the web reader that they were using couldn’t read through all this extra code. I just never used it for that reason.

But I’m sure they’re better now. I do believe that, but you don’t need them. When you have the block editor, you don’t need a page builder.

[00:11:06] Nathan Wrigley: Are there any situations in which you wouldn’t ascribe the necessity to move over to a more modern, block based theme? In other words, is there any scenario where you look at somebody that’s on a classic theme and you say, you know what, just stay where you are, everything’s fine? Or are you always keen to promote people to move in this direction?

[00:11:25] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I’m not always keen to promote people. So I have a client who, oh gosh, she was part of the second wave feminist movement, and has a really great website people love. I built it for her in like 2015 and it’s still working fine. She can stay on it. She’s comfortable with it. You know, there’s no reason really, if it starts being an issue with the PHP levels and so forth, then I’ll talk to her about it.

[00:11:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I suppose there’s also, given the trends in graphic design and the way websites look, there’s always a moment in time where your website just begins to look stale on the front end.

[00:11:59] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Or it looks retro, or it looks cool. And the others all look the same. So there’s always that.

[00:12:05] Nathan Wrigley: So that, if you like, was more about the why of you may wish to move over to a, away from a classic theme.

So let’s move into the sort of the how then because that I think is the crux of your presentation really, how to do it and you need to demonstrate on the screen and what have you. So let’s go through that process. What is the first thing that you do when you are looking to transfer somebody over?

[00:12:25] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Well, the first thing you do is you set up a staging site. I’m not saying doing this live. Bring up a staging site on your server. It’s your same website and all it is is the new URL that says staging, dot, blah, blah, whatever.

Then after your staging site is up, you activate your 2025 theme. You may want to use 2024. 2024 is a really good theme as well. I think the patterns in 2024 are maybe a little more geared toward business, and the patterns in 2025 may be a little more geared towards personal blogs and artists. But pick one.

So you have now have the 2025 theme, and it’s going to look very plain because it’s just plain until you fix it. And the next thing I usually do is I go through and start editing the pages. So a lot of my old themes, I put in the classic editor plugin. Remember the classic editor plugin?

[00:13:18] Nathan Wrigley: I do, yeah.

[00:13:19] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Yeah, we were afraid of block editor so we all put classic editor on. And so it kind of keeps it looking classic. And, well, you deactivate that. And then when you go to a page or a blog post, you’ll see a little greyed block on the top of that content that says classic editor. You click it, and then it’ll say, convert to blocks. And this is where you just do it. You say, yes, I’m going to convert to blocks. You click it, and you got blocks.

Now, where you are going to find problems? But first of all, most of it deploys really well. Paragraphs deploy, they’re still paragraphs. Headers deploy, they’re still headers, et cetera, et cetera. But where you have columns, your original theme may have used some sort of a short code for columns that’s different than a block editor. So that may not convert.

Where you have embedded YouTube videos or something, you may decide to do them differently using the YouTube embed plugin instead of whatever code comes up. And you’ll get a little, if a paragraph doesn’t convert well or a block doesn’t convert well, it’ll say, you’ll know that.

But you still have your live site. So you can go there and find the content and put it back in. You know, it would would be cut and paste if you may have to chase down a YouTube link to embed a YouTube video. But it is all very doable and it’s pretty fast. It doesn’t take that long. I had a website with 200, over 200 blog posts that I had to do that on. That took a little while. But it was 200 blog posts, more than that actually. But for just a standard website with a dozen or so pages, it’s not hugely time consuming.

[00:14:54] Nathan Wrigley: I guess the only problems that may occur is if some part of the, well, let’s say theme, but it may be a plugin, but it may be part of the theme was injecting something somewhere. And in the classic editor you don’t see it, but it somehow surfaces on the front end. I don’t know, it may be the insertion of an ad or something like that. And then you may run into problems because you can’t see where that content’s coming from.

But I suppose in your scenario, you’re just flicking backwards and forwards between the current live site, which is the classic one, and then you’ve got your staging site, which is the block based one. I guess it’s just a jigsaw puzzle really. You’re trying to figure out, okay, why is that missing? Where does that come from? How can I deploy it in blocks and go through that process? And hopefully on each iteration you get more and more back to what the original content was.

[00:15:38] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Right, exactly. That’s how you do it.

[00:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And so it’s a process of going through it kind of one at a time.

Have you ever encountered something which you couldn’t solve in that scenario? Have you ever come across something where you just throw your hands in the air and think, what, where’s that?

[00:15:50] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: One time. So I had a website on a Studio Press theme, and I did the conversion. It all looked good to me. And then I realised when you were not logged into the site, the navigation didn’t show up properly. And I tried to figure that out and I redid the navigation. It looked good when you’re logged in, but when you’re just looking at the site not logged in, it wasn’t. So I ended up actually rebuilding that site entirely.

[00:16:16] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting.

[00:16:17] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I just went ahead and brought up a whole new 2025 theme and copied and pasted content and brought it over.

[00:16:23] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so rather than having a staging site, well, you presumably did have a staging site, but it wasn’t a case of going into the posts or the pages and clicking the convert button. This more of a, okay, something’s broken here, I need to start from scratch.

[00:16:34] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Something’s broken, I couldn’t figure it, I mean, I’m sure if I were a coder, I would’ve dug into the code. But it’s like, it’s going to take me hours, it’s going to be easier in this case. It didn’t have a ton of content. There was like six or eight pages and maybe four or five blog posts. So it wasn’t that hard to do. It was easier to just bring up the new 2025 theme and start fresh.

[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, in the scenario where you’ve only got a handful of pages, it probably is literally quicker to do it that way and copy and paste.

[00:16:58] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Especially if you see an issue pop up immediately. It’s something, the navigation, I couldn’t figure out why that wasn’t working. But it was a Studio Press theme, so something was coming through from the old theme.

[00:17:09] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And you mentioned that this whole process where you, you go to your staging site and you go into a post or a page, and there’s this bar at the top. The content is missing essentially. And there’s this bar, it’s a grey bar and it looks.

[00:17:23] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Well, the content is usually there.

[00:17:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but it’s all in the wrong, it’s as it was essentially. So it’s not yet as blocks. And you click the button, wait a heartbeat, a moment, and the WordPress sort of process of migrating one to the other just sort of takes over. Paragraphs become paragraphs blocks, and on you go. I’ve yet to have that fail on me in a catastrophic way. It’s never done anything unexpected.

[00:17:45] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It’s never failed catastrophically, not on me. And I’ve converted, even on that one website I just mentioned, the content converted great. It was just the navigation that was the issue. But I’ve used Canvas theme, which used to be produced by WooCommerce before it became a part of WordPress. And I’ve used, of course another theme on, that another website. So that content comes through actually, really easily.

[00:18:09] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned also that you are using the default theme in most cases. So you mentioned 2025, but also you said, I think perhaps try 2024 or something like that. Is that your kind of go-to? Do you explore the ecosystem of other themes that are out there in the environment, either the repo or possibly commercial themes, or you just heavily leaning into default themes?

[00:18:28] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I just lean into the default theme.

[00:18:29] Nathan Wrigley: Is there any particular reason for that? Because obviously, you know it’s going to be updated, which is really nice. You know that it’s a, well, it’s deployed on every WordPress website, a standard if you download a vanilla version of WordPress.

[00:18:39] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It’ll be maintained for a long, long time. I know somebody who’s still in the 2015 theme and their site still works great.

[00:18:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the backwards compatibility promise of WordPress is pretty remarkable.

[00:18:51] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: It’s pretty remarkable.

[00:18:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Have you found limitations in those themes though? So one of the things that I think people wish were better would be, for example, things like navigation. You know, the options that you have in default blocks for navigation. Currently, there’s quite a lot of work going on to improve that as it happens. But are there any limitations that you’ve encountered where you thought, I wish it could do more?

[00:19:12] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I haven’t with the 2025, not recently anyway. But with 2024, I used a little bit of CSS in the navigation block. So add a little CSS.

[00:19:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, just tweak it a little bit. There’s a lot of requirements for maybe, I don’t know, mega menus, things like that, adaptations to the mobile menu that are not available in the blocks. And as we’re leaning more into kind of like a no code environment with block based themes.

[00:19:35] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: I have used a plugin for mega menus on one of my clients.

[00:19:37] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So you take care of that in a different way by using plugins? Yeah, okay. That kind of makes sense.

Okay, so that’s the bits and pieces perhaps about the sort of how you do it.

[00:19:46] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: And the reason I used the mega menu plugin for that client was he had very specific ideas of how he wanted his navigation to look on cell phone.

[00:19:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because it is fairly limited what you get out of the box. There’s not too many options and think the community is possibly moving towards having something a little bit better in the, yeah, a bit more full featured, let’s put it that way.

It’s a curious question, do you see any need for more than a single theme in the WordPress space anymore? So in other words, now that we’re leaning into an era where all of the bits and pieces that would’ve been handled by the theme is now handled by the interface of the block-based theme. So, for example, all of your templates is within the UI of full site editing and what have you. Do we even need a whole bunch of themes?

Could we just have a single theme which did the bare bones, maybe headers, footers, menus, that kind of thing. And then all of it is done by patterns or templates, which can be pointed on and clicked in, in the interface?

[00:20:44] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Well, I think that it’s good to have themes, and I’ll tell you why. My daughter’s wedding photographer. She is not a website designer. You know, she was used to using Squarespace, realised that the SEO on it sucked and decided to go to WordPress and found a great photography theme from a good maker of themes. I had no problem with it. I looked at it. And all she needed was a little tip on how to see where her blocks were and what the block is. She’s just going to be able to go with that.

Now if she was starting from scratch with no theme to work with, and just trying to figure it out, I think it’d be a lot harder for her. But having a template that’s like, here’s your photography template, she can put her own pictures in there. She understands the concept, and she’ll be able to build her own website with it.

[00:21:36] Nathan Wrigley: Do you find it’s easier for your clients then to work with the block based themes than it was with the classic themes?

[00:21:43] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Yes.

[00:21:44] Nathan Wrigley: I find sometimes it’s difficult to kind of work out where you are in the UI. You know, you’ve clicked on a bunch of things and you can’t figure out how to get back to where you were, things like that. But then if I weigh that up against how difficult it was with classic themes, where you had to basically have a code editor open at some point and be editing template, PHP files, and things like this. Although it’s a bit confusing navigating around the UI, I think even the people developing WordPress would say, yes, there’s a bit of work to be done on the UI. I think on the whole, it’s much easier, but I don’t know what your clients think.

[00:22:13] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You know how I explained to my clients, I said, if you use Mac, can you put together a Pages document and maybe add some images, can you do that? And they say, yes. I said, well, if they’re using Microsoft, can you do the same thing? Yes, I can. Well, then you can use the block theme.

Because once it’s set up, I mean, I think that there’s certain areas that are a little more tricky and for our clients, I’ll say, look, don’t get into the editor. Do not do full site editing. Let me do that. If you want to add something to the navigation, just tell me, I’ll edit it. It’s not a big deal. It takes me five minutes. They’re going to have to figure it out, because it’s only something they’re going to do once in a while when they change their navigation.

But for any of their pages, you know, they know how to hit the three lines, see what block they’re in, click it, it lights up the block on the right hand side, and then they can do the editing to the right of that. They can do it.

[00:23:03] Nathan Wrigley: Do you lean into the feature of locking blocks? Because it sounds like you’ve got a fairly close relationship with your clients. You’re probably able to get on the phone with them and things like that, have that communication. So you can just say, don’t touch that, leave that alone, and that’s fine.

But obviously in different scenarios where, I don’t know, it might be more corporate, that kind of thing, the capacity within native WordPress to exclude the client from being able to edit that.

So as an example, yeah, you can change the text on that block, but it’s a cover block, but we’re not going to allow you to change the background image. Or conversely, you can change the background image, but you can’t change the text, those kind of things. So these are sort of new features which have crept in over time, and I’m not sure how many people use those, whether or not that would be of interest to you and your clients.

[00:23:45] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You know, it’s their website. They may be on my servers that I’m hosting, but it’s their website and if they really want to mess it up, they can. And I can fix it. But really, it’s not a problem.

There’s been a few times, I have one client who adds content and he happened to add it all in tables. I don’t know why or how. I had to fix it on one of his pages. But, you know, I fixed it and the content is there down and it’s not in a table.

[00:24:10] Nathan Wrigley: Do you build into your process, when you have converted something from classic to block base, do you have like an education piece in the middle there somewhere?

[00:24:18] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Oh, yes.

[00:24:19] Nathan Wrigley: So time to show the client how to use it. Because obviously they may be very familiar with classic editing, or it may be something that they’re not really dabbling in that much. Either way, it’s not at all like the new thing. And how do you do that? Do you allocate time? Do you have videos prepared or just sit next to them in their offices?

[00:24:35] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You know, we usually do it as like a Zoom call. They share their screen. Well, actually, during the process, there’ll be times when I’m on the phone in a Zoom call with the client or a Google Meet call with the client, and I’m showing them what I’m doing on my end. So that’s part of the education process.

And we talk about, okay, do you like this font? No, I don’t like this one. Okay, well, how about this one? They see me change things back and forth. I put up content and they say, oh, we want to edit that. We want to rephrase it like this.

So if we’re doing it on a Zoom call, it’s going back and forth, they see how I’m working. And I make a point, oh, see how I hit these three lines, and we can edit this paragraph block, let’s put a background on this paragraph block. Here’s how you do it. So they learn how to do that, just kind of as we’re building it.

And then when it’s done, I will definitely show them how, anything they want to change. And I’ll walk through them how to add a blog post, for example. Usually the pages are pretty dialed in by the time we go live, it’s exactly where they want. So they might need to learn how to add blog posts. And I’ll introduce them to the blocks I think they’re going to use. They don’t need to know how to do every single block because there’s so many blocks.

[00:25:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Do you switch some of them off, make them unavailable? I don’t know, there’s things like the Animoto Block, which goodness knows whoever was using that, I don’t know. But it’s there. I think most clients don’t need them. And having the capacity to switch some blocks off, quite a nice idea.

[00:26:00] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You can. I haven’t done that.

[00:26:01] Nathan Wrigley: No, okay. And are there any common gotchas? When you’ve gone through this process multiple times, is there anything which comes out the other end which is reliably strange to the client? You know, okay every client’s reporting back either, nothing, this is brilliant, it’s a hundred percent, I’m all on board. Or do you have common things which you have to explain over and over again to the different clients because it’s just quirky?

[00:26:21] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: There’s a couple clients that are boards, nonprofit boards, and so then I have to explain it over and over again.

[00:26:29] Nathan Wrigley: And is that because of the nature of.

[00:26:31] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Because the person I’m talking to changes.

[00:26:33] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay.

[00:26:34] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Sometimes clients will want something I don’t really feel like I can deliver. So I have a client who wants full with image, with content on top of it, and wants it to be a slider. So there’ll be a full width image with content and a button, and then another full width image with content and a button. It’s a slider. So I created this.

And then when it was done, they were like, well, I want the whole image to show on a cell phone. I had to explain, if that entire image gets so narrow that it shows on a cell phone and it’s not very tall, your content won’t fit in it. And it was really hard to accept. So that kind of thing can occur.

[00:27:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, it’s not for everybody, but I feel at this point, this is the future of WordPress. This is the way it’s going to go. This is what most people are talking about and what have you. Just getting into your presentation later, firstly, good luck with it. I hope it goes well.

[00:27:26] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Thank you.

[00:27:27] Nathan Wrigley: How are you tackling this subject? Are you going to be doing slides? Because it’ll be curious, the audience, presumably in front of you are, well, we’re at WordCamp. Presumably they are a bunch of WordPressers. I’m curious to know at what level you are pitching it.

[00:27:39] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: You know, I think somebody who’s fairly new to WordPress will be able to get a lot out of this. I think it’s geared towards somebody with a little bit of experience, not a lot.

I’m going to talk about three different websites. One of them was actually built in 2006 on Blogger. I wasn’t the one that built it. And two other websites. And I’m going to talk a little bit about the City of Portland, so people who come to this, even if they know everything I’m talking about will learn a little bit about the City of Portland.

[00:28:05] Nathan Wrigley: And this is all filmed as well, which is kind of nice. And these days those videos tend to get turned around pretty quickly. Long gone is the day that you would attend a WordCamp and then six months, a year later, the video would still be stuck in somebody’s hard disk.

Hopefully by the time this podcast episode drops, that will be out and we’ll be able to watch your presentation. I think I’ve asked everything that I wish to ask. Is there anything that you think that we didn’t touch during our conversation?

[00:28:31] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: There is.

[00:28:31] Nathan Wrigley: Go for it.

[00:28:32] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: While I was building the site with 200 blog posts, I discovered a little, what I thought was a glitch. And it turns out it’s a feature. But if you were a developer, you think it’s a feature. So in the 2025 theme, when you go to templates, you go to your website editor and you go to patterns, and then you have the header, the footer, and the page templates.

For the blog page, I pick a page template for the blog page, just that one. And then I can go in and I can select the style of my query loop. So if I want a query loop that’s just a picture on the left and content on the right for that blog page, and then people can scroll through and see all the different blog posts.

I picked one that was different than that. So I picked it, and then I deployed it, and then I went to the blog page and looked at it and it looked great. Except when I hit next page, it returned to the same page. It never was advancing to all these other 200 blog posts. And I was like, what happened here?

So I went back to the template, page, templates, blog page, picked a different query loop. Same thing. Picked a third query loop. Ah, this one worked. I could advance to the next pages. So then I was curious, why is this?

So I went back to that template, hit the three line dropdown arrow, looked at every single block in there and saw a pagination block that had not been in the others at the bottom of the group. So then I copied that and I put it in. And voila, my original one worked, I was very happy with it.

So I went yesterday to the Contributor Day and I sat at the Core Performance table, and normally not where I would belong, and said, this is your issue, it’s got to be fixed. And they looked at it, and a couple more people looked at it, and then they explained to me that not all query loops are used on the blog page. Some might be used on a landing page. And you may not want a next pages on every one of your query loops, so it’s not there on everyone.

[00:30:53] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting that it got there on one of them. And I think this is something that can be quite confusing, things like that, which in the old world, you would’ve dropped in as a short code. And in order to get that short code, you would’ve gone into some other UI and configured it all, and then the short code would’ve been spat out with the correct parameters to do what you wanted. So there might have been a toggle for show pagination, take pagination off, and what have you. And then the short code would ultimately do that.

In the block editor, this kind of thing happens fairly frequently in that there are nested blocks. And if you don’t deploy the nested blocks, so for example, if you didn’t know that pagination was a separate block, which usually sits outside of the query loop, usually below it in the same group or something like that, it’s easy to think, well, it ought to be there. Why isn’t it there? And sometimes you have to go find that pagination block, insert it in the right place and what have you.

Yeah, so things like that, if you don’t see it, you don’t see it. It’s not intuitive to think that it ought to be there. And I can think of probably dozens of examples of that kind of thing where blocks that you may rely on are in fact nested blocks of other blocks, and they may not come in automatically.

So, yeah, it’s a process of figuring that out, and maybe a toggle inside the query loop block saying, just enable pagination, turn it off, or something like that.

[00:32:11] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: That might be helpful. But I was able to fix it, and I realise now that it actually is a feature because they can, you can go to those query loops and look at all sorts of query loops that you might use elsewhere on your website. So I thought it was great to go to Contributor Day. I contributed and I learned.

[00:32:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really nice. And people were able to explain it to you. Yeah, definitely a thing if you come to a WordCamp, certainly of this magnitude, attend the Contributor Day. And it’s not just a process of contributing, it can be a process of sitting next to people who are working and asking them questions and thereby upping your own knowledge.

[00:32:44] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: And I don’t think that they were aware of it until I pointed it out.

[00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, they’re in the weeds of deploying it, and they may not consider all the use cases. And in this case, you had one in which it didn’t work as expected. I guess from their point of view, everything that they said is probably true. You know, it may be deployed in this way, it may not, and so we built it in such a way that you can have the pagination or not, but nevertheless, you kind of needed it right away.

Well, that’s brilliant. Thank you so much Mary. Appreciate you chatting to me today.

Where can we find you if people would like to reach out about anything you’ve talked about? Where’s the best places?

[00:33:14] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: On my website is waterlinkweb.com. You can find me there. I’m on Instagram at Water Link Web. I have a LinkedIn, Mary Ann Aschenbrenner at LinkedIn. And I think that does it.

[00:33:28] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you very much. I’ll make sure all those bits and pieces get into the show notes. So head to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Mary Ann Aschenbrenner. I will hopefully speak to you another time. Thank you very much for chatting to me.

[00:33:40] Mary Ann Aschenbrenner: Thank you very much, Nathan.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the state of WordPress in higher education.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today we have Rachel Cherry and Alex Aspinall.

Rachel is the founder of WP Campus, a nonprofit organization she launched a decade ago to support professionals using WordPress in higher education. Under her leadership, WP Campus has become a community hub, hosting conferences, and leading research projects tailored to the unique needs of its members. Currently, Rachel serves as the organization’s Director of Technology, and sits on its board of directors where she continues to drive innovative projects.

Alex is part of the globally distributed team at Human Made, an established WordPress Enterprise Agency founded in 2011. At Human Made, Alex helps deliver large scale web platforms for major organizations, including names like Harvard, Standard Chartered and PlayStation. In recent years, Alex has developed a strong interest in how WordPress can uniquely serve the higher education sector, and he’s become especially passionate about exploring and supporting this use case.

During the podcast, we get into the story behind WP Campus, which has for the past decade been empowering people who use WordPress in colleges and universities. We explore Human Made’s growing interest in the complexities of higher education projects, from large multi-site networks to the strict accessibility and governance requirements such projects increasingly require.

The heart of the conversation is the just released State of WordPress in Higher Education 2025 report. We dig into the reports key findings, such as the slow adoption of the block editor and full site editing, the challenges of managing hundreds of university websites with small teams, and why enterprise level tools are in such high demand.

Whether you’re a WordPress professional, agency, educator, or are just curious about the unique needs and opportunities the higher education space offers, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Rachel Cherry and Alex Aspinall.

I am joined on the podcast today by two fabulous guests. I have Rachel Cherry and Alex Aspinall. Hello both. How are you doing?

[00:03:36] Rachel Cherry: I’m lovely, Nathan. How are you?

[00:03:38] Nathan Wrigley: Good, thank you. And Alex, you all right?

[00:03:40] Alex Aspinall: How are you doing? I’m great.

[00:03:41] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. So we’re going to be talking today about the higher ed space, the higher education space, and WordPress. Specifically about WP Campus. In order to establish both of your credentials in this space, I wonder if we could get a little biography from you both, maybe 30 seconds, something like that, just explaining who you are, where you work, what your connection is to WordPress and specifically WP Campus.

So let’s go with Rachel first, if you don’t mind.

[00:04:05] Rachel Cherry: Hi, yes. So I am the founder of WP Campus, which has been around 10 years as of last month, which is kind of wild. And so we are a nonprofit organisation that supports people that use WordPress in higher education. And we host conferences, we host research projects like the one we’re going to discuss today.

So currently I am just one of a board of directors and I’m the director of technology specifically, but I was the lead for this project.

And then by day I am the accessibility developer at the University of Rochester. And so I’ve worked in higher ed and other enterprise organisations for the last 18 years.

[00:04:43] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. That’s great. And Alex.

[00:04:46] Alex Aspinall: I mean, I have way less credentials in terms of my WP Campus presence. I work for Human Made, which is an enterprise WordPress agency. We’ve been around since 2011, I think.

We’re a globally distributed team, people across all continents. And we specialise in building larger scale web platforms for organisations such as Harvard, Standard Chartered, PlayStation, few other names I could throw in there.

We also have an enterprise hosting solution too. We, probably about a year, two years ago started, well, I personally started becoming really interested in the higher education use case for WordPress. I think it’s really interesting. I think it’s quite unique. And that’s really why Rachel and I started speaking, I don’t know, maybe 18 months or so ago, and that led us to I guess this podcast.

[00:05:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. So the podcast is going to be framed around a freely available resource, and it’s called The State of WordPress in Higher Education. I will link in the show notes rather than try to butcher a URL in an audio podcast. I’ll link in the show notes over at WP Tavern to that and you can freely download it.

It’s billed as a research report in the year 2025. I confess, I don’t know if you did a 2024 version and beyond, but we’re going to concentrate on the 2025 version.

But I guess some more preamble, I’m afraid, but I guess we probably should establish what WP Campus is. And I just want to be clear, we recently released an episode about WP Campus Connect, and so I just want to draw a distinction there. These two things are not the same thing.

So I’m going to toss that one to Rachel. Will you just tell us what the endeavor is at WP Campus, why it was set up? What need is it trying to satisfy?

[00:06:22] Rachel Cherry: Yeah, so about 10 years ago I was working in higher education, building WordPress websites, and I wanted my own community. And I was going to a lot of WordCamps and no one was talking about the work that I was doing, the kind of work that I was doing. There wasn’t a space for my kind of work at camps at the time and so I started this organisation.

And so for the last 10 years we have worked to build a community of people, of like-minded people, that are using WordPress to support the mission of higher education. And we support each other with professional development, with resources, with connection, and every now and then some advocacy. Years ago we raised funds to do the audit of Gutenberg, accessibility audit to be more specific.

And so because accessibility is very important in our space, and here was this editor coming round going to cause a lot of change, as it has, and there was this huge unknown of whether or not it was accessible. And that was a very big deal to our group. A lot of our group has policies and such. And so every now and then we do work like that.

This type of research is very important to our mission as well, to provide data, to provide insight to our community members and our institutions.

And I think one of our kind of ideals that we stand on is that we want to give people data to inform their own decisions, kind of like with the editor audit. Like, we didn’t tell people it was inaccessible or accessible, we gave them data so that they can decide for themselves. And so this research, you know, is a big part of that as well.

There’s a lot going on in our community right now. And we wanted to pull out this data, and one of our objectives was to better understand the needs and challenges of people using WordPress in higher education.

[00:08:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you for that, Rachel. I’m going to advise that everybody goes over to the following URL. In fact, pause the podcast right now. If you’re sitting at a computer or you’re on your phone, go to wpcampus.org and over there you’re going to be able to see more about the mission.

At the moment, the membership numbers are displayed on the website. Whether or not that’s true when you visit, I don’t know, but 1,763 members, 688 institutions. That is an impressive number, by the way. I mean, the membership is great, but the institutional count is utterly fabulous. That’s really impressive.

But the idea is to juxtapose WordPress and higher ed. We don’t really use that word in the UK too much. We just kind of generically call things, I think university, so I just want to clear that up. Does higher ed basically service the needs of anybody that’s left traditional school? So I don’t know, 18 plus who’s going through some degree program or something like that?

[00:08:58] Rachel Cherry: Yes. Our mission is really to support kind of that, and I apologise, I can’t think of the general term. There’s a kind of a general term that we do use across, that’s more of a global, because higher ed is very specific to the United States in a lot of ways.

So we do support kind of that further education. We do have a lot of UK institutions and universities that participate in the work that we do. I would say that our group is largely United States, a lot of UK, a lot of Canadians as well. But we do have folks from all around the world. So it’s really just that spirit of wanting to support that mission of education.

Over the years have had a lot of people, even in the kind of K through 12 or early education people, wanting to be involved. And a lot of the things that early education and higher, or later, education have in common, but they’re also very different. So we haven’t quite merged with the early education group in that way. But yes, we do support largely this kind of university, higher education context.

[00:09:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. Yeah, that clears that up. I mean, you’re really busy over there. You’ve got loads of, I mean, an awful lot going on. There’s a whole thing about governance. You’ve got a newsletter, you put on real world events as well as online based events, and a Slack community. And there’s just a lot going on. It seems like, I don’t know if this has taken over your life, but it seems like it could well have done.

[00:10:17] Rachel Cherry: It did for a long time, and these days I have a lot more help. For a long time I was really the only director and then a few years back we did the work to implement more of a fleshed out kind of board of directors. And so I’m just a member of that board now. I am not the director in charge.

[00:10:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, all of that, again, is freely available on the website. You can see who the current custodians of the project are.

So where does Human Made, Alex, where does Human Made fit into this piece of the puzzle? How, have you become involved?

[00:10:45] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, I guess it goes back to what I was saying a little bit before about, I was just personally really interested in the higher ed use case of WordPress, and started digging around into learning a bit more about what kind of projects people had on the go, and what kind of platforms were being built in the space. They’re diverse, they’re complicated, they’re multi-site, you know, interesting, I guess is why I started getting involved.

Human Made is one of the agencies that builds complex, larger projects, so there’s a fit there as well. So we started looking around the space, seeing who it might be interesting to talk to, just in terms of learning a bit more. Obviously Rachel and WP Campus. We started talking informally about just the experience of being in WordPress in higher education.

I think the first thing we collaborated on over a year ago now was we did an online conference in the run up to WP Campus’ IRL conference a couple of weeks later. And then after that we enjoyed working together, we thought there was a lot more material we could work on, and this research project, I suppose was the biggest idea that came out of those discussions following that.

[00:11:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So I’ve downloaded the report and I’ve had a thorough look through it. There’s an awful lot in here actually. It is available, like I said, I’ll link to it in the show notes. However, I have to say, it’s a very graphical thing that we’re going to be talking about. There’s loads of charts kind of explaining the percentages in many cases of one thing versus another. So you will probably get more out of this podcast if you have downloaded it, and had a little peruse.

It doesn’t really matter who wants to take this, but I’m going to ask one of you to sort of explain what are some of the curious findings that you’ve got? Maybe the one, two, or three top level items that you think might be of great interest, and then we can maybe dig into the weeds of those particular things. So anything that your intuition suggests as something our audience might be interested in.

[00:12:32] Rachel Cherry: I’ll start with like my key takeaways, which are very broad, and then dive into a few of the data points. But my two key takeaways that I reported on was that our higher ed teams need more resources, and a way to share more resources, and that higher education needs more enterprise features in the WordPress product. Those were kind of my two, like looking at the data, my two takeaways. And at our report presentation that we had recently, we talked about that with folks in the community.

But some of the really interesting questions that we asked were around usage of the block editor and full site editing. And so nothing super surprising. But let me pull up that particular chart really quick.

So we asked folks, how fully have you adopted the block editor and full site editing? And only 40% of the respondents are using it on all of their sites. And there was a range there. Like we asked, are you using it on all of them? Are you using it on like most of them? Alex touched on this earlier, higher ed is a very interesting space, and the thing that I, people used to hear me say frequently was that WordPress and higher ed is WordPress in the enterprise on a budget. And what that usually means is a lot of under-resourced teams having to use WordPress to solve these large scale enterprise, high user environments.

What comes out of that is very creative, very custom, very interesting, complex solutions. This is kind of tying back to my takeaway of people need more resources and they need ways to share them. Because something that is also interesting in our space is how much custom work there is. How much people are solving the same problems, but they’re solving them on their own, and they don’t have a way to really share them. It takes a lot of energy to like maintain a public plugin that gets used around. And so because these plugins are usually so custom that creates this whole challenge.

So anyway, back to the block editor. So when you’re trying to introduce new functionality in these complex enterprise environments, it can take a while. Higher ed is usually, it’s usually a pretty slow train of adoption, and there are reasons. And a big reason for that is resources. And you’re not just going to turn around and add the block editor on because you’re probably managing like 300 websites, and you can’t just change the editing experience without changing all of your training materials, and without changing your governance.

So yeah, so there’s context to why, and there’s lots of reasons. There’s other reasons that we don’t really dive into in these numbers, but there’s context that goes into why only 40% are actually using it on all their sites, even though Gutenberg came out in 2019.

[00:15:28] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask you a quick question? You said something which took my breath away there. You said these people are managing probably 300 websites. I didn’t see that in the report anyway, and that seems like a really surprising number. How does that map to an institution? Is it because there’s a website for, I don’t know, the geography department, and then there’s another one for the sociology department? Is that what’s going on there? Because 300 seems like, well, I mean you could run your entire agency and not have 300 websites under your custodianship. So what’s going on there? You dropped that number and I was really surprised by it.

[00:16:01] Rachel Cherry: Yes, in higher ed, there is a website for everything. And there is the notion of, if you’re familiar with domain of one’s own, which is a concept actually introduced in, or invented in, higher education in the States. And what it really means in our context is that people will set up WordPress multi-sites and then let people create their own sites on it.

And they’re largely blogs, like a faculty member’s blog or a research lab’s blog. But it’s a way to allow the sharing and the spreading of information and research in higher ed with kind of a low service effort.

So like you can log on and you have like two template choices or two theme choices, and then you’re responsible for kind of managing a site on there. And then they try to, you know, build this domain in a way that’s kind of reusable code and plugins, like you do in WordPress. So yeah, you can get a lot of sites going.

[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s absolutely fascinating. I hadn’t really thought about it as, well, for example, if I go to a university website here and I end up at the Department of Geography, I’m kind of thinking it’s the same website, but I imagine, you’re right, it’s a whole different team of staff that are logging in and doing the geography stuff than they would be elsewhere.

Okay, so that’s curious. Right, back to the points that you mentioned, the resources. When you say that universities, I’m just going to use the word university, when you say that these institutions have limited resources, it kind of feels like the funding model in the US is very different to one that we have in the UK, and possibly different parts of the world.

And it always feels as if the US institutions probably have more money, but I’m probably thinking of things like the Ivy League universities where the fees are very high, but that probably doesn’t map all over the place.

So when you say resources, are you talking about cash, them being strapped for cash, or are you talking about human beings? You know, there’s not enough boots on the ground, if you like, or maybe it’s a confection of both.

[00:17:50] Rachel Cherry: Probably both, but largely headcount. I mean every university or institution’s different and some might actually be more cash strapped than others. But it’s largely a headcount. It’s largely the fact that in a lot of these institutions, you’ll have a web team of like three people managing 300 websites. And what that means, how they have to kind of manage how they spend their time and what they do with it.

[00:18:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it’s a bit of both. There’s less human beings than there might be in the corporate space, but also they’re probably fairly strapped for cash.

And then moving onto the block editor, I’ll come to you in a second, Alex, if that’s all right. But staying with Rachel for a moment. I’m looking at the chart now, 40% adoption of the block editor entirely, using them on all the websites, so point four, 40%. Then we drop down to 23% using it on some of them. 19% using on most, and then the last one really of interest here is 16% who are not using the block editor at all.

Has that adoption just sort of slowly ramped up, because 40% in higher ed feels like, to me, it doesn’t seem like a bad number in all honesty. I know that in the real world probably it is higher adoption than that, but I’m guessing that there are many more constraints on universities just switching out to the block editor. So is that number slowly but inexorably rising? It feels like it’s going in the right direction, but with the caveats that it has to happen slowly.

[00:19:11] Rachel Cherry: We don’t have data from the last, you know, four or five years to truly answer that question. But the vibe, or the sentiment, in our space is that, yes, it’s been slowly increasing. And part of that is just people, you know, there’s lots of factors, right? There’s people waiting for maturity. They’re waiting for it to grow more before they adopt. Or because of said resource discussion, people are waiting for the next redesign, for example.

In our space, I think we even asked, how often do you redesign? Is one of the questions that we asked in our survey. I think it’s on average like every three years or so, three to five years, something like that. And so people in our space tend to wait for that to really implement large scale changes because it’s just easier to do it then than it is, you’re already doing a bunch of work, you might as well do it then. And so that’s another factor involved.

[00:20:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s a little corollary to the chart that I’ve just described, underneath it, where the question was asked, how long did you wait before implementing the block editor? And basically the data skews towards, we’re trying to wait as long as possible. You know, more than two years is 35%. So it feels like, because of the nature of the audience, and I guess accessibility is a really crucial part of this, you’ve got to put the brakes on. You can’t be all that agile in the same way that maybe a corporate would, because you’ve got lots of stakeholders, lots of editorial teams that need updating and so on and so forth. So that’s kind of interesting.

And then I know that you didn’t mention this, Rachel, but it’s tantalizingly underneath the question that has just been mentioned. We move on to full site editing and it feels like, whoa, the brakes are really on for that. 62% of respondents said that they’re not using full site editing at all, and the numbers are kind of into low single figures where they’re describing whether or not they’re using it on all their sites.

So the block editor, in terms of content creation is on the rise, but it would appear that full site editing, the ability to, you know, modify themes and customise that kind of thing inside of WordPress, not so much. It feels like the breaks are really on there, probably as a result of the resources that you mentioned earlier.

[00:21:15] Rachel Cherry: It’s probably following the same trajectory. Full site editing is newer and it will grow with time. But I think with full site editing, it’s very similar concerns to the block editor, but it’s more about governance and control. When you do set up these WordPress websites where you do have a lot of governance over accessibility or over branding, it’s really scary.

The full site editing without fully understanding what it does, and how you can control it and set boundaries, there’s that concern about governance of, we don’t actually want people using our websites to be able to customise the site. We want a lot of control over that, most of the time, not everyone, but most people. Because in our space, a lot of the users that are coming in and kind of admining their site, or editing their site, are not trained web professionals. They are biology professor who’s kind of doing job as needed.

And so we want them to have flexibility to go in and publish content. We want them to be able to share their research, share their information, but we don’t want them to be able to have free reign to kind of break our governance rules, and potentially create risk to our brand or to our accessibility and things like that. And so the full site editing, there’s a lot of people that are kind of hesitant and being patient for the full site editing implementation.

[00:22:43] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for that. So we’ve got a picture then of how WordPress is deployed. It seems like it’s the CMS of choice over in the education, higher ed landscape anyway.

So moving over to Alex, I’m talking more about the implementation of this now. Presumably agencies such as yourself, Human Made, you are getting requests from these institutions to build these websites.

How does that process work? Do you generally tend to work with like the web team over there and you, you know, backwards and forwards with them? And then the bit that I’m most curious about, talking about what Rachel just said, how on earth do you get these people so that they can use the website that you’ve built? Because, in many institutions it may be one or two people have got their hands on this, but it sounds like there may be several hundred people who need to access the WordPress website. So training.

So there’s two parts to that question really. How are you interfacing in terms of building the things when you are approached by these institutions? And then how do you get to hand it off and provide a good level of support and training to them?

[00:23:37] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think the main back and forth we have would be with, typically the web team of course, as you guessed there. I think each institution is set up differently. I think Rachel probably could testify to the fact that, you know, the challenges and benefits of being set up one way is not mirrored and how it’s done elsewhere. So I do think agencies generally have to be flexible, and work within the parameters that they’re asked to, you know, that’s kind of our job.

I think there are also, particularly with the biggest implementations in higher ed, there’s often other agencies involved or other specialists involved as well. You might be working with someone, you know, we might be bringing design and platform expertise and you might be working with someone that’s looking after the marketing and the wider brand of the university as well.

So I think there’s quite a lot of collaboration indeed, like the amount of time I’ve spent within higher ed, I think collaboration is a really big theme, and I think that the successful projects that we see getting delivered are very collaborative in nature.

And then yeah, in terms of training and handover, I imagine on the ground in the universities in question, they have a bigger challenge than perhaps we do, because we’ll be handing it over to a smaller percentage ultimately of the wider institution. We don’t run 300 separate training sessions or anything like that. We provide detailed documentation, videos, follow up sessions, and we make sure that the team that are receiving the product are fully versed in it.

I think a lot of the time those people are. I think it’s handing it over to the editors that then the work will have to be done on a one-to-one basis in terms of what they’re allowed to do, going back to the FSE point. Not everyone can edit everything.

[00:25:08] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of curious because when I see a website for, again, I’m going to use the word university. When I see the website for university, I’m just seeing this kind of brochure site, really. In other words, here’s the university, look at all the magical things that we do. But my daughter has just been at university, and there’s so much more to it than that. So there’s like this portal where my daughter goes, logs in, and now the expectation is that much of the work will be carried out in that format. You know, you’ll submit content, there will be lesson plans and all of that kind of thing.

So essentially the question is leading me up to, what kind of things are being built into this website apart from the public facing bit, which we might call a prospectus, really? You’ve got this online prospectus, the world can see it, we can marvel at how great the university is, but it seems like there’s a heck of a lot more. Each department has its own stuff. Presumably the students, increasingly being expected to log in, especially post COVID, I imagine as well. So again, that one probably to Alex. What kind of curious things are built inside these WordPress websites, LMSs, brochure sites, and so on?

[00:26:10] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, I mean, no, you listed off a lot of the options there really. I mean, the main three or four pages you might think of as being the university site are very much that, just the brochure. But there’s all kinds of different requirements for different departments. We’ll have different kinds of products that they want to build in there. You’ve got archives of hundreds and thousands of different reports and pieces of information from the past that will be needed to be upheld.

We rebuilt Harvard Gazette, which is, you know, obviously part of the wider infrastructure at Harvard. So that’s a massive publishing site. That’s essentially the same as any magazine or newspaper would have. It’s what it is. As you say, the student logins, all the complexities of multi-site. Rachel, I’m sure you’ve probably got a list longer than that.

[00:26:53] Rachel Cherry: It’s a lot, right? In my role as an accessibility professional, do a lot of governance work and it’s trying to tie together all these different types because there’s WordPress at my university, but there’s tons of other stuff. There’s front end brochure websites, and there’s research lab sites, and there’s marketing websites, and then there’s all the academic focused, as Alex mentioned a few. There’s a lot of web applications. There’s a lot of people doing a lot of different types of content in different ways. And how does that all tie together?

We talk a lot about things like data sharing and a lot of the work that we do is also just trying to keep all this content in sync and trying to not have duplicates or not have outdated content, things like that. So when we talk about governance is like a big word that means a lot of things to different people. But a lot of it is really just kind of managing quality and the expectations of how websites are managed and how our mission as an institution is kind of presented to the world.

So it’s interesting, Nathan, that you say, like to you, it’s like you just see this brochure site, and that’s a common conversation about kind of the challenges of enterprise. We have all this internal knowledge and we also have, you know, there’s a funny common conversation in universities about acronyms. We have all this internal terminology that we use, but does that come across to the end user? Does the work that we do translate? And it’s a complicated question to solve.

[00:28:22] Nathan Wrigley: I’m kind of curious as to whether or not WordPress can service the needs of the entire IT department, if you like, within a higher ed institution. So I’m imagining that the legacy is that there’s many, many pieces of software that are being used throughout the university. You know, there may be some sort of portal where people log in and check in that they’re actually at work. There may be other things where people log their essays that they supply to their tutors and things like that. Plus then there’s the brochure on the front end.

I’m curious as to whether or not WordPress in the future can handle most of those, and whether there’s an appetite from the higher ed institutions to have everything in one platform. They may see that as, you know, maybe that presents an Achilles heel to them. If there’s one systemic failure, then the whole thing goes down. But I’m curious as to whether or not WP Campus is trying to pitch WordPress as the answer to all the things, or is it a much more limited subset of things? You know, it’s the website, and it’s the LMS and that kind of thing. So that’s more of a kind of roadmap question, whether you’re trying to push WordPress as being the answer to everything.

[00:29:20] Rachel Cherry: As an organisation, we don’t really push for WordPress to be used. It’s not really our mission. That’s not how we think or how we work. It’s really more just to support people that have, that are using it, and to help each other in our roles.

To answer your broader question, I mean I kind of, it depends. Can WordPress be used for all these things? Sure. I’m sure you could finagle it to do a lot of things. Should it do all those things? Probably not. Not in its current state, no. It, in and of itself, is a database with programming and you can get it to do all kinds of things.

[00:29:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there was one of the questions which I’ve just refound and it was, what challenges do you face with the WordPress plugin ecosystem? And bloat was one of the things that was mentioned. So yeah, this is specifically to do with WordPress plugins. It’s not WordPress Core. I thought that was kind of curious.

And then in second place, just by a whisker, was accessibility requirements as well. And you’ve touched on accessibility a lot, Rachel. You’ve mentioned the word tangentially, and obviously that’s your kind of area of expertise.

I’m guessing, but I’m not sure for certain, does the US compel certain things to be done in certain ways? You know, if you’re a university and you launch a website, does it have to comply with things? And do those things map across the globe? I know that we’ve got the European Accessibility Act, which just dropped earlier this year. So the question is pretty broad, but just tell us about the accessibility requirements and how stringent they are in higher ed as compared to just, I don’t know, if I’ve got a brochure site online selling widgets into the community.

[00:30:51] Rachel Cherry: So unfortunately the US does not have as strong accessibility laws as Europe does, or many countries in Europe, like the UK and others. We do have some though, and we do have something called section 508, which basically means that if you receive federal funding or federal service, you do have to meet certain accessibility requirements.

And so universities in the US largely fall under that. Not always. Universities are probably the only real kind of ecosystem in the US that does have more accessibility rules than other industries like general business. And so that’s why we did that accessibility audit of Gutenberg to help support our community in that time.

And so it is very important, accessibility is very important. And it kind of touches on something that I said earlier about, a lot of universities in the US especially build custom plugins because they have to meet accessibility guidelines and it’s really challenging sometimes to find general use plugins available in the ecosystem that meet those guidelines. And so a lot of teams just kind of build their own stuff.

And so I would say that those top two challenges, when it comes to bloat and accessibility are really, like that was not surprising in any way. That is the common struggle. It’s finding plugins that meet our accessibility requirements, especially with the front end. And then having plugins that do a lot of functionality that people don’t need. And so I think a lot of these times will lend people to kind of build their own plugins.

They won’t rebuild like complicated plugins, any kind of administrative plugins or like form builders and things like that. Like, people largely will use plugins from the ecosystem. But there’s a lot of custom functionality in the work that we do.

So once again, I think the common theme is it’s complex, and because of that complexity, there’s all kinds of interesting challenges. And so plugins are hard to kind of maintain. It feels like, I hear a lot of people expressing to me, you know, how often they have to kind of update them and keep them up to date, and manage and do all that. And so it’s not enough to stop people from using WordPress, like they’re using it, but having better solutions for some of these challenges would be an example of kind of supporting these higher ed institutions using WordPress.

[00:33:12] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Alex, back to you. A question around just higher ed in general, is this like an area which Human Made is drilling down on? Is this an endeavor that you are trying to grow the pie, if you like? There’s thousands, I would imagine, maybe tens of thousands of institutions which come under the banner of higher ed. And at the moment, I don’t know what percentage of them are using WordPress. If we were to ask every single one of them, I would imagine it’s a significant percentage.

But the idea of WP Campus, I guess, is to have a central place where people can go and learn about it. And Human Made being involved, presumably there’s some advantage to you as an enterprise agency. The question basically boils down to, is this an area that you are going to be working on, pitching towards, trying to grow in the near future?

[00:33:55] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, for sure. I think like I said at the start, we’re generally the kind of agency who works on larger platforms, maybe more complicated platforms. And I think we’re interested in, you know, a broad range of industries. Probably higher ed is one of four or five, probably publishing, finance, enterprise generally, entertainment, higher ed. I think those industries tend to provide very interesting use cases for WordPress. We’re interested in all of them.

I think we’ve seen, in the last couple of years, a lot of interesting higher ed projects being worked on by us and obviously by lots and lots of other people. And yeah, like we’re definitely part of that world, and really interested in it and, you know, yeah, definitely keen to continue being part of it, a hundred percent.

[00:34:45] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting, towards the bottom of the survey, so right near the bottom, probably nine tenths of the way through, there’s a whole series of kind of roadmap questions, if you like, things about the future of WordPress. And the fairly, I don’t know, blunt question, let’s put it that way, because it could have gone in the other direction it turns out, it’s hopefully gone in the right direction, but the question was asked, would you move to another CMS if you had time and resources?

And gosh, that could go the wrong way. The answer was a strong 49% no. Which, when you say it like that you think, hang on, only half of the people wouldn’t move. But then you ask, then the other bit was only 23% are looking to move at all, and 28% are unknown. So really you’re up into the sort of seventies really, who either are not sure or want to stick around.

That seems like an amazing statistic to me. And obviously, Human Made have kind of put their flag in the ground in higher ed, WP Campus, the same. It feels like you’ve got quite a lot of runway with these institutions in the future. Unless things go horribly wrong within WordPress, it looks like you’ve got an audience long into the future.

[00:35:43] Alex Aspinall: I think the report offers a really positive view of WordPress. As a technology choice, I think on the whole, most people are saying it was delivering what they needed it to. I can’t remember if it’s 70, 75%, something like that, it was said that it was either meeting or exceeding their expectations, which I think is a large number. Again, it’s not like 90, but if you think about the amount of ways you can complain about software, particularly people that know a lot about the software, I think 75% is pretty good.

And yeah, you’re right, whilst people are perhaps saying, oh, they’re looking around or they’re always considering alternatives, I think we’ve seen repeatedly that the platform, its security credentials, its extensibility, some of the core features, are all spoken about really, really favorably from the people that responded to the survey.

And I think really we saw a passionate group of people responding to a technology they know a lot about. There are a lot of ways it could improve, we all know that, and the people that completed the survey know that as well, and they’ve, you know, they weren’t shy about listing them out. But I think you’re right, overall, the level of satisfaction is good, and I think with further adoption and the adoption of newer features, I think that that satisfaction should continue to grow.

In fact, one of the things I was actually kind of wanting to ask Rachel actually was back to the point about FSE earlier on. I actually think WordPress needs to do a much better job of marketing itself, particularly around newer features, and particularly perhaps at the enterprise level, or where there’s complex use cases, or where a lot of the users aren’t developers. The benefits of FSE, for example, are numerous. And we’ve seen clients and indeed we’ve used it ourselves, and the people using it really like it, and I think that’s reflected in the report as well.

So I was going to ask Rachel, as well as the other examples of why adoption might have been slow in higher ed, do you think that there’s actually a case for people in, maybe agencies, maybe WordPress Core doing a better job of the selling and the pitching? Because I actually believe that there are worse solutions that do a better job of convincing people that they should work in a certain way.

[00:37:51] Rachel Cherry: I think there’s always room for more marketing and kind of communication about what’s going on, and there’s always improvement for that. And I do feel like Core could do more towards the enterprise ecosystem as well. That, you know, I don’t know what their primary use case that they’re focusing on is. But I would be surprised to find out that enterprise is higher up on that list. And so paying attention to our community and having open conversations with them, and there has been some efforts at that. There’s not like a non amount of effort on that.

But yeah there’s, I think a good way to kind of describe how a lot of our community works is just kind of, it’s cautiously optimistic, but cautious. And having to manage risk and having to manage their time and energy, and so they’re not going to jump into anything. They’re going to do a lot of research. They’re going to try to find out who else is doing it, and is it working well for them?

So there’s a lot of, we do a lot of case studies and try to encourage our community to share about the work they’re doing. Because really that goes a long way too. If a university sees another university using full site editing and that it’s successful, then that goes a long way.

And when you have an absence of that, when you have an absence of examples, then it’s a struggle, right? Because our environment is so complex that an article about full site editing and what it can do doesn’t really go super far. We need to understand, not just what it does, but the long-term implications. Because once we implement it, that’s it. It’s very hard to back up, especially in our, these 300 website multi-site instances where we’ve got to train people and do all these things. We can’t rush into it.

So there’s a lot of cautious waiting and seeing. So the more that universities can share about how they’re using the tools and how it’s working for them, and what’s not working for them. Being genuine in the reality of what we’re doing goes a long way. So there’s pros and cons, like, here’s how it worked, here’s the roadblocks we hit, here’s how it could be better. Having those kinds of conversations can really go a long way towards adoption.

[00:39:59] Nathan Wrigley: I have a few things to add to this, and the first one would be that my expectation when a survey is put out is, broadly speaking, the expectation is that negativity is going to be the thing driving them to the survey. And that’s not what you find here. People who’ve got an axe to grind are frequently more likely to open up a survey and grind the axe, and that isn’t the case here.

You know, it’s remarkably sanguine. Everybody seems entirely optimistic. And even the data which may be not quite as favorable, is not unfavorable. It’s just maybe not as shiny as it could have been.

But then I’m looking at the second question here about what the favorite things are and it’s all the stuff that we lean into all the time. The extensibility, the fact that it’s free, otherwise known as cost, the fact that it’s multi-site capable, the fact that there’s plugins and what have you that you can extend it with.

And the editing experience, so we’re talking about full site editing, I guess there as well as the editor, is low on the list of priorities, which is quite interesting. Only 36% of respondents thought that that was their priority.

And then talking to the broader, I don’t know, the marketing piece, I think WordPress as a whole, it is really difficult to market something to the entire world. And that’s what WordPress is. So for the, like the Core community and things like that, to try and figure out where to put their best efforts, you know, how to convince people that WordPress is the solution for them, is really difficult, because it’s everybody. It’s literally anybody who might want a website.

And so I think that’s where endeavors like WP Campus really pull out all the stops. You know, you are out there shouting loudly that this is the credible solution, if you’ve got a need for a website in the higher ed space. You are making it so that, I guess if we were to Google higher ed CMS, WordPress is going to come up fairly high. So you are growing that pie.

But I guess the audience is fairly small, isn’t it? You know, at each institution, how many people are going to be making those searches? It’s not going to be the 300 people that you mentioned. It’s probably going to be the web team.

So I think you’re doing great work. You know, you’re definitely finding those people and the important decision makers are probably the people. that you need to find.

I keep coming back to the phrase, growing the pie. That’s what I think WP Campus is basically about. You know, of the 10,000 institutions out there that might use WordPress, it’s about making sure that a growing proportion of them know that it’s a credible alternative to whatever they’re using now. And from the numbers in the survey, it looks like once you’ve onboarded them, it’s easy to keep hold of them, which is pretty cool.

[00:42:21] Rachel Cherry: For WP Campus as an organisation, we wanted to use the survey to really surface the needs. And so there’s questions in this survey that talk about what plugin needs exist.

You know, one of my takeaways from this survey is how WordPress does need more enterprise functionality. And that’s covered a lot in the questions about plugin functionality. There is a big need and a gap for a lot of enterprise functionality in the WordPress ecosystem and higher ed needs it. So if there are people out there wanting to build it, we are ready for it.

And so, you know, I want to surface those needs to kind of help bring more resources to our community and to what they’re doing. And so anyone out there looking to help fill that gap, please check out the survey and I’m open to have a conversation at any time, and we’d love for you to join our Slack and ask us questions and get us involved.

[00:43:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s an interesting call to action because you know, if you’ve got space in your calendar to build a new thing, you now have a brand new audience potentially, if you’ve not considered the higher education space, there’s a ton of data in this report which you can download. So maybe this is a whole new audience that you didn’t realise that you could tap into. Alex, was there anything, it sounded like you had something.

[00:43:33] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, no, I was just going to echo really to what Rachel was saying there. I think the idea with this report was to, as Rachel said earlier on, provide data that has been missing. There’s no cynical play, it’s a collaborative report that’s designed to help other people understand how their peers are working, what their challenges are, how they’re trying to solve them, what kind of environment they’re doing it all in.

It’s a really fascinating area, as I said earlier on, and we are really excited to see it develop and help it develop. And, yeah, we will be certainly collaborating with WP Campus and Rachel going forward.

[00:44:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so whether or not, it really doesn’t matter which bit of WordPress you are attached to, whether you’re a hosting company or a plugin or a theme developer or an agency, just building out websites, there really is a bit of this which will map to whatever it is that you are doing.

The website URL I mentioned earlier, wpcampus.org is where you’re going to find this out. I presume that they’re somewhere, if I was to explore, I would probably find a contact form. But beyond that, let’s go to Rachel first, how could people reach out to you if they’re curious about what you’ve said to today? Where would they best find you?

[00:44:36] Rachel Cherry: Yeah, so you can join our Slack, which is accessible from wpcampus.org. There is a Slack page and you fill out a form and you get an invite, and feel free to join and start some conversations. There is a contact form on wpcampus.org, and I do receive those emails along with other people in our organisation. So that’s another great way to get in touch with me as well.

[00:44:59] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. And Alex, same question.

[00:45:01] Alex Aspinall: Yeah, for us, obviously website, humanmade.com. There’s a contact form on there. But also Twitter and LinkedIn tend to be our main sort of points of contact for people getting in touch with us.

Might also be worth flagging out, we’ve got a Word on the Future newsletter, which goes out once a month. You can sign up for that on the website. That generally has this kind of content, not always about higher education, but about the enterprise WordPress space in general. So that’s quite a nice touch point too.

[00:45:24] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll just mention before we finish off that the WP Campus site not only links to, you know, the bits and pieces that are going on right now, but there’s the blog and there’s also links to the events as well as the Slack channel and things like that, oh, and a newsletter. There’s a whole load of opportunities to keep in touch with what’s going on over there.

So, yeah, what I would also say is it’s very hard in an audio podcast to do justice to a report, which is primarily graphics. So please, if you’ve any curiosity around what we’ve been talking about, go and download that and you’ll be able to get the full detail of what we’ve been talking about. You’re going to find that on the Human Made website, and I will link to it in the show notes.

Okay, Rachel Cherry, Alex Aspinall, thank you so much for chatting to me today. Really appreciate it.

[00:46:05] Alex Aspinall: Thanks for having us.

[00:46:06] Rachel Cherry: Yes, thank you.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how WordPress is shaping the future of education for students worldwide.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today, we have Destiny Kanno, Isotta Peira, and Anand Upadhyay.

Destiny is the Head of Community Education at Automattic. Isotta is the leader of the WordPress Credits Initiative for students, and Anand is the founder of WordPress Campus Connect.

This episode is all about how WordPress is not only powering websites, but also empowering the next generation of learners and creators. You’ll hear about the growing movement of education focused WordPress events happening worldwide, from hands-on workshops on university campuses in India, to student clubs designed to keep the momentum going after introductory events.

Anand shares how WP Campus Connect is bringing WordPress directly to students, reducing barriers to entry, and helping bridge the gap between academic learning and real world tech skills. We also explore the challenges of organizing these events, from convincing institutions of the value of open source, to fostering genuine community involvement among both students and educators.

Isotta then introduces us to the WordPress Credits Program, an initiative that lets students turn their contributions to the WordPress ecosystem into recognized academic credits at universities like, Pisa in Italy. It’s a win-win. Students gain practical resume worthy experience, while educational institutions get a transferable, skills focused, program that prepares learners for the jobs of the future.

Whether you’re an educator, a WordPress enthusiast, or just someone who cares about open source and community, this episode is packed with actionable insights. The guests share how flexible and resilient these education initiatives are, how you can get involved, and why engaging the next generation is not just important, but essential for the continued growth and sustainability of the WordPress community.

It’s a truly inspiring episode, and is at the intersection of so many areas of profound importance.

If you’re curious about how to bring WordPress into your local school, university, or community, or if you just want to hear how WordPress is making a difference far beyond the web, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Destiny Kanno, Isotta Peira and Anand Upadhyay.

I am joined on the podcast by Destiny Kanno, by Isotta Peira, and also by Anand Upadhyay. Welcome all three of you. Thanks for joining me today.

Now just before we begin this podcast, we’re going to be talking about education, the education landscape, and how WordPress combines with that. I hope during the course of this conversation, you will get an impression that this is something which is very dear to my heart. We don’t need to go into that, but this is about the most profoundly purposeful use of a CMS that I can actually imagine. I mean, I’m sure there’s other scenarios for other people, but for me, this is the perfect sweet spot. Education, WordPress, open source software. It doesn’t basically get better than that for me.

So with that out of the way, I think it would be good to go round the houses one at a time and just give a little short biography of who you are, where you work, what your history is with WordPress, something like that. You can make it as long or as short as you like, but if we keep it under a minute, maybe something like that, that would be good. So let’s go to Destiny first.

[00:04:46] Destiny Kanno: Yes. Hi there, I’m Destiny. I’m currently head of community education at Automattic. I’m a sponsored contributor in the .org space. And yes, before working on the exciting new initiatives we’re going to chat through today, I was working alongside the training team, two years as a training team rep, helping build out content, like online workshops and courses and learning pathways. And I was part of the group of folks that brought that new relaunch live last year. So yeah, exciting stuff, and that’s what I’m up to right now.

[00:05:23] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s great. Thank you so much. We have some context there, that’s lovely. And okay, let’s go to Isotta. Do you want to give us your bio next?

[00:05:30] Isotta Peira: Sure. Thanks a lot Nathan for inviting us and, yeah. I’m Isotta, I’ve been around the community since, WordPress community since 2022 when I joined Automattic, and I’ve been a sponsored contributor since then. For the past year, three years, four years, I’ve been contributing full time to the community team. And recently this year I switched on to the educational initiative, and I’m currently leading the WordPress Credits program for students.

[00:06:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you very much. And finally, Anand.

[00:06:04] Anand Upadhyay: Hi, my name is Anand, and I am running a WordPress plugin development company WPVibes. I am a user of WordPress from the last 15 years, since 2010 I’m using WordPress for various purposes.

I have been contributing to WordPress through much multiple channels like Core, docs, polyglots, jumping from one team to another. And from the last year, I have found like my new passion. Just like you, I am also passionate about education and teaching. So from the last year, I found this idea of WordPress Campus Connect, and currently I’m very much involved in trying to bring it to the broader community.

[00:06:39] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. So I think we’ve established that the panelists today, there’s a lot of really meaningful contributions in all of your past, especially around WordPress and education. So let’s dig into that a little bit. As I said at the top of this show, I can’t see a more meaningful use of WordPress, frankly.

I mean, I don’t know what it’s like in the places where you live, but in the UK where I live, education is one of those things where we like to talk about it being a priority, but the finances kind of don’t really match up to that aspiration. And so things like ICT, websites, coding, all of that, it’s a nice thing to have, but I think often it gets left in the background a little bit.

And because of that, things like open source platforms, I feel there’s a really great use of that, not only from the educator’s point of view, you know, people that can use those platforms to help with their class education, maybe set up a community website, maybe set up a school website or something like that. But also from the point of view of learners, people who wish to get a leg up in life, and figure that maybe learning technology and learning how to build on the web is a credible place for them to start.

So let’s just go through, where is WordPress at the moment in the educational landscape? I know that’s incredibly broad because we haven’t sort of pinned it down to any of the projects. Where are we at? What are the initiatives that are going on at the moment? So, again, anybody that wants to jump in, if we do a bit of crosstalking, so be it. But anybody that wants to jump in, just go for it.

[00:08:13] Destiny Kanno: I’ll start from like what I’ve observed a little bit. I’m pretty new to the Community Team itself and this event space, but I have seen that there have been a few education related events happening throughout the years, regardless of WordPress Campus Connect.

Like in Africa, they recently had their, I think it’s annual event, I believe in Uganda. And that has been going on for a while. It just hasn’t been under like the name WordPress Campus Connect.

And then I believe as well, and correct me if I’m wrong, there was, with Sebastian in Poland, this like WordPress Academy, like they’re also doing like education type events and initiatives. But when it comes to now this WordPress Campus Connect, it’s an official event series, like do_action. It has like more intention around that. And I think because when you go in and you, you know, apply to organise, and now there’s this way to do it through WordPress Campus Connect, it’s just going to bring those initiatives that are already happening into like a more streamlined funnel of people seeing that it’s happening, I think, in a more, how do I say it?

[00:09:21] Nathan Wrigley: Cohesive would be the word.

[00:09:22] Destiny Kanno: Yeah, cohesive way. Thank you.

[00:09:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so I guess what you’re saying there is that there’s a lot of people out there in the WordPress community, many of whom might be educators or, you know, working in a school or what have you, and that they’ve rolled their own thing like we all have with WordPress. And that’s great. That’s one of the benefits of having open source software. You download it, roll your own, what have you.

But it’s also, it’s nice, it’s meaningful, it’s impactful if everybody can see, oh, there’s a bigger, kind of more organised piece somewhere. And it may not fit exactly what I’m doing, but at least I can see that it can be deployed this way. Maybe I can talk to those people, get some intuitions and ideas from those people and what have you, yeah.

[00:10:01] Isotta Peira: I wanted to jump in and connect with what Destiny was saying because this is exactly what happened from the community perspective. So talking about events, a few years ago we were seeing the Training Team doing a lot of great progress around education and the Community Team around events. But we weren’t that connected between contribution teams. And we’ve also, as like project wise, we were seeing also the need to bring a different type of audience to the WordPress events.

And we weren’t exploring at all the education field. With all the students around the world, we weren’t like taking care of them in our programs. So from the Community Team, they kind of encourage organisers all over the world to come up with new diverse format for events. And in 2023 it was launched this, it was called at the time next generation of WordPress events.

And one of the formats that stood out was exactly the Campus Connect brought up by Anand and the community. And other events like the Website challenge, and the others that’s been mentioned. And as he was saying, then we have had the time now to come back, connect the pieces between different contribution teams, and be able to offer something recognisable, standardised, something not as overwhelming as sometimes open source programs are.

And so we hope not just to reach a wider audience of students, but also to empower more teachers, more trainings, and anybody else in the community into bringing WordPress in any different type of education at different levels. With the support of course of the community.

[00:11:47] Nathan Wrigley: We will get into the bits that WP Campus Connect do in a moment, but just coming back to something that you said there, it feels to me, if I browse around in the WordPress landscape, and trust me, I browse around in the WordPress landscape rather a lot. It always feels to me as if, how to describe this, initiatives where companies sell WordPress on, they build things and there’s a fee involved. You know, so you’re a web agency or what have you, you build the thing and you sell it on.

That seems to dominate the conversation. And the more philanthropic side of things, the education piece, the bit where you’re just, you’re doing the work because it’s meaningful, and perhaps you are not getting remunerated for it. That bit somehow gets, well, it gets ignored. It somehow is the silent relation of the for-profit things. You know, you hang out in Facebook groups and you hang out on Twitter, X, whatever, online, it’s always the for-profit bit, which seems to be making the noise, you know, the plugins, the themes, and rah, rah, rah.

And this kind of stuff seems to get left. And I don’t know why that is, but it’s, hopefully this podcast is addressing some of that.

Anyway, sorry Anand, I think it’s your turn to have a little bit of a chat with us. Tell us about, yeah, the same question really, your experience in the education space and where you think WordPress is at at the moment.

[00:13:02] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah, so just as you explained about the state of education in the UK, so the same is in our region, India as well. So students in the academic life are slightly disconnected with the, what is happening in the industry? So there is like a gap between the academics and the industry. So through these kind of events, we are empowering the students to come closer to what really happening in there.

And we are also helping them to make aware about the various carrier opportunities that WordPress ecosystem can bring to them. It’s not like about just one thing, it’s also about if someone is interested in programming, someone is interested in designing, SEO, content. So there is something for everyone, right?

So with this program, we are trying to connect the students with the various career opportunities, and also trying to bring some fresh energy to the WordPress ecosystem. They can become the contributors, they can bring their own fresh perspective. Because I have read somewhere the WordPress community in many areas is aging. We need that new fresh energy. So this kind of program can also address that problem.

It’s always good to have more people getting involved in the contribution, like sort of just started with the WP Credit, which is bringing actually students to the contribution. And the Campus program is trying to introduce them to the WordPress. So all these kind of programmers combined with working towards getting more and more people getting involved in the WordPress ecosystem, and trying to make the project more sustainable in the long run.

[00:14:28] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting, I attend quite a lot of WordPress events, and particularly the flagship events so, you know, the WordCamp Asia’s and Europe’s and US and what have you. And, I think you’re right about the demographic. The demographic definitely skews older. It’s hard to see anything above, I would imagine 10% of the crowd that would be under the age of 20. I have no data to back any of that up. I’m kind of putting my finger in the air a little bit.

But it feels like that. It feels like the demographic is, I don’t know, 30, 35, 40 and above. And if that were the only reason that you were doing WP Campus Connect, that in itself would be a credible reason, you know? But obviously there’s a lot more to it than that. But just that alone would be significant and important.

And I think also, in a world dominated by proprietary platforms where everything is siloed, you don’t own your own data, the experience is exciting because there’s some kind of algorithm trying to hook into your brainstem, then we need to get these young people. And because we don’t have the marketing budgets of a Facebook or a TikTok or what have you, then we have to do it in different ways. And attaching an event to a campus, to a university, to an educational institution is a great way I think of doing this.

So firstly, bravo, for getting this thing off the ground. Perhaps this one is for Anand again. I don’t know if he wants to take this question, but can you just describe what WP Campus Connect is? What’s involved in that? What’s the age group? Where are you doing it predominantly? How long has it been going? As much or as little as you like. And depending on what you give back to us, we can take it from there.

[00:16:09] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah, so WordPress Campus Connect, there is no like fixed criteria on to whom you are going to deliver this. So the only thing is we are going to the students, we are going to their campus. We are not creating a kind of WordCamp kind of thing, or centralised workshop where everybody is coming to our venue and we are delivering them the knowledge, but it’s about going to their campus. And because this will reduce the friction, like if we are going to organise an event, centralised event, we are inviting everyone to join, then there will be a friction. A lot of people might not going to join. Maybe there were some valid reasons as well.

