[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.

[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 personal journey through the history of the internet from start to now.

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 wp tavern.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 Wes Tatters. Wes has been immersed in the tech space for close to four decades, starting his journey with early computers like the Commodore 64 and TRS 80. He’s been an author, with multiple books on internet technologies to his name, has worked across AV and media, and today he’s the driving force behind Rapyd Cloud, a globally distributed hosting company. Wes’ perspective is shaped as much by his hands-on experience building communities on CompuServe, AOL and MSN, as by his deep involvement with modern open source platforms like WordPress.

Wes starts off by sharing some of the fascinating stories from the early web, when getting online meant stringing together modems and bulletin boards, and long distance communication felt nothing short of miraculous. He talks about the evolution of the internet as a space for community, and how chance encounters in early online forums led to opportunities like writing for Netscape and shaping the very first JavaScript Developer Guides.

We then discuss the changing meaning of community across different eras of the internet, touching on the shift from closed walled gardens, like AOL, to the open source ethos that powers projects like WordPress, and much else that we take for granted online. Wes describes how WordPress’ flexibility and openness allowed anyone, anywhere, to claim their own piece of the web without technical barriers, and how this has contributed to its rise as a cornerstone of global digital freedom and self-expression.

Our conversation also examines the challenges, and potential missteps, of the modern internet from social loneliness, to the commercial world of social media. And reflects on WordPress’s role in helping steer a path back to more positive, open, and empowering online experiences.

If you’re interested in how the history of the internet directly shaped WordPress, the Open Web, and the communities we build today, 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 wp tavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Wes Tatters.

I am joined on the podcast today by Wes Tatters. Hello, Wes.

[00:03:50] Wes Tatters: Nathan, good to be talking together again.

[00:03:53] Nathan Wrigley: I’ve got to be very, very, accommodating of Wes’ time, because for me it’s about four in the afternoon, something like that. Wes, on the other side of the planet, is giving up his time at about one in the morning. I have no idea why you are here, but I appreciate it. Thank you.

[00:04:07] Wes Tatters: Oh look, my day tends to be largely focused on talking to people in Europe, and in the United States. Half my employees are in those parts of the world as well. So I tend to work midnight to midnight. And we’re in the middle of a big product launch, for Rapyd, which has meant we’re just talking, and being visible, and I’m awake and happy to chat.

[00:04:25] Nathan Wrigley: So you literally pivot your day, your Australian day, you pivot it so that you are available for North American and European customers. So we should probably say you work for a hosting company called Rapyd Cloud, And that’s where the thrust of your marketing endeavors go. So you pivot your day?

[00:04:41] Wes Tatters: Yeah, like about, I think about 60% of our customers are in the United States, and about 30, 45, 35 are in Europe, and 5% or something in Asia, Which is pretty generic for the WordPress space. Our focus is around obviously those markets, but also because we’re a global company, we don’t have a head office.

Everyone who works in our team is doing it remotely. It might be Dubai, or Chicago or the Philippines or Pakistan, India. So we choose times of the day, we have this great calendar and for every meeting we post up a list of all the times, and then there’s happy faces, red faces and smiley faces. And someone will go, all right, I’ll take the red face. That’s the nature of WordPress though.

[00:05:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, madness though, when you think about it. If you were to rewind the clock 30 years none of this was possible. I mean here, I am talking you through a web browser, as if it’s nothing, and it is utterly remarkable. And actually that’s going to be the thrust of this conversation, I think. We’re going to trace the WordPress community in particular, not just the community, the software and what have you, over the period of time it’s been in existence, 21 years odd.

So, do you want just give us your backstory, specifically I guess around WordPress, but just generally in tech? Because I know you’ve done quite a lot of other AV related things as well.

[00:05:54] Wes Tatters: I’ve, been in the tech space for close to 40 years. I was trying to work it out a little while ago, and it’s like, I remember my first computer. It was a Commodore 64 or something, or a TRS 80, or something like that. And I would’ve been 16 or 17, and even then it was like, I was programming them, not playing games on them. I enjoyed programming and coding.

So I started very early in the tech space, but as a result of which, even modems didn’t really exist when I first started in the IT space. Laptops and PCs and computers and certainly iPhones and all that wonderful technology we have today didn’t exist.

But there was already people in the space at places like DARPA, that were going, how do we connect the world? It was a government military strategy. How do we connect the world in the event of a nuclear war? That was the driving mentality behind what they were planning. It was originally going to be a network of radio towers sending, a bit like we had with the old modems, the buzzing noises.

But it was this whole concept of, how do we build a disconnected system that can survive massive breakdowns in the structure of communication? And a part of what they build, ironically, is what makes the internet so powerful these days. It’s that ability to interconnect disparate technologies, disparate systems, all different types of capabilities and devices and all those sorts of things, in ways that are transparent.

As you just said, we’re in two parts of the world and we are talking together in real time. I grew up in the, as a part of my life, in the media world, and film and television and primarily television. In a point in time where if we wanted to conduct a live interview with someone on the other side of the world, firstly, we had to book satellite space in the thousands of dollars per minute almost. And then we would go, Nathan, are you there?

And Nathan would come back four seconds later, and we would conduct these really bizarre interviews, with delays on this crazy technology. So much so that when live television was first starting, obviously there was a big fear that someone would say naughty words, or swear on television for the want of a better word. And one of the early ways that they originally managed, we have what’s called, a lot of television stations had this big red button called a dump button.

The whole idea was someone said f, someone had to slam the big dump button. But the way they we’re actually handling it was they were actually sending the entire signal up to a satellite and back down to the ground station before they transmitted it. Because that gave them roughly two or three seconds of delay, which gave them the ability for that big red button to stop the transmission point. But the signal had gone up and down through a satellite just to even achieve that craziness.

I came into that world, and started in that world. I was incredibly lucky that I lucked into an IT firm, here in Australia, that was at that stage of company that doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s a company called Wang Microsystems. Dr. Wang was the guy that invented the first memory ship, so he, he’s reasonably well healed, but that entire platform doesn’t exist. But Wang was one of the first it companies to release a processor with a box. There was this three racks that was a modem.

300 characters per second. It was bleedingly fast. But for, its time, and I was one of the first people that got to play with one of those things in Australia. And I’ll tell you what, I was hooked. I just went, even then I could go, oh my goodness. There were dreams of we can make it faster.

And we got 1200 baud, and then we got 1600 baud, and then we got 3,200 baud and 56 k. And every bit was exciting. Because what it was allowing me as a person to do, especially a person in Australia, was to reach out and communicate with people that weren’t in my part of the world. And we had things like America Online, well CompuServe first, I guess prior to America Online.

We had bulletin boards and local BBS software and things like that. And all of them were creating communities. All of them were starting to build communities around this same space. It was something that I really engaged with.

When I got into CompuServe though, it for me changed a lot of things. Because until that stage it was hard to communicate with anyone outside Australia. But with CompuServe, all of a sudden, I was connected to people around the world.

[00:10:37] Nathan Wrigley: What did that connection actually feel like though? Was it literally, you’d type something, and was it you’d leave the computer, like the email sort of exchange?

[00:10:46] Wes Tatters: They were really very, very similar to an early sort of discussion board. People would leave comments, and people would make comments back and respond, and people built relationships and discussions were built. And in my early life I was an author. I’ve written a number of books on internet technologies.

This is the guy in Brisbane, Australia, who happened to luck into a forum on CompuServe with a guy named Mark Tabor, who was the head of publishing acquisitions for Schuster and Schuster, which is McMillan, and sams.net, the biggest publisher on the planet.

And Mark was going, we are looking for authors to write in this space. They were releasing a new imprint at the time called sams.net, which was going to be like. Theirs was Teach Yourself series.

They were building it at McMillan, and their biggest problem was respectfully that IT people don’t make good writers. Love us, or like us, we don’t even like writing comments in code, let alone knocking out 4 or 500 pages of a book, to tell someone how to do something.

But that ability to be in a community outside of my own space, this is me in Brisbane, Australia, talking to the head of acquisitions for Macmillan, going, yeah, I can write a book. I’d already been doing some writing. I had, as I said from, because I have a media background, I’d been writing for magazine articles in Australia, and I’d been involved in communications and had some journalism experience, so I was kind of already in the space.

And yeah, the book got written. We actually wrote a book that told people how to connect CompuServe to the internet, because previously CompuServe couldn’t be connected to the internet.

[00:12:21] Nathan Wrigley: Do you remember those times like halcyon day’s, rose tinted spectacles. Because that was real pioneering stuff. The idea that, okay, so dear listener, if you are under the age of 30, your world was entirely connected from the moment you could conceive a thought. In some respect you could turn the tele on and be live tele from around the globe. You may not have had internet access.

[00:12:44] Wes Tatters: I remember trying to explain to my parents what I was doing, and they were looking at me going, you’re doing what? And it wasn’t until the first book, 500 pages, 50 copies arrived in a box from McMillan, that the lights went on in parents’ head who went, okay.

[00:13:04] Nathan Wrigley: There’s something in this.

[00:13:05] Wes Tatters: This is odd. And we sold hundreds of thousands of copies of edition of these books. I wrote the same book for America Online.

The joke was America Online actually wasn’t even in Australia at that stage, which was interesting. But it gave me lots of opportunities, and this was about communities. This was about getting into communities. While I was in that community, talking, working with the a AOL team on how they were going to connect to this thing called the internet. There was a little crowd called Netscape banging around, going hey, love what you did, Tim. Love that original browser. We’re going to build a better one.

[00:13:37] Nathan Wrigley: An open one.

[00:13:38] Wes Tatters: An open one. And the Netscape guys had seen my books, came to my publisher and said, hey, could we do a book with Wes on how to write, how to build websites for Netscape? So we wrote six books for Netscape over the next five years, going teach yourself HTML development for Netscape. So community was the whole basis of it.

[00:14:03] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so curious that for people that are born in the last, like I said, 20 years or so, the internet has just been a feature of their life, almost like a utility. Almost in certain parts of the world, like a human right. You might even describe it on that level.

This conduit of information that can come in. This capacity to talk to people, any point on the globe almost immediately with almost zero cost. And in the time that you are describing just the merest foundations of that were beginning. Little glimmers of that would beginning to emerge.

[00:14:34] Wes Tatters: Really edge.

[00:14:35] Nathan Wrigley: Really interesting though. I can imagine your passion and interest and all of that must have been. The curiosity that was spiked by that.

[00:14:42] Wes Tatters: It was. I loved it. But even then, we still didn’t truly understand where it was going.

I remember a call from the team at Netscape going, it was around, I think it was around version three of the Netscape. Going we’ve got this idea we’re going to, we’re going to put a scripting thing in Netscape. What do you think? And I’m going, yeah. What do you mean? What do you think? We need you to include it in the next book. It’s this little thing called JavaScript.

[00:15:04] Nathan Wrigley: Just little thing.