So with Campus Connect, we are going to their campus and delivering the WordPress knowledge to them. And so far we have done this in the universities, postgraduate colleges, undergraduate students. And we are helping them to understand the WordPress, how WordPress can be a career choice for them, and how WordPress can be useful for whatever their interest is.

Because as I already said, that there is students, if we are going to a college or university, that every student might have different kind of interests. Maybe they are enrolled in the same course, but still they have, might have some different kind of interests.

So we are trying to explain them that they are with various career opportunities available so you can jump in. And we are doing it through the hands-on workshops. It’s not like that we are just doing a kind of seminar or lecture kind of thing. We are doing it in form of a kind of a hands-on workshop, like five to six hour workshop where we will help them to build their first website.

And it’s not about like we want to make them expert in six hours. It’s not possible. So what we want to do is, we want to give them a feeling of accomplishment. This is something that is something interesting and this is something that we can use and build something.

So this way, if they get some, after six hour workshop or five hours workshop, if they’re coming out with kind of feeling of accomplishment that this is interesting, we should explore it further, we should explore it more. So that’s our win.

[00:18:05] Nathan Wrigley: Can I ask, in the part of the world where you are, is there a real hunger for this? Is there a real appetite for this? Because with the best will in the world, I think there might be a geographical divide in terms of interest and hunger for things like WordPress. And again, there’s no heuristics behind this, this is me supposing from what I’ve heard and conversations that I have had.

It feels like in your part of the world, and you only have to look at plugin contributions, contributions to Core, events that are taking place in your neck of the woods. It seems like there’s a real appetite for it, that there may not be quite in the part of the world where I am from. So first of all, can we speak to that? Is that the case? Is it like, you know, you put this stuff on and people show up? You build it and they come?

[00:18:56] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah, so there is a quite hunger. India is like a kind of a very large country and if you count the number of WordCamps that happening in India every year, it’s quite big. Right now, these are like two, three months where we don’t have any WordCamps because it’s mostly the rainy season in everywhere. Otherwise every month you will have one or two WordCamps. And the communities that are organising WordCamps struggle to find a date that is not conflicting with another WordCamp in the same country. So that’s how the things happen.

If you talk about the beginning of this year, first three weekends have WordCamps in India, and all were very successful. So there is a kind of WordPress community is very engaging in India, and so the way everywhere.

And also if you talk about the hunger in the students, so it can vary about what they are learning, what their background is, where they’re located. But, yeah, students from what we have interacted, because we interacted with the students who doesn’t have any knowledge. We got a very good response. We saw them talking about like, oh, this is great. We can do something amazing with this. We have a lot of ideas already. This is something that we can use to implement those ideas.

So there is surely a hunger, but we just need to give them a path like, this is the path, and you can follow this. And we need to ensure them, there’s big opportunities, big market opportunities are also waiting for them if they excellent with some skills in this segment.

[00:20:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think it’s true to say that more or less every young person, let’s go, child or young adult or what have you, has some sort of insatiable appetite to learn. But given the education that they’re presented with, given the opportunities that are put in front of them, their experience of life later on will be very different. And so if WordPress never comes on the menu for them, if nobody ever suggests, well, have a look at this thing, then they’ll never know about this thing. This whole wonderful world of online publishing and all of the myriad things that you can do around the WordPress ecosystem. And so WP Campus Connect, I guess is facilitating that.

Now, curiously though, you said that you go to where the educational institution is. How does that work? How do you connect, so again, this doesn’t have to go to Anand, this can go to anybody. How do you connect the educator, let’s say, or the institution that wishes to put something on because, you know, their students might like it. How do you connect the educational institution with the people who then go in and provide this WordPress workshop and training? How does that work? How does that get paid for? Is it all voluntary? There’s a lot in there to unpack, but I hope you get the thrust of my question. How do all those jigsaw pieces fit together?

[00:21:37] Anand Upadhyay: The first thing is it’s all voluntary. So just like in a WordCamp, we have an organising team, a team of organisers and speakers. Nobody’s getting paid for this. We are also doing it voluntary. We have a team of organisers, not specifically to me, every WordCamp has a team of organisers, have a team of volunteers, workshop facilitators who are organising the workshops. So it’s all voluntary, nobody’s getting paid.

And also it’s free for students as well. There is no charge for students from the WordPress Campus team. So it’s not like we are putting a kind of a ticket to them. It’s completely free. Going to your question about getting the institutes convinced for letting us do the workshop in their campus, so it’s kind of a tricky thing.

The first time we reached out to the institute, so it was very tricky. I get to the college with a pitch deck. So I pitched the complete idea, complete presentation to show them what is WordPress, what are the kind of community thing? Because every institute has this question like, why you are doing this? What are your benefit?

And It’s the same thing that you said, we have to pass that bureaucracy before getting to the better benefit of the student. We have to go to the bureaucracy. And it’s a genuine question in their mind as well, because, not a lot of such communities exist that are doing these kind of free things voluntarily. For the students. So the first question we were asked is, why are you doing this? What are your benefits? And don’t expect anything from us.

[00:22:58] Nathan Wrigley: It rings so bizarre in the world in which we live. Everything about that screams, hang on. Wait, where’s the catch? Where’s the sales pitch? What’s going to happen after the fact?

[00:23:10] Anand Upadhyay: We have to work on with this way and we have to explain like complete things. We showed them that these are the big events that in the WordCamp ecosystem happens, and we are trying to create a unique initiative for students and we’ll be delivering everything free to them. And we were not going to charge, we just need you to provide the students and the required infrastructure.

So the pitch is really tough. In some institutes we got very understanding people who understood what we are saying. Within the next 15 minutes, we got them convinced. In some places we have to discuss a lot of questions. But yeah, it was again, interesting experience as well. We got some general feedback from them as, because last time it was the very first time we were doing this kind of thing. We don’t have any reference, like we just have an idea like we are going through this thing. So we also brainstorm with them like, what are the expectation of your students? They also gave us some suggestions.

So because in every institute you’ll find different kind of students, you have to plan your workshops, you have to plan your workflow according to the interest of the students. So that’s how we approached, yeah, to convince the institute is the most tricky part. Because other than that, if you have to do workshop, we have our facilitators who are already working in WordPress. So it’s not difficult for them to deliver the same knowledge to adults. The only barrier that we have is to convince the college and universities to join and become a partner.

[00:24:32] Nathan Wrigley: And has that journey, that, I guess bridge that you’ve got to cross, has that now become more straightforward? In that, you’ve got a history of things that you’ve done. So it’s now more a case of, look, here’s the testimonials. Here’s the things that have happened. We have credibility, we’ve done it before. This is not brand new. Has that become an easier journey? In other words, the door is more open than it was the first few times around.

[00:24:54] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah, so the last year it was very tough. We have to reach up to them, take appointment, go there and spend some time there. And this year in the institute where we have done this last year, I just sent them a message like, we are doing it again, and if you want to be a part, just fill this form and we will discuss further.

It works. So it’s much easier. And to those who are not a partner last year, but they have seen our post on the social media after the event, and they reached out to us like somehow we missed it, this time connect with us whenever you are doing it again. So once you have done this thing, you have a credibility and you can just showcase them.

After that event, we have got a lot of the students joining our meetup. Before that, I’m running our city meetup from 2017, and we barely get 10 to 12 members in every meetup. Right now we are doing the meetups of 40 to 50 members. And it’s a kind of amazing thing. And it’s not only about having a lot of the students only. After seeing the students joining in, after seeing our pictures and the sort of local community going on, some professionals are also jumping in to join the meetups.

Because they see that there is something valuable going on. So they’re also joining. So this is something amazing, because this is a byproduct. You’ll be able to grow your local community. You’ll be able to strengthen your local community more.

[00:26:10] Nathan Wrigley: I have such profound respect for what you are doing. It is almost bringing tears to my eyes. It’s incredible. Everything that you say there is just so philanthropic. It’s just philanthropy all the way down. College students probably don’t have a great deal of money to throw around. They would want to consume education, which will make their life prospects better. They would like that to be as affordable as possible.

And you show up, like here’s a bunch of stuff and it’s completely free. Okay, that’s great. And then there’s this virtuous cycle of, okay, we do it each year. That becomes easier, because the testimonials work, and presumably you can spread out and the ripples will move around where you live. And then hopefully maybe hop through jurisdictions and borders and international, who knows? We can get to that.

But then also this knock on effect, which was maybe unexpected, a consequence that was unexpected of the WordPress community, the meetups that you offer, the swelling there and swelling in the, we talked about the demographics earlier, it’s skewing younger. And if you can attract a percentage of those, and keep them sticking around in the community, they can then take on these roles in the future.

And the whole thing kind of propels itself. What it needed was the prime mover, which was you, which is pretty incredible. So I don’t know if Destiny or Isotta want to add anything. I’m almost speechless.

[00:27:31] Destiny Kanno: I did have like a few points I wanted to add to what everyone’s saying. Reducing barriers has been a huge factor of setting this up. Originally we were using like the previous event organisation form and were like, actually there’s a lot of stuff in here. It doesn’t make sense for this use case. So we really paid a lot of attention to just thinking differently for this, and treating it differently. We don’t have to use the same things as we had before.

And Isotta said before, like it’s standardised in a way, but it’s flexible too. So even though we have this framework that people can come to, we don’t say, you can only do the event in this way. You can have a one day event, you could do a half day event, you could have event series over a couple weeks like Anand is doing, and that is totally cool. Like, however you want to run this, we are open to that, and we’re also here to mentor you and support you in that.

And then I, a thought came to my mind as Anand was talking, and you Nathan as well about like, you know, what’s in it for the volunteers? And I’m like, I think it’s an opportunity for volunteers just as much as it is the students, because they’re also getting exposure to these universities. And I don’t know, maybe someone has an ambition to teach at university someday, or like at least teach about WordPress at a university. So, you know, as you go into these, yes, there’s a hundred percent the philanthropic aspect, but it’s also like a learning experience for you as well as a volunteer to be in that space with the students too.

And then lastly, I wanted to say as well, like going a little bit back about the current climate and how it feels like we are kind of like aging, I’ve also noticed in my experience it’s like, we are all also just, this is probably very like, duh, but we’re all professionals, right? So we’re not really looking to talk to students most of the time. We’re looking to sell something or network or like talk to other professionals. So I do think that this is a great way to bring in that new batch of folks that are going to become professionals, hopefully in the WordPress space. But yeah, it’s just that renewal instead of like just trying to sell or buy from whoever’s there based off of whatever you’re currently working on in the WordPress space.

[00:29:46] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Isotta, anything you want to throw in at this point?

[00:29:49] Isotta Peira: Of course. I want to add one point about the aging discussion that we were having, because also, in my opinion, it is true what you, Nathan, said at the beginning that just only the fact of reaching younger people is a way to make the project more sustainable, long term. But also I would love everyone to think about the other way around, because what is WordPress giving to all these younger generations?

Because wins are much, I mean, for how I see it, I see like a winning opportunity everywhere. Because it’s not just about reducing the age of the people involved in the project. If we reduce the age, but people are not engaged. If they’re not getting what they need, learning opportunities, networking opportunities, even just opportunities to understand that they have a whole world around them, they didn’t even know that it existed, which happened to me before I learned about WordPress community and WordPress, this is huge.

So this is a real, like all this initiative are core of the service that will be giving to millions of students. For now, we are at thousands of students already, but, this would be available for any students worldwide. And this is a pretty big deal, I believe, for younger generation and their futures.

[00:31:12] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s, on every level this is just so remarkably interesting, and the growth of it hopefully we’ll get into the millions. Right now you say you’re in the thousands. It’s still remarkable.

I want to sort of drill into it a little bit. So it feels like there’s this sort of double fronted marketplace aspect to it where WP Campus Connect kind of sits in the middle, and so you’ve got WP Campus Connect in the center, and then on the one side you’ve got the students and the institutions that those students attend. And then on the other side, you’ve got the educators who will come into that institution and WP Campus Connect is sort of like the fulcrum, the center, the spokes all lead into WP Campus Connect, and they do all the connecting and what have you.

Let’s talk about the educator side. So this is people who already are familiar with WordPress. Are there any constraints on who you would welcome into WP Campus Connect there? Like, is there any level of expertise that you’ve got to have, or any kind of proof that you’ve got to go through that you, yourself would be a credible educator? I don’t know, so that’s open to anybody. Is there any kind of barrier to entry if you are an existing WordPresser and want to be involved?

[00:32:20] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah, so far we have not planned any kind of a specific requirements or the limitations or criteria. So far we have picked from the local community members, like we just opened the call for facilitators, and all those who are interested in teaching. And they responded to it and we just picked them.

We are doing a kind of a series of event to, I think five to six colleges in this time and going every weekend to one college. So we have a pool of four workshop facilitators and we’ll be rotating them to multiple colleges. So this is how it is working. So there is no kind of barrier kind of thing.

We are just thinking about if they are ready for the community work, because there may be many educators, but there may not be everyone who will be doing it for free because we are not going to pay them anything. So if they have the community feeling, they have the community vibes and they can come forward for this. So that’s the only criteria we have. You have the WordPress knowledge, you have the love for community. Just come forward and join us for the event.

[00:33:19] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s great. Great to hear. So staying on that side of things then, I remember my forays in education, one of the things that was kind of drummed into me was, failing to plan is planning to fail. And so there was always this aspect of, if you’re going to stand up in front of a bunch of people, you have to be ready. You can’t necessarily, I mean you can, right? A workshop environment maybe maps to that pretty well, where you stand up and it’s led by what the audience, the students in this case, would like to hear.

I’m wondering if there’s a curriculum which you have planned or do plan, or if somebody can kind of like drop in and just pick up the pieces of paper if you like and say, okay, here’s the lesson plan, if you like. WP Campus Connect has put these plans together, and we’re going to go and show these students how to do this.

So that is my ignorance. I don’t know if that’s the kind of thing that you do. Do you provide materials for wannabe educators to deliver, or is it very much you create your own curriculum on the fly or however you wish to do that?

[00:34:16] Anand Upadhyay: So we just meet together and just plan, just think about like how we can go on ahead, like what are the things that we to teach? And we just brainstorm it together. It’s not like we are giving the, because there is not much different between the organiser and workshop facilitators here. So we are all the community members, so we have just divided the roles, but we are all, they’re working towards the same goal.

So we just all sit together, brainstorm the ideas, like what should we give to the students? So for example, last year we helped them to build a kind of a business website. So all the educators plan together. So we will follow this workflow, we will follow this approach. And we went to one college, we tried to do the same thing. We came back and then we again said what went wrong? What was difficult for the students to follow? How we can overcome them in the next college? We repeat, we improvise and deliver the same thing.

This year we, again, we are planning, so we again sit together. And then we thought about, last year we helped them to create a kind of a simple business website, but we found that students were not connected with that. They built the same thing, but they didn’t utilise it later because it was not connected to them. So this year we are planning to help them to build their personal portfolio website, a kind of a resume, where they can showcase their projects, they can showcase their resume, they can showcase their work or learning what they have done. So we are planning that kind of website.

So again, our workshop facilitators are working together, all those educators, and working together to create a kind of a reference website. And then we will guide them to recreate this, the same thing, adding their own touch because this will be more personalised thing. They will get attached to this, and maybe we can have some of the students to put their websites live. So it’ll be, again, a good chance.

And we are also getting some support from the hosting companies who are offering some pre-hosting accounts so we can do kind of a competition kind of thing, or someone who has done incredible work during the workshops and post workshop, we can provide them those free hostings and they can get the chance to put their website live.

[00:36:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it’s a real kind of project based education then. So you walk into the room, you interact with the educators, you ask questions, I’m struggling with this thing, I can’t make this work, and they come and step in. So you described it as a workshop and maybe the audience, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that kind of setup, but education often felt like to me, person at the front with some kind of display, whiteboard, blackboard, whatever. They talk, I listen, I fall asleep.

But this is not that. This is, okay, we have a project, we’re going to design a business website, a personal portfolio, resume kind of website. And the idea is that you interact with that and by the time you’ve left, you’ve got some useful knowledge. You’ve done a thing, not just listen to somebody talking about possibly doing a thing hands on. Okay, that’s brilliant.

Is there any kind of age restriction? Because obviously if I was to bring along a 3-year-old to this, we would question the utility of that. You kept talking about colleges and I think you mentioned universities a couple of times. So it feels to me as if we’re 18 or something is kind of where this goes, yeah?

[00:37:28] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah, most of the students we interacted with are around mostly 17 plus we can say, 17 or 18 plus. So that’s the age group. And this year we have got a student, we have got a request from one of the high school as well. So they want to, their approach was very nice. They want to give the students kind of exposure to what they are going to face after completing their high school. So they’re running kind of a program so they’re also interested in if we can just go to their school and give their students some kind of a short introduction about any skill that is relevant for them. So we’re also getting that kind of request as well.

[00:38:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and that’s such an interesting age as well, because you haven’t yet kind of formulated your path. And I think maybe by the time you get to 16, 17, 18, you’re more funneled. You’ve made decisions which have led you in a certain direction. You know, I’m going to be a, I’m into agriculture, I want to do whatever it may be.

But if the high school level, everything’s wide open still, isn’t it? And if you can get them and expose somebody that’s never been on a computer even, and, oh look, I put something and people nowhere in me can suddenly see it, that may open up a completely new pathway.

But what you’ve got going at the moment, what do these students get in return? Is there like a quid pro quo? Is there some, sort of leading question here really. Is there some credit that you might get on the other end of this? Do students get to walk away with, apart from obviously the knowledge, which is now in their head for life, do they get to walk away with some kind of accreditation to say, I did this, here’s my certificate, or whatever it may be?

[00:38:59] Anand Upadhyay: Yeah. So we are again providing them certificates for the completion of attending the workshop. And, yes, obviously they are getting some amazing knowledge, amazing exposure to the community. Yeah, but as a proof of thing that they have done something, we are providing them certificates.

[00:39:14] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And obviously, you know, if they then continue that participation in the meetups and what have you, you get the bit which is way more important than the certificate, which is the actual exposure to the people out there in the real world who can give you that leg up or point you in the right direction for the person that you need to help you on that first career step.

So I’m just going to the panel, I’m just going to say. Did you want to add anything to that? So I was talking about this sort of double fronted marketplace, you know, students, one side, educators on the other. Anything to add?

[00:39:43] Destiny Kanno: Well, I did want to add in general that we’ve been very careful to say in all of the handbooks and landing pages, educational institutions. So that could be colleges, that could be high schools, that could be technical schools or different business schools, boot camps, wherever you’re getting educated on something that WordPress can maybe be hand in hand with.

We would love you to run a WordPress Campus Connect event, so I wanted to like make sure we clarify that. And then also, anyone could put this on. A request to organise could come from like a teacher, for example, or a student even. We’re not like limiting it to local community organisers or anything like that. So if there is direct interest as well from a campus, then that’s even better because, you know, they’re going to have a venue and all they really need is like mentorship and maybe some facilitators.

And then to plug in just a bit, you were like, what kind of curriculum do they have? Don’t forget, there’s Learn WordPress, you know, .org as well where folks can definitely use the materials there to craft their own curriculum or a series of workshops or whatever they’re going to put on as well. So I do want to ensure folks know that there are resources available that are free to help you with that part of the programming too.

[00:41:00] Nathan Wrigley: I’m just going to read this into the record. If you are, I don’t know how podcasts are consumed, I just know that they’re consumed in a wide variety of ways. If you are driving the car or you are walking somewhere and you think, I’ll get to this later, stop. If you know an educator somewhere, make a point to mention this to them at some point. You know, tomorrow, get home, phone them up. They’ve probably never heard of this. They’re probably not in the WordPress space. They probably don’t have the slightest intuition that this freely available stuff could step into their institution, with what sounds like minimal work required on their part.

But it’s unlikely that they’re WordPressers in the same way that you are because you’re listening to this podcast. So that’s my request to you, that’s your philanthropic request of the day. Go and mention it to the people that you know, who work in these places and have connections with these places, because it won’t happen without those kind of things happening. So, sorry, Isotta, I didn’t allow you a chance to speak. I got all carried away.

[00:42:00] Isotta Peira: Don’t worry at all, Nathan. I believe that we’ve been saying a lot already, and there is just a good amount of information around for everyone who’s listening about how this program works, how to connect with us, and how to just launch their Campus Connect series events in their cities.

[00:42:18] Nathan Wrigley: So we’ve spent a long time thinking about WP Campus Connect, but something that was dropped into the show notes, and I confess, I don’t really have a great deal of background on this, so you’re going to have to explain it in full. WordPress Credits. The name I guess suggests something, but I don’t really know what that something is. So, Isotta, if you fancy just running with that, tell us about WordPress Credits.

[00:42:39] Isotta Peira: Of course. Big pleasure for me to share more about it. WordPress Credits, in simple words, is a contribution based practice programs by the WordPress foundation open to students to just to bridge them in the Core of WordPress. Regardless of what they’re studying, their fields, their interests, what we want to do is take one step from the WordPress skills education and show them how they can enhance, train, and gain new skills using the WordPress ecosystems, regardless their interests.

And the word credits, as you said, yes, it’s just something because we want to partner with educational institutions, universities, schools, that will recognise the practice program into their students’ curriculum.

A clear example, we’ve just launched a pilot with the University of Pisa in Italy for the Department of Translation and Communication. And for them, we are offering 150 hours of practice for the students. They will be connected with mentors. They’re going to have their virtual classrooms, and they’ll be guided since the beginning until the end. At the end, they’re going to build their website of WordPress, we teach them how to do it. You are going to use the Learn platform to guide them through the whole process. And they’re going to be involved in practical work within the community.

They get to pitch what they want to work on. So this is open for designer, translators, developers, whoever wants to practice their own skills and position themself already into the job environment. Because we noticed, I felt like livid on my skin when I was studying translation at the University of Pisa, that I had to do countless hours of practice translating things that nobody ever read, used. It was very good for me. For me it was perfect to have things to practice on, and so I could become a great translator, but I worked on stuff that nobody ever used.

And the moment I joined the WordPress community in 2022 and I found out about the Polyglots team, I start thinking, hey, I could have been translating WordPress for five years and getting real life experience, exposure to a global community of professionals in the field that I’m interested, and also connection with companies with other fields that I couldn’t even imagine it existed for me as a translator.

So the goal of this program is exactly to enable students around the world, regardless what they’re studying, to become, to shape their future through practice. And we, when I say we, I mean all the volunteers and contributors who are participating into this project. We have designed a path for each student where they not only get to practice the skills that are more relevant to the fields of study, but also transferable skills.

Like, for example, organising, working independently in a remote and async environment while keeping stakeholders updated. How to design a project, because they will have to finish the program, presenting a project that they would’ve designed, developed, and worked on. Public speaking because they would have also exposure to presenting the work to the WordPress community.

And at the end of the mentorship, of course, from experienced contributors in our community, and at the end, at the wrap up, they will receive a certificate from the WordPress Foundation, certifying the hours of contribution within the program. And at that point, the educational institution they’re studying, they’re going to recognise these as a part of their curriculum.

For some universities and schools, it translates into credits. For example, for Pisa, 150 hours of contribution translating into six credits. So students can decide to skip a traditional exam and do this practice. And for other institution might look different. But the requirement for an institution to join this program is that they have to recognise this work into the students curriculum.

[00:47:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay so, dear listener, you may have noticed we shifted gears. We went from talking about WP Campus Connect to WordPress Credits, and we’ve now moved into a very different arena.

And so now, I’ve never been to the University of Pisa, but I’m going to guess that, just the name itself, it’s an utterly credible institution, you know, with a long history of taking in students and requiring them to work hard in order that they get some kind of qualification at the end.

So this is very different. We are now talking about doing WordPressy things, and at the end of it, it’s equal to a proportion of the stuff that they would be doing at that university already. Now that then, I guess, implies that this is a more structured thing, that there needs to be more inspection of what’s going on, that there needs to be kind of hoops to jump through that you need to be able to credibly say, we know that this person did this. We can prove it. There’s a paper trail, and at the end of it you get, with the University of Pisa, six credits, which equals whatever that equals.

So presumably there’s more backwards and forwards. Rather than the WP Campus Connect, which is more philanthropic and, you know, more community based, presumably you’ve had to have fairly lengthy conversations and dialogue with the University of Pisa so that they know that you are not giving away six credits for nothing. What’s that been like?

[00:48:39] Isotta Peira: Yes, you are absolutely right, and this is the case, and it is understandably, because we need to show them what is the potential, and what the students will gain. For me, it’s been a wonderful experience. And now I’m also in conversation with other universities and other schools. And having myself lived, like felt this gap between, oh, I’m doing practice, but it feels like it’s just useful to me, but it’s not applied in the real world.

And seeing, hey, this could bring, just basically push all these students into creating something that not only they own, because I believe the ownership is very important because most of cases, studies are a little bit passive. So as you were saying before, we have a teacher, we sit, we listen and we do what we’re asked to do.

In this case is the other way around. It’s, hey, this is a playground of learning opportunities for you. We show you everything that you can play with, and then you get to design the project. You get to experiment all this exposure to real life that usually you don’t get at university or another, let’s say, formal institutions. And for the universities, this is going to be, basically a certificate for institutional excellence for them, because right now, only the University of Pisa is offering this. In a few weeks, also the universities Fidélitas in Costa Rica will start offering this.

So just, hey, to institutions worldwide, this is something that the university, once they understand what it is, they will want to jump on it. And so as you say, it’s a lot of back and forth. It’s always a very interesting conversation because every university has some similar and some different needs for their students. And for me it’s a huge learning curve because I’m getting to learn a lot about other institutions. But at the end, everyone who I’ve been talking to so far, they are like over the moon with the idea of offering this option, this possibility to their students.

What I’m doing right now is starting connecting with teachers, schools, universities, institution that I personally, I’m already personally connected with, like the case in Pisa. And the WordPress community is key because also, in this community, there’s plenty of teachers. Everywhere you look, there is, oh, okay, I teach WordPress, I teach this other WordPress related theme. Oh, I teach at this school, I teach at this universities. Or, hey, in my kids’ school, they were looking for something like this, and it turns out that maybe you’re not a teacher, but you have kids and they’re at schools.

So it’s been key, the connection with the community. And it’s actually one of the biggest needs that we have right now. Right now, there are three, including myself, contributors focusing on this project. We need more help, also to create this connection, to get into the institution and to have them understand the offer that we’re giving to them.

[00:51:59] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m going to read into the record a recycled version of the comment that I made a moment ago about WP Campus Connect. And that is that if you know anybody who could fit into this part of the jigsaw, you know, an educator or somebody that works in a university, whatever capacity that may be, I guess you are looking for that door to be slightly pushed ajar so that you’ve got these contacts wherever they may be. Obviously you’ve got Pisa, Costa Rica and what have you. But it would be nice to spread this a little bit further.

Okay. Okay, so that bit is now done. The bit that I want to ask with this is with the university students going through the WordPress Credit system, is this kind of a distributed thing? Is it something that they can do in their own time? Or do they need to, I don’t know, attend, be in a particular lecture hall at a particular time in order to prove that they’ve done a particular thing? Or is it entirely remote with, well, basically it’s a very open-ended question. How does it work from a student point of view? How do they achieve this?

[00:52:59] Isotta Peira: This is a great question actually. The values behind this program is to keep the open source experience as real as possible. So it is a hundred percent remote. We have built the virtual classroom for each student on the Learn platform, and they will be able to self onboard themself, go through the all the steps, but at the same time, they will be paired with the mentors.

So we strongly recommend, and for this first, let’s say, round of program, we are making strong suggestion to meet with their mentor once per week, so they can learn more about each other, the mentor can help them guiding their way, but they have to complete the hours. We want to, not just respect the principle of the WordPress ecosystems, but also put students in this real life environment that they will find in their job.

Because most of the roles in different type of companies, you just don’t have to like stay there and show that they’re doing the things. You work at your pace. You have your project. You have to share updates, of course, and show that you are progressing. And for WordPress credits, if students want to work on weekends, during night, this is up to them. They just have to complete the WordPress site and the hours assigned.

And there are couple of steps that will have them syncing at a specific moment with other parts of the community. For example, participating to a discussion on Slack, or a discussion on a blog post. Because also they’re experimenting different tool and different communication styles. And if there is a meetup, local meetup active in their cities, one of the step would also be participate to one of them. Or if there is no meetup, local meetup happening, to join an online meetup.

So in this way the success of this program would reach the most, the highest point, if they have not only completed the work they decided to do, but if they also have experienced all the different parts of the ecosystem. So this way they work out the program, and they have the new world possibility open. They can decide to stay, they can decide to just focus more on one particular thing and they would’ve learned how to upload and work on WordPress, TV. How to use tools like Slack, GitHub, WordPress, the Learn platform, everything. So this is what they will get.

[00:55:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. I mean, set aside the fact that when I was at university, the internet just didn’t exist because I’m of a certain age, but I would’ve loved something like this. The capacity to just sort of do things in my own time, you know, fit it around, cherry pick the bits that I want to pick. For me it was much more, you pick a course, you show up to the course, you imbibe the content, you sit and exam and so it goes. And that was what was on offer. But this is so great.

And also, I don’t know if this is something that you do do but it just came into my head, the capacity for this to be an accreditation prior to gaining access to a university. So at the minute in the UK, all of the results are coming out for the examinations which children, well, young adults require in order to get to their place at university. And then when they’re at the university, they obviously get these credits and get the degree or what have you. But something like WordPress credits, it’d be kind of fun if it could count towards that onboarding process, you know, to get you in the door of a university to show up and say, I did the WordPress thing. I did something a little bit above and beyond what everybody else is doing. I mean, I don’t know if there’s any plans for that, but that struck me as a curious option.

[00:56:45] Isotta Peira: That would be the dream. Having WordPress credits embedded into like mandatory curriculum to get to a specific level of education, or to be able to end, to graduate from a specific level of education. This is going to be the dream. Now we’ve taken the first steps, so now we’ve built up the program, we are going to gather feedback, improve it, adjust it with all these first new batch of students that are coming. And also from the sponsors, the universities, and the mentors feedback. And then little by little, this is where we want to go. Ready to bring WordPress contributions everywhere.

[00:57:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, gosh, what an episode this has been. I thoroughly enjoyed this. However, I don’t know if we’re done yet because on the show notes that I had, we had three points that we were to mention. One was WP Campus Connect, which we did at the beginning, and then we’ve just spent a few moments talking about WordPress Credits. But there’s this other curious bit that I don’t know much about, and I don’t know if this is something we want to delve into, WordPress Student Clubs. What’s that?

[00:57:47] Destiny Kanno: Yeah, so that is, you don’t have to have a WordPress Campus Connect event to request a WordPress Student Club on your campus. But it essentially was birthed out of this idea from Anand of like, hey, you know, now that we’ve got this captive audience of students, like where do they go to continue the WordPress activities after we’re gone? And so the, yeah, WordPress Student Clubs were born.

You can now request a site created for your Student Club when you request to organise a WordPress Campus Connect event, or you can just reach out to us directly. And right now, I believe Anand is working with the Sophia Girls College right now in Ajmer to set up their WordPress Student Club. I think they’re the first actually to have one.

And the goal is that they can continue on campus, their WordPress activities. They can connect still with the local community, potentially like invite them to their student club events. It’s just like a extracurricular circle or club that now is WordPress themed that will, I think, help them continue.

And also, sorry, I just wanted bring in like the Credits portion too. Like you might have folks from different majors, right, that are using WordPress in different ways. So it’s a way for also the students to intermingle amongst different majors within their campus as well.

[00:59:08] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of a way to keep the conversation going, isn’t it, in a sense? It’s more opportunities to kind of keep people interested and give them opportunities. And all of that is just so necessary. We talked at the beginning about the age demographic of WordPress and how all of this stuff is just such a real credible way of trying to tackle that.

And I think if you were to put somebody that went through, let’s say, WP Campus Connect. If you were to drop them straight into a meetup, maybe that’s too much, because it can get fairly technical. You know, the presentations are often about some fairly technical things, and so this feels like a really nice bridge. It keeps it more based around the students, so they’re familiar with each other. They’re in the same institution, presumably. It’s kind of like a club. We call them afterschool clubs in the UK. It feels a little bit more like that. So it’s much more based around where they already are and that kind of thing.

[00:59:59] Destiny Kanno: It gives them a sense of ownership as well, because it’s as you said, it’s a students’ club, so, you know, there’s going to be someone that’s leading it, and maybe a co-lead as well, and a faculty member who will also be there to advise or assist.

[01:00:13] Anand Upadhyay: It’s kind of an in campus meetup group, that kind of thing. So they can, just like you said, taking them to the local community meetup will be a little bit overwhelming from them, because whatever the sessions, whatever the topics that are planned in the meetups stuff, catering to the wider audience. So in the campus club they can decide their own kind of topics. What are the topics they are interested in? And they can learn, it’s kind of a group learning as well. Someone from them is learning one topic and delivering this knowledge to the other club members. So it’s a way to keep the momentum going on that is started with WordPress Campus Connect program.

[01:00:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s absolutely wonderful. I’m going to make sure, before we finally finish this call, although we’ll end the podcast recording in a moment, I’ll make sure that I ask these panelists to send me any links that may assist you. And so what I’m going to say is if you head to the wptavern.com website, and if you search for this episode, you could probably search for WP Campus Connect or WordPress Credits or what have you, certainly it’ll be there available in search.

Head to that, look at the show notes and the links. There’ll be a transcript of this and there’ll be some show notes where I just sort of summarise what’s going on. But right at the bottom, a little way down the page will be all of the links for everything that we have discussed. Maybe some additional ones as well for things that we didn’t have.

And when I attend WordPress events, there’s always a sense of this, there’s always a sense of look around, the community’s not getting any younger. We’ve got to do something about it. Complaining is the wrong word. People are not doing that, they’re just curious about that. Well, here, you’ve been spoonfed the solution. You now know what it is that you could do to skew the demographic younger. If the WordPress project is something that you believe in, and you would like to carry on, the only way to do that is to have a funnel of younger people who will become the older people, who will then teach the younger people. And so the cycle continues.

If you want that to happen and you don’t know how to make that happen, well, now you do. You’ve got these people to reach out to. You’ve got these projects that you know about. You can get involved in any of this, at any level.

And all that it remains for me to do is to say, wow, thank you to all three of you for being interested in this. Not just interested, being active and making the effort to get these things started, to get them off the ground, which is the hardest bit, I think. And hopefully now that they have got off the ground, they will fly with wings of their own. That would be really nice. So, Destiny, Isotta and Anand, thank you so much for chatting to me today. What an episode that was.

[01:02:55] Destiny Kanno: Thank you so much, Nathan.

[01:02:57] Isotta Peira: Thank you. It’s been a huge pleasure.

[01:02:59] Anand Upadhyay: And thank you for giving us a platform to share all these initiatives.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case the long complex story of how WordPress came to have a.com and.org variety.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy and paste that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today, we have Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers. Michelle is well known in the WordPress community for her myriad roles, including Executive Director of Post Status, and program director for WP Includes. She’s a prolific freelancer, podcaster, and a driving force behind many WordPress initiatives.

Jonathan is a WordPress Core committer, contributing to the project since 2013, and has been sponsored by Bluehost to work on WordPress Core since 2018. His work largely takes place behind the scenes supporting contributors, maintaining build tools, and keeping WordPress running smoothly for millions of users.

If you’ve ever searched for WordPress online, you’ve probably found both wordpress.com and wordpress.org at the top of your results, and like many, you might be unsure what really separates the two.

Today, Michelle and Jonathan helped clear up the history, philosophy, and practical differences between wordpress.com and wordpress.org.

They talk about how these two flavors of WordPress came to be, why they’ve both been key to WordPress’s growth and the ways they overlap and differ in features, user experience, and monetization.

Michelle shares her perspectives as a longtime user and advocate, with experience across both.com and.org sites. While Jonathan dives into the technical and historical details from his Core contributor vantage point.

They also explore whether the naming conventions of .com and.org have helped or hindered the project, and how the WordPress communities open source ethos shapes the ongoing conversation.

Along the way, they touch on how .com made WordPress accessible in the early days, the importance of data portability, and evolving efforts to unify the user experience between the two platforms.

If you’ve ever wondered which version of WordPress is right for you, why the projects seems split into two variants, or how community and commerce intertwine in the WordPress ecosystem, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers.

I am joined on the podcast by two guests today. I’m joined by Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers. Hello.

[00:03:48] Michelle Frechette: Hello.

[00:03:48] Jonathan Desrosiers: Hi, how’s it going?

[00:03:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good thank you. We’re going to talk today a little bit about a subject, which I confess confuses me greatly. It’s the differences, the similarities between WordPresses variance, .com and.org.

Before we get into that, I know it’s a terribly generic thing to do, but nevertheless, we’re going to do it anyway because we have a new audience member each time this podcast airs. So I’m going to ask you both to give us your little potted bio. Tell us who you are. So let’s start with Michelle.

[00:04:14] Michelle Frechette: Hi, I am Michelle Frechette. I do a lot of freelancing type work in WordPress, and I also am the Executive Director of Post Status, and the Program Director for WP Includes. I have a couple podcasts, a couple different things that I do, lots of different projects I’ve started, none of which are relevant today.

[00:04:31] Jonathan Desrosiers: Hi, I am Jonathan Desrosiers. I am a WordPress Core committer since 2018. I’ve been contributing to the project in some way since 2013, and I am partially sponsored by Bluehost to be a contributor to the project.

And so for me, a lot of that results in, some people call it invisible work, but I’m behind the scenes just making sure people are supported properly, they have the resources they need, they’re not blocked.

I also do a lot with our build tools. So making sure our tests keep running and our different build processes to build the software that’s eventually shipped to the world is working in order. Yeah, you’ll find me a little bit everywhere. I’m a generalist. I have my hands in a lot of different things.

[00:05:13] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you both for joining me and also for giving us your credentials there. That’s great. So we’re going to get into this strange topic.

Now, I just carried out a typical search. I went onto a search engine. It wasn’t Google, by the way, but nevertheless, I went to a search engine, and I typed in one word, and that word was WordPress.

And I’m now confronted by a result at the top, which says wordpress.com. That came in at number one. The second result for me was wordpress.org. And I’ll just give you the headlines. It says wordpress.com, this is the first result, wordpress.com, everything you need to build your website. And then the second result, download wordpress.org.

And both of you know the difference. I know the difference, on a very high level, I understand the difference, but when we get into the weeds, I quickly start to misunderstand what the difference is. But they are different. These two things are radically different in their intention, in the relationship they have with their users, the way that they’re monetised, and so on and so forth.

So let’s, first of all, just clear that up. Let’s rewind the clock, if you like. How did this all start? What’s the history of wordpress.com and wordpress.org. And then we can get into what the heck they are and how they’re different a bit later. So, I don’t know who wants to answer that.

[00:06:28] Michelle Frechette: I’ll give a quick start. Then I’m going to let Jonathan get into the more technical aspects of things.

Back in the nineties, blogging became a thing, and lots of people were establishing blogs online through things like Blogger, Blogspot and all those things. And then WordPress was one of the blogging platforms that you could create your blog on. All of them were free. I think I still have a Blogspot out there somewhere with really angsty poetry on it. So if you ever really want to find that out, sure, I could send you a link. But the idea was that, you know, you could get online and you could do the blogging things with it.

And then it was like, well, is it just for blogging or could it be used for other things? And so there are still people today that when you say, oh, I could build you a WordPress website, say, isn’t that just a blog? And to which I say, look at all of these websites that are built on, like the White House and NASA and all of these other things that are not just blogging, and are building their websites on WordPress.

But that’s different necessarily from wordpress.com where I do have a blog, right? I actually, it’s actually a website, wptrailbuddies.wordpress.com. I’m using the free .com to create a very quick, very simple, very easy way for people to sign up for one program.

But I also have several websites built on the .org idea, right, which is self-hosted. Find a host, download the software, or have the one button install, which is much more common now.

And then also I have a paid plan on wordpress.com as well, which takes away any ad space, and also allows me to have plugins and themes within that website.

So that’s what I know at the surface level, what are the differences. I know that Jonathan knows much more about the software itself.

[00:08:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think you’ve highlighted some of the top level items, so we’ll circle back to those in a moment. But first, let’s get Jonathan’s take on that. So it’s the history question, really. What’s the history of these two different things?

[00:08:24] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, so WordPress started as a project in 2003, and it’s what we call a fork. And so you probably know if you listen to this, that WordPress is open source software. And basically that means, it’s licensed under the GPL, and you have the right to download it, make modifications, see how it works. We distribute, all those things are your right to do with the software that is published.

And so it was forked from a project called b2 where a couple people were not really happy with the development that was happening on that, bugs weren’t being fixed to their liking, and so they decided to fork it. And so that was Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. And that was in 2003, and they called it WordPress. And so that was the beginning of the WordPress project that we know today that is now over 22 years old.

A few years later, Automattic just turned 20 years old, so in 2005, Matt Mullenweg, one of the co-creators of WordPress, co-founders of WordPress, decided to create a company. And so he created a company called Automattic. And the company’s bread and butter was obviously WordPress, because he knew it very well. And so that’s how wordpress.com came about.

And in many ways it was the first true managed WordPress hosting platform, because you could sign up, you could get a blog for free, and you still can, and your URL will be, you know, nathanssite.wordpress.com, or johnssite.wordpress.com. And you can pay for additional things such as, the subscription plans allow you to have a custom domain name, and that’s evolved. The features that you can pay for has evolved significantly over the years.

But along with this is the WordPress software that I mentioned earlier. And so the WordPress software is available for anyone to download and run, as I mentioned. And Automattic has a hosting setup that runs the open source software. And so many of the hosts that you have today, you all run that same software at the core of it, and it’s just a matter of what services are surrounded with it. What do they allow you to do within their environment? And how they support you in your journey to have an online presence.

[00:10:36] Nathan Wrigley: So the .com side of things was a very early move. So really, more or less as, I mean we’re into sort of the 20 plus years of history of WordPress, but right back near the beginning it was made easier to install. And nowadays, if you go to more or less any host that’s got any association with WordPress, they will offer some kind of one click solution, which makes it trivially easy, within a couple of moments, really, and a few buttons, you’ll have a version of WordPress. And I’m talking there about the .org side of things. So you’ll have a .org install of WordPress. Really straightforward.

However, if you rewind the clock right back to the beginning when .com started, I’m guessing it was a much more painful process. There weren’t these managed hosts where you could do that, and so it made sense, I guess, into the market to put something where you didn’t need to install anything. You simply sign up, create an account, be it free or paid, we’ll get into that in a moment as well, and you’ve got yourself the software.

And so I guess that’s an important part to remember. It was much more difficult back then to do the .org thing than it is now. So many tools now making it relatively straightforward. I guess that’s a part of the success of .com, that it was just the first mover made it more straightforward.

[00:11:51] Jonathan Desrosiers: The WordPress project has several philosophies that we use to guide our decisions and how we choose what makes it into the software and what shape that takes. And some of those, for example, are design for the majority, decisions not options, clean, lean, and mean, striving for simplicity, out of the box software.

And so you see this in the setup process in the five minute install. We really aim to make the installation as simple as possible for the software itself. But that doesn’t mean the surrounding database set up and server set up and uploading, getting the files on the server, doesn’t mean that that’s easy as a part of that.

And so WordPress could be two clicks to install. Could be really simple, email and password and installs it for you, but it doesn’t really, can only contribute so much to that cohesive experience, that all encompassing experience of what a website is, of what hosting is.

[00:12:42] Michelle Frechette: I think back to, again, the early days of blogging where that was the goal. You could change the colors behind it, you were limited to the theming that was provided with whatever platform you were choosing from. And the way that we’ve grown from just like, here are your five options, kind of like a MySpace idea, right? You’re kind of limited with what you could do back in those days as well, to where you can do a lot more now.

And so even with .com, with the free plan, you have a lot more options than you did 20 years ago, 23 years ago. And if you upgrade to a business plan, then you have all the options basically that you have with the install, the .org install for yourself, self-hosted.

One of the things I love about it is that I don’t have to worry about security, I don’t have to worry about traffic, and I don’t have to worry about upgrades. I don’t get a message that my PHP version is outdated. On some other sites where I’m self-hosting, I have to make sure that everything’s up to date all the time. With the .com. It’s one of those things that I don’t have to do.

And so for me, that is one of the benefits. Of course, I have only one site there, but I’m loving the fact I can walk away from it and not be having to check it on a regular basis. And I think that’s one of the beautiful things for people who are not tech savvy, because they can get in and do the things like they would in one of the competitors.

[00:13:57] Nathan Wrigley: So a lot of this conversation is going to be done through the prism of history, you know, and decisions that were made which now perhaps people have got opinions about, maybe they think poor decisions were made, or brilliant decisions were made, they were made at a different time.

And I’m going to allude to what I said right at the top of this episode, which was that if you do a Google search, for just simply for the word WordPress, and that probably is the word that you’ve heard. You probably have no familiarity with whatever WordPress is. You just, somebody told you, you know, you were in a bar somewhere and somebody said, oh, you want a website? WordPress can do that.

So you end up at a search engine and in it goes, WordPress, and up come these slightly conflicting things. And I guess that’s maybe where some problems for end users begin. We’re in the inside of it all, so we’ve totally got a grip on this. We might not understand the intricacies of all of the bits and pieces, but we understand what .com is and we understand the difference.

This is a question you don’t have to answer in a binary way. It doesn’t have to be a yes or a no. But, do you think with the benefit of hindsight, it would’ve been a good idea to call these different versions different things? So for example, WordPress could have been the .com or the .org, and it would’ve had a different name for something else. And that’s purely from a, keeping it obvious what the two different things are. So again, you can obfuscate or you know, dodge that question if you like.

[00:15:18] Michelle Frechette: I’m reminded of George Foreman, whose children are all named George.

[00:15:23] Jonathan Desrosiers: Most confusing household ever. Without getting into the nuances of the agreements and all, how the permissions work, Automattic just has special permission to use the WordPress trademark. And so that’s why it’s called wordpress.com and wordpress.org. And while there are some, there is some confusion that comes from that. In many ways, it also has contributed to the success of the project, because in the early days, it was very easy to get a site spun up on WordPress, on wordpress.com, and people started using WordPress.

And so there are definitely people out there that solely started using WordPress because they got to wordpress.com and they were able to get a site. And now more and more hosting companies are much more capable, and we all have our own, like I said, I work at Bluehost, so for example, we have our own special sauce of onboarding, where we ask you a couple questions and we help you. We find that the thing people struggle with a lot is where to start.

You get dumped into WordPress, right? And you don’t know where to start. What do I need on my site? What do I make it look like? What do I need to do? And so using these onboarding questions to produce a starting point for you, that’s contextual to what you’re trying to do. And so that’s one of the things that we take pride in is our onboarding process that we’re working on and is available if you want to try it out.

But all that to say is that, you know, in the early days it was definitely a benefit. And now as the project has grown to over 40% of the internet, that confusion gets magnified in some ways. And a lot of times that takes the form of, as you said, Googling and finding conflicting resources as people not accurately describing the differences.

We get a lot of tickets on Trac, which is the bug tracking software for WordPress, for the software itself, that incorrectly is saying there’s a bug, but it’s actually intended behavior, but it’s on .com and not in the .org software. The support forums are full of people that are not sure of the difference.

And so it’s just important as community members that we keep this in mind, that it’s not always easy to understand, but a lot of times people just need a push in the right direction. And in some ways it returns to our philosophies of making it simple because the majority of WordPress users are not technically minded and so they probably don’t care about the difference, right? They just want their WordPress site. I have a site, I need it up, I need it to not go down. I need customers. And so keeping that lens in mind as well is helpful to get through this.

[00:17:40] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of interesting, I’ve been using the internet more or less from the beginning and although these boundaries have got really blurred, back in the day, anything which ended .org had a real kind of community, charity, non-profit kind of focus to it. I don’t know if you both remember that as well, but anything ended .org, it felt like there was a philanthropic purpose to it. And anything which was .com, that wasn’t the case.

[00:18:11] Michelle Frechette: It was commerce.

[00:18:12] Jonathan Desrosiers: Commercial. Yeah, it for commercial.

[00:18:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there go. So commercial, company, along those lines. And I don’t know when that was, but that just ceased to be a thing at some point. But back when .com began, naming it .org maybe was a bigger signpost than it now appears to be, if you know what I mean. Oh, look, it’s WordPress, it’s .org. It speaks for itself. It’s a philanthropic version or what have you. And that is maybe a part of the jigsaw puzzle.

And again, rewinding history, when the split happened between.com and .org, I’m presuming that nobody had any intuition that any of this was going to be successful in any way, shape, or form. .com, you know, the commercial wing could have been an absolute failure. The whole project could have collapsed within a couple of years. . org, again, nobody took any interest in it. It just didn’t work out. And it became, well, another b2, the annals of history. And it didn’t work out that way.

But I guess once you’ve started down the path, you are going to stick with it. There would be no point 3 years in in saying, you know what? Everybody’s confused about .com, .org, we should upend the whole thing. I guess that’s off the table a bit at that point as well.

[00:19:20] Michelle Frechette: Well, I think that the generic web user who’s not a techie still doesn’t necessarily have an idea that the .org and .com were originally intended for different audiences, right? So I think that, I mean there are, definitely are some savvy people who understand that, but I think that the majority of people still, it doesn’t matter if it’s a .io, we have so many extensions now that I think it’s kind of blurred what those actually mean. And if you actually go to register a .org, it’ll say, do you want the .com and the dot net, and the dot whatever else too? So that you’re kind of getting all of your traffic driven to the same place.

I think that that is something that, yes, we understand that now. And I think that we would’ve always understood that, the three of us, but I don’t know that that was such a huge distinction back in the day.

I also think that it was one of those things where, you know, you have light versions of something or, you know, you have free versions of other things in life that aren’t software related that you can upgrade to or that, you know, free gifts with purchase.

And so I think the idea of, you could have this free one, or you can upgrade to these other things, or you could take it and run with it and do it your own thing, I think is something that made sense at the beginning, but again, can be slightly confusing now.

Because I do see people come to my meetup and they’re asking questions, and we all try to troubleshoot. We get them to log in, and we’re like, oh, okay, now I see, you’re using the free version, so you don’t have the ability to add this plugin or change your theme this way, or use CSS, you know, and those kinds of things, as you can with the paid version or with the self-hosted. And so I think that there is an opportunity for us to make that distinction in different places.

I will say one of the benefits, however, even if you start on the free .com, you can upgrade to paid and get that, or you can port that over to your own self-hosted as well. Other competitors don’t necessarily let you, like take your whole version of your website that you’ve built on their platform and bring it into a self-hosted situation like WordPress can.

And so even if you made the decision to go with wordpress.com, and halfway through a build, or a year later, realise that you really wish you had done something different, we make it easy for you to be able to take that and move it someplace else, like Bluehost or you know, SiteGround or other places like that. So we make it easy for you. We’re not trying to shove you into one box and make you stay there and say look at all those people over there doing things you wish you could do.

[00:21:43] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, I think that the underlying motivations was just fueled by the open source ideals, and the software belongs to the people and not so much specific companies or corporations. And so by putting it in .org, it was just more about being open and available and for the community, right?

Matt and Mike, when they forked b2, the intention was to get more people to work on it with them, right? And ensure that the software that they were running their website with survived and continued to grow and didn’t have bugs. And so I think that that was just part of the motivation where, I just looked it up, and the .org domains were intended to only be used by organisations. And it seems like the intention was to require documentation at some point, but it was never enforced.

I mean, when I got, in the late two thousands when I got involved, there was always the perception in my mind that you had to be an organisation to get one of those right? But that’s not actually the case. At least my early perception was that I needed it in order to do that. And so I wonder if that persists with other people as well.

And so I think that what Michelle also said resonates well is that, you know, no matter where you WordPress, you’re going to be able to take your site with you and go somewhere else. And that’s what makes WordPress great. And maybe you’re not even taking your site somewhere else, maybe you’re just taking out your content and, I don’t know, maybe feeding it into AI, or creating a book of all your posts, like a historical reference or something.

[00:23:07] Michelle Frechette: I did that.

[00:23:07] Jonathan Desrosiers: That sounds kind of cool actually, yeah. And so being able to take your content with you and you are the true owner of your content, and you have the rights to it, is not something that’s true for other platforms. You know, not to name names, but there’s a lot of other website platforms where it’s difficult to impossible to extract out your content if you need to move somewhere else.

[00:23:27] Michelle Frechette: It’s a lot of copy, paste at that point.

[00:23:29] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, or like finding someone that knows how to create a browser extension, or a scraper or something like that. And so that’s always something that I tell someone looking to get started with a website where, you know, it might be easier to get started with this other service now, and it might be okay with your needs now, but if you outgrow that website or that service, it’s more difficult to bring it elsewhere later.

We’re working on different ways with the data liberation initiative where we’re looking at ways to make our data more portable from other platforms to other platforms. And so I really feel strongly about that.

Like, that’s the strongest point, one of the strongest points of WordPress is that you own your content, you control it, there’s no algorithm changes, you know, on Facebook where all of a sudden people aren’t seeing your content. They change a feature, right? People can’t react a certain way to your content anymore, and it affects your traffic to your site.

And so I always strongly emphasise that to people, because people don’t think about that. They think I just need a website, right? But they don’t think about, what happens if I need to make changes and this software doesn’t work, or this service doesn’t help me anymore?

[00:24:36] Nathan Wrigley: We’ve definitely moved as a community, and by community I don’t mean the WordPress community, I mean the community of online users. We’ve definitely moved towards more gatekeeping and siloed consent repositories. You know, you think of things like social media, and essentially anything where there’s a, you know, a username and a password and a paywall. We seem to be more at peace with that.

And that brings me to the next thing actually. And I’m sorry if this comment lands badly, dear listener, but I think there is something quite curious about our community. I think we are full of people who are very well intentioned, who have extremely benevolent motives, and often, I think, regard commercial things sometimes as something to be viewed with a little bit of suspicion. I don’t know if you’ve detected this kind of thing as well.

All of those things are things which drew me in. They didn’t alienate me. They were exactly the kind of people that I wanted to be around. But I do wonder if WordPress’ history, so the .com, .org history over the last, let’s say 15 years or so, I do wonder if the flavor, the colour of the community, if you like, that we’ve got meant that we were going to have problems about this .com, .org split.

Because on the one side, fierce, fierce open source advocacy people. You must own your own content. You’ve got to be able to download the software. This is terribly important, you want to be able to fork it at a moment’s notice.

And then on the other hand, a bunch of people are, well, that’s great you do that, but I’m happy over here. I’ll pay my fee for the premium version of wordpress.com. That’s fine with me. I’m okay with that. I don’t need all the bells and whistles that you seem to have. I don’t need it to be this version and that version. I don’t need this plugin or that thing.

But I do wonder if the community that we’ve got is a part of that. In the mix somewhere is just what we’ve got. The people that are drawn to open source are going to view the .com side of things with a little bit of suspicion, and maybe see that, you know, that’s something which, gosh, we should not have that.

[00:26:46] Jonathan Desrosiers: The only thing I’d challenge you on there is that I don’t think it’s fair to say that people on the .com side don’t also care about the open source ideals. I think that many of them, if not all of them, do care about the underlying principles there. I think that, you always hear, you have to look after your own, right? You have to make sure you can pay your bills and you have a business and you. I’m US based, the American dream, right? Of creating a business and growing that into something sizable that can help people and benefit many.

And so that’s my only pushback there is that they do. It’s not a binary thing. It’s definitely an overlap. And I like to think that there’s more overlap than we think. And that might be a little naive, but I do tend to think that it overlaps pretty heavily in that section there.

[00:27:29] Nathan Wrigley: I think you are right, and I think what you’ve done there is uncovered the poor way that I phrased what I was saying. I think when I was trying to describe that I was, although I didn’t say it, I was trying to describe things from the .org point of view only. And so the nature of that community is fiercely protective of the open source values there and what have you. So yeah, you’re quite right. It felt, with a bit of hindsight, it felt like that question was coming from both sides and it really wasn’t. So thank you for picking me up on that.

[00:28:01] Jonathan Desrosiers: It’s normal to be skeptical of other people, right? Especially when you see all these horror stories of this big business, you know, draining these businesses out there that are draining money out of everybody and raising prices and profits are through the roof, right? So it’s normal to have this skepticism towards commercial entities, and that they’re trying to do the right things and things of that nature.

But to that, I just say to look at how the company and the space is contributing back and how they are ensuring that they do get their fair share of the WordPress pie, that is billions of dollars, on the last publishing that I saw, last report that I saw. But also making sure that that ecosystem is still strong, and supportive of everybody in the pool. To make sure that we can all compete to, you know, there’s definitely competition. We’re all going to compete together to make sure we’re trying to get more of the pie, right? And try to prove that our service or our products are the best.

But, yeah, so I think a little level of skepticism is healthy. You always hear, assume good intent. I think that’s very important, and to obviously judge people by their actions and what they do to help grow that open source community while they’re living in that .com commercial space.

Yeah, I don’t know, Michelle, if you have anything to add there. You probably have a different lens as the non-developer background.

[00:29:19] Michelle Frechette: Definitely the non-developer background here. So you used the word community when you talked about that when you first started the question, and I think we have to think about the fact that the community, although it does encompass both .com users and anybody who’s self-hosted through .org. It really is the lion’s share of that community comes from that self-hosted .org side. Comes from the people who go to Meetups. Comes from the people who attend WordCamps. And most importantly, it comes from the people who contribute to the ecosystem.

Whether that’s by volunteering through the .org and Make WordPress, whether that’s selling a product, or having a podcast or any of the things, a newsletter, any of the things that contribute to the success of WordPress overall, it applies across the board. But when you look at all of the volunteerism, and all of the unsponsored people, and even sponsored people who are creating, right? So Jonathan is a developer, he’s in the weeds with it. He’s got a sense of pride with what the community creates for each other.

And when you have a sense of pride in what you do, you have a loyalty to that as well. And so we are part of a group of people, a huge group of people, a multimillion group of people worldwide who are this .org community with some .com community peppered in. So of course there’s going to be skew, one direction versus the other.

I don’t think it’s necessarily derision. That I don’t think people like necessarily look at .com and go, ugh, what do they say? The redheaded stepchild of, you know, .org or whatever. I think it’s more along the lines of, we know this, we use this. We want other people to use this too. This is our community and this is what we’ve built this community around.

But I think that democratising publishing is used by both, right? So if you look at .org and .com, we talk about democratising publishing. And the free .com allows people in incredibly socioeconomically depressed areas, and who have very little side income to be able to start a website. The ability to do that, whether it’s a website to talk about a service that they offer. Whether it’s a website just to blog. Whether they’re trying to monetize or not, there’s opportunities for people around the world to create a free, absolutely free website on .com.

And have it say, you know, michellefrechette.wordpress.com, because that’s what I could afford at the time. And then when I can, I either upgrade to paid, or I port that over to a self-hosted situation. So I think that both of them really have an amazing place in our ecosystem, but we tend not to see that when we sit squarely in one side or the other.

[00:32:02] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know? That’s a really interesting point, and one I cannot believe I’ve never thought about that. Over all these many years of thinking about WordPress and all of its different flavors and things, wordpress.org carries the word free around with it in my head. I’m thinking wordpress.org, free. I’m struggling to imagine a scenario where it is entirely free to deploy.

[00:32:25] Michelle Frechette: I used to say WordPress is free like a free puppy. A free puppy, you still have to take to the vet, and buy food, and get their nails trimmed, and buy the leash, and all of the things that go along with a free puppy. WordPress.org is like that. It’s a free puppy. You still have to pay for hosting and pay for themes, and I mean, you couldn’t do it fairly inexpensively, but not a hundred percent free.

[00:32:44] Jonathan Desrosiers: I was just going to add in, likewise, it’s not free to get to the point where it’s published. And another thing that you brought up, Michelle, that made me think is, I mentioned about judging companies based on how they contribute and the ideals they follow. But that also is true for the individuals that spend their personal time, or self sponsor, to contribute to the software.

And so they are not looking, most likely, not looking for your business. They may be if they’re a freelancer type thing. But in most cases they’re looking for just recognition, or maybe a job, or maybe sponsorship, so that they could continue to help the software grow.

And so there’s multiple lenses to that commercial side of things, right? Where we talked about .org versus .com, and commercial versus, open source. But within that, there’s also other layers of that as well where you’re contributing to make sure the software grows, so that your company continues to do good. But also maybe you just really enjoy the software and believe in it and want to contribute on your own to ensure that that same thing happens.

[00:33:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, interesting. I’m just going to finish off my thought from previously there. So the free to download bit, I think where I was going with that was that there’s a minimum of hosting. In order to get that free version of the software, the zip file that you download. In order to make it meaningful, you’ve got to at least do the hosting. The other bit, well, I suppose you could host it on your own computer, but good luck with that if you’re a newbie.

[00:34:09] Jonathan Desrosiers: I challenge that too, not necessarily, right? Like a website is only as good as who can access it, if they find what they’re looking for. But you could very easily just run WordPress on a Raspberry Pie somewhere in your basement that, you know, you use it to send requests to, to turn on your lights or something like that, or sync up your garage door. You know, you could theoretically use WordPress to do all these types of things.

So I would also challenge you to think outside the box a little bit on that. I’m not saying it’s a good idea and I’m not saying I might grunt at you when you come with your really weird obscure edge case in Trac, but that’s part of the great thing about WordPress.

[00:34:45] Michelle Frechette: But it’s possible.

[00:34:46] Jonathan Desrosiers: You can use WordPress in many different ways, with many different combinations of plugins and themes. And that makes WordPress great, but it also makes it incredibly difficult to maintain and ensure that backwards compatibility, which is one of our main pillars, is sustained release to release.

[00:35:02] Nathan Wrigley: It’s fascinating. Yeah, what insight that was. That’s remarkable.

The commercial side, so the .com side where you’re paying a subscription if you want the different tiers and the abilities that you get for doing that, I don’t know if any of this data is available, whether it’s been published, whether it’s easy to access, I’m not sure. But I’m guessing that there is some through line between the profitability of the .com business side of things, and the open source project.

We all know that many, many, many volunteers contribute to .org in every conceivable way. Whether that’s to the code, to events, to whatever it may be. But I’m imagining there is some connection. Maybe it’s attenuating a little bit more now. Maybe it was more in the past than it is now. But I’m imagining that there is a connection between sales, unit sales of the .com out into the open world, and people being paid, seconded, and what have you, to work on the .org side.

I actually don’t know if there’s any truth in that, if there’s anything there, but I’m imagining there is. If the .com business pays for the .org side to be as successful as it is essentially is what I’m trying to say.

[00:36:18] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, I mean, historically Automattic has been the most sizable contributor to the project. There’s something called the Five for the Future Project, which is basically a challenge to companies, or individuals, making a living on WordPress to contribute 5% of their time back to the project. It’s a great initiative. That’s something that I was hired to participate in, so I’m very thankful for that because I’m able to have employment to work on open source software because of it.

But there are some flaws with it in that 5% isn’t right for everyone. It’s a goal, right? It’s, I’ve talked about this at WordCamps in the past, but time is not necessarily a good measure because it doesn’t measure the impact you have, or the productivity, or the efficiency that you have, right? So you could spend one hour working on this one bug fix that could fix screen reader software for millions of people accessing sites across the world. That’s very meaningful and that has a very strong impact. But that’s very hard to measure. And hours is certainly not the way that you can measure that.

So it’s a good idea. I like that a lot of people rallied behind that, and that it’s a very strong program. There’s a lot of participants. I’m looking forward to the next iteration of that, which a lot of community members are discussing and, you know, I’m sure leadership is always thinking about that as well. Like, how can we improve this and encourage more people to contribute and give back?

And so I guess all that to say that, you know, I guess .com and Automattic have contributed a sizable amount to the project over its history, and many other companies as well have historically contributed a lot back too.

[00:37:53] Nathan Wrigley: So another thing that I wanted to discuss, which we haven’t discussed so far is the sort of different feature set that you get, and the evolution of that over time. So if I was to get a .com site back, I don’t know, 12 years ago, the things that I could do with that would be different to what I can do now.

Obviously with the .org side, all bets are off. You can do what you wish with that. It’s yours. You can do anything you like. But on the .com side, it was limited in certain ways. The software was designed presumably to facilitate whatever it was that their agenda items were, whether that was profitability, growth, simplicity to use, whatever those metrics were.

Where are we at at the moment? Because it kind of feels like the two are coalescing, especially from a UI point of view. It feels like there’s moves at the moment to make the .com side be brought in line with the .org side. So the .org UI it feels like is going to be made available or pushed into the .com side.

And that kind of feels curious to me. It always felt that the UI was a big differentiator, like, you know, it looks different, you can immediately see that’s a .com website. Maybe in the future it won’t be. So let’s just talk around that. What are the differences in what you can do with the platforms? And then maybe we can get onto the UI and the UX.

[00:39:08] Michelle Frechette: So the free .com versus the upgraded paid plans have very different things that you can do within them. And then the paid plans are almost identical to what you can do with self-hosted. And so the difference really is you’re looking at the free plan versus any upgraded paid plan.

And with the free plan, you’re very limited into plugins and themes. There are very few that you can choose from. There’s more now than there were 10 or 15 years ago for sure. And I think my experience with logging into a free .com site looks different now than it did 10 or 12 years ago as well. But it still looks different than it does on a self-hosted WordPress installation.

That does change with an upgrade plan, because now you have a lot more features that you can add, you can bring in plugins, you can change a lot of the way that things look through CSS or through customisation. And so, yes, I think that the paid plan and the self-hosted are very much in sync with one another.

But the free plan still looks, to me at least, a lot different. And when I tried to add CSS to what it said, oh, you need to upgrade to do that, which I understand, right? So if they gave away everything, then there would be no money coming into the company to be able to operate and to pay the employees that actually work at Automattic. So yeah, I think there is still a difference. And I know that Jonathan probably knows a lot more about the technical differences than I do, but that’s my experiential difference.

[00:40:38] Jonathan Desrosiers: Well, one interesting fact is that wordpress.com is just one multi-site. So when you create a site, it’s just all in the same instance of WordPress. You just have your own space on that install.

[00:40:48] Nathan Wrigley: That is truly remarkable by the way. That is a quite numbing thought when you actually ponder that for a moment.

[00:40:54] Jonathan Desrosiers: For anyone that’s worked with multi-site, you know how challenging it is to have 10 sites, nevermind millions of sites. So it’s definitely impressive and interesting.

I’d also add that, you know, Michelle has talked a lot about more the personal style plans, right? Where we mentioned you get a free site if you have your site at nathan.wordpress.com. You can pay, you know, to get a domain, like I mentioned is the next plan. And then you can pay for more things like different plugins and different backups, whatever the features are that they offer.

But after you get past that, there’s additional tiers for people like agencies. There’s very, very high level, reliable hosting for companies that run Fortune 500 companies, Fortune 10 companies, whatever it is that they need more handholding. They need you to help them with engineering maybe with their team. There’s tiers all the way up to that level at Automattic. And I think it’s fair to say that any, you know, they have plans that compete with any different tier that may be out there.

There’s e-commerce plans and all of that. And, you know, at Bluehost we have e-commerce plans. We have managed plans just like they do. And like I said, before, we’re all trying to have our special sauce to make our home the best place to WordPress and for you to come and want to set up your site and make a living on us.

[00:42:09] Nathan Wrigley: So then back to the question of the, what feels like an endeavor to make the .com look a lot like the .org. Now that was something that I caught sight of not that long ago. It was probably, maybe, I want to say about eight weeks ago, something like that. I don’t know if either of you caught that piece of news, and whether or not that’s in fact moving forward. But the idea is to make a default version of .org basically identical in terms of look and feel.

I found that curious. I wondered what the intention was there. Was it purely just to have, I don’t know, one base of software that could be relied upon for both, or whether it was to make it easier to do a migration in either direction? I don’t know. So, I don’t know if either of you do.

[00:42:48] Jonathan Desrosiers: So a little, I guess a little history is that wordpress.com used to use the same dashboard as .org. And a while ago there was a project called Calypso, and that is basically the dashboard that you know probably from the last five years or so. And I can’t confirm this, but I believe that it was an exploration on what the dashboard, what a new WordPress dashboard could be. And I think that they’ve realised that having your own dashboard that’s different than .org is not really the best path.

And there’s a few reasons for that. One is that we mentioned you have millions of sites on .com, right? That’s all very valuable feedback from using the software. And if they’re using a different dashboard than everybody that’s not on wordpress.com, that’s basically lost opportunities to receive feedback on the software that we’re building. And so that’s one aspect.