[00:15:06] Wes Tatters: And I remember sitting there going, interesting idea. Can you tell me more about what it can do? And they went, we don’t really know yet. We’re still working on those bits. So we ended up writing the first JavaScript development guide, me and my technical writer, who was my technical editor for my Netscape books. And I wrote the first JavaScript Developers Guide for Netscape.

So we were there in the middle of it, but all the way through, we still didn’t truly get it. It was still such this small thing. I was talking with Bud.

[00:15:37] Nathan Wrigley: Bud Kraus.

[00:15:38] Wes Tatters: Yeah, I was talking with Bud at PressConf, and we were chatting about just the way the internet’s evolved. I had the opportunity to meet Tim Burnes Lee.

[00:15:46] Nathan Wrigley: Nice, the Godfather.

[00:15:48] Wes Tatters: The Godfather of the internet. And listening to Tim talking about his dream of the internet and the worldwide web, this was a worldwide web conference seven, which was back before WordCamps. It was, that was what a WordCamp looked like before it was WordPress. And I look back and I was thinking, and I’m going, there were some serious names at that event. Tim Burnes Lee was there. James Gosling, the founder of Java, was there.

And these were guys doing for the want of a better WordCamp style sessions, chatting about these ideas they’ve had. Seeing even then that what the worldwide web, and what we’ve grown into with WordPress had the potential to be, was entirely different to the way the world thought before that.

I remember there was like, I think it was the Friday night. I actually ran the media for that particular conference, that was held in Australia. It was the first time being held out of the northern hemisphere. But no fully explained reason, it was being held in Australia, in my hometown, and I ran all the media for it.

And I remember some guys, they had this sort, they were going to create this shoe library, it was like, this is the early web. Who knows what we’re going to do with it? We want a shoe library.

[00:17:00] Nathan Wrigley: A shoe library, yeah.

[00:17:01] Wes Tatters: They taking photographs of people’s shoes, and I remember it was like 7:30 on a Friday night, and Tim’s in a pair of slacks and a t-shirt. Taking his shoes off so that they could photograph his shoes, so that his photograph of his shoes could go into the shoe library.

[00:17:19] Nathan Wrigley: Of course.

[00:17:20] Wes Tatters: And this is the guy that invented the thing that we all live on. This is the father of everything we do today. But even then, he was this amazingly humble person, that was happy to have a chat with a bunch of kids and take photos of his shoes. It’s a different world.

[00:17:38] Nathan Wrigley: When you are where you’re at. So in the year 2025, we’re concerned about the internet now. And so the way it ended up is how it now is. And honestly, it’s not one of those things that you pick apart, as like what is the history? What were the dominoes that fell to make the internet, what it now is?

Like, history, politics and warfare, and all of those kind of things get dealt with by historians. The migration of people over great land masses, all of the kings, queens, all of that.

But this, this kind of doesn’t, and it’s fascinating to listen to you there, because it feels like it could have gone in so many different directions. Maybe would’ve been a more AOL type thing, where everything was closed and you had to buy into AOL, and everything was handled by AOL. It didn’t turn out that way. Open won. I’m not entirely sure that we didn’t swing back to closed with things social media?

[00:18:29] Wes Tatters: One of the things that caused that was the people who started using the technology that DARPA invented first, and it was universities.

[00:18:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. That was the client base, wasn’t it? It was the academics.

[00:18:44] Wes Tatters: It was the academics. So Tim’s original agenda was to obviously create a way to communicate with all the scientists in Cern what was happening in the accelerator that was sitting under three countries. Even then it was about community and communication. But as it’s walked forward, I look at the whole journey of the internet and at every point community has been a part of that.

The ability to share things. The whole basis of what we have today in open source, moving towards WordPress, is about communication. So you can’t have open source without a group of people coming together to collaborate on a project as large as WordPress, or as large as, Linux or as large as Drupal, or as large as all of these other projects. And they’re not being paid for the most part.

They’re doing it because of community, and the underlying technology behind that obviously is the internet. And more insignificantly since then this thing called the World Wide Web that Tim originally envisaged as a tool for sharing.

[00:19:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But just tool for sharing with a handful of academics, and then it just grew exponentially. Do you remember the first time that the internet became more social. No, let me rephrase that. Do you remember when the internet shifted from something which a few people did? To something where, not the majority, but it was like hard to ignore at that point. Because definitely as a child have a of no internet.

[00:20:20] Wes Tatters: Done badly, but Microsoft MSN. Windows 95 was the watershed. So Windows 95 launched, and for the first time, anyone, in inverted commas, with a modem didn’t need to know someone at a university. Didn’t need to know how to hard wire AOL to connect to something else. They could literally go get me on the internet, and it happened. So that was the watershed moment.

Now, MSN as a platform also was heavily driven by community. And again, like it or love them, the original version of Messenger, an embarrassing mess, but it started the concept of community. The original version of MSN was a place where you could go and chat. Their design philosophies around. I remember, in Australia, 9 MSN was, the branding of it. 9 here is our major television network, and they partnered with MSN, in Microsoft and Australia and our major telco to bring MSN to Australia. But it was heavily geared around building communities. And I was quite active in that MSN community in Australia.

We used to do things like popular TV shows would go to air, and then we would host forums where the actor, or the presenter, or someone from the show would hop literally straight off, the show would end at 9:30, and they would be in a forum going, and hey, tonight we’ve got insert name of whoever it is.

And people could ask them questions. And we curated it. I was a part of the curations team at 9 MSN at that stage. And, again, it was using this crazy technology to build community, and to expand communities.

Now for that network they were using as just obviously a marketing tool, but what it was doing underneath it was again, building this ethos of communities and spaces.

We then have obviously Facebook that took that and ran with it in crazy directions, and commercialized it. But underneath it we’re still this open source thing. There’s still whole open source community.

[00:22:31] Nathan Wrigley: Do you remember the moment as well when the internet went more from a consumption kind of thing? So you know, you would log onto somebody else’s property, MSNs Messenger or whatever it may be. I do remember that, by the way. To I can own a bit of the web, a bit of that whole thing can be something that I am in control of. And now we move towards CMSs I guess.

[00:22:51] Wes Tatters: So this is probably 98 initially. So we were still writing books and Netscape was still trying to work out what they were doing in the world. And, Tim was, Tim was out telling people how big the internet could be. And I remember lots and lots of people, as I said, James Gosling’s come down, Tim Berners Lee’s come. The BBC had flown two camera teams, journalists, The Times had flown out people. NBC and CBS had flown out camera crews and to be at this event. Because Sir Tim was becoming Professor Tim at that stage. He was being reordered, a honorary doctorate from an Australian university. It was a big event.

Could not get a single Australian broadcaster to even show up. Now, put this in perspective. I knew them all. I was actually in that industry. I knew the people. I literally was on the phone to news directors going, dude, just send me one cameraman. Oh, what’s this thing? What’s this thing? It was the internet.

So 95 to 98, it was still a bit hokey. I think where it really started to change though is when things like WordPress started to arrive. Because before that my books on how to build a website, I love meeting people and go, I think I’ve got your book on a shelf somewhere. It was, and it was always either mine or Laura Lemay’s.

Laura and I were both writing in parallel for the same publisher. And some of her chapters are in my books, my chapters in her books. But then it was, we were still hacking HTML. If you wanted to use JavaScript, it wasn’t jQuery or anything like that. You were writing lines of code and hoping it worked.

And there were some predecessors and other things. Microsoft had to go at the same thing. Microsoft released a product called ASP, a little thing that.

[00:24:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, that’s right. Active Server Pages.

[00:24:35] Wes Tatters: Yeah, and then they released a thing called asp.net, and this wonderful new programming language called C#. And that was their push into this community space. They released open source product with it. They released a product which was called I Buy Spy Portal, which was eventually then forked into a product by a guy named Sean Walker to become a product called DotNetNuke, which was literally their version of WordPress.

I was there, I know Sean. I was in that space, and we were building communities again, coming outta the Microsoft space on DotNetNuke. At the same time, this little thing called WordPress was happening in parallel. At that stage, ironically, at that stage, I think DotNetNuke was actually more a CMS than WordPress was. Because WordPress was still really a blogging tool. It was still really MySpace for people who actually had a desire to code a bit.

But I think it was then, that WordPress journey, the arrival of a mechanism that did two things. It allowed you to create a website without knowing how to code, and it allowed you to become a part of something, a community online, where you could all of a sudden reach out of your local neighborhood, your local city, your country, into the rest of the world. And take things to the rest of the world. Sell products to the rest of the world. Communicate to the rest of the world. Share your opinions and thoughts. In the past, you could do that on CompuServe. You could do that on America Online. But in all those places, you didn’t own your content.

[00:26:16] Nathan Wrigley: Right, exactly that.

[00:26:18] Wes Tatters: Even MySpace, sort of like the predecessor to almost Facebook. Facebook groups and forums. None of these spaces you owned your content. And so I think WordPress in its initial incarnation, a blog, was a way for people to start expressing their feelings. And the concept of blogging. And then we started to grow that how do we get our blog to the world? Well, RSS feeds, and then aggregators, and then this wonderful thing called Google came along.

[00:26:45] Nathan Wrigley: Discoverability.

[00:26:47] Wes Tatters: Discoverability, and visibility. And all along that journey, there’s this guy in the states beavering away, we’re talking about Matt, with a vision of what WordPress could be in that space. And he was creating that in parallel to these communities starting to emerge, to these other companies like Google, and Facebook building closed enclaves.

Where Matt, obviously very passionate about open source, had a philosophy to build this space that people could use, that people could communicate and share. It was incredibly open. Anyone could write a plugin. Anyone could write a theme. Anyone could decide that they wanted to commercialize that space by selling their theme or selling their plugin.

Hosting companies could host that platform. So the fact that was such an open product, tweaked something in the consciousness of the time. It tweaked something in that desire to communicate, but also I guess a concept of freedom to communicate.

Freedom of speech is a passionate position of a lot of countries. The right to freedom of speech, and to a certain extent the right to express an opinion, safely. Or in some cases the rights to communicate in communities.

I discovered during Covid that the platform that Rapyd grew out of Buddy Boss, which is a social media platform creation tool for WordPress. Install Buddy Boss and you’ve got your own private Facebook.

We discovered that there were communities using Buddy Boss to communicate things to their people that they were terrified to communicate on private spaces, like social media or Facebooks. I know people specifically in some of those communities, doctors, other frontline groups and organizations that were facing the real challenges of what was happening in Covid and impacts of those things. They were able to use that gift of community, freely given, freely shared, where you own your raw data in ways that I hadn’t even considered.

And for reasons that I hadn’t even considered. And each time I look at it, people find ways to use community creatively and in incredible ways. And we find that at the core of WordPress.

[00:29:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we really do. I remember the first time I ever produced anything online, and it wasn’t with a CMS, it was just HTML. There was no CSS at the time, it was just tables and things. But I remember publishing that, a friend of mine knew more than I did, and he said, okay, here’s the environment. Here’s the text file. Just write it in there and, I’ll click a button and it’ll go to some server.