And the other aspect is that, if you have a different dashboard, you have to have people maintaining that different dashboard, and making sure it works with all the new features that are added to wordpress.org. Make sure it’s sustainable and performant and all of this requires resources. But if you could adapt your products to use the same dashboard that everybody else has, then maybe you could take some of those resources and put them back to the .org software, instead of the internal Calypso project.

I should correct that, it wasn’t an internal project, it was used internally. It is open source and, especially initially there was a lot of encouragement for community members to participate in that. And so it’s not like it was a closed thing where they shut everybody out and they wanted, you know, it to be their own thing. It wasn’t trade secret type stuff. It was open source.

So, yeah, those are just two things that stand out to me as reasons why you would want to use the same experience that everybody else has, as it just contributes to the greater good of the software and the health of the ecosystem.

[00:44:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting, and again, something I hadn’t really thought about. The heuristics that would come out of .com. Well, for a start, it’s incredibly cohesive. That data set is going to be enormous, whereas trying to gather that from all the other versions of WordPress, you would obviously have to opt people into that to begin with. But also, it would be very difficult to gather all of that, whereas presumably the .com side of things has got that completely sealed up. So yeah, again, really interesting.

It is curious. I don’t really know if we’ll ever overcome in people’s heads the, well, for some people I think it’s a chasm. You know, it’s a really big divide, the difference between .org and .com. But I think we’ve done a fairly good job of explaining what the history is, why the things have been done in the way that they’ve been done, maybe a little bit into the future and how things are going to look.

I don’t know if there’s any salient point that you think we missed there, but if not, I think we’ll round it up. So I’ll just ask Michelle first. Anything you wanted to get across about that before we knock it on the head?

[00:45:43] Michelle Frechette: I think that we often talk about .org versus .com as though they were adversarial, but it’s really just a comparison as opposed to one being better than the other. I think you choose the option that’s best for you and your goals, and there’s nothing wrong with choosing any of those options.

[00:46:02] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, I’d just add that with any technology or anything, knowledge is not always binary, right? It’s a spectrum. And so how can we better expose people to the concepts, better explain them to people so that it’s easier to understand and get up to speed on what different concepts are. Technical concepts, brand concepts, whatever that may be, software, and strive for simplicity, right? That’s our, one of our philosophies. And so how can we make things more simple so that more people are able to better understand and be empowered to have a better online presence by having a greater understanding.

[00:46:37] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you both for picking that puzzle apart with me. That’s been really interesting. So Michelle Frechette and Jonathan Desrosiers, thank you both for joining me today. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

[00:46:46] Michelle Frechette: Thanks for having us.

[00:46:46] Jonathan Desrosiers: Always a pleasure. Thank you Nathan.

[00:00:19] Bob Dunn: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, rebranding Do the Woo, and growing openchannels.fm.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today, we have Bob Dunn. Bob is a long standing figure in the WordPress community, having branded himself as BobWP back in 2010. With nearly two decades of experience in WordPress, Bob has become one of the most recognizable voices in WordPress podcasting. Producing shows that have educated, inspired, and connected countless developers, builders, and enthusiasts.

Most recently, he launched Open Channels FM, a rebrand and expansion from his well-known Do the Woo podcast, which was originally focused on WooCommerce, but now explores broader topics around the open web, open source, and the wider maker community.

Bob talks about his journey in podcasting, from running Do the Woo for almost seven years to the decision to rebrand and launch Open Channels FM. He explains why he felt it was time to broaden the focus, welcoming listeners from outside of just the WooCommerce and WordPress ecosystem, and how that led to a network approach with multiple channels and series.

Bob describes how Open Channels is structured. Rather than traditional shows, the network features three flexible channels, Open Makers, Open Source Reach, and Open Web Conversations, each hosting a variety of series. This lets content stay organized and evergreen, and accommodates the 25 to 30 rotating hosts with the freedom to produce series across different topics.

Bob talks about the challenges, and rewards, of handing over the mic, stepping into a more of a managerial and founder role and how he’s building a sustainable, collaborative, podcasting network.

We discuss Bob’s technical approach as well, including how he uses WordPress to manage multiple RSS feeds and subscriptions, making it easy for listeners to follow specific channels or get the fire hose of all content.

Bob also shares insights on rebranding a podcast, managing redirects, retaining audiences, updating hundreds of featured images, and ensuring continuity without confusing listeners.

If you’re interested in open source podcasting, or building community driven content, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Bob Dunn.

[00:03:37] Nathan Wrigley: I am joined on the podcast by Bob Dunn. Hello Bob.

[00:03:40] Bob Dunn: Hey, hello Nathan. Great to be back.

[00:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much for joining me today. Bob and I have been chatting for quite a long time. Actually over many years, we’ve been chatting for quite a long time, because we’re both very, very, very into the exact same thing, and that is podcasting in the WordPress space.

Should anybody not have heard of you, Bob, I know it’s a bit of a generic question. Do you mind doing your little potted bio to tell us who you are, and what you’ve been doing?

[00:04:04] Bob Dunn: Been in business a long time. Two major businesses, branded myself, BobWP in 2010. Did a lot of stuff between then and now.

And, yeah, right now I am doing openchannels.fm. I’m running that, that is a podcast channels with, actually three channels, we’ll be explaining more about that. But yeah, I’ve just been in WordPress quite a while and I think since, oh, I don’t know, about 17, 18 years or so.

[00:04:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s a fairly long time. You were one of the voices, when I joined the WordPress space, you were the established podcast voice I think. There were a few, but not many. And there’s very few that have survived. You’ve managed to, turn a living out of podcasting in the WordPress space. So Bravo, well done.

[00:04:50] Bob Dunn: Thank you. Yeah, it’s been interesting. It’s something you just kind of keep going and, you know, doing it all yourself. It gets to a point where, yeah, it’s a lot of work, but it’s paid off.

[00:05:00] Nathan Wrigley: So a little while ago, I’m going to say about, I don’t know, six months ago, something like that, you can correct me in a moment. But for the longest period of time you’ve had Do the Woo. Prior to Do the Woo, there was a bunch of other naming conventions for your podcast. What was it that, in the most recent past, why did you decide to jettison Do the Woo and create openchannels?

Open channels, by the way, you can be found at openchannels.fm. There’s no hyphens or anything. It’s just as you’d imagine, openchannels.fm. Go and check that out. You’d be able to see what we’re talking about. What was the reasoning behind that?

[00:05:35] Bob Dunn: Yeah, so I actually did the rebrand early June. It was at WordCamp Europe, but I’d been thinking about it for about a year. So you have almost seven years under the belt with Do the Woo, and it started out as a WooCommerce focused podcasts. And over the years I added more WordPress into it.

And then over the last couple years I started talking about a bit more of the, you know, even outside the WordPress bubble. And I felt like something was always missing, because it’s kind of two-prong where WordPress developers, builders, a lot of our audience need to also be aware of other stuff that is going on around them. I’m not trying to push somebody one direction or another. It’s like just know stuff that is happening out there.

And then also for people that don’t know WooCommerce, expanding on that, trying to bring them in on other topics. They would look at WooCommerce or they look at WordPress and say, hey, you know, I’ve never really dug into them. I listen to a few of these.

The two major things that really, I had been chewing on for like, oh man, it had to be almost a year, was growth and sustainability of the site. And, you know, it worked great when it was really WooCommerce focus, but people had the impression that, if they know Woo, they’d look at it and say, oh, it’s a WooCommerce podcast. I’m not going to check it out because I’m not using WooCommerce.

And then of course, people that didn’t know anything about it, they would maybe think it’s, I don’t know, some wrapper or something. I don’t know what, you know, the title is like, it didn’t really define it. And of course they dig in a little bit, they learn what it is.

But, yeah, that was the impetus. It was like, I thought, man, it’s time to, as hard as it is to change a brand or even drop one that has worked for you, I thought we are moving more into content around the open web, open source, fediverse, all these different things. And I really want to make this something where, like I said before, people that don’t know WordPress or WooCommerce would come and listen to other stuff and maybe they’d check it out, maybe they don’t.

And then the WordPress people would continue, because we still have that content in there and they could learn about other stuff. They could learn about things that probably will really help their business even staying in WordPress. So I’m not, again, trying to push them out of it, it’s just open your mind a bit and learn new things.

[00:08:14] Nathan Wrigley: The wisdom that I often get when I read around the podcast industry, and if you are just a consumer of podcasts and you’ve never really dug into that industry, in the same way that WordPress has just a gigantic amount in the background, as soon as you prize open the can and realise that there’s this whole open source software, and there’s events and all of that, the same is true inside of podcasting. There’s a whole industry going on in the background that you may not realise is there.

And one of the pieces of sage advice which is often delivered, is to kind of niche down when you are beginning your podcast. Because obviously, you are going to be a small fish in a very big pond. And so the more specific that you can get, the more likely you are to build up that audience over time.

And so I’m guessing that that’s kind why you went with Do the Woo? So that it was pretty clear at the beginning, okay, we’re really focusing on Woo. So have you noticed that the pivot away from that, so from Do the Woo as a name, even though there was more content in there, to this much more open channel, so open source, whatever that might cover. Has your audience kind of, and I don’t really want to use the word forgiven, maybe I want to use the words, gone with you.

Have they come across that brand transition willingly, or do you sense that some people have, you know, lost interest because now it’s not just Do the Woo? Because that’s, I suppose, something you have to be mindful of.

[00:09:29] Bob Dunn: Yeah. You know, I’m sure some have maybe decided differently, but the interesting thing is how I built it and how I, even after the launch, reorganised it even more, is that all the content that was on there is still on there and continues to be on there. And so as I looked at how can I best organise it, I first put it into like five shows, and it still didn’t quite make sense and gel. So I thought, well, what if I do three channels, and I have an open source reach channel, an open web conversations channel, and an open makers channel.

A lot of the WordPress and Woo stuff went under the open makers channel. So now we still have series, like three or four series on WordPress. At least three series on WooCommerce, and then a variety of other stuff. So the thing was to get people convinced, and when I talked to a lot of people and I was at WordCamp Europe, you know, it’s like, it’s basically the brand is changing, we’re expanding, but the stuff you’ve been listening to is not going away.

And I have to really emphasise that. And it’s, yeah, there’s a bit where you think, oh, you know, am I going to lose it? But then they may come back, they may actually see that, yes, this is still existing, you know, getting this stuff out in front of people. And also, there will be now newer people that will, instead of looking at a name, Do the Woo and thinking, hmm, what do I do? Something like open channels, even though it is a lot broader, might interest them a little bit more.

[00:10:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s definitely the ability to tap into a new audience. So this podcast, WP Tavern, it has one show. And on a weekly basis we have a show and, you know, it’s me talking to somebody else. And I guess Do the Woo was a bit more like that. There was this one show and it would drop with a regular cadence and what have you.

And it may have escaped people because we didn’t really introduce it as such. But open channels is not that formula is it? It’s more of a, kind of like a network, I suppose, for want of a better word. You’ve got your own mini kind of network of podcasts. So let’s just dig into that a little bit. So you’ve iterated it a bit. You started with maybe three shows and now it’s up to however many, we’ll get into that. Do you just want to go through what all of the different shows are, and broadly what they cover?

[00:11:41] Bob Dunn: Yeah, so what happened is during this whole time of change, and some of this even happened before June, was that I had a whole bunch of shows. So you go to the thing and you’d see like, I don’t know, there was like 15 shows or something. And it seemed a bit too much to me. You’d go there and it’d be like, whoa, you know? Realistic, you’d think, okay, you’d find the show you like and stuff and listen to it.

But as I was expanding the content I launched on June 5th with, there’s a website, there’s five shows and there’s some series under those five shows. And that still didn’t gel after I started getting in there and start rebranding it and working on it deeper, and I’m still working on it. I realised that what I’d like to do is eliminate the aspect of a show, so when they go there, it’s open channels, so it’s plural.

You’ve got the three channels that I mentioned, and underneath all of those are series. So there’s several. Some of them, there’s quite a few series under open makers. There’s some under the other two channels. And the reason I did that is channels are a lot more flexible, and also series are incredibly flexible. If you have a show and you stop it, it’s like, bam, you know, people, oh, where did that go?

And I thought, what if I had these three umbrella channels that I could put series in? I could start them up. Some of them have been going on forever. Some may just go on a few months, but they’re part of that whole stream under that channel.

Now everybody can go there and get all the podcasts that come in, or they can actually subscribe to the three channels.

But the series are just a variety under it. And I haven’t really, the series are often focused more when they happen, the name of the series. I mean, I decided putting all the series on the site would just confuse people more. It’d be like, oh, what?

Then they can go through and they’ll see, you know, if they look through the episodes, they’ll see the various series. I mean, there’s, under open makers, there’s Woo Product Chat, there’s WP Behind the Builds, there’s WP Agency Tracks. And a lot of those were pre-existing. And so the other channels as well will have specific series under it, like Open Web Conversations has a series on the fediverse. One is on, oh man, I should have written some of this down. I can’t even remember all the series.

Anyway, there’s a few under that and there’s a few under open source. And what the beauty of it is too with as many hosts as we have now, I don’t know if it’s like around 25 to 30 hosts. They can pop around in different channels and under different series, or they come up with an idea for a show and we basically do it, and I say, okay, where should I pop that under? I can pop it under a series. It just makes it a lot more flexible.

Talking about it makes it sound more confusing. Going to the site is a bit more cohesive. But the feedback I got from a lot of people, they loved the idea of the organisation and they loved the idea of expanding into more of the open web and open source stuff.

[00:15:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well, let’s get into that bit in a minute. But let’s just stick to the consumption of open channels. So if you go and subscribe in a podcast player, so, you know, typically on a phone or something like that, to this podcast, WP Tavern, it’s fairly straightforward. You either drop in the RSS feed, which is, you know, available, or you can type in WP Tavern, and that’s then saved. And every episode that we produce, including this one, will appear when it’s published.

How are you doing it for openchannels.fm? Because you’ve obviously got three channels, and then there’s different shows and series which live under that. How is it consumed? Is there just one overall RSS feed which will get you the lot? Or can you say, okay, I only want to, I don’t know, consume the stuff about the open makers or the open web conversations? How does it work?

[00:15:55] Bob Dunn: Yeah. What I’ve done is, you can, if you want the fire hose, you can go to openchannels.fm, it has its own feed, and then I do the feed for each of the channels. Like you said, open makers, open source and open web conversations. I thought of going down even more to every series, but I thought that just confuses people more so, you know, it encapsulates what each of those channels are about.

I mean, open makers is, somebody said, yeah, you know, it’s about people in tech making stuff. You make stuff, even if it’s WordPress only. Sometimes it’s interesting to hear how other people are making stuff. And it opens it enough where it’s long, that long funnel of people that make things, you know, whether the developer, designer, their marketing stuff, whatever.

And so that was, yeah, I think that’s the best way to have people subscribe is, you know, they can get it all. But they can look at the three channels too. So if they go on their pod thing and look for open web conversations, that’s primarily what they’re interested in. What we’re talking about there, they can subscribe to that.

[00:17:04] Nathan Wrigley: Just from a, well, it’s not particularly technical, but from a slightly technical point of view, how do you manage that? If memory serves you’re using Castos, which is a sort of self-hosted, it’s a WordPress plugin, which binds your RSS feed into your WordPress website, but also carries the functionality to have different series and episodes all within the same WordPress website. I might have been kind of promoting that a bit, and it’s not the solution that you used, but I think it is.

[00:17:29] Bob Dunn: Yeah, it is. And so what it allows you to do, I could have actually created feeds for each series, but then I thought, is that going too granular? I mean, are you looking at all this stuff and thinking, so Open Web channel is like the default channel, I mean, openchannels.fm. Then you create three feeds for three shows or channels, which are the other three. And then when I do a series, I just choose to put it under whichever channel it should fall under.

[00:18:01] Nathan Wrigley: Right, okay. So you’ve basically got three places to go and update, and you can handle all of that in the WordPress admin and what have you. I should probably say that there’s a SaaS equivalent as well. You don’t have to use WordPress to make that happen, but it’s so tightly integrated with WordPress, it kind of makes sense.

The other curious thing about it though is that for the longest time we were really familiar with you as a real significant piece of that jigsaw puzzle. You know, Bob would do the episodes. It is always Bob, in the same way that there’s always me on this. But with this, I think you said now you’re up to, did you say 25 or 15 co-hosts, something?

[00:18:36] Bob Dunn: 25-30 hosts.

[00:18:38] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s a lot. So you’ve got 25 other people who are helping you create the content. In effect, they have become you for these shows. They are the host, if you like, and they’re then interviewing people, and talking about whatever that episode may be about.

How are you coping with that? How are you coping with no longer being behind the mic? And you’ve basically become a bit of a manager for a podcast network, which is curious.

[00:18:59] Bob Dunn: Yeah. Yeah, I’d like to, you know, I was talking to somebody about this and to me it was, it ended up being a goal that I didn’t know I wanted it to be a goal. You know, as I started to step back, I thought, well, you know, I’ve talked a lot over the years, I mean, more than anybody ever wanted to hear. I thought, well, maybe, you know, it’s time to get some other voices out there.

For the time being, I’m still doing the opening, but I keep myself as forefront as, I guess you call founder or whatever, of the podcast channel. And I’m cool with it. I love hearing the different opinions. It just was a shift for me at some point where I had no problem with it. And I think testing it in the beginning, I think the first three, so I brought on Brad Williams at the very beginning, because I didn’t want to do it by myself. We were just doing co-hosts and then we continued for a while.

Then I brought on, later on I brought on Mendel Kurland, which at the time was GoDaddy, and Jonathan Wold who at the time, he was at WooCommerce, and now he has his own thing going on. And I would still be part of it, so it was the four of us. But I started liking the idea when I wasn’t part of it. It was fun to see somebody else take and run with it.

And so over that period of years, I became more and more confident with people. Now, it’s basically, unless I have an idea for a guest, a lot of them choose our guests. They choose a topic because they’ve done this long enough. They know what I like to hear. They know what not to do and to do. I keep it pretty open for them. And they love that freedom because they don’t have to, you know, they come in, they do the recording, all the production stuff is not their responsibility.

And I think it’s also helped them to get to know each other more. They’ve gotten to know other guests. It’s built their brands some, I hope. And it became a point where I was just like, I thought this is it, this just works. And I’ve been really lucky with the hosts I’ve had, because they’ve been excellent. I never have problems. I mean, it just is a nice flow and they’ve all become good friends and, yeah, it works.

[00:21:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think if you were looking at it from the outside, there are so many trip wires there where you think, well, that, couldn’t work. You know, 25 hosts, multiple shows, yeah, okay. Good luck with that.

But obviously, the history that you’ve got doing the shows and turning up to WordPress events, presumably you kind of knew most of these people fairly well already, so you had that rapport and trust with each other.

But it’s a lot to trust them to just get on with it. To be able to say, okay, here’s the time slot, go off, get your guests and then just hand me the recording at the end, I’ve got complete trust in you.

But it does sound like you’ve still got your fingers in there a little bit with the kind of like the post-production and the editing, and finally making the episode into what it is and all of that, and shipping it. Do you ever see yourself stepping out to the point where you don’t even do that, where it’s just, there’s just this network?

[00:22:05] Bob Dunn: You know, I’d really like to kind of just have the role as founder. I mean, I’ve done a production and I’ve done this for, when we ran our other business before WordPress, the life and WordPress and stuff, we basically did everything, we didn’t have employees. So I’ve been doing this like over three decades.

You know, I am at a point where, no, I think it’s time to step back from some of this production stuff. I would like to because it, yeah, it buries you. And when it picks up and you have quite a few shows in a row or something, there’s some serious work to do. And I get a little too over picky with editing, probably somebody could do it a lot quicker. I mean, I, it drives me nuts sometimes. I’m thinking, why am I spending this much time on it?

But, yeah, I definitely am looking at some ways of doing that over the next few months. And looking at some other opportunities, but want to still be part of this, because it’s still my baby.

[00:23:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that’s incredible to have that level of trust. I’ve never yet managed to have that relationship where I thought that I wanted to step away. I think for me, the bit that I enjoy more than anything else is this bit that we’re doing now, the bit I’m having a chat with somebody. I really do like the one to one, or one to few. So the most I do is 2, 3, 4 really is the sort of ceiling, and that’s the bit that I like most.

And so the bit that you’ve stepped into, curiously, would be something that I would not really wish to be involved in. I’d rather just hand that off to somebody, but I do know what you mean.

You have a perfectionist approach to the editing, and you can be halfway through it and think, I’ve just spent six hours and all I’ve done is remove empty space that nobody would’ve noticed. Anyway, it can be curious.

So are you still iterating? Are you still willing to take on some new voices? Are you still open to people approaching you?

[00:23:57] Bob Dunn: Yeah, we are. Because I think with this new brand, it’s kind of, before I get into that, I was just going to mention is that when you rebrand, I’m finding there’s a ton of work with post rebranding, and another one of my picky little, I don’t know what you want to call it, is I started looking at the site and I thought, well, I want this site to reflect the new brand a hundred percent. I don’t want people to go back and get confused.

I’ve been changing the featured images on 670 episodes with the new brand. And, you know, that’s just, again, that’s me. But I want, it was quite a shift in rebranding and I want to make sure that, when they even go back, they see that, yes, I’m still on the same podcast, you know, I’m still on the same site so. Now I’ve lost track of what you asked.

[00:24:45] Nathan Wrigley: No, it’s okay. I’m actually going to pivot and just ask you a quick technical question, which is, did you close down your previous RSS feed, and rely on people finding the new one, or is there some clever way of moving people over?

[00:24:58] Bob Dunn: Yeah, you have to redirect it basically. It’s not a lot of steps, but it’s steps that if you don’t do it in the right order, it can really pretty much screw up everything. And right now, I am having a bit of challenge with some of the stuff moving over on Apple and the feeds and stuff, and I just put in a support question with them.

But you basically, eventually I’ll shut down a show called Content Sparks and Do The Woo. Because they were, they’re now under Open Makers as a series, but I kind of got to make sure all the things are connected and working smoothly. So it’s something, if anybody ever does this, whoever’s hosting your podcast, talk to them and ask them questions until you feel confident to be able to do steps one through five, without blowing up your whole podcast.

[00:25:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s a bit like when you move a website, there’s loads of different bits and pieces that you’ve got to get right and in the correct order so that, I don’t know, your email carries on sending, and all the posts that you desperately want to be still in the search engine results, that kind of thing. Yeah, there’s a lot of hoops to jump through.

In fact, so much so that a few kind of pivot ideas that I’ve had, not around WP Tavern, but around other podcasts that I do, I’ve kind of backed away just because the technical challenge was just not worth the time investment for the minor thing that I wanted to do.

Anyway, the question, returning to where we got to. The question was, are you still open to modifying what you do or have you solidified for a little period of time? In other words, if somebody catches sight of your podcast or listens to this one and thinks, do you know what I could contribute? I’ve got an idea in the open space that I would like to contribute. Are you still open to new hosts or is it really just guests now? Have you solidified on the hosts? Where are you at with all that?

[00:26:36] Bob Dunn: You know, the hosts, I think the hosts that are on it right now, they always have the option. I mean, they volunteer their time. I’m hoping they get rewarded by, you know, brand and exposure. And I know a lot of them have met a lot of people and built relationships that they never would’ve been able to because they actually talked with someone.

So that’s another reason this particular structure of it now is so great because it’s so fluid. So it’s easy. If somebody comes in and has an idea, and it kind of gels and I think, okay, this is great, or maybe it exists with an idea I already have going or a series I do. Yeah, I’m always open to that because, you know, and some people kind of serve as, I don’t want to say substitute hosts, but they’re kind of there if I need to grab somebody, or I have an idea and it’s like, I need somebody to host this and this person would be good.

So, yeah, kind of a long answer there, but I’m always open, because this is not, this is a reason to change this is to keep it fluid and make it sustainable basically, where it can continue to grow.

[00:27:42] Nathan Wrigley: So definitely not closed, but you’re happy with where things are at the moment. If the status quo was to continue, that would be great. But, you know, new voices is possible.

Again, not just with the personnel, are you kind of fairly happy with the structure that you’ve got, the three channels that you’ve got now? Have you solidified more? Because it sounds like there’s, you know, been a couple of months of chopping and changing over there. Do you think you’ll stick with what you’ve got?

[00:28:02] Bob Dunn: Yeah, I think that’s definitely, it’s where it is because, like I said, I did something completely different in the rebrand in June, and since then I did something different again.

I think what happens is, when you rebrand and you start restructuring, what you thought was the right structure, you start looking at it and you think, oh, maybe this isn’t quite right. Maybe I should do it this way.

And so I talked to several people. Getting some opinions, it’s nice because sometimes I’m inside my own head and it’s like, I need somebody to tell me if I’m just stupid or it’s a wild idea or, yeah, this is good. So, yeah, I like the three structured channels because it gives me so much flexibility under those.

[00:28:45] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s pretty remarkable what you’ve managed to do. You know, you went from just many, many, many years ago, just beginning a podcast. And just hacking away at that for years and years and years. And now you’ve got this, kind of like little mini network.

But also, I’m getting the intuition, I could be wrong about this, but I get the intuition that you’ve leaned into the word open so that you are no longer limited to just WordPress as a project. Is that the case? Are you going to be leaning into just other open source things, whether that’s other CMSs or, I don’t know, anything in the open source space? Is that in fact the case?

[00:29:19] Bob Dunn: Yeah, you know, I think what it is, in fact I was just talking to somebody, person that does accessibility, she wants to bring on somebody from Joomla and talk about accessibility because she’s under the open source channel. And exactly that. The impact of open source has been so huge and WordPress has been at the core of it. And WordPress will still be a big part of this podcast or this channels. And, yeah, I feel it’s healthy for my hosts. It’s healthy for everybody that listens, and everybody in the WordPress to hear about other stuff.

You know, it just opens your mind. It has you thinking more about things and knowing what’s out there. And sometimes maybe you think, well, you know, I’m burned out on WordPress, but you hear some other stuff and you think, well, maybe it’s not so bad. You get a big picture of the open source and open web.

[00:30:11] Nathan Wrigley: There’s certainly no shortage of things to talk about if you go into open. I mean, obviously WordPress is such a large niche that you really can talk about that until the cows come home. But the you prize open the can of open source, you know, you really are a hundred x’ing the amount of things that you can talk about. So that’s kind of really nice that you can, well, you’ve basically got an infinite horizon of content to make in the near and distant future. And I don’t suppose open source is going anywhere in the short, medium, or long term. It’ll still be around.

Okay, speaking of short, medium, and long term, if you’ve taken yourself away from the mic on every occasion to being in a few, and then kind of now being in the minority of things, and we talked about how you enjoy kind of managing the whole thing, even though it sounds like there’s a lot of shepherding cats, let’s put it that way, in the background.

Is the intention for you to sort of get to the point where you can be invisible in this, well, certainly from a public facing point of view. You wouldn’t have your voice in any of them at some point, and you would be able to, I guess, silently kind of move away. Is this like an end game here? What’s going on?

[00:31:14] Bob Dunn: No, you know, I think I’m going to be involved, and the thing was built on my brand really. And I need to stay and keep my fingers in whatever way works for me. And, you know, I’m, I just turned 68, and I’m ready to do other things every once in a while like sit on a rock on the beach and look the water. You know, important things like that.

But no, it’s, I like looking at it as still being the face of it, but maybe, can I say not so much the voice of it? I’m out there, I’m still, you know, a huge part of it, and probably as long as I have my fingers in it, I’ll occasionally do little short podcasts. Right now, I do some on the updates on the site and, you know, I might even whip up something like, you know, thoughts from the founder, I don’t know.

[00:32:03] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I like it, yeah.

[00:32:05] Bob Dunn: Yeah, something like that. So there’s, I don’t want to just become invisible because it really, how a lot of people have known this, and how I’ve built it is through my personal brand, and I think that’s important to stay intact with it. So I’m not going away anytime soon. And yeah, just need to reevaluate how many hours I put into it and how I can make it, again, more productive and sustainable. Because, you know, if I’m sick, who’s to do the production?

[00:32:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. When it was just you, you could just say, well, I’m not to record that one. I’ll just skip a week. But now that you’ve got like these 25 other hosts, you’ve got to kind of manage all of that. Oh, that’s really interesting. And of course, you’ve got to put time in the calendar to sit on the rock on the beach as well.

[00:32:47] Bob Dunn: Yeah, I know. I’ve got to get that in there, you know. It’s very important.

[00:32:52] Nathan Wrigley: How does this whole thing hang together from a financial point of view then? So is it a sponsorship relationship? Do you onboard sponsors to keep the whole thing, because obviously, you know, it’s trying to, you’re trying to support yourself in all of this. How does that work?

[00:33:03] Bob Dunn: Yeah, it’s basically sponsorship. And the sponsorship model, but ever since I started this podcast, in fact, before I started this one and did another one before that, I started having sponsors right away.

And if your podcast is your main source of income, you got to have something. So yeah, it’s sponsorships. I am sure you relate to it yourself. And, you know, unless you’re famous and they just roll in, or you can get like a million subscribers paying $5 a month or something like that.

So, yeah, we’re constantly looking for sponsors. And I’ve changed the model so many times over the years. And it’ll probably change a little bit here again soon. So it’s never capped at a certain number. That might be capped for a period of time. But, yeah, it’s a constant flex and it’s hard work. And that’s all I can say.

[00:33:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I will just drop the URL for that. So if you’re interested from this conversation, if you’re interested in getting on as a sponsor for the openchannels.fm network, it’s the regular URL, openchannels.fm, but then append to the end of that, /sponsors, plural, or you can just find it in the main menu at the top of the site. That will also get you there and, yeah, you’ll be able to find out more about how you might make the journey into sponsoring that podcast.

Well, Bob, I know that you are a busy man. You’ve got 25 cohosts to shepherd and lots of editing to do, and dare I say it, sitting on a rock on the beach is also going to feature at some point during the day as well.

So thank you so much for chatting to me today. Once more, if you want to check out what Bob is doing with all of his co-hosts and his new structure, go to openchannels.fm to find out more. Bob Dunn, thank you so much for chatting to me today.

[00:34:47] Bob Dunn: Thank you. Always a pleasure.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, what goes into organizing a flagship WordCamp.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today we have Karla Campos. Karla has been involved in the WordPress community for over 10 years. Starting out in Miami, and taking part in meetups and word camps before stepping into larger organizational roles. With a background in media and marketing, Karla brings plenty of experience in both web and events to the world of WordPress.

Karla joins us today as a lead organizer for the upcoming WordCamp US 2025, which will take place in Portland at the end of August. Remarkably, this is her first flagship WordCamp, and she’s organizing before ever attending.

We discuss what motivated Karla to take on this major responsibility, how she balances the volunteer work with her professional life, and the challenges, expected and unexpected, along the way.

We discuss the organization of such a huge event from working with a professional production company to handling the logistics, communications, accessibility requests, visas, and more, for a thousand plus attendees. Karla shares how the community side of the event is managed, the late night worries, and what it really takes, both in time and personal commitment, to make a WordCamp US happen, especially as a volunteer.

She also highlights some of the initiatives for this year’s event, renewed efforts to welcome students and first time attendees, including student ticket pricing and the WP Trail Buddies Program to help newcomers feel at home. She also teases the introduction of a hackathon style contributor today, and new remote collaboration options.

If you’ve ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes of a WordCamp US, how it’s organized, how volunteers are supported, and what motivates people like Karla to invest their own time and resources, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Karla Campos.

I am joined on the podcast by Karla Campos. Hello, Karla.

[00:03:21] Karla Campos: Hello. How are you, Nathan?

[00:03:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good thank you. Very nice for you to join us today. I really appreciate it. Karla’s here today, we’re going to talk about WordCamp US, which is happening in Portland. Actually, I was going to say later this month, almost later this month. We’re recording it right at the very, very end July, 2025. It’s taking place toward the end of August, 2025. So it’s pretty soon.

But before we get into that, Karla, will you just give us your little potted bio. Tell us who you are, what you do in the WordPress space, and maybe very quickly just tell us how the heck you came to be organising a WordCamp, one of these flagship WordCamps.

[00:03:56] Karla Campos: I always like to say that my involvement in projects sometimes comes about serendipitously. Just kind of like, hey, look, I saw that on the internet, it looked interesting, and I decided to join.

I actually have about more than 10 years with the WordPress community in Miami. When I first moved to Florida, I started going to meetup groups and then I met the WordPress Miami organisers and started really getting involved with them.

My ex-colleague and coworker, her name was Jackie Jimenez, she unfortunately passed away, but we had a lot of great moments building things together in the WordPress Miami community. And when I saw the announcement online, I said, you know, she would’ve loved to do this with me. Let me check it out. And then that’s how I kind of just decided to join the organizer group.

So I’ve been with WordPress for over 10 years. I’ve been working in marketing. I used to work for Telemundo here in the Florida area. I used to work for iHeartRadio. So I have a lot of the media marketing background as well as the working on websites and copy. So I’ve been around for a while, just I’m more of like a quiet, in the background type of person.

[00:05:09] Nathan Wrigley: And have you attended any of these flagship, so the flagship ones are obviously WordCamp Asia, WordCamp Europe, WordCamp US. Have you attended any of those flagship ones in the past?

[00:05:18] Karla Campos: Is it odd that this is my first flagship and I’m organising it?

[00:05:21] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s great.

[00:05:22] Karla Campos: It feels almost surreal.

[00:05:23] Nathan Wrigley: So just before we hit record, you said that, I don’t know, something like a month ago, you caught wind of the fact that WordCamp US still needed some volunteers. Have I got that about right? It’s about a month ago that you became involved in the organisation of the upcoming event.

[00:05:38] Karla Campos: I would say May, I think May. You know, the dates are all come together. We don’t even know what month it is. Because we’re working on it so much in the backend. So I would say around May, when I first saw the, or when I got pulled into the organiser group.

[00:05:53] Nathan Wrigley: Since then, has it kind of taken over your life? I don’t mean that to sort of sound disparaging, but has it kind of crept in into all the different parts of your life? So you’ve basically got no free time left anymore.

[00:06:04] Karla Campos: It has because you’d think, okay, you know, even because we do have a production team that’s helping organise the event to make sure it’s properly handled for all the attendees, because we do expect around a thousand, it’s always been that amount for a flagship.

So we have a production company working on the backend helping us with the production to make sure everything is smooth. But still, with that going on, I still feel like at 2:00 AM I’m thinking WordCamp US, WordCamp US. I know there’s something I have to do. So yeah.

[00:06:34] Nathan Wrigley: Let’s split out what the production company do first of all. So I genuinely don’t know what that even means. So, a production company, I’m guessing you offload something, all the tasks that you can to them. I’m guessing they’re a commercial entity and they get paid to fulfill whatever contractual obligations that you’ve got. What is it that they handle? And then we’ll get into what the community side of things, the team of community, volunteers, and so on are doing.

[00:06:59] Karla Campos: So the production team is making sure that the venue and everything that happens at the venue is organised. So from some of the room logistics, so more on the venue side, that they’re handling that part to make sure that we can handle everything else that comes with organising, including all the planning around contributor day, showcase day, the photographers. So that’s our side, and then their side, the production team, is more of venue logistics.

[00:07:27] Nathan Wrigley: And so do they handle things like, oh, I don’t know, the building of the sponsor booths and things like that? Because when you attend these events, there’s a very, very professional feel to them. So it’s not like you just show up and, you know, it’s kind of thrown together at the last minute. It really does feel, when you actually stop and think about it, you have a great sense of, gosh, there’s months, possibly years of organising that’s gone on in the background. Is it that kind of thing? You know, making sure that essentially when you walk in, everything looks right, everything that you can see, they do.

[00:07:57] Karla Campos: Yes. And then Megan Marcel, which is my co-lead organiser, she’s heading that part. So she’s managing that production company to make sure the venue and all the booths are on point, that they look like what they cost. Because, you know, those booths and everything that the sponsors spend, it’s not cheap things. They’re very luxurious. Sometimes more than others. But yeah, so she’s making sure that that’s covered with the production team. That it looks a hundred percent what the sponsors expect.

[00:08:25] Nathan Wrigley: And, okay then, let’s flip to the more community side. So everything that is not part of the production team’s remit. What are some of the tasks that you are finding yourself worrying about at 2:00 AM in the morning?

[00:08:36] Karla Campos: Actually just making sure the communications, and all the attendees are getting service. So I am the lead organiser in charge of communications and marketing, and I have other team leaders under me, like Caroline Harrison, who is the team lead for the attendee communications. So we’re getting a lot of requests when it comes to accessibility, food that they have allergies or that they need visas.

A lot of traffic, of course, right now, I told you we had about 730 attendees already registered, so that email traffic is coming into our teams. So I’m just like, I saw an email and I know my team handled it, and I know they’re prompt but, you know, I wake up at 2:00 AM. Did I answer that email? Was that a nightmare? Did I miss something?

That’s how it’s been in my life, you know, like I’m having these nightmares that I didn’t do something, but I did, because I’m a very responsible individual. But it just feels like that. It’s become so intertwined in my life that I’m having nightmares that I didn’t do a task.

[00:09:33] Nathan Wrigley: When you get involved in the WordPress community, there’s obviously so many bits and pieces that you can get involved in, but very many of them don’t really, at the beginning, at least anyway of community involvement, don’t necessarily have crunch points in time. Obviously, as you get more into the community, there might be moments. You might be, I don’t know, a release lead or something like that, in which case there will be a date in the calendar where things have got to be all tied off.

But mostly, there’s never that calendar moment where everything’s got to be finished. But you very, very much are faced with a ticking clock, aren’t you? Because come the date that the first people are arriving, the attendees are arriving, and presumably, before that the production team need to get in, and set up all the sponsor booths and make sure all of that’s taken care of and what have you.

That’s a curious thing. So the stress, I guess, does pile up a little bit. And it would behoove all of us who attend events like this, just to pause for a moment and remember that it is done by a bunch of volunteers who have this ticking time bomb, if you know what I mean, in the back, where everything’s got to be finished by a certain date. And so I would just like to express my gratitude for the fact that you’ve stepped up basically and tried to fulfill that role. Appreciate it.

[00:10:40] Karla Campos: Thank you. I appreciate the nice kind words, because it’s been a little bit hectic and, you know, it’s good to hear that people appreciate your work.

[00:10:48] Nathan Wrigley: Have you actually had a chance to go around the building yet? I know we discussed this prior to hitting record, but is this more of a kind of, you’ll be showing up the first time in the same way that everybody else will, or have you managed to sort of walk the floorboards as it were?

[00:11:00] Karla Campos: Like I mentioned earlier, but we weren’t live, I’ve seen personally the venue in virtual tours and et cetera, but I’m coming to the Oregon area a week before. So I’ll be there earlier to see the venue. Go through the walkthroughs and do what the team does earlier, so that everything’s on point. But from what I’ve seen, everything’s going great.

[00:11:22] Nathan Wrigley: Do you get any sort of remuneration for any of the work that you do? So by remuneration, I’m specifically talking about finance. Does anything get offset? So for example, if you are based in Florida, presumably you’re going to be hopping on a plane, and there’ll be the food that you’ve got to eat during the time that you’re there, and the accommodation, the hotels and so on. Does somebody at the level of volunteering that you have nominated yourself for, does any of that get offset, or is this completely voluntary, where you’ve got to dig into your pocket for every single expense?

[00:11:50] Karla Campos: This is voluntary. So yeah, I’m just putting in from my end to support the community. So if ever you are planning on joining something like the WordCamp organisation groups, it usually is a volunteer thing. There are some scholarships but that’s, you have to apply for and it’s very competitive. So I don’t think everyone gets one. But yeah, no, everything that I’m putting in personally is through my own finances.

[00:12:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, again, obviously I gave you some thanks a moment ago and I’m about to do it again. Thank you for that commitment as well, because it’s not nothing. You know, going to Portland on an airplane from where you are, you know, it’s all the way across the country. It’s not a cheap place to reside in. Accommodation in and around the venue is probably at a premium, you know, it’s summertime, everything’s quite expensive around there. So it’s not inconsiderable, and there is an impact to that. So again, once again, thank you for taking the time, and also allocating the funds to make that possible. Obviously, events like this cannot happen without people like you doing it.

[00:12:51] Karla Campos: Yes. And I think they must be done. You know, sometimes we have to make sacrifices to bring together something that brings people together around WordPress, which powers people’s businesses, their livelihoods. So, you know, I don’t mind putting in when I know that I make an impact in a community and helping those people with their livelihoods.

[00:13:12] Nathan Wrigley: Now you said that this all began for you in May, and we could get into what it was that exactly prompted you to do that. It sounds like somebody kind of sent something in your direction, which you responded to. So what have we had May, June, July, basically, you’ve been into this for a couple of months.

Any intuitions now of regret? That’s probably not something that we want to get into too much, but do you know what I mean? If you could rewind the clock to, let’s say April during 2025, did you get into this with your eyes wide open, or has it ended up being much more of a task than you imagined? What I’m basically trying to ask is, are there any bits of this that you think, gosh, I didn’t really anticipate that was going to be involved? This is way more than I was imagining biting off.

[00:13:54] Karla Campos: Yeah, the time required to do all the work that needs to be done, and I’m a confident person, so I went in this, I have experience organising events for Telemundo, big concerts of 50,000 people plus. So I went in confident thinking, I got this. But as I got more into it, I just started to notice, okay, well, this is taking a lot of my time that I wasn’t prepared for.

But I’ve adapted and I’m good now. It’s been a rollercoaster ride, but it’s fun for me because I’m that type of person who enjoys the challenge.

Yeah, it’s been fun, it’s been unexpected for sure. So we’ve had ups and downs, but we’re getting through it, you know, and that’s the fun of a rollercoaster ride, so yeah.

[00:14:31] Nathan Wrigley: What are some of the things that you didn’t anticipate? Obviously, you said it’s ended up being more time, so yeah, more time has been required of you. But what beyond that? What are some of the things that you didn’t anticipate that you would need to do, that you have in fact ended up doing?

[00:14:44] Karla Campos: I think all the time spent talking to people, it’s been really crazy. So I think I just didn’t anticipate the timing. So I think I originally volunteered for about 10 hours per week. Leading up to the event I think, a week before the event we’re supposed, or a month before the event, we’re supposed to be putting more in time, but this feels like a full-time job.

Oh my gosh, you know, like I just didn’t anticipate for that. So it’s been kind of, like we talked about before, merging with my normal life where I’m just like, oh wait, my to-do list for my regular projects, and my family and everything is now part of WordCamp, if that makes sense.

[00:15:19] Nathan Wrigley: So during the onboarding process that you’ve had over the last couple of months, how have you learnt what you needed to know? Because this event, I mean, it can’t have been thrown together in the last couple of months. Presumably you came along and joined at some point where many things had been set in motion. But how did you acquire the knowledge that you needed to do the work that you are now doing? Who taught you all of this and so on?

[00:15:43] Karla Campos: Well, we do get the last year’s folder with all the information. So it came about from a lot of reading, asking past team members. So we do have some people who were part of the organizing team last year. Gail Wallace, one of our co-leads, she’s doing contributor day, she’s doing photography, she’s also helping with the lead organising. So she was very helpful in just kind of letting us know about the previous year.

We have mentors like Kevin Christiano and Aaron Campbell from hosting.com, who also worked with WordCamps in the past. And there are mentors who we can always contact on Slack. So we do a lot of work on Slack, and we can always message them back and forth with any information any, hey, we need help with this. They’re always there to just say, hey, this would be a better practice from our experience last year. So we do have mentors there that help us, and that’s been a big relief.

[00:16:37] Nathan Wrigley: How much time do you imagine, if I was to ask you on a, let’s go for a weekly basis. At the moment, so we’re three-ish weeks away from the event, something like that, how much time are you spending during the previous week? So the last seven days, how many hours do you think you’ve clocked up working towards this event?

[00:16:53] Karla Campos: At least, I would say 30 hours.

[00:16:55] Nathan Wrigley: Wow, okay. And so that then presumably has had a material impact upon the regular work that you do. Now, either you are just superhuman and can add 30 hours into your working week with no perceived, you know, there’s just, that’s fine. I can just add 30 hours in. Most of us, including myself, could not do that. I would have to kind of offset one thing with the other. Have you done that? Has it had an impact on the business, the work that you normally do? Have you had to sort of downgrade the amount of time you’ve been spending recently on that kind of work?

[00:17:22] Karla Campos: Not on my business, more on my free time, so I’m not getting out this summer to the pool as I would have last year. But luckily, we’re having a super heat wave in Florida, so it’s too hot outside anyway.

[00:17:33] Nathan Wrigley: It’s like it’s been planned, yeah.

[00:17:35] Karla Campos: It’s been planned. The universe is putting a heat wave out there, so now I can’t outside in the pool, but I would probably still take my devices out there.

[00:17:42] Nathan Wrigley: Has the team had any concerns around attendee numbers? Because I remember I went to this event last year, and I actually don’t know what the numbers are, but I’m going to guess it was in the region of, I don’t know, 1,300 to 1,500, something like that, attendees.

There’s obviously been a lot of controversy in the WordPress space since that event. I wondered if there has been some anxiety? I have a recollection that the event, the planning of the event probably would’ve been happening earlier than it did for this event.

So I’m just wondering if you could speak to that, whether or not the team itself are happy with the numbers that you’ve got so far? And whether or not things are kind of late in the planning, let’s put it that way. Do you feel that it’s all being put together in a rushed way?

[00:18:23] Karla Campos: No, I think we’re on track. I mean, we expected the event to be smaller this year because there have been discussions around different things that are happening in just the space, like traveling restrictions, people being scared to fly to the US, different things that we knew it was going to make the numbers less.

But right now we’re up to 730 registered attendees. So we are planning for a thousand attendees. That’s our goal. Hopefully more. But yeah, we expected that it was going to be a little bit less than last year for the various reasons, including the travel restrictions and things that people do not want to come to the US for.

But, Portland is ultimately a very friendly place and I think our concern is that everyone is safe and happy at the event. So I think we’re doing a very good job with that right now.

[00:19:11] Nathan Wrigley: I guess also there’s maybe, the fact that an event like this has happened in the previous year at the exact same venue. There’s maybe a little bit that would be squandered there, if you know what I mean?

So the idea that you’d get a similar number of the exact same people, plus others, coming back to the same venue. I know for me at least anyway, it is quite nice to have the opportunity to go to different places. I’m going to be in attendance, so it hasn’t put me off. I’m still going to be there. But I think some people do like the fact that, you know, it’s in Portland one year and it’s in, I don’t know, Texas or California or whatever it may be in different years.

So maybe that kind of speaks into it a little bit as well. But yeah, the whole thing around traveling to the US, plus the obvious problems that we’ve had in the WordPress space around the community and so on. And then maybe this third piece of it being in the same venue and in the same location, maybe all of those conspire to not make it as big as last year. But still, a thousand, which seems to be the target number, is pretty credible.

Do you anticipate getting to a thousand? Is the trajectory at the moment, if you were to map that forward, do you think you’ll actually manage that? Despite the fact that it’s an aspirational target? Are you fairly confident you’ll get there?

[00:20:14] Karla Campos: Yeah, I’m confident. But I told you earlier, I’m a confident person, I’m always thinking positive. And we do have a lot of student initiatives, because we want to bring more people into the WordPress community, more students that perhaps haven’t even had the opportunity to experience WordPress, and the community, and how that can help them build their career.

So, our topic is sort of like the future of WordPress. And we’re doing a lot of student initiatives so that, you know, everybody gets a little bit of that WordPress community feel and that would, there’s a lot of students very interested, so I think we can reach the number.

[00:20:48] Nathan Wrigley: I certainly hope so. I mean, when you say students, I’m presuming from that, that you mean younger people by that as well. So not just people that are in education, but really aiming that target at young people in education.

It always struck me when you go to these events that the demographic definitely skews older. I don’t mean, you know, particularly old, but you don’t tend to find a bunch of 18 to 20 year olds wandering around in large proportion.

It seems to me, it’s definitely in the late twenties, early thirties, forties, fifties and and upwards. So that’s been a definite charge that you’ve had then has it, to try and get younger people? Have I got that right? When you said student, did you mean younger people?

[00:21:29] Karla Campos: Well, we are working with colleges because they’re very interested in how AI and WordPress are evolving, and everything that’s going around that. And through our event, the teachers that work at the colleges are very excited to connect the students with the future of the web and whatever’s happening with web development and AI.

They’re really interested in sending the students there because even though they’re educators, they’re not the innovators. So they want to come to WordCamp to connect with those innovators, including Google. Google’s liaison of search, Danny Sullivan, that was amazing to the students. They wanted to meet people in charge of the tech industry and connect there. So I’m talking about those students, yeah, the students that are in the tech industry that want to connect with the industry leaders.

[00:22:17] Nathan Wrigley: I think things work slightly differently over here in the UK, but I know that in the US there’s this sort of concept of college credits, where you do a certain thing and it can count towards part of your educational program. You know, you can tick some boxes and it will get you to jump over some hurdles.

Do you know if an event like WordCamp, in this case WordCamp US, do you know if an event like that can count? And does that in some way then kind of make it slightly easier to sell a WordPress event into that student marketplace, if you like?

[00:22:47] Karla Campos: It can, depending on the teachers. Some of the universities and colleges already have their structured standards on how credits work. But if we’re working with the teachers, sometimes they have summer school projects that they get extra credit, that helps their grades. So we can tie that in with that.

We’re welcome to working with any teacher who wants to help their students grow their career and willing to give them extra credit and opportunities. So it depends on the college and the teacher and what already they have established.

[00:23:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, like I said, we don’t kind of operate that system, certainly for WordCamp US, I don’t think that would particularly count. But I know that those kind of systems exist.

Just pivoting to you a little bit and the work that you did in the past. Obviously it sounds like you’ve got a heritage in being involved in sizable events, credible events in the tech space, and perhaps other spaces as well.

What do you make of this event? How do you sort of see it? Do you see it as a sort of professional tech event, something that you may have attended on behalf of organisations that you were working for before? Or is this much more of a kind of community event?

I can’t really sum up the exact target of what I’m trying to say there, but I’m just really after a feel of what you make of the event in terms of whether it’s more, I don’t know, more friendly, a little bit less business orientated, and perhaps skewing more to community, that kind of thing.

[00:24:05] Karla Campos: I think it’s a little bit of both. It is a friendlier atmosphere from the different tech events that I’ve been involved in that feel more serious. Because when you go to a WordCamp, you automatically feel that it’s a little friendlier, a little bit less corporate.

Yes, everyone is very skilled. They’re very like awesome in their profession, but they’re also very down to earth and just willing to, hey, share a tidbit here, a tip here. I’ve even seen people help other people with their websites live at the events. Hey, look, I’m having a problem with my website. It’s not doing something on mobile. It’s not responding the way I want it to. It’s not responsive. Can you help me? And someone will stop and say, yeah, let’s sit down here in this corner. Let’s go to that room, and let me look at it and help you a little bit. And it’s something that I don’t see at other conferences where people have this community feel. So I’ve always admired that about WordCamps.

[00:24:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s really hard to encapsulate, isn’t it? What that thing is. But that thing is a thing. And what I mean by that is there is some quality of community spirit that definitely hasn’t existed at any event that I’ve been to outside of the WordPress space. It feels a little bit more like, heads down, you’re there for work, you must concentrate entirely on work, and maybe you’ll attend some kind of, I don’t know, after party or something like that. But again, the entire purpose of that will be business, business as usual.

And there is much more of sense of camaraderie. And really, I suppose if somebody is listening to this and is kind of on the fence about these events, definitely I would draw your attention to that fact. And although if you are perhaps slightly more on the introverted side, it doesn’t necessarily make it a hundred percent easier to attend, and this feeling that you’ll just suddenly be embraced by everybody in the hallway, it probably won’t work that way. But there is definitely a more friendly atmosphere. There’s a different, and dare I say it, vibe going on, which I have always really appreciated. It definitely feels less corporate, more friendly. There’s more of an opportunity to make friendships, for want of a better way of describing it.

[00:26:07] Karla Campos: Yes. And also, I’m sure you know Michelle Frechette.

[00:26:10] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah.

[00:26:11] Karla Campos: I think everyone knows Michelle. She’s organising something called WP Trail Buddies. So she’s actually connecting veteran WordCamp attendees with new attendees, so that they can have like a friend, a buddy at the WordCamp that they can do things with, so they don’t feel alone and they feel welcome.

So that’s a new thing, and that sounds, you know, if a person is coming to WordCamp for the first time, they can go that route, you know, they can actually have somebody there with them.

[00:26:37] Nathan Wrigley: I would draw everybody’s attention, if you’ve never been to one of these flagship WordPress events before, there is something particularly good about this Portland one. And the thing that I enjoyed so much last year, I enjoyed the event, but the venue itself was so brilliant, so enormous. There was never this hint of falling over people. There was quite literally acres of space to mill around.

And so the hallway track felt very much, you know, you could take five minutes out and go and sit in the corner over there and get on with your own stuff, what have you. But this would be a really good one to attend. So I would definitely advise people, if you’re on the fence and you kind of think, I maybe should go, I’m not entirely sure. Everything is geared up. We know what that place is like, the conference center is absolutely magnificent. So I would definitely urge people who are wavering, who aren’t entirely sure to give it a go.

And I will put a link into the show notes for the initiative that Michelle Frechette is leading, the WP Trail Buddies. And if you’ve got concerns about showing up and just hanging out and feeling a little bit isolated, then Michelle will be able to introduce you to somebody who has been there, done that, for want of a better word. Again, another reason to have a little look.

And the tickets are really inexpensive. It’s not nothing, but at the moment, I don’t think there’s going to be any change in this. But it’s a flat hundred bucks. And, in all honesty, you’ll probably eat more than a hundred dollars worth of food in the time that you’re there. So the ticket price is just absurdly low.

[00:28:02] Karla Campos: Yes, and we do also have a student pricing of $25, if the students show ID, or proof that they’re enrolled in school. So that’s also like an amazing deal.

[00:28:12] Nathan Wrigley: Now, the events often have a bit of a formula to them. There’ll be presentations, and they will run over a couple of days. So you’ll pick various tracks and you can go and see this person, and then come out into the hallway and hang out in the hallway.

But then also there’s this idea of contributor day. And in contributor day, typically you would select a table, that table will be aligned to some core part of the project. So it could be photography, it could be Core, it could be, I don’t know, polyglots, something like that. And you would allocate your time and decide to work on that for the day.

I have a feeling that you are doing something a little bit different on contributor day this time around. Do you know about that? Do you want to speak about that?

[00:28:51] Karla Campos: We are, but it’s a secret.

[00:28:53] Nathan Wrigley: Is it? Okay.

[00:28:54] Karla Campos: No, it’s a hackathon, but Gail Wallace is going to speak more about that in the coming weeks. So we’re just waiting for her to share all the information about what she’s been working on with that.

But there is something new, which is collaborating remotely for the Testing Team. So that’s fun. That hasn’t been done before.

[00:29:14] Nathan Wrigley: So the Testing Team will be open to kind of like a, more of like a Zoom approach. So it won’t just be people that are attending in the room. They’ll be able to offer the opportunity for people to join live, but remotely. Yeah, that’s really nice. That’s a really nice idea.

The hackathon, I was lucky enough to go to a hackathon earlier this year. I attended CloudFest in Germany, in Rust in Germany. Obviously you are not able to reveal whether you know or otherwise what that will involve. For the people listening to this, I’ll just give you some indication of what that might involve.

And a hackathon, rather than just showing up and deciding on the spur of the moment what it is that you’re going to be involved with. A hackathon is more of a kind of project based thing, where you come to the hackathon with a project that you would like to see finished in a certain way. So you might come and say, during the next day, we’re going to try and do this thing, so we’re going to move from here to here.

And in that way, everybody coalesces on the exact same purpose, and tries to push that thing over the line. And in the hackathons that I’ve been to, again, there’s this sort of slightly tongue in cheek, fun, competitive edge as well, where at the end of the day, different people from the different teams sort of stand up and say exactly what they did and how they did.

And then there’s kind of like a voting, there’s a panel of people who decide who the, and I’m doing air quotes, who the winner is. So, again, obviously I’m not going to try and get you to reveal any details, but that kind of component, if it is anything like that, that really does bring something new and a bit of fun, I think.

[00:30:40] Karla Campos: Yeah, I think people enjoy, when it’s friendly competition on something that they’re passionate about building, I think they enjoy that, like sports. So it’s exciting.

[00:30:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s a good way of describing it, sporty, competitive edge kind of thing, isn’t it? Just sort of rehashing a bit of a question I asked a minute ago though. Obviously, like I said, you’ve been involved in these kind of events before in different spheres. Is there anything that you think, if you were to rerun your time, and maybe you’ll be involved in next year’s WordCamp US, I don’t know. Is there anything where you think, do you know what, I think we could try this, or we should jettison that? Obviously nobody’s implying that you are going to be the decision maker in any of this, but are there any bits and pieces that you think, well, we should definitely try that, or we should definitely maybe lose that?

[00:31:23] Karla Campos: I think we’ve had so many ideas, and we were all just kind of thrown together as a new team. And there were so many ideas flying around that we just couldn’t get to. So we’re doing the best ones that we thought about, but like there were so many others that we could’ve included.

So I’m not sure if I’m going to be joining next year or not, I haven’t planned that out yet. But I think we’re going to at least have a discussion with the organisers about just kind of like looking back, hey, what did we like. Let’s leave little notes for the next year’s organising team so that they can, you know, they can know what to expect.

But now we have a roadmap together as a team. So I think it’s fun. And we’ll be way more prepared next year and add more fun stuff that we just didn’t have time for. But we’re all very creative, so you know how those discussions go when everybody’s creative, throwing ideas. And it’s like, all right, we have to pick just three because all of these are great but, you know, we’re on a time constraint, so we just execute these.

So I think it’s been fun all around. But yeah, just kind of getting all the ideas that we had together and executing them next year.

[00:32:23] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s kind of an important moment for these kind of events because they’ve been running largely on the same format for a really long time. And there’s definitely, in events outside of the WordPress space, there definitely are some of these fun ideas kind of creeping in, making it a little bit more entertainment, if you know what I mean, at the same time as being educational and informative. And I think it would be interesting to sound some of those different organisations out. Maybe go to the different events like DrupalCon and things like that, and see how they do things differently. See how sponsorship works and so on and so forth.

Now, one question, which I think probably will be rounding off the episode, if that’s all right with you, would be to ask you, when does your involvement with this end? And I don’t mean, you know, that you might get involved next year. Because obviously I’m going to attend, and the minute the whole thing is finished, it’s kind of more or less over for me. I may go back to the hotel or spend a few days in Portland having a look around or what have you. But for me, the event has kind of finished at that moment. For you, I’m guessing that’s not the case. Do you have any anticipation of what it will involve in terms of collapsing the event down? At what point it will be considered to be finished by the team?

[00:33:28] Karla Campos: Well, physically we have to be out by a certain date and everything cleaned out. So I am planning to stay there a little bit longer to handle that with the rest of the team. But I think we should be done by the 31st. Everything should be cleared out, physically.

But then of course we’re going to reunite and just kind of have a meeting and talk about the experience. And like we were talking about, what can we do better next year? And I think maybe, I think we’re still going to be in talks at least two weeks after the event is over to kind of close that out as a team.

[00:33:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So it definitely doesn’t end on the day that it’s going to end for me. So, yeah, there’s another example of the amount that people like you are doing.

I would just draw attention to the fact that clearly this is not an event which is being organised entirely by you. There’s obviously a huge team of people going on in the background. And it would be remiss of us not to thank all of them. Can’t mention them all by name, but if you go to the website, I’m sure there’ll be places where you can go and find out who is involved in the team.

Don’t forget that if you want to get tickets and you’re a student, you can pay just $25 for a, basically three day event. I mean, that’s nuts. Or if you are not a student and you want to attend, then $100. And there are still, I think, some additional options that you can explore, perhaps sponsorship options and things like that, above and beyond that as well.

So, Karla, that’s all the questions I’ve got. Is there anything that I’ve missed? Is there anything prior to recording to this you thought, ah, I must remember to say that, but didn’t get a chance to say it?

[00:34:57] Karla Campos: I just want to say thank you everyone for even thinking of attending. It’s going to be a great event. We have amazing speakers all about the future of WordPress and AI. How everything in technology is changing, what that means for your business now. Or if you have plans for a new business, what it means for you in your career. It’s going to be just a great place to network with people in the field, and I’m extremely excited. So I hope you’re excited just like I am. And I hope to see you guys at the WordCamp US 2025.

[00:35:26] Nathan Wrigley: So I should probably at this point mention that the links to anything that we’ve mentioned so far will be in the show notes. But if you do wish to find out more about it, head to us.wordcamp.org/2025. And as is usually the case, there’s a whole bunch of links at the top of that website.

So for example, you can look at the schedule, so see who’s speaking. You can look and dig into the location and about it. And obviously buying the tickets as well, that’s all going to be there. So us.wordcamp.org/2025, the numbers.

There we go. Thank you very much for chatting to me today, Karla Campos. Really, really appreciate it. And very, very best of luck with the event. I hope to see you there.

[00:36:07] Karla Campos: Thank you, Nathan.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how the Google Site Kit plugin is attempting to simplify their product offering, right inside of WordPress.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea. Featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Mariya Moeva. Mariya has more than 15 years of experience in tech across search quality, developer advocacy, community building and outreach, and product management. Currently, she’s the product lead for Site Kit, Google’s official WordPress plugin.

She’s presented at Word Camp Europe in Basel this year and joins us to talk about the journey from studying classical Japanese literature to fighting web spam at Google, and eventually shaping open source tools for the web.

Mariya talks about her passion for the open web, and how years of direct feedback from site owners shaped the vision for Site Kit. Making complex analytics accessible and actionable for everyone, from solo bloggers to agencies and hosting providers.

Site Kit has had impressive growth for a WordPress plugin, currently there are 5 million active installs and a monthly user base of 700,000.

We learn how Site Kit bundles core Google products like Search Console, Analytics, Page Speed Insights, AdSense into a simpler, curated WordPress dashboard, giving actionable insights without the need to trawl through multiple complex interfaces.

Mariya explains how the plugin is intentionally beginner friendly with features like role-based dashboard sharing, integration with WordPress’ author and category systems, and some newer additions like Reader Revenue Manager to help site owners become more sustainable.

She shares Google’s motivations for investing so much in WordPress and the open web, and how her team is committed to active support, trying to respond rapidly on forums and listening closely to feedback.

We discussed Site Kit’s roadmap, from benchmarking and reporting features, to smarter, more personalized recommendations in the future.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by analytics dashboards, or are looking for ways to make data more practical and valuable inside WordPress, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Mariya Moeva.

I’m joined on the podcast by Mariya Moeva. Hello, Mariya. Nice to meet you.

[00:03:35] Mariya Moeva: Nice to be here.

[00:03:36] Nathan Wrigley: Mariya is doing a presentation at WordCamp Europe. That’s where we are at the moment, and we’re going to be talking about the bits and the pieces that she does around Site Kit, the work that she does for Google. Given that you are a Googler, and that we’re going to be talking about a product that you have, will you just give us your bio? I’ve got it written here, you obviously put one on the WordCamp Europe website. But just roughly what is your place in WordPress and Google and Site Kit and all of that?

[00:04:05] Mariya Moeva: Yeah. I mean, I’ve had a very meandering path. When you would look back to what I studied, which was, you know, classical Japanese literature, all these poems about the moon and the cherry blossoms, who would’ve thought at that time that I would end up building open source plugins? But I did have a meandering path and I ended up here because, mostly because of passion for the open web, and for all kinds of weird websites that exist out there. I really love stumbling upon something great.

I started Google on the web spam team, actually looking into the Japanese spam market, because of this classical Japanese literature degree and the Japanese skills. And then after a couple years or so, I basically despaired of humanity because all you look at is spam every day. Bad sites, hacked sites, malicious pages. And I just wanted to do something that makes the web better rather than removing all the bad stuff.

And so I switched over to an advocacy role, and in that role I essentially was traveling, maybe attending 20, 30 conferences every year, talking to a lot of people about their needs, what they have to complain about Google, what requests they have. And I would collect all of this feedback, and then I would go back to the product teams and I would say, hey, this and this is something that people really want. And they would say, thank you for your feedback.

Essentially at one point I said, okay, we’re going to build this thing, and that’s why I switched into product role. And I was able to take all the feedback over the years, that we’ve gotten from developers and site owners, and to try to build something that makes sense for them. So that’s how I ended up in the product role for building Site Kit.

And the idea from the very beginning was to make it beginner friendly and to make it from their perspective to match that feedback, rather than doing something that is like, here’s your stuff from analytics, here’s your stuff from Search Console, figure it out. That’s how we ended up building this and it’s been now five years. And it actually just a month ago entered the top 10 plugins. So clearly people find some value in it.

We have 700,000 people that use it every month. And overall it’s currently at 5 million active installs, meaning that these sites are kind of pinging WordPress so they’re alive and kicking. It’s been very encouraging to see that what we’re doing is helpful to people and we will keep going. There’s a lot to do.

[00:06:29] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s kind of amazing because in the WordPress space, there are some of the, let’s call them the heavy hitters. You know, the big plugins that we’ve all heard of, the Yoasts of this world that kind of thing. Jetpack, all those kind of things. This, honestly has gone under the radar a bit for me, and yet those numbers are truly huge. Four and a half to 5 million people over a span of five years is really rather incredible.

[00:06:54] Mariya Moeva: It grew very fast, yeah.

[00:06:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And yet it’s not one that, well, I guess most people are reaching out to plugins to solve a problem, often a business problem. So, you know, there’s this idea of, I install this and there’s an ROI on that. This is not really that, not really ROI, it’s more site improvement. Okay, here’s a site that needs things fixing on it. Here’s some data about what can be fixed. And so maybe for that reason and that reason alone, it’s flown under the radar for me because it doesn’t have that commercial component to it.

[00:07:24] Mariya Moeva: Yeah, for sure. It’s for free and it’s not something that, yeah, sells features or has like a premium model and we don’t market it so much. But I run a little survey in the product where people tell us where they heard from it, and a lot of the responses are either YouTube video, or like blog posts or word of mouth. So it seems to be spreading more that way.

[00:07:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no kidding. I’ll just say the URL out loud in case you’re at a computer when you’re listening to this. It’s SiteKit, as one word, dot withgoogle.com. I don’t know if that’s the canonical URL, but that’s where I ended up when I did a quick search for it. So sitekit.withgoogle.com. And over there you’ll be able to download well, as it labels itself, Google’s official WordPress plugin.

The first thing that surprises me is, a, Google’s interest in WordPress. That is fascinating to me. I mean, obviously we all know, Google is this giant, this leviathan. Maybe you’ve got interest in other CMSs, maybe not. I don’t really know. But I think that’s curious. But obviously 43% of the web, kind of makes sense to partner with WordPress, doesn’t it? To improve websites.

[00:08:31] Mariya Moeva: Yeah. I work with plenty of CMSs. I work with Wix, with Squarespace, and we essentially what I try to do and what my team tries to do, we are called the Ecosystem Team. So we want to bring the things that we think would be useful to site owners and businesses directly to where they are.

So if you are in your Wix dashboard, you should be able to see the things from Google that are useful. And same if you are in WordPress. And obviously WordPress is, orders of magnitude, a bigger footprint than any of the others. And also it has this special structure where everything is decentralised and people kind of mix and match. So that’s why we went with the plugin model. And using the public APIs, we want to show what’s possible.

Because all the data that we use is public data. There’s no special Google feature that only the Google product gets, right? We are just combining it in interesting ways because I’ve spent so much time talking to people, like what they need. And so we just curate and combine in ways that are actually helping people to make decisions and to kind of clear the clutter.

Because when you go to analytics, it’s like 50 reports and so many menus and it’s like, where do I start? So we try to give a starting point in Site Kit. And we also try to help with other things like make people sustainable. One thing that we recently launched just a month ago is called Reader Revenue Manager. So you can put a little prompt on your site, which asks people to give you like $2 or whatever currency you are in, or even put like a subscription.

And so the idea is you don’t have to have massive traffic in order to generate revenue from your content. If you have your hundred thousand loyal readers, they can help you be more sustainable. So we’re looking at these kind of features, like what can we launch that is more for small and medium sites and would be helpful? And how can we make it as simple as possible? So that people don’t kind of drop off during the setup because it’s too complicated.

[00:10:33] Nathan Wrigley: Would it be fair to summarise the plugin’s initial purpose as kind of binding a bunch of Google products, which otherwise you would have to go and navigate to elsewhere? So for example, I’m looking at the website now, Search Console, Analytics, Page Speed Insights, AdSense, Google Ads, and all of those kind of things. Typically we’d have to go and, you know, set up an account. I guess we’d have to do that with Site Kit anyway. But we’d have to go to the different URLs and do all of that.

The intention of this then is to bind that inside of the WordPress UI, so it’s not just the person who’s the admin of that account. You can open it up so that people who have the right permissions inside of WordPress, they can see, for example, Google Analytics data. And it gets presented on the backend of WordPress rather than having to go to these other URLs. Is that how it all began as a way of sort of surfacing Google product data inside the UI of WordPress?

[00:11:21] Mariya Moeva: Yeah, we wanted to bring the most important things directly to where people are, so they don’t have to bother going to 15 places. And we wanted to drastically decrease and curate the information so that it’s easy to understand, because when you have 15 dashboards in Analytics and 15 dashboards in Search Console, and then you have to figure out what to download and in which spreadsheet to merge and how to compare, then this is. Maybe if you have an agency taken care of, they can help you. But if you don’t, which 70% of our users say that they’re one person operation, so they’re taking care of their business, and on top of that, the website. We wanted to make it simpler to understand how you’re doing, and what you should do next with Google data.

[00:12:02] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s a curated interface. So it’s not, I mean, maybe you can pull in every single thing if you so wish. But the idea is you give a, I don’t know, an easier to understand interface to, for example, Google Analytics.

That was always the thing for me in Google Analytics. I’m sure that if you have the time and the expertise, like you’re an agency that deals with all of that, then all of that data is probably useful and credible. But for me, I just want to know some top level items. I don’t need to dig into the weeds of everything.

And there was menus within menus, within menus, and I would get lost very quickly, and dispirited and essentially give up. So I guess this is an endeavor to get you what you need quickly inside the WordPress admin, so you don’t have to be an expert.

[00:12:43] Mariya Moeva: Yeah. And then it gets more powerful when you are able to combine data from different products. So, for example, we have a feature called Search Funnel in the dashboard, which lets you, it combines data from Search Console on search impressions and search clicks, and then it combines data from Analytics on visitors on the site and conversions. So it kind of helps you map out the entire path, versus having to go over here, having to go over there, having to combine everything yourself. So when you combine things, then it gets also more powerful.

We have another feature which lets you combine data from AdSense and Analytics. So if you have AdSense on your site, you can then see which pages earn you the most revenue. So when you have that, suddenly you can see, okay, so I have now these pages here, what queries are they ranking for? How much time people spend on them? Can I expand my content in that direction? It helps you to be more focused in kind of the strategy that you have for your site.

[00:13:45] Nathan Wrigley: Is it just making, I mean, I say just, is it making API calls backwards and forwards to Google’s Analytics, Search Console, whatever, and then displaying that information, or is it kind of keeping it inside the WordPress database?

[00:13:58] Mariya Moeva: We don’t store anything, well, almost anything. Yeah, we wanted to keep the data as secure as possible, so we created this proxy service, which kind of helps to exchange the credentials. So the person can authenticate with their Google account, and then from there, the data is pulled via API, and we cache the dashboard for one hour. After that we refreshed authentication token. From the data itself, nothing is stored.

[00:14:23] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s just authentication information really that’s stored. Well, that’s kind of a given, I suppose. Otherwise you’ll be logging in every two minutes.

[00:14:29] Mariya Moeva: Right. So that’s the model that we have because we really wanted people to be able to access this data, but also to keep it secure. And because of how the WordPress database is, we didn’t feel like we could save it there.

[00:14:41] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds from what you’ve just said, it’s as if it’s combining things from a variety of different services, kind of linking them up in a structured way so that somebody who’s not particularly experienced can make connections between, I don’t know, ads and analytics. The spend on the ads and the analytics, you know, the ROI if you like.

Does it do things uniquely? Is there something you can get inside of Site Kit which you could not get out of the individual products if you went there? Or is it just more of a, well, we’ve done the hard work for you, we’ve mapped these things together so you don’t have to think about it?

[00:15:10] Mariya Moeva: The one thing that it does that I’m super excited about, and we’ll build on that, but we have the fundamental of it now, is it actually creates data for you. Because in contrast to Search Console or Analytics or all these other, which are kind of Google hosted, they can only tell you like a long help center article, go there on your site, then click this, then paste this code, right? They cannot help you with this, whereas Site Kit is on the website.

So if you agree, which we don’t install anything without people’s consent, like they have to activate the feature, but if you agree, then we can do things on your behalf. So for example, we can track every time someone clicks the signup button and we can generate an analytics event for you, even if that plugin normally doesn’t send analytics events. And that way, suddenly you have your conversion data available.

So very often people look to the top of the funnel, like how many people came to my site? But they don’t look to what these people did beyond kind of, oh, they stayed two minutes. So what does this mean? You want to see, did they buy the thing? Did they sign up for the thing, or subscribe or whatever it is? And we help create this data because we have this unique access to the source code of the site.

So we create, for example, on leads generation or purchases. We also, every time that a specific page is viewed, we will generate an event about the author of the page. So then we can aggregate the data, which authors bring in the most page views. Let’s say you have like a site with five, six, whatever authors. Or which categories are bringing in the most engagement and these kind of things.

[00:16:52] Nathan Wrigley: So it really does get very WordPressy. It’s not just to do with the Google side of things. It is mapping information from Google, so categories, author profiles, that kind of thing, and mapping them into the analytics that you get. Okay, that’s interesting. So it’s a two-way process, not just a one-way process.

[00:17:09] Mariya Moeva: Yeah. It’s very much integrated with WordPress. We have also a lot of other features, like for example, that kind of stretch into other parts of the website. So this Reader Revenue Manager that I mentioned before with the prompts that you can put on your pages. You can go to the individual post and for every post there’s like a little piece of control UI that we’ve added there in the compose screen, where you can say, this is excluded from this prompt, or, you know, you can control from there.

So we try to integrate where it makes sense, like where the person would want to take this action. And again, because it’s on the website, we can kind of spread out beyond just this one dashboard.

[00:17:48] Nathan Wrigley: And would I, as a site admin, would I be able to assign permissions to different user roles within WordPress? So for example, an editor, or a certain user profile, may be able to see a subset of data. You know, for example, I don’t know, you are involved in the spending on AdSense. But you, other user over there, you’ve got nothing to do with that. But you are into the analytics, so you can see that, and you over there you can see that. Is that possible?

[00:18:12] Mariya Moeva: We have something called dashboard sharing. So it has the same, like if you use Google Docs or anything like that, it has this little person with a plus in the corner, icon. And then from there, if you are the admin who set up this particular Google Service, who connected it to Site Kit, then you’re able to say who should be able to see it. So you essentially grant view only access to, let’s say all the editors, or all the contributors or whatever. And then you can choose which Google service’s data they can see.

[00:18:44] Nathan Wrigley: So yes is the answer to that, yeah.

[00:18:46] Mariya Moeva: Yeah, yeah. So they don’t have to set it up, I mean, they have to go through a very simplified setup, and then they basically get a kind of a screenshot. I mean it’s, you can still click on things, but you can’t change anything, so it’s kind of a view-only dashboard.

[00:18:59] Nathan Wrigley: I’m kind of curious about the market that you pitch this to. So sell is the wrong word because it’s a free plugin, but who you’re pitching it at. So obviously if you’ve got that end user, the site owner. Maybe they’ve got a site and they’ve got a small business with a team. Maybe it’s just them, so there’s the whole permissions thing there.

But also I know that Google, there are whole agencies out there who just specialise in Google products, and analysing the data that comes out of Analytics. Can you do that as well as an agency? Could I set this up for my clients and have some, you know, I’ve got my agency dashboard and I want to give this client access to this website, and this website and this website, but not these other ones? Can it be deployed on a sort of agency basis like that?

[00:19:38] Mariya Moeva: You would still have to activate it for every individual site. So in that sense, there’s a bunch of steps that you have to go through. But once it’s activated, you can then share with any kind of client. And actually we have a lot of agencies that can install it for every site that they have.

Just today someone came and after he saw the demo, he was like, okay, I’m going to install it for all my clients. Because what we’ve heard is that it’s exactly the level of information that a client would benefit from. And this means then that they pester the agency less. So we’ve literally heard people saying, you’re saving me a lot of phone calls. So that’s why agencies really like it.

And the next big feature request, which we’re working on right now, is to generate like an email report out of that. So for those who don’t even want to log into WordPress to see, there will be a possibility to get this in their inbox.

[00:20:30] Nathan Wrigley: So you could get it like a weekly summary, whatever it that wish to trigger. And, okay, so that could go anywhere really. And then your clients don’t even need to phone you about that.

[00:20:41] Mariya Moeva: Yeah. So we are trying to really actively reach people where they are, even if that’s their email inbox.

[00:20:49] Nathan Wrigley: And the other question I have is around your relationship with some of the bigger players, maybe hosting companies. Do you have this pre-installed on hosting cPanels and their, you know, whatever it is that they’ve got in their back end?

[00:21:02] Mariya Moeva: Yeah, we have quite a few hosting providers that pre-install it for their WordPress customers. The reason for this is that they see better lifetime value for those customers that have a good idea of how their site is doing. And yeah, Hostinger is one of those. cPanel. Elementor pre-installs it for all of their users. And they see very good feedback because again, it’s super simple to set up and super easy to understand once you have it. So for them it’s kind of like an extra feature that they can offer, extra value to their users for free.

[00:21:32] Nathan Wrigley: We know Google’s a fabulous company, but you don’t do things for nothing. So what’s the return? How does it work in reverse? So we know that presumably there must be an exchange of data. What are we signing up for if we install Site Kit?

[00:21:47] Mariya Moeva: So, at least, I mean, Google is a huge company, right? There’s hundreds of thousands of people working. So I can’t speak for the whole of Google, but I can speak for the Ecosystem Team, which I’m part of, like the web ecosystem.

The main investment here, or the main goal for us is that the open web continues to thrive, because if people don’t put content, interesting, relevant content on the open web, the search results are going to be very poor and that’s not a good product.

So our idea is to support all the people who create content to make sure that they’re found, like if you’re a local business, that people can find you when they need stuff from that particular local business. And what we see is that, especially for smaller and medium sites, they really struggle, first with going online, and then with figuring out what they’re supposed to do. And so a lot of them give up because in comparison to other platforms, it’s a little bit of an upfront investment, right? Like you have to pay for hosting, you have to set up the site, you have to add content.

So we try to help people as much as we can to see the value that the open web brings to them, so that they can continue to create for the open web. So that’s our hidden motivation. I think in that sense, we’re very much aligned with the WordPress community because here everybody cares about the open web and for all kind of small, weird websites to continue flourishing and get their like 100 or 300 or 1,000 readers that they deserve.

So that’s the motivation. I think because it includes other things like AdSense and AdWords, like people can set up a ads campaign directly from Site Kit in a very simplified flow, and the same thing for AdSense. Obviously some money exchanges hands, but this is relatively minor compared to the benefit that we think there is for the web in general.

[00:23:35] Nathan Wrigley: Google really does seem to have a very large presence at WordPress events. I mean, I don’t know about the smaller ones, you know, the regional sort of city based events, but at the, what they call flagship events, so WordCamp Asia and WordCamp Europe and US, there’s the whole sponsor area. And it’s usual to see one of the larger booths being occupied by Google. And I wonder, is it Site Kit that you are talking about when you are here or is it other things as well?

But also it’s curious to me that Google would be here in that presence, because those things are not cheap to maintain. So there must be somebody up in Google somewhere saying, okay, this is something we want to invest in. So is it Site Kit that you are basically at the booth talking about?

[00:24:19] Mariya Moeva: So me, yes, or people on my team. We have like a Site Kit section this year. There’s also Google Trends. There’s also some other people talking about user experience and on search. And this changes depending on which teams within Google want to reach out to the WordPress community.

But with Site Kit, we’ve been pretty consistent for the last six years. We are always part of the booth. But the kind of whole team, like the whole Google booth content has kind of changed over the years as well depending on who’s coming.

[00:24:51] Nathan Wrigley: I know that a lot of work being done is surrounding performance and things like that, and a lot of the Google staff that are in the WordPress space seem to be focused on that kind of thing, talking about the new APIs that are shipping in the browsers and all of those kind of things.

Okay, so on the face of it, a fairly straightforward product to use. But I’m guessing the devil is in the detail. How do you go about supporting this? So for example, if I was to install it and to run into some problems, do you have like a, I don’t know, a documentation area or do you have support, or chat or anything like that? Because I know that with the best will in the world, people are going to run into problems. How do people manage that kind of thing?

[00:25:27] Mariya Moeva: Yeah, this was something that I was super, I felt really strongly about based on my previous experience in the developer advocate world. Because very often I got feedback that it’s super hard to reach Google. And it’s also understandable given the scale of some of the products.

But when I started this project I insisted that we allocate resources for support. So we have two people full-time support. One of them is upstairs, the support lead. He knows the product inside and out. They’re always on the forum, the plugin forum, support forum. And they answer usually within 24 hours. So everybody who has a question gets their question answered.

We’ve also created the very detailed additions. When you have Site Kit, you also get a few additions to the Site Health forum, so you can share that information with them and they see like detailed stuff about the website so they can help debug. And in many, many cases, I’ve seen people coming pretty angry, leave a one star review, then James or Adam who are support people, engage with them, and then it turns into a five star review because they feel like, okay, someone listened to me and helped me figure out what is going on.

We have real people answering questions relatively quickly. And they don’t just go, of course they focus on the WordPress support forum, but they also check Reddit and other places where people like mentioned Site Kit, and they try to help and to direct them to the right place. So for Site Kit, we have very robust support.

Now, when it’s an issue with a product, a Google product that is connected to Site Kit, so it’s not a Site Kit problem, let’s say you got some kind of strange message from AdSense about your account status changing. Then we would have to hand over to the AdSense account manager or support team that they have, because we don’t know everything, like how AdSense makes decisions and stuff like that. But for anything Site Kit related, we are very fast to answer.

[00:27:22] Nathan Wrigley: That’s good to hear because I think you’re right. I think the perception with any giant company is that it kind of becomes a bit impersonal, and Google would be no exception. And having just a forum which never seems to get an answer, you drop something in, six months later, you go back and nobody’s done anything in there except close the thread, kind of slightly annoying. But something like this. So 24 hours, roughly speaking, is the turnaround time.

[00:27:45] Mariya Moeva: Yeah. I mean, not on the weekend, but yeah.

[00:27:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Still, that’s pretty amazing.

[00:27:47] Mariya Moeva: Yeah, yeah. We are very serious about this because, I mean, also the WordPress community is really strong, right? So you want to show that we care. We want to hear from people. A lot of bugs then also turn into feature requests and get prioritised to be developed. So, yeah, we really value when people come to complain. It’s a good thing.

[00:28:03] Nathan Wrigley: Excellent. Okay, well, we won’t open that as a goal, please send in your complaints. But nevertheless, it’s nice that you take it seriously.

So it sounds like it’s under active development. You sound like this is basically what you’re doing over at Google. Do you have a roadmap? Do you have a sort of laundry list of things that you want to achieve over the next six months? Interesting things that we might want to hear about.

[00:28:21] Mariya Moeva: Sure, yeah. I mean, my ultimate vision, which is not the next six months, I would love to move away as much as possible from just stats. As curated and as kind of structured as it is right now, and get more into like recommendations, and like to-do list. Because what I hear from people again and again, it’s like, I have two hours this month, tell me what should I do with those two hours?

So they’re asking a lot from us. They’re asking essentially to look, analyse everything and to prioritise their tasks, to tell them which one is the most important or most impactful. And this is like several levels of analysis further than where we are now.

So one thing that we are looking to work on is benchmarking, because you cannot know are you growing or not, unless you know how you’re doing on average. And today, people who are a little bit more savvy can do this of course, but a lot of people don’t. And so for us to be able to tell you, not just you got 20 clicks this week, but also this is okay for you, or this is better than last year, this time, or this is better than your competitors. I think that’s a really valuable way to interpret the data and to help people understand what it means.

[00:29:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And really, Google is one of the only entities that can provide that kind of data.

[00:29:44] Mariya Moeva: Especially for search.

[00:29:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, especially against competitors. That’s really interesting because analysing the data, whilst it’s fun for some people, I feel it’s not that interesting for most people. And so just having spreadsheets of data, charts of data, it’s interesting and you no doubt gain some important knowledge from it. But being told, here’s the outcomes of that data, try doing this thing and try doing that thing, that is much more profound than just demonstrating the data.

And I’m guessing, I could be wrong about this, and I’ve more or less said this in every interview over the last year, I’m guessing there’s an AI component to all of that. Getting AI to sort of analyse the data and give useful feedback.

[00:30:22] Mariya Moeva: I mean, we are investigating how to do all of these things. I think in the case of WordPress, it’s a little bit trickier again, because of the distributed nature, and the fact that all the site information lives on the site and then all the Google information. So we’re not like fully hosted where you can access everything and control everything, something like a Squarespace or a Wix.

But there’s definitely, like AI is a perfect use case for this, right? Like benchmarking, you can bucket sites into relevant groups and then see, are they performing better or worse? That’s like classic machine learning case. And we will see exactly, technically, how we’re going to reach this, but that’s one of the things that we’re working on right now.

Another thing is to expand much more the conversion reporting and to help people understand, are they achieving their goals? Because this is something that surprisingly to me, so many people pay money and invest time in the site, and they cannot articulate what the site is doing. Is it working? Is it doing its job? And they’re like, well, like I got some people visiting. And I’m like, did they buy the thing? So you have to know what to

track, and then also to take action after you see the metrics, like to move them in one direction or another. And so helping people like map out this full funnel is one thing that we’re working on. And the other thing is also this email report.

[00:31:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s amazing. So really under active development. And you sound very impassioned about it. You sound like this has become your mission, you know?

[00:31:47] Mariya Moeva: I think, nobody ever complained that something is easy, right? When you make things simple and easy for people, they appreciate, even if they’re more knowledgeable than if they can do more advanced things themselves.

And I personally really care, like every time that I find a random website with really strange content, but just, someone put their soul into it. I recently found something in Zurich of like tours of Zurich, walking tours, by someone who really cares about history and architecture.

And it’s a terrible website design wise, but the content is amazing. And I was like, okay, this person could use some help, but he’s doing, or she’s doing like a great job at the content part, and then should get the traffic that they deserve for this. So that’s what motivates me also to come here.

One person, two or three WordCamps ago came over and was saying, everything about Google is hard except Site Kit. And I was like, yeah, that’s what we are trying to do. We really want to simplify things for you. So, yeah, being here is also super motivating. To talk to people and to hear feedback and feature requests. And again, we like when people come to complain.

[00:32:54] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I was just speaking to a few people prior to you entering the room and those few people all have Site Kit installed on their site. So you’re doing something right.

[00:33:02] Mariya Moeva: I hope it’s helpful. I hope it answers some questions and saves people some time. That’s what we are trying to do. Yeah, we are in the part of Google that has the ecosystem focus, so we know that ecosystem changes take longer. I mean, still it’s a fast growing plugin. It got to 5 million in 5 years, but still that’s 5 years. And in the context of software companies which move very fast, 5 years is a long time.

Yeah, we will keep going and hopefully more people can benefit from it. But we do have, yeah, still there are many people who come by and they’re like, whoa, what is this? Show me.

[00:33:36] Nathan Wrigley: Well, that’s nice. There’s for growth as well.

[00:33:38] Mariya Moeva: Yeah, yeah. For sure. I mean, for sure there’s always, and more people create new sites. So, again, going back to that hosting provider question of like, can we bring it to them at the moment of creation so that they know this is something I can use?

[00:33:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So one more time, the URL is sitekit.withgoogle.com. I will place that into the show notes as well.

Mariya, I think that’s everything that I have to ask. Thank you so much for chatting to me about Site Kit.

[00:34:01] Mariya Moeva: Yeah, thank you for the invitation. It’s been a pleasure to talk about the ecosystem. And, yeah, if people have feature requests, they can always write us either on GitHub in the Site Kit repo, or on the support forum, or if they are coming to any WordCamp where we also are, we are also super happy to hear. So we always love to know what people struggle with, so that we can build it for them and make it easy.

[00:34:23] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much indeed.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how new, native browser features, are transforming what’s possible on the web.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast. And you can copy and paste that URL into most podcast players.

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

[00:01:10] Adam Silverstein: So on the podcast today we have Adam Silverstein.

Adam is a WordPress Core committer and works to fix bugs and improve modern web capabilities. He’s also a Developer Relations Engineer on Chrome’s Web Platform team at Google, and there he focuses on making the open web better for everyone.

Adam is here to break down how the rapid evolution of browser technology can supercharge your WordPress sites. We are doing this by referencing his presentation at WordCamp Europe 2025, in which he covered multiple new features of browsers, which can be used by WordPress users to bring a variety of experiences to their websites. In many cases these are browser APIs and features, and are quietly redefining what’s possible on the web. From CSS powered popovers, and scroll driven animations, to speculative loading that speeds up your page transitions. Adam explains how these advancements are changing what’s possible for both developers and end users.

The conversation sheds light on the collaboration between browser vendors, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge, through initiatives like Interop and Baseline, paving the way for more consistent and robust features across platforms.

Adam also talks about practical topics central to the WordPress community, like how the Popover API and native CSS carousels reduce JavaScript bloat, make sites more accessible, and deliver a better overall user experience.

He shares exciting new frontiers, such as browser-based image processing, powered by WebAssembly, which is paving the way for universal support of modern formats like AVIF and Ultra HDR, and even running AI locally in your browser, no API key or cloud server required.

He provides concrete examples on how these technologies can be leveraged in WordPress via Core updates, canonical plugins, and Gutenberg experiments, with a special focus on how developers can get involved and offer feedback to help shape future web standards. Prepare to look at your browser in a whole new light, truly.

Whether you’re a theme designer, plugin developer, or site owner simply curious about what’s next, this episode is for you.

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

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

[00:03:47] Nathan Wrigley: I am joined on the podcast by Adam Silverstein. Hello, Adam.

[00:03:51] Adam Silverstein: Hello.

[00:03:53] Nathan Wrigley: This is our second conversation. We had a conversation, I want to say four years ago, maybe more in San Diego, think. And at that point we talked about images, AVIF, WebP, those kind of things. We might get into that today.

Adam’s been working with Google for many, many years. Making the web a faster place, I think is a fair way to sum up your career. Just tell us a little bit about yourself, just so that, because this is a fairly technical topic and you are honestly going to have to teach me an awful lot as we speak. Let us know what your credentials are, why people should listen to what you have to say.

[00:04:21] Adam Silverstein: Oh, wow. Being a Googler is not good enough, huh? Well, I’ve been doing WordPress for a long, long time. I think I started, first started contributing back in 3.6. So I’m deeply involved in the Core project. I am a Core committer, which is something that I consider an honor, a privilege, and a responsibility. There’s not that many of us in the world, but I’m one of the people that actually commits code to WordPress.

And I used to have my own run, my own agency, tiny me agency, but building sites for clients directly. Then I wound up at 10up. Learned to build enterprise sites, and work with large teams, and do a lot of planning. And then eventually made my way to Google where I’ve been doing developer relations work. I’m trying to educate developers and bring things like all these new APIs that I talked about in this talk, so that people can learn about it.

[00:05:05] Nathan Wrigley: Have you been focused more or less entirely on WordPress, or are you in any way engaged with the Chrome team?

[00:05:11] Adam Silverstein: Yeah. So our team kind of organisationally was under Chrome, like that was kind of where we sit. We worked with other, like I’ve worked with Drupal and TYPO3. So I’ve worked with some of the other CMSs out there, especially like the open source ones. So that’s kind of been in my purview, but I would say primarily focused on WordPress. That’s where I’ve had the most experience and am most comfortable.

[00:05:32] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting because on my computer, obviously I have a browser using Chrome, it’s kind of one of the most benign pieces of software that’s there, in that it doesn’t really have a task that’s assigned to it. I have a music editing piece of software, and I go there for that. And I have a video editing piece of software, and on it goes.

[00:05:49] Adam Silverstein: Yes. And you’re running those in your browser.

[00:05:51] Nathan Wrigley: Right. But also the browser is just this open thing, you know, you can basically do anything in it, and so incredibly powerful. And it feels like in the last few years it’s got way more powerful. But most of that is entirely hidden because I open it up and it looks broadly the same today as it did five years ago. You know, the UI may have changed a little bit.

[00:06:13] Adam Silverstein: Right. But what’s changed is what you can do with it, right? So you talked about editing video or editing audio in your browser. Like, that was not something that was possible five or 10 years ago when we had blue links and HTML. And it was basically, we were publishing newspapers on the web. That was the limit of what we could do.

[00:06:29] Nathan Wrigley: I have an app, it’s called Descript. I don’t know if you’ve come across it, but it’s a full audio, video editing suite entirely in the browser.

[00:06:37] Adam Silverstein: And famously Adobe released Photoshop. Runs in the browser. The full Photoshop. Yeah, I mean it’s like mind blowing that that’s even possible.

[00:06:45] Nathan Wrigley: So the capabilities of the browser have dramatically increased. And you’ve just done, or you’re about to do? Just done.

[00:06:54] Adam Silverstein: Yes.

[00:06:55] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Firstly, how did It go?

[00:06:56] Adam Silverstein: It went great. Packed room. I think people got something out of it. People gave me good feedback.

[00:07:00] Nathan Wrigley: And it was called Modernising WordPress with New Web Platforms. And I’m just going to read a bit of the blurb that went with that. It says, WordPress is a powerful platform for building websites of all shapes and sizes. To truly thrive, WordPress is embracing the latest advancements in web technology. This talk will explore how developers and site owners can leverage cutting edge web platform capabilities to create next generation WordPress experiences. And then there’s a little bit more which mentions web APIs and so on and so forth. So that really is going to be the core of this discussion.

Now, caveat emptor, dear listener, I have nowhere near enough knowledge to ask you these questions. But I’m going to hope that you are going to help me through it.

So first stop then, let’s just go through a whole laundry list of these different APIs. What are some of the fun things that a browser can do now, that it couldn’t do previously?

[00:07:53] Adam Silverstein: So in the talk, I sort of break it into three areas. There are features that help developers do things that maybe we could do, but we struggled or relied on heavy JavaScript libraries to do.

There’s things that help users by creating better experiences on the web than we previously had the ability to do.

And then the third category is things that previously were just impossible. Just things that we can now do, like running Photoshop in the browser, we mentioned that we could not do before.

So I did not explore, this is not, the talk was not like an exhaustive list of all the APIs, but it was rather sort of a selection of ones that I thought were interesting. Most of them are new. They are sometimes available only in one browser, not in all the browsers. So they’re things that are coming to the web platform. Some of them were already on the web platform.

So let’s go through them. I’ll see if I can remember them all. I have my little slide deck here.

So in the category of helping developers, the first one that I talked about is this thing called the Popover API. So popovers are simply like dialogues or elements that you want to hover above the rest of the page content. And in WordPress we use these extensively in the admin. Like for example, the pointers that you get when you install a new plugin. Or if you open a dialogue, or even like mobile menus use a popover.

And we have it in Gutenberg. And so we already have this technology, but it relies on JavaScript, and it’s actually surprisingly complicated to do a popover. You have to pay attention to always being at the highest level. And if there’s another popover, how do you handle that? And you have to make sure it’s accessible, so when the user hits the escape key, the popover closes.

And if it’s a pointer that’s trying to point to a new feature, say in a menu, how do you handle when the user resizes the window and that element moves? These are very complicated things. And in JavaScript that means you’ve got a heavy library that’s running just to do this simple popover thing.

So with this new CSS based popover API, you can create a popover with just a couple of lines in your code, and the browser takes care of all of the complicated parts of actually doing the popover.

[00:09:49] Nathan Wrigley: So just pausing there for a moment. The whole power of CSS, I’m going to say three years, this has been capturing my attention. CSS seems to be able to do a load of programmatic things now that it didn’t used to be able to. So in this case it’s, I don’t know, it’s calculating the height of the viewport and figuring out is there another thing, how much further to move it down? All of this being handled natively in the browser.

[00:10:13] Adam Silverstein: Exactly. And I think like your point is very true, like CSS capabilities have grown tremendously, and the ability to do sophisticated layouts. And all of these kind of feature things that typically might require JavaScript, now we can do directly in CSS, even things like calculations.

So CSS is a programming language just like JavaScript, right? People like to poo poo it and and so forth, but it’s quite powerful. And a lot of these features that I’m talking about are based on CSS.

[00:10:36] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting, if the 18-year-old me was beginning again, I think CSS would be the thing that I would do first. I think I would learn that inside and out before ever looking at JavaScript. Because I you’ve got the foundation of modern CSS, and I know there’s a lot of W3C things that are still being decided and what have you, and obviously the browsers have got various different capabilities. But so much that we would’ve relied on for JavaScript is now capable with CSS, but unexplored I think by many.

[00:11:08] Adam Silverstein: Right. So this feature popover is available in all the browsers. It’s in Baseline. So Baseline is the set of features that developers should be looking at for deciding what they can use. Baseline is a somewhat new concept, so people might not be aware of it. But it is basically a way of knowing which features are available on all the major browsers. So if you see a feature that is labeled Baseline, like in the MDN docs, that means it’s available on all the browsers. You can count on it as a developer.

So in my talk, I covered a lot of APIs that are actually not in Baseline yet. They’re still in development. They maybe are available only in Chrome, or Chrome and Edge, or maybe Chrome and Edge and Firefox, but not Safari. As developer, those are the APIs you need to be a little bit wary of, right, because you wanna build something that’s going to work for everyone.

In many cases, the API will gracefully degrade, it just won’t work in the non-supporting browser. But in the case of like a popover, if it is supported in all the browsers, so you’re safe to use it. If it wasn’t, you would need to have that JavaScript as a fallback. So some of these APIs are, you know, new and experimental, but the browser vendors are all planning on adding support for them. So I only choose APIs that actually browser vendors have indicated their support.

[00:12:14] Nathan Wrigley: Can we just pause there a moment because I began my journey with the web, oh, Internet Explorer 5 kind of days. You probably remember the days as well as I do, and it was chaos, you know? I mean, really we had to try and fix a whole bunch of things that Internet Explorer did differently from all the other browsers. The browsers didn’t agree on almost anything. They went off in completely different directions.

That, I’m going to say, over the last five or maybe more, maybe more like eight years, there seems to have been a real confluence of, and I don’t know if that’s done from like a senior management level, but it does seem like Mozilla is talking to Chromium, Chromium is talking to Safari, and a lot of the people seem to attend the same conferences and talk the same language. They may adopt it at different rates, but they’re all trying to get to the same point, the open web.

[00:13:00] Adam Silverstein: Yes. And in fact, they’ve developed an approach to collaborate on this, and that is called Interop. So the Interop effort is sort of a group effort by all of the browsers to agree upon a set of features that they’re going to work on for each calendar year. So there’s Interop 2025, there’ll be one for 2026, and so forth.

And these features are, they come from either the browser’s needs, what they want to build, or from developers. So there’s an open process where they open a GitHub repo each fall and developers can go and submit. And we’ve actually had some from WordPress that made it in and influenced what browsers do.

So as developers are out there working, they’re finding pain points, they’re struggling to do this or struggling to do that, or it doesn’t work well in one browser. It works in one browser, but not the other. Interop is sort of the effort each year to come up with a set that the browsers agree upon working on. And those features hopefully all land in Baseline the following year.

I remember those days very well, and that’s why we have things like jQuery, right? So we had all these libraries that were built with this promise of sort of normalising the capabilities. Now, you’re absolutely right, the browsers have realised this is a problem for developers and they’ve come together to form a standard, and that is the Baseline thing that I mentioned.

So they’re always building new APIs on their own, and some of them will never make it into all the browsers, and they may go away or they may change. But if they make it into Baseline, you can be sure that you can use them. And that’s what’s different, right? We have this set of features that we can rely on.

[00:14:21] Nathan Wrigley: I kind of feel we lost a decade somewhere of real productivity. You know, the browsers could have been capable of a whole lot more than they are now. I mean, we’re happy with where we’ve got, but it does feel like we lost, this proprietary approach to browsers really wasn’t in the best interest of anybody. But you can see how it grew out of Microsoft and all of these other organizations.

I’m guessing that Google with its Chromium browser, Chromium based browser, the fact that that became utterly dominant was probably quite a pivotal point. You know, it was in the sort of eighties and nineties percent, adopted by 80 or 90%. I guess Google was able to push things through a little bit more.

[00:14:59] Adam Silverstein: Perhaps, like they do often lead on features. I mean, I wouldn’t say they’re always the lead on features, sometimes Safari has a great idea and they want to develop it, and with Firefox as well. But they do have a huge effort going into it. And, you know, of course Microsoft famously adopted Chromium as the engine for Edge. And so Microsoft is actively contributing as well to Chromium, which is the core of Chrome.

So yes, I think the dominance did allow them to sort of lead on features and have the other browsers sort of need to follow. If Chrome is going to ship a feature, everyone’s going to use it. But I don’t know if that’s always the case. You know, when you read these, I’ve read some of these proposals, you know, the browser vendors, they talk to each other in the open, right?

So these aren’t like private conversations that are happening in a room somewhere. They are all into open source software. So they’re, you know, there’s a repo where like, for example, Chrome will come in and say, we’re working on this new API, we would like feedback from the teams building Mozilla and Safari about if this is a good feature, are you going to support this? And that’s like typically early in the process where they try to get that feedback so they know whether this is something that is likely to land in the platform.

[00:16:02] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t really know whether it was the best thing for one browser to sort of win out, but it certainly seems now that the dust has settled, it seems that that was a fairly good thing to happen.

[00:16:11] Adam Silverstein: Yeah, I mean, I think if we had only had one browser, that would not be good. I mean, Apple is definitely dominant on mobile in markets where iPhones are very popular.

[00:16:21] Nathan Wrigley: North America, for example.

[00:16:22] Adam Silverstein: Exactly. North America and Europe, I think as well. Although if you look at most of the world, it’s actually Android that is far more dominant. So that’s where Chrome gets a big percentage of its users because Android is the default browser there, just as Safari is the default browser on iOS devices

[00:16:35] Nathan Wrigley: I guess there was the whole Chromebook thing as well with, you know Google trying to promote this idea of a browser computer, for want of a better word.

[00:16:43] Adam Silverstein: Chrome OS.

[00:16:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, Chrome OS exactly. And but the idea that, when it first came out, I remember looking at Chromebooks and thinking, yeah, it’s intriguing. It can do Google Docs, but where’s the video editing? Where’s the audio editing? I’m guessing like a modern Chromebook is a full swap out for a, it just doesn’t have the physical storage memory in some cases.

[00:17:01] Adam Silverstein: It doesn’t have any. It’s, well, I mean, it has some for caching, but basically you log in and that’s your computer. Someone else logs in, it’s their computer. It’s fully in the cloud.

[00:17:09] Nathan Wrigley: It’s pretty amazing.

[00:17:10] Adam Silverstein: Although I will say, I bought a cheap Chromebook, like 150 bucks, refurbished, but I bought it to travel with so that I didn’t have to carry around my eight pound MacBook Pro. And because I’m a developer, I figured out how to do development work on it. You can install Linux on it and run, you know, Docker and all the things that you can do on a desktop machine.

Does take some effort, like that’s not built in. But they are actually full computers, it’s just that the way the operating system is set up is this sort of cloud-based thing.

But it’s quite, I think they’re amazing honestly. And, like I said, very inexpensive and also like bulletproof. You never have problems with them because your whole world is basically the browser.

[00:17:47] Nathan Wrigley: And it kind of boots in half a moment, and it’s so secure.

[00:17:51] Adam Silverstein: Yeah. They’re fantastic, and especially for like schools or corporate settings because it has all that management built in. I think they’re great computers. I would definitely recommend them, especially for people who don’t want to spend all the money that it takes to get, you know, and especially like you’re saying, everything’s in the browser these days. So there’s really, you don’t need a desktop computer to do most things.

[00:18:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think we painted a picture of the power of the browser, we’ve done well there. We got kind of hijacked a little bit. So you were talking about popovers, that was the first thing. Let’s return to that. What’s one of the other things mentioned?

[00:18:20] Adam Silverstein: Next on my list is this Scroll Animations API. So this is animations like CSS animations that are either triggered or tied to a scroll event. So you could think about, like Slider Revolution has this feature in it, or you’ve seen it on like Apple’s website where you’re scrolling and as you’re scrolling an image is fading in or something is being revealed. Or another good example is like a reading indicator that Medium has at the top of the page as you scroll down.

So we can do these things today with JavaScript, but it involves paying attention to the user scroll position, and this kind of heavy handed approach to monitoring the user. With CSS scroll driven animations, it’s just a couple of lines of CSS and suddenly you’ve tied an animation to scrolling.

[00:19:01] Nathan Wrigley: So again, all handled by CSS, no need for a JavaScript library. Any impact in, I mean, these JavaScript libraries are famous for sort of bogging things down, tons of bloat and what have you. I’m guessing that because it’s shipping in the browser, that is minimal to say the least, almost non-existent.

[00:19:17] Adam Silverstein: Yes, and the animations are CSS animations, so they’re not happening on the main thread. JavaScript famously has one main thread, and if you have something running on that main thread, it’s going to interfere with other JavaScript. So if you can get rid of some of the JavaScript on your website, that’s freeing up that thread for the other JavaScript that you have, that you want to do to track your analytics or to, whatever else you’re trying to do on your page with JavaScript. This is one less piece of JavaScript you need on your site.

[00:19:42] Nathan Wrigley: The feature that you’ve just mentioned is something that I guess WordPress developers are going to be particularly interested in. They love all that stuff.

[00:19:48] Adam Silverstein: Yes, clients love it. They love animations. And again, this is something that’s very lightweight, right? The argument against these types of animations is they’re typically very heavy.

The other advantages of using CSS based features versus JavaScript is accessibility. Often these features, I mean this isn’t necessarily true with scroll driven, but like with the carousels, it’s got that accessibility built in. It’s got the escaping out of the dialogue.

Again and again we see that, when you build something in JavaScript, I’m going to talk in a minute about CSS carousels. When you build it in JavaScript, if you want to make it accessible, there’s a lot of extra work that goes into doing that well. If the browser builds the feature in as like a fundamental, almost like an HTML component, then the expectation is the browser will take care of that for you. So as a developer, you won’t even have to pay attention to it.

[00:20:36] Nathan Wrigley: I’m guessing that in the case of the one you’ve just described, that’s really easy to map onto this podcast because a WordPress user, they’re using a page builder or something like that. They’re going to have encountered these options, you know, somewhere buried in the settings for this image component is a fade in on scroll.

And I’m guessing that in the future in WordPress, this might be some sort of toggle in a block, an image block or something like that. You’ll just switch it on, assign some characteristics to it like, I don’t know, fade to 50% at halfway through the viewport. And that will just create the CSS, but all done inside of a panel of a block.

[00:21:11] Adam Silverstein: Yeah, I did exactly that as a pull request and have a link to that in my talk. Yeah, that’s a great example. It could be an image, it could be a header block.

I guess one question I have as a Core committer is whether that is actually Core territory. We have this long standing philosophy in WordPress that it’s kind of the 80 20 rule that a feature that we land in Core should benefit 80% of users, otherwise it belongs in plugin territory.

That said, one of the things we’re talking about now is this idea of canonical blocks. So there’s a lot of new blocks being proposed in Gutenberg right now, and the question is like, how many blocks do you actually want to ship with the editor? There’s a zillion different things you could think of building a block for, or a feature like animation, say for images like we’re talking about. But if it’s not valuable for all users, does it really belong in Core? And does it just overload the list of blocks they have to choose from, or the list of features they have to choose from? Why not just let plugins extend it?

The other idea, like I said is this idea of canonical blocks. So you could have a block that’s developed by the Core team, is supported by Core, and is directly installable in the admin, in a like clearly labeled way that this is a Core product. But actually not ship it with WordPress. So it’s something that you could install with one click. I mean, we actually haven’t defined exactly what a canonical block or plugin is, but this is sort of what my idea is. It’s something that’s like, you’re one step away from having it installed.

[00:22:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it feels like a canonical plugin, at least feels to me like something which has the security guarantee of Core, plus the updating guarantee of Core. Basically if you install it, it’s going to work with the latest version of WordPress, plus the all the backwards compatibility. I kind of like the idea of, like Apple ship with things like iOS, like Core animations. A plugin which just enables the animations in Core blocks.

[00:22:51] Adam Silverstein: Right. Like the capability might already be there. I mean, you know, so one of the other APIs that I talked about in another section is the Speculative Loading API. So this is a good example. And this is actually shipping in WordPress 6.8. And this is the ability for the browser to prefetch the resources for a page that a user is about to navigate to.

And in WordPress, we shipped it in the most conservative mode possible, which essentially is the user needs to click down on the link, and then before they let go of their mouse, so the time between the mouse down and mouse up event is when the browser is prefetching the resources for that link.

So if the user clicks down on the link, we’re very confident that they’re actually going to navigate. Although it is possible to drag away and not navigate. 90% of users are going to follow that link or more. And so the idea is not to waste prefetching for links that users never visit.

However it is possible to configure this API in a more bold manner where it will, for example, prefetch links that you hover over, which is going to give you much more of a head start, but also a lower hit ratio where, you know, some people will hover over links and they never click on them. So it depends on your use case.

So I’ve already seen, so we landed the API in WordPress at the very conservative level. There’s already a plugin out that lets users configure that API for their own site, so they can adjust the default settings.

There’s another setting that’s even more aggressive where it actually pre-renders the page. And in that setting, it’s almost as if you’ve loaded the page you’re about to navigate to in another tab, and when you click the link, it’s like switching tabs. It’s an instantaneous transition. It’s like amazing.

However, you know, if you’re pre-rendering every page a user hovers over, that’s going to be a huge additional load on your server. So there is a trade off there. But maybe you have like a large call to action button on your homepage that 50% of your users are going to click on. Go ahead and prefetch that. They’re going to get a better experience. You’re going to get a better conversion rate if that page loads faster.

[00:24:45] Nathan Wrigley: if memory serves, this is a browser API, Speculation Rules API and everybody’s got it switched on in 6.8 and beyond. But it’s in conservative, and it’s prefetch not pre-render, it’s click. And honestly, the chances of you not wishing to get to that page are pretty, like you say, you could slide away. But yeah, if you were to download the speculation rules, I can’t remember what the name of the plugin is. Anyway, the plugin, the option there is to do things like pre-render, or hover. And then, yeah. You could get into a real mess with the server and, you know, just wasteful.

[00:25:23] Adam Silverstein: Yeah. If you, especially if you’re on like a light end server, but maybe you want that, like the most important. Like, let’s say you have an e-commerce store and you’re really trying to get people to add things to your cart. You know, there’s all kinds of studies that show that if your pages load faster, and it’s even buy like things like a hundred milliseconds, the conversion ratio is much higher. People are quick to abandon slow sites. I mean, there’s all kinds of data on that.

So you may decide it’s worth investing the additional resources and dedicated hosting and caching so that you can prefetch and pre-render and get that faster navigation. This API enables that type of navigation that is, you really can’t get that without this API because it’s basically letting the browser know, it’s okay to like start loading resources before I even visit a page.

[00:26:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I keep having this thought that at some point Chrome’s going to come up with, it’s going to know a whole year in advance all pages that I wish to visit and just load them all for me.

[00:26:15] Adam Silverstein: Well, I did actually an experiment with AI to see, like ask AI which link is the user most likely to click on? And I tried it both with just literally dropping the HTML of the webpage in the AI, as well as drawing a screenshot. And I tried it on a very simple page, so like a WordPress plugin page. There’s a large blue button that says download. Probably the most likely link that users will click on. But the AI was like very good at identifying that. So in theory you could imagine that the browser could actually predict into some degree what users, based on their behavior, are going to click on, or based on the layout of the site.

[00:26:50] Nathan Wrigley: So this is a, curious new world in which we live, isn’t it? So there could be heuristics about what I’m literally doing with the mouse. So the mouse is, I don’t know, approaching a button. That’s a fairly strong indication. And also, I guess the speed.

[00:27:05] Adam Silverstein: Yeah, if it’s paused over the button.

[00:27:07] Nathan Wrigley: Right, or slowing down, the speed is sort of coming to a terminus. Yeah. This is all really interesting.

The 6.8, the Speculative Loading in 6.8, what I really like about that is that there’s zero configuration. It just works. So it’s using this fabulous new feature of the browser, but also no technical knowledge whatsoever. Absolutely none. And it would hopefully just save you a bunch of, well, your visitors a bunch of time.

[00:27:33] Adam Silverstein: Exactly.

[00:27:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Fabulous. Okay, that’s another one. Any others?

[00:27:37] Adam Silverstein: Oh my gosh, so many. We did touch briefly on CSS carousels, but let’s just cover that again. So over half of WordPress websites load some sort of slider or JavaScript library.

[00:27:49] Nathan Wrigley: Like them or hate them, they’re there.

[00:27:49] Adam Silverstein: Yes. And even if people don’t use them, they seem to load them because I don’t know if half of sites all have sliders, but in any case, this is a very popular feature for WordPress sites. And of course there’s many plugins out there that do this, and they all rely on a JavaScript library. There are several very popular ones. They’re very full featured libraries. They do all the things that you need for a carousel.

Now we can do that with CSS, so you don’t need the JavaScript library. Now, there may be advanced features that the JavaScript libraries will be able to do that will add some functionality. But the goal of the CSS implementation is to basically be feature parity with what you can do now with JavaScript. So all kinds of carousels

with buttons that you can click, with little indicators as to which slider, which image you’re on. You know, just all the features that you can imagine in a carousel. There’s a great demo site on the chrome.dev site of just like a zillion different carousels.

[00:28:41] Nathan Wrigley: What does the DOM look like for that?

[00:28:43] Adam Silverstein: It’s so simple. It’s like you have the images themselves, and you have a couple of pseudo elements like scroll marker, and there’s some for the scroll arrows. I don’t actually remember all the deals because I haven’t built one. But it’s all done using like CSS selectors essentially to indicate which elements are the control elements, and which elements are the target elements. And you can even do things like grouping them so that like when you hit the right arrow, it’s like a page of things moving back and forth, like several elements.

Like I said, they’ve tried to address all of the features. And again, here you would be able to do a CSS based carousel, that means no JavaScript required, right? You don’t need to load that giant JavaScript library. It’s going to be immediately available, right? So JavaScript takes some time to load. It’s going to work more quickly. And it’s also hopefully going to have accessibility built in. So you don’t have to worry about if your JavaScript library is keeping up with accessibility standards. It’s going to be a standard web component.

[00:29:36] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, okay. Of course. Yeah, if everybody’s implementing the same thing, it’s not this weirdy JavaScript thing that you downloaded from somewhere.

And okay, another question about, just sticking on that one for a moment. Will that be performant in the sense of, I don’t know, if I’ve got a carousel of 15 images, will the 15th one be loading at the moment.

[00:29:56] Adam Silverstein: Lazy loaded?

[00:29:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, exactly.

[00:29:57] Adam Silverstein: You would hope so, yes. I mean, I think in general it will be more performant than a JavaScript implementation. Unless the JavaScript implementation is doing some magic that the browser’s not aware of, like lazy loading. I think that is, will be built in. But you, again, don’t have that JavaScript running on the main thread doing the actual animations. All the animations are CSS animations.

[00:30:16] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of curious because that example, I’ve always liked how they look but I’ve always been persuaded that it’s the wrong thing to implement because of the JavaScript bloat, the inaccessibility. So they kind of went into that pariah status for a while. But if done right, there’s absolutely no reason not to implement it.

[00:30:36] Adam Silverstein: Yeah. And I think, you know, like you said, clients love them, they’re very popular. I think one of the arguments that I’ve heard about them is that data shows that most users never navigate beyond like the second image. So there is sort of questionable value there, especially if you’ve got one that say has 30 images in it on your homepage. Maybe that’s not such a great idea.

But maybe if you have three products that you want to feature at the top and you don’t know how to feature them all, a slider is a good way to have three things that the user can see all in the same space. So I think they have their uses, but I think there is the sort of resistance to using them from developers is based on solid data.

[00:31:09] Nathan Wrigley: It’s interesting as well because given, I don’t know the, bad reputation they have, it’s kind curious that that got made.

[00:31:16] Adam Silverstein: Right. So this actually brings us to a good point. Where do the browser vendors come up? Why are they building these things right? So the reason they decided to build CSS Carousel is this is an area that developers have struggled with.

Like I said, there are several libraries that are well established that have built really good sliders, but that’s taken a long time, right? And they still have accessibility challenges.

This is something that a lot of developers want to build, their clients are demanding it, and they’ve typically struggled to actually build something quality. So this is the impetus for a lot of these features that I talked about is places that developers are struggling. And that Interop project that I mentioned earlier, that’s where developers can give their feedback to the browser vendors about which features they feel are lacking.

That was the sort of like the last question of my talk was to developers, what are you struggling, what are you constantly using JavaScript for? What are you finding that’s still incompatible between browsers? Because I think that’s actually really important to get feedback from developers. The browser builders are in a room somewhere, they’re doing their thing. You know, they’re not out here building WordPress websites, so they’re not building Gutenberg. So we as developers have a responsibility to give feedback to the actual browser vendors so they know what we need, what we’re struggling with.

[00:32:27] Nathan Wrigley: You may not know the answer to this question, but does Chrome in a default setup where I install Chrome and then just click yes, yes, yes to everything that I’m asked. Does it provide heuristics back to Google about things like that? There’s millions of people interacting with carousels, for example.

[00:32:44] Adam Silverstein: I’m going to say, well, going to say no because they’re, Chrome does collect data, but you have to opt in. By default, you would not have that box checked.

[00:32:51] Nathan Wrigley: But it is possible.

[00:32:52] Adam Silverstein: Yes. And many people do. Many people do provide that. And most of that data is available publicly. So that data is anonymised and then made available publicly as part of the CrUX, the Chrome user experience data set. And that’s an open public data set that you can query using BigQuery. If you have a website or a product that’s very popular, you can get amazing data about how many sites are using it, about the performance of those sites, about growth over time. There’s all kinds of data out there.

Of course, again, it’s a subset of the web. It’s not every website on the web because there’s a privacy concern about this data. So the only data that’s reported is when the pages or sites have enough visitors that you couldn’t track back to individual users. So it is a limited data set. Small sites with low traffic won’t appear in it. However, it’s incredibly valuable. And if you build a popular plugin, for example, this is a great way for you to gather data about how your plugin is being used, because some of the sites that install it will be in that data set and it’s public data.

[00:33:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. That’s CrUX. CrUX. So that’s interesting. So there’s two routes there. There’s the heuristics provided by the browser if you opt in, but also it sounds to me like there are open channels communicating through people like you, if you’re a developer.

[00:34:04] Adam Silverstein: Like me, or like the Interop process that I mentioned earlier, where they open up a GitHub repo each year and you can just open an issue saying, here are the things that we’re struggling with. And I mentioned like Gutenberg actually did that.

For a couple years I was posting on the WordPress blog, hey, Interop is open, let’s give feedback. We did have one, at least one year where the Gutenberg team went in and made a long list of things that where they found incompatibilities. And some of those made their way into actual interrupt tasks. So it is incredibly valuable to give that feedback. And the browsers want to know, they want to build products that developers like to use.

[00:34:36] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. next, if there is a next.

[00:34:38] Adam Silverstein: Oh yes. Okay, so now we’re getting into, I think I hopped around a little bit, but the next section was about improving user experience. So the first one is actually a really simple one that I think is really cool. It’s customisable select.

[00:34:49] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so good.

[00:34:50] Adam Silverstein: Yes. So the select element traditionally has been rendered by the operating system. And that means, so if you have a select list, like a dropdown, you’re going to see a bunch of words and you’re going to be able to scroll through those. But if you want to make it more visual, say add some images or icons next to each word, you really couldn’t do that. If you wanted to do that, you’d reach for a JavaScript library that would render the select element graphically, but wasn’t really a select element.

So this is the ability to actually put HTML inside your select elements. So a great example of that is icons and images in the dropdown. So, for example, I gave a lot of different examples of how we can use this in WordPress Core, but one is in the media library where we filter by media type. We can add like nice little icons. So if you’re looking for, you know, the videos, you get a nice little video icon. It just makes it easier for users to find what they’re looking for.

And again, this is still a semantic select element, so it’s going to be accessible just like a regular select element. If the browser doesn’t support this feature, it’s just going to fall back to a regular select element.

It’s also going to autofill correctly, right? So another example I gave was a currency selector that adds flags for the country of the currency. A nice, helpful thing. If your browser knows that you use the Euro, it’s going to select the Euro because autofill is this great technology that helps us select things that we always select. But if it’s a JavaScript do hickey, the browser has no idea what’s going on inside there, so autofill will not work correctly. So it has some real key advantages over traditional, you know, the way we would build these before. Now we can just do full on HTML select elements.

[00:36:21] Nathan Wrigley: It’s the kind of thing that once you’ve seen it, it’s like, why.

[00:36:25] Adam Silverstein: Why didn’t that exist before?

[00:36:27] Nathan Wrigley: Because we just have the OS. It just looks like an OS selector. So on my Mac, it looks like a Mac. On my phone, it looks like Android, whatever that would be. Which leads me to that actually. So on the phone, same experience because it’s not stepping outside of the browser. if I’ve got those flags, for example, or I’ve got coloured backgrounds or rounded corners or whatever it may be, Because it’s not reaching out to the OS to create this select, it’ll work on any device.

[00:36:53] Adam Silverstein: Right.

[00:36:54] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.

[00:36:54] Adam Silverstein: And it’s CSS controlled, right? So you could do a different mobile implementation than your desktop implementation.

[00:36:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I mean, it’s profoundly brilliant when you see. I’ll put some links to some demos somewhere into the shownotes.

[00:37:06] Adam Silverstein: You know, I’ve got several pull requests open both in Core and in Gutenberg to add these features into the select elements that we already have. It’s kind of a simple enhancement. And again, like if your browser doesn’t support it, you don’t really, there’s no harm, right? You don’t benefit from the feature, but you don’t lose anything either. I love that one. You know, I’m hoping that form plugins in our ecosystem will adopt it.

[00:37:25] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, no doubt. I mean, why wouldn’t you, basically? that’s a brilliant one. Thank you. Next.

[00:37:30] Adam Silverstein: Another one that, this one actually pairs really well with the Speculative Loading API and it’s called, the View Transitions API.

And this one is really cool because it basically turns your static website into a, kind of a fluid app-like experience. And in the slide deck, I have this great demo video of just a classic theme, where the users just clicking through to different pages. So you’re on say, the archive list and you’ve got a list of titles. And you click on a title and it’s going to take you to the single post page. And what happens is the browser actually navigates between those two states. So you see the title that you just clicked on, grow and expand, and it winds up in the position where it will be on the page you’re navigating to.

Same thing like with the featured image. Let’s say you have featured images and those appear in a list and you click on the featured image, the image will grow to where it’s going to be in the final position. So it creates a smooth animation between the different pages of your site, or states of a single page app.

And these are again, CSS animation, so you can control them. It has an auto mode where it picks the animation for you, so you really can do a very, just few lines, and get this effect working, but you can also customise it. So if you want the page to say scroll left when you hit the next button and scroll to the right when you hit the back button, you can implement it that way.

[00:38:45] Nathan Wrigley: So the place I’ve seen this before really is on mobile applications.

[00:38:48] Adam Silverstein: On apps. You see it on apps, right. Because it creates this fluid experience. We are used to on the web this idea of, you click on a link and then there’s kind of like a little bit of a wait. Then boom, there’s a refresh and the next page starts loading. And this kind of bridges that gap. It’s something that changes how users perceive your website. It doesn’t really change what’s loading. It’s the same before and after states. What it’s doing is creating that transition between the two states.

[00:39:12] Nathan Wrigley: It feels more like you’re on a journey as opposed to these little stops along the way to get to the final destination. It just creates this sort of fluid, endless experience. And I believe, I think I saw one of your colleagues, Felix Arntz, I believe he’s got a plugin, like a feature plugin out.

[00:39:30] Adam Silverstein: It is. It just shipped. It’s part of the Performance Lab plugin suite. So that is basically going to add a way for themes to just opt in. So we have a feature in WordPress where you can be, add themes support. And you can say, my theme supports this feature. So if themes opt in, they can just enable this API and just, you instantly get the navigations.

We fortunately benefit in Core from a lot of consistent naming for things. Like the class names on titles tend to be consistent among all the Core themes. And even in the ecosystem, a lot of people have stuck to those standards. And that makes it really straightforward to sort of choose the correct elements for the transitions.

Because part of setting this up is you sort of need to tell the browser, this is the title element. On the previous page, this is the title element on the next page. I want you to navigate between those two. And fortunately, at least for the Core themes, that’s pretty standard to do. So there is a pretty straightforward way to like implement it across all the core themes.

[00:40:23] Nathan Wrigley: I just want to remind the listener that, you may have got lost, we’re not talking about WordPress per se. We’re kind of talking about what the browser enables WordPress to do. So these view transitions, of course they can be implemented by a WordPress website, but it is in effect the browser that’s doing the hard work here.

You don’t have to be tied to WordPress, you could do this in HTML and CSS if you so wish to do it. But it’s easy to imagine that this is some clever JavaScript thing that somebody’s implemented in WordPress. And it’s just not that. This is just happening inside the browser.

[00:40:53] Adam Silverstein: No, these are all browser features and, yeah, the talk is kind of like, how do they apply to WordPress? How WordPress use them?

[00:40:59] Nathan Wrigley: I can imagine a world in the future where this feature in particular will have been massively overused. You know, people will, like scrolling animations for the, you know, this grows and this shrinks, and let’s see how that’ll settle. But the implementations that I’ve seen are just magnificent. They give you that, I don’t know, I’m on my phone, I use a music app, and I go to the next song and somehow the little icon for that song grows in this nice fluid way. Things fade in and fade out. Text becomes bigger, and it’s all happening. And It just encapsulates the screen perfectly. It gives everything the perfect place. And instead of it being a moment where it all just changes, everything slides into place. And it just feels natural, and we’ve got it coming in the browser.

[00:41:39] Adam Silverstein: It is amazing. Yeah. It’s, a pretty cool feature.

[00:41:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay, next.

[00:41:42] Adam Silverstein: Okay. So I did talk about what you mentioned, we talked about modern images before. So I did talk a little bit about modern image formats, just a kind of love of mine. I honed in on. HDR imagery. So we all, most of us have smartphones these days that actually take high dynamic range images, right? Previously we had standard dynamic range, but now all of our phones take multiple exposures and combine those to create an HDR image.

We have long had the ability to save images in HDR with formats like AVIF, WebP supports it. However, the challenge comes when you upload those images to WordPress and then you try to use them on a standard definition monitor, an SDR monitor, right? So you’ve got an HDR image, but suddenly you’re displaying it on a monitor that can’t display HDR, and you have to sort of, re downsize it to that lower bit depth, and that degrades the image greatly.

So there is a new format available that’s ISO standard, and it’s called Ultra HDR. And this is a combination of standard jpeg SDR imagery with a gain map metadata layer. So it’s a single image format that includes both the SDR data as well as the data required to render the HDR version of the image. So it’s a full HDR image when you view it on a monitor that can support it, but on a monitor that doesn’t support it, you can just use the SDR image, you don’t need to do some conversion to try to create that alternate image.

[00:43:09] Nathan Wrigley: I’ve never heard of this, so I’m going to try and parse it in real time. Let’s see how this works. So I’m imagining an image and I’m imagining like a CSS gradient over the top, There’s a bit of metadata which does something. The underlying image is unchanged, but there’s something gone over the top.

[00:43:25] Adam Silverstein: Yes, it’s called a gain map.

[00:43:27] Nathan Wrigley: Right, so gain mapping. And I can put that on, put that off. So it’s metadata transforming the image, but the image is the same.

[00:43:33] Adam Silverstein: Yes.

[00:43:35] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting.

[00:43:35] Adam Silverstein: Yes. So I am a programmer and I deeply know about how WordPress media works, but I am not a photographer. However, there have been some great contributions from photographers who really know this space well. And they’ve come in and helped us on the media team really understand the challenges of handling these types of images and publishing them to the web, right?

So I have a link in the slide to one of those guys and his photography website. He’s a software developer and a photographer. And he’s got like those sliders you can kind of see before and after and see what the difference is between SDR and HDR imagery. And you realise, oh my God, HDR images are amazing. So the point of this feature, or the thing that I’m talking about is to try to let people actually be able to use HDR images on their WordPress websites.

[00:44:17] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating. So a metadata layer living on top of an image, which visibly transforms it, but not just to add, I don’t know, to change the hue or the tint of it, to render a better image of a higher quality. Gosh that’s fascinating.

[00:44:32] Adam Silverstein: Yep. So the challenge we have in WordPress is the ability to process these images. So in WordPress, when you upload an image, it goes to the backend, to the web server, and then we process it, we convert it to various sizes for different display sizes. So you get a different image when you’re browsing the site on a mobile or a desktop or a high definition screen. We have all different sizes, and themes can add sizes.

And all of that image processing happens using a couple of image processing libraries. GD and Imagick are the two that we support natively. Those libraries do not support the latest format, so Ultra HDR was maybe just added to Imagick. It will take years before that library, the new version of the library is actually available to WordPress sites. So even a format like AVIF that’s been around for quite a while now, is only supported by 30% of WordPress servers. So only 30% of WordPress sites can actually upload AVIFs and get the full, you know, various sizes that they need.

So that’s a limitation of the architecture of WordPress. And one of the next features that I talked about is something that will help us leapfrog that limitation. Browser based image processing. Exactly right. So what I’m talking about here is WebAssembly.

So WebAssembly is the ability to run code that was written in another language like C or C++, that targeted a machine language, is meant to be run natively on the hardware. So that, for example, these image processing libraries, and also newer image processing libraries, can be run directly in the browser.

And what this gives us the ability to do is ship the latest version of the image library directly with WordPress. We no longer have to rely on hosts doing the messy and difficult process of upgrading servers, very challenging thing for hosts to do, to get the latest version of the Imagick library. We can just ship that library directly in the browser. And that gives us the ability to make every WordPress site support AVIF, and it also gives us the ability to do things we simply can’t do today on the backend.

A good example of that is converting gif or gifs to movies, right? This is a common performance recommendation. Gifs are very heavy. You convert them to a native video element and they behave just the same for users, but they’re much lighter because the compression is so much smarter. Can’t do that in WordPress right now. Neither of the image libraries support that ability. But there are image processing libraries that handle this, and we can run those directly in the browser.

[00:46:52] Nathan Wrigley: Let me see if I’ve got this right. So in this world of the future, it’ll be possible, let’s say in the block editor, I drag in a, I don’t know, a jpeg or something, but I could convert that on the fly to an AVIF for example.

[00:47:05] Adam Silverstein: Yes. Even if your server didn’t support AVIF.

[00:47:06] Nathan Wrigley: Even if. So it’s literally in the browser.

[00:47:09] Adam Silverstein: Yes

[00:47:09] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. First thing is that quick.

[00:47:11] Adam Silverstein: Well, okay, so it’s not quick on the backend either, right? But it is asynchronous, so you can continue working on your post while it’s happening.

[00:47:18] Nathan Wrigley: Right. So you wouldn’t necessarily see anything.

[00:47:20] Adam Silverstein: Right. You would that it was processing. And of course it would depend on how large your image is, how many subsized images you’re creating. But no, it’s not fast. It’s a slow process, but it’s a one time thing each time you upload an image.

[00:47:31] Nathan Wrigley: That was next question. It’s a one time thing. So the movie thing that you just described, where you got the gif to a movie, again, a one-time thing?

[00:47:38] Adam Silverstein: Yes.

[00:47:39] Nathan Wrigley: So we upload it. In the background, asynchronously, it’s converting it, and then at some point it gets saved, I guess as a .mov file or something like that? inside the media library?

[00:47:50] Adam Silverstein: And this is actually not some future technology you’ll be able to use someday. You can use this today by installing Pascal’s Media Experiments plugin. So my colleague Pascal has swisspidy as his handle, people know him by that. But he’s got the Media Experiments plugin, and that will let you do all these things that I’m talking about today. And it is experimental, so beta software, but, check it out because it really demonstrates what we can do.

There’s also a PR already open in Gutenberg with a whole roadmap for landing this feature. It is already sort of an experimental feature in Gutenberg. So if you install the Gutenberg plugin and you go into experiments, you can actually enable this feature. I don’t think it has all of the things that he has in the plugin, but it has sort of the additional framework for it.

[00:48:28] Nathan Wrigley: If I were, well, I am fairly non-technical, this is the kind of stuff I expect, I think. You just drag an image from any device of any kind into the editor, whatever that editor interface is be it Gutenberg or, you know, whatever. It should just handle that. You know, there shouldn’t be a proclivity for we prefer this thing or we prefer that thing. It should just do it and whatever output I want, I want it as an AVIF, I want it as a WebP. Okay. we’ll just transform it in the background. I know there’s a ton of technological milestones to be achieved and overcome with that, but that is, I think, the expectation. The web should just work like that. Everything should convert and be easy, and drag and droppable and, yeah.

[00:49:10] Adam Silverstein: Yeah, and famously, several years ago, Apple started storing images in the HEIC format, which is a better compression than jpeg. However, it’s not a web safe format. I think Safari is the only browser that supports it. So when we upload HEICs to WordPress now, we do convert them to jpegs for users.

However, that only happens if your server supports HEIC images. Again, we rely on the server libraries, and that statistic is very similar to AVIF. It’s about 30% of sites. Fortunately Apple does automatically convert them if you upload them from your phone. But people do get into this problem where they wind up with HEIC images on their desktop and they’re trying to upload them to their WordPress, and then it will get rejected if your server doesn’t support it.

[00:49:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, this whole thing of, I’ve got images. It’s an image. Well, it’s in the wrong format. It’s an image.

[00:49:55] Adam Silverstein: Right? Why do I have to care?

[00:49:57] Nathan Wrigley: It shouldn’t matter. Yeah, okay. That’s a perfect example. Okay, so images, anything else?

[00:50:02] Adam Silverstein: The other one that I think is really cool that maybe people don’t know about is running AI directly in your browser. So there’s a great library called Transformers.js that lets you run a whole bunch of different models, kind of, it acts as an interface.

So just like the large language models that we have online, like Gemini and ChatGPT. You can actually run smaller versions of those directly in your browser. And some of the advantages of that are the data is private. There’s no API key required, or cost to you to use these. You can ship an AI directly with your product. So imagine you have a software, a plugin that is designed for company bulletin boards. You don’t really want that data going out to some remote API, but you’d like to give users a way to summarise the conversation from yesterday. A language model running in your browser is capable of doing that.

[00:50:49] Nathan Wrigley: Where does it live.

[00:50:50] Adam Silverstein: It runs in the memory of the browser and it gets downloaded in cache. So there is a large download when you first start using it to actually download the model. And then it’s cached, with the browser storage APIs.

[00:51:01] Nathan Wrigley: It’s persistent.

[00:51:03] Adam Silverstein: It’s persistent, yes.

[00:51:03] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Switch the machine off, switch the machine on.

[00:51:05] Adam Silverstein: Yes. It’ll stay cached in your, browser. Browser has the ability to store files.

[00:51:08] Nathan Wrigley: I’m guessing the constraints around what it can do compared to, I don’t know, ChatGPT 4o or whatever is much more minimal.

[00:51:15] Adam Silverstein: Significant. Right. This is in the browser, you’re probably going to get the performance maybe that you got out of the models a year ago or a year and a half ago. Remember when.

[00:51:24] Nathan Wrigley: Oh not that bad then.

[00:51:25] Adam Silverstein: Yeah. Not that bad, right? And you can imagine that a year or two from now, they’re just going to get better. And there have been dramatic improvements, and even like new approaches to how they’re doing them. So they’re getting quite good. They’ll never be as good as the large language models that are running in the cloud that have abundant resources.

There’s also hybrid models, right, where you use the local version when that’s all you have available, your offline, say, for example. Or you have a more complex query, then it can go to the cloud. There’s different ways of approaching that. But you can build a hybrid system, but the point of, the ability to run it in the browser, is to actually be able to do everything locally, and not rely necessarily on a cloud provider.

[00:52:00] Nathan Wrigley: It really feels at the minute as if Google is in a big pivot towards AI.

[00:52:06] Adam Silverstein: Absolutely.

[00:52:07] Nathan Wrigley: In fact, it kind of feels like if you were to describe it as a race, it feels like Google is kind of nudging ahead at this moment in time. I just watched some of the bits and pieces from Google IO.