And then I saw it, saw it on his computer. And then I said to him, but it’s on your computer. And he said, no, no, no, if you go home, it’ll be on that computer well.

[00:29:44] Wes Tatters: And if, you go down the library, or you go up the road, and all you needed to know was where it was.

[00:29:50] Nathan Wrigley: And I remembered this profound feeling of, what the heck. That’s so amazing. What, I just put something on your computer, and now anybody in the world should they, discoverability is the big problem, but they could find it. He’s yeah, that’s it. That’s what the internet basically is. And I remember thinking, gosh, what a force for good.

[00:30:10] Wes Tatters: Huge force for good. Unfortunately, it’s also been a force for other things. I had a conversation with Tim, as a part of a set of interviews that the BBC were doing, this was in 1998. And at that stage, Tim was just exploring the idea of what he called the semantic web, which was zaml, and underlying metadata. And what Tim always envisaged the worldwide web should be, he always envisaged that every page, because he’s a data scientist, he envisaged that every page would have a beautiful set of metadata and structures, so that it could be searched and indexed.

Of course that’s everything the worldwide web didn’t become, respectfully. We have enough trouble in the WordPress space remembering to put a, an alt text on a photo that we upload. But his envision was of this beautiful semantic web. So it hasn’t gone exactly the same way as he envisaged.

But even without that semantic web, the additions and add-ons of things like Google, and Google search, and the ability to create an index, a massive index of the web. And now in 2025 going, hey, ChatGPT, can you just tell me the answer to this question please? And then can you write me a presentation?

I was having a meeting with an associate of mine. I haven’t caught up with each other for about six years, and he’s deeply involved in the concept of human centered design, which is, a business practice where you, look at the customer to identify the problem. Not look at the business and try to solve a problem.

He wanted to know about what I was doing in AI and that sort of stuff. And I said, did you know that I could write you a business plan? And they used to spend a lot of money creating business plans for people, and creating sessions and seminars. And I went, I can write you a seminar structure and plan in two minutes, on any topic.

I said, no, we’ll do better. Hey, ChatGPT, tell me what you know about human-centered design and why it’s good. And of course it printed out 20 paragraphs. And then I went, can you summarize that for a presentation seminar? And of course it did that. And then I said, now can you give me the structure of the seminar?

And it did that. And this guy sitting there going, are you kidding? And I said, that’s where we’ve come. But underlying all that is data and information. And none of that’s of any relevance unless you’ve got a community to share it with.

[00:32:23] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have a sense that the internet has gone in a, I’m going to use the word bad or poor direction over the last decade? Do you have a sense that mistakes have been made? If you could rewind the clock, were there any moments in time where you think, I wish it hadn’t have gone in that direction?

Because I often think things like proprietary platforms that kind of want to put a wall around the conversations that we have. They seem like, maybe in 50 years time when we look back, maybe they’ll seem like missteps. I don’t know. Maybe they’ll carry on and it’ll all be, as it is now.

But it does feel like there’s a resurgence more to owning your own conversation. So obviously we do that in WordPress, but it does feel like there’s a bit of a groundswell towards more federated protocols. Things like the AT protocol that Bluesky are doing, but Mastodon and an ActivityPub and those kind of things.

[00:33:12] Wes Tatters: I think again, if you harken back to Tim’s semantic web and, he wrote a document, 2022 I think, which was 30 years on. And he talked about where things had gone. I can tell you right now that the way I read Tim’s take on the worldwide web is that e-commerce was not a part of it. That was not a part of his idea of.

[00:33:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, how would you even have conceived that?

[00:33:38] Wes Tatters: Yeah, e-commerce wasn’t a thing. I don’t truly think, Snapchatting or no fully explained reason, 15 second videos in TikTok were anywhere on the radar, because there was this whole deal of philosophy. But each of these things actually has the same underlying traits.

It’s all about communities, it’s all about relationships and building relationships with people. Where I think personally we have made a misstep is in how our younger generations consume that community.

[00:34:12] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a lot.

[00:34:12] Wes Tatters: Well, it’s more than a lot. There was a survey done and I haven’t got the figures in front of me, because I wasn’t planning on discussing where we were here. That’s looked at the level of loneliness of people in 2025, compared to the level of loneliness of 20 and 30 years ago. And it directly related this online community thing. The, unfortunately, what do we call false community sometimes. The people we have never met that we talk to in a Snapchat or something like that, that are not community, and they’re not really our friends.

And there is an increase in loneliness. And I think if there’s any misstep that we as a society have maybe taken out of this thing, is a lack of understanding of the impacts of loneliness. And I think the internet’s to blame for that.

[00:35:13] Nathan Wrigley: The internet is so beguiling, isn’t it? Because there’s so much interesting stuff there. I think throw the mobile phone into that equation as well. This always on device, which is available 24 7. But it’s that capacity, incapacity, to put it down. You start doing something with it and then five minutes later you realize, often, in many cases, five minutes is not even the benchmark. More like an hour or something.

[00:35:36] Wes Tatters: And, there are clinical reasons for that. We’re actually getting out of these devices the same dopamine hits that lead to depression. The same dopamine hits that lead to mood swings and to a certain extent mental health issues.

We now have this whole, go on the internet and you’ll get, especially when you’re hitting my age, are you dopamine deprived? Join this, get on this dopamine detox. And it’s real. It’s a real problem. And the five minutes bursts, the swiping, the scrolling, the doom, scrolling, they’re not things that you could have even comprehended. We have all this data, massive amounts of data available to it, but we prefer to consume a, TikTok video, or look at photos of funny dogs or kittens, or dogs and kittens or whatever it is. The internet and the things that have grown out of that, have all contributed to that.

[00:36:32] Nathan Wrigley: It really is interesting. Bit of a double-edged sword, really. Like on the one hand, the internet is probably the greatest innovation, maybe of all time. Or the electric light or, you know, what did the Romans us kind of thing.

But also, curiously, it also has aspects of it which are really deleterious to humanity, and can really bring out the worst. It allows us to consume the worst to, I don’t know, to spend hours where we probably got other things that we should be doing, but for some reason we can’t let go of the phone, and things like that. So it is really curious.

[00:37:06] Wes Tatters: It’s the speed that it’s happened.

[00:37:08] Nathan Wrigley: And continues to happen. I don’t see any slowing down.

[00:37:12] Wes Tatters: At PressConf the other day, one of the sessions was an AI session. Of course there’s going to be an AI session. Seriously, if you go to the opening of a restaurant in the town center, there’s some guy doing a presentation, and we’ve got Barry to talk about AI for 15 minutes. It feels like that anyway.

One of the demonstrations was about two paragraph script, and it said effectively, hey, insert name of AI tool. I want you to create me a five second video, and I want the five second video to be of a dinosaur running out of a valley with a volcano erupting in the background. And as the dinosaur runs towards the camera, the ground shakes and the dinosaur’s then going to pass to the right hand side. And I’d like it to look a bit like Jurassic Park. That was literally the wording, and you hit enter not that long later, here’s a 15 second video that looks lifelike, realistic.

[00:38:05] Nathan Wrigley: Jurassic Park.

[00:38:06] Wes Tatters: It literally was, you may as well have been in the feature film. 10 years ago, 20 years ago, that would’ve cost couple of million dollars for that five seconds of animation. Now it’s literally something you can get on your mobile phone.

[00:38:20] Nathan Wrigley: Anybody can get on their mobile phone.

[00:38:22] Wes Tatters: I was looking at a video thing today. I was like, some AI tool where you can go, hey, can you, put me in a video of me flying? Yeah, sure. I just need 10 photos of you please. And, now what would you like to fly over? Yeah, technology’s changed.

[00:38:35] Nathan Wrigley: Madness though, when you think about it, if you were to rewind the clock 30 years none of this was possible. I mean here I am talking you through a web browser as if it’s nothing. And it is utterly remarkable.

[00:38:48] Wes Tatters: So we live in a society where we’ve moved from the first time anyone heard of a deep fake, but now it’s just what you do when you’re at lunch break.

Things are changing. Forget about the ethics, the morals, and all those things, but our technology has changed. So yeah, to answer the question, are there missteps? Probably. But the interesting thing about the internet, and it’s something that was built into it at the beginning at DARPA, it’s actually got this amazing ability in technology to recorrect itself.

And that was how DARPA was built. The whole idea was, if you can’t get it this way, it’ll go this way. And if you can’t get it this way, you’ll find a carrier pigeon, and you’ll keep the communications going. What we’ve discovered with communities, and with groups, is that they seem to have an inordinate way of self-correcting as well, through moderation, through conversations.

When you get critical mass, and you pull enough people together, there is this inordinate ability to self-correct. I don’t fully understand the psychological basis behind it, but it’s fascinating how the internet has this ability to self-correct itself. So maybe over time it will, who knows?

[00:40:02] Nathan Wrigley: Certainly in the world at large at the moment, we do seem to be in need of some sort of self-correction in all sorts of walks of life. And the WordPress community that we are both a part of definitely has had its schism over the last six months or so.

[00:40:17] Wes Tatters: Look, and it’s been, and that’s happened before. And even those things self-correct, because there are communities that are passionate in this space. Yes, there’s been some drama. and there’s no point in having conversation about that. But one of the outputs of that has been interesting new conversations in communities. Not looking at things like how we destroy WordPress, or how we, what we do next, but actually going, how do we build our community? How do we assist our community?

So even in those sort of challenges that every big ecosystem has, the community itself can self-correct. The community itself, can develop new relationships. And people grow out of those things.

PressConf was an amazing example of that. Obviously it had happened before in a slightly different form a number of years ago, but this was, let’s put 150 odd in a space for a weekend, and let ’em all chat and have conversations. And actually have intelligent dialogues and a whole heap of things grew out of it.

When we have WordPress events, we have WordCamps. We have Word Camp Europe coming up. Groups creating new vision. We talk about things like contribution and what contribution looks like. There’s been some negatives about contribution in the recent space, but there’s also been some huge positives about contribution. Out of the drama we’ve had, actually created a new conversation. Many people who didn’t even understand the concept. Oh yeah, I just assumed WordPress was this thing. I never thought that there was actually people giving up their weekends to go to a day in Hyderabad to fix bugs in wordPress. But that’s what people do.

And it actually helped us have a new conversation with a lot of people in the WordPress space that actually hadn’t even comprehended. Because they just assumed that they were, oh yeah, I just downloaded this WordPress thing.

[00:42:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do wonder if some things will come out of the year 2025 that would’ve been in the year 2024 unimaginable.

[00:42:21] Wes Tatters: I would say I’m quietly positive. There are lots of conversations, at many layers. I do think, and this is my own personal opinion, that there is a time for speaking and a time for listening. And I think that right now there is a need for a lot of listening from disparate part of the community, and by listening I think a lot of people need to listen to what other people have to say. And then as a community, look at what all those things are. What’s being said, and look at what we do to self correct. I think it’s important to listen.

[00:43:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, a conversation which drifted through what the internet even was and is. Then finally landing on CMSs and WordPress and the community built up around that. So Wes, what a pool of knowledge you are. You’ve really done the entire internet circuit and I’m really glad that we got a chance to speak today. Thank you.

[00:43:19] Wes Tatters: Nathan, it’s been a pleasure. Always happy to chat. It’s about conversation and communities. That’s what matters at the end of the 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 understanding the nature of WordPress contributions and making sure that contributors understand where they might be needed.

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 host 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 Hari Shanker. Hari has been a member of the WordPress community since 2007, and has contributed in various capacities, including as a full-time contributor for several years, working with Automattic, working with initiatives like Five for the Future, and supporting numerous community events around the world. He currently volunteers his time as a community program manager, helping to grow and support the WordPress ecosystem from his home in India.

If you’re involved in the WordPress project, you likely know how vast and complex the contributor ecosystem can be, but you might not have heard of the WordPress Contribution Health Dashboards. An experimental initiative aimed at making sense of all the communities moving parts by gathering, visualizing, and sharing contribution data.

But why does WordPress need something like this? Well, it could help new and existing contributors figure out where to pitch in, and how their work might guide the project’s future growth. Hari’s here to explain.

We start the podcast by going off on a tangent, discussing the landscape of WordPress in India. India is experiencing a huge upswell in community activity, innovation and youth engagement, and it’s exciting to hear about.

We then dive into the main thrust of the podcast, the Contribution Health Dashboards. How the idea came about. Who helped drive it forwards. Why it’s proving so challenging to build, and the massive value it promises for contributors, team reps, project leadership, and anyone curious about where WordPress needs help.

We look at the practical aspects too. What tools are, and aren’t, available? The difficulty of tracking data across the many platforms WordPress uses, and what kinds of skills, and volunteers are needed to push this work forward.

Hari shares his vision for accessible visual dashboards that can guide contributors of all skill sets, and help make the best of every single contribution hour.

If you’ve ever wondered how to make your WordPress contributions matter even more, or how the project could be better supported by data driven insights, 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 Hari Shanker.

I am joined on the podcast by Hari Shanker. Thank you for joining me.

[00:03:53] Hari Shanker: Thank you for inviting me to the podcast and I’m so excited to be here, Nathan.

[00:03:58] Nathan Wrigley: I am really pleased that you’ve joined me. We had aspirations of doing this podcast from Manila, but things conspired against us, and so we are doing this via an online call, let’s say a Zoom call or something like that. So I’m really pleased that we could finally hook up.

The intention is to talk today about something that I suspect many people in the WordPress community will not know a great deal about. So it is called the WordPress Contribution Health Dashboard, or dashboards I should say. And we’ll get into that in a moment. What it is. Why it exists, and how that project is moving along.

But before then, Hari, would you mind just giving us your little bio, your introduction to who you are, where you live, what you do in the WordPress space. As much as you like, really over to you.

[00:04:44] Hari Shanker: Thank you so much, Nathan. So my name Hari Shanker. I live in the south of India, in a city called Kochi. I’ve been with the WordPress community since 2007. I’ve been contributing actively since 2016. I have been contributing full-time. I had been contributing full-time from 2020 to 2024.

At this point, I’m a volunteer contributor. I used to work with Automattic for a while, from 2016 to 2025. At this point I’m not employed, I am a volunteer contributor, very much excited to work on WordPress. And I’ve done a bunch of things with WordPress. WordPress is one of my biggest passions.

My work has mostly been in the community team. I am still a community program manager, which means I approve events, I support events, and my work has mostly been in the contributor experience of WordPress. I led the Five for the Future initiative for quite a long time. And I was also working on the WordPress Contributor Working Group, where we held three editions of the WordPress Contributor Mentorship Program.

As I said, I live in Kochi. I have a wife and I have three cats. I absolutely love it here. They call Kerala Gods own country, and I love the state, I love where I live. And I love the fact that I can work on the best open source software in the world, sitting in my lovely little city, in my lovely little apartment. That’s all about me.

[00:05:58] Nathan Wrigley: That’s so nice. That’s really lovely. Can I just segue a little bit and steer away from the conversation that we’re intending to have? And ask you about WordPress in India?

Now, obviously you may not have your finger on the pulse of everything that’s going on, but I’m curious. Not having been to India during the period I’ve been using WordPress, I have an intuition that it’s a thriving community over there, dare I even say, a growing community.

But that’s just based upon the little bits and pieces that I’ve captured from friends, and articles that I’ve seen. And there seems to be this big upswell in plugin development, and agencies that are really doing great work. So there isn’t really a question there, it’s just more, tell us about how WordPress is going in India.

[00:06:40] Hari Shanker: Absolutely. So you got it right. WordPress, the WordPress economy, the WordPress ecosystem is really thriving. As you said, it’s everywhere. Like, the plugin ecosystem, we have VIP agencies. We have so much innovation happening in WordPress. We have companies like InstaWP. We have agencies like rtCamp, Multidots. There’s so much innovation happening. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

There is also so much community activities happening. We’ve had so many of these events, so many innovative WordPress events, we’ve had WordCamps.

So I was involved in setting up an event called WordPress Photo Festival, and we’ve had a WP Campus Connect. We’ve had a host of women’s day events that were held on March 8th. Again, that’s the tip of the iceberg. There’s so many activities happening. So be it innovation in plugin development or theme development.

And again, themes are big in India. We have had, Astra theme comes from India. So many of these activities happening. And it’s not just centered in one city, it is really all over the place. So in Kerala where I live in, we have very thriving community. We have folks who’ve come up from the community, and who’ve built things that have made waves all over the world. And again, across different cities, be it Mumbai, Pune, Ahmadabad, Kolkata, Ajmer.

So India is, as you know, is a big country. So we have a host of these local WordPress meetup groups and several thousands of community members. And I do not use the word thousand as a euphemism. It really is, like we actually have thousands of community members who are doing cutting edge work. And I can tell you, it is so inspiring to see. I mean, as an open source fan, like it really gives me the energy to keep going.

So yeah, you are right. WordPress is thriving. And we have WordCamp Asia coming to India, in Mumbai in 2026. I am very excited about that.

I was actually the mentor of WordCamp Asia for a short while, but this point I’ve stepped down. I have applied as an organiser and I hope to be in the organising team as well. So I think it’s the best time for WordPress in India, and we still have heights to conquer. The best is yet to come. Super excited about all that.

[00:08:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really great because it does seem in different parts of the world, and maybe this will feed into the conversation that we’re about to have, it does feel in other parts of the world. So I’m in the UK, and it does feel that the community side of things has definitely taken a bit of a hit since the pandemic, so 2019 and beyond.

Those meetups that happened in some cases have come back, but in the majority of cases, they still are either dormant or perhaps have been abandoned. And I feel that the same might be true across Europe and North America. I can’t speak to whether that is accurate or not, but that’s the feeling that I get.

It does feel, like I said, the news that I see, the articles that I read in WordPress journalism, it really does feel like India is exactly as you’ve described it. But also it feels like it’s not just confined to WordPress, it’s tech in general. It feels like there’s, well, maybe renaissance is the wrong word, but there’s just a huge pivot in all things tech over to places like India. You know, whether that’s, I don’t know, SaaS apps and so on, but CMSs as well. It does feel like India is definitely on the rise in all manner of tech.

[00:09:41] Hari Shanker: Absolutely. I think there’s a bunch of reasons for it, but in my mind, I think a big reason for that, I wouldn’t call it the biggest reason, is our very young population. India’s population at this point is over 1.4 billion. I’m not aware of the latest number, but I think it’s around 1.5 billion. So off the top of my head, I think at least 50% of it is a young population. They are less than 35 years of age.

All these young folks, they’re coming in with so much energy. There’s an abundance of human capital. And we are in the internet age, and one good thing that happened after COVID-19 is a lot of these folks got connected. And India has really cheap internet. I mean, of all the places that I’ve traveled to, internet in India has been the cheapest that I know. So it’s really easy to get connected.

And a lot of these people who are connected, they’re using it very productively. That is one of the reasons why you’re seeing this spurt of activity. And there’s been a lot of these inspiring stories, which is really inspiring the youth. And WordPress being what it is, is seeing a lot of this innovation coming in.

But I think, again, we’re really at the tip of the iceberg. The best is yet to come, because I see a lot more people coming into the community. And my hope is with WordCamp Asia happening next year, we will see a lot more of these young folks embracing WordPress, not just tech, but embracing WordPress, and doing a bunch of innovations. So I think the goal for the Indian community is to get all these young people to WordPress.

[00:10:53] Nathan Wrigley: It’s interesting that you mentioned the young people. I was just wondering if there was a connection between, for example, education, you know, school and the emergence of jobs. I don’t know what age you leave school in India, but in the UK it would be typically 16 or 18. And at that point you’re perhaps going on to higher education, so university, something like that, or finding a job.

And I think there’s been a real effort in the UK to supply education in tech. But it doesn’t really seem to pivot around open source software. It tends to pivot around, can I use this already existing product? Often a kind of Microsoft version of something, in order to create wealth or a job. But I don’t know if there’s more of a pivot in India to use open source things to teach those kind of things.

So again, there’s no question there. It’s just more of an observation really.

[00:11:41] Hari Shanker: Yeah, so I think your observation is pretty astute. But I think India has a bit of a USP here when it comes to open source. We have had an open source movement since time immemorial. I mean, specifically my state of Kerala, we have a very uniquely liberal government. So they sort of stepped away from proprietary software and embraced open source software as early as in the nineties.

So Richard Stallman, when he used to be active in the community, he used to visit Kerala almost every other year. And we, as a result of that, have a pretty thriving open source community in my state.

All sorts of open source from Linux distributions, to Python and WordPress of course, and Drupal, and we have all these communities very active and thriving.

And a lot of the young people, they get their introduction to tech through these open source communities, which have local chapters. It’s not just related to my state, even though my state has a pretty high population of this, a lot more people doing this. I would say that the open source movement is pretty active all across India. So we have these big open source conferences in some of the big universities. We have these small local chapters where people get active. So at some point or the other young people who are interested in tech, they get some introduction to open source. And a lot of people are enamoured by the philosophy.

Now, coming specifically to the WordPress community, we have recently had some really good events. So these are in a youth camp format. I was involved in one of them. And there was an event called WP Campus Connect that was held in Ajmer, Rajasthan, which is held by Pooja Derashri. So these events, they were experiments really, but they’ve been quite successful, especially I would say the WP Camps Connect event. It’s been fantastic.

Like, it was an event series, and as a result of those events, I don’t know the numbers, but off the top of my head, at least 200 to 300 people, 300 kids, they got introduced to WordPress directly. I’m not just talking about, you know, setting up websites, they got an introduction to the community. And those efforts are really paying off. We are seeing these people coming into the community and being active.

So the gist of what I’m saying is, yes, you are right. We are seeing an open source movement and we, a lot of these young kids, I mean of course a lot of them, as you said, they move to proprietary technology, but they have more of a window into open source as they blossom.