[00:52:16] Adam Silverstein: Yes. Really impressive.

[00:52:16] Nathan Wrigley: It was pretty profound in many respects. But also, can you constrain that AI? So for example, could I limit it to one, well, let’s say website? It can only be used and consumed by this thing. I don’t know if there would be a need for that. I’m just wondering, is it available to all the things or can you constrain it?

[00:52:35] Adam Silverstein: I mean, so there are actually aI things being built into the browser where you’ll get AI in the browser itself. But this is not really that, this is more like it’s running inside your app. So it would be constrained. And I see this as something that we’ll start to see like plugins, shipping AI with their plugin, and it doesn’t require you to have ChatGPT or some other service provider, it just has the AI built in.

Maybe it’s identifying objects in an image. Or maybe it’s reviewing comments as to whether they’re spam. So things like that where it’s a pretty straightforward AI capability, it works really well on these smaller models. And so that’s something that I could imagine would just be built into a plugin. You would add this AI feature, but it doesn’t require that you sign up for a ChatGPT account, and get an API key and install it. You know, there’s a lot of barriers, I guess, to using the cloud models.

[00:53:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I feel like you’ve left the most interest, well, not the most interesting, but the bomb is there. My head is kind of a bit taken by that one because I can really, I mean, everybody’s fascinated by AI, the possibilities of it. But it’s always an API key. It’s always a go off somewhere else. I mean, maybe it hasn’t been for people such as yourself, but I did not know that it was possible in the browser.

And if it’s only a year behind, honestly, the stuff that I want to do with it is give it a corpus of information and filter that a little bit and give me a summary of it. That’s what I’m using it for. I’m imagining that all of that would be possible in the browser at no monetary cost.

[00:53:59] Adam Silverstein: Exactly. Right. Because you’re doing the computing yourself on your own platform.

[00:54:03] Nathan Wrigley: And I would imagine, like I said, Google leaning into this, that’s only going to get more investment from them.

[00:54:10] Adam Silverstein: Yeah. I mean, there is, yes, there’s a lot of investment going on in AI right now, so it’s pretty exciting. Yeah, and I did have, you know, I did talk a little bit about just how AI is going to impact all of our workflows and stuff, but that’s not really in the, it was kind of an expansion because it’s not actually a web capability, per se.

[00:54:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Well, I think maybe that’s the perfect place to end it. Unless you’ve got some cataclysmic thing which can trump that.

[00:54:30] Adam Silverstein: Nope. That was the end of talk. The last slide was really just asking for feedback from developers. So that would be my last thing to say is just, you know, try to give feedback. I’m always open. My DMs are open on WordPress Core Slack. And like I said, there’s the interop thing where you can actually open up a ticket.

[00:54:45] Nathan Wrigley: So, again, dear listener, just remember all of this, the browser is doing this. It sounds like it’s WordPress doing it, or it sounds like some other third party service. It’s not, it’s all in The browser and it’s fascinating. The browser is definitely more powerful today than it was yesterday. Adam Silverstein, thank you so much for chatting to me.

[00:55:02] Adam Silverstein: Yeah, thank you.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, reducing your WordPress website’s carbon footprint.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today we have Charlotte Bax. Charlotte is a sustainable web designer with a background in both environmentally conscious living and technology. Beginning her journey as a sustainable lifestyle blogger, she soon merged her passion for sustainability with her skills in web design, rebranding herself as Digihobbit.

For several years now, Charlotte has been focused on building websites that prioritize low carbon footprints, and she is also the founder of the climate tech startup ENNOR Toolbox for Online Sustainability, which helps measure the CO2 emissions of websites and web applications.

When we made this recording, Charlotte had just finished presenting at WordCamp Europe on the topic of how to make your website more sustainable, and her presentation is the topic of the podcast today.

We talk about digital environmental impact, the hidden pollution our websites create through their energy use and infrastructure. Charlotte explains some striking facts about the carbon footprint of ICT, noting that if the internet were a country, it would be the seventh largest polluter globally.

She shares a wide array of practical steps for web professionals to reduce the environmental impact of their sites. You’ll hear about the benefits of green web hosting, using modern image formats like WebP and AVIF, optimizing architecture and UX to minimize unnecessary page loads, the crucial role of caching, as well as some new innovations like grid aware websites, which adapt themselves based on the renewable energy mix available to users in real time.

The conversation also touches on Charlotte’s involvement in WordPress sustainability initiatives. The importance of multiplying small improvements across high traffic sites, and the moral imperative web creators have to help shape a greener internet.

If you’ve ever wondered how digital choices impact the planet, and what steps you can take to help, this episode is for you.

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

And so. Without further delay, I bring you Charlotte Bax.

I am joined on the podcast by Charlotte Bax. Hello Charlotte.

[00:03:29] Charlotte Bax: Hello Nathan, and thank you for having me.

[00:03:31] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. Charlotte and I are having a conversation at WordCamp Europe. We’re in Basel, and we’re going to be talking today about the environmental impact of your website, whether that be WordPress, or any other platform that you might be using.

In order to establish your credential, Charlotte, would you just for maybe a minute or something like that, just tell us a little bit about you, your relationship with technology. And I guess if you lean into your sustainability credentials, what you’ve been doing in the past, that would be helpful too.

[00:03:59] Charlotte Bax: Yes. Well, I started out as a sustainable lifestyle blogger, really, like in 2000 and something. And I didn’t really feel like I was at the right place in my work at that time. I was doing a job at the service center for ICT. It was really overwhelming. So I decided to make my hobby into my work and I chose the web design side. And after only a year, I think I stumbled upon a sustainable website challenge by some Dutch guys, that I got to know them. And that was the missing link between my sustainable lifestyle and my work as a web designer.

So I really went down that digital sustainability rabbit hole, and I sort of rebranded myself as a sustainable web designer in the name of Digihobbit. Well, so I’m building sustainable websites for quite some years now.

Two years ago, I really wanted a tool to make estimating the CO2 emissions of websites easier because, for example, Website Carbon by Whole Grain Digital, I love that tool. And there’s also some other tools I really loved, but you have to copy paste every single page of a website in there.

So I wanted a tool to do that in bulk. So I asked a friend to build me a tool to do that really easily, and he did. And that sort of escalated into a full blown startup. So since August, 2024, I also have a climate tech startup called ENNOR Toolbox for Online Sustainability, in which we build software to measure the CO2 emissions of websites and web applications.

[00:05:37] Nathan Wrigley: Wow, that’s fascinating. You’re the first person that I’ve spoken to who’s actually finished their talk at WordCamp Europe. Your presentation was, I’m sure you know, how to make your website more sustainable. So very quickly, how did it go?

[00:05:49] Charlotte Bax: It was amazing. Like the room was so full. It was such an amazing experience, and it went so good. And yeah, I’m just still riding that high.

[00:05:59] Nathan Wrigley: Do you feel, I mean, obviously there’s tons of topics on here and there’s many, many tracks, and the fact that you filled yours up, do you sense that sustainability is a thing which web developers are latching onto, that they find important, that they’re curious about?

[00:06:14] Charlotte Bax: Yes, I think so. Especially the curiosity part. I’ve done presentations in the Netherlands also for some government entities, and there were some senior developers. They talked to me afterwards and they said like, I have never thought of this before. Just, yeah, like spreading that awareness, planting those seeds. I think really nice to do that.

[00:06:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that it’s a topic which many people will not even have given any thought to. Because, we were talking just before we hit record about how clean and sterile our technology feels in our lives. You know, I’m staring at a laptop, and I’ve got a microphone in my hand, I’ve got a phone over to my side here, and none of it emits anything by itself.

You know, it’s clean. If I hold it in my hand, I’m not going to breathe any toxic fumes in from it. And yet all of the technology that we’re surrounded by in some way, shape, or form will have been produced, there’ll be some pollution that’s associated with that. But also particularly around ICT, the mere fact that it’s switched on and is consuming electricity, well, that electricity has to be generated in some way.

And you put a really interesting statistic on the blurb for your presentation, which says that 8 to 10% of all energy, and I think I’m saying that right, yeah, all energy that’s produced globally, 8 to 10% is related to ICT. I would never have suspected it because it’s completely divorced. I switch my computer on, there’s no pollution in my house because of that. It’s happening elsewhere.

So how does ICT rate? If it’s 8 to 10%, where does it sort of slot into all the other industries?

[00:07:57] Charlotte Bax: Well, it’s more than aviation. There’s this book, Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood. There is this graph somewhere, quite in the beginning, that puts the internet, if it were a country, it would be the seventh biggest polluter in the world. So that’s really, really big. And you don’t see it because all the pollution happens elsewhere. Like, you don’t have a data center, or an energy plant, in your backyard. It’s all hidden away. Or there’s those big boxes next to the highway, you know? You don’t see it. And in Dutch we call it far from your bed show. And that is a really nice comparison I think.

[00:08:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think if I was to ask you to stand behind my car and I rev the engine, so I use the car, you are going to be really reluctant to stand behind my car because you know that out of the back of the car is coming a lot of terrible gases that you don’t wish to consume. And yet my computer, in a remote destination that I am not standing anywhere near, is doing basically the same thing.

[00:09:05] Charlotte Bax: More or less.

[00:09:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean it may not be the same gases or what have you, but there is a pollution component to that.

[00:09:10] Charlotte Bax: Yes, there’s a pollution component indeed.

[00:09:11] Nathan Wrigley: But every bit of technology that I own, I sense none of that. And so that’s a really interesting disconnect. And I guess that promotes us, well, not promotes us, I guess it allows us to ignore the problem because we do not see it.

[00:09:28] Charlotte Bax: Yes. That is exactly the right wording for that. It allows us to ignore it because we do not see it. It’s not just like there’s this energy usage, for example, data centers and routers and your own devices, of course. But there’s also so much more. There’s this embodied carbon from producing all that hardware. And that’s not just the machines that we see around us, your laptop, my laptop, your phone. It’s also like the data centres, the servers, the wifi box, the routers, satellites, et cetera, cables.

Producing electronics is really dirty. It takes up a lot of resources and energy. Data centers, they use up a lot of water for cooling. And at the end of the day, most of those things, they become e-waste, because electronics don’t get recycled that much yet.

[00:10:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess given the nature of this podcast, we probably won’t focus on all of the different bits and pieces that are involved in all of that. You know, we can’t talk so much about how a phone ought to be recycled. Well, we could, but we are going to talk about websites.

And again, the disconnect is so profound. I go to a website, any website, there is no connection in my head between browsing that website and the consequences to the environment. Essentially, in my head, and probably the heads of many people listening to this podcast, it’s entirely benign. I’m doing no harm whatsoever. Of course, on some level, intellectually, if I apply thought to it, of course I know that I am, but it’s way easier for me to ignore that.

So then that leads to the question, what on earth can people like you, like me, like the people listening to this podcast who create websites, what on earth can they do? What are the little things that they can pick out that they can change about their website in order to make them less polluting, more sustainable, whichever term you’d like to use?

[00:11:26] Charlotte Bax: Oh boy. I don’t think we have enough time in this podcast to touch on all of that. But in my talk I sort of, yeah, I had a list of certain areas where you could make sustainable choices, and they also arrange really widely. For example, your web hosting, choose a green web host. It makes such a difference. Renewable energy. Not all web hosts are hosting on green energy. And there is this really nice organisation, the Green Web Foundation, they have this database of web hosting providers that are using renewable energy.

And they have a tool, you can put in your website and see if your website runs on renewables. And if you are a web hosting provider, you can send evidence to the Green Web Foundation that your data centers are running on renewables, so they can add you to that database, which is also very good for your reputation as a web host.

[00:12:23] Nathan Wrigley: Right, okay. So as you say the things that you mentioned in your talk, I’ll throw them back at you just so that we’re absolutely certain what we’re talking about.

So every website obviously, well, most of them need some kind of hosting environment. And what you’re saying is go out and be proactive. Look for this badge, this Green Web Foundation badge. They’ve done the hard work, if you like. You can be certain that if there’s a Green Web Foundation sticker on there, there has been an exchange, to and fro, between the host and the Green Web Foundation, and they classify that as sustainable. What does that mean? Does it mean that, like, is it 80% of their energy consumption is renewable or a hundred percent or do you know?

[00:12:59] Charlotte Bax: I don’t know that exactly. You should ask Chris Adams. But they’re also, yeah, I learned that also from that book from Tom Greenwood. You can make a difference between certain ways of using renewable energy, such as like actually producing your own renewable energy by having solar panels on the data center, for example.

You can invest in green energy. You can buy it from a green energy supplier.

And there’s a fourth thing, and it is that you buy certificates from other countries and that, yeah, I think that’s greenwashing.

But as far as I know, they don’t show that yet in the Green Web Foundation database. I have contacted them like months, maybe more than a year ago about it, whether they would do that. And they were open to the idea. I think someone was even working on it. But it just takes a long time because they are not a commercial party of course. They also just run on subsidies and they have just so many resources.

[00:14:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so there’s the first piece. There’s one thing that you can do. That’s a really easy concrete thing to do. We all need the hosting. So when you go, go and look and have some trust in the Green Web Foundation’s badge, if you like. You trust that they’ve done the due diligence and that that is in some way superior, in the way that that energy is captured or what have you.

[00:14:24] Charlotte Bax: Yes, yes. But I have a little disclaimer. Not all green web hosting providers are in the database yet, and not all of them show the badge. But it’s really easy just to check your own website through the tool on their home page.

[00:14:39] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you. Okay, what was next? What did you have next on your list?

[00:14:43] Charlotte Bax: Well, you can make sustainable choices in your architecture and your UX design. Just make it very easy for your visitors to find things on your website, so they don’t have to go here and there to search for stuff and produce lots of unnecessary page views. Because that’s all data traffic and that’s all CO2 emissions. That’s a thing you can do. Just think really good about that website architecture.

[00:15:12] Nathan Wrigley: So the idea there is that every time we produce a page, the server at some point is having to do some work. That work requires electricity. If we can cut 10 visits down to 5 visits, there’s an, obviously a 50% reduction in the amount of pages that are loaded. And again, it’s so hard in my head to encapsulate what that is doing because it just, I’m just thinking, okay, i’ve saved time. But obviously, you know, now that we’re having this chat, I’m now beginning to think more, okay, not only am I saving time, I’m actually saving electricity and therefore it’s more sustainable.

So that has a knock on consequence of course, in that nobody wants to go to 10 pages if you could go to five pages anyway. So figuring all that stuff out from the start is a good idea. Okay, lovely. Next one.

[00:15:58] Charlotte Bax: Next one is design and content creation. Yeah, what your website looks like. There’s lots of sustainable choices you can make in the assets that are shown on the front end, such as images, video, audio, the fonts that you use, the CSS styling, et cetera. We could do a whole podcast on that alone. So things I talked about previously this morning is scaling your images. Be very picky in your images.

Also sometimes I see websites that have so many pictures on it. I think people are afraid to be boring or something. But use the images that are actually valuable to your content, to tell a story instead of just putting a thousand pictures on there just because. Because images, they tell more than a thousand words, but also images are very, very heavy compared to just plain text.

[00:16:52] Nathan Wrigley: So I guess it’s, couple of things there. The first thing is use images when necessary. So that there’s not unnecessary images being loaded. But also I’m imagining that we’re probably trying to lean into newer image formats. So not only reducing the scale of the image so that it’s the correct dimensions and it’s not, you know, this giant image which is being shrunk in the browser, needlessly downloading a four megabyte image that really is like 150 kilobytes.

[00:17:19] Charlotte Bax: I saw this like on a government website that I tested and there was this, a really small icon, it was like 36 pixels wide or something. And there was an image like 6,000 by 8,000 pixels loaded for that. And I was, my heart bleeded.

[00:17:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, this should have been about 3K and it was probably more in the sort of four or five megabyte territory.

[00:17:41] Charlotte Bax: Yes, yes. I don’t know the exact numbers, but terrible.

[00:17:44] Nathan Wrigley: But image formats are changing as well, aren’t they? You know, in the past we were, everybody familiar with PNGs and JPEGs and things like that. And now we’ve got things like WebP and AVIF images as well. My understanding is that they are significantly reduced in their scale, with no measurable difference in the way that you can see them. They look basically identical.

[00:18:06] Charlotte Bax: Yes, yes. That’s really nice. WebP and AVIF, they are web friendly formats for your images and they are really lightweight. They also, they support transparent background and animation, so they are also really good alternatives to PNG and GIF, not only to JPEG.

And what I also like is that you can change the image quality when exporting to that format. Just like with JPEG, you can say, I want quality of 90, or image quality of 80% or even less. And when you’re choosing something between 80 and 90%, usually you don’t really see the difference. You can just play around with that on your computer. But it’s significantly reduces the file size.

[00:18:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was playing around with something the other day and I was converting a JPEG image to a WebP image. And I went to a service, which enabled me to do that, and at 80% I genuinely couldn’t see any, I was really staring hard and I could not see a single pixel that was different.

I think, you know, maybe if it was some incredibly detailed picture of some medical procedure or something like that, maybe. But in most cases it’s not necessary. But also if it’s going to represent a tiny icon on the website, upload an image which is a tiny icon in size. Don’t upload the big one and the browser handle that.

[00:19:28] Charlotte Bax: Yeah, but also for icons, you can much better choose like a vector image, like SVG, because vector images when done right, I have seen it done wrong, which is terrible, but when done right, they are really lightweight and they are scalable without limits and without any loss of quality. And that’s really suitable for logos, for icons, for certain illustration styles. You can also use SVG really well.

[00:19:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so that’s a really good point. So for what you might call like a bitmap image, you’ve got AVIF and WebP, they seem to be the ones that are out in the front at the moment. And then for things like logos, then some kind of vector based image, like an SVG where essentially it’s data, you know, it’s bezier curves and things like that. So it can really scale up, and it will still look just as good if it’s gigantic.

So definitely listener, if you’re hearing this, go and explore those, it’s well worth it. I would say that WordPress, by default won’t allow you to upload an SVG image. You might need to get a plugin to help you out with that.

[00:20:28] Charlotte Bax: My favorite for that is Safe SVG. I just put it on there as soon as I start a new website and then just put all the SVGs on there.

[00:20:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s curious. It’s because it’s not truly an image. It’s kind of like a file format and so it potentially could contain some code which might be harmful to your website. But those plugins strip out all of that. That’s my understanding anyway.

[00:20:47] Charlotte Bax: Yes. So indeed, if you use plugins like that, you are at less risk of malfunctioning code, not malfunction, maleficent code.

[00:20:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, like malware. You know, security problems, things like that.

[00:20:59] Charlotte Bax: Yeah, but if you make your SVGs yourself, well, then you have control over that. You know there’s no malware in that, unless you put it there yourself.

[00:21:06] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t know if you have an answer to this, but obviously video is really important on the web. You know, certain types of things that people are doing online, maybe not quite so much websites but, you know, things like Instagram and TikTok and things like that, it’s really, really popular.

Do you know if there’s any similar thing happening like WebP and AVIF with movie formats? Is there anybody trying to compress those in a way that WebP and AVIF have been?

[00:21:29] Charlotte Bax: I haven’t dived into that that much, but I know there is WebM I think. But also, MPEG and or MP4. They are really good compression techniques and as lightweight as you can make it.

[00:21:45] Nathan Wrigley: I guess the same rules apply for images as for video though. You don’t needlessly put video on the website. And certainly it’s possible to deploy video in a way that it’s not as environmentally profound. You know, for example, auto play switched off.

[00:22:00] Charlotte Bax: I really hate those websites with this automatically playing background video. I must admit, when I started out as a web designer, some of my first clients, they really wanted that, so I did it. But I had an opinion on that and I explained, I didn’t know anything about the sustainability part yet by then, but I explained that it is a big file that gets loaded automatically. It really slows down your website also, so it’s a bad user experience. So I recommend that they didn’t do it, but they really wanted to.

But I really hate how some websites shove like an enormous amount of megabytes down your throat as a visitor by those autoplay background videos.

[00:22:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and also I think there’s a move to make it so that, and I don’t know if the block editor, the video block automatically does this, I could be wrong about that. The idea of having an image placeholder instead of the video itself, because the mere putting the iframe onto the page, there’s some communication between, let’s say YouTube, if you’re embedding something from YouTube. Whereas really, you don’t need to engage YouTube until somebody’s actually clicked the play button. So having some placeholder there, click the button, click the image, and then the video begins to load. I guess there’s something there. That’s a good idea.

[00:23:18] Charlotte Bax: I have a trick for that. When you embed a YouTube video or a Vimeo, they do the preload is none thing really good, which is nice, so you don’t shove that many megabytes through someone’s throat. But what YouTube does, and Vimeo also but less, is they put a lot of tracking scripts in that embed.

So what I like to do is, so something I did for one of my latest websites for the Rotterdam Metal Band, Ann My Dice, they have this show reel of their newest songs on top of their homepage. And I put an image thumbnail there. And when you click that, it opens a modal. So the video and all those tracking scripts, they are loaded only when you click on a thumbnail to open the modal. That’s a nice little trick to work around that.

[00:24:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so video and images, that’s a really easy win. There’s loads of things that you can do.

There’s lots of services out there, both on your computer, but online where you can compress the images. And obviously we’ve talked about the different formats and not necessarily loading video.

Okay, should we move on? Is there anything else on there?

[00:24:21] Charlotte Bax: Yeah, yeah. There is caching of course, which can make a huge difference. WordPress is based on a database. So in theory, every time someone visits a page on your website, the server has to calculate the webpage and then send it over to your visitor.

But if you use, for example, server side caching, you can do that once and send the generated page to all your visitors. So that saves a lot of computing energy server side. But there’s also browser caching, which means that certain assets that you can reuse, for example, your CSS style sheets, and your fonts, you can retain in a browser. So they don’t need to get loaded on every page your visitor goes to.

[00:25:06] Nathan Wrigley: There’s so many different ways of tackling this, isn’t there? Whether that’s through your web host or a collection of plugins that you might use. But yeah, caching, the idea being that it’s stored somewhere, kind of ready to go. It’s already been created. Somebody just comes along and if you like, just picks it up.

Whereas in the typical WordPress way, there’s this whole crunching of data. There’s all this PHP being rendered in the background. And the database is being called to construct the page. And really, if the page isn’t being changed from minute to minute, there’s no need for all of that. You can just have a cached version. And increasingly, you know, you don’t even have to make that cached version travel across the globe, because you can put it at the edge in different countries and so on and so forth. So there’s a whole load of interesting stuff. But caching enforce that where possible.

[00:25:54] Charlotte Bax: If you have a, I always recommend people to look at their target audience for choosing their hosting. For example, I live in the Netherlands and my target audience is mostly Dutch companies and Dutch governments. So it makes sense for me to host my website in the Netherlands. But if your target audience is all over the world, I really recommend using a CDN to distribute all your cached web pages. It makes it more sustainable and it also makes it a lot quicker.

[00:26:23] Nathan Wrigley: It’s curious that one, isn’t it? Because in many ways, using a CDN, you are creating a bigger footprint because there’s more, you know, instead of it being cached in one place, it’s now cached in multiple places. So there’s more caching happening. But the people who are absorbing that cache, using that cache, there’s a net benefit there because they have to travel less distance.

So for example, if there’s a cache data center in Sydney, and some Australian user is using that, it doesn’t have to come all the way, for example, to London and then back again. So even though you are storing multiple versions of the cache around the world, the traffic that’s going backwards and forwards from that cache often will make up for that.

[00:27:01] Charlotte Bax: Yeah, it’s really dependent on the situation and the size of your target audience because obviously if you only have like one visitor from Australia every month, it’s not worth it. So it’s also sort of, look at your own situation and make choices based on that.

I always think about, like sustainability is not something like what you can and cannot do, but I like to view it as more as inspiring people and giving them the tools to actually make conscious choices instead of just doing what the masses do and what is easy.

[00:27:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s no destination, is there, probably? It’s more of a journey. You’re kind of trying to do little bits, and chisel away the bits that you can. Okay, so caching is a whole other topic. You can no doubt go down that rabbit hole and spend the rest of your life there.

[00:27:49] Charlotte Bax: Yes, yes. If you want to know more about caching, I think Ramon Fincken from Halvar knows more about that.

[00:27:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. Okay, so there’s another one we’ve ticked off. Anything else on your list?

[00:28:00] Charlotte Bax: Yes. There’s visitor management, because obviously the page weight is not the only factor of a website, but also you have to multiply that with all the page visits to get your total CO2 emissions over time.

So if you have a lot of visitors, and that’s not only the human visitors, but also the bots of course, then that’s a lot of CO2 emissions. And that can be up to hundreds of times more than you actually realise.

Joost de Valk had a really great talk about that a few years ago, 2022 at WordCamp Netherlands. I wasn’t there myself, but I have seen a YouTube video and I really, really recommend people checking that out because he can explain that really well.

[00:28:44] Nathan Wrigley: So this is to do with the amount of traffic that you are getting.

[00:28:47] Charlotte Bax: Yes, yes. The amount of traffic. So page weight times traffic is CO2 emissions basically.

[00:28:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, interesting.

[00:28:54] Charlotte Bax: Yes.

[00:28:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Next one.

[00:28:56] Charlotte Bax: That’s the last one in my list. And that is sort of the cherry on top. And that is to make your website grid aware. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Fershad Irani. No. He is one of the pioneers in website sustainability. He does a lot of projects for the Green Web Foundation. And currently he is working on grid aware websites toolkits to make your website responsive to the energy mix on the local energy grid from your visitor. And he does that with Cloudflare CDN workers. I hope I explained that right because that’s an area that I’m less familiar with.

But what it does, for example, if your website visitor is in an area where the energy grid is mostly running on fossil fuel energy, then it shows a more minimal experience of your website to the visitor. And when they are in an area where the grid is a big percentage renewable energy, then it shows a more rich experience of your website.

[00:30:01] Nathan Wrigley: Gosh, that’s fascinating. So it’s like progressive enhancement, but for sustainability.

[00:30:07] Charlotte Bax: Yes.

[00:30:07] Nathan Wrigley: So I might see an entirely different page with, let’s say, I don’t know, a greater number of images on it or something like that, given the awareness that the website has of where I’m viewing it, or where it is being hosted? I wasn’t sure about that bit. Is it more about the visitor or more about the location of the hosting of that?

[00:30:26] Charlotte Bax: It’s about the visitor in this case, yeah. And I think he does that in a really, really smart way. There’s also sort of a version of the toolkit that does it browser based. I don’t know enough about that to explain that right I think.

[00:30:39] Nathan Wrigley: Genuinely, that’s fascinating. That really feels like he’s pushing the boundaries. What I’ll do is I’ll try to find a link to something.

[00:30:46] Charlotte Bax: There is a page on the website of the Green Web Foundation, and if you contact Fershad through LinkedIn or Mastodon, or I’m happy to link you with him. He is currently working on it and he is looking for people and websites to experiment with it. I think it’s a really nice experiment to see how much effect this can have. I’m really curious.

[00:31:07] Nathan Wrigley: It kind feels like a technology which is going to be very difficult to pull off, but very profound if it is pulled off. You can imagine high traffic websites, and I’m thinking of news organisations, for example, the BBC or something like that, that just have millions of views every few minutes, I would’ve thought, and could really benefit from something like that. You know, showing a different website. I’d never heard of that. That’s fascinating.

[00:31:29] Charlotte Bax: Yeah, it’s a really new project. He’s still developing the toolkit right now. I think it’s a really amazing project and that could be really impactful for, yeah, those really high traffic websites. I have seen, earlier this week I had a video call with Fershad, and he showed me a demo version on, oh, I don’t know the name, I can’t recall it, but it was like an online magazine.

There was this menu, there was just this dropdown in the menu bar with four items, live low, medium, and high. So you could choose the settings yourself, or you just could go with the live thing, based on your own energy grid where you were localised.

[00:32:08] Nathan Wrigley: So like a demo, and you can pick how you would like to see it in four different versions. Okay.

[00:32:12] Charlotte Bax: Yeah, yeah. The live version is like how it is shown based on your energy grid. But as a visitor, you can also choose your own way if you want to see the more rich version or the more minimised version. And the information on the website, it just stays the same of course, but it shows less images and that kind of stuff. But if you view it in the, like the minimalist version, you can still opt to see images if you want to by just clicking on it. It’s a really smart way he does that.

[00:32:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s fascinating. So in my email client, for example, I have it set up, the default is do not show me images, and I just click a button, display images, and they all come in. I can’t pick which images, they all just come. But there’s a decision there, you know, it is like I’ve decided not to see all the images off the bat. Click a button and in they come.

That is really interesting. So I presume the text would stay the same, because that’s the core of what the website is probably offering, text. But, you know, do you want a heavy experience in terms of data? Well, there it is. There’s all the images and the videos. Yeah, okay, I will follow that up. That sounds fascinating.

So we’re at we WordCamp EU. This is all about WordPress. How do you feel WordPress, by default, so ignoring any plugins, if I just chuck a default version of WordPress, a vanilla version of WordPress out there, how does it do in terms of sustainability compared to other things in the environment?

[00:33:33] Charlotte Bax: Oh, that’s really funny because I haven’t really done any research into that. What I have done is I made, it’s some time ago, but I checked some of the WordPress vanilla themes against some of my favorite themes, just making a staging website with only lorem ipsum paragraph, and just the vanilla theme, and then checking how much page weight it is, and how much CO2 emissions on first load. But that’s ages ago. And I, maybe you just sort of started a new project in my head.

[00:34:05] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, nice.

[00:34:07] Charlotte Bax: Measure the CO2 emissions of WordPress themes and vanilla WordPress. I think that’s a good idea.

[00:34:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because it feels to me, especially if you’re using a WordPress default theme, they do seem to be quite light, you know, there’s a lot of text and very, I mean, some of the themes that we’ve had in the past, I can’t remember, I’m just trying to conjure it up, it might have been 2021 or something like that. It was basically all text. And I just wondered if WordPress itself could be proud of its sustainability over time, or whether it was something that, you know, compared to other CMSs but, you know, if you don’t have that data, that’s okay.

[00:34:40] Charlotte Bax: I don’t have the data, but I do think that maybe WordPress could be more of a front runner in terms of sustainability. For example, I learned that Drupal already has like a sustainability policy and they’re doing certain things on that. But unfortunately, our own sustainability team got canceled.

But yesterday, during Contributor Day, there were like 10 people or something, they really wanted to do a sustainability table, so we just impromptu did that. The table cards, they were there. So we just did it and we formed a new team. Still unofficial. I have no idea how it happened, but apparently I’m a team rep now. There are some of the old sustainability team members that also want to continue their work. So we sort of started an impromptu petition to get the sustainability team their official status back, so it can become a core value of WordPress.

And I think that it would really help WordPress to be a front runner, especially in Europe where sustainability is, as far as I know, sustainability is a bigger thing in Europe than in America or Asia. That’s how I feel it. And I think if we don’t jump on that sustainability bandwagon, we could really lose market share.

[00:35:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think you’re right. I’m curious about the sustainability team. So you are talking about Contrib Day yesterday?

[00:36:03] Charlotte Bax: Yes.

[00:36:05] Nathan Wrigley: An impromptu sustainability team sort of set itself up and just carried on as if nothing had happened. So that’s interesting.

[00:36:11] Charlotte Bax: Yes. Not really as if nothing had happened. Most of the time we spent on like strategising how to get this back on the road again, and how to continue because the previous team, they did really great work and I just latched on a few weeks before they got closed down and I think it’s really sad.

[00:36:29] Nathan Wrigley: Well, you’ve given us loads of really interesting tips. Hopefully the listeners to this have gathered some useful information. Realised that it’s a profoundly important and moral topic to be involved in.

Should anybody wish to contact you and get into a conversation about how they could become involved, or just some tips or what have you, where do we find you, Charlotte?

[00:36:48] Charlotte Bax: You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find Digihobbit on LinkedIn, and you can also find Digihobbit on Mastodon. I’m not really on like the regular social media channels, but that’s a whole different topic to discuss. I also have a personal LinkedIn profile, but if you want to link with me personally, just add a message to it so I sort of know the context.

[00:37:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So dear listener, I will put everything that we’ve talked about today, all of the Green Web Foundation’s, and other varied links into the show notes. Head to wptavern.com and search for the episode with Charlotte Bax.

So Charlotte Bax, thank you very much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:37:22] Charlotte Bax: Thank you very much, Nathan, for having me.

[00:37:24] Nathan Wrigley: You’re most welcome.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case the power of local WordPress Meetups in community building in Spain.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today we have Héctor de Prada.

Héctor is one of the founders of Modular DS, a tool for managing multiple WordPress websites. But his contributions to the WordPress community go far beyond his day job. Based in Spain, he’s been involved in creating and developing websites for years, and has immersed himself in the WordPress community, attending numerous WordCamps and Meetups in various cities.

More recently, he’s been co-organizing the WordPress Meetup in Leon, a city in northern Spain, which has seen impressive growth and engagement since its revival after the pandemic.

Héctor shares why he volunteers his free time to organize these community events, and the impact Meetups can have, not only for individual learning, but for revitalizing local tech ecosystems.

We discuss what makes a successful Meetup, how his team approaches event planning, rotating roles so nobody feels the pressure to attend every time, and how sponsors and local venues help make it all happen.

Héctor explains how their Meetup group draws diverse attendees, from students and marketeers, to business owners and agencies. And how they’ve experimented with differing formats and topics to keep things fresh and inclusive. Whether it’s inviting guest speakers from digital businesses, running panel forums, or focusing on networking opportunities for job seekers and entrepreneurs, he highlights the power of community in building connections that exist beyond WordPress.

We cover everything from the practicalities of finding venues and sponsors, to managing team workflows and keeping the events welcoming and approachable.

If you ever thought about starting a WordPress Meetup in your city, or want to bring new energy to an existing group, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Héctor de Prada.

I am joined on the podcast by Héctor de Prada. Hello, Héctor.

[00:03:20] Héctor de Prada: Hello, Nathan. A pleasure to be here.

[00:03:22] Nathan Wrigley: We’re at WordCamp EU. It is in Basel. We are on the contributor day. And you are going to be giving a presentation about an experience that you have, I guess, on a monthly basis running an event. Let’s get into that in a moment. First of all, just introduce yourself, who you work for, what you do in the WordPress community outside of Meetups.

[00:03:41] Héctor de Prada: Okay, so I am Héctor de Prada. I am one of the founders of Modular DS, which is a tool to manage multiple WordPress websites. So that’s like my main occupation. But thanks to that, and also since way before, I have been involved with WordPress, creating websites, developing websites.

And for the past couple of years, or three years I could say, I have been also involved in the community. I’ve been in many WordCamps in Spain because as you know, in Spain, we have a lot of WordCamps. I’ve also been in many Meetups in different cities. I try to stay as much connected as I can to the community.

I also write a newsletter about the WordPress ecosystem in Spanish. And since a year and a half ago, I am also one of the co-organisers of the Meetup, and that’s what I’m going to talk about, well, Saturday in the WordCamp Europe in the talk I have.

[00:04:39] Nathan Wrigley: This is going to seem like a strange question because you know, on a very visceral level, you really understand why you do it, but I’m kind of keen to explain that to the audience. Why do you use up your free time organising WordPress events on a sort of voluntary basis? You know, you’ve given up lots of your free time, there’s no financial gain, you’re just doing it. Why do you do that?

[00:05:02] Héctor de Prada: Okay, well, I was thinking a lot about this question before and I came up with two different answers.

The first one is that since, like I said, I have been kind of part of the community for a few years, and I have been in many events outside of my city. I saw how the WordPress communities, how it feels, all the good things that come out of it. And then one of the main things I was always thinking when I was going to these events was like, why can’t we have this in our city for the people in our city to experience this, to have this type of connections, inspiration, learning, and so on? So that’s one of the first things.

And then it was also mixed with, I come from a small city in the north of Spain, and one of the things, many people say inside the city and outside of the city is that we don’t have many things anymore, okay. So it’s hard to explain, but like there is not much to do, a lot of young people leaves the city. So it’s kind of like depressing mood a little bit.

So it was also like, why don’t we try to do something in our city to try to start creating an ecosystem? And WordPress gave us the perfect excuse to also do that. Try to get people together, people in the tech world, which is what we do, talking about me and my partner, my friends, we are always talking about websites, technology, design. So it kind of all got together and we said, okay, let’s start doing the WordPress Meetups. And it’s been great so far.

[00:06:31] Nathan Wrigley: How long have you been actually involved in the one that you’re doing now?

[00:06:34] Héctor de Prada: The meet up in our city, we have been doing it for around year and a half now. So after the summer, we’ll do two years.

[00:06:40] Nathan Wrigley: I should probably say to the listeners that a Meetup, if you’ve never attended one, WordPress has a whole community outside of the software, who help create the software, but they also show up for social events and things like that. And the ones that you may have heard of are WordCamps, and they’re the big ones. That’s where we’re at right now. So they tend to be an annual thing, perhaps in a city or, we are at WordCamp Europe, which is an annual thing, which moves around Europe.

But the Meetups, which is what we’re talking about, that’s usually bound to a city or a town or something like that, and it’s much more regular and it’s probably happening in an evening. It’s not a whole day. It’s maybe, I don’t know, six o’clock till nine o’clock, something along those lines. And presumably using local talent, using the people in the community that you’ve got, drawing them in and trying to get them to do the presentations and all of the bits and pieces.

So if you don’t know anything about that dear listener, now you do. If there’s something close to you, if you actually log into your WordPress dashboard, there will be an area in the dashboard, if you put all of the panels on, if you turn them on, you’ll be able to see, hopefully it will geographically locate you and give you some intel as to that.

So tell us a little bit about the one that you’ve been doing. You said it’s been going for 18 months, or at least you have been involved for 18 months.

[00:07:53] Héctor de Prada: Actually it was already working before Covid, so for a couple of years before Covid. Then it was shut down. I wasn’t involved before Covid. I didn’t even know the WordPress community before Covid. And then it was like three years stopped. Yeah, like 18 months ago, we kind of restarted the Meetup.

[00:08:13] Nathan Wrigley: So how many people typically would attend your Meetup? Because yours is quite a big one. The one that we are at at the moment is ridiculously big. You know, it’s going to have several thousand. Nobody can expect those kind of attendance numbers. That would be extraordinary. What are the kind of numbers that you are seeing on a monthly basis?

[00:08:28] Héctor de Prada: Yes, so I was checking this for the presentation I’m giving on Saturday, and we have, in this 18 months, we don’t do it every month, okay, it is more like every couple of months, because we don’t do it in the summer or during Christmas, for example, in December. So it’s kind of like six, eight, a year. And we have an average attendance of 60 people.

I know it’s pretty big because like I said, I’ve been in many other places where having like 25 people, 30 people, is already like a huge success. And that’s what we were trying to accomplish at the beginning. Like, okay, let’s try to get 20 people here, 25 people, get together. And since the beginning it’s been like, yeah, like sometimes it’s 50 people, sometimes it’s like 75 people. And for us it’s like, sometimes we don’t even know, how is it possible? But sure, it’s very fulfilling and we’re very happy about it of course.

[00:09:16] Nathan Wrigley: And how do you sort of account for that? Do you email people? Do you have like a system? So for example, a lot of the Meetups will use a platform, which is called Meetup. You can go to meetup.com, and figure all of that out. But do you use a system like that to keep in touch with people and notify them that there’s a new one coming in June or July or whatever it may be?

[00:09:35] Héctor de Prada: Yeah, we use meetup.com to create the events and send the email communications to all the people that is subscribed to the group, or has been in one of the previous Meetups. And also, we always try to get people to follow us on social media because it is where, we have like a Twitter and Instagram account. It’s where we try to advance the new Meetups and give all the information and stuff.

And then we try different things also to get more people to come in. For example, we go kind of old school and we print some big flyers, okay, to put it on the walls. And we put it, for example, in the university, in the buildings the city hall has for technology companies. So we put them over there just for people, when they go to work or students, when they go to the university, they will just check it out. And maybe they will feel like going. So that’s also something we do.

[00:10:25] Nathan Wrigley: And where do you actually do it? Do you have the same venue every single time, or do you tend to move around?

[00:10:30] Héctor de Prada: No, we move around. This is very important because it, I think it’s one of the most important things when you are organising any kind of event, the venue where you’re actually doing it. And we are very lucky because, even when I was telling you that in our city it seems like not many things are being done. When you actually try to do something, everybody tries to help you.

So we have been offered many different venues from City Hall, from the university, from private companies, from the government, public buildings they have. So what we have tried to do is to do the Meetup in different places. So in case, at some point, we can do it in one of them, we will always be able to go to any of the other ones. And that has worked very well for us.

[00:11:12] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice, yeah. I think that’s not typical. I think usually it’s done in kind of the same venue and what have you.

My understanding also, and I could be wrong about this, but my understanding is that the Spanish WordPress community is actually one of the healthier ones, for want of a better word. It seems to be kind of thriving. I don’t know if I’ve just heard a story and that’s not true, but is that true?

[00:11:33] Héctor de Prada: No, I think it is. I think it is definitely, well, I was talking with somebody that is organising here at WordCamp Europe, and we were accounting for WordCamps made in Spain last year. And I think it was like 12 WordCamps in one year, only in Spain, which I could say is what the rest of Europe has in one year.

So it’s like pretty crazy. I think, we Spanish people, we just like to gather a lot and just meet each other. But also I think there are many Meetup groups in Spain that are doing a great job and have great numbers and do a lot of Meetups with really great speakers. So yeah, I would say in Spain there is a lot of community movement.

[00:12:14] Nathan Wrigley: I’m quite jealous. The part of the world where I live in the UK, Covid really had a profound impact. The Meetups kind of disappeared, and in some cases came back, but in most cases they didn’t. I think maybe the year 2025 was a bit of a watershed. There’s a few I think that maybe are on the cusp of returning.

So it can’t just be you. I’m presuming that there’s a whole bunch of people, a team, if you like. And how does that work? How many people regularly are helping you out, and do you have, I don’t know, different roles that you perform? Like, you’re in charge of the emails, you’re in charge of the venue, you’re in charge of the snacks and whatever it may be. How many people on the team and how do you manage all that?

[00:12:49] Héctor de Prada: We are six people currently, and what we tried since the beginning was to find other people that could be complimentary to us. And like you said, we try to split responsibilities. So one of us, who is very good with social media, is the one taking charge of posting everything in social media so everybody sees what we are doing.

Other person is always in charge of the networking we do afterwards to get the catering, even the venue we have to change somewhere, because it’s somebody who has a lot of contacts in that space.

Also somebody’s in charge of sponsors. Somebody’s in charge of creating the Meetups. Somebody’s in charge of the design.

Okay, so we try to split the responsibilities, but at the same time, and this is not so obvious, I think what we have also found very important is that, even when each one has a responsibility, we also try to rotate every once in a while. So, for example, when we started, everybody thought or supposed I was always going to be the one presenting, because I’m kind of more used to speaking in public. One of the first things we decide is that every day one of us was going to present the Meetup. So in case I’m missing or anybody else is missing, the Meetup will work exactly the same.

Because we don’t want this to feel like an obligation, like every member of the team has to be every single Meetup no matter what, because it’s not a job. You said it. This is like a volunteer thing. We do it for the community. So if at some point something happens with life, you have to take your kids to school or anything, well, the rest of the team will be able to take charge.

[00:14:27] Nathan Wrigley: So everybody kind of rotates things around so that if somebody’s, I don’t know, unwell during that day, somebody can slot in. Yeah, that’s kind of an interesting approach.

[00:14:35] Héctor de Prada: Exactly. Yeah, the same with like organising the networking and the catering afterwards, taking charge of cleaning everything up afterwards. We try to rotate everything.

[00:14:44] Nathan Wrigley: There’s so much that goes into these events. So let’s just go through the little laundry list of things that you have to achieve. Now, you may do some of these, you may not. But I guess it’s things like booking the venue has to be done. Maybe there’s a payment that needs to be involved with that. You have to presumably have an email list. You’ve got social media accounts. You’ve got ordering the food, tidying up at the end.

[00:15:03] Héctor de Prada: You need to talk with the sponsors as well to get any merchandise they might send to you to give to the attendees. Also, you have to select the speakers and then prepare it with the speakers.

[00:15:14] Nathan Wrigley: So do you work with the speakers as well? Because my experience is that often speakers can be, if they’re new to it, they can be a little bit nervous. And so having some sort of, coaching is maybe the wrong word, but some intuition as to, yeah, you’re on the right lines. That, I think, is what our audience will like.

[00:15:27] Héctor de Prada: It depends a lot on the speaker, because it’s true that there are some speakers that are very, I’m not going to say professional, but they’re like very used to, they are experts in something and they’re very used to give talks about it. So you basically can’t tell them anything because they already know more than you do, okay, about how to do it right.

But it’s true that one thing that we like to do a lot is that we don’t only try to do like the normal talks you might see in a WordCamp, where somebody is an expert on a field, and they just give you a talk trying to allow you to learn something. But we also like to do more experience stuff like trying to look for inspiration instead of learning.

So for example, like you do with the podcast, nowadays I think podcasts are a trend because we like to listen and understand the stories behind people, how they are doing something, or how did they come to this? So for those kind of talks, it’s true that we kind of give them a guide. So, we would like you to talk about this.

Or sometimes if we do, the last meeting we did, it was like a forum with three different businesses, and we wanted to just talk about their experience. And what we did is try to get like the main questions we wanted them to answer. And we gave them to them previously so they could kind of prepare a little bit of what we wanted to talk about. Because they didn’t have any presentation or anything, it was just like a normal conversation, like an interview more. So in those cases, it takes much more work than if it’s just somebody with a presentation and they do their thing.

[00:16:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, i’ve been to Meetups where they’ve done a whole variety of different things, not all at the same evening. So for example, they might do two presentations of, I don’t know, 45 minutes each, and then have a bit of networking in the middle.

Some places do social things where it’s just, maybe there’ll be an hour where you just do the networking and hang out. I’ve been to Meetups where they do prize giveaways and quizzes and things like that.

So there isn’t just one model. You can sort of mix it around a little bit and offer things which the audience, I don’t know, it’s a bit more entertainment, if you like.

[00:17:29] Héctor de Prada: Of course. I think it’s very nice to try different formats, different things. Because also people, when we have a lot of, I guess like many Meetups, we have many regular people, they go to almost every Meetup, so I think it’s also good for them to try different things so it’s more like, a little bit unexpected. You get a surprise of what you are getting out of it, and it’s not always the same thing.

[00:17:51] Nathan Wrigley: Have you had things which you’ve tried maybe recently in the last six months or something that you just thought, oh, let’s give that a go. And if so, maybe you could share that.

[00:17:59] Héctor de Prada: Well, the last one we did, at the beginning it was a little, it wasn’t so much about the format because we had already tried that because it was like, yeah, like four people from three different businesses talking about how they achieved what they have done. But the crazy thing is it was the topic about it. Because it was three different gastronomic business, which at the first time you could say, okay, so what does this have to do with WordPress?

But it was very interesting because those three businesses, it was a social media influencer only talking about restaurants, a food influencer. Then it was a restaurant that has digitalised all the experience inside the restaurant. So you get to the restaurant and you order the food with your phone, everything, so no people around you or anything.

And then the other one was an e-commerce site made with WooCommerce of one of the biggest meat sellers in Spain. It’s a big restaurant just to eat meat. The type of meat, like you pay a lot for that. And they are really crushing it, like with their e-commerce made with WooCommerce.

So it was all very digital, but at the same time, the topic was like gastronomic and at the beginning people was like, doesn’t feel like a WordPress Meetup. It was amazing. People loved it.

[00:19:08] Nathan Wrigley: It worked.

[00:19:08] Héctor de Prada: Yes, yes. Because their stories were so interesting and how they kind of mixed with the technology and how it started, the pains they had at the beginning, trying to introduce that technology and how it has now changed their business. It was super interesting.

[00:19:23] Nathan Wrigley: How did you come up with the idea of that particular one? Because that’s so curious. Because usually it is, there’s a strong WordPress focus to the ones that I’ve been, you know, there’s a presentation, it’s WordPress, there’s a Lightning Talk, it’s WordPress, there’s another presentation, it’s WordPress.

But that one, there’s a thread running through it, which is technology. Sounds like the audience really liked it. And there was obviously that WooCommerce bit at the end that you mentioned. How did you even conceive of that topic?

[00:19:47] Héctor de Prada: Yeah. Well, it wasn’t only that WooCommerce, like the three of them had started somehow the business with some WordPress, a WordPress website, a WordPress blog, a WooCommerce, okay. It wasn’t the main focus of the talk, but they all had something to do. And that wasn’t intentional, like it just came out because I guess WordPress, you want it or not, it is behind most of the worldwide web. So it was very nice.

But one thing talk about in the presentation here at WordCamp Europe is that I think that WordPress is what unites us, but I don’t think it should be what separates us. So I think, thanks to WordPress powering like 40 something percent of the worldwide web, it allows us to talk about almost everything related to the digital world. It will always be somehow related to WordPress.

So it’s true that we don’t go too deep into the technical WordPress part. It’s always somehow related, but we feel like our audience is not like WordPress experts, to say it like that. We have a lot of students, marketing students, marketing agencies, entrepreneurs. And then we talk more about like the digital business part, the online marketing. It’s always somehow related to WordPress, but it has worked for us very well to kind of get a broader view and not go so specific, to get also like more attendees coming, and they all feel like they understand, that they can apply that to themselves.

Of course we always talk a lot about WordPress. It’s a WordPress Meetup. But I think that’s also important because even us that we are so deep in the community, I feel like WordPress is like my main thought like 24/7 almost. But for most people outside the community, it is not like that. And I think one important thing in WordPress is that we try to get as many people to the community as possible, and they don’t have to be such experts.

[00:21:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting because if you show up and you did two presentations back to back and it was all about, I don’t know, WP-CLI, followed by some other very technical thing, it may be that half of the audience, maybe more, maybe 70% of the audience would think, I don’t really understand that. And managing that is quite difficult.

So mixing it up a little bit and making sure it’s not too technical for one of the evenings. Maybe you have a technical one now and again, but you’ve got to think a lot about the audience and what they are prepared to consume.

So, pivoting slightly, I guess this cannot be entirely free. So I know that you give your labour for nothing. But presumably there is a cost somewhere along the line, whether that’s for snacks or whether it’s for hiring of the venue. How do you finance your Meetup? How does that work?

[00:22:22] Héctor de Prada: Yeah, we have sponsors that help us with the cost. We basically, our costs are only the flyers, which is like almost nothing because we don’t do that many, and then the food and drinks for the networking. So we always try to have two sponsors. One, it’s always a local company, and then one is a workers community company.

I think in Spain at least, because I don’t know outside of Spain, but there are many companies, mostly hosting companies that really want to sponsor these kind of events. And since the beginning, we have had a lot of offers of companies trying to sponsor. I guess it’s also important that we have good attendee numbers and stuff. But I think they sponsor most of the Meetups in Spain. That’s what we use to cover the cost.

[00:23:08] Nathan Wrigley: How does the sponsorship actually work? Because obviously they couldn’t realistically be paying you directly and then you then move the money to buying the snacks and the pizzas or whatever it may be. How does that sponsorship actually work? Who is the person that’s receiving the money and distributing it and so on?

[00:23:23] Héctor de Prada: Well, normally what we do is that, since our costs are very located in, I would say 90% or maybe 95% of the budget goes to the food and drinks for the catering, which we have also tried different companies and different stuff. So they give us a bill and then we’ll send it to the sponsors so they pay the bill. I know it’s not the easiest way. Sometimes because of the company requirements of the food, we have to give the money first and then ask the sponsor to give us the money.

Well, I guess as long as you are, for example, us of course, in the team, as long as you are completely transparent and you show where all the money goes and what is being spent. At least for us, I’m sure for you guys in London, for example, it has to be way different because it’s another city, other kind of prices and everything. But for us, the money sums are really, really small. Even when we have a 60 person Meetup, the money is really small. It just gives you for that, for like the food and that. We are still waiting to try to do some T-shirts for the team, but we haven’t still gotten the money for that.

[00:24:27] Nathan Wrigley: So you tend to get a sponsor on board to sponsor a thing, a component of the Meetup. So it might be that this week hosting company X is sponsoring the food. Or such and such a company is sponsoring the venue. It’s like in one door out the other. Somebody on your team will pay for the food, but then send the receipt, the bill if you like, to the sponsor, who will then reimburse them for all of that.

[00:24:50] Héctor de Prada: Yeah, could be. For example, we have never paid for the venue. We have always had agreements, it’s always free for us so far. Yeah, it’s basically always the food. And the sponsor, even the local company has changed a few times.

But for example, I would say the WordPress community company, that for us is a hosting company, that also sponsors many WordCamps in Spain, we have always had the same one because since the beginning they told us, we want to sponsor, and as long as you keep doing it, we will send you the money or give us the bills.

And also the sponsors we’ve had, they always give us gifts or merchandise for the attendees or maybe to give something like a raffle and then somebody can win a prize or something better. Or they even give us gifts for the speakers as well. So they always treat us very good.

[00:25:37] Nathan Wrigley: So is there like a magic number that makes the event work? So you said that sometimes 70, sometimes 55, something like that. I mean, they seem like pretty good numbers. If you stand in front of that many people, that can be quite intimidating, you know, that’s a lot. Obviously other places will have smaller numbers. Maybe some places will have bigger numbers.

Is there some feeling in your head about, if the numbers dipped down to 20, it’s not worth doing it anymore or anything like that? Do you have any of those thoughts? Because I know that a lot of people who’ve put these events on before, they get quite demoralized because they begin it, three people show up and they do it again, and then two people show up and maybe five people show up. And it kind of seems like a lot of effort. There’s not much interest. I’m trying my hardest, I’m doing all the things which I think are the right things to do. Any thoughts on that?

[00:26:22] Héctor de Prada: Yeah, well, I think it’s definitely challenging because I’ve seen, like you said, many cities where this is the case. It’s really hard for them to get people to attend. I think the main focus for us, when we got all the team together, we always try to think about new things to bring new people in. Maybe talking with the teachers at the university, or maybe going to a business group to present them the Meetup, or maybe get a collaboration with a social media influencer in the city, so he can talk about the Meetups, even be a speaker and then post it on socials. So it is definitely, I think it’s the most important thing.

In my experience, i’ve been in many Meetups and when you are more than 20 people, I could say, it already feels pretty good. Because more than 20 people, it’s already a good number of people to network, to talk, to give a presentation in front of. So more than 20 people, I think it’s already a good number. When you go below 20, below 10, I guess it’s pretty hard.

[00:27:19] Nathan Wrigley: You sort of feel that it’s a lot of work and, you know, it’s difficult to justify that work if the interest is not there.

So speaking of that then, is there a support, like a wider WordPress Meetup support network? So where you can go and dip in for ideas, advice. Obviously if you’re listening to this podcast, that’s one avenue you might get it. But is there a place that you can go, like a Slack channel or a wordpress.org forum or something like that where you could go and gain advice, or some leadership from people like you who’ve been doing this before?

[00:27:48] Héctor de Prada: Yeah, well, there are different places. In the day to day, we have the Slack channel, for example, in the Spanish community inside the WordPress Slack, we have a channel for the Spanish Meetups. So every time we have a problem, we had one a few weeks ago with the Meetup platform, for example, or things like that. We always go there and there is always somebody from the community team replying, and telling you, and helping you, whatever you need.

Also I think it’s very important. It was huge for us at the beginning, before we started doing the Meetup of our city, again, when we started now 18 months ago, it was very helpful to go to WordCamps and in the Contributor Day, like today, go to the community tables and talk with the people that has experience organising Meetups. And they were the ones, for example, when we started it was like super easy because people like Rocío Valdivia, Juan Hernando, who are very deep into the community team for many years, they have been there. They just help us do all the process, all we needed to know. They gave us all the basic advice to know, screwed up at the beginning.

So I would say, if somebody’s looking to organise a Meetup, the first thing they should do is to go to a WordCamp event, or maybe a Meetup in a different city, and talk with people that is organising a Meetup to just get some of the real experience, because I think that’s invaluable.

[00:29:08] Nathan Wrigley: How do your team actually meet up then? Do you have like a regular weekly gathering, like a session where you all gather on zoom or something like that?

[00:29:16] Héctor de Prada: It’s more like on a monthly basis. So since we do Meetups every two months, let’s say on average. So one month we do the Meetup, and then the next month we got all together. It may be all together on the same place, because since it’s a small city, we are all kind of close to each other, or it might be on Zoom. And then we do like the feedback of the previous Meetup to talk about what went well, what could be improved, and at the same time to prepare the next Meetup.

So it’s kind of one month, Meetup, one month, all get together to talk about it. Next month, Meetup, next month, get together to talk about it.

In one hour we can talk about the previous Meetup and organise the next one. And I’m not talking about organise everything, I’m talking about kind of like divide the responsibilities and say, okay, so I’m going to do this, you’re going to do this. And then on a WhatsApp group, we are just letting each other know like, okay, I already booked the venue. Okay, I already talked with the speaker, and he said, okay. Okay, I already designed the flyer or the image and we are good to go, and things like that.

[00:30:14] Nathan Wrigley: From what you’re saying, it sounds like it’s kind of got a homely, family sort of vibe to it.

[00:30:20] Héctor de Prada: Yes. We try to have that casual vibe, like friendship vibe. Like, even in the Meetups, when people come at the beginning when other people on the team was speaking at the beginning, like presenting the Meetup, and talking a little bit about what is the WordPress community, or what do we do here, what type of events are in the WordPress community and everything. They were a little bit nervous about it because they haven’t done it before or seen it as many times as I have seen it.

And I would always tell them, this is like a friend group. If you say something wrong, you just say naturally, okay, this is my mistake. I should have said that this way and not that way, okay. And just do it in a casual vibe. Like, most of the people, like I said, since they’re regular people, we kind of know everybody. We all know each other because we do, if we do like one hour talk, then we always have like one hour, or hour and a half, of networking. So almost everybody knows each other.

So it’s kind of more like, yeah, like friendship, not family, but friendship. We try to do that also so everybody who comes feels comfortable and not afraid to speak with anybody or even to ask something during the Meetup or anything. Because it feels really like it’s just a group of friends and you are part of those friends and everybody’s welcome.

[00:31:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that feels really nice. The Meetup that I attend, we also have this idea of kind of networking and that seems to be quite a powerful thing as well. So people don’t just show up to make friends, which is nice. They don’t just show up to watch the presentations. Again, it’s nice, but they also show up, and there’s an opportunity to share stories about, I’m looking for work, I’ve got a job that I need to be filled.

And just the other month we had a story about somebody who, you know, started a new job because of a conversation that had happened at that event. Just wondered if that kind of thing was something that you have noticed happens with yours as well?

[00:32:09] Héctor de Prada: Definitely, definitely. One of the first things I was telling, for example, in the first Meetup we have, I think a few students came from the university. And I was like, this is where you have to be because you’re studying for marketing, and here there are like, I don’t know, like seven or eight agency owners that are going to be looking for the next people to work on their marketing team. So this is the perfect place. You are not going to meet them any other place. You’re not going to go on the street and just cross them all. So you have a marketing agency. I want to work on a marketing agency. No, it’s not going to happen.

But here you just come here for free, you learn something, and also you can talk to these people directly. You can tell them about your life. They can tell you about theirs. Maybe there is a match. So yeah, I hope, I know a couple of stories that have worked, but I hope, I really hope it will be like the best thing for the Meetup that a lot of good things, it’ll either be collaborations, hirings, partnerships, anything come out of the Meetup. Because that would be great for the ecosystem, for the people in our city, for the people attending the Meetups. So that would make us so, so happy.

[00:33:11] Nathan Wrigley: It’s one of those things that I think many people might find it a little bit nervous to go for the first time. You know, just the idea of sitting in a room full of strangers. You can do just that. You can sit at the back and you don’t have to contribute. You don’t have to put your hand up and say anything. So the idea of just showing up, lurking maybe a few times, just seeing what the whole situation is like. And you never know, something completely revolutionary might happen.

[00:33:33] Héctor de Prada: Yeah. There is always, sometimes when you go to the networking part, and you don’t know anybody, the normal thing is that you probably go to a corner just by yourself, okay. Or just close to a wall and just stay there. But the normal thing in this type of events, or I would say almost any event, is that you’re going to find other people next to the wall, next to you, because they also don’t know anybody.

And those are the first people you’re going to meet. And you’re going to create that relationship. And from that you’re going to start moving to other groups. Somebody’s going to come that knows one of you. And that’s how it starts. So it might feel intimidating at the beginning, but then once you get into it, also, this is especially in the WordPress community, it’s very easy to start to know people.

[00:34:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It’s just occurred to me, Héctor, that we’re sort of 40 minutes in and I haven’t said, where is it? Where is your Meetup?

[00:34:24] Héctor de Prada: Okay, yeah, true. Well, it’s in the city of León, which is in the north of Spain. It’s a small city in the north of Spain.

[00:34:31] Nathan Wrigley: And I will make sure, when I put the show notes together for this episode, if you go to wptavern.com and search for the episode with Héctor in it, I’ll make sure to link any resources that you put in my way. I’ll make sure to link so that if you are in that neck of the woods, you can check it out, but also I’ll make sure to link to other more wider resources.

[00:34:50] Héctor de Prada: If somebody that listens to this at any point thinks that me or anybody on our Meetup group can help them, if they are trying to create a Meetup, or doing a Meetup and trying to change something, please reach out to us and of course we’ll be happy to talk with anybody, if our experience can help in any way.

[00:35:10] Nathan Wrigley: That’s perfect. I will make sure to put some links to your bio as well. That’s absolutely wonderful. Héctor de Prada, thank you so much for chatting me today.

[00:35:17] Héctor de Prada: Thank you, Nathan.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, learning from mistakes in website development agencies.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today, we have Jennifer Schumacher.

Jennifer has been working with WordPress and web development for over 15 years. Her journey began with a spark of curiosity in university, building her first WordPress website after a YouTube crash course. Then evolving into freelance gigs, team collaborations, and eventually running a white label agency working alongside other agencies around the world.

Jennifer’s experiences have exposed her to the highs and lows of agency life. Projects that run smoothly, but also cultures that can become toxic, people burning out, and the all too familiar frustration of unbillable hours, and broken processes.

This inspired Jennifer’s lightning talk at WordCamp Europe 2025, where she shared some of the most common, and painful, mistakes she’s seen agencies make, and what can be learned from them.

Jennifer walks us through her path in the WordPress world, and we discuss three real world mistakes agencies make. Web support that drains your soul, the design handoff from hell, and work more, bill less, and smile anyway.

We talk through support, bottlenecks, frustrating design to development handoffs, and the dilemma of over servicing clients without fair compensation.

Jennifer shares her candid perspective on why processes and honest communication matter, not just for the bottom line, but for the mental health and building sustainable teams. She also discusses how transparency, learning from failure, and continually improving processes can improve agency life.

Jennifer’s approach is refreshingly open about both the mistakes and the solutions, aiming to help others avoid repeating them.

If you found yourself frustrated with agency workflows, or are hoping to build a healthier business in the WordPress ecosystem, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you, Jennifer Schumacher.

I am joined on the podcast today by Jennifer Schumacher. Hello, Jennifer.

[00:03:26] Jennifer Schumacher: Hello. Nice to be here.

[00:03:28] Nathan Wrigley: We’re here on Contrib Day. It’s WordCamp Europe 2025. Now, because it’s Contrib Day, that means you haven’t yet done what it is that you are going to do at WordCamp Europe. But you’ve got a presentation, like a lightning talk. So you’ve got 10 minutes to stand on the stage.

The idea is that you are going to be talking about agency, WordPress agencies, how they mess up, I’m going to use that word, and how they can learn from their mistakes.

So before we get into that, just tell us a little bit about you.

[00:03:56] Jennifer Schumacher: I started web development about 15 years ago, maybe a even more even. I was at university, no money, on a freelance platform, and somebody asked me if I could build a website. I checked on YouTube, okay WordPress. I said yes, and then I sold a website. No idea how to do it, honestly. But then YouTube helped me figure things out, and that’s how I started and fell in love with it. No way to turn back.

Went for it, did a couple of freelance gigs and then, you know, joining other team members, joining other people in the freelance world, building like groups, working on stuff together, working on projects. And then it grew, got bigger. We got bigger projects. We built a white label team working for the agencies, collaborating with other agencies. And that’s what I have done over the past years. So that’s a bit of my background.

[00:04:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s perfect. Yeah, that’s great. I think your story sounds like a lot of people’s stories in that they, if you began 15 years ago, the web was still very much discovering what it was going to be. And you drop in and learn as you went along. I think maybe now that’s a little bit more difficult. I think if you drop in these days, it’s maybe more challenging. There’s so much more competition out there and things like that. yeah, your story kind of mimics mine except that you grew an agency and I didn’t, I just stuck as a one person, and that kind of worked out for me.

[00:05:15] Jennifer Schumacher: Yeah, it’s like the people network, right? You meet different people and then you get to know each other, and then you start learning, and then you think about the opportunities. And then either you say, okay, this is a path that I want to take, or you don’t, right?

[00:05:27] Nathan Wrigley: And have you ever worked for other people in website building? Have you worked for other agencies, or been an employee? Or has it always been you and the agencies that you have run?

[00:05:36] Jennifer Schumacher: I never have been like an employee per se, so it was more like a contractor, but either freelance or for the agency that we built. But the nice thing, and why I really loved this was it was in different roles, right? Sometimes I was the designer in the beginning, or I was the developer. Later on I did develop myself, but that was in the WP Bakery days. So I don’t do that anymore to be honest.

Yeah, so it was design then more development. And then later on I moved more into project management. And then in the most recent years, there’s so many things that I, after all those years, you know, it’s nice, I love WordPress, but certain things make me sick. I was like, God, no, I don’t want this anymore.

Certain stress levels that I’ve reached where I said, no, I don’t want to do it the same old way as usual. This is something that my talk will be about, to be honest.

And the last couple of years have been more about process improvement. Doing things faster, less stress, and then also all these unbillable hours that many people just hide below the table. So this has been my focus for the last couple of years.

[00:06:41] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Well, I’ve got to say it’s very, very nice to meet somebody who’s really open and honest about their successes, but also things that they consider they could do better. Let’s use the word failures. I think most people kind of hide that stuff, but it’s really interesting that you are doing a presentation where you are raising that as, okay, I messed this up, I messed this up, I messed this up, and here’s how I took it as a, you say learning opportunity, which I suppose is the best way to parse any of those kind of things.

Why are you doing a talk though at WordCamp? So this is kind of a more of a community question. It’s not really about the presentation itself. I’m just curious as to why, what is it that you get out of it? Do you just enjoy sort of hanging out at these events or, why have you decided to do it?

[00:07:20] Jennifer Schumacher: How can I explain that in the best possible way? I’ve met many great people over the years, but I’ve seen many of them who got frustrated about certain things in part of the culture at the agency they worked at. I’ve seen toxic cultures as well. I’ve seen many projects that started off very nice and then it became frustrating over the time. And then towards the end, people were not getting paid according to what they actually delivered.

I’ve seen people that later on actually quit and they said again, I don’t want to do it anymore. That they were so frustrated, especially in project management, I’ve seen a couple of them just drop out. It’s like, you know what? Not doing it anymore. And I don’t think that that’s worth it.

If we don’t talk about what goes wrong, if we don’t acknowledge about stuff, these things that could be better, and then say, hey, you know what, let’s figure out a better path and resolve this kind of stress because we deserve a better team that’s in sync, then what are we doing? If we just continue and say, well, that’s agency life, you know? That’s how it is in agencies. No, it’s not supposed to be that way.

If you just accept it and just go with it, then it’s going to be that way. I think it’s worth sharing that, because if you don’t ask the question, how can it be better? You’re not making anything better to be honest.

[00:08:38] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you. So let’s hope that the wisdom that you impart will land with the people. But you’ve got this idea of three real world agency mistakes. That’s what you’re going to focus on in your 10 minutes.

I have a question around that. So obviously you’re going to highlight the things that went wrong, explain how you tackled it. Do you ever get the sense though that there’s ever, and I’m doing air quotes, a perfect system? Have you ever landed on something where you think, okay, that’s it, I do not need to improve that thing anymore? Or is there always room for improvement?

[00:09:09] Jennifer Schumacher: Well, that’s a good question to be honest. I’m German. Many Germans try to be perfect to be honest. But I don’t think perfect exists, and isn’t imperfect perfect. Because the thing is like, learning is a journey, so if we set up a system and then we figure out, okay, let’s try that way, and then we work with it and then see, what can we tweak, what can we improve? And isn’t that what makes it perfect, right? Because we keep improving things.