[00:13:40] Nathan Wrigley: The interesting thing I suppose about that is, given the long march of history and having many decades into the future, that groundswell amongst the younger people now is going to paint a really interesting picture in a couple of decades time. So in the 2030s and the 2040s, it’ll be interesting to see how that movement, the young people obviously going into the marketplace, and getting a job in some industry or other, it’d be interesting to see how that all plays out.

Because one of the things that I always notice when I go to WordCamps is that age thing. The demographic of age, it always seems to skew older rather than younger, you know? If you were to say, how many people here are over, I don’t know, let’s say 45 or 50? I think there’d be quite a few hands. And if you would say, who’s under 20? Very few. Certainly in my part of the world. So it will be interesting how that shakes out.

But how positive is that? That’s such a great way to begin this podcast. I don’t know if you want to, if you’ve got anything more you want to leverage into there quickly before we move on, feel free to.

[00:14:40] Hari Shanker: I just want to add a quick comment. That is a huge opportunity, and to be honest with you, even in India, even with the huge population, the WordPress events that we have, we still haven’t seen that influx yet. But the good news is that it’s changing. It definitely has an effect because when I started organising events for the community in 2016, we got a lot of the young kids and I am seeing them.

So it’s been eight years. I’m seeing the same people, they’re making waves. I know three or four specific examples of folks who got into the community as college students and then really went places. So if we are able to, when I say we, I’m referring to the WordPress community, or specifically the Indian WordPress community. If we are able to leverage it well, and if we manage to keep the momentum and grow it, I would say the sky is the limit. So I am super optimistic and extremely excited about where the future lies for WordPress in India.

[00:15:25] Nathan Wrigley: So that was supposed to be like a one minute aside, and there we go. We’ve had a really interesting conversation about what WordPress is doing in your part of the world. Thank you for that. That was really interesting.

Let’s pivot now to the article. And I’m going to, in the show notes, I’m going to link everybody to an article which Hari wrote towards the latter part of last year, so 2024, September. And it was called WordPress Contribution Health Dashboards: An Experiment.

Now, obviously if you are in the WordPress ecosystem and you’ve been here for many years, you will have no doubt figured out how complicated and tangled WordPress is. Not just the community, but the software, the code, the events, the different teams which make up WordPress, the multitude of ways that you could become involved.

And I think it would be fair to say that if you were new to WordPress, that could be pretty overwhelming. It would be fairly easy to sort of step into the community and think, what? Where do I belong? Where do I fit? Where is my experience best used? Where would I find the most, fun or engagement, or meaning in the WordPress space?

And so it feels like these contribution health dashboards might be some version of trying to get an understanding of what WordPress is, where the gaps are, where the holes are being filled, where the holes in the future might emerge and so on. But just unpack it for us. Who’s involved? What is the idea of a contribution health dashboard?

[00:16:54] Hari Shanker: Great question. And thank you for the excellent introduction, Nathan. I think you did a great job of explaining everything.

To summarise, the idea behind the contribution dashboard is to have sort of like a cockpit or bird’s eye view of WordPress contributions. WordPress, as you know, has around 20, 22 contribution teams, and these teams are doing a bunch of different activities. As you said in your introduction, it’s very hard for everybody to follow this.

So the hope of this project is to build a dashboard, or dashboards, which provide anyone, not just contributors, really anyone in the community to get an idea of where things are with WordPress. So it involves updates on the release, latest releases. It involves activities from various teams, like Core, community, training, photos, meta, et cetera.

So to give anybody who is coming from any part, with any experience, to give them an idea about where things are. Because at this point it’s very hard to follow. We have these blogs, we have Slack, we have Trac, we have GitHub. When those contributions to spread out across multiple places, it’s very hard, even for experience folks to follow. So the hope behind this project was to simplify this with the help of data, and specifically data visualisation. So that is the project specifically.

Now, as regards to who is involved, I will need to share some history and I promise I’ll be brief. So this started as a collaborative effort with a bunch of folks, I should say Courtney Robertson’s name. Courtney has been a real force for good for this project. Like, she’s been very active. So Courtney Robertson, Naoko Takano, myself, Isotta Peira, and a bunch of contributors all over the world.

We all came up with this idea. This idea has been floated around for a long, long time. We need dashboards. It could be helpful. But we were not able to make a ton of progress.

So around WordCamp Europe 2023, there was a question asked in the keynote to Matt Mullenweg and he advocated for it. He said it would perhaps be good to have dashboards, which will bring all this information together.

So that was when all these efforts really gathered momentum. So Courtney was one of the first people to be really excited about this, she really led this forward. And since I was working on contribution health, I was part of the Contributor Working Group, I was also very excited about this. So Courtney and I, we joined hands and we kicked off efforts.

So we first looked at having a tool that will help set things up. But that is when we realized that it could get really complicated, and a lot of the existing tools out there, it may not really fit the bill. But we also needed to find out what we need to measure. What should be there in these dashboards? That was a big question that we had.

So we published a couple of blog posts in the Sustainability Team and the Meta Team. We got a bunch of ideas from the community. We did a lot of on the ground research. Progress was very slow, but we eventually found a tool called Bitergia. Bitergia is a paid tool, it costs a lot of money. Automattic were kind enough to sponsor the tool for the time being.

So we got a paid subscription with some of us having access to it. And we looked at the data, we crunched numbers. But the limitation of Bitergia was that it only looked at GitHub, like the WordPress GitHub. So if you look at the dashboard, the data for that needs to come from various sources, right? The Make WordPress Slack, there’s the P2 blogs, there’s Trac. So this tool was only limited to GitHub.

So after a lot of discussion with the community, and we held several project health hangouts all the way, Courtney Robertson, myself,  Naoko Takano, Isotta Peira, , all of us, we decided to do, with support from Josepha Hayden, who was then Executive Director of the project, and Chloe Brigmann, we decided to do an experiment.

We picked three teams, which was the Core Team, Community Team, and the Training Team. And we identified some KPIs, or progress some metrics, which we found out by discussing with the team members. We used the tools that we have, which includes Bitergia and some data that was already available. For instance, for the 6.6 release, we had the spreadsheet which developers always release once a release comes out, like you have the list of contributors. So we crunched numbers, we did some visualisations, and we published the blog post that Nathan, you’ve linked in the show notes.

So that is what we’ve done in short. It’s an experiment. We’ve shared some data that we have on what we’ve collected. We’ve identified some KPIs.

So the challenge that we have is, building a full fledged dashboard is time intensive, resource intensive. The Bitergia dashboard that we have, it’s very limited. It does not give out out the whole information. That post really is a snapshot. And we have data from January through September, 2024.

So the post, the content that we have, those are really snapshots of the project of contributions for the Core Team, Training Team and the Community Team, as well as stats for WordPress 6.6.

We went out, we put it out there, we hope to get feedback. So that’s what we’ve done. We’ve not moved ahead from there. But that’s a whole executive summary of the project and a history of what we’ve done.

We did get a lot of positive feedback from folks who were fascinated to find some of the information, which is not previously available. The good thing that we’ve done is we were also able to set some KPIs. But the work has not progressed since, we are still there. And it’s a resource intensive project, it needs more contributors and more work to be done in order to move forward. But that’s a brief summary of everything that we’ve done.

[00:21:48] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect. We’ll get into that bit in a moment, the resource intensiveness of it. But just an observation from my point of view is that, typically, I think if you were to do this experiment in a corporate environment, the data would go to the board of directors, if you know what I mean. So that they could inspect that and figure out how to, I don’t know, cut out waste, or figure out who needed to be employed, where people needed to be pushed around in the organisation in order to maximise things.

But whole point in a corporate environment would be the data would end up going north. It would end up towards the senior management way of looking at things. But this is not that. This is a democratised way. In effect, it’s kind of the opposite. The data is intended to be open for absolutely everybody, so all people can see all of the things.

And if somebody new were to drop into the project, yes, they might not understand what all of the data means, but at least they might get an understanding of, okay, that team over there looks as if it’s really fallen on hard times. That team over there, they seem to be doing great. Okay, maybe some of my time needs to be given over here. But the point being, the data is not so that senior management can do things if you like. It’s so that everybody would be able to see the same view. I hope that’s what it is anyway.

[00:23:04] Hari Shanker: That is exactly what it is, but we also hope to influence the senior management there as well. And when I say senior management, it’s not just for this project leadership, it’s also the contributors, the folks that keep the lights on. So that would mean Core committers, team representatives, anyone really.

And again, like you said, the beauty of WordPress, it belongs to everybody. So that’s the way it’s supposed to be, right? So we want to make sure that anyone can benefit something from it. So if it’s a new contributor, they can find out which projects need help. They should be able to identify the areas that they can contribute directly to.

For leadership, they should be able to see the leading indicators or like the areas where the project is doing really well. And the lagging indicators, where a project needs help so they can make better decisions. And they should be able to change the project goals alongside, by understanding the data. So essentially it is aimed at everybody, not just the top down folks. And that is the hope that we came to this with.

[00:23:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, perfect. Now, anybody that’s been in the WordPress space or contributed in any way you will have come across all the tools. You know, there are so many. There’s Trac, there’s P2, I suppose, if you’re working in that environment. There’s Slack. There’s probably a bunch of others as well. I’m sure you could list a whole bunch more.

And if you’ve ever wrangled with APIs or, I don’t know, web hooks or whatever it may be, trying to wrangle data, it’s a hard task. And it does require a lot of human intervention at the beginning.

I’m wondering, is the intention of the project to get it to the point where the human intervention can kind of step away? Because the hard work has been done. We’ve now understood how to capture the data. How to regurgitate the data. How to display the data. So that at some point it will be less about figuring out how to make the data meaningful and more about, okay, now everybody look at the data and draw conclusions from the data.

But it sounded from your description as if we’re still in the, how do we even get the data in? How do we recycle the data? How do we pull it in, regurgitate it and display it ?Again, is that about right?

[00:25:03] Hari Shanker: You are 100% right. That’s exactly where we are in at this point. I think I shared some of the background earlier. The challenge is, we are working on data, it’s a lot of work. I know this because I did a lot of the work in creating the pages that we have.

Unfortunately, we do not have a tool that gets all the data from all the sources. Any tool that we have, it will need to be customised extensively, and that needs developer help. We do not have a ton of data engineers in the WordPress community. We do have some folks, but they are not in the position to contribute their volunteer time towards this.

So this needs investment in terms of developer hours, in terms of more tools, in terms of integrations. So in short, this is a huge endeavor. This needs investment from several organisations working in WordPress for this to really succeed, at least to the vision of what we have. That is the realisation that we had.

But yes, the goal, if the project were to succeed, we should ideally need automated tools that automatically show data. Because if you were to publish this data manually, it’s a lot of work. I am not sure is the best returning because like, I worked with volunteers when I was working on the Contributor Mentorship Program, and I respect volunteer time.