There are new things coming out now, you know, AI is everywhere. So, are there certain things that we can use that help our system? We just keep tweaking it. So, no, perfect system. Do I want one? No. Is it fun to keep tweaking things? Yes. So I think you’re just trying to get started, build a certain setup and try to improve it over time.

[00:09:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So that would’ve been the way I would’ve paraphrased it as well. You kind of get something which feels like it’s good for now and then the technology changes, WordPress adapts and you have to figure it out a new. Okay, that’s great.

So there are three things that you’re going to tackle. Maybe you could’ve done 5, 10, but the time was probably the limitation. What are the three things that you are going to mention? What are the three things which agencies make as mistakes that you have encountered?

[00:10:21] Jennifer Schumacher: First of all, I had to think a lot about, okay, which kind of situations do I want to include, right? Because over the years, you know, you collect a lot of stories, and I think the most impactful is a story. You want to talk about a specific situation where you were in. And so I was thinking about, what should I cover?

For each story I made a nice headline. I can just quickly share those headlines, and then you think about what you think that that means.

[00:10:46] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect.

[00:10:47] Jennifer Schumacher: So the first one is, support that drains your soul. The second one is, the design handoff from hell. The third one is, work more, build less and smile anyway.

[00:10:59] Nathan Wrigley: Let’s go back to the first one then. You’re going to have to say the exact wording, because I’ll probably get it wrong. What was number one again?

[00:11:04] Jennifer Schumacher: It’s web support that drains your soul.

[00:11:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, tell us, what went on here? What calamity befell you and your agency that led to that portion?

[00:11:13] Jennifer Schumacher: I’ve seen it in many, many agencies and if, for example, once I had a agency in Switzerland and they said, we manage one point of contact for our clients. So this was mainly the project manager, right? So whenever the client wanted something, they contacted this person.

Why was that not a good idea? Because pretty often the people that I met were just simply overworked, especially when it came to support staff. Because the client got in touch with them, they got in touch with the designer. The designer got in touch with them. They got back to the client and they were just in the middle on every little item.

And the more you have of this kind of support work, the stressier it gets. And this is something where I’ve seen a lot of things go wrong and where I’ve seen a lot of frustration just for being the person in the middle.

[00:11:58] Nathan Wrigley: That was something which was commonly, I want to use the word taught. People often told me it would be better to always deal with this one person, because that one person at least is this single point of contact. You can build up a relationship with them. Just prize that open a little bit. Has that led to problems, and what were those kind of problems? Was it that that person, I don’t know, maybe they are not a good communicator or something like that?

[00:12:21] Jennifer Schumacher: Well, the thing is, that person doesn’t, it’s just a person most of the time that communicates. This person’s never resolving the issue. So for example, the client has something super simple, I want to change the position of that button. So the client asks their single point of contact. The single point of contact, they go to the developer, hey, they want to change that button. But then the developer goes back, but yeah, but this position we cannot do, it’s not recommended.

It’s like ping pong. And let’s say changing that button takes like maybe just 30 minutes, but the entire communication about where the button should go and why not there, why it would be more recommendable to go into that spot exactly, or which size or animation they want. These kind of details take maybe two and a half hours. But now the client doesn’t really want to pay for the communication about it.

And then in the end, I’ve seen many, many agencies, they just put this under the table, under the rug, or they say it and then just don’t admit it. And if you have a lot of these support items, you have a lot of unbillable hours. And is that sustainable? No. Is that frustrating? Yes. Especially if you’re a small team and you need to bill for the time. If you’re not able to bill for it, then what are we doing here?

[00:13:31] Nathan Wrigley: So this is the idea then that in a company, let’s say that you as a freelancer are working with a company, I don’t know, maybe they’ve got a hundred employees or something like that. You’ve set it up so that you only speak with this one person in their company. But those other 99 people are funneling all of their bits and pieces through that one person.

You just get this backwards and forwards. That one person becomes a bottleneck because they’ve got to communicate with the 99 people. Any change has to go through them.

Okay, what was the second one? I’ve forgotten, I’m sorry.

[00:13:57] Jennifer Schumacher: The design handoff from hell.

[00:13:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, what’s that?

[00:14:00] Jennifer Schumacher: Have you ever worked, like you’re a developer and then you are working on a project where they say, okay, the design will be done by a design agency or by some other designer. And then you get the design, you’re like, well, that doesn’t fit anymore what I thought I would spend on time in the beginning. And then I get a file, it was not even clear like this page, what should be the H1?

And then inconsistent styles. And then suddenly on the mobile view, if the designer also did a mobile view, the designs do not match at all. Like, on this screen they use this size, on this screen, this size. Super inconsistent. And this is so frustrating. Because as a developer, in theory, then suddenly you have so many hours.

Then, again, you have to decide, do I log them? Do I tell them that this is not anymore a fit? And if I am not anymore making it a fit, do I look bad? And again, unbillable hours. And then either you bill them or you’re like hiding them. I don’t like that.

[00:14:57] Nathan Wrigley: This is the idea of if you are, I guess if you’re in a big agency where you’ve got a design team, and the design team is literally in the, you know, the cubicle next to you. That’s a fairly easy point to solve because you just stand up and have a chat about it. But if you’re a freelancer, or you’re dealing with a third party design agency or something like that, it’s a real bottleneck, isn’t it?

Because you get a design, it looks great, but suddenly you realise, well, yeah, it looks great, it would make a great magazine piece. Transferring that over to the web with H1s and paragraphs, and it’s got to be accessible and color contrast has got to be good and all of this kind of stuff, that suddenly becomes problematic.

And usually the client doesn’t have that same level of expertise. So you know, they might catch sight of that design and think, perfect, do that. Do exactly what we see and then you have to have this whole tennis again of explaining, well, actually we can’t do it quite like that. So, okay, that’s the second one.

[00:15:50] Jennifer Schumacher: What I can tell you is that I’ve seen this happen nonetheless in big agencies too. I have worked also with agencies with more than 150 employees. And it always depends a lot on their internal processes and how they approve and the system, right?

Nonetheless, I’ve seen also like big design agencies, and it looked all fancy, but then it did not match up. Maybe you’re very good at selling, but if you internally do not have certain systems in place, this stuff can still happen.

[00:16:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And I also feel that when I was doing this kind of work, when I was a freelancer, I had to be all the things. I had to be literally everybody. I had to be the designer, I had to be the developer, I had to be the communicator, I had to be the marketer, I had to be the SEO. I had to be all of these things. And with the best will in the world, I’m not the best at all of those things. Probably one or two things I’m pretty good at, but the rest of them fairly lousy.

And so that kind of fits in as well. And again, the process, getting a process exactly right. You are all about sort of saving money by having a process, saving time and money by having a process, yeah.

[00:16:54] Jennifer Schumacher: To be honest, in my opinion, it’s mental health. Because if it goes on for too long that you’re charging less than what you are actually bringing to the table, that’s frustration. You bring that frustration to your home, that’s when you get stressed out. You share with your family what happened. You are like unloading the stress. You are not that much capable of being a good listener if you’re stressed. And you want to be a good listener with the people that you love. So, what are we doing here? You know?

[00:17:23] Nathan Wrigley: You also become like a double fronted marketplace a little bit. Because you’ve got the designer over here who’s giving you designs and you are sat in the middle. And then you’ve got the client over here and you are sat in the middle. And you become this person that has to communicate the ideas in both directions.

And when they say, we want this, you have to communicate that back to the designer. Do you have like a trusted designer or a design, like a network or a team or something like that, that you just more or less rely on that because you’ve figured out they know what I am typically going to want?

[00:17:52] Jennifer Schumacher: I give them guidance how I want it. Some have, you know, worked with me before, here and there, and then they already know. But I tell them exactly how we need things, and then I point things out, okay, hey, like a checklist. Okay, we need to check this, this, this, this, this. And this sometimes could take a lot of time too, depending on the people that, you know, I work with.

But it’s not that I have like a hundred percent go-to person per se. No. Maybe I can share that same thing. I did design many years ago, then development. And sometimes I need to also, you know, pause and say like, Jenny, no, don’t jump in and just do it yourself. You know, I could, but I just should not. So I just try to, let’s say, express how I need things to be done before going into development. If that’s not done, we’re not going into development.

[00:18:41] Nathan Wrigley: I think designing for the web is really difficult because it is a real skill in and of itself. You know, if you’re designing for a magazine layout, I mean, obviously there’s a high level of skill required to do that in an effective way. But then being able to actually understand the semantics of that design, and how it might look, and especially now where we’re going into a web which is not three view ports. It’s not just mobile, it’s not just tablet, and it’s not just desktop.

It’s this much more kind of, we have no idea what you’re going to be viewing it on. We don’t know the width. I think this sort of Intrinsic Design, which people keep talking about, that makes the job even more difficult, okay. So there’s number two.

Number three, what was that one?

[00:19:23] Jennifer Schumacher: Number three was, work more, bill less and smile anyway.

[00:19:27] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, go on. Did you say work more, bill less?

[00:19:30] Jennifer Schumacher: Yeah. Work more, bill less.

[00:19:32] Nathan Wrigley: That seems counterintuitive.

[00:19:33] Jennifer Schumacher: Yeah.

[00:19:33] Nathan Wrigley: Most people would say work less, bill more.

[00:19:36] Jennifer Schumacher: Well, everybody likes to say that, which is unfortunately, the truth is not always how it works, right? So, how about this? Have you ever been on a project where time goes by in the beginning, everybody’s excited? All fits, looks good. We’re progressing and then the client comes back with feedback and then there’s a change. Maybe it’s a change request, you know, okay, we add some extra hours.

But then there’s something that either we did not notice, for example, oh, this doesn’t work in the Safari. And suddenly we need to work a bit more to make it a fix. But the budget is really tight. Anyway, we need to fix this. Or the client wants something, oh, but this should also animate. You animated this, but also this needs to be animated.

Details. Detail here, a detail there. And then suddenly you notice like, well, the budget we had is not anymore available, but the client is still asking for things, and even saying stuff like, that should be included. How could you charge that extra? Or it was not communicated early enough like, hey, you know what, client, our budget is getting tight. If you are requesting more things, we will need to invoice you extra down the road.

Of course you want to say, okay, if there’s something wrong with our work, we will cover this internally. You don’t want to be somebody who says, okay, I did a mistake, but I’m not correcting it, haha. But if the client is requesting more stuff, you need to let them know in advance. Because if you let them know later, they also go like, huh? Where does that come from? Why didn’t you tell me that this has got more expensive?

And then suddenly you cannot charge them for that. And now you worked more, but you are effectively billing less if you take your effective hourly rate, what you actually delivered and work.

I’ve met agencies, freelancers, when they would really calculate their effective hourly rate, they would be crying, sitting in the corner of the room and crying. This is frustrating, right? And nobody likes that. But anyway, they expect you to sit there smiling and just pretend like everything was good.

[00:21:33] Nathan Wrigley: Do you always do that with your clients though? Do you have that approach of, we must smile through this, even though things are not necessarily working out? Because that was one of the things that you wrote in your description. Let me just find it. You wrote, it’s about laughing, learning, and maybe even recognising a situation you’ve been in yourself.

So do you try to have that sort of humorous approach when things are not working out? Can you always laugh? Because sometimes these things can be so profoundly, well, annoying, let’s go with that. It’s difficult to laugh, I think.

[00:22:01] Jennifer Schumacher: I think it depends a lot on your personality. I can tell you something. So I live in Spain and in Mexico. I’m German, but I don’t live anymore in Germany. But I think when you meet different cultures and see how they react, how they treat certain situations, that made me open up my eyes and see like, okay, you know, you always have the choice. How do you react to this? This is your choice.

And if you get frustrated and you dwell into the pain and just continue again and again, and in the same cycle, then that’s your choice. What’s the other end, right? You can just say, hey, you know what? It was a mistake or this happened. I’m not happy about it, but the only thing I can do is appreciate that it happened because it gave me the opportunity now to learn from it. And that’s the super different perspective.

Some people are not capable of thinking like that, but I prefer to think like that, because it makes me feel better and it makes me look at possible solutions and focus on that. Instead of me looking at the situation, focusing on the issue and the problems.

[00:23:07] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s very difficult in the moment sometimes to be so, I’m going to use the word sanguine. Just to be so measured about it because you know, something doesn’t work out. Maybe the first reaction is a buildup of anger or something like that. But to have that, to be able to in your head, parse that and say, you know what? The anger probably won’t get me anywhere, but viewing that as a learning opportunity.

Because you go into pains, that’s what you say over and over again. Treat it as a learning opportunity. It’s almost like Zen Buddhism, or something like that, you know, it’s kind of trying to turn a bad situation into a good situation.

But you are also at pains to say, well, it feels like you’re at pains to say, just don’t keep repeating it though. You know, if something bad happened, learn from it, but then adapt the process. Make the process different so that it doesn’t happen a second or a third time because, well, that’s crazy making.

[00:23:57] Jennifer Schumacher: Yeah. But that’s, again, the reason why I think I really love the opportunity to be here and to be having that speech at WordCamp. Because, I get frustrated just thinking about it, I’ve seen so many great people just do the same thing over and over again, because they think that’s it and that’s how it is in agencies. It doesn’t matter if they work at this agency or that agency.

Maybe some do it a bit different here or there, but the same problems come up and they do not really think about, how can I resolve this? New project. Like, new projects will fix it, or let’s sell more. Let’s fix it in the next project. Let’s fix it in the next project.

But then they don’t think about a fix. And I have a couple of people who I really think like, God, you’re so good at what you do, but why do you do this to yourself? Why don’t you think about how to get out of this mess? And I think that’s what I want to do, what I want to share because you have to focus on how to solve this. Otherwise, if you don’t make it a priority, you’re stuck where you are.

[00:24:50] Nathan Wrigley: I guess also, each one of us really genuinely does have, so I’m focusing on a freelancer at the minute, you know, so you’re not in an agency, it’s just you. We all really genuinely do have a unique set of attributes which make us the way we are. And it may be that you just have to lean into those. You’re good at this thing, you’re not so good at that thing, so maybe that gets outsourced, or maybe you just have to approach it in a different way. But it’s very, very hard.

I also think that over the last 10 years, we’ve lived through a cycle of YouTube videos where people are trying to pitch us the perfect solution. In 10 minutes I’ll teach you how to revolutionise your agency. Some of that works, I’m sure, but there seems to be quite a bit of snake oil there as well.

And what i’m trying to say is, just because it’s in a YouTube video or somebody is shouting from the rooftops that they’ve got the answer, it may be that that answer actually won’t work for you because that’s not who you are.

[00:25:43] Jennifer Schumacher: Yeah. Well, that can be too. The thing is like, if you see those fancy videos on YouTube with these nice titles, they put them because that gives them a better click rate because people are more like, okay, well, I want to see if I just say like I have something that’s way high work. If you think that that’s a good idea or not, that’s up to you. It’s not a big selling point, right?

So they write it that way just because of the enticing title makes you click. So that’s also, you know, it’s your human brain that follows this kind of direction. Yeah, so I think a big part, just as you mentioned, resources, YouTube. For me, the biggest part has been asking. And that’s why I loved, we started white labeling, working with other agencies, I learned so much from them. So much.

And just sharing, I have one CEO that I once asked, he had built an agency with over two hundred employees, and they started out as four many years ago. I asked him for lunch. I asked, I would love to know how you did it. What was your motivator? How did you decide who to hire? How did you find the right people? What were the big decisions or risks that you took.

And I think that is so important. Why not? What do we have to lose? I think, why not open up conversations and just ask, how are you approaching this? And I think this kind of stuff gets lost a lot. It’s not just only just sitting there and looking at YouTube videos. Who else could I ask? How do you deal with this?

[00:27:12] Nathan Wrigley: I have a question, which is maybe one that you don’t want to answer because it’s quite vulnerable. But what is your biggest mistake? What’s the thing that if you look back over your career you think, oh boy, that was a calamity?

[00:27:23] Jennifer Schumacher: I have one and I think I’m not, well, it is embarrassing. Yes, it is. But why not? It’s like a learning opportunity, right?

So when I was younger, oh God, I don’t know how many years ago, it was like 10 years maybe. So I thought, okay, I want to build a team, I want to do this. Let’s make it at an agency. We have clients, we have projects, okay, cool.

So I searched for people. I got an office and we were all there. And I thought, okay, I also want to be great with our culture because I think, you know, the team is what matters because only if the team is happy, we can make great work. I wasn’t going to be the one that’s sitting there with a whip, you know, like, do this, do this, do this. That was not how I envisioned myself.

But I focused so much on this team that I did not notice that I did not yet learn enough how to be a good salesman. Few months later, I ran out of money.

And because I was not yet intelligent enough about putting up boundaries that certain clients were like, oh, what? That should be included. Why was that not covered? And we just went in and covered it and not communicate, okay, that we stopped covering certain things for free. We did not yet know how to charge certain things on time.

So we were still like, or I was still, did not resolve it. I did not think about, how do I need to do it so I don’t get myself in the situation that I would have a hard time getting out of, especially financially? And then I had to say, okay, that’s it. Pack my bags. I then started a job in sales. And then I had to learn, damn, how do I sell? How do I communicate? And that I did for a year and a half. And when, again, made more money outside of the job, I did quit.

[00:29:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that was a real learning opportunity, wasn’t it? You went, the whole thing collapsed but the key bit that was missing was sales. You pick yourself up, got a sales job, learnt the sales portion, and then kind of began again. I guess it worked out the next time.

[00:29:18] Jennifer Schumacher: Yeah. This time, we’re still here.

[00:29:20] Nathan Wrigley: That was the low point. That was the thing which you did worst. Maybe you’ll be good at answering this question. Some people are a bit shy when you ask a question like this. What’s the thing that you think you’ve done best?

[00:29:29] Jennifer Schumacher: Oh. What? The best.

[00:29:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What’s the bit that if you look back over your 15 years, I mean, it may not be exactly one thing, but can you summon up something which you think, actually, do you know what? I’m really proud of me for that.

[00:29:41] Jennifer Schumacher: I’m really proud of me for opening up and saying like, you know what, that’s not how it has to be. I don’t want this anymore. I want to see how I can improve this. I must say that my husband has been a bit of an inspiration here too. He’s the kind of person that’s like, ah, I want to work less. Like, I don’t want to work that much. And he finds a way to do it. He always does. He always finds his way around. It’s like, how come that he figures that out and I don’t? And I’m like, sitting here stressed.

And there was also this thought like, do I like this stress? Do you know these people who are addicted to this kind of stress? And they just think they need it. It’s like, do you really think you need it? Do you really think that that’s what you want? Yeah, this is what made me think. And I’m happy that decision, saying like, you know, no. I don’t want that anymore.

And i’m still having things to learn. You know, there’s still things that I’m working on. Totally. I think having that in your, like a little angel, I don’t know, or figure in the back of your head saying like, you shouldn’t do that. Can this be better? Think about it. That’s what I’m proud of.

[00:30:47] Nathan Wrigley: Being honest with yourself, even if that means some uncomfortable realisations.

[00:30:51] Jennifer Schumacher: Oh God, yeah. Tell me. Admitting to yourself like, damn.

[00:30:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I know what you mean. We often have a culture of, okay, just work harder. Just keep going. Just keep doing the same thing because I’m pretty sure the process over there is bulletproof. Just keep going, and maybe being a bit more open with yourself and trying to learn from the mistakes.

[00:31:12] Jennifer Schumacher: And I think when you see somebody, it’s not cheating the system, but it’s kind of like doing it faster and being more relaxed and even having time to do some extra stuff, and you’re like, I want that. Why am I not striving for that? Why the hell I’m just focusing on being more busy? I think you start doubting things.

[00:31:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s interesting. There’s always somebody in my life who seems to have way more free time than I do. There has to be a reason for that. And probably that they’ve just figured it out and allowed themselves the time off.

And I always found that curious. I would find myself sitting at the desk doing the busy work, just because it felt like I needed to be shackled to the desk because that was where work took place. But really, I probably would’ve been way more productive if I’d gone for a walk for half an hour or just did something a little bit more for me, and then come back, regroup, start again. I never did learn that.

[00:32:05] Jennifer Schumacher: Isn’t that, like it sounds so weird, but isn’t that kind of the expectation of society that you should be sitting there on that desk. How come you’re just going for a walk? How come you’re just saying, you know what, I’ll just get my hair done. Let’s just relax a bit and then I get back with a clear mind to that issue. Why not? But no, society expects you to be available, to be at the desk. That’s how you look good.

[00:32:29] Nathan Wrigley: And it’s curious, we’re in such a fortunate position. I mean, obviously if you work in an agency and they provide you with a desk and you have to be there from nine to five, you’ve got that. But there’s a lot of people in our industry who don’t. You know, they’re working out of a spare room in the house. Maybe they’re doing it out the kitchen or what have you. And you can, you genuinely can, take time off and do other things and work a little bit later because you gave up some time during the day. You can be flexible. I think that’s one of the most remarkable things about the industry that we’re in. It’s utterly brilliant.

[00:32:57] Jennifer Schumacher: I read the other day on my phone an article, it was about a bank where they were saying like the four day work week. And they were saying like, now that AI is around the corner, it’s a no brainer. That’s going to happen. Because we will be able to get more efficient with how we do things. And I think, isn’t that beautiful to more focus on outcomes instead of like the nine to five.

Well, depends also how you manage the agency and everything. And I’ve seen many, they said they want to call their employees back. For example, in Mexico, like I live partially there. Many, many people got called back. But others in Germany I’ve seen, they still keep a hybrid model. Some days they just say, okay, we do a day here, a day there. But many developers said like, nope, staying at home.

[00:33:42] Nathan Wrigley: So people listening to this podcast, hopefully some of them will think, do you know what? It’d be really interesting to chat this through with Jennifer. You know, she seems like she’s got some interesting ideas around that. Do you have a little community of people that you vent your anger, vent your frustration with? Do you have a little clique of people where you share the ideas that you’ve been discussing today?

[00:34:01] Jennifer Schumacher: Besides my husband.

[00:34:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, how do you keep yourself sane? Yeah.

[00:34:04] Jennifer Schumacher: I do not yet have a big community, but I am working on this. Because I think it’s great just to share. I was in this mess, in this chaos until I realised, like I had this awakening moment for more like 10 years. So 10 years, I kind of would, was like lying to myself, I feel.

So I would love to share more. I want to do a LinkedIn live show. So I’m preparing that kind of stuff just to share, like we do, like a bit of talking. How did you do that? And just this story. I have a great network of people that I’ve met over the years with great stories.

And this is something that I want to share. I also wrote a book for freelancers, where I just share the exact same thing because damn, I wish I would’ve noticed certain things earlier, to be honest. Because 10 years is quite a lot, you know? And especially when you start out and you’re freelancing, oh God, I just charge way less. I just shouldn’t think about it.

But you know, I didn’t even know how much I was worth. I didn’t even know how to protect myself so that certain situations I could say ahead of time, you know what? That’s it. This entire project management mindset, or building the system, it didn’t occur to me for so long. I just thought, no, let me put this in a book and then, why not?

[00:35:21] Nathan Wrigley: So, where do we find the book? Or where’s the best place to find you, which then might link to the book?

[00:35:26] Jennifer Schumacher: On LinkedIn. And just, first of all, my network, I just want to get some feedback and then improve it. And then let’s see what else I can put in it. I also can share you something, maybe that’s something you found interesting. There’s this writer, Ryan Holiday. He has a great, great book that’s just called Growth Hacker Marketing. Read it. I love it. And I love the way how he writes this book because it’s so honest. It’s so transparent.

And I wrote it the same way he did. I took my entire inspiration, how I wrote it, based on his book. And I also have a couple of stories that I share at the end of the book from other people out of my network. How they did resolve, for example, the cash flow issue, right? How they approached the entire setup. Where how they even were able to sell their agency. You know, like build it and sell it.

That’s what I mean, ask others. Ask others how they did it. And then not getting stuck on these fancy YouTube videos for people that say they have the solution. But I think it’s so much worth it just to have conversations and learn and listen.

Maybe you do not have to take everything that people say, but maybe just can take a bit here or there and then build your own. That’s what I like.

[00:36:34] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect. Jennifer Schumacher, thank you so much for chatting to me today.

[00:36:38] Jennifer Schumacher: It was a pleasure to be here, to be honest. Thank you.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case a debate about whether or not there’s a place for accessibility in a canonical plugin.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today, we have Joe Dolson and Jonathan Desrosiers. As you’ll hear in their podcast introductions, both Joe and Jonathan are veterans of WordPress, committing to Core in different ways. They’re deeply committed towards making the platform more useful for all users.

This episode is all about exploration rather than answers. Joe and Jonathan discuss the world of canonical plugins, a special category of plugins maintained by the Core team. They’re designed to be as reliable and secure as features found in WordPress Core itself.

The discussion unpacks exactly what defines a canonical plugin, how these plugins have evolved out of the traditional feature plugin model, and what it means for users and contributors alike.

At the center of this episode is accessibility, should accessibility enhancements remain a primary concern within WordPress Core, or is it time to start developing them as canonical plugins? Joe and Jonathan discussed the pros and the cons of both options, referencing technical challenges, project philosophies, and the ever-changing legislative environment, especially with tough new regulations in Europe.

They consider the discoverability of canonical plugins for non-technical users, potential overlaps and division of labour between plugins and Core, and the moral imperative of making websites accessible to all.

We also touch upon practical examples, from the WordPress video block to the Performance Lab plugin, and weigh up how cadence, stability, and focus can differ outside the Core.

The conversation also goes beyond theory, delving into the real life impact accessible technology has, from legal requirements, to personal stories and the broader mission of democratizing publishing.

Whether you’re a developer, a site owner, or someone interested in the ethical questions at the heart of open source software, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Joe Dolson and Jonathan Desrosiers.

I am joined on the podcast by Joe Dolson and Jonathan Desrosiers. Hello both.

[00:03:35] Joe Dolson: Hello. I’m so glad to be here again.

[00:03:37] Jonathan Desrosiers: Likewise.

[00:03:38] Nathan Wrigley: We’ve had quite a preamble chat prior to recording this. This is going to be an exploration podcast. I don’t think we’re going to arrive at the destination. This is, I think about the journey.

But it’s going to be a conversation about something called canonical plugins. Dear listener, if you don’t know what that means, hold on. But also about accessibility. Prior to that, probably a good idea to get both of your biographies so that we know a little bit about you, and your credentials in the areas under discussion. So should we start with you, Jonathan, just a little bio. Tell us who you are.

[00:04:08] Jonathan Desrosiers: My name is Jonathan Desrosiers. I am a full-time sponsored Core contributor to the WordPress project from Bluehost. And I spend a lot of my time on the day to day, the work that keeps the project moving. That may be lesser seen, like our processes, our testing frameworks, helping the release squad with the resources, make sure they have the resources they need to do their jobs well, and ultimately produce good releases of WordPress every time.

[00:04:35] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Thank you so much. And Joe.

[00:04:37] Joe Dolson: So I’m a part-time Core contributor to WordPress. I’m also a Core committer and I’m sponsored by GoDaddy and Kinsta. I mostly work on accessibility, so I help make all aspects of the project more accessible, including Core, Gutenberg, wordpress.org itself and all of those related bits and pieces.

[00:04:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so we’ve established your credentials. The topic under discussion, I’m going to try and find the post in the Slack channel, which kind of promoted this whole thing, but it goes back a few months now. And the topic under discussion today is about whether or not it would be a good idea, I’m going to say, let’s go with that, an interesting idea, a good experiment, who knows, to put accessibility work into a plugin of a special type called a canonical plugin. So we’re used to hearing about plugins, perhaps not so much canonical plugins. So let’s make that the first port of call. What is a canonical plugin?

[00:05:34] Joe Dolson: I mean, I think we can kick this off with the idea that we don’t really know. But there is a long history in the project of essentially Core sponsored plugin projects that are used for specific features or provide various functionality. And then sometimes they get merged into Core and sometimes they don’t. It’s highly variable.

So there is a deep reality that this particular proposal, we don’t have any clear idea of what it’s actually proposing. But I think it’s good to talk about some of the historical canonical plugins that have already been used.

One great example I think is the WordPress Importer. It’s a plugin. It’s installed on demand into your dashboard when you decide to go to import something. And it’s an extremely standard tool. And it’s kind of the classic idea of something that isn’t needed in Core permanently, but is heavily used and really needs to be something that is maintained by the project.

[00:06:29] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, I think it goes back, like Joe said, pretty far in that in the past we’ve had this concept called feature plugins. And so the initial idea behind those was to begin work on a feature that would span many releases and to get it into a refined state where it was ready for primetime to be included, you know, and shipped to the world.

So some good examples of this are the MP6 plugin which, re-skinned the dashboard in the modern way that we know today.

The REST API started as a feature plugin project. There’s many more to that effect. Simple XML Sitemaps, I believe started as a plugin as well.

I think of this in the way that canonical plugins are always feature plugins, but feature plugins are not always canonical. And so what I mean by that is a feature plugin can always become a canonical, but that may not be the case. It may end up in Core and we don’t need it long term. Or we could decide that it’s just not a good fit and it could become a canonical, and we maintain it long term as that add-on type plugin that you would use, that’s officially supported and maintained.

And so even before the suggestion to put accessibility into a canonical plugin, there were a few posts from Matt that suggested that we revisit this concept of feature plugin. And I think it’s just, canonical is just in some ways a new name for it in the sense that, you know, an SEO, canonical is you put the canonical tag and it points to the one true page on the internet that represents that content, right?

And so it’s similar to that, in that we want to have these canonical plugins that are the one true place you should be able to rely on for functionality that adheres to the project philosophies in the same way as if it were in Core itself.

[00:08:07] Nathan Wrigley: I suppose my supposition about canonical plugins are that they encapsulate important things that could be in Core. You know, if the universe was slightly different, they could easily be rolled into Core. But also importantly, they receive security updates and the same kind of inspection that Core might have. So it’s not like they’re just sort of left to fester.

On a regular basis, they would be inspected, updated in much the same way that Core would be. So it’s almost like Core, but kind of install it yourself. But the importance being that you can utterly rely on it, if you install it to be dependable, to be updated, to be secure. Have I misremembered, that or is that a part of the definition of a canonical plugin?

[00:08:53] Jonathan Desrosiers: No, that’s accurate. We give you that same commitment to backwards compatibility. The project philosophies, as I mentioned, the plugins that are maintained that are released as community plugins are covered by the Bounty Program and our Hacker One program as well. So there’s incentive for people to find security vulnerabilities and responsibly report them and work with the security team to fix these for the community.

That’s right in that you are getting kind of like that badge of honor, like we promise, guarantee type thing, that we’re going to do our best to give you the best plugin for this particular feature.

And the importer I think is a great example of that, right? They’re not all great, in good shape, and part of that is because some of them are importing from software that’s also, that’s really old and outdated, right? And the concepts that they have and the data structures.

But we have almost a dozen importer plugins that are, in a sense, canonical, and they are the go-to plugins to import your content into WordPress. I’m hopeful the Data Liberation Project will help make those more refined and make them easier to use and less prone to issues, yeah. But, yes, in theory we do give you that guarantee and that backing.

[00:09:58] Joe Dolson: I mean, one of the reasons I did bring up the importers is because I think they’re actually a really good example of something that isn’t getting the care that it really needs. I mean, they’re stable and they’re functional, but there are certain things that they really don’t do very well.

And one of them is, like if you’ve got a site with say, 10,000 users, you just can’t use the importer plugin. Because it generates these select dropdowns to assign your posts to a particular user, and the performance on those is ludicrous when you’ve got a page that has 100 dropdowns with 10,000 items in them.

This is the sort of thing that I think everybody would like to see worked on more in the world of canonical plugins. And that’s, I think one of the fears that maybe some people have about moving more stuff into canonical plugins, is this idea that they might not get the care that we theoretically promise.

Because I do think, the idea of canonical plugins, we absolutely do promise those security updates and making sure all of these things are solid, but I’m not sure we’ve always carried out on that as well as we could.

[00:11:03] Jonathan Desrosiers: You said something that resonated too in that. So one of the Core philosophies is the 80 20 rule. And so we want to make sure that the things we merge into Core work for the majority of our users that use our software. And so the same kind of holds true for canonical plugins in some ways. Not that we want to plug in that 80% of people will use, because then it would belong in Core, but 80% of the people that want that feature, the plugin should be relevant to them, right?

And so in the sense of imports being too large, the canonical plugin is a great tool and it’s the defacto recommended way, but it’s may not be the right tool for your instance. And so in that instance of a large import, WPCLI is probably more something that you would want to use in that case, because it’s not subject to timeouts and there’s just different technical boundaries that it works within.

So we want these canonical plugins to be the defacto, but they’re not the end all be all, and they don’t cover every situation. But we want to cover the majority of situations for as many WordPress users as we can.

[00:12:00] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So I think we’ve established what a canonical plugin is, and I’m going to summarise it as follows, basically something that you can depend upon. I would summarise it just that.

[00:12:08] Jonathan Desrosiers: Something that tackles a specific, or group of features.

[00:12:10] Nathan Wrigley: Right. It’s got a specific feature. It could have gone into Core, but it was decided not to go into Core, but you can hopefully rely on it. Although, Joe made a very good point that, you know, reliance is an objective thing.

However, what we’re talking about today is accessibility. We’re in the year 2025. It’s June, 2025. We’re at WordCamp Europe. And it feels like the train over the last few years has really pushed accessibility to the front. I think any web designer, developer, in the year 2025 who doesn’t have accessibility right at the front of their mind is kind of missing the point.

The legislation in Europe is coming thick and fast, I imagine in other jurisdictions and other parts of the world, the same will be true. So I guess the question, and I’m going to ask this to Joe first, given his background of committing to Core in the accessibility arena. What do you make of this? The idea of pushing something to this canonical plugin that previously was the domain of Core.

Does it feel a bit like it’s, I don’t know, that the importance of it is being relegated in some way? Do you feel it’s like undermining? Because we should all have an accessible approach to WordPress development, website development, but in this way, well, it’s not important enough, if you like, to be in Core?

[00:13:30] Joe Dolson: So I think there’s a lot to unpack here. One of the first things I need to say is, first I’m going to, I have just a very slight quibble with your definition of a canonical plugin because there are kind of two different paths. There is the whole canonical plugin, which is intended to always stay outside of Core, but there’s also the canonical plugin, which is used for experimental progress.

And that’s something like the Performance Lab plugin, where it’s a whole bunch of different pieces, and they’re targeted for probably being merged into Core, and this is an experiment ground where we can figure out, is this really working? Is this the best way to do it? Is this suitable for Core? Maybe it should be different in the plugin than it is in Core. Like, for example, what was it that was just shipped? Speculative loading.

They used different rules in the plugin than they ultimately added to Core. It was just a less aggressive version of speculative loading. And I think that can be a very reasonable thing. And that can apply to accessibility too, as accessibility is a spectrum. We’re not talking necessarily about all accessibility is just, this is accessibility, it’s all required. Accessibility covers a gamut from, this is absolutely mandatory, basic level stuff, to this is pie in the sky. To even, basically there are some accessibility features that are literally contradictory to each other. In order to make something optimal for this population, you have to implement something that is actually not what this other population needs.

So there’s a lot of complexity there. The idea of putting accessibility into a plugin can lead to some very negative consequences. It is not necessarily inevitable. So there’s a lot of difficulty in just determining what is an accessibility plugin? What is it supposed to do? Is this something that’s supposed to change the front end? Is it supposed to change the back end? Is it implementing editor tools? Is it implementing new features? Is it fixing things that already exist? And I think all of those are complicated unanswered questions.

So kind of figuring out that path and, what is actually intended in this idea of an accessibility plugin? What are the problems it’s trying to solve? Is the first question mark. And we don’t really have that. That hasn’t been worked out in any way.

[00:15:44] Nathan Wrigley: So the complexity, and thank you for the clarification, the complexity there, the devil is in the detail. I guess Core in a sense is, if it’s going to ship in Core, it’s there. There’s a menu for this and a toggle for that, and a switch for this, and what have you. What you are saying is the landscape of accessibility is much more complicated than that. And so maybe, in a way, if it was pushed over to a canonical plugin, you could have a more a la carte approach to it. I don’t know if that’s where you were going.

[00:16:14] Joe Dolson: That’s conceivable. So, many years ago, Matt proposed the idea of an accessibility, it wasn’t a plugin at the time, but it was the concept of an alternate admin that would be a simplified admin. And, you know, I pushed back on that, and I still would if it was being marketed as an accessibility feature. There is a value to a simplified admin. It’s just that it can’t be considered accessibility focused unless it actually does achieve all goals. But simplification is in itself a goal. Making something easier to use, and having an option where somebody can do something in a simplified way, is extremely valuable.

[00:16:52] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, just some thoughts to that. So I’m a Core committer and I make changes to the software that everybody uses and needs to be compliant, right? I’m not an accessibility expert by any means, but I’m versed in the concepts.

So one of the differences that could be in a canonical plugin for accessibility, Core, our coding standards for accessibility, we adhere to the web content accessibility guidelines, version 2.2 at Level AA, right?

But there’s different levels, there’s different versions of that. And so with different levels come different requirements, and different strictness to how you approach different interfaces. And so maybe a canonical plugin could allow you to adhere to different levels that perhaps your organisation needs to adhere to, that the 80% of users don’t necessarily need to.

Another thing that, I wanted to mention this because I always think of this. We, by default, think of accessibility as someone in a wheelchair or someone that’s blind, but you could break your hand, you could fall down the stairs, you could get eye surgery and have to wear a patch for a month. And so it’s not just permanent, it’s temporary disability as well. And I like to try to remind myself of that because you don’t need accessibility until you do, and then you’re glad it’s there when it’s there, right?

My grandfather was legally blind and he was a veteran. So he went to school and he learned how to use a computer. And he had a computer with like JAWS on it, and it would read it to him, and we’d send each other emails and stuff. I always like to think of him too, because if you know someone in your life that has accessibility needs, it also raises that importance to you as well. So, if I don’t do this in the right way, my grandfather won’t be able to use this website, or communicate with the world in the same way that I can.

And so finding those, I think that when you talk about accessibility, and this isn’t directly related to what you said, Joe, but I wanted to mention it. But if you can humanise it in some ways, in a way that’s in your life that you can relate to, it helps you find the reasoning in why it’s important, why these discussions are important, right? That we approach these problems in the right way, and that we meet the acceptable standard.

[00:18:57] Nathan Wrigley: In the end, this will be a binary decision. It either will be a canonical thing at some point in the future or it won’t, I guess maybe.

[00:19:05] Jonathan Desrosiers: Will it? I mean, we might merge some of it into Core or we might choose, it doesn’t fit in a plugin, right? And that’s kind of where that gray area is. And in some ways, canonical plugins take up a little more time because we are having these discussions. Like, we feel strongly this should go in, someone else may not. We have to work to get a consensus, and once we reach that consensus, we have to, I talk about this in my talk about how we make decisions, but we disagree and commit. And so you can state your disagreement, but then it’s important that we move forward together. Building that consensus and deciding on the right path, even if you disagree.

[00:19:39] Nathan Wrigley: Does the canonical option then, does that allow for more flexibility? So as an example, you could release, I don’t know, every two weeks, or every month or something like that. Whereas at the moment, we’re recording it in June, we don’t need to get into it, but we’ve got a different, a very different cadence for how often Core is being updated. Maybe that will change in the future, maybe not.

But with a canonical option, it would be possible to do any cadence you liked. And also, I suppose you could be a little bit more a la carte because you could have a variety of canonical plugins wrapped around the theme of accessibility. So, yeah, I guess what I’m asking there is really, does the cadence of a canonical plugin allow more flexibility?

[00:20:21] Jonathan Desrosiers: Absolutely. Whether we’re releasing once a month, or we’re releasing once a year, you can release a canonical plugin as often as you want, whereas Core has a much more predictable, well, not that the canonical plugin releases won’t be predictable, but it has a much more standardised schedule, I guess.

And so you could release once a week for your canonical plugin, and then if we have a Core release every three months, that’s 12 weeks, you have 12 releases of that canonical plugin that you could potentially refine issues. Whereas if you released it in the one Core release, you’d get all that feedback at once instead of dividing it up and making adjustments and going from there.

[00:21:00] Joe Dolson: So just to pose an example of something that I think actually is extremely suitable for an accessible plugin, and this is because, you know, I actually have written this. So let’s take for an example, the WordPress video block. It is extremely basic. It produces a video element and it gives you options to upload various tracks that are used in that video element. It is just the raw HTML 5. That’s what WordPress produces in the block editor.

Now, is it appropriate for WordPress Core to make a decision about how that video block is actually going to be rendered as it is with this raw HTML 5 element? It’s rendered differently by every browser. They have their own rules, their own way of doing it. That’s what it’s going to do. You can make it much more accessible, because there are a lot of things that those native blocks don’t support, the native video element doesn’t support.

In the past, WordPress did use MediaElement.js to render videos. And I actually think getting rid of that, and just using the raw video element was a good thing. But it’s not the most accessible way of viewing video. So is it something that we should do in Core? Should we dictate a player interface, or should we leave that raw in Core? Core just produces a video element, and then a plugin can enhance that to make it more accessible.

I’m also the lead developer for an accessible media player called Able Player. That’s a completely separate JavaScript project that has nothing to do with WordPress, but I have got a WordPress plugin for it, which basically just says, hey, here’s a video block, I’m going to re-render it using Able Player.

[00:22:37] Jonathan Desrosiers: I think if you want another good example of what a canonical plugin can be in the framework it can operate within, look at the Performance Lab plugin. The Performance Team has this plugin, and initially it had all these different features in it, and then we were trying to merge in support for the WebP image format in Core, and we realised it needed a little bit more time. And Matt suggested that we break them out into more finite plugins.

So the Performance Lab feature plugin has, or canonical plugin, has a framework and then there are sub plugins that you can install for modern image formats. Pre-loading the images, there’s an accessibility feature where it shows you the color, the dominant color of the image, and it’s there until the image loads. And so that way it’s visually represented. And so that’s another good example of that.

And one example that I’m wondering may be a good use of canonical plugins is the new AI Team. And so we’re at a point where we need to do some research and figure out what, in the context of WordPress, is needed for AI to flourish, and WordPress to be AI friendly. And I think that in some way, that will end up being a base foundation, some classes and some ways to interact with your content and your site, that can communicate with different models.

So perhaps some canonical plugins could be one for each of the popular models. And so you have this data transport layer that passes your site’s information to these plugins, and then it connects with ChatGPT, or whichever your preferred model is. And so within that you could have settings. The reason why I brought up the Performance Plugin is there’s settings within it. So for the modern image format, you could say, I only want WebP, or I only want JPEG XL or AVIF. You can decide which ones you want. But if that were to get into Core, that’s not the right thing to say like, I do or I don’t want this.

Another philosophy is decisions not options. We don’t want to overwhelm users with this. And a good example of this is, should this site be indexed by search engines? And if you disable that, it also disables your sitemap. And so making those intuitive decisions on behalf of the user and what they’ve done, the actions they’ve taken, we don’t want to overload them with options.

And so in canonical plugins, you can be more, you don’t have to follow that as strictly, because the point is that it’s a plugin that’s configurable, that we’re testing different things in different ways, and finding out what works for which groups of people, and in what ways, and gathering feedback around that.

Back to the point about, one other thing I wanted to mention too, is that one complaint I’ve always had with canonical plugins is that it’s very difficult to know about the experiences of the people using them. So for example, we had a plugin for a while that they want to, thankfully they want to rekindle it, is the Design Experiments plugin.

And you would install that, and there were, you know, at any given time, a couple of 2, 3, 4 different design experiments in the plugin. But we never knew who had which experiments active, which ones they disabled. Did they have bad experiences? And that’s why they turned it off. Did they like it? Did they prefer it?

We almost need to have some type of either AB testing within the plugins themselves, or a way to gather that feedback from the people that are using these canonical plugins. This is especially true when it’s a feature plugin that we may want to emerge into Core.

And so I did bring up to Matt in one of our recent meetings with the Core committers, and he was open to exploring the idea of better ways in canonical plugins to gather that feedback, because they’re now of a renewed importance in our community and how we foresee maintaining things.

We’re quite large, and we need to start saying no to more things in some ways. And so this is a great way to push it to a canonical plugin. Like, we don’t think that’s a right fit in Core, it’s too much, we can’t handle it. But create a community maintain plugin and we’re happy to stand behind it with you.

[00:26:32] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to try and get this out. I’m not sure I’m going to encapsulate it right. I’m going to offer this one to Joe first. And that is the legislation in the landscape of 2025. And we know that in Europe in particular, a lot of this stuff is mandated. Obviously there’s degrees to that, but there’s a lot of mandatory stuff coming down very, very soon.

Given that, putting things into a canonical plugin where you can pick and choose, I have not installed that, I have installed that, what are your feelings about that? Is there some, I’m going to use the word core, set of features around accessibility that really where we’re at now, there’s just no choice, it just has to be in Core?

Because the concern that I have perhaps is, how will you discover this canonical plugin? How will it surface itself? The three of us will find it, because this is what we do. But the regular user who’s just got a brick and mortar store, they want to put a WooCommerce site out there, just something quick and easy, where are they going to even find out about these canonical plugins?

[00:27:32] Joe Dolson: And I do think this is a big part of what comes down to that question of, what does the accessibility plugin, what does it do? Because that is where things can really go kind of horribly wrong.

When we’re talking about the accessibility of existing WordPress interfaces, how you actually interact with the admin, I don’t think there’s anything there that should ever be in a plugin because the Core code has to be accessible.

You know, Jonathan mentioned that we’ve got this commitment to WCAG 2.2 at Level AA. I would say that we haven’t quite achieved that. It’s a goal, but I mean, the reality is there’s still a lot of legacy interfaces that our, I find new things every day. It’s just the reality. But those need to be fixed in Core. They should not be part of a plugin.

So, a plugin should be something that enhances something in a meaningful way that perhaps doesn’t apply to all situations. That’s one of the reasons I brought up the video element, because one of the interesting exceptions in WCAG is that you are not responsible for the accessibility of browser defaults. The browser is responsible for that.

And so if you are using a video block, and it’s just the video element, that is actually something that should pass. It’s not necessarily accessible, that’s up to the browser, but it’s not the responsibility of your site. And that’s a really fuzzy area from the law because, yes, you should still fix it.

[00:29:00] Nathan Wrigley: Imagine a scenario where we have a canonical plugin for accessibility. So we have WordPress Core, and then a canonical plugin for accessibility. WordPress Core is evolving all the time. No doubt missteps will be made. People like you, Joe, will be going in and saying, okay, this needs to be adapted, this needs to be amended.

And then on top of that, we’ve also got this complete other path of developing the canonical plugin side of things. There’s two strains of work happening now. So that’s just interesting. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad.

[00:29:30] Joe Dolson: So one thing I will say is, you know, the bulk of the new development in WordPress is in Gutenberg. There’s no need for a canonical plugin to handle accessibility things in Gutenberg because honestly, that should just go into the plugin Gutenberg. If there’s something in Core that needs to be fixed, you should be able to install Gutenberg and be able to move forward. I think that would be reasonable. I don’t think that’s a practical path to have a separate accessibility canonical plugin that fixes issues in Gutenberg problems for Core. I mean, I can’t see that as making any sense.

[00:30:04] Jonathan Desrosiers: In some ways we have to just weigh the benefits with the effectiveness and the time and the resources available. Some other ways that you can find canonical plugins, when you click add plugin on your site, there’s different tabs at the top, like featured, popular. One of them is featured, and so that is one that when we have canonical plugins, we want people to adopt or use, we add plugins to that tab.

So the performance plugin is there, Gutenberg is there because we want people to be testing those up and coming changes. To the point of the, we’re not being fully compliant with that standard, it’s, we have to remember that this constant churn going on with a code, right? There’s new code coming in, there’s old code being removed. And so in a way the goal line is still the same, but we’re getting peaks and valleys that we have to, they suddenly appear and we have to tackle them as we go.

I think for discoverability, it depends on the ecosystem in some ways. For example, as an American, you know, I’m not always, sometimes I hear of new legislations from EU and I say, oh, what are they up to now, right? It’s more things I have to do to follow the rules. But I think about maybe an American business owner, or American site owner, and sometimes it’s not clear. What happens if I’m in Europe and then I visit my site when I’m traveling, right? Does that open me up for legal action. If someone happens, if I make a very specific or rare type of trinket, and people in the EU find it, does that open me up to legal problems?

And so these are things that the normal site owner, I just want a website, I just write on it, right? They don’t think about this stuff. And so, in addition to being compliant with these guidelines that we strive to achieve, we need to think about those decisions, not options type things.

Another philosophy is to be simple, strive for simplicity. Most people don’t know what an XML sitemap specification is, or how to implement it, or what should go in it. And so we just make the decision to handle that stuff on their behalf. And if they need to, they can install a plugin to customise it, right?

So the same is kind of true in this sense. And if the world is susceptible to, or responsible for adhering to certain things, and we can reasonably help them without them having to find certain things to install or configure, then maybe it’s the right thing to put that thing into Core, right?

Perhaps it falls on the shoulders of hosts, where if the customer has an EU address, they install the accessibility canonical plugin, depending on what’s in it and what’s not. It’s likely not. We should be deliberate about what goes in Core and what goes into the accessibility plugin and for what reasons. But we also should be conscious that, as a community, we have to also help these non-technical users by making decisions for them when we know that it’s a problem.

Like, our legal team says, yep, any site that potentially gets EU traffic, they have to have this, or they have to block EU or whatever it is. We can outline these situations and make the best decisions for our customers and our users, given those criteria that we are aware of.

[00:33:07] Joe Dolson: It’s interesting you say that because one of the things you particularly dove into there is the idea of an accessibility plugin being something for the front end. And that is something that is actually fundamentally challenging. Because when it comes right down to it, we don’t know what’s on the front end. And accessibility is an incredibly difficult problem to solve when you’re kind of just trying to do automation on something that you don’t know.

You know, there’s a lot of accessibility plugins out there that are already doing that sort of thing. Overlay plugins. They are famously iffy, because they really don’t solve most of the problems. And some of them actually introduce more. And that is the thing that I most want to avoid, is that we create our canonical plugin and it’s just screwing up people’s websites.

[00:33:59] Jonathan Desrosiers: We’ve all installed a plugin that has way too many options, way too many features, and it doesn’t do any of them well, right? That’s not what a canonical plugin should be. In instances where there are many features, like the Performance Lab, there’s a framework perhaps, and then there’s sub plugins that do it, right? We don’t have an importer plugin that has every importer in the same plugin. They’re in specific plugins so that it can be more targeted, more focused on that specific outlined goal or focus area.

And so that, yeah, that speaks to me, because we definitely don’t want to mimic some of the plugins that are out there where they try to adhere to cookie laws, and then they also try to adhere to popups and, you know, Consent API and all that type of stuff. And so we want to make sure that we’re dividing those problems up into meaningful chunks, but chunks that we can manage reasonably and not be a runaway train in some ways.

[00:34:47] Nathan Wrigley: I was thinking about this last night and I was thinking, why does this conversation matter to me so much? And it came down to the fact that if we were having this conversation about a canonical plugin for, let’s say, performance or SEO, it would be intriguing, but there’s no moral component to it. You’re just serving a bunch of people who would like a more performant website. Well, that’s great. That will increase your SEO. No doubt, more traffic will come to your website.

But there is a moral component here, and there are people whose lives will be immeasurably better if WordPress is, and I’m doing air quotes, accessible. And so that just makes this whole thing so much more important and impactful. So there’s no question there, it’s just an observation.

There’s a different wrinkle here. There’s just some other thing. You know, you can imagine the panoply of different people trying to use websites. The frustration, the endless frustration that’s being caused by things because they’re not configured in a way that they can use them. And it would be a shame to miss this opportunity. And I don’t know what the right answer is here. I just know that there’s this moral component that makes this much more of a hot button topic than anything else. So that’s my piece, but if you want to respond to that.

[00:36:03] Jonathan Desrosiers: I just left the keynote this morning by Noel Tock, and he spoke a lot about the impact. I try to illustrate this often, and he did a much better job than I’ve done before. He’s involved with a lot of organisations in the war affected Ukraine. And so he covered a half dozen organisations that are saving lives, rescuing animals, providing humanitarian relief, and they run on WordPress. And so accessibility lends to that in some ways, because you don’t know where a group is that has a need, and the free software could help them with that need, and in what ways and what impact that could have on them.

Sometimes I think about how certain things overlap. And so I picture two circles, one for accessibility, and if you were to make a diagram of how it overlaps with democratising publishing. In many ways, it almost completely overlaps that circle. There’s something democratising with being accessible. I mean, it’s in the name, it’s accessible to as many people as possible. And so I think that, whether you know it or not, that probably in some ways is eliciting that feeling, right, of we all believe in this project where we all want to do good in the world. We want our software, and our community, to have an impact. And in many ways, accessibility leads to that mission that we all have.

[00:37:26] Joe Dolson: And I do want to say that, as it stands right now, when we’re talking about the admin of WordPress, it’s already one of the most accessible content management systems out there. We have done very good work there.

The front end is kind of a completely different story, and that ultimately is the fact that Core doesn’t control very much of front end, which is both one of the incredible powers of WordPress. It’s got this amazing degree of flexibility, and you can do almost anything with it. And it’s also one of the curses, because if we want to globally make the front end of everybody’s website better, there is very little we can do.

That’s where I kind of feel like our accessibility efforts most are needed right now is just kind of getting plugin developers, getting theme developers, to be better. Make better choices and provide better options in their tools.

[00:38:18] Jonathan Desrosiers: It is true that we don’t control the front end, but one of the features I love in Gutenberg is when you’re selecting the text colour and the background colour of a block. If you select light blue and dark blue, it says, hey, this is not accessible, it doesn’t meet the guidelines. People are going to have a hard time reading this.

I often think about ways that maybe, one I had suggested before which hasn’t been implemented yet, some issues take many years to flesh out and be adopted, if at all. But one of them is perhaps we do another notice like that when someone is entering an alternate text for their image. You know, maybe they just put jpeg 123, right? That’s not what alt text is meant for. It’s meant to describe what’s in the picture in case someone can’t see it, or it’s not visible.

And so it should be, Nathan Wrigley holding his microphone, sitting at a table, talking to Jonathan and Joe, who also have a microphone. Stuff like that. He’s got a red shirt. Things that illustrate what’s in the image. And so what are opportunities that we can take to guide our users to produce better content on the front ends?

And I think there’s a particularly large opportunity for that in block themes, because the nature of block themes is very structured. It starts with a theme.json file, and it’s gobbledegook for a lot of people. They don’t understand what the JSON is, how to read it. But it’s structured data that’s extrapolated into the editor to apply the default margin for your blocks. To apply the default labels, the colours, all those different things that are configurable in a block theme.

And so like, what’s missing from that that we can add that will lend to better visual representations of your content? There’s the HTML API behind the scenes that manipulates HTML strings in the context of WordPress. So how can we make sure that we’re generating accessible markup, those building blocks?

A lot of times we run into issues where there’s no good solution for a specific accessibility problem because the foundational elements, were not taking that into consideration when it was built. And so oftentimes it’s hard to get backing for those changes, because it’s such a big undertaking because it wasn’t a part of the the initial discussion and consideration.

And so how can we replace these over time, but also as we build new things, take those things into consideration so that the things that get expanded into the user experience and exposed in the site editor, result in better front end experiences for everyone, that are more accessible?

[00:40:50] Joe Dolson: Yeah, I think that’s a really great thing to call out is those places in the authoring process where we provide accessibility feedback. There’s a whole set of guidelines that are specific to that. That’s the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines. And I love everything we do to try and implement those.

I will say that the colour contrast one, it was implemented very, very early on. There are a number of things that are in Core now that it actually just isn’t able to handle. Some layering things that it’s just like, oh, I don’t know what’s going on here. So that needs work. But that’s just kind of the constant process. At least it does exist and it can cover a lot of the most common use cases.

But, yeah, that alt text one, that’s also a really valuable thing to be able to have some checks on. It’s a hard thing, and I think one precursor change we actually need to be able to make that possible is we need to make some revisions to how alt text is stored in the database.

Because the reality is, right now WordPress stores alt text as a meta field that’s tied to the attachment, tied to the image. But alt text actually is context sensitive. And so really there shouldn’t be one canonical alt text for an image. There could be a canonical description of that image, but the alt text itself should always be context sensitive.

On the other hand, if we just removed that field and didn’t save it, which is something that the block editor has kind of taken that path, when you change it in the block editor, it does not save to the media library, that’s also flawed, because sometimes you do actually want to use that, or at least want to use it as the basis for the next version of that alt text you write. So what I’d like to see is that we could actually save multiple alt text fields and have that managed.

[00:42:33] Jonathan Desrosiers: There’s all these great ideas, and great things, but we also need to strive for simplicity. We don’t want them overwhelmed with a hundred different accessibility notices of how they could improve to the point where they say, I’m going to somewhere else, this website’s too confusing.

This is potentially also another opportunity for AI. Perhaps AI could be used to suggest what accessible alt text should be in the context of the article you’re writing, or the page you’re authoring. You know, maybe AI can be trained in a way to audit your page for accessibility and make suggestions.

AI is really exciting. I often sit back and watch and just observe because there’s so many models and you never know which ones to use. And unless you’re really deeply involved, it’s hard to know the best model for certain tasks.

But I definitely like to think about, it’s helped me be more organised for sure. I have a hard time sometimes when I am creating a talk, getting my thoughts into an organised deck. And so by putting all my thoughts into AI, I’m able to better organise it and then I can drop my notes and my thoughts in the structured outline that it kind of organises for me, right?

But, in what ways can that be applied in the editing process within WordPress under the lens of accessibility? And we could have SEO, we could have, Yoast has a lot of SEO tools that makes SEO recommendations. And we could have our canonical plugin perhaps has an AI interface and we go from there.

So, yeah, there’s many different ways we can tackle these accessibility issues. It’s exciting to have these types of discussions and consider what could be.

[00:44:05] Nathan Wrigley: Sadly, I think time is going to get the better of us. But I would like to say thank you, both of you, for your intelligent commentary on this. I don’t know which way it’ll go.

[00:44:15] Jonathan Desrosiers: And there’s no right way necessarily.

[00:44:16] Nathan Wrigley: That’s right. And it seems like there’s benefits in both possibilities. I’m not going to put you on the spot and ask you which your preferred one is. I have suspicions. Let’s keep this debate going I suppose. Let’s see which way it falls out. And, yeah, Joe and Jonathan, thank you so much for chatting to me today.

[00:44:33] Jonathan Desrosiers: Of course. Perhaps we could do like a six month check-in on the state of canonical plugins.

[00:44:38] Joe Dolson: Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what happens next. Thanks so much.

[00:44:40] Nathan Wrigley: I honestly think that we could have gone in a hundred different directions here. I think there’s bits of this podcast, which we could have opened up and probably spoken for many, many more hours. But, yeah, thank you both.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how Human Made have built WordPress at the scale of a global bank.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today, we have Tom Willmot and Jon Ang.

Tom is the co-founder of Human Made, an enterprise WordPress agency that’s been pushing the boundaries of what WordPress can do since its inception. Jon is also with Human Made, and together they bring a huge amount of experience working with major clients on large scale projects.

At this year’s WordCamp Europe in Basel, they presented a case study, their long-term, continually evolving work, with the global banking giant Standard Chartered. Most listeners might not be working at the scale of 85,000 employees, 70 countries, and hundreds of millions of page views a month, but Tom and Jon are here to share insights from the top end of WordPress implementation.

They explain how Human Made helped Standard Chartered shift from a proprietary CMS lock-in, to a flexible, open source Gutenberg powered WordPress solution that serves as the main web platform for the bank across all its markets.

We talk about the unique compliance and security challenges of working in the banking sector. What it takes to persuade giant enterprises that WordPress is not a toy, and how to support hundreds of CMS users with custom workflows and integrations.

Tom and Jon discussed the specifics of scaling WordPress for the enterprise, from accessibility and multilingual setups, to custom block development, and real time collaborative editing. We also hear how Human Made works with clients to contribute innovations and security improvements back to the WordPress community, ensuring that lessons learned at the enterprise level benefit everyone.

If you’re curious about how WordPress powers mission critical web infrastructure for some of the world’s biggest organizations, or how you might pitch WordPress for enterprise use, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Tom Willmot and Jon Ang.

I am joined on the podcast today by two fabulous guests. I have Tom Willmot and Jon Ang. Hello both.

[00:03:32] Tom Willmot: It’s great to be here.

[00:03:33] Jon Ang: Hello.

[00:03:34] Nathan Wrigley: This is my first interview at WordCamp Europe in, I want to say Basel, but I still don’t know how to pronounce it. Let’s go with that.

[00:03:41] Tom Willmot: I mean, I think it’s Basel.

[00:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay, we’ll go with that. And we’re here today talking to Tom and Jon all about an interesting project, which I want to say they’ve just completed, but I’m not sure that’s the right word.

They’re doing a presentation at WordCamp Europe and it’s all about a project for a bank, and a very large bank I might add. Standard Chartered, you may have heard of it, you may not. But that’s the presentation. I’m guessing you haven’t done it because we’re still in Contrib day, but are you all prepared and ready?

[00:04:06] Tom Willmot: I think we’re pretty prepared. When did you submit the slides, Jon?

[00:04:09] Jon Ang: Just submitted it 10 minutes ago, so I think we’re good. But it’s been revised multiple times, yeah. I’m fairly certain that it’s going to be quite interesting.

[00:04:16] Tom Willmot: I mean, one of the challenges actually of doing a presentation about a bank is you have to double check that you’re allowed to say everything that we’re going to say.

[00:04:23] Nathan Wrigley: So we’re going to be editing this heavily.

[00:04:25] Tom Willmot: Yeah, potentially.

[00:04:26] Nathan Wrigley: So Standard Chartered is a very large bank. WordPress is obviously a CMS, which allows us to create websites for these banks. But let’s talk about the whole story. These are not new clients of yours, or they are new clients of yours. How long have you been working with them?

[00:04:39] Tom Willmot: No, I mean, this has been a relationship that we’ve had since 2016. So, yeah, this is a long term client. These projects are not really like the project starts and the project finishes. We got involved working with them, yeah, back then there was an early prototype that turns into more stuff, that turns into more stuff. And we’ve been building and iterating and evolving the platform for nearly 10 years.

[00:04:59] Nathan Wrigley: Prior to us hitting record, I will have recorded a preamble saying who both of you are. But just in case you’ve dipped into the podcast right now, you’re both with Human Made. My understanding, Tom, is that this was something that you are the founder of.

[00:05:12] Tom Willmot: Yeah, I’m the co-founder. Me and my, actually my brother Joe, which a lot of people don’t know, co-founded the company together, and then Noel joined a year, in so that we are the three founders.

[00:05:21] Nathan Wrigley: And I guess it’s fair to categorise you as, maybe this is something that you don’t like the sound of, I don’t know, an enterprise WordPress agency.

[00:05:27] Tom Willmot: Yeah, for sure. We’ve been focused on like WordPress at the high end, since the beginning. We were always interested in like, what’s the biggest stuff that WordPress is possibly being used for and how can we get involved in that?

[00:05:38] Nathan Wrigley: And I guess you must have some kudos, credentials, now which enable you to open doors like the Standard Chartered door, in a way that nathanwrigley.com, that’s probably not going to happen.

[00:05:48] Tom Willmot: I mean, we’ve got a history now of doing that kind of work and so that helps.

[00:05:52] Nathan Wrigley: So tell us about this client then. Just paint the backstory. Who are they? What do they do? I guess what we’re trying to do is build a picture of just how massive a project this is. Because working for a bank, I imagine there’s lots of t’s to cross and i’s to dot.

[00:06:06] Jon Ang: Yeah, they’re a global bank inside about 70 countries, hovering around to 150 markets. I think about 85,000 employees worldwide. So out of those, there’s maybe, and it’s a bit of a intro into what we see in our slides, but 500 employees that’s using the backend on a day-to-day to publish.

So think of them working with the monetary authorities of each country that is governing how a website should function for a bank that has all of this running with the staff, figuring that out, and us providing the platform for them to stay compliant, and continue to be a agile in a way of what they’re publishing every day.

I think that’s a bit of what Standard Chartered is like. They are, I think, a bank that started in 1800’s, and has a pretty massive presence in Asia Pacific, particularly I think Singapore and Hong Kong. Started from the UK a long time ago.

[00:06:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s got a lot of heritage, hasn’t it? There are banks which are popping up all over the place at the moment, but there are still a few holding on that have been there for literally centuries. And this is a name which is very familiar to me. And whenever I’ve traveled throughout the world, there’s always some presence there. They’re big, essentially. This is not a child’s play website. You can’t throw this together in a matter of weeks. This is a big deal.

[00:07:19] Tom Willmot: And I mean, you know, they’re a big company and it’s a big name, there’s a lot of employees. I think also what’s interesting is that their use of WordPress is also big. So they’re not just using WordPress for a campaign mini site or their corporate comms department. This is like the primary web platform for Standard Chartered across all those countries, including sc.com, Wealth Banking. I think something like 95 plus percent of all web traffic goes through WordPress.

[00:07:44] Nathan Wrigley: Just to paint a picture of that, so it’s a website though, we’re not dealing with the sort of transaction data. You know, if you’re a customer of Standard Chartered, WordPress is not handling the money going from one account to another. This is the sort of front end, public facing website, I’m guessing.

[00:07:57] Tom Willmot: Yeah, we’ve not got like a dollars custom post type.

[00:08:00] Nathan Wrigley: So paint a picture of just how big they are. So they’ve been going for a couple of centuries. You mentioned that, I think 2015, you built this relationship. You’ve been working with them in an agile way since then.

Do you have any metrics in terms of, I don’t know, the amount of traffic that the website is currently having? The number of locales? I think you touched on that a little while ago. Number of users? And then I’ve got this fourth one that I’ll come to in a minute. So let’s hit traffic first. Do you have any idea of the amount of petabytes or terabytes of data that are flying around just for this website?

[00:08:28] Jon Ang: I don’t have the petabytes, we’re talking about like hundreds of millions of page views per month. Like, that’s the kind of traffic that they’re getting. Your previous question around, so like it’s not quite hitting the dollars amounts, like, how much do I have in my savings account? But there is a lot of work passing, let’s say account signup information from the front end to the back end stuff that we do on that front as well. So it does work on some fairly critical pieces too on the banking website, it’s not just the marketing setup.

[00:08:56] Tom Willmot: Yeah, like for example, when you use the internet banking mobile apps, all of the customer messaging there comes from the WordPress CMS.

[00:09:04] Nathan Wrigley: Wow, okay. So lots and lots of data flying around. Some fairly critical components where you have to be absolutely a hundred percent sure that you’ve got the bulletproof security. In terms of the number of users, what was that? Did you say 500?

[00:09:17] Tom Willmot: Around 500 in the CMS, at any one time. I mean, that’s kind of interesting. There’s like a central global team that manage like brand governance and all of that. And then each country has their own country level marketing team across like 150 markets or something.

[00:09:32] Nathan Wrigley: And when you say the 150 markets, does that translate into 150 different languages as well? I’m guessing languages, there’s a fairly large component there.

[00:09:40] Jon Ang: I think there’s about 30 separate languages in there. So around that, 150 markets is split into what we call retail banking and non retail. So retail banking are regular things that you and I would do. We go into the bank, we get a credit card set up, we withdraw cash. And then non retail will be like investors, people who are interested in big money. So those are the like individual markets they work in. And across that, 150 markets, 70 countries, 500 plus users, doing this on a day-to-day basis.

[00:10:09] Nathan Wrigley: These are all genuinely eye watering numbers actually. They just come out of your mouth like they’re nothing. But if you actually pause for a moment and consider it, they’re breathtaking. You really are pushing what is possible.

I mean, I’m sure there’s websites out there which exceed that, but getting onto compliance, which is going to be my next question. There can’t be an industry where compliance is more important than banking, I mean, maybe there is, but it feels like banking and compliance. And you’ve got how many countries? 70 odd countries, each of those with a different set of criteria for compliance. Just open that box a little bit. I mean, that must have been fun.

[00:10:46] Jon Ang: So think of it as every country has some sort of monetary authority that governs the banks. So you’ve got that monetary authority that sets this bunch of rules that you’ve got to follow. Then they’ve got pretty much an association of banks in a specific country that listens to that. And below that you’ve got the banks that have to obey all these rules. And then we have to talk to all three organisations in every single country that’s out there that wants to use our CMS. So that’s basically it.

And obviously this did not start in 2016, or at once. But across time, all of these individual countries that need to use the CMS has gone through the process, and talked to us, and we’ve gone through making it work for them. And pretty much every single country has their own set of rules. But the idea of good compliance, good governance, good security, is rooted in good practices. So it’s not that we’re trying these things every single time fresh, you know?

[00:11:43] Nathan Wrigley: Given that you are working with one company, so Standard Chartered is obviously spread out amongst all these different countries, does that make that piece a little bit easier? So Standard Chartered to take care of the compliance. Do they give you the documentation, you sign it off? Because if you were to work with 70 different companies in 70 different countries, that’s your entire project grinding to a halt, I imagine.

So do they come to you with their lawyers and say, if you can satisfy this stack of requirements, we are good to go?

[00:12:08] Jon Ang: It’s a bit of that but it’s also, it’s 85,000 employees. And these regulations, they change on a regular basis. And it’s not like, you pass it on day one, you’re going to pass it on day a hundred again. They might come back and say, oh, there’s something new that we have to talk to you about. And they might not know actually how to pass this, because it’s their first time dealing with this as well.

So there’s a lot of discussions and collaboration, I guess, between Human Made and Standard Chartered. There is a central team that we work with, but they are fairly open on figuring this out with us. We work together to get through these regulations.

[00:12:40] Tom Willmot: Something else I think that’s worth mentioning is there’s also industry compliance regulation. And so I think we’re probably the only WordPress agency with the OSPAR compliance, which is the kind of banking industry, digital compliance process which took I think maybe a year for us to go through that process. We were audited by Deloitte, and then they sign you off. And so that helps a lot because it’s like, once you’ve got that sign off, then the bank can kind of trust that most of what you’re doing meets their compliance.

[00:13:04] Nathan Wrigley: So did you do that in order to prize the door open to the financial sector, or did you do that so that Standard Chartered could come on?

[00:13:12] Tom Willmot: Yeah, actually did that fairly late into working with Standard Chartered. They were able to, it goes back to there’s like 85,000 employees, there’s a lot of internal politics and stuff too, as one can imagine. And so we were able to avoid needing to meet that highest level of compliance for the first few years.

[00:13:29] Nathan Wrigley: And I’m guessing that was not a toy. I imagine that that was a fairly serious piece of paperwork.

[00:13:34] Tom Willmot: For sure. I think it cost us like a hundred grand.

[00:13:36] Nathan Wrigley: We’re at WordCamp EU, and if we were to walk out those doors, we’re surrounded by all manner of different people using WordPress. Some of them may be freelancers, they’ve got a couple of websites. And then at the other end of the spectrum, there’s you guys. How easy is it to convince a company like Standard Chartered that WordPress is not a toy?

[00:13:54] Tom Willmot: I mean, it’s an interesting question because obviously we started talking to Standard Chartered in 2016, so that’s a long time ago. In the context of this question, back then the concerns were much more around scalability and security and performance. Actually, that one of the big hurdles that we faced to begin with is there really just weren’t examples of companies of that size using WordPress as their primary CMS in the way that Standard Chartered wanted to use it.

And so when they would come to the ecosystem and say, show us the biggest people using WordPress, and we would say, oh, PlayStation use it for their blog, or Skype use it for their blog. And so they had some big names, but they used it for small stuff. And so that was kind of a problem because Standard Chartered were like, well, we don’t want to move our blog to it. We are talking about making it the primary CMS of the bank that we’re going to mandate every employee use for the next 10 years. How can we trust that WordPress is up to the task?

[00:14:42] Nathan Wrigley: So did you have to saddle that burden as a company then? So it wasn’t leaning into, okay, that agency over there built that thing and we can sort of say, okay, that’s WordPress, and there’s another agency over there that built that. So did you have to do the job of convincing?

[00:14:56] Tom Willmot: Yeah, yeah, we just went for it. We were just like, of course WordPress can do this. I mean, the big thing that helped was that they had an internal senior stakeholder that really wanted WordPress. And so that meant we could work with him to figure out, you know, how do we satisfy the concerns of the bank? How do we sell this in the way it needs to be sold in? That was really much more common, especially back then. WordPress wasn’t in the conversations unless somebody internally wanted it, and then they would do the work.

[00:15:22] Nathan Wrigley: That’s an interesting bit of serendipity. There’s this one character in the company who potentially was the route in.

[00:15:29] Tom Willmot: Yeah, and that’s, almost every big project we did back then, there was some internal champion that had fought the fight to get it taken seriously. And then we could come with the data and the expertise to back up what they were saying.

These days, that’s definitely changed. Now WordPress just is in the conversation. Which CMS should we move to? WordPress is going to be the one that’s considered. And so that’s much easier.

[00:15:48] Nathan Wrigley: Is it? Do you not have to do any persuasion anymore?

[00:15:50] Tom Willmot: Not as much. I mean, you’d be surprised. These days WordPress is seen as more secure in the enterprise level. Like, open source generally is seen as more secure than proprietary often. And so that can actually be an advantage.

[00:16:00] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating because my next question was exactly that. How do these big companies view an open source platform? Because it’s not like, I use the analogy sometimes, it’s not like they have the bat phone. There’s no person that they can immediately contact and say, we have something that’s broken, we need Core to be fixed. There is no bat phone.

And I would’ve thought, do you remember when, I think it was Log4j or something, there was this thing, maybe it was in 2019 or something like that, and there were all these pictures of this edifice held up by one Lego brick and that person, do you remember?

And that was all about the bat phone. We have nobody to contact to get this done. And I would’ve thought that would still be an obstacle and a difficult conversation to have. But maybe it’s just the rock solid nature of Core that kind of allows you to sidestep that.

[00:16:44] Tom Willmot: I mean there are just so many big examples now of WordPress being used that it’s, people will still have some of these concerns. Maybe they still have an idea that WordPress is not used for serious stuff. But then you just show them the huge list of like NASA, the White House, Standard Chartered, the New York Times. You just show them all of these brands, that helps.

[00:17:00] Jon Ang: I think there’s also a bit of that where, we mentioned that Standard Chartered had a senior stakeholder that really wanted WordPress because he’s used it, he likes it. The difference it makes against proprietary, very large CMSs. I think even right now you continue to have these people become senior stakeholders, to become CTOs of major companies. They’ve used WordPress maybe in their personal life as well, and they’re thinking, why wouldn’t I make this easier for the rest of my team? Why wouldn’t I make this easier for the rest of the world, and use something that’s good?

So there’s a lot of people coming to these spaces, into these roles that could say, yeah, let’s look at WordPress and figure it out. And just going back into what you were asking around, who did they co-op? I think this is one part, like, so we mentioned we’ve got this OSPAR compliance. We’ve probably gotten our SOC2 compliance as well. And we’re probably the only agency in the world, well, only WordPress agency in the world that has SOC2 as part of our setup.

They look at these things and did something that someone like Human Made is able to support them. You know, even if we are not WordPress support. We are their platform support. And WordPress is part of it. WordPress is what we do. But they call Human Made, I guess, to help them fix things, yeah.

[00:18:07] Nathan Wrigley: When you are, and I know this hasn’t been a pitching process as such, because you’ve been working with them for a decade or more, but do you ever lean into the whole, no vendor lock-in thing? Is that something that you big up or something that you sort of push to one side? Because obviously you would like to have them as a client forever more, but equally suggesting that, look, if some time down the road, you know, it’s not working out between us, that’s a really credible selling point of the CMS. But equally it might not be something that you wish to mention.

[00:18:37] Jon Ang: That is actually something we mention in almost every single one of our sales stacks, that we are not there to lock you in. By using WordPress, by working with Human Made, we make everything possible for you to move away if you ever wanted to in the future. And it might be that you still stay with WordPress, but maybe Human Made is not the company you want to work with in the future, that’s fine.

But your entire platform remains open source. It remains portable, remains yours. And that’s something we’re very serious about, to the point that like we have worked with large Fortune 500s to open source what we’ve built for them, so that it could be maintained beyond Human Made, so that their team could continue to work on it, to extend that into their own product.

And that’s something that I think is built into our DNA. As part of this, the banks, this Fortune 500s, they believe in this and therefore they don’t feel locked in, and therefore they feel more compelled to invest in it. Yeah, I think that’s a lot of that.

[00:19:35] Nathan Wrigley: I have this impression, and this is really nothing to do with this conversation. I haven’t even written it down. But there seems to be a push towards this open banking standard. I don’t really know much about it, but there seems to be a push to make banking transactions a much more open protocol as well. So that’s kind of a curious overlap.

[00:19:50] Tom Willmot: I mean, I think there is just, the trends over the last decade have been in open source’s favor, right? That people, we’re going to talk a bit about this again in our talk, but there’s, I’ve now, as a bank, been through multiple decades of being locked into proprietary platforms, I’ve felt the pain and expense of that. That’s where Standard Chartered were when we got involved.

They were running a CMS that had been end of lifed by the company, and they were having to pay for that company to keep that CMS on life support just for them. And that was incredibly expensive. The CMS was terrible. It was super painful. I remember hearing early on actually, that they had 40 people on site that they were paying for full-time from the CMS vendor, because every single content edit had to be done by the CMS vendor. They couldn’t do it themselves.

Absolutely, it’s in our DNA. Like, we care a lot about growing WordPress, and so there being no lock in a big part of that. But also, all of these customers have felt the pain of lock in so much that it’s like a huge selling point. We couldn’t afford to not mention it. It’s such a benefit of WordPress.

[00:20:48] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so lock in is one thing, but if you had to cherry pick just one or two things that make it easy to pitch WordPress at this level. So the vast majority of the people listening to this podcast will have no experience dealing with clients of the nature of Human Made. But they might be curious, you know, it’s nice to hear. What are the things at this enterprise level, that you can say, okay, WordPress has this? Just one or two things.

[00:21:12] Tom Willmot: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there’s two kind of, I think fairly obvious ones that I’ll mention up front. One is just how flexible WordPress is. Like, a lot of these proprietary systems are not that flexible and customisation is very hard and expensive. And the reality for big enterprise is they’ve got a ton of like weird stuff that they need to integrate with. They’ve got a ton of weird, unique workflows that they need to support. And WordPress is just like, can do all of that really easily. So the flexibility’s a big selling point.

I think the interesting one that maybe listeners won’t realise, and which like honestly still surprises me to this day actually, is just how important the usability of WordPress is. I mean enterprise software generally is like known to be terrible to use, and that’s really true even in the enterprise CMS space. Even today with the like major enterprise CMSs, if you actually see the backends, they’re all pretty awful. And so often what we do is we go in and we like demo, and they’re like blown away.

[00:22:04] Nathan Wrigley: Genuinely blown away.

[00:22:05] Tom Willmot: Yeah.

[00:22:05] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating.

[00:22:07] Jon Ang: I think another number you could take away as well is that the market share of WordPress in Japan is something like 80%. 80% of websites in Japan use WordPress. Not a lot of that is enterprise yet, but whenever I do demo just default Gutenberg, I am showing them creating a block, I am making changes to the font sizes, I’m moving things up and down. They are like, that’s possible?

And again, like this is just them looking at this, right? We’ve not even like built the custom blocks, made it tuned to the design. And I take a look at the backend that Tom just mentioned, and it would be something that WordPress was maybe 20 years ago when it was first created and. A lot of this really enterprise CMSs that have not moved on.

So Gutenberg is, I think it’s a major, major piece that people get interested in. And once you then continue to build that into the way that they think about workflows, content approvals, the way that it integrates into other APIs, and all this visualisation is just showing up, straight up on their backend editor. It’s just so much more amazing, yeah.

[00:23:10] Tom Willmot: This just reminds me of another story from, this is not from Standard Chartered actually, this is another big enterprise customer. When we went in for like the initial discovery, the way that they managed their online catalog, they were like a product company, they had a custom Java application that ran on one Windows XP PC. All of the content edits had to be done on that computer through that Java application.

And so like the idea that multiple people could log in and edit content was a major selling feature for them. Again, like I said, I still get surprised by this. It’s so easy to take for granted the stuff that WordPress does. But actually, in enterprise, a lot of that is pretty groundbreaking.

[00:23:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting. I recall the joy I found when I first opened up Gutenberg and I could move a paragraph up and down. And I’ve completely lost that appreciation for that because I’m in it every single day. And in fact, you get to the point where you only see the things that it can’t do because you’re just really familiar with it. But the description that you’ve just given, it is quite a profound technology, isn’t it? And because I’m so familiar with it, can’t see the wood for the trees.

[00:24:09] Tom Willmot: It’s one of my favorite things, you know, especially in a company like Standard Chartered, there’s 500 people using that. Their entire job, they’re spending in that, doing those workflows. And so like the transformation that something like WordPress can bring to just like the quality of their life at work is huge.

[00:24:23] Nathan Wrigley: Is there anything though where you have to have the opposite discussion? So you’ve demonstrated it and they find that there’s drawbacks to WordPress. Do you have to convince them of things in the WordPress space? So you’ve just demonstrated a couple of things where it was fairly easy. You know, you show them the block editor, great. Are there bits of WordPress Core that they’re not that happy with?

[00:24:41] Tom Willmot: I think most of that, mostly not with the Core software. Like, I honestly think the Core software is like industry leading. I think the biggest challenge they face goes a little bit back to the bat phone piece, which is that they look at the WordPress ecosystem and it’s like how am I supposed to interact with this? I need to find a host. I need to find an agency. There’s all these plugins. Can I use those? What are WordCamps?

And so it’s like, it’s pretty difficult for an enterprise to like understand how that should be put together to meet their needs, and how do they procure it? In enterprise software, there’s usually an organisation, a vendor, that you can go and deal with that’s packaged all of that very nicely, and can like tell you what the roadmap is.

And so that tends to be the biggest challenge, and that’s like most of what the work we do is like, how can we package what’s available in the WordPress ecosystem? But like make it available in a way that these companies are going to understand in the terminology they use, provide them with the roadmaps and the confidence that they need to be able to say like, yeah, okay, we’re going to use it.

And to some degree hide all the mess and the chaos, which are like, is a real strength for the ecosystem but, yeah, can make it difficult for someone, a digital executive who like doesn’t really know that much about the ecosystem, and it’s probably going to get freaked out if they like go to the plugins directory and are like, oh, I need Salesforce. That’s not a great entry point.

[00:25:57] Jon Ang: I think there’s also a lot of work that we do to help them understand that moving alongside WordPress’s innovations is good for you. They’ve spent last, what, 9, 8, 9 years, 10 years, like believing in that. So it doesn’t take us a lot of effort saying, this is what WordPress is thinking about in the next few versions. Given the amount of Core committers we have on the project, we kind of can get a good sense of where the roadmap of the project is going. And then we kind of tell them ahead of time. So when it does come out in an actual Core version, like a major version update, then they already knew about it, maybe like a year ago. They’re thinking, okay, great, now we get to use it.

[00:26:33] Nathan Wrigley: If I was to look at the Standard Chartered backend, would I recognise it? Would it be something which is entirely familiar to me, or is there just a ton of bespoke stuff in there which makes it, you know, usable for them? So I’m thinking of things like, you’ve built custom workflows so that people who are, I don’t know on the editorial blog team or whatever, they can get their work done more quickly, or permissions which allow them to access this block, particular attribute of that block or not. So really, I’m just opening it up. Have you built a bunch of custom stuff for them to use?

[00:27:04] Jon Ang: There’s a lot of custom stuff. I’ll say that our focus in making sure that they stay open and they’re not bound to, you know, anything that we built that is just not understandable by them. So we continue to use the WordPress language, I guess. Things that feel like it should be part of the block editor, how the workflow should be placed. It should be part of the published button, should it show up as a separate overlay and so on? All of that is taken into the understanding of how WordPress kind of demands it, and we present it in a very similar way.

So even if you have someone that’s new to the bank, you know, but that person’s used WordPress before, they should be able to quickly understand how this is all going.

Now obviously there are bank rules, and workflows, and regulations that they have to be like inducted into, but the understanding of how to build a content in the platform that’s built for them should be something that you could get it understood in 30 minutes or an hour. You would probably see it about 60, 70% as what you would usually see in WordPress. But the rest of it, again, is still built within the WordPress design language.

[00:28:05] Nathan Wrigley: So it looks the same. So it looks like a WordPress site, but there’s obviously some custom bits and pieces, okay.

[00:28:10] Jon Ang: Where you would expect things to be will be where we place it, like the extra buttons, extra workflows, and so on. They’ll be exactly where you think you’ll be clicking the publish button, for example.

[00:28:19] Nathan Wrigley: So, I’m making air quotes, you are using modern WordPress, I’m guessing. So this is blocks, this is Site Editing. Tell us a little bit about that. Have you got some sort of custom block functionality in there? And I’m guessing it’s a Site Editing theme, a Full Site Editing

[00:28:35] Jon Ang: So it is some Full Site Editing, and then the way we’re set up obviously is that we try to build patterns on Core blocks. So there’s obviously a lot of custom blocks, but the more we do with the default WordPress blocks. We style them. The more that they benefit when WordPress decides to make some improvements and so on. So that’s a lot of that.

And part of our talk, we’ll talk about the integrations of different APIs into the blocks themselves. So, we are pulling, let’s say investor data, stock prices, and so on directly from all these APIs outside, and then into this charting systems that we’ve built within Gutenberg, so you get to build a chart within the block editor itself.

And there will be visuals, that you’ll be able to see in our talk. But I think that’s probably one of the most customised things out there. But it goes back to what’s using the virtues for the block editor, gives you the visual of what you’re trying to create, and then it allows you the press button to create this graph that you want to create within WordPress.

When you see these graphs on the WordPress website that we’ve created for Standard Chartered, it’s not an image that someone created in Microsoft Word. It is something that’s created within WordPress and generated directly inside there. So that’s basically what, well, part of what we’ve done for the block editor.

[00:29:47] Nathan Wrigley: I always had this impression that the block editor enabled blocks to basically be mini applications. So, in the example of banking, like you said, you put a block onto the page, it’s hooked up to some API or something, and then you can provide some custom infographic or something like that. You know, you can see it on the back end and you click publish and it looks basically the same on the front end.

The curious thing about that is it seems like only the enterprise can get there because that’s so much work. But the promise is so profound. These little mini applications, you know, for a real estate agent, like a house block or something like that. And in your case, display information about last year’s stats for Standard Chartered. I just think that’s the power of it, but so few people can pull it off because of the time and expense.

[00:30:33] Jon Ang: I’ll say that at an enterprise level, obviously you have to work with someone like Human Made as an enterprise agency to get the maximum out of this very unique API data. You don’t get access to Morningstar’s API data as a regular person, for example. But if you’re talking about, let’s say a real estate person, there are plugins out there that plug into, let’s say the country’s real estate data that automates a lot of this. And these blocks are already built for that.

So I think if you were in that industry and then talking to even a regular agency, they’ll be able to find these plugins that do a lot of that. And I said, these vendors, for example, they realise the need their software to integrate into WordPress. They will be building blocks that directly integrate that.

An example of that is HubSpot. They do a lot of integration into WordPress, and then you’ve got blocks to do that. Even if you don’t have a specific official plugin. Gravity Forms, does a lot of integration into separate ecosystems and so on.

So you get actually all these block transformation integrations and so on with this like popular plugins out there. And the more we use WordPress and the block editor together, I think the more of these blocks will become very accessible to the general public.

[00:31:40] Nathan Wrigley: How do you even have that conversation with a client like Standard Chartered though, because they’re into banking, you are into building websites, there can’t be a great deal of overlap in, like we would love this to be on the website. Okay, we can build that. How does that conversation even happen? How do you draw out of them, we can build that into a block? Because you are so miles apart in your areas of expertise.

[00:32:02] Tom Willmot: Really what we did is we worked with Standard Chartered to help them build a web platform team internally. And so the platform is really run as a 50/50 partnership between Human Made and the web platform team. They then act as the kind of internal service provider to all of these like country markets. Compliance and IT, and all of these other stakeholders, they bring the banking knowledge, and we bring the WordPress knowledge. It’s like we’ve got to work very, very closely together to make the most of that.

[00:32:30] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s a case of often them coming to you saying, can this be done?

[00:32:33] Tom Willmot: Yeah. And, you know, we’ve been running like two week sprints now for 8 years or something. So it’s like a very deep, agile relationship.

[00:32:40] Nathan Wrigley: This project, fingers crossed, has no end goal. There’s no date at which it’s done.

[00:32:45] Tom Willmot: No, exactly.

[00:32:46] Nathan Wrigley: Every two weeks, lets see we’re at.

[00:32:48] Tom Willmot: WordPress obviously has a pretty fast paced and iterative development process, right? There’s new stuff coming out pretty regularly. The bank has got aggressive growth targets and marketing plans across all of those countries. I mean, something else we didn’t talk about in terms of the lock-in, some of these country level teams will have their own agency relationships, maybe a marketing agency or something.

And so we also act as a centralised agency coordinator service so that those other agencies can plug into the right bits of the website, but in a safe way that complies with the development processes and things that are necessary.

[00:33:20] Nathan Wrigley: Just to finish it off, a few little questions around accessibility and multilingual and things like that. So multilingual, I suppose is fairly self-evident. You’ve got to translate this website into just about every language on the planet, I would’ve imagined. So that’s a whole body of work.

[00:33:36] Tom Willmot: One of the ways actually that, I mean, multilingual is somewhat easier at this big enterprise level because essentially every country just has its own team and its own website. And so actually multilingual is just solved with multi-site. Standard Chartered do not translate their content, they rewrite it in that language. Different people write the content using multi-site.

[00:33:52] Nathan Wrigley: But in terms of accessibility, very hot topic in the year 2025. And I’m guessing, again, goes back to compliance. I’m guessing there’s no missteps here. You can’t get this wrong. So just tell us about what’s been going on in that sphere.

[00:34:06] Jon Ang: I think the way that we’re set up as well is that every single team has their own site, which means that every deploy gets checked in terms of accessibility. So we would expect that any designs that come along is accessible in the first place. So they’ve done their work. And then when we actually build the front end for it, and a part of their team also builds the front end, it goes through all this accessibility checker stuff that we’ve already built across time that I think feeds the WCAG to 2.2 AA Plus standards.

So every single deploy is checked against that to make sure it is accessible. At any point in time where this looked at and said, okay, there should be improvements that we need to be making. It’s part of the whole two week adjustments that we continue to make sure that all these like websites are accessible.

It doesn’t matter whether it is a Chinese website or Japanese website, where maybe like they’re not held to the same EU accessibility laws, but every piece is actually taken to the same level and held out to the belief that, if we’re accessible in a specific space, that’s should be the same everywhere else.

[00:35:06] Tom Willmot: You know, something to say on accessibility, often listeners will probably feel this. It can be difficult to get clients to care about it enough to pay you to do the work necessary to make it accessible, right? That’s a common problem. It’s one of the really nice things about working with a heavily compliance regulated industry like Standard Chartered. Like, actually, they really care about it. And so they really do the work. They want to invest to make sure the platform can enable them and support them as much as possible to like meet their compliance requirements, yeah.

[00:35:31] Nathan Wrigley: Has the more recent WordPress past, let’s say since about September last year, has that caused any ripples in the nature of the work that you do? Or has it required a different relationship with your clients, more explaining what’s going on in the community? Has there been any kind of blowback from the pace of Core amendments? I think we’re maybe getting more back on track with that. But I just wondered if there were any ripples?

[00:35:58] Tom Willmot: The dropping from three to one releases a year, like I think in many parts of enterprise, it’s kind of helpful actually, like three releases a year is pretty fast. And so certainly that’s not raising eyebrows at the enterprise level.

I think just like, we’ve got a mix of clients, some who are the kind of stakeholder who loves WordPress and really wants it, and so they’re perhaps a little bit more plugged in. And so, yeah, they’ve got more questions. And then you’ve got the other 50% of clients who know nothing about it.

[00:36:22] Jon Ang: And I think that when we are building these enterprise websites, right, we are kind of playing at a slightly different playing field. So they’re not using the typical consumer level plugins and so on. They’re using the service that we’ve provided them. So when you look at this, they look at this as the Human Made WordPress thing that we’ve been doing. And then when they look at whether they can trust this thing, they’re looking at the service that we provide. So they’re not concerned about what’s going else out there. They’re concerned about whether we have the ability to continue providing this service and nothing has said otherwise, yeah.

[00:36:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, very last question then. How much of this can be contributed back into the project? Are there any facets of this, little bits over here or over there that can be contributed back to the community? I don’t know where they would land. And if that’s a question you can’t answer, how does Human Made take on the position of contributing back? What’s your posture on that?

[00:37:13] Jon Ang: So Standard Chartered was definitely one of the earlier adopters of Gutenberg. But I think one of the earliest, earliest adopters we had was a part of Disney, where we were using version 0.2 beta of Gutenberg. It was not much in Core. We’re talking about a very beta version of it. So we were building sidebars, we were building like all these things that, Gutenberg didn’t have yet. It was just paragraphs and so on, like back then.

So we were doing that and we were contributing back the idea of it, back to the project. And so you’re going to hear from our talk how we’ve already completed collaborative editing in Human Made. We are now talking to people outside about contributing the idea back to it as well. I think the growth of the block editor itself has been stuff that we are, you know, pushed back in as well. And then I’ll say that’s one part.

The other part as well is the security aspects of stuff. So banks are checked on CVEs and all these pieces, and their security team are on contact points with us on a regular basis. So when we do learn of these things that they’re concerned about, and this is something that we’ve then fixed for them, we then contribute it back to the project.

So I know John Blackbourn works in Human Made, he’s the WordPress Security Team lead. Big part of his job is making sure that the projects that we work on is secure, but the stuff that we have secured then afterwards is contributed back to the WordPress project. So there’s a lot of that ongoing.

[00:38:30] Nathan Wrigley: Do you blow your own trumpet about contributions back or do you like to keep it quiet? I was having a conversation with somebody in the Drupal space recently, and it seems like there’s this whole thing that they’ve got there where, if you contribute, you accrue benefits in terms of, you attend an event like a Drupal Con and you can sponsor because you did some things. And so you had to blow your own trumpet in a way to be acknowledged as having done the things.

I don’t know what your position on that is, whether you like to sort of shout it from the rooftops. We did this, we contributed this back, or I don’t know if it’s more softly, softly than that.

[00:39:00] Tom Willmot: Yeah, I think I’m quite a fan actually of the maker taker stuff that Drupal does. Like, I think they do some really interesting things to benefit maker organisations, which I think has the right incentives then associated with it. Something I learned about, they’ve worked with some of the federal and public sector contracting authorities to preference maker organisations in the RFP processes that they do. So I think stuff like that’s actually really good. I would like to see some of that on the WordPress side.

We really do trumpet it when we’re talking to clients because it’s a big part of our sales pitch, right? That’s how we contribute back to WordPress. We’re a part of the Security Team. That means that we can use Gutenberg way before it’s shipped in Core, which means by the time it’s shipping in Core, Standard Chartered are already using it. They’re already familiar with it. There’s not a big expensive transition. It’s not a shock.

The collaborative editing that Jon mentioned, they needed real time editing in the CMS for multiple users, and we were able to take the like alpha version that the Core team are working on, finish that off and do the work to get that running in production.

[00:39:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, just snuck that in. I mean, that’s a whole episode.

[00:40:01] Tom Willmot: Yeah. And you know, that’s really interesting. They’ve been running that in production for a year or more. So then, yeah, there’s obviously stuff there that is like a two-way thing. So some stuff is like, okay, we build something unique and that’s like released open source, but actually more of it is just we are using the stuff that’s coming ahead of time, so then what we are learning can feed back, and make sure that when that is ready, it’s like already learnt the enterprise lessons it needs to learn to be relevant or whatever, yeah.

[00:40:26] Nathan Wrigley: Well, that was a really, honestly, I got so much out of that. Thank you very much, Tom Willmot and Jon Ang for talking to me today all about your project with Standard Chartered. Thank you very much.

[00:40:35] Tom Willmot: Great to be here and a great way to kick off the day. We’ve recorded as our first thing for the conference, so that’s pretty cool.

[00:40:41] Jon Ang: Thank you for helping us walk through our talk as well. So a lot of what we mentioned, it’s probably going to be mentioned our talk. But it’s been good to be here.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, website maintenance for WordPress agencies and freelancers.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today, we have Reyes Martínez, and Héctor de Prada.

Reyes has been involved in the WordPress community since 2015, with a background in journalism, digital communications, and early stage startups. From 2021 to 2024, she was sponsored by Automattic to contribute full-time to global marketing and communication efforts for the WordPress Open Source project, She led several initiatives during that time, including the experimental WordPress Media Corps. Reyes currently serves as content lead at Modular DS.

Héctor has been building websites since he was 12, and has worked with WordPress for nearly a decade, first as a freelancer, then running his own agency. Today, he’s one of the co-founders of Modular DS. He co-organizes the WordPress meetup in León in Spain, and writes a Spanish newsletter that keeps readers updated with the latest news from the WordPress ecosystem.

In this episode, we get into the nitty gritty of WordPress maintenance. What it takes to effectively manage multiple websites, and why maintenance is such a crucial, if often overlooked, part of running a successful client business.

You might think that updating plugins and themes is all there is to it, but Reyes and Héctor explained that there’s much more involved, performing regular backups, monitoring, uptime, and performance, checking for security vulnerabilities, database cleanups, and ensuring essential features like contact forms continue working as expected.

We discuss best practices for educating clients, how to position ongoing maintenance as an investment rather than a cost, and solutions which can help automate and streamline these essential tasks.

We also chat about how the maintenance landscape is changing with upcoming legal requirements around accessibility and privacy, and the emerging business opportunities for professionals specializing solely in website care.

If you’re a freelancer or agency owner looking to scale up your business, perhaps you offer care plans to clients, or are considering adding maintenance plans to your service, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast. Where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Reyes Martínez and Héctor de Prada.

I am joined on the podcast today by Reyes Martinez and by Héctor de Prada. Hello Both.

[00:03:53] Héctor de Prada: Hello Nathan.

[00:03:54] Reyes Martínez: Hello Nathan.

[00:03:55] Nathan Wrigley: I’m so pleased to have both of you on. This is going to be interesting because I’m going to be speaking to Héctor in about a week’s time as well, which will be kind of interesting. So there’ll be two podcasts coming out in quick succession featuring Héctor.

But the topic will be very different, and I’ll explain in a moment what the topic is going to be about.

But before that, I wonder if we could just get a little bit of an introduction to both of you. If we can keep it around the subject of WordPress that would be helpful.

So let’s go to Reyes first. Tell us exactly who you are, who you work for, what do they do, whatever you like in your little potted bio.

[00:04:29] Reyes Martínez: Yeah, sure. I’m Reyes and I have been part of the WordPress community since 2015. My background is in journalism and digital marketing and communications, and over the past 10 years, more or less, I have worked with startups and tech companies closely connected to the WordPress ecosystem.

And from 2021 and 2024, I was sponsored by Automattic to contribute full time to the WordPress project, where I had the opportunity to contribute to different marketing and communications initiatives.

And now I am the content lead at Modular DS. We’re building a tool to help freelancers and agencies manage multiple WordPress sites more efficiently.

[00:05:13] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. And let’s move over to Héctor. Similar question really, just give us your little potted bio.

[00:05:19] Héctor de Prada: Of course. Well, I have been making websites, I always say almost all my life, since I was like very young, at 12, 13 years old. At the beginning, not with WordPress, I have to say. But I started working with WordPress around 8, 9 years ago when I started freelancing as a web designer, and that evolved to creating a web design agency.

So I have been doing web design and websites, WordPress websites, for a long time. And 4 years ago almost, it’s when my partner and I, David and I, we started our current company, which is Modular DS, which is now where Reyes is working.

I am also part of the community. This is what you were saying, Nathan, that we are going to talk about, WordCamp Europe, because I am one of the organisers at the meetup in León, in my city. So this is also something I like a lot because we go to a lot of WordCamps, a lot of WordPress events, and it’s very nice to be able to do that in our own city as well.

[00:06:20] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you both so much. So if we stray into anything today, like a blog post is mentioned or a homepage or anything like that is mentioned, I will endeavor to link to that into the show notes. So if you head to wptavern.com and then search for the episode with these two fine people, then you’ll be able to find all of those links. It’s going to be easier to do it that way than to read anything out in an audio podcast.

The approach I think I want to take with this episode is one of somebody fairly new in the WordPress space. So if you are new in the WordPress space, then you might just have the one website. And maintaining that one simple website is probably a reasonably straightforward thing to do. You know, you log in, you update the plugins, you update the themes and what have you.

But if you’ve got any aspirations of becoming a bigger player in the WordPress space, perhaps you want to take on the job of maintaining multiple websites, perhaps you want to have clients and you want to maintain their websites, it becomes fairly obvious, fairly quickly, it’s a bit of a chore. There’s quite a lot of tasks that you need to do in order to keep those websites live.

So that’s what we’re going to talk about. What are those tasks? What’s important to notice if you are a WordPress freelancer or agency owner. What are the things that you need to make sure that your clients are getting updated with and for? And then I guess we’ll sort of mention right at the beginning that Modular DS is something which kind of can take that process off your shoulders and make it fairly automated. But you can go and check out that of your own accord.

So let’s just get into it then. What are the things that you would need to worry about? You can interrupt each other as you see fit. What are the kind of tasks that as a newbie WordPress we may not even know are coming our way, when we’ve got 2, 3, 5, 50 websites that we’ve got to keep maintained?

[00:08:14] Héctor de Prada: I don’t think it’s, how to say, like that we don’t know we have to do that, or that we don’t expect to do it when we are trying to manage a few websites. Reyes and I, we were talking this morning, normally maintenance or maintenance tasks are something nobody is very thrilled about doing, okay. It’s not like the best job. Like, you can be a designer because you love creativity and designing things, or a developer because you love to build things.

But I haven’t met anybody that is like, oh, my dream is to update plugins, create backups, and restore the website when it’s broken, you know? I think that’s the number one challenge, okay. Normally I see that one of the biggest problems is that we know maintenance has to be done in a website, but we don’t always do it. And when we have more and more websites, it becomes even a bigger problem, because we also let it aside more and more because it’s too much work. So that’s one of the main problems.

[00:09:17] Nathan Wrigley: One of the things that in my life, I don’t know what the number of websites was, but there was a point where each morning, because I decided to do the updating on a more or less daily basis, there came a point where you realise that you’d now logged into X number of websites. So you’d gone to the URL to log in, you’d found the username and password, you’d logged in, you’d inspected whether there were plugins or themes to be updated. You’d gone to them individually, you’d update them in a careful manner to make sure nothing got broken, and you moved on to the next website. And at some point you kind of have the intuition, how many minutes or hours have I just lost?

And whilst for one or two websites this really isn’t a problem, I guess what we’re talking about here is something at scale, when you’re over a, let’s say 2 or 3 or 5, or whatever that number is. It does start to add up, and you can’t afford to waste time in that way. And I think it’s exactly like you said, you don’t really know going into it that this is what you’re going to end up doing with your WordPress websites. But you’re right, nobody wrote down on their bucket list of things to do in life, I would like to update plugins for a living.

[00:10:23] Héctor de Prada: And it’s very important at the same time. Like we said, yeah, maybe Reyes, you can say a little bit more about it. But maintenance, it’s really important for many reasons, in particular in the WordPress ecosystem.

[00:10:34] Reyes Martínez: Yeah, I would say that it’s just that, that it’s not the most glamorous part of managing a website, like all the maintenance tasks. But I think it’s also what keep things running smoothly and professionally. I guess that’s the difference between being reactive and being proactive as well. I mean, that makes all the difference. So even though it’s not the most, I don’t know, glamorous part, it’s still very important to keep things professionally.

[00:11:03] Nathan Wrigley: What are the things that we’re updating? So we’ve covered plugins and themes, and I suspect that they’re the ones most people, and again, the audience for this podcast is really broad, so obviously that sentence will be really blindingly obvious to many people. But there may be a proportion of people who don’t even know that that kind of stuff needs to be updated. So let’s just work from the basics upwards. There’s plugins and themes. When you talk about maintenance, what else are you bringing into that?

[00:11:30] Héctor de Prada: You have the updates, both plugin, themes and the Core of WordPress, because it also gets updated. Now it’s once a year, it used to be like two, three times a year so those are also very important updates. But normally it’s mostly, because some people might ask, why should I update a plugin? If my website is working, if it’s perfectly fine, why do I have to update a plugin or a theme?

Well, one of the biggest things in maintenance, because we have to do these updates, is the security part. I am positive that WordPress is a secure solution, that is why it powers 40 something percent of the web. But at the same time, we have 60,000 different plugins just in the WordPress repository. Each one of them is created by an independent team or developers. And even when everybody tries to create the best possible plugin, a secure plugin, and everything, there is human error, of course. And there is always people, since WordPress is so popular, trying to find vulnerabilities to attack these kind of plugins or themes.

So many times, the most important updates are security updates. To avoid that, you have an older version of a plugin or a theme that maybe got exposed, and somebody found a vulnerability, and your website might get hacked because you didn’t do the updates. So even if your website is functioning perfectly, you should still do those updates. And this is something, for example, a lot of end clients, they normally don’t understand when you run an agency and stuff, because they don’t see the point of doing this. But this is one of the reasons, it’s super important.

[00:13:08] Nathan Wrigley: In the normal experience in life, you go into a shop and you buy a thing, like some new sunglasses or a pair of shoes. You don’t anticipate having to update the shoes or update the sunglasses. You kind of just bought the thing and the thing is now yours and off it goes. You know, you expect it to function as sunglasses from now on, and the shoes will keep going as shoes. You know, you might have to replace them from time to time, but that’s another thing altogether. So it’s kind of hard to encapsulate that.

But also, I suspect that most clients wouldn’t even know that there’s this sort of specter of security problems and the fact that bad things could potentially happen. Most clients I imagine have just come to you, the agency, the freelancer, because they want a website. They’re not interested particularly in all of that, but you have to explain that to them. And I always thought that was quite hard. I always got an intuition that the clients kind of thought, what are you on about? I’ve just bought this thing from you, why do I need to update it? Why do I need to keep doing these things?

[00:14:07] Héctor de Prada: Education is one of the biggest parts in having a WordPress maintenance service in your agency or as a professional. Most people, end clients, many people is not tech people so they won’t understand. Updates, backups, these are all very not tangible things. So it’s not hard to explain, but it is more, it’s not like you go to a store, okay? You buy something, it normally doesn’t need maintenance. But I would say it’s like, you buy a house, you buy a car, it needs maintenance, okay? Because you can keep running with a car, but even if the car still works, maybe the brakes, at some point they will stop working and you will have a crash and nobody wants that. So I would say a website is more like a car than a normal product.

[00:14:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s a really nice example because with a car particularly, there are bad people who are literally trying to break into the car and take the car away, or do damage to the car, or steal bits from the car. That explains it really well.

Okay, let’s imagine that you’ve had that conversation, you’ve done that education piece, you’ve said to the clients, look, we need some kind of thing going on in the background. There has to be some kind of ongoing relationship between me, the website builder, the developer, and you, the client. But what are those tasks? What are the things, I guess your software will handle these kind of things, but just talking about them hypothetically, what are the list of things just beyond plugin, theme, Core updates? Are there any other things which you recommend?

[00:15:32] Reyes Martínez: Besides updates there are also, for example, like I think it’s very important making regular backups. Monitoring up time and performance. Checking for security issues, you were just talking about that as well. Vulnerabilities, cleaning up the database, and in general, like making sure the site is running smoothly, like contact forms and links are working.

Because there are things that even people think they might have not, I don’t know, like they are not very important. They can have an impact on their business as well. For example, like a broken contact form, that’s just like a very small example, but yeah, those things come to mind. I don’t know, Héctor, if you want to add anything else.

[00:16:15] Héctor de Prada: I think those are the main ones, like your backups and the restoration of the backups when you have a problem. It happened to me I have to say. When we had the agency, I remember more than a few times having a client calling me and telling me, hey Héctor, the website is not working. And I was like, I didn’t know. So it’s like a very, very embarrassing moment because you’re supposed to be taking care of the website, but you didn’t know it wasn’t working until the client told you.

So things like monitoring. When I started making websites, I couldn’t monitor them at all. If they break, I wouldn’t find out because somebody told me or I was just trying to do something and I found out. So monitoring as well. Security Monitoring, like you said, for vulnerabilities, for malware. There are a bunch of tools. I mean, it’s not only tools, maintenance tools, like it can be Modular or others.

There are a bunch of tools in WordPress, like for everything in WordPress, that can help you with this maintenance task. Because the ideal thing, like we were saying, is to automate them so they don’t take so much time. Even if you only have one website, the ideal thing is that backups, monitoring, you have most of it automated, so you make sure even if you forget, if you go on holiday or whatever, it will still be running.

[00:17:30] Reyes Martínez: Yeah, and you can get alerts, for example. Like Héctor was saying, if a website goes down, you can get alerts so you don’t have to be monitoring all the time. Imagine like manual monitoring or going site by site, just checking if everything is working correctly. And monitoring, it’s exactly a big task as well of maintenance and because it can help you catch problems early.

[00:17:55] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, let’s just break all that now and then. So we’re imagining a scenario where we’ve built a website, we’ve handed it over to a client, and then we’re sort of presenting with the client the scenario, look, although we’ve given you the thing, here’s the website, there it is, it’s on the internet, there’s a whole load of other things that we need to do in the background.

And there’s an education piece there, but there’s also a bit of sales that has to go on there because you have to persuade them, presumably that the thing that I’m suggesting here, you are going to need to pay for probably, there’ll be a, some kind of subscription model going on there. We will do all of these things in return for a monthly fee or whatever it might be.

But broadly it is updating things. So that’s plugins, themes and Core. Making sure that those things are available. Then there’s the backup piece, a different thing altogether, and that’s just basically storing in multiple locations, an entire version of the website, the database, and the files to make sure that if an absolute catastrophe occurs, you can go back to whenever the website was last saved successfully, minus any security problems that you might have.

And then another thing is uptime monitoring, which is the process of just alerting you, and I presume it’s you, not the client, that something’s gone wrong. The website that was there 10 minutes ago is not here now. And that’s a really, really, you know, that’s not a once a day thing, that’s once every two minutes kind of thing. You want to know the minute the website goes down, so that you can be the person that contacts the client to say, look, we see that the website’s gone down. And in some curious sense, you actually paint yourself in a good light by admitting something before they’ve even learned about it.

But also something that you said that I never really think about is the idea of bits of the website, which may appear to work, but which don’t work. So the contact form is a big one. You know that whole egg on your face moment where you realise that possibly for six months, the contact form hasn’t worked, has never worked, and you have no way of saying to your client, look, sorry, we’ll be able to reverse that, we’ll be able to get all of the contact forms that would have been submitted over the last six months, because you won’t. It’s gone. And if it wasn’t working, that’s a catastrophe.

But then my mind then goes to things like e-commerce. The site might look fine. Everything might check out okay, when I say checkout, I don’t mean checkout through the cart, I mean, looks fine. But the checkout might not work. Maybe people can’t actually buy things off your website, so it’s up but it’s not working.

So there’s all this stuff. And I guess what Modular DS is doing, and the rivals that you’ve got in that space, is they’re trying to take all of those tasks, package them up into a wrapper piece of software, and basically you don’t really have to worry too much about it. You just sort of set it all up, make sure that all the dominoes are set up in the right place. And then it will do all of those things for you without you having to do too much. Have I got that about right?

[00:20:54] Héctor de Prada: Yeah, of course. That’s the idea, to try to centralise everything when you have a lot of websites. And at the same time, like we were saying, yeah, automate these kinds of tasks so they don’t slip away. And it’s a great point about the WooCommerce because one thing about maintenance is that it’s very dependent on the type of website you have. I mean, it’s not the same maintenance you have to do for maybe a small corporate website, like the Meetup group website, for example, than a big e-commerce that is selling hundreds of products every day. You won’t need to have the same systems in place, not for backups, not for monitoring, not for any kind of checks. So that’s also very important to know. Maintenance is very different depending on the website.

[00:21:38] Nathan Wrigley: So in the case of this whole idea of being able to do this for your client, I’m guessing your position would be that this is something that you can in fact sell to your clients on a regular basis. It’s not like you built the site back in 2024 and you’ve charged a fee for it, and then that’s the end of that. This is more of a, you charged a fee to build the website, and now we have this kind of, I think the term which I hear used a lot is like Care Plan or something like that.

Some kind of process of, on a monthly basis, annual basis, whatever it might be, you offer these different things in return for a subscription fee, and therefore kind of have recurring revenue. And in many cases that recurring revenue might not need a lot of work. You know, fingers crossed, if everything works out okay, and WordPress updates itself correctly, and the plugins all work out and there are no security vulnerabilities, you might have days, weeks, entire months go by where your revenue is really not that difficult to manage.

[00:22:39] Héctor de Prada: In what you said there, it’s like all the main things. Not only you can offer Care Plans or Web Maintenance Plans, but you should as a professional. Because I’ve heard you talk on another podcast, Nathan, you were saying that when you’re a freelancer or an agency, you are always waiting for next projects to see when they come. What’s going to be next? And if you’re going to have enough work to keep going.

And that’s why recurring revenue, it’s so important for us as professionals. And in web design or web development, it’s not so easy to get besides web maintenance. It might be if you want to go to plugin development or theme development or do something like that, you can start getting recurring revenue.

But if it’s just building websites, I think the only way to get that recurring revenue is by offering Care Plans. That’s why I always say, the critical thing that you were also mentioning before, is that it’s of course also a sales job to sell this to a client, but I don’t think it has to be once the website is generated, and you try to tell the client, okay, we did the website, it’s looking good, it’s working. And now we are going to do maintenance on the website, and you have to pay this or that.

I think it has to go way before that. When we were an agency, what worked really good for us, so I always give this advice because it really worked for us, is that we used to talk about maintenance with the clients before we started the website project. If somebody would come to us saying, okay, we want a new website design for our company, we’d include it always in our proposal. It’ll be, okay, we are going to design the website, we are going to do the development of the website, and then after that we are going to care for the website.

So we are going to do a maintenance on the website because this is very important. We are not going to just leave you there with your website, out in the open. Like, you don’t really know how it works, but we are going to be there with you. And this was like a massive change for us because when we were selling it this way, once the website was completed and we would tell the client, okay, now is the time to start the web maintenance job, and they were like, oh great, so this what we were talking about. It is not even a discussion anymore. It is like, oh great, it’s finally the time. So that’s like crucial. It was crucial for us.

[00:25:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think when people do get recurring revenue into their business, especially around maintenance, it does feel like, why didn’t I do this before? Because it really is kind of, I hate to use the phrase, you are kind of leaving money on the table a little bit.

I wonder what both of you have in your head around the way to pitch that product. Because I went through lots of different ways of doing it. Some of them I’m not that proud of. So for example, in some cases I would emphasise the problems that could happen. You know, your website could go down. The internet can be a bit of a dark place, there’s hackers out there. And in the end it felt a bit like, I’m trying to scare you into giving me this maintenance deal. But then on the other hand, there was the sort of more positive way of doing it. You know, we’ll make sure that your website is always up and just different ways.

I wonder how you, both of you, tackle that. Do you have a particular kind of language? Do you have like a brochure or a booklet that you pass on to somebody which outlines it all?

[00:25:59] Héctor de Prada: For us, at least when we were an agency, you are seeing that I like to talk a lot. So for me it was like I could talk a lot with the clients. I would just try to be very educational, like we said from the beginning, in calls or in meetings I could talk about maintenance, the task it requires. Trying to explain it for everybody, of course, like not trying to make it sound technical or anything. Just trying to make them understand that technology evolves, WordPress evolves, the needs that the website, or the business, might have change so we should keep the website evolving with the business so it always stays in good shape.

Luckily, even when this is a terrible thing for our field, is that many, many clients, they come to you when they have had a bad experience before, having a website design. And this experience, so many times has more to do about not having maintenance than about the web design itself. Because they might come after three, four years and they might tell you, somebody did this website for me four years ago and now nothing works.

And it’s like, okay, when they did the website, everything worked. What happened? Nobody looked at the website for four years, so now nothing is working, which is understandable. So that also helps you a lot to make them understand that you don’t want that to happen again.

[00:27:22] Reyes Martínez: I think it’s also important to maybe reframe things or just showing clients that that’s part of, I mean that you care about their success over time. So it’s not just about launching their site. I don’t know, sometimes I like to think about maintenance as insurance. You hope you don’t need it, but if something goes wrong, you’ll be glad to have it. So I think it’s the same. Like, if you have someone who’s taking care of your website to make sure it’s healthy, that it is performant and that everything is running smoothly. I think you are investing in its long-term success as well.

[00:27:57] Nathan Wrigley: Framing it as an investment is quite a good way around it, isn’t it? As opposed to a, it’s not like a cost, it’s an investment. You’re putting something in so that it maintains. Spending money kind of feels like, oh, I’ve spent it, it’s all gone. Whereas an investment, you feel a bit more like, okay, I’ve spent some money, but as a result, things are going to be better in the future.

[00:28:15] Héctor de Prada: You both said it, Reyes, you said right now that it is kind of an insurance also, if something bad happens. Because when something really bad, like the website crashes or gets hacked or whatever, because it can always happen, at some point everybody will be glad to have a professional taking care of things.

Because another way to frame this, and you were saying that before Nathan, is that I’ve seen many, many professionals that they are like, okay, so the client doesn’t want to pay for maintenance, so I’m just going to wait until they have a huge problem that will come sooner or later. When they come without the maintenance deal, I’m going to charge them a bunch and then they will be glad they get the maintenance package. And they will start paying for that. I’m not saying I recommend that, I haven’t done that, but I’ve seen so many people do that at the same time.

[00:29:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think describing his insurance is quite interesting. The curious thing about insurance is, how to describe it, at some point you might begin to resent paying the insurance if you never have an accident or nothing is ever stolen. So one of the things that I often got with the Care Plans was this whole thing of years would go by, I would do my job well, so nothing ever happened.

And so after 24 months of nothing ever happening, the client would turn around and say, what am I actually spending the money on? And then it occurred to me, okay, maybe there should have been some process of telling you what I was doing each month. Some kind of report or something to give to the client to say, look, literally things are happening. It’s not like we’ve gone away with your monthly subscription and done nothing.

So I wondered if you had any thoughts around those, you know those clients who think nothing’s happening, why am I spending this each month in order for apparently nothing to happen? It’s just a black hole.

[00:30:02] Reyes Martínez: That’s actually one of the hardest parts as well, like showing all the work that professionals are, like us are doing in the background. That work, that it’s not so visible as well, and how to communicate the value of all that work.

So I think there are, I don’t know, there are many different ways to communicate that value, but for example, like reports are pretty common. Showing, not just task, but all you have been monitoring and performance data, updates. And just, again, like educating on how all the work done have an impact on their business.

Because I think it’s also easy to go maybe, or to get into technical details, but I think clients don’t really care if you update a plugin or if you, you know, how you are maintaining their site. I think they care that their website is secure, fast and it’s working. It’s always working.

[00:30:58] Nathan Wrigley: One of the things that I ended up doing, which I think worked well was, I eventually landed on the idea of this report thing. So I would issue a report and it would say, during the course of the last month, these things have happened. And it would be a list of all the plugins that been updated, maybe WordPress Core had been updated, maybe I’d done some work on the server to update that, a PHP version or something like that. So all of those kind of things. And then some kind of indication of how the uptime went. You know, it was 99.9% last month, we had a little glitch on Tuesday or whatever, but that was taken care of within five minutes.

But the thing which worked best for me was I offered a proportion of time, based upon the plan that they gave me, of my actual time. And that could be deployed in any which way they wanted.So, for example, it could have been, I will just tell you what that report means or let’s just knock our heads together for half an hour or an hour, and figure out if there’s anything you wanted doing on the website. Maybe you want a telephone number updating or you want to have a different design on the homepage because Christmas is coming or whatever it might be.

And interestingly, most clients never took me up on it, but the mere fact that it was offered, and I’d offered the time, there was just something a bit more to it. There was something more tangible and more credible about it. And then when the clients did take me up on it, and I could explain what had happened and that it wasn’t this black hole where the money was just falling into for the maintenance plan and nothing happened, that really worked.

But I had the time available. And it may be that some people, most people don’t have that time available. For me, that was a good thing, you know, that kind of personal touch was a way to make it work.

[00:32:33] Héctor de Prada: Also another thing that is very important to solve, for example, in client reports, and it’s not so obvious, it’s because it is not a job you are doing. It’s some stats about how the website is working for their business. Because 99% of the time a website comes from a business that needs an online presence.

So it should be very important for them to know how this is performing or how this is helping the business. And I found this hundreds of times, that people have a website and they don’t know if somebody’s visiting the website, if you can find it on Google. They don’t know anything about the website. They are just like, yeah, I have a website there, but I don’t really know what’s happening with it.

So I think adding things like, I don’t know, like Google Analytics or any other analytics. Or search console results so you know, it’s somebody coming from Google or where is people coming. Or if you have an international website, from which countries is people coming. Things like that, I think it’s like very valuable for the end client, for the business, to know how the website is performing. And it’s not always added, but I think it’s crucial to also put that information.

[00:33:41] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know if anybody actually makes a business out of what you do? So, do people have a business of maintaining websites? Just doing that work. So they’ve decided they don’t want to be involved in creating the website, but they want to turn this product, if you like, that we’re talking about now. Is that a thing? Do people do that for a living? They maintain other people’s websites for them. Maybe you could bind yourself to an agency and they would hand the maintenance side to you. You are both nodding, so I’m guessing the answer’s yes.

[00:34:11] Héctor de Prada: We know many people, but we are kind of biased because most of our clients are agencies or freelancers that manage a lot of websites. So many of them are actually specialised in this kind of service. So we have freelancers that manage like 120 websites, and that’s all they do. They don’t do any websites, they just manage websites.

And then we have agencies that they are like fully specialised in web maintenance, web caring, and maybe if you have an urgency in your site because it’s broken or something, they can help you with that also. But they don’t design websites or create new websites.

So I think, yes. And one example I always say is that, at least in Spain, if you search in Google for WordPress maintenance, there are so many page results. So that means it’s a profitable business, okay? There is a lot of competence of people trying to get leads out of those keywords. I would imagine in most countries it could be the same. So yeah, definitely. I think it’s possible. I see it every day, so yeah, a hundred percent

[00:35:10] Nathan Wrigley: That’s kind of interesting because it may be that you are, I don’t know, you just want to take a break from actually building websites, and this might be an interesting way to pivot, especially if you’ve got your foot in the door with a bunch of agencies, and you know people that could supply you that work and they don’t wish to be involved in that. That’s curious.

[00:35:27] Héctor de Prada: You can automate much more stuff than in a web design process, or web development. In maintenance, like we were saying, with tools like Modular or other tools, you can automate most of the maintenance tasks. So many times, yeah, like one person can manage like 120 websites. Imagine how long it would take to build 120 websites. It’s almost impossible. You could say, oh, I don’t know, like five years, seven years. But you can maintain every week or every month, 120 websites by yourselves, just with the tools that are available. So that’s a really big difference.

[00:36:04] Nathan Wrigley: Does this maintenance landscape change? Because I’m just curious, the web industry changes all the time, but broadly, you know, plugins and theme updates, that’s been around since WordPress got plugins and themes. Hosting and backups, again, similar.

But there have been developments in the more recent past where I’m thinking, okay, you could definitely push that into the maintenance idea. So things that come to mind are, I don’t know, optimisation, Core Web Vital scores, maybe something like that could leak in.

And the one at the minute, which I think would be really interesting, and again, maybe it’s a thing already, is accessibility. Some kind of report about, okay, it looks like these pages need a particular bit of attention, or something’s gone wrong here from an accessibility point of view. And so really my question there is, does the landscape of maintenance change, or is it broadly fixed with whatever it is now is how it’ll be in a decade?

[00:36:57] Héctor de Prada: Now also with AI, I don’t even know what’s going to happen in a decade. But I do think things change. For example, with accessibility, like you said, now in Europe it’s going to be big changes. With security as well, with the new Cyber Resilience Act, it’s going to be changes.

And for example, we saw it a few years ago with the data privacy law in Europe. I’ve seen so many agencies offering legal checks for the cookie banners and things like that. To also add in maintenance, I don’t know, like seven years ago, that wasn’t a theme because it wasn’t mandatory, so nobody really cared that much. And it is the same with accessibility.

A few years ago, nobody, almost nobody cared about that. And I think now because of the law changes, this is going to change drastically and almost every professional is going to start doing things related to accessibility, and is going to care about that. And it’s also going to be able to offer that to their clients as an upsell, or as an extra value, they’re going to give in their care plans.

So yeah, I do think it changes. We don’t have a lot of changes because the basics are always the same, the updates, the backups, the monitoring. But there are things that, yeah, might bring big changes every once in a while and we have to adapt.

[00:38:12] Reyes Martínez: I just wanted to add that also with AI and no-code tools, I mean, it’s easier than ever to launch a website. But what happens after that? Because maybe we find that more and more sites are being left behind with no updates, no backups.

What I mean with this is that maybe, maybe not, there’s already a growing maybe opportunity, because there are more and more sites that we don’t know what would happen with them. And they will need maintenance for sure. So I think we are seeing a growing opportunity as well, there for people who want to manage or dedicate themselves to maintain websites, yeah.

[00:38:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it does feel like in the year 2025 when we’re recording this, there are some key bits of legislation which are coming. You know, the European Accessibility Act very, very soon going to be completely mandatory across the whole of the EU. I mean, basically it should be something that you’ve taken care of already, but nevertheless.

And so these kind of things I imagine, will become part of the platform, the ethos of doing maintenance in the future. So that’s kind of interesting.

Just for the last moment or two, minute or two, let’s talk a little bit about what you have. So Modular DS, I’ll put a link into the show notes, but is the URL, is it modulards.com? Is that where we would go?

[00:39:30] Héctor de Prada: Yeah, we could say dash EN for the English version.

[00:39:33] Nathan Wrigley: Lovely, okay, so I will link to that into the show notes. I’ll link to the English version in this case, just because I think that makes most sense given that we’re all talking in English.

This is what you do. This is that in a nutshell. You have a service that you can sign up to. Is it plugin based? Is it a SaaS? Is it a mixture of SaaS and a plugin? How does it work and what kind of things can you do?

[00:39:56] Héctor de Prada: It’s kind of a mixture. It’s a SaaS outside of WordPress, we are going to say, but it needs a connector plugin to connect your websites to Modular DS. So basically what you do is you connect your different websites, the ones you manage, to Modular, and then from there you can like centralise most of the maintenance tasks, do updates, for example, in all the sites at the same time.

And also you can automate monitoring, vulnerability analysis. You can automate client reports like the generation of this client reports. So it basically tries to help, yeah, agencies, freelancer to save time, to have a good maintenance business. And also, like we have been saying, to sell the maintenance business to their clients, which we all know is not easy. So that’s what we try to do.

[00:40:42] Nathan Wrigley: So if I were somebody looking after my site and a bunch of others, you cater to that market, but also you are catering towards the more agency owner, if you know what I mean, where they’ve got multiple websites.

Is it possible to, white label is often the word I hear surrounding this. Is it possible to sort of make it so that it appears your own? That seems to be something that people really like, but I don’t know if you offer that feature.

[00:41:04] Héctor de Prada: You can white label everything that goes to the client. Let’s say, client reports. Of course, you can white label that, like your agency logo, your agency email to send the reports. Also, you can white label the plugin. So in the WordPress installation, you can change the plugin info so the client doesn’t know you’re using Modular, if you don’t want them to know. So yeah, of course, that’s important for many professionals, yeah.

[00:41:27] Nathan Wrigley: You could definitely be checking that out. And obviously this entire episode really was to provide an education piece around what it is that you might need to do, especially for those people who are new. You may not realise that there’s an actual business opportunity here for you, but also that there’s a whole cavalcade of different things that you can do.

So just to reprise, plugin, theme, updates, plus up time monitoring, backups, client reports. There’s a whole laundry list of things in there.

Yeah, I think that’s everything I wanted to ask. So if that’s the case, I will say, Reyes and Héctor, thank you very much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:42:04] Héctor de Prada: Well, thank you, Nathan.

[00:42:05] Reyes Martínez: Thank you.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how speculative loading is speeding up your WordPress website.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today we have Felix Arntz. Felix is a Senior Software Engineer at Google, and a WordPress Core contributor from Germany, currently residing in San Francisco, California. He helped establish the WordPress Core performance team, and has been heavily contributing to its efforts. He has been using WordPress for a decade and contributing back to the project since 2015. More recently, he has stepped into the role of the inaugural performance lead for the WordPress 6.2 release, and subsequently of the 6.3 and 6.8 releases. In the latter release, he spearheaded development, and launch, of the new speculative loading feature, which is the focus of the podcast today.

Speculative loading is one of the most important, and yet, almost invisible performance enhancements of recent times. If you’re on WordPress 6.8, this new feature is already active on your site, working quietly in the background to make page navigation faster, but you might never know from the WordPress UI. There’s no menu, no toggle, and no obvious indicator to show it’s there.

Felix explains exactly what speculative loading is and why it feels almost like browser magic. The Ability for WordPress, using the browser’s new Speculation Rules API to load the next page just as the user is about to visit it. It’s a clever use of browser signals like mouse clicks, and hovers, to anticipate navigation, shaving off precious milliseconds, sometimes even providing what feels like an instant page load.

Felix clarifies the difference between conservative and more aggressive approaches to speculative loading. And why the WordPress core team opted for the safest, least wasteful, option by default, while still giving developers or advanced users the hooks and tools to customize, or even disable it, as needed.

Felix discusses the origins of the feature as a plugin, the testing and data collection undertaking with tens of thousands of sites, and how this real world data gave the team confidence to ship speculative loading to all WordPress users. We talk about what those performance wins mean at scale, how a 2% improvement on 43% of the internet translates into saving users untold hours of waiting collectively.

We also get into the weeds on measurement and methodology, how the team uses data from the Chrome user Experience Report and HTTP Archive to track web performance, prioritize features, and validate real world impact. Felix offers insights into how these global, anonymized data, sets allow the performance team to make truly data-driven decisions.

Beyond the tech, Felix addresses practical considerations such as how to opt out or fine tune speculative loading if you have specific needs. How environmental concerns are balanced by default configurations. And how plugins or agencies might build on this foundation in the future.

If you’ve ever wondered how large scale browser level improvements make their way into WordPress Core, or simply want to know if there’s a way to make your own WordPress site that much faster, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Felix Arntz. I am joined on the podcast by Felix Arntz. Hello, Felix.

[00:04:46] Felix Arntz: Hey. Happy to be here.

[00:04:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. I appreciate you joining us. Felix is joining us all the way from California. I’m in the UK so there’s a big time gap. And I appreciate you getting up early and talking to me. That’s fantastic.

Felix is going to be talking to us today about something which is now in WordPress, and you may not even know that it’s in there because there’s nothing to see here. But the endeavor of what Felix has built is to make all WordPress websites basically immediately better. More performant, so that the end users of your websites will be able to access your content more quickly.

It is something that’s really fascinating. But before we begin digging into all that, I know it’s a dreadfully banal question, Felix, but would you just tell us who you are so that people understand your credentials in the WordPress space?

[00:05:32] Felix Arntz: Sure. Thank you. I have been contributing to WordPress now for 10 years. So I started as a freelancer building websites using WordPress, and eventually got into contributing to WordPress Core after I went to my first WordCamp, which was a great way to get started.

Yeah, ever since then I’ve been contributing to WordPress Core, and eventually became a Core Committer. And now, for over six years, I’ve been working at Google, the team where we focus on CMS projects for the most part. So I’ve been, especially in the last good three years or so, I’ve been sponsored by Google to contribute to WordPress with a specific focus on improving performance.

So our team essentially co-founded the WordPress performance team, which is an official part of the wordpress.org project. And ever since that was founded in late 2021, we’ve been contributing to that effort, and the speculative loading feature is a big part of that.

[00:06:25] Nathan Wrigley: That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Can I just rewind a little bit though, and talk about Google for a minute. So, are you employed by Google to commit to WordPress Core? Do you spend a hundred percent of your time working on WordPressy things, or do you have a proportion of your time which is devoted to more, and I’m doing air quotes, Google things?

[00:06:46] Felix Arntz: Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t say that I contribute a hundred percent of my time, but a good chunk, probably 70, 80 or something. Our focus is, when it’s not on WordPress, it’s still on other somewhat related open source projects. So we have been contributing, we’ve been also working with other CMSs here and there.

[00:07:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s interesting because I know that Google have a big presence. If you go to the flagship WordPress events, you know, WordCamp Asia, WordCamp US, and so on, then Google very often have a huge advertising booth. You know, they’re a global partner if you like.

But drawing the line between Google and Open Source CMS is a little bit hard to do. It’s almost like a philanthropic thing. Because I guess their job is to just try and make the internet better and part of it, if they can make 43% of the internet better by seconding somebody like you to commit to the project, that’s just good for everybody.

So yeah, bravo to Google. I appreciate the fact that they’re sponsoring you and helping the project in that way.

Also bravo to you and the team, the Performance Team. It is just a relentless good news story coming out of the Performance Team. So, I don’t know, when did you say, 2019 it was founded?

[00:07:54] Felix Arntz: Late 2021, but things really kicked off like mid 2022 I feel.

[00:07:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and I am habitual about the WordPress news, and it just never stops. The Performance Team do something profound, help everybody out, it just ships into Core. Most people don’t even know that things have happened because, you know, they’re not in the baseball in the same way that you and I probably are.

A profound thanks. Maybe there was just this massive backlog of things that needed to be tackled. Maybe not. But it did seem that the minute the doors opened to the Performance Team, lots of dominoes fell really quickly.

So thank you on behalf of me and everybody who uses WordPress for the work that, I don’t know whether you feel that you get the credit that’s due to you, but I’m giving you some credit now, so thank you.

[00:08:37] Felix Arntz: Thank you. I appreciate it. That’s definitely great to hear.

[00:08:39] Nathan Wrigley: I’m pleased you know, that there’s people as capable as you who are doing this kind of work and that you’re willing to do it in the background. And a big piece of that is what we’re going to talk about today.

Landed in WordPress 6.8, but has a history prior to that as a plugin. It’s called speculative loading. It sounds impressive. But it also, I guess it is impressive and it’s a bit like voodoo. It’s kind of doing things that you wouldn’t imagine were possible. Do you want to just tell us what it is? What is speculative loading?

[00:09:08] Felix Arntz: So essentially, speculative loading, the idea is that when you navigate to a new URL, when you are browsing through a website and you go to a URL, the moment that you land on the URL, it starts loading. And we probably know that the performance aspect of that is very important to the user experience.

So if a page takes, I don’t know, three seconds to load, that’s not great. If it takes eight seconds to load, it’s probably horrible of a user experience. And so one of the performance team’s goals is to make that time that it takes a load shorter. So what then speculative loading does is load the URL, the idea is that it loads the URL before you even get there.

[00:09:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s the bit that’s voodoo. That’s the bit that just sounds like you’ve basically hopped into Back to the Future and you’ve gone back in time a moment or something. It’s very counterintuitive. So you are going to have to explain, how on earth does it do that?

[00:09:59] Felix Arntz: Right, right. Essentially, there are browser, there are heuristics which can be relied upon to hopefully assume correctly that a URL will be visited. So when you are on a page on the website, there is of course links to other pages on the website. So if you hover over the link with your mouse, if you’re on a computer for instance, and you hover over the link with your mouse, maybe you’ll click it. That’s like one level of signal. It’s not the strongest signal.

But then an even stronger signal is when you actually click the link. When you click a link, you want to go to that URL. I think that’s a fair assumption in like 99 plus percent of cases. So when you click on the link, that’s technically still before you’re at the other URL though. We’re talking about milliseconds. You probably think when you click, you are already on the other URL, but that’s not the reality. There is like maybe, I don’t know, 200, 300, 500, however long it takes, there are some milliseconds in between the time you actually click and that the other URL opens.

So by loading, for instance, by loading a URL, when you click on the link, you still gain those, whatever, maybe 500 milliseconds. I’m just going to make that up now, and reduce the actual load time by that.

[00:11:07] Nathan Wrigley: Let me just prize that apart. So we are now going to talk about a tiny fraction of time. For the next few minutes, we’re going to be talking about literal milliseconds. So let me imagine that I’m on my computer, desktop computer, let’s start there. I’m on a webpage and there’s a bunch of links, buttons, what have you.

I’m holding my mouse, my mouse approaches the button and it begins to slow down, you know, because at some point we have to rest on the button. So there’s this deceleration of the mouse and the cursor, and it eventually lands there. And then I click it.