They have daily jobs, even sponsored contributors. They have a ton of things to do. Everybody’s overloaded. That time is very precious, and using the time and creating these dashboards, trust me, it’s extremely resource intensive. Like, between Courtney and myself and, Isotta and Naoko, we took a lot of time to prepare the dashboards that were out today. So we did that as an experiment to inspire folks so that we can get things done.

But if you ask me, is it worth it to keep updating it? I’m not sure. Because I’m not sure if it’s worth the number of hours. Maybe we can do it. Maybe if there’s more folks to help out, it can be continued. But my hope would be to create an automated tool. I’m convinced that it is going to benefit folks.

[00:26:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, I guess that if you do everything manually and you draw the conclusions manually, you’ve got those one set of conclusions. And really what would be ideal is a portal, for want of a better word, where people can go and see and mine the data for themselves, and display it in interesting ways, and can consume it, and then decide how they’re going to display that and drill down in different ways. And obviously that requires automation.

So, okay, we’re recording this kind of the gap between May and April in 2025. If you could, and I should probably say, you know, the listenership to this podcast is fairly wide. If you could ask for people to come and assist with this project, what kind of people at this moment in time are you looking for. You mentioned that you know, there’s not many people who are really interested, maybe in data manipulation and what have you, in the WordPress project. Just give us an idea of who you would wish to speak to you after they’ve listened to this podcast.

[00:27:45] Hari Shanker: Anyone really. I’ll share why. The beauty of WordPress, and I think I’ve explored different open source projects and I think the beauty of WordPress is there’s something for anyone. So a big part of what we need to do is research. And in the sense of, what do people need to measure?

So any feedback that folks can give on what they would like to see in a dashboard, that would be helpful. So if you are a listener to this podcast and you have ideas on what you would like to find out, that feedback itself is a big contribution. That will go a long way. That is a big part of the information that will help us.

On the next level, I would like to have developers who are familiar with Python and data visualisation and things like that. We have explored different ways to do this. I’ve spoken with several Core committers and folks like Jb Audras who, I mean, Jb Audras does a ton of this amazing work. He publishes release information.

So I was inspired by that. And the 6.6 dashboard that I published was very much built on his work. He does a lot of that work. So he’s just published something on WordPress 6.8 in his blog, and he regularly publishes the, a month in Core, year in Core posts in the Make Core blog, which has some of this information.

So folks like that who have time to spare, who are really good with visualisations, that could be really helpful. And what Courtney and I, and Isotta and Naoko, what we had identified, what our group had identified was that we need a tool, we need an external tool. It’s very hard to build something from scratch.

What would really help is to manipulate a tool. And there’s a bunch of open source tools. There’s GrimoireLab, which is, it’s an industry standard tool. It’s an open source software. It powers several open source projects. And there’s a company called Bitergia, which builds on  GrimoireLab, to, provide like a sponsored alternative, which is the one that we are using.

We reached out to them to see if they can build something for us. They quoted a very high price. Currently Automattic is paying €1,000 per month. They quoted upwards of 30 to €40,000 to build this integration. That’s a huge amount of money and I don’t think we have the bandwidth to do it.

So what we need is to bring, again, for folks listening, if you’re a developer, if you’re interested in data visualisation, I’d like to bring you all together to discuss what would be the best way forward.

So first, once we have the KPIs clearly identified, let’s see how we can collect all this data and how we can display it. Maybe we can build something. We are in the era of vibe coding. So I think it’s a lot easier than when we started this project in 2023. It’s not impossible. Perhaps we can build something, build some very simple dashboard, identify some core KPIs. Maybe have two or three dashboards per team, which can be really filtered. Maybe that is possible. Maybe we don’t need a tool.

So we need those developers, and folks with experience in data visualisation. Even like Core developers, like folks who have significant experience tinkering with Meta and Core and all that. So all these folks, if we are able to bring them together, I think we can do that. So I invite all of them to work on this.

[00:30:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So if any of that is making sense to you, can I just ask you to go to WP Tavern. Search for the episode with Hari, H-A-R-I. That’s probably all you need to know. Search there in the Tavern search and hopefully this episode will pop up. And from there you’ll be able to link in the show notes to the piece that is described where you can find all of the links to the people contributing, but also Hari. Are you open to people contacting you directly and beginning conversations with you one-to-one?

[00:30:57] Hari Shanker: Absolutely, absolutely. So at this time, as I shared on the beginning of the podcast, my time is slightly limited, but I’m more than happy to bring people together. That is my strength. And Courtney Robertson, she’s also very interested in this project. So like, between both of us, I think we can wrangle something and we can keep this moving.

Because I firmly believe that WordPress needs this. And if folks are able to volunteer their time, I’m more than happy to bring people together and to keep this project moving. So please, feel free to ping me directly. I’m Hari Shanker in the Make WordPress Slack. That’s H-A-R-I-S-H-A-N-K-E-R. As you said, Nathan, folks can comment in the Tavern blog post as well. So any way you can find me, I will find you.

[00:31:32] Nathan Wrigley: It feels to me like, you know when you go into a great big store or a shop, and I’m going to use supermarket as an example, where you’ve never been to that one before. You’re looking for a particular item. And you can literally spend so many minutes, hours even just searching around. You know, where’s the aisle? Okay, I found what I think is the right aisle. Now, in the aisle, which shelf am I looking for? And then, where is it?

This feels like that. It feels like signposting to, here’s the thing you want. You’re standing at the door and I’ll just grab you by the hand and I’ll take you to the thing that you need to purchase right away. It feels like these dashboards are going to be something akin to that. Just a way of alerting people to the project as a whole, think the supermarket in this case, and how to just make that journey a little bit easier. Make it obvious to everybody what needs help? What doesn’t need help? What’s working? What isn’t working?

How is it going to be manifested? This will be my last question really. What will this look like? Are we going to be looking at spreadsheets full of numbers? Are we going to be looking at charts? What is the intention? Because when I hear dashboard, I’m kind of immediately drawn to like line graphs and things like that. That’s what I’m imagining I’m going to end up seeing. But what would be the intention? Because some of this data would probably fit in that, but maybe some of it is just not going to be that. It’ll just be paragraphs of text, I don’t know.

[00:32:47] Hari Shanker: I will share my vision for the dashboard, and it might be very different from what we end up building.

I would like to build visualisations in the best possible way. So it involves charts, it involves charts of various kinds, pie charts, line charts. So the best form of information depicted in a very visual way, which gives folks a clear understanding of where the project is headed.

In the current version, we’ve included some text because we wanted to sort of like share our findings. But I think as you shared earlier in this podcast, we want folks to find out the data for themselves. And Bitergia currently allows folks to download the data directly as a spreadsheet or in a CSV format. We’d like to give folks that option too. So if you’re not comfortable seeing, or understanding, the data that is in front of you, you can download it and you should be able to manifest it or manipulate it in the way that you want.

So what I have in mind is a very visual dashboard full of charts. And the goal is to not over complicate things, which is why we are really looking at some certain KPIs for teams and for the project itself. For instance, if you look at the project, market share could be a KPI. It’s not necessarily what I, I’m just using it as an example.

So identifying certain key metrics and building charts of various kinds which manifest this data, and to make it as user friendly, and as accessible, and accessibility in the strictest sense of the world. So that anybody with any size sort of accessibility requirement should be able to view this data and understand it. That is the vision that I personally have, and I think Courtney also has a very similar vision. So yeah, that’s what I have in mind.

[00:34:18] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like in the year 2025, where we are at the moment, it feels as if, and we don’t need to go into the reasons. It does feel like contributor hours are more precious than they’ve ever been. And so that in and of itself is a fantastic reason to have data like this available.

So for example, I don’t know, let’s imagine that I’m an enterprise agency and I want my contributions to really count. Well, I could throw my staff in all different directions and not really know whether they were being deployed in something which was already completely fine, or whether there was an area which really needed a bit of work. It might not be the most glamorous piece of work in the world, but it needs that work to be done.

And because the contributor hours at the moment are, let’s use the word struggling, something like that, then having a window into what is needed, it does feel like this project has more importance now, perhaps even than just a year ago when you were sort of in the weeds of setting the whole thing up.

[00:35:16] Hari Shanker: I cannot agree more, because I’ve tried to collect this data together, to put this together. And I’ve seen the information that it can help companies. So you mentioned organisations or companies who are contributing through Five for the Future. So I was working on Five for the Future for a long time, and I was mentoring quite a few organisations who are stepping into WordPress.

So this data that I picked up, it really helped them. I was able to guide people into the areas that. We had folks who were doing other things, like they were able to contribute strategically, which I have specific cases of organisations who were able to improve their place in the WordPress economy by making strategy contributions.

So this is all very linked. And again, that’s where I’m coming from. I mean, and as you said, contributor hours are very precious. I personally feel that any time or effort set towards building data oriented solution could go a long way. It is a very impactful way of contribution, and if folks are there to help it out, the potentials are limitless. That is where I’m coming from.

[00:36:10] Nathan Wrigley: There are so many dots being connected in this episode. So we talked at the beginning about the fact that, you know, WordPress is a growing and interesting thing for the younger generation in India, but the project obviously needs contributors.

Those contributors need to fit into the holes in the jigsaw, the bits of the jigsaw, where the pieces are missing, if you like.

And so there’s this kind of virtuous cycle going on here where, if something like the dashboard can meaningfully impact where those contributors go, the jigsaw grows. The pieces where there’s blank missing pieces, they get filled in. And so, like I said, there’s this wonderful virtuous cycle nature to this whole thing. And what a fantastic project.

It’s hard to encapsulate in words what you’re trying to do, but I think we did a pretty credible job of doing that. So one more time, Hari is going to be available to whichever way he described. I will put in the show notes the links to the pieces and Hari’s contact details and things like that.

What an interesting project, one that many people I’m sure haven’t heard of. Is there anything that you wanted to say before we sign off?

[00:37:11] Hari Shanker: Well, all I want to say is, if you’re interested in data, please consider looking into this project, or if there’s anything that you can learn from the data that we picked up. I know it’s a little old at this point. As I said, this is a project that anybody can contribute to. So even if you have insights on what data is missing or what data that you would like to see, that feedback really goes a long way.

So feedback is the best gift that you can give in, again, in an open source project like WordPress, especially for an initiative like this. It goes a long way. So it’s a very impactful way of giving back to the project too. And I see contributions as investments, so if you would like to invest in WordPress in your free time, it’s a great way to do it by helping us build these dashboards.

[00:37:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, as you said, it’s like an impactful but kind of curious, interesting, powerful way of helping the community. And perhaps it’s something that you’d not heard of before. So Hari Shanker, thank you so much for explaining all that to me today and joining me on the podcast. I really appreciate it.

[00:38:07] Hari Shanker: Thank you so much, Nathan. It was truly an honor to be here, and I absolutely enjoyed talking to you about my favorite topic.

[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, podcasting and finding inspiration in WordPress stories.

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’s name might ring a bell in the WordPress community, not only for his teaching and writing, but also as the host of the Seriously, BUD? Podcast.