Now my intuition is that the click event is the moment, that’s when everything begins, if you know what I mean. But are you saying that you can go back in time prior to me actually hitting the button with my finger? Is it the mere fact that, okay, the mouse has come to a standstill, you haven’t engaged the finger yet. Maybe the finger is literally on the way down in the real world, in this slow motion universe we’re imagining. Is that kind of it? It’s taking heuristics about, where is the mouse now? How is it decelerating? Or is it literally he clicked? Because if it’s the click bit, then I don’t understand what’s different to how it usually was because it felt like the click was always the moment.

[00:12:19] Felix Arntz: There are different ways to configure speculative loading. And one way, and that’s the way that WordPress Core does now, is to only speculatively load on the click. You say now that that feels like it’s always been like that, but it’s not quite always been like, that because of what I tried to mention with there’s still like 500, maybe 300, whatever, little milliseconds time between the click and the actual URL loading.

So when you hit the other URL, then it starts fetching the HTML document and all the CSS and JavaScript and so on. By doing that already on the click, on the link, on the previous page that you are on, you still gain those, I’m going to say valuable milliseconds. And we’re probably talking about at the very least, a hundred milliseconds, maybe a few hundred milliseconds.

[00:13:04] Nathan Wrigley: It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s, you’ve invented time out of nowhere. You’ve completely conjured up time that didn’t, well, actually you’ve removed time. You’ve gone in the opposite direction. But that time was needlessly spent before. Now that time has been saved.

You also mentioned that the WordPress implementation, and we’ll get into how you might be able to configure that in a moment, but the default WordPress installation, so this is in every WordPress website from 6.8 onwards, it is set to, and I’m going to use the word conservative, but it’s set to a fairly dialed back approach to this Speculation Rules API.

I’m curious, and we’ll get into how you do it in WordPress, but just in terms of the Speculation Rules API, what are some of the more aggressive things that you could do if you wanted to? And is things like the mouse slowing down, is that potentially part of it? Those kind of things.

[00:13:55] Felix Arntz: Right. So maybe let me take a step back, first to clarify that there’s a speculative loading feature that is in WordPress Core, it’s built on a browser API that is called Speculation Rules API. We can talk about maybe two things. There’s like, well, how can you use the Speculation Rules API? There’s different ways to configure it, and that’s something that we could apply in WordPress. But then we could go beyond that, and I’m probably not the best person to speak about that, but we could also think, how can you actually, what could the Speculation Rules API possibly do, that it isn’t able to do today?

So in terms of using the Speculation Rules API, it allows different configuration modes in for what is called eagerness. And you actually said it right. It’s called conservative, the mode that WordPress currently uses. And it just means, I think it is conservative in the sense that it is the safest measure if you want to make sure you only load URLs that the user actually goes to.

But it’s also the least performance of all the options. It’s always a trade off because unfortunately we cannot predict the future, so there’s no real wizardry going on here. And because of that, there is always going to be a trade off. You can use signals that are very reliable on the user visiting the other URL, like clicking on the link. There is an scenario where you click a link and then you pull your mouse away before you let go of your finger. We probably all have done this, but we probably do this like 1% of our clicks, if even that. But people do this occasionally, very occasionally.

So that’s the way where a click would not trigger the actual URL to the link to be, that wouldn’t result in the user visiting the other URL. This would be the one example where conservative speculative loading would still load the other URL and the user wouldn’t go to it. But I think that risk, that trade off is very, very little because of how rarely that happens.

[00:15:46] Nathan Wrigley: Right, so the posture of the Performance Team was to go conservative. So although it’s not the most performant, it is the least likely to end up in, you know, needlessly downloading content that is perhaps never going to be looked at.

But again, just moving ourselves away from WordPress for a minute, the Speculation Rules API, if we were to go on the more eager side, what kind of things could be brought to bear? And again, not in the WordPress setup at the moment, but I know that you can modify those things. But what can the Rules API do, if you go like full eager?

[00:16:18] Felix Arntz: Right. So you can also use, the next after conservative is called moderate. That uses signals that are less explicit, like a hover. Again, I have to specify, on desktop it uses hovering, because on the phone you can’t hover, like you don’t have a mouse and it doesn’t know where your finger is if you don’t press the screen.

So, essentially, moderate on desktop, it relies on the hover over a link to preload the URL that is behind that link. So that generally, yeah, of course if you hover over link and then you click it, there may be like a second, easily a second between this, or there may even be five seconds in between those two actions, right? And sometimes you hover and click immediately. Other times you hover and you get back there, and then you click, and in that case, the whole page can technically be already loaded.

So that’s the part where speculative loading, if you configure it more eagerly, you can get to situations where you get instant page load. You go to the other page and it’s already completely loaded. There’s, for instance, there is also Core Web Vitals, metric Largest Contentful Paint, which measures the load time speed. So you can get to an LCP of zero. Like, literally. If you use it, for instance as moderate eagerness, let’s say your page normally takes two seconds to load completely, and you hover over a link, and then you get back there like three seconds later, you click, it’s already there, and your LCP is literally zero because you didn’t need to wait at all.

That’s the performance power that it has. But of course, it does also come with a trade off to consider. Like, how do you configure this in a way that it’s the least wasteful? And wasteful in the sense of loading URLs that the user does not go to, ends up not navigating to. But you have to basically weigh off, what is the performance gain? How do users typically use your website?

There’s also, there’s a lot of individual configurations that websites may want to do on their specific site. So going back to the conservative option that WordPress now uses, it’s just that, it’s simply that we want to give the bare minimum feature and we want to make the feature available in general to WordPress sites. But because WordPress is so massive, you need to go with a literally conservative default.

[00:18:25] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So that’s all really interesting, but it sounds like all of this is happening in the browser. So all of these events are being triggered by the browser. Again, forgive my ignorance, I’m presuming that Chromium, Chrome, Firefox, all of the other variants that there may be out there, I guess they’re all shipping some variant of this inside the browser because obviously it can’t be WordPress that’s doing this.

If that’s the case, is there kind of like a broad consortium of people who are working on this initiative, maybe other similar related performance initiatives, and trying to make them all browser compatible?

[00:19:03] Felix Arntz: So there is, the Speculation Rules API is currently, it’s available in Chrome, Edge and Opera, so in the Chromium based browsers, but it’s not available yet in Safari and Firefox. That means that people that use Safari or Firefox, they’re basically just not going to get the benefit.

[00:19:18] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s like a progressive enhancement. There’s no downside, it’s just an upside.

[00:19:22] Felix Arntz: Exactly. So because overall the browsers that support it are very widely used, plus the other browsers not having any negative effects of this feature being on a website, that’s why we thought it was a good time to roll it out.

[00:19:36] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s really interesting. It just suddenly, and completely unrelated to the conversation that we’ve had so far, it kind of makes me think that maybe in the future there’ll be a hardware layer to this. You know, imagine if my mouse had built into it some pressure sensation, or even proximity sensor where it could perceive that, you know, my finger is descending and it could fire the signal from the mouse to say, yeah, he’s about to click. Or even in a mobile phone, you know, you were mentioning earlier, we don’t know where your finger is. Maybe at some point in the future we will know where your finger is.

[00:20:09] Felix Arntz: That would be really powerful, yeah.

[00:20:10] Nathan Wrigley: It’d be kind of interesting. Okay, you heard it here first. But it’s not there yet. So, what has been the way that this has been implemented? My understanding is that you launched this as a plugin. I think you got a fairly high user account. I think 30,000, 50,000 or something websites.

[00:20:27] Felix Arntz: I think it’s now at 50,000.

[00:20:28] Nathan Wrigley: 50,000. So tons of data coming back. And presumably that data gave you the confidence to, yeah, let’s push this through. And I have a memory that, broadly speaking, you got fairly close to a 2% productivity gain. And obviously at 43% of the web, if we can do things 2% faster, doesn’t sound like a lot, 2%. But 2% of everything that WordPress gives up, that’s a lot.

[00:20:53] Felix Arntz: Performance is really like, people say sometimes things are numbers games, but performance is a tiny numbers game. Like it’s very hard to make performance wins sound very appealing. It’s like, here is 2% win. We scratched off 80 milliseconds of this, and it’s like, what is this even, like.

[00:21:08] Nathan Wrigley: But it literally is human years. It’s probably decades of time when you think about the internet as a whole. If you think about it in that sense, it’s really quite a lot of time.

[00:21:18] Felix Arntz: Exactly, and I think it’s important to remind ourselves of that sometimes. I feel myself like announcing something where it’s like, oh, here we scratched 80 milliseconds off. It sounds like nothing. It is quite something, but it sounds like so little that, I don’t know, I feel self-consciously saying such a tiny number as a great win.

But yeah, again, like I think it, you exactly mentioned it, the scale of rolling out performance enhancements like this, it really makes the number matter. And also, people browse so many webpages a day, like even for an individual person. If you go on one website, you easily might visit 10 URLs or more, and that’s just one website. So think about , again, I’m just continuing with that number, like if you had 80 milliseconds gain on all the webpages you visit in a day, I don’t know, it might come out at some seconds, maybe a minute, who knows. And if you do that every single day, like you gain time.

[00:22:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I agree. It’s difficult to parse, isn’t it? The human brain doesn’t kind of work that microscopic level. That really tiny fraction of time is so difficult to become important. But there’s this compound interest effect to it. You know, the more that it adds up, the more time you spend on the internet every day clicking things. And I suppose the curious thing here is, nobody even knows that it’s happened. You would presumably just think, gosh, that is a very quick website. You know, I’m having a fabulous experience here. Everything’s loading amazingly. They must have an amazing server set up or, you know, they’ve got everything configured perfectly. And all the while it’s the Speculation Rules API working in the background.

But I think we’ve got it, you know, it’s adding up to tons of time, probably years, maybe decades of time when you throw that across the whole footprint that WordPress have.

However, most people who don’t follow the WordPress news really, really carefully probably won’t know about this. And there’s nowhere to know about it really, apart from WordPress journalism, and the blog posts that go out from the Performance Team. Because there’s no way in the WordPress UI, there’s no setting, there’s no menu item to go to, there’s no toggle, there’s none of that.

So that then leads me to ask, is there a way to modify this? If you have a need for more eager. Or you just wish to, I don’t know, you’ve got a desire to turn it off for some reason. Can it be modified with code, with hooks, with whatever?

[00:23:31] Felix Arntz: Yeah, certainly. Quick context on the reason that there is no UI in WordPress Core to control it, is that it’s considered a very technical feature, and the philosophy of WordPress Core says, decisions not options. That’s one of the Core philosophies. So try to use defaults that work for the majority, and most people won’t have to change. And then especially when it comes to very technical things, you don’t want to bother an end user that just wants to maintain, create their website with, here you need to learn now about this complex Speculation Rules API.

Like, we already talk about this for like 30 minutes now, and there’s probably so much more to uncover. So you can imagine that certain site owners don’t want to deal with that. So that’s why there’s no UI in WordPress Core. But it can be modified through hooks like you’re saying. There are several filters and actions to modify the behavior programmatically.

And in addition, the Speculative Loading plugin that existed prior to the Core launch, that still exists and it’s now, when you install it on top of 6.8, it still serves a purpose. While it doesn’t ship the whole API anymore, because that’s now part of WordPress Core, it’s still includes a UI where you can configure it via UI in different ways.

And it also changes the default behavior of WordPress, for the speculative loading feature. And that’s essentially because when we started the plugin, we went with a more aggressive default, because we want to know, the plugin only launches at first at small scale, it’s meant to, especially in the case of a feature plugin, it’s meant to inform us about how well it’s working, are there potential issues, and so on.

So we went with a more more performant configuration out of the box with the Speculative Loading plugin. So if you use the plugin, it will use the moderate eagerness that I mentioned before. And then in addition, it uses, and we haven’t covered that at all yet, so it pre-renders the URL. So I can explain that briefly.

The WordPress Core implementation, the Speculation Rules API allows you two alternative modes for speculatively loading a URL. Either you can pre-fetch the URL, or you can pre-render the URL.

Pre-fetching means you essentially just load the, you get the HTML content already, but then you don’t do anything else. Like, it doesn’t load any JavaScript or it doesn’t load any CSS or images, it still waits with all of that until you go to the other page.

With pre-render, it does everything, like literally everything. It loads the HTML, it loads also all the JavaScripts, CSS, images and whatever else is on your page. And it even renders this in the browser, like it basically does everything as if you were already on the page in the browser. Let’s think about it as if you had the page open in another tab and you couldn’t see it.

[00:26:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’ve just like pulled back a curtain suddenly and there it is. It’s just, it always there. You just couldn’t see it and suddenly.

[00:26:14] Felix Arntz: And the pre-rendering is the thing that can get you to those immediate page loads. Because when you use pre-fetching, it only loads the HTML, so then when you get to the page, it’ll be faster, but you still have to load all the other things, and render it. But pre-render is where, if you have pre-render and eagerness of moderate, and then we go back to our previous example, you hover over link, go back there, two seconds, three seconds later, then you might get this immediate page load with LCP zero.

[00:26:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s really interesting. So you’ve kind of got two options. The first option is just accept WordPress Core. That’s how it is. And then, maybe three options. The second option then might be you can modify things with hooks and what have you. And I’m going to link to the articles that Felix wrote in the blog post that goes with this. So go to wptavern.com and search for the episode and you’ll be able to find all the bits. It’s more easy for me to say that than it is to read out the blog titles and things.

And then the other option, the third option would be to download the plugin, which gives you a UI, but just caveat emptor, beware, it will then automatically make things moderate. It’s going to be doing things in a more, a slightly more aggressive way.

[00:27:21] Felix Arntz: It brings you better performance, but it might also have more trade offs on, it will load, certainly to some capacity, load URLs that may not be navigated to. If you install the plugin, just keep in mind that the UI that it provides also would allow you to go back to the WordPress Core default. If you just want a UI and you install the plugin, just go into the UI of the plugin immediately, change it back to conservative pre-fetch, and you’re back at what Core would do as well.

[00:27:45] Nathan Wrigley: Great. Yeah, thank you. Now you mentioned LCP and things like that. And I think there’s been an obsession for the last, let’s go for four years, with speed and trying to get Lighthouse scores to be impressive for your website. I’m curious, is there a way that Google scraping the internet can perceive any of this?

In other words, if you do this, are you doing it simply to make your visitors happy, because they’re the people who are doing the clicking or what have you? Or is there some like Core Web Vitals metric which can be improved by this? Because it feels like there couldn’t be, because I doubt that Google Bot has the capacity to kind of speculatively load anything, but maybe there’s some flag in the, I don’t know, I have no idea how that would work.

[00:28:31] Felix Arntz: So, that’s a great question. I think you’d, certainly when you apply performance enhancements like this, the goal is that they benefit your website’s end users. Google, of course, would love to know how well these features work, right? And also the people that work on the actual Speculation Rules API would love to see how the features are used in production, on production sites. And we, as a Performance Team, would also like to know that, how it goes with WordPress specifically.

So there is a public data set called Chrome User Experience Report, which is sourced from anonymous data from users that use Chrome and have opted into this anonymous data tracking. So there is essentially a data set that collects the performance data of people visiting websites. And that is made publicly available, you can literally, if you know how to use BigQuery, which is this kind of advanced version of MySQL, where you can query gigantic amounts of data, you can query the Chrome User Experience Report data set, and you could be checking like, I don’t know, as long as sites that appear, it basically aggregates all the page, all the data by origin, so the domain.

Any site that is relatively popular is in there. I don’t know exactly what the threshold is, but something like, maybe like at least 50 monthly users or something like that. So then your site will appear in there and you could query this for your own site to see how your site is doing. And you could do this every single month. And you get like a chart, how the performance of your site is doing over time.

Of course, neither Google nor we as a Performance Team cares about one specific site. We’re doing things like in our team, we were building things for WordPress, for the WordPress ecosystem, try to improve the performance of the ecosystem as a whole. So I have been working a lot in the past years and learning a lot about this stuff. How to query the Crux, that’s a short version of it, Crux, the Crux Report, to gain insights on, how do you possibly measure the impact a certain feature has on these metrics?

There’s another data set called HTTP Archive, which is the domains that are in this are also sourced from the Crux Report. But what HTTP Archive is, it basically scrapes all of these URLs every single month, one time, and gets all sorts of public information from these URLs, like which technologies it uses, does it use WordPress? Does it use, I don’t know, React or whatever, all these things. It also stores, from this one momentary point, it also stores the actual HTML body, and it’s a gigantic data set. And also that is public as well. You can look it up on httparchive.org and how to use it.

So the goal of these efforts is to make these different performance data and to basically assess the health of the web ecosystem, publicly available, and then also these, especially HTTP Archive has a lot of charts on their own website based on their own data that essentially, yeah, makes it easily available without having to query BigQuery data.

But when you actually can query BigQuery data, it becomes really powerful. So we can combine the data from HTTP Archive to see which origins are using WordPress. So then we get like a scaled down version of the whole web that is just the WordPress sites. And then we can combine it with the Crux data that has the performance results for all origins, but scope it down to only the origins that use WordPress.

And that way we can see, for instance, the median LCP for a given month across all WordPress sites is this. Or the median INP and all the other metrics. More importantly, what we have been using as a more important metric though, is what’s called the passing rate. For every Core Web Vitals metric, there is a threshold where it’s, under this threshold is good, above this threshold, it’s not good. So for LCP for instance, that’s 2.5 seconds.

And passing rate is essentially the number of, in this example, is the number of origins that have a median LCP that’s better than 2.5 seconds, the percentage of origins that have an LCP that’s better than 2.5 seconds. And that you can track over time to see how WordPress LCP is improving or decreasing over time. That’s how we essentially monitor performance for WordPress at a high level.

And then we’ve been doing all sorts of experiments to try to get feature specific improvements. That’s really the difficult part because these data sets only gather data, the Archive data set only gathers data once a month, the Crux data set gave this data, it has all the data, but only the performance data. So it does not know, at what point did you activate a certain feature or deactivate another feature? That data doesn’t exist. So we can only make assumptions.

Like, for instance, even when you want to measure the difference, and like an easy example, and that’s already complicated, is to measure the difference from one WordPress version to the next. HTTP Archive has data, whether a site is on, let’s say 6.8 or 6.7, but it’s from one specific moment in time. And we generally broaden these moments in time to the whole month because that’s the generally, like they do it once a month. If you see that a site is on 6.8, I think the HTTP Archive runs, like the actual queries usually run somewhere between 20th and 25th of the month.

So if you see that the site is 6.8, you don’t know, is the site on 6.8 the entire month or did it just update to 6.8 a day before and most of the month data is actually the previous version? This is just unknowns that we have to deal with. And the data set being so huge, because WordPress is so popular, that helps a lot to sort of like make these unknowns maybe less impactful. Because if you’re at scale see that 6.8 has a big improvement, we can’t say that this value precisely is correct, but if it’s a clear improvement, we can assume that there is an actual improvement to a certain degree.

And doing that for feature specific level is even more complex. I don’t think we have time to get into this too much right now, but I just want to say that this 1.9% value that is in the blog post is based on such an effort, where I try to look at all the sites that have speculation rules, and I looked at all the same sites before they activated speculation rules and get this median difference between all of them. And I don’t even know how to explain anymore because I don’t remember, because it was so complicated.

[00:34:42] Nathan Wrigley: I am so glad that you are able to explain it though. I mean, firstly, really interesting, all of that, really interesting. Because you just sort of peeled back a whole curtain that I didn’t even know existed. So there’s just this aggregated, opted-in data coming out of the browser, dropping into this massive data set. I can only imagine what that is like to deal with.

But it does mean that you’ve got anonymised data. You can make reasonable guesses, in the aggregate, about what’s happening. You know, you can refine it to WordPress, you can refine it to 6.7, 6.8, okay? And day by day, maybe it’s not meaningful. But if you spread it over one month, six months, what have you, more and more trends start to pop out.

So you can see over time, you’ve got this 1.9%. And it, terribly complicated though it might be, I’m glad that you did that work for us. That’s amazing. Okay. And I didn’t know that whole thing was going on.

And again, getting back to the point that you made at the beginning, the whole purpose of this is to make it better for your users. The purpose is not for the data that Google’s gathering, but it’s gathering it. And it’s helpful because people like you can then use it and make reasonable assumptions about what the rest of us ought to be doing with our WordPress websites. But the key metric there is, does it perform better for your users? And of course, we know the answer to that.

[00:36:00] Felix Arntz: Just wanted to quickly add like we have been, these two data sets have been important source for us as a Performance Team from the very beginning in terms of even prioritising what we work on. There’s ways to get a high level idea. Like, out of all the 50 things that we could do to improve performance, which have shown to be the most impactful on the web so far outside of WordPress, or maybe even on the few WordPress sites that already use it through some other way. So it has helped a lot on the prioritisation, and personally a big advocate for data driven decision making. And in many parts of the WordPress project, we are not able to do that because we don’t have much data. But I’m really pleased that on the performance side, there is this big data set that can be used to see what is actually impactful.

[00:36:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you can be really confident that your decisions are based upon fact, which is so nice. A lot of the WordPress project is, you know, intuition and design and things like that, and it’s hard to get agreement about that, and hard to get things right for everybody. But in this case, that’s slightly different.

[00:37:00] Felix Arntz: For anybody that’s interested in this to learn more, I did write a blog post on makewordpress.org/core at some point about it. How to assess performance with HTTP Archive, something like that. That’s something that we can probably, that you can probably look at. There’s a whole collab. I worked out for a while on a collab to teach as a sort of like tutorial, how to get started with this for anybody that’s interested.

[00:37:23] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, I’ve got a couple of pieces that I’ve got open over here, which are probably not the piece that you’ve just mentioned. So when I come back and edit this, I’ll make sure that I get in touch with you and we find that, and we’ll put that into the show notes. So there’ll be at least three things that you, dear listener, can go and check out.

I’m just wondering if there are any situations, because we know what people are like. Performance experts, they love to configure their servers, they love to put things at the edge that, you know, all these clever things that are going on. Are there any scenarios where things like the speculative loading that that can conflict, or overlap or be something that you actually don’t want to do because you’ve already got something in place that might be handling, I don’t know, let’s say for example, you’re in team Cloudflare, and you’ve jumped in on all the different things that they’ve got? Perhaps they do this already. I don’t know. But I’m just wondering if there are any scenarios where, let’s say I’m a hosting company, or I’m just really into my performance. Are there any scenarios where I need to be mindful, maybe I want to switch this off?

[00:38:22] Felix Arntz: I don’t think there’s a lot on the hosting side, but there can be on the whatever client side’s technologies you use. So because this speculative loading happens in the browser, so the, I don’t think there’s anything on the hosting side, or server side, that could do something similar. I think that wouldn’t work.

But there are other ways that some similar things like this have already been done outside of a browser specification, outside of a browser API. Like there are certain JavaScript frameworks, for instance, that have something like speculative loading. Like, if you have a Next.js site, for instance, which I think is not very common to be used together with WordPress, but if you do have a Next.js site for instance, it might load URLs speculatively too, but through its own mechanism, like a completely separate approach. I’m not sure about specific JavaScript libraries right now that do exactly this, but there are definitely things like it that some sites were already using before the browser Speculation Rules API came around.

[00:39:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so broadly speaking, if you’re a WordPress, a typical WordPress user, you’ve got nothing to worry about. And you probably know that you’ve got something interesting and unusual going on with loading things in a different way, so you’re probably okay.

One of the things that I did want to know, I just wondered if there were certain, I don’t know, let’s say I’ve got a WordPress website, maybe there are bits of that website that I don’t wish to be speculatively loading.

I’m not really sure what that might be. An example that I think came out of one of your blog posts was you took the example of a Woo, well, I presume it was WooCommerce, you know, the end of the URL being cart or something like that, you know, so forward slash cart, forward slash whatever.

That’s possible though. I presume, again, with hooks you could say, okay, this predetermined set of URLs, we don’t want to speculatively load anything. That kind of stuff can be done. The URL parameters can be configured into all this.

[00:40:05] Felix Arntz: Yeah, exactly. So you can exclude certain URLs, or URL patterns from being applied to the speculative loading. And you can also configure whether you want to exclude them entirely or whether you want to exclude them only from pre-rendering, but not pre-fetching.

So this is important to consider because the WordPress site, well, probably now 95% of the sites with 6.8 use pre-fetch because that’s a default. There are still sites that change it to pre-render. And then there are different implications for the site, for the URLs that are pre-rendered.

And one of the considerations is, that’s actually another reason why we went with pre-fetch. because also pre-fetch, even though it’s less performant than pre-render, is also a safer option at the scale that we roll this out to all WordPress sites. Because the only risk with pre-fetch occurs if there is a URL that modifies something just by visiting that URL, which is an anti-pattern, like you should not do this, but there are plugins that do this occasionally. For instance, if you have like a URL that’s called empty cart, and just by visiting that URL you empty your shopping cart.

That means, if you speculatively load the URL and you don’t visit it, your cart is emptied. You don’t want that. This is the only risk with pre-fetch. But, for what it’s worth, WordPress, the WordPress Core implementation also includes some default exclusions already. One of them is that it won’t speculatively load any URL with query parameters, like those question marks, something. And that’s because most WordPress sites by far are using pretty permalinks, and on those sites, having a query parameters is extremely unusual. And if there is, it’s usually from a plugin that does something specific.

And so that’s why we exclude URLs because the chance that, like WordPress Core doesn’t have anything in the front end that will change something when you visit a URL, but plugins might. And plugins would usually handle this through query parameters if they do, and that’s why we exclude any query parameter URLs.

[00:42:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I know that you will not have an answer to the next question, but I’m going to ask it anyway. But I’m just curious on your thoughts about it, because I know that anybody listening to this, there’s going to be a proportion of people thinking, wait, we want less bits traveling across the internet.

And I’m thinking about the environmental impact of things now. You know, we don’t want pre-fetching anything, because that’s then potentially just wasted energy. Just carbon being burnt for stuff which may, or may not, be looked at. And obviously the WordPress approach that you’ve taken is to try and minimise that.

But I just wondered if you had any thoughts, you know, around that and whether you could sort of calm people down about that or whether or not it, was that whole thing disregarded? Where does it fit into the thinking of all of this?

[00:42:52] Felix Arntz: Yeah, like I said in the beginning, it is a trade off that you have to make, but it also depends like, which decision you take probably depends on how your site is being used, like what is the best configuration of speculative loading for your own site?

If you go with a too eager configuration where there’s tons of URLs are eagerly loaded and then they might never be visited, then this definitely has a negative impact, like you’re saying. But obviously the ideal outcome is that the wasteful reloaded URLs are minimised and at the end of the day you, by speculatively loading, you improve the user experience.

I can’t really answer where you draw the line in that. That being said, the adverse effects of URLs being loaded that you don’t navigate to with this conservative eagerness is so little. That’s why we chose that value to be the default. And you can go for more performant solutions, or configurations, but when you do so, please test how that works out.

You can also, don’t want to get too deep into this, but you can also, if you have some kind of analytics provider for your site, you can gather like performance data or you can see which links users typically click on. And then you could configure speculation rules in the way that these links specifically may use like a more eager configuration. But the other ones don’t.

This is where people really get, I’ve not personally done this but when, I’ve heard from other people when they work with enterprise clients, they really go in and look at, oh, when somebody has sent this URL, they usually click one of these four URLs, one of these four links, and then you can configure speculation rules to say, these four links should have moderate eagerness, but all other ones only conservative, for instance.

[00:44:22] Nathan Wrigley: I can see a whole third party ecosystem of plugin developers kind of rubbing their hands together. You know, those that create performance plugins kind of leaning into exactly what you just said. Here’s your entire WordPress website, and here’s what we think, you know, in the same way that SEO plugins might give you a traffic light. Here’s a set of URLs, which we think you are not serving in the way that is going to be beneficial to your users or what have you. So, oh, that’s interesting as well.

[00:44:46] Felix Arntz: The tough thing though is that it’s usually, I think it’s going to be very heavily dependent on the individual site. That’s where my hesitation is with that is that like, I’m not sure how much a plugin, a generally applied plugin, throughout the ecosystem could predict that. I think it’s often depending on the layout of the site. What is even the content of the site, right? What do people mostly click on? I think that makes it challenging from a general plugin perspective. Like to me, that’s mostly something that developers would do for their client’s websites, or agencies would do for a client’s website or at an individual level.

[00:45:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s just the beginning, isn’t it? It’s dropped in fairly recently. No doubt, the WordPress ecosystem will kind of figure out a posture on this. Maybe third party plugins will come along. Maybe developers will produce more documentation about how to wrangle it. How to surmise whether or not your website is using the Speculation Rules API in a way which is helping you, I don’t know, measuring the cost of your server infrastructure and what have you. But just the beginning.

So there you go. Now, dear listener, you know a whole load of stuff about WordPress 6.8 that you didn’t. Before because probably, it was completely invisible to you. So, is there anything we missed, Felix? Is there any burning issue that you think we did not cover that and that was important?

[00:45:58] Felix Arntz: No. I think we covered pretty much anything, everything. I just wanted to add that the new data from the Crux Report comes out, I think actually it came out yesterday, I believe. So it comes out every second Tuesday of the month. So I’m about to look at that. I want to take a look at that, definitely by the end of this week to see whether we can get any impact data now that speculative loading is out because, so the way that this works is the Crux data is released for the month before. That’s what happened, I think yesterday. So now we should have data on April where WordPress 6.8 came out. So now we can see how much did this feature launching in 6.8, and 6.8 in general, affect performance, hopefully in a good way.

[00:46:39] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, yeah. So this is actually for you, quite a big moment. You are suddenly going to get this data dump, which is going to actually cover this 43% of the web. It will be on all, well, most of the sites, and you are suddenly going to see what the impact is. Do you know, if you write that up, I will find it, if it’s out before I produce this post, then I will definitely link to that. And I’ll be fascinated to see if we can calculate how many decades, or weeks, or months, or years of time we have actually saved. That’s absolutely brilliant.

Thank you so much for explaining it, helping to create it in the first place, and basically improving WordPress in a very, very demure way. You know, not shouting it from the rooftops, but doing a lot in the background to make everybody’s experience of the web a whole lot better. Felix Arntz, thank you so much for chatting to me today.

[00:47:29] Felix Arntz: Yeah. Thank you.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, what WordPress and Drupal have in common.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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

So on the podcast today we have Chris Reynolds. Chris is a developer advocate at Pantheon, where he brings nearly 20 years of experience in the WordPress community, as well as deep involvement with Drupal and open source technology at large. Prior to his advocacy role, he worked at some of the top WordPress agencies like Human Made and Web Dev Studios. He’s been active at events like DrupalCon, PressConf, and Word Camps.

In this episode we set aside the usual WordPress only focus, and turn our attention to two CMSs, WordPress and Drupal. What makes them tick, where they excel and where they might have something to learn from each other.

Chris draws on his unique perspective working closely with both platforms as Pantheon is one of the few hosts with a 50 50 split between WordPress and Drupal sites, and has a significant footprint in both ecosystems.

We discuss the similarities and differences between the two open source CMS communities, from the mechanics of flagship events like WordCamps and DrupalCon, to the ways these projects organize their contributors and support community initiatives.

Chris explains how Drupal’s model with its association run funding, and project governance, compares to WordPress’s approach, including how each community approaches plugin and module development, and what role agencies and companies play in contributing to Core and the broader ecosystem.

If you’re curious about how open source projects organize themselves, how their communities navigate growth and challenge, and what WordPress can learn from Drupal, and vice versa, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Chris Reynolds.

I am joined on the podcast today by Chris Reynolds. Hello Chris.

[00:03:20] Chris Reynolds: Hi. How’s it going?

[00:03:22] Nathan Wrigley: You cannot see, dear listener, what I can see. Chris has the most amazing setup where he’s doing the recording. I guess it’s an attic or something like that, but it looks like the Starship Enterprise from where I’m sitting.

[00:03:34] Chris Reynolds: I’m working on that.

[00:03:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s really nice. Chris is joining us today and we’re going to have a conversation about the WordPress community. The things that we do well, and perhaps the things that we could improve. And we’re going to probably use Drupal as a comparison.

Before we get into that, Chris, I know it’s a dreadfully banal question, but it’s always good to scope out where you are and where you stand with WordPress and Drupal and the companies that you work for. So just a moment really to give us your little potted bio of who you are and what have you.

[00:04:04] Chris Reynolds: Sure. My name is Chris Reynolds, I am a developer advocate at Pantheon. I was formerly a senior software engineer for Pantheon for about three years, before joining the developer relations team around August, right before WordCamp US in September last year.

I’ve been in the WordPress community for close to 20 years. I think I’ve gone back to my first blog posts and my first, like talking about technology that I was using. And I think that I’ve found references to using WordPress in some capacity back in 2005, so almost exactly 20 years.

But even before that I was really interested, like as a side hobby in just open source software, playing with Linux and playing with other open source community projects that I found I was really a big fan of one called Ampache for a long time, which was a music sort of library app thing written in PHP. That was really cool. I think it still exists even.

But yeah, so I’m a developer advocate at Pantheon. That means I do a lot of these sorts of things, talk about best practices, write a lot of blog posts, get in a lot of trouble, not really, and go to events and stuff like that. So I was at DrupalCon in March. I was at PressConf last month. Probably doing stuff this summer and in the fall.

[00:05:14] Nathan Wrigley: Just to lean in a little bit on the Pantheon side of things. Pantheon, a hosting company, but very much aligned in two worlds, maybe more than two. But from my perspective, I used to use Drupal exclusively until about 2015. That was my CMS of choice for many, many years. I think Drupal 4, and then finally I jumped ship at Drupal 8 over to WordPress and have been that consistently.

But Pantheon was around as what felt like at that time, so we are going back more than a decade, the only sort of managed Drupal host, but it definitely had a WordPress side to it as well. Can you just speak to that for us for a moment? That is Pantheon’s sort of MVP, isn’t it? It handles managed hosting for both of those platforms. And maybe there’s more, I don’t know.

[00:05:57] Chris Reynolds: Yeah. I mean, I think that from a platform perspective, we obviously do host Drupal and WordPress. We also can host like Next.js and sort of front end sites. But the sort of hidden Pantheon magic is in the kind of DevOps, WebOps we like to call it, layer that happens like somewhere between pushing code and the code being a thing that like site managers and editors and things like work with, right? So automation tools, and we were one of the first providers that used Git by default. Now that’s not such a big deal anymore, but like that was a big thing within Pantheon for a really long time.

When I was a developer, the first time that I used Pantheon as a developer when I was back at WebDevStudios was, the thing that was the killer feature for me was we have a thing called Multi Dev, which is, each site has a development, a test, and a live environment. So everybody gets those three things and we have a very specific sort of workflow. Code goes to dev, to test, to live in that order. But we have these Multi Devs, which are entirely separate containers where you can build, you can do all your feature development on a branch in a Multi Dev and see what that looks like before merging it into dev.

It sounds like maybe not that much now, but I know when I was back in agency life and even when I was working at Human Made and we had built our own sort of stack that had this very similar kind of system, we didn’t have Multi Dev because spinning up new containers for sites that you’re just going to destroy at some point in the next couple weeks or days anyway is expensive and hard.

And so what that meant was the master branch, or the development branch, of all of your code is always really messy and dirty, and you want to keep that away from the code that is going to production, right? Because that’s where your experimental code is. Maybe you didn’t back it out entirely. That’s where like a whole bunch of weird database stuff is going. That’s like the junk, right? So you want to keep that separate from like your staging branch and your production branch.

And with Pantheon, the idea is your development branch is just where your finalised code goes, because you can do all that testing in a separate environment and then when you go from dev to test, it’s not a headache, it’s just this is production ready code, basically.

[00:08:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I remember my recollection of Pantheon was that it was one of those platforms that, well, platform really, it felt more like a platform than a host, if you know what I mean? It just offered more as a layer on top of the typical host that you might find.

However, you also do a whole bunch of stuff around the Drupal space, but also the WordPress space. I’m just curious, maybe you don’t have this information, but maybe as a developer advocate, you do. What would you say, as a percentage, does Drupal represent as opposed to WordPress? You know, is it like an 80, 20 split, a 90, 10, a 50, 50?

[00:08:40] Chris Reynolds: We’re almost exactly 50, 50.

[00:08:42] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting.

[00:08:43] Chris Reynolds: And we’ve actually honestly been 50, 50 for about five-ish years, five or six years.

[00:08:48] Nathan Wrigley: So does that mean that in the Drupal side of things, okay, dear listener, WordPress as a CMS is a giant, it’s a leviathan of a thing, you know. Occupies a massive amount of the market share. Drupal I think is somewhere in the region of, I think it’s like 1.2% or something like that.

[00:09:05] Chris Reynolds: Yeah, we might be creeping up to two-ish, but yeah, it’s pretty low, yeah.

[00:09:09] Nathan Wrigley: That then implies that you as a company have, you’ve got your foot on the pedal more on the Drupal side of things. Maybe the people who are building clever things on top of Drupal are using you much more. You’re a bigger player in that space than you are inside the WordPress space, even though it’s, you know, the same in terms of revenue. As a community endeavor, Drupal probably means a lot more to you than WordPress maybe.

[00:09:32] Chris Reynolds: Yeah, I mean definitely going to DrupalCon for my first time this last March, it’s definitely, so there’s Acquia, which is essentially Drupal’s version of Automattic. Acquia is a company that was founded by Dries, who is the founder of Drupal, and very much like managed Drupal hosting the same kind of thing that Automattic is into, and a lot of the sort of same ideas, at least from a, where it sits in the ecosystem.

But, you know, you go to a WordCamp and you see the big Automattic booth and you’ll see a couple other sort of bigger hosting booths. At a DrupalCon it’s like, there’s the Pantheon booth and there’s the Acquia booth, and then there’s a bunch of little things. We’re definitely the kind of headliners because between the two of us, I think probably we do own most of those Drupal sites that exist in the ecosystem. But we’re definitely a bigger fish in that pond, than perhaps the WordPress pond. There’s also a lot more fish in the WordPress pond.

It’s an interesting thing, like for me coming to DrupalCon for the first time, to see just what Pantheon’s footprint is in contrast to when I go to WordCamps. And, you know, we were big in WordCamps for a long time, and then we kind of pulled back a little bit, and then the intervening time it’s I think felt by the community like, well, who are you? Where did you go? We’ve gotten sort of feedback from folks being like, I used to think about Pantheon, but like it’s been a long time, you laid a lot of people off. Why should I care anymore?

And that’s, you know, part of my personal goal is to say, no, this is why you should care. That’s one of the things that excited me of joining the DevRel team was to go back to our roots and go back into the community, and we still have a really good product that I believed in when I was a developer and I still think is really good as, you know, obviously I think of it as a developer advocate. But like I’m here because I like the thing. I think we have a good thing.

[00:11:19] Nathan Wrigley: Do you basically have the exact same platform for both of the CMSs? So I know there’s all the other stuff that you do, but let’s just concentrate on Drupal and concentrate on WordPress, those two things. Do you basically have the exact same platform? Or is there some nuance that you can do this on WordPress because of, I don’t know, WP-CLI or the REST API or whatever it is that you can’t do in the Drupal side? In other words, if I sign up for a Drupal account, do things look different, behave differently, or is it broadly the same?

[00:11:45] Chris Reynolds: It is broadly the same. There is sort of individual differences but they’re very minor. And honestly like, in many ways, I think that when Pantheon, and this is before my time, obviously, but I think when Pantheon jumped into the WordPress boat, it was really more of a, well, we have this stack and we’re really good at this thing, and WordPress is also a PHP application that has a lot of the same requirements, surely we can just run the exact same stack for WordPress.

And what’s sort of evolved over time is like, well, that’s like 80% true, but it’s the 20% that’s really important. And if you just go into building WordPress sites or hosting WordPress sites with the same mentality as you’re doing Drupal, well, you are going to run into a lot of the growing pains that we ran into, right? Drupal from like a database perspective is far more efficient. The queries are much shorter because the way that it’s structured is more efficient than WordPress. WordPress, you kind of have to do more sort of optimisation on top. So those are things that we needed to figure out.

The Drupal space sort of moved toward Solr as their sort of search tool of choice, which is a project from the Apache project. WordPress went into Elasticsearch. So trying to convince a WordPress team to use Solr, in fact, a pretty old version of Solr, is kind of pulling teeth. Like, well, why would I do that when I’m doing Elasticsearch for everything else? I don’t know why you would do that, honestly. Like, you should probably use Elasticsearch.

And so we’re like actually going in, that’s a project that’s on the roadmap as well finally, it’s something I’ve been talking about for like three years internally. There’s little nuances. Drupal obviously since version eight has been using Composer as a fundamental part of how the CMS just works. Whereas WordPress, you’ve got some people that are using Composer, in fact, last time I was here, two years ago, I was talking about Composer. And I don’t know that the adoption of Composer has really changed much in the WordPress ecosystem since that time.

I would like to say that it has. I still think that you should be using Composer. Throwback to the last WP Tavern Jukebox podcast that I was on about Composer. But yeah, so there’s little differences and I think that that’s, there’s not anything from a platform level where your experience is going to be that much different.

[00:14:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. If you were to take a look at the Pantheon platform, I think quickly poking around on the site, maybe the pricing page or something would give you an intuition that really you are kind of more for the sort of enterprise level, I think would be fair to say. You know, you are trying to get the bleeding edge out of the websites that you’ve got, and so it’s, high traffic, that kind of thing.

But the endeavor today really is to put all of that code stuff to one side and get into the community side of things. So just to reiterate, we threw around a couple of words there, and maybe the listener doesn’t really know that even there’s a WordPress community or a Drupal community.

There really is. There’s just hundreds, maybe thousands of people who attend events, they might go to a local thing, which we might call them Meetup on the WordPress side of things. I don’t know if there’s similar things in Drupal. But then there’s these bigger events, which we’d call WordCamps, and then there are bigger ones of those which are kind of flagship WordCamps.

There’s one in the US, there’s one in Asia, and there’s one in Europe. They happen each year. And thousands of people show up and inhabit the same space, listen to presentations, hang out in the hallway.

And then you’ve got the same thing happening on the Drupal side. It’s called Drupal Con, but forgive my ignorance, I think the DrupalCon thing is a once a year thing and it moves around the globe. It’s not necessarily in the same space. Have I got that about right?

[00:15:15] Chris Reynolds: It’s more than once a year. It’s actually the equivalent. So DrupalCon is the equivalent of flagship WordCamps. So there’s a DrupalCon, there was a DrupalCon US in Atlanta this last year. There is going to be a DrupalCon Europe in, where is it? Maybe Vienna, in the fall. There’s a DrupalCon Asia that’s just starting to get fired up. That’s happening I think in, the next one is like 2026, I believe. I think they just had their first one. So very similar, like the Cons in the Drupal space are equivalent to the flagship WordCamps. There’s also DrupalCamps in much the same way as there are local WordCamps.

I feel like in the WordPress space, a lot of the local WordCamps kind of, they either blew up and got super big, or they kind of fizzled after Covid, right? I don’t have a lot of local camps. I don’t see a lot of local camps anymore. I do see those things happening a little bit in the Drupal space, or at least starting up again.

[00:16:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah so, what we’re basically painting a picture of here is that we’ve got two bits of software which basically are trying to achieve the same thing. They’re a CMS. They’re trying to make it so that non-technical, as well as technical people, can run a project and put it online. Whether that’s a website or an e-commerce solution, whatever it may be, you’re trying to get your stuff out onto the internet. And both of those things will work.

But also, behind the code is a bunch of people who are willing to go and hang out in the same place, the community, if you like, attend these events. And so there’s massive similarity. In fact, you know, if you’re an alien landing, I suspect that you wouldn’t really know that the two things were different. Okay, there’s different advertisers in the hall and there’s different logos and things, but broadly they would probably look really similar.

However, in the more recent past, and if you don’t know the story, I’m not going to go into it too much here, but you can figure it out by looking at various news articles in the WordPress space and what have you. The WordPress community has really been pulled in different directions, let’s say that. And it’s curious because no sooner had this happened than some of the more prominent people, Dries Buytaert, who is the founder of Drupal, put out a piece, really as a way of kind of offering, look, this is what Drupal do. We know you’ve got on the WordPress side things that are not working out for you. Here’s our model.

And far be it from me to say whether that is the perfect system. I don’t really know it, but I was just curious to get your thoughts on what that is. And that’s going to really occupy the majority of the rest of this podcast. What the Drupal community looks like. What you believe it does well. How it does things differently. So let’s start there. Let’s start with Dries’, what he was telling us about. How does Drupal, the community, how does it do things differently in terms of, I don’t know, events, the access to the code? So yeah, a conversation around that really. So I’m just going to throw it over to you, Chris. How is Drupal different than WordPress on that level?

[00:18:05] Chris Reynolds: Well, I was saying before we got on that I kind of had a crash course in Drupal when I went leading up to, and then immediately following going to DrupalCon. Part of that crash course was at DrupalCon, they actually have a community summit. It’s similar to like, in WordPress we’ve had sort of community summits before. At DrupalCon it was really more of like a track, with like presenters and like also conversations. It’s like space for chatting and hanging out with people.

But mostly, mostly it was like community related talks in a space, talking about what’s working, what’s not working, as well as a sort of a get to know you sort of thing. And that was really helpful. I also did homework before the event in watching a couple of Dries’ last Dries Notes. So Matt has State of the Word, Dries has Dries Notes, which is just like keynote. It’s basically the same thing, like the same state of the CMS, right?

I caught up on what was going on in Drupal before the Con. And one of the things that I learned about, and then I followed up and dug into the history a little bit, was we have the same problems, right? WordPress and Drupal have the same fundamental sort of issues from both a contribution standpoint as well as a just organisational, managerial management kind of standpoint.

And Drupal, or Dries, just kind of got to a point sooner where he’s like, well, I can’t do all of these things. So the Drupal Association, and I’m sure there’s some Drupalistas that are going to correct me on my history, but as I understand it, the Drupal Association was initially formed to sort of manage events, because Dries knew that they needed to have events. They were having events, they started off just similar to WordPress, small camp things. And they started getting bigger and Dries is like, well, I can’t do all of the management stuff of this, so I need to like do something, create an organisation that can do that stuff.

And that was where the Drupal Association first was founded, to sort of manage that thing. And then over time, that evolved into being able to fund, or kind of oversee, directions for where, more of like a community representative in the general sort of CMS development ecosystem, right?

There is a board. They are elected by the community. They are paid. They manage events, but they also, all of the money that is made after expenses and stuff from DrupalCons and donations and whatever, they have the authority to direct into whatever projects they think would be most valuable for the evolution, or the fulfillment, of the ideals of the Drupal software, right?

So Dries says, I want to do a thing, and he can go do that thing. The Drupal Association is like, well, I think that what we really need is this kind of thing, and we’re going to devote some of our resources that we have into hiring some folks to work on that thing.

So, most recently, where you can kind of see this in action is there’s been a lot of hype about Drupal CMS. That is a thing that exists because of the Drupal Association, because the Drupal Association saw, okay, I mean, I assume, I’m reading between the lines. But I assume that you can’t ignore the sort of declining line of Drupal in the broader ecosystem of CMS usage. But also, there’s been a really big problem since Drupal seven of a lot of the sites on Drupal seven remain on Drupal seven.

Drupal seven should be end of life by all accounts. Everything else up to the current version is end of life. Drupal seven isn’t, because there’s still, it’s now just under, but it’s still close to 50% of Drupal sites are running Drupal seven. It’s a version of Drupal that’s about 10 years old.

And the reason why, there’s so many people. Drupal historically has always been a thing where, when a new version came along, you kind of killed your old site and rebuilt it in the new version, because it wasn’t sort of backwards compatible. WordPress has gotten around that by just remaining backwards compatible all throughout its history.

Drupal seven to Drupal eight was the first version to introduce Composer. We talked about Composer and how a Composer’s been part of Drupal for a really long time. that was the cutoff. So that was a pretty big shift. And there’s a lot of people, teams, organizations that have not made, or have been reluctant to make that shift because it’s a, it’s a rebuild. It’s a full site rebuild.

It’s not just, we can just migrate the thing over. You have to rebuild your site. You do need to migrate your stuff over, but also you need to rebuild your site. So in the intervening time, WordPress has gained adoption and acceptance and grown into 43%. And so now we’ve got these Drupal seven sites where it’s like, well, we need to rebuild anyway. Do we rebuild the site in Drupal 10, 11? Or do we rebuild the site in WordPress where I’m never going to have this problem ever again.

And that’s where a lot of that like, bar graph, a lot of those sites have moved to WordPress. Some of them have stayed on Drupal, but it’s a declining number, right?

So obviously, folks inside Drupal see this and know that it’s happening, and know that they need to do something about it. So Drupal CMS is basically like a layer on top of the latest version of Drupal, which is 11. It’s got a far nicer installation screen. I wrote a blog post about this on the Pantheon blog, I think. It’s got a far nicer installation screen, that actually walks you through, stepping through like what type of site, what type of content you want to have on your site. To actually get you thinking about the site that you’re building before you just hit install. Which I find to be amazingly refreshing.

And then beyond that the admin interface is far less cluttered. I know one of my personal gripes about working with Drupal, even up until, up until now, like up until before Drupal CMS is that there’s too many buttons, there’s too many menus, there’s too much stuff. Like, I don’t know where stuff is.

This feels a lot more familiar, partially because I think it kind of resembles the WordPress admin a little bit. You know, sidebar on the left, menus. And it feels just more, more familiar to me. And then also they have built in some new architectural things like, recipes are a thing where, a recipe, Drupal has modules, WordPress has plugins. Modules generally need a lot of configuration, to get them actually working.

When you install a module, it’s not like it just works outta the box. A lot of WordPress plugins, you install a plugin, it just works outta the box. So a recipe is like, here is, maybe a collection of modules, maybe a specific module, but it’s probably a combination of a bunch of different modules, but also the configuration that goes along with them.

So when you install a recipe, it’s like, here’s the stuff that you probably will need. You’re most likely to need this stuff in this order, configured with these settings, and then you can do whatever you need after that. But like, here’s the go bag and now you can move on. So, one of the really interesting recipes for Drupal CMS is the SEO recipe.

And that is interesting because they’re using a Yoast module. The Yoast module is literally taking the JavaScript of Yoast SEO from the WordPress plugin and throwing it into Drupal. And what’s fascinating about that is it doesn’t have all of the other stuff that comes with the Yoast plugin, it’s just the traffic light system, and the scanning the text system and it’s, so it’s the best possible implementation of Yoast that I’ve seen because it’s all of the good stuff.

They’ve also built an AI recipe. And that’s interesting because when that is configured, you can actually talk to an AI chat bot inside your Drupal instance and ask it questions about Drupal or about your site. You could say, hey, I need to create an event content type. I’m gonna be hosting events. They’re this type of thing. I need to have a, like a, date picker and whatever, and we are taking attendees and you can tell that the chat bot that that’s the thing that you need. And it will, to the best of its ability, build that content type inside Drupal for you.

So the WordPress equivalent is, I have a podcast and I need an episode post type. I just talk to a chat bot, and it magically creates that episode post type for me with like the Gutenberg blocks I need. That makes it an audio format or whatever. And, it’s just there for you. It’s like, great, thank you chat bot. As a WordPress developer, I think that’s really cool. Because that’s kind of the thing that I want, is like I know how to do some things, but I really don’t know any of the buttons and gears and gizmos in the Drupal admin.

But if I have a chat bot to sort of help guide me through, I know I can figure out the rest of the way, or I can see how it did the thing, and I can figure out, oh okay, so that’s what I need to do. And so all of these things are geared toward the idea of just getting more people using Drupal and lowering the barrier to entry.

Because one of the big things with Drupal is it’s always been really developer centric, really highly technical, and you need sort of skilled individuals to even just manage the site. So if we lower that barrier to entry, you can target the people that are already using WordPress, the sort of content level people or the site administrators that don’t have a lot of technical experience.

That’s all like basically because the Drupal Association put money, funding that they had into backing these very specific projects.

[00:27:25] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of a curious idea, isn’t it? It’s like a subset of the CMSs capabilities put into this one project, Drupal CMS. Which has like a target audience in mind. So it’s like a blogger, or a podcaster or something like that. You know, it’s for content creators. That was the message I got from when I read all of the, the marketing bits and pieces that came out.

But also addressing the need for it to look nice. That was always an area I thought WordPress excelled at. When you logged into the WordPress admin, it was night and day looking at a Drupal admin. Everything was consistent. Everything looked modern and clean and easy to understand. On the Drupal side, it was, it was much more difficult to understand. But also things like updating plugins. Backwards compatibility on the WordPress side, always much more straightforward. On the Drupal side, much more difficult.

And so this is such a curious experiment. Putting it into the hands of people who might want a blog, or whatever it may be, and hopefully making it more straightforward. And the website for it, I will link to it in the show notes, it’s just so kind of modern and appealing and friendly and, Drupal never, for me at least when I got to Drupal eight, for the exact reasons that you described, that’s all of my sites would have stayed on Drupal seven.

It definitely wasn’t that kind of warm and fuzzy welcome to everybody kind of thing. But now it really look like it’s leaning into that. But getting back to your main point, that was funded from the inside by some, facets, some internal mechanisms, some body inside the Drupal Association that decided that’s what we need to do. This is where the money’s going. But are you saying that decision making was divorced from Dries?

[00:29:02] Chris Reynolds: Dries leads the technical architecture. And Dries will like say we need to do a thing. And he may be personally involved in the leadership of doing that thing, but mostly he’s like at a director level. Like, go my people and go forth and do stuff. And the Drupal Association says, okay, well one of the things that Dries said we need to do is X. So how can we make X happen? And in the case of recipes, it meant getting agencies and people from agencies involved. Create like a coalition. Like there’s a bunch, it wasn’t just one agency. It was like a bunch of people from different agencies are working on this thing together. Which is another thing that I find really interesting about the Drupal ecosystem.

I have thoughts about that too. But in this context, yeah, I get a bunch of different people to work on this thing. Um. Whether it’s the SEO recipe. Whether it’s the AI recipe, and they, I think the way that it sort of broke down is, and it might have been even Dries that conceptualized the idea of recipes and it’s like, okay, go out and implement this thing.

But when they did, it was like, okay, if we’re gonna do this thing, we need these types of recipes from the get go, from day one. We need SEO, we need whatever. We need AI, we need content things, so that people have an idea of what a recipe is and can start building their own recipes.

[00:30:15] Nathan Wrigley: So they’re bound into it? You can’t install Drupal CMS without those things. They’re just there.

[00:30:20] Chris Reynolds: It supports the recipes, and in the installation process, when you’re doing the Drupal CMS installation, that screen that I was talking about, where it’s like asking you the type of site you want to build, those types of sites in quotations, correspond to sets of recipes that align with each of those things.

It doesn’t ask you about AI in the installation screen, but it does sort of say like, oh, do you want this type of content or that type of content? And then we, based on your selection, it automatically installs those recipes for you.

[00:30:48] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s installing things based upon a wizard at the beginning, but the principle being though that you the end user, not really interacting with anything apart from oh, I would like that. Yes, please. I would like that. And then you finally get to the end of the wizard, wait for a few moments. The modules get installed, activated, and they’re pre-configured to behave in a way which is likely to be the best that you can get.

[00:31:08] Chris Reynolds: To get you as close to what you want as possible. And the goal, the roadmap, is Dries wants to actually take that one step further, and do sort of site templates where if a recipe is a collection of modules and configuration, a template would be like, I want to build a real estate site. So I download this template, or I install this template and then click a button or two and it gives me a real estate site with the configuration that I might need to have a real estate site.

And obviously I can go in and customize things, but I have a starting point. One of the things that I heard a lot when I was talking to people within Drupal, among other things, there’s not really a marketplace as much for stuff, for software, for add-ons in the way that there is in WordPress. And there’s not really in particular, there’s not really the same sort of like theme or a repository, or a place to go for commonly used or shared themes in the way that we have the Themes Repository. Mostly you have like the default things and then you’re building your own.

So, as a user, having a template that maybe comes with a theme that is specifically tuned for that type of site is a really big win, because there really isn’t an alternative in the current ecosystem within Drupal.

[00:32:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s, really worth leaning into because again, please interrupt me if what I’m about to say doesn’t actually match reality anymore. But when I was using Drupal, there was basically no commercial plugin system. Everybody had kind of leaned into the same thing for the same problem.

So if you wanted to put a form on your website, there were a few, but there was this one called Webform, and it was just the one everybody leaned into it. And so rather than in the WordPress space where you’ve got, you know, you’ve got a few repository ones that are free and easy to use, and then you’ve got the commercial ones that you can pay for and they add different features and support levels and all that kind of thing.

In the Drupal space, it felt like there was just this one kind of community endeavor to do the thing. Yeah, so if you wanted something to display data, Views was the thing you used. The Views module, and I think that did actually get rolled into Core. So it’s there. My point being, there isn’t this sort of, shattering is the wrong word, but in the WordPress space, there’s often a dozen, more than a dozen, there’s multiple alternatives. So you have to go and find the right thing.

In the Drupal space, it feels more like, okay, for that problem, we have this module, and everybody leans into it. So I’m presuming that all the people who contribute in the community to the code and what have you, they’ll all finesse that version. But that means therefore, that when you come to build the CMS, there’s basically this one way of doing it? Okay, if you want forms, we’re going to use that module. And if we’re going to add this feature for real estate or what have you, here’s the modules that we’re going to add in. And the jigsaw of those modules will make it work. And that’s different from WordPress. WordPress has much more leaned into commercial plugins and kind of figure out which ones you want for yourself.

[00:34:04] Chris Reynolds: Yeah, that was one of the things that I didn’t know going into DrupalCon that I learned while I was there. It’s a really different approach, and I actually kind of appreciate the Drupal model because the community is built around more of an idea of, if I build a form plugin and you build a form plugin, and mine is the defacto form plugin or.

In the Drupal space, it’s really more of a, well, let me talk to you and see what ideas you have that we can bring into the canonical one and just collectively like integrate those things. And that’s, that is a thing that happens more often than not in Drupal. That’s why you don’t see the competition, the competing modules for different things.

Because if you had a competing thing, or you had a different idea, you would contribute it to the one module that does that thing. Or if you had a different thing, then you might be invited to do the same, right?

In the WordPress space, it’s like I want to protect my form module or my form plugin because right now it’s free, but tomorrow I might want to sell it, and I want to keep my intellectual property to myself and not contribute because, you know, I might wanna make a buck on this later.

And, I kind of like the other thing better because it’s more, it is more of a community. Like I get like wanting to make money and everybody wants to make money and have a form plug in. Like, that’s great. Like I’m not going to say Gravity Forms shouldn’t exist or anything like that. Gravity Forms is amazing. But I do think that building an ecosystem around contributing to a collective, or a community based solution for the thing, where everybody has a, a say or a seat at the table, is a really, I don’t know, possibly overly idealistic, but very optimistic sort of view of how we can contribute to software.

I find it really nice. Like it feels good. Like it feels less like we’re all trying to grab our little piece of territory, you know?

[00:35:53] Nathan Wrigley: It feels to me like that moment when you first install Linux. And you realize, wow, there’s a free OS that I can put on my computer. And there’s just something quite remarkable about that. That a bunch of people got together and, really pointed everything at this one solution. I suppose that is the choice that you’re going to make. Really, that there is something right in there.

You know, the commercial side of WordPress has probably been its single biggest accelerator. The fact that people could build businesses on it. And they could have a living. They could obviously refine and finess and dedicate real time entire lifetimes, in many cases. Get staff on, support staff and what have you. Pay all of those people because they’ve cracked this nut and everybody wants a piece of it.

Whereas on the Drupal side, it’s much more, let’s go for egalitarian, let’s say that. But it, also, I suppose, means that at the moment where something doesn’t work you probably have to either understand how to maintain that yourself or hire a developer.

So there’s a bit of a trade off there. And I presume, like I said, I imagine that’s why there was this acceleration of WordPress’s popularity because the people who maybe were buying these plugins had that intention, I just want a website. I don’t want to learn how to code. I’m not interested in that.

I can see over here, look, I can buy that. It’s $97 a year. That’s perfect. That’ll satisfy me perfectly. Whereas maybe more on the Drupal side, it’s okay, that kind of works, but not entirely. I now need to make it work and obviously the community can do that.

So that leads me then to the next question, which is, who the heck builds Drupal? So in the WordPress space, if you’re listening to this, you probably have an understanding of that. There’s a lot of volunteers, but there’s also a lot of companies that will dedicate a proportion of their time. We have this idea of Five for the Future. And so 5% of whatever it is that you want to give, be that time or money, or what have you. And so there’s this idea of community massively, but also corporations, businesses, putting time in. Is it the same basically on the Drupal side? Is that how it works?

[00:37:51] Chris Reynolds: Yeah, largely. One of the things that I think you’ll notice that is a little bit of a distinction between WordPress and Drupal, from the events again. Is going through like the showroom, the sponsors floor. And at a WordCamp you see the hosts obviously, but then you see a lot of like plugin development shops, and that’s pretty much what I would expect, right? Big plugin or theme development shops and WordPress hosts. And a lot of the WordPress hosts are doing plugin development, and like, that’s sort of the thing.

In Drupal, and at DrupalCon, obviously we have the hosts. And we had a, I mean, CKE Editor was there. That was kind of weird to me. I don’t know, like it’s in Drupal. It was weird to have like a library have a booth space. That seemed weird to me. But like it’s a lot of agencies, because agencies are the ones that are doing the work, and I’ve never seen an agency or maybe not since very small, like local WordCamps, have I seen an agency with a sponsorship, a booth space at a WordCamp.

But that is, that’s where it is. And it’s agencies that do a lot of that Core contribution, because they’re also in the weeds working with clients and building these things for their Drupal customers. And so like, the SEO recipe that I was talking about, like at DrupalCon we, Pantheon has booth demos. Acquia also has booth demos, which means we can talk about, like do demos of our platform, whatever. What we actually did was bring in guest speakers from like agencies and universities and whatever that are actually using Drupal and Pantheon and to talk about their implementation of the cool stuff that they’re doing, because that works better.

And one of the people that I talked to was about the SEO recipe, and he is at an agency and he worked with other people at other agencies, competing agencies even, to make this SEO recipe. So it’s, that’s where the contribution comes from. But again, like it’s the same sort of thing.

Dries said 10 years ago, wrote a blog post about the maker taker problem, as he defines it. And then again in September, in relation to the current state of things in the WordPress ecosystem, because that’s a thing that he’s been thinking about for a long time. It’s obviously a thing that Matt’s been thinking about for a long time.

Like it’s not, again, we’re not that different. We have the same fundamental problems. At the Community Summit at DrupalCon, one of the topics of conversation was getting more people involved, a younger generation involved into Drupal development, which is the exact same conversation we’re having in WordPress as well.

Like, how do we appeal to a younger audience? It’s all the same stuff, right? And there was at some point like a contribution like pie chart. Again, similar to the pie chart that could be displayed at a WordCamp. You know, Automattic does a big chunk of that pie chart.

And then you’ve got, you know, maybe Google does a smaller part of that pie chart and maybe like Bluehost or whatever. Similar pie chart. Acquia does a lot of the big part of the, of that pie chart. And then like other agencies are noted around, and then there’s like an other category, right, of just like individual contributors. It’s a very similar breakdown.

[00:40:47] Nathan Wrigley: It’s interesting because obviously you alluded to the fact that WordPress has been in a state of flux since September. But Dries, I presume prompted by the situation that arose out of WordCamp US. He wrote a piece very much timed after that. So I presume it was in, there was some sort of correlation in his head. And he was laying out how Drupal have, not solved, but how they just have a different approach to that. And I can’t remember every single detail, but there was some curious examples in the Drupal community, like this kind of, I’m going to say pay to play thing.

In other words, if you as a company, let’s say Pantheon may fit into this perfectly, if Pantheon steps through certain hoops and can prove that they did this thing and this thing and this thing for the community, for the Drupal project. If you step through those hoops, you then get, kind of, merit on the other side.

You can, for example, turn up to DrupalCon as a sponsor. My understanding is that maybe it’s only certain tiers, I’m not really sure. But you can’t sponsor DrupalCon unless you have jumped through those hoops. And we don’t really have anything on the WordPress side like that. We have Five for the Future, but it’s hard to pin down. It’s hard to figure out who did what and what have you, because there aren’t the same sort of goalposts, but it feels like the goalposts are a bit more nailed down on the Drupal side.

[00:42:03] Chris Reynolds: There is a process of nailing things down. I don’t know that it goes to the level of, like you can’t actually sponsor, because obviously Pantheon does sponsor and we’ve been, on the other end of being told that we don’t contribute enough to both WordPress and Drupal. But that also depends on how you define contribution really. And I have thoughts about that. The merit thing, it’s just where you’re drawing the lines in the sand. And Drupal has, Dries has his particular lines and the things that make you a contributor to the ecosystem, and what that means in Drupal.

And then, to a degree, I mean, yeah, like you said, Five for the Future is kind of, sort of that thing, but it’s also kind of amalgamous and like it’s honor based. There’s not really a real sense of tracking or, you could kind of, sort of track things, I guess. But it’s very wibbly wobbly.

But my perspective on contribution always has always been, one of the things, I know we’re not supposed to talk about what was talked about at PressConf, but Brad Williams, who I, was my former boss said, he was talking about Five for the Future and was talking about how Web Dev was very early on an adopter of Five for the Future, and I was there at the time, so I remember this. So it’s not just Brad’s words that I’m repeating. And the way that he approached Five for the Future was very much in the umbrella of if you’re doing anything WordPress related that is open source, we are counting that as a Five for the Future project, right. And that was how I understood Five for the Future.

That was kind of how it was presented back in 2014 or whatever when Matt first threw the idea out to the, out to the ecosystem. And since then it’s sort of become this thing where contribution to WordPress really means Core contributions, or contributions in very specific ways. And it doesn’t mean all of this other stuff over here, including an up to theme development, plugin development.

Even if that stuff is on .org, even if that stuff is open source, that’s not included in contribution. But I’m very much in the side of the bucket where like, well, everything is kind of contribution. We wouldn’t know how good WordPress scales to like enterprise level sites that are running it today, that are driving the adoption of WordPress, and driving the bar in like the visibility of WordPress, if it wasn’t for just hosts that are running the thing and making sure that it operates properly. And the teams like 10up and Human Made, and whoever who are like then, oh, to get this working at its best, fastest, most optimized state we need to do some enhancements. Either through the plugin ecosystem or contributing back to Core, so that we can push this code to these hosts, or platforms, or softwares as a service or whatever so that they operate for these clients that we’re building.

So like I kind of feel like everything should be, even if you are a taker, in the language of Dries, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not pushing the ecosystem forward. And I have that critique for both of our BDFLs, right? Because they both have very similar ideas.

Like I think that the contribution title could be applied and should be applied more broadly, because everything that we’re doing is driving the project forward. A lot of the stuff that I write is like GitHub actions, or like plugins or things that are still broadly available to, and publicly available, and they’re open source and they’re for the community, but they’re not technically contribution, because contribution is narrowed down into this very specific definition.

[00:45:30] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of curious, you know, if you were to cast your mind back 20 years, the beginning of both Drupal and WordPress, just even the idea that they would still be around for one thing, you know, that that software wouldn’t have just come and eaten them up and there would be like a two year lifespan.

[00:45:44] Chris Reynolds: And that there’s an open source solution for these things.

[00:45:46] Nathan Wrigley: And it’s going and it’s kept rising and it’s kept being used. That’s just so curious. But also the teething pains of that. The idea that, you know, it started with Matt, and it started with Dries, and then people got on board and it grew. And then in the case of Drupal, and in the case of WordPress, it just grew to the point where these individuals can no longer handle everything.

You know, you described how Dries needed to sort of say, can somebody handle the events please? Because that’s just not where I want to be. The same, presumably on the WordPress side. And now we’re into giant communities. Really, really complicated communities. A lot of differing opinions, a lot of different maybe even politics, but a lot of different backgrounds, geography, the whole thing.

It’s this international thing. And it’s difficult. It’s really, really hard to get it right. But what I’m taking from this conversation. Is that maybe Drupal do things differently, but they have way more in common than we have as differences.

But also maybe there are some things that WordPress does better. Maybe there are some things that Drupal does better. And it would be very, very interesting if the two communities could kind of collide more, and share those ideas and we pick the best of each of them. It’s never gonna be perfect, but maybe that’s something that in the future, given that really at a very core level we’re not in competition with each other, it would be very nice if those conversations could take place.

And I think you’ve laid the groundwork for a lot of that and explained how one project is not that dissimilar to the other one. So, that’s it.

Chris, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it. That was very enlightening.

[00:47:22] Chris Reynolds: Thank you for having me. I always love chatting with you.