Bud’s WordPress journey started back in 2009 when a client told him he had to learn WordPress, and ever since he’s been immersed in all aspects of it. From building sites to teaching, to creating content for major WordPress businesses. These days, Bud calls himself a WordPress content creative, focusing mainly on producing articles, videos, and of course, his own podcast.

In this episode, we turn the microphone around on Bud to talk about his transition from site building to content creation. He shares how the Seriously BUD? podcast came out of a desire to have real, unscripted conversations with people from around the WordPress community. Chats that go beyond plugins and code and dig into the stories, quirks and lives of the people behind the tech.

We talk about the format of the show, Bud’s technique for bringing out interesting stories, and the importance of really listening to guests. Bud explains his approach to podcast technology, why he thinks the tech stack doesn’t have to be intimidating or expensive, and he also offers insights into the editing process that makes his interviews come alive.

Towards the end, Bud shares his thoughts on the future of podcasting. Why it’s still such an appealing medium, and what it takes to keep a show fresh and enjoyable for the long haul.

If you’re curious about podcasting, interested in the art of conversation, or are thinking about starting your own show, 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.

[00:03:12] Bud Kraus: Hi, Nathan. How are you?

[00:03:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, very good. Nice to chat with you. The tables are turned because not that many weeks ago I appeared on your podcast, which is going to be the focus of this podcast today. So it’s kind of inception, WordPress Podcast inception.

[00:03:27] Bud Kraus: You know, podcasting is getting very incestuous. I mean, everybody’s on everybody’s show. It’s more convoluted than the Hapsburg Empire. I mean, it really is.

[00:03:36] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a description. I like it. Before we begin and start to explore your podcast, why you did it and so on, let’s just get into who you are. So a couple of minutes, really, your potted bio. Tell us anything that you like. This is obviously a WordPress podcast, so centering it around your WordPress journey would probably be ideal. So, couple of minutes, over to you.

[00:03:54] Bud Kraus: Alright. Well, I have a little elevator speech on this, or a little longer than an elevator. But in 2009 I had a friend client who sat me down at the Oyster Bar in New York City and said, you know, you really need to learn WordPress. And I said, no, I’m a Rage Against the Machine kind of guy.

And then he got very serious and then I started to learn. And once I learned that you could make a child theme and what that was all about, you know, I was hooked. And then I started teaching WordPress at FIT in New York City and everywhere. I was just teaching like crazy. And I was making websites, and eventually I got to hate making websites because I just wanted to do it my way, not the client’s way. That’s not really a good attitude.

And eventually in the last couple of years, I’ve really gotten into creating WordPress content for WordPress businesses. So I call myself a WordPress content creative. That also includes, of course, podcasting and my show Seriously, BUD? So that’s it.

[00:04:44] Nathan Wrigley: So are you still working with WordPress in any way, shape, or form for other people, or is it primarily just for yourself now?

[00:04:51] Bud Kraus: I try not to, unless you beg me. Now, occasionally, no, I do have a couple of sites that I do updates for. I could get rid of that business. It’s not really much, but I just like doing it and I like the people and so, you know, I do it. But I have my own two sites, joyofwp.com and seriouslybud.com. And I am the client, so I get to decide everything and that’s what I like about it.

So yes, I don’t want to stop doing WordPress, okay, the site stuff, because it will diminish my ability to write and create WordPress content, but I don’t want to get paid to do it for clients.

[00:05:27] Nathan Wrigley: And was the intuition to move into content, was that purposeful? In other words, did you sit yourself down and say, do you know what? I’m fed up of doing the client thing, I want to stay in the WordPress space, so what can I do? Well, content seems like a good thing. Or was it more an evolution where you just wrote a few pieces and discovered that you enjoyed that?

[00:05:44] Bud Kraus: Well, I am not that smart. The first way to do it, like to think logically I should be doing this, I don’t go that way. So, Vikas Singhal from in InstaWP got me really on this track a couple years ago when we first met online. And he said, why don’t you create a video for me on security? I said, okay. And I did.

And then I started doing some other things, and then Marcus Burnette said, why don’t you write articles for GoDaddy? And I started doing that. And I said, you know, I have written articles before, but I never got paid for it. And I thought like, you actually can get paid to create WordPress content. No way.

So that turned into, now I write for Hostinger on a regular basis. I write for Kinsta on a regular basis. And I could write for, name it, okay. But that’s not, the problem is I can only, you know, one person and I’m not interested in cloning myself and making myself into a content agency. And so this is it.

And the podcast, well, we’ll get into that. But I wish I were smart enough to plan. Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. That’s just the way it is.

[00:06:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think the same is true for me. I was building client websites and straight into, I mean, all I do basically is create podcasts. I’ve never written much. I don’t really have the capacity to overcome the blank page at the beginning. But I stumbled into podcasting and it slowly became what I did.

And there was never an intention there. It surprised me that the WordPress ecosystem is actually big enough that that kind of thing is possible. Now, if everybody in the WordPress space decided to make a podcast, both you and I would be sunk.

[00:07:22] Bud Kraus: Wait a minute. Pardon for the interruption, but doesn’t everybody in the WordPress space have a podcast. Where are you going with this?

[00:07:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it does definitely sometimes feel that way. But if everybody did it, then we’d all be sunk. But the fact of the matter is, there are literally millions of people out there using WordPress. And so there’s a niche within a niche. You know, you can find, I don’t know, maybe you do a security podcast in the WordPress space or a community podcast or what have you.

You’ve settled on, Seriously, BUD? Tell us what that is then, and how you’ve settled on that format? And what is the format?

[00:07:55] Bud Kraus: Well, the idea came in an instant. This was after years of saying to Bob Dunn, you know, I will never make a podcast. What are you doing podcasts for? This is the most ridiculous thing. Why does anybody ever make a podcast? So I was not looking to do this.

But I was in an Uber leaving WordCamp US 2023 in Washington. I’m telling you, like a lightning bolt, this thing hit my head and it went like this. You know, I wish I could spend more time with Nathan Wrigley. I just got to wave at him and like say hi, and that was about it. But boy, I’d certainly like to know about his childhood, his life, whatever, I’d like to spend more time, and have a conversation about his life.

And in that instant, the show was born. Now, it wasn’t called Seriously, BUD? Right away it was called In Conversation With, but that’s such a boring subject title. But I knew right from the get go that this is what I wanted to do. And I also said, I don’t care if I ever get sponsors. Now I do. I don’t care if I ever get listeners. Now I do. But I just wanted to do it for myself because, you know, it was like, what do they say, scratch an itch or whatever it is. Itch a scratch or scratch an itch.

So that was it. And about four or five months later, I did my first episode with Marcus. And it’s been every Friday at eight o’clock in the morning, in Eastern Standard time, a new episode comes out and I’ve, I don’t miss. The really cool thing is that the stories are phenomenal. I mean, there is a certain, similarities between people, there definitely is and I can write a book now about the WordPress community.

And I’m also, you know, the purpose of the show too is not just to satisfy me, but to give people an opportunity to tell their stories. And not surprisingly, people like to talk about themselves. You know, so my job is sort of, let them do that, get out of the way, hopefully get them to say something that they don’t really want to say. It’s just been really, it’s taken over my life.

[00:09:47] Nathan Wrigley: Have you always been, how to describe it, a raconteur? Have you always been the kind of character that can fill a silence? Or is this something that you’ve had to develop and get out of your comfort zone a little bit?

[00:09:59] Bud Kraus: No. I’ve always been pretty good at talking to people. And I really started to realise that, or sort of got into that, I took this train trip around the United States in 2018. I was gone for 19 days, went all the way around the country, and I basically would interview people. Now, you know, I didn’t record much, but I would just go around and say, when you’re on a train for that long a period of time, you get to talk to people.

And I started realising, my God, everybody I’m talking to has the most unbelievable story. It wasn’t like right from there, I went from that to WordPress, to my podcast. But I, you know, in a very gradual process, I started to realise that I like doing this. And the other thing is I love radio and the spoken word, and I think you do too. Most people who are in podcasting are sort of like frustrated radio personalities or whatever. I don’t feel that’s what I am, but I’ve always listened to talk radio ever since I was a little kid so, yeah, it all fits together.

[00:10:56] Nathan Wrigley: I feel there is a certain skill if you are going to do interviews as you do, and it, I guess it’s more of a conversation what you have. I think most of content that I create is more of an interview where the person comes and I ask a series of questions, which hopefully elicit responses.

But I think there is a certain character trait about that. You know, the ability to ask questions and then sit back and listen. And that is one of the things that I discovered at the beginning was the most important skill is not necessarily the question, it’s the listening. Which sounds a bit the wrong way round. But if you’re not listening to each reply as it comes out the guest’s mouth, then the follow-up question is basically, you’re just following a proforma.

Okay, I’m going to ask this question, and then whatever comes out of their mouth when they finish saying that, I’ll go to this question. And that, for me, has never really worked. It’s been more a case of, okay, be quiet Nathan, listen to the reply, and then hopefully the conversation will flow, because a question that you didn’t anticipate will come out of your mouth. And so I wondered if that was a part that you’ve discovered as well as I did, that listening is equally important.

[00:12:03] Bud Kraus: It’s probably more important now. You know, it reminds me, in fourth grade, I had a music teacher that said, it’s not the note you’re playing, it’s the next note. And that’s very much like what you’re talking about, which is you’re listening and you’re figuring out, and it’s hard. It’s not that simple, because you’re listening to what they’re saying, but you’re also thinking, what’s going to be my follow up question? What’s the natural flow of the conversation?

You know, and if you’re really good at it, you’re not really thinking that way. It just flows natural, you know? So if they say something, I think the first thing you need is curiosity. Where did that come from? Or, why did you do that? Or, how come you didn’t do this? And in fact, we’re releasing a book, an ebook now called Questions I Wish I Had Asked. And I have five people who have answered each one, their own question that I should have asked them, or I forgot.

So when it comes to this kind of stuff, you can build like a little empire with eBooks and blogs and this, you know, it’s just amazing what can grow out of a podcast.

[00:12:55] Nathan Wrigley: I make sure that all of the guests have access to some sort of shared show notes, so that if I have a series of questions, at least they can be prepared. But also my weapon of choice is what you can now see, but the people listening to this can’t. It’s basically a pen and a piece of paper. When something during the course of our conversation occurs to me, I know that my job is to not interrupt you with that moment’s thought, but I just scribble it down and then when you’ve finished, see if that’s where the journey takes me. But it might be that something else comes along. So yeah, it’s kind of interesting.

I think we’re both very lucky though, in that we are in the technology space, and WordPress in particular is this perfect medium for getting a podcast out into the real world. Because I feel that for a lot of people, that’s another hurdle that they’ve got to go through. Okay, I want to make a podcast. How do I do that? Where do I put it? How do I get a website, and all of that? And so, what do you feel about that? Do you feel that you’re in a, you know, a lucky position that you knew WordPress when you started out this whole thing?

[00:13:55] Bud Kraus: Yeah, but I didn’t really launch with a website. I launched just by learning the software, Descript and SquadCast and the Riverside and this and that, you know? Because I didn’t know any of this. And, you know, some people were giving me, why don’t you check this, check that? And eventually I came up with my podcast stack. How do you like that?

But then after I had a couple episodes out, I thought like, you know, I should have a website. And then that came along. And of course that’s easy because, you know, we both know WordPress, so that part’s done.

Yeah, you’re right. I mean, we’re lucky also that we’re in a community who is technologically savvy and will listen to podcasts. And so that’s another thing that’s also fortunate that there are many corporate sponsors of WordPress podcasts. Although I don’t consider myself a WordPress podcast, but you know, I guess I am.

[00:14:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess the people that you’re interviewing are definitely bound to that subject, but you are very often not dealing with WordPress too much during the conversations, which is I think kind of nice. And we’ll get onto that in a minute.

But, do you mind if I obsess about the tech stack there? Because it may be that there’s people listening to this who have listened to this podcast and it just comes out of their phone or it comes out of their speakers, and they’ve never really thought too much about the bits and pieces that go on in the background. So let’s just share our similarities and differences there. What would you say is the tech stack that you’ve got? What are the three or four things which are essential that you’ve learned?

[00:15:16] Bud Kraus: Well, I start with SquadCast for the recording. And I’m not an expert on this because I’m still new at this and I don’t, you know, I haven’t used, I’ve experimented a little bit with Riverside, and I know there’s a whole bunch of other ones and free ones and this one, but SquadCast, you pay a little bit of money, so what. And I think it’s really good. You can do audio, you can do video, you can do all kinds of stuff. And then I use Descript to do the editing.

And you know, everybody has a different workflow. I will use the timeline, I will use the text-based editing. I’ll do it my way, you’ll do it your way. It’s always kind of interesting to learn how people use these tools in different ways. And then after the show is edited, and personally I find the editing to be the best part of the show, which is really, you know, you think talking to the people. Well, that’s fun but, you know, Nathan, going back to what you were talking about, about listening, I don’t really hear the show until I start editing.

That’s the first time I really hear it, because I’m not concentrating on the questions. I’m now focused on what the guest had to say. And then it’s a very creative process. Do you want to shorten the gaps between pauses? Do you want to take out all the ums, sos, you knows, all that stuff? You know, all those words that, the filler words, or do you want to let it fly? Do the Rob Cairn’s approach, no editing. There’s different ways of doing this.

I am more of a particular on the editing. I like to really clean things up and cut things out, especially if it’s me talking. I did this episode with Jeff Chandler where we went on and on and on about sports. That all got ripped out because like, come on, we’re both from Cleveland, Ohio. So you know, we start talking about Cleveland sports, get rid of this, no one’s going to listen. So I try to think of like the audience too.

But anyway, the editing is the most fun. A little tedious, but I think the most interesting part. And when it’s all done, then I run the file through, what did he take? It was a, I forgot what it’s called. Anyway, I run it through like a cleaner and then I published it to Buzzsprout, which seems to be doing a very good job publishing and putting it on all these platforms.

Because you don’t want, you need to have a podcast distribution service. You can’t go to all these different services and do it yourself. So it’s kind of, you know, it was sort of, because I had an understanding of technology and how things worked. The learning curve wasn’t too bad. It was pretty easy actually, when you think about it.

[00:17:37] Nathan Wrigley: I think when I started, I think I started in 2016 or something, it was definitely, it wasn’t difficult at that point. Many of the hurdles have been overcome, but it’s certainly easier now. When I did it, I began with Skype, which has just died actually, or at least Microsoft have said they’re going to kill it off.

I bought an app which would go on the Mac, and then that would record. But there was no clever sort of software like you described. We’re using now SquadCast, which is basically, you open it in the browser, send a link to somebody, and so long as they’ve got access to the internet and a microphone, we are good to go.

And it’ll record everything in separate isolated tracks. And then, as you said, both of us will throw it into Descript, which is a piece of software, it’s actually available in the browser, but you can also download it as app. And you can do all sorts. It’s amazing what it can do actually. It will bind the transcript that it creates to the timeline. And so you can delete portions of text by highlighting as if you’re in a Google Doc or something like that, so delete sentences and what have you. And it’s really sublime. So it’s much, much more straightforward.

But I’m, a bit like you, I’ve really enjoyed the editing experience because you can fiddle with it, can’t you? And you can decide which bits stay on the edit room floor and which bits go in, and sometimes you go off on different tangents. But the other side of it, that’s the software side. What are you using to actually record the audio? So microphones and computers and any of that.

[00:18:59] Bud Kraus: Okay, well, thank you Omnisend, my first sponsor. I have to get that in there, because they bought me, they said, we don’t want you using that crummy microphone anymore. Go out and buy yourself a nice microphone. Which is, it’s the same thing that you’re using. What is it?

[00:19:11] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a Shure MV7.

[00:19:13] Bud Kraus: Yes. And I really like it a lot. I have it on my desktop. I have a desktop stand for it. I have a hard time doing a boom microphone. So it’s a desktop, and it’s nice. But you know, you don’t need, I think a lot of people know, you don’t need a lot of heavy investment to do a podcast. It’s almost, talk about a barrier to entry being nothing or next to nothing. Podcasting certainly is that.

[00:19:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you really, really need very little. You and I have got this modestly priced mic. It’s not the top tier and it certainly isn’t the bottom tier. But when I began, for probably four or five years, I had a really cheap mic. And it’s about where you position it and how far away you are from it and refining all of that and, you know, not breathing too heavily over it and different bits and pieces.

But the barrier to entry really is, if you’ve got a phone, you’ve got everything that you need, because it’s got its own microphone built in, it’ll do a credible job. The audio software will kind of clean it up nicely. And the website, the WordPressy bit is icing on the cake. If you really wanted to keep it cheap and cheerful, Google’s YouTube will suffice. Really, you could just upload it to YouTube and they now offer podcast as an option. It doesn’t have to be a video. Well, it needs to be a video, but it doesn’t have to actually be a picture of you and your guest or anything like that.

[00:20:28] Bud Kraus: I upload, I mean I know I’m interrupting you, but I have a question. So, where do you think the future of all this podcasting is going? I mean, what’s podcasting going to be like in a couple of years, according to you?

[00:20:38] Nathan Wrigley: I will give you the answer to that in about.

[00:20:40] Bud Kraus: I’m sorry for interrupting.

[00:20:41] Nathan Wrigley: No, no it’s fine. I will give you the answer to that in a few weeks time. I’m going to, one of the biggest podcast shows in the world is held in London every May. I’m going to be going to that. 10,000 attendees. You know, I’m in this little WordPress bubble of podcasting, but it’s an absolutely gigantic industry. It’s occupying one of the biggest convention spaces in the UK in London, in Islington, if you’re a person that knows London. I will give you more of an answer then because it’ll be interesting to see what the trends are.

However, we did have a bit of a bump in credibility in podcasting for a while, and then I think it plateaued a little bit or perhaps went down. But more recently, I think it’s been going up again.

The reason I think it remains popular is the same reason that talk radio hasn’t gone away, is because you can really get into the subject matter. If you’re really into WordPress, then there’s a bunch of WordPress things, or if you’re into, I don’t know, skiing, there’ll be skiing podcast and what have you. And the crucial bit for me is that you can do other things at the same time.

[00:21:43] Bud Kraus: Well, that’s where I was going to go too, which is talk about a mobile media. You could take it wherever you go. You don’t have to sit at a computer or anything, it’s in your headphones.

[00:21:52] Nathan Wrigley: If you’re stuck in your own house, you know, just doing chores, it can be done at the same time. And even things like mowing the lawn, which is typically quite loud and probably would’ve gotten in the way, the noise canceling headphones that you can have nowadays. And for me, basically, when I’m not doing something which requires my eyes to be on something, if I’m alone and I’ve got nothing else to do, you can more or less guarantee that I will have a podcast plugged into my headphones.

[00:22:19] Bud Kraus: Well, you know, this is the perfect medium for the legally blind. I ought to know, I’m speaking from experience here, but it is, it’s all ears.

[00:22:27] Nathan Wrigley: So, I don’t know. I don’t really have an intuition about where it’s going to go, but I don’t see any signs of it as a medium going away. Because I think we all love to listen, well, not all of us, but many of us really enjoy listening to other people and their stories, and their trials and their tribulations and their expertise and whatever it may be. I think it’s going to stick around

[00:22:50] Bud Kraus: Now, you’re so lucky because you have those golden pipes, I have nothing. I have this old man’s voice. God, I would do anything like if AI could clean me up and make me sound like you, I know it could. That gives me an idea.

[00:23:02] Nathan Wrigley: You’re very kind. I’m not sure you’ve captured entirely what my.

[00:23:06] Bud Kraus: Oh no, I remember, whoa, hold on a second. I first saw you and heard your voice when you were doing the agency summit and you’re doing all those intros. I don’t know how long ago was that?

[00:23:15] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, probably about, I don’t know, 7 years or something like that, yeah.

[00:23:18] Bud Kraus: Yeah. And I was listening. I go, oh, I’d like to. Who’s this guy with a voice?

[00:23:22] Nathan Wrigley: You know we talked about editing bits out.

[00:23:25] Bud Kraus: That’s going to be edited out. Don’t you dare. You better not or you’ll be hearing from me.

[00:23:30] Nathan Wrigley: We’ll see. We’ll see if it makes it. Okay, let’s, dig into your podcast. We’ve talked a lot about how we go about making podcasts. What is the plan? What do you do during that podcast? Yeah, just tell us what you do on typical episode and what are you trying to achieve there.

[00:23:44] Bud Kraus: Okay. Well, I’m trying to get an unexpected conversation. I always say it’s an unexpected conversation of so and so in the WordPress community. What I do is a guest first has to come to my site and fill out a form, which everybody says is ridiculously long. And I mean, you know, I ask about like almost, every question I could think of. What’s your blood type? Things like that.

And then I, before the show starts, I really don’t do any prep, very little. But before the show starts, I’ll look at what you submitted, I’ll look for a question, my first question, whatever it is. And it’s not going to be like, where were you born? Okay. It’s going to be like how come you like to smoke or something, you know? What’s that? It’ll be something like that.

Off we go. The show does not follow a linear progression, because that’s, I look at it like if I’m talking to you like at a bar or something like that. I’m not going to start from the beginning of your life and go to the end. I’m going to go back and forth and whatever. It’s just going to be, it’s sort of like a show about nothing, you know?

[00:24:35] Nathan Wrigley: It’s like the Seinfeld of podcasts.

[00:24:38] Bud Kraus: Right, and it works. Seinfeld worked. So I figured maybe this will work. So it goes back and forth and I try not to talk too much about WordPress. Usually I’ll say something like, okay, let’s talk about WordPress. You know, what do you do? And then if I feel like the guest is talking about anything, I’ll just jump in and go, okay, that’s enough of that, and we’ll go on to something else. When you’re in real life, at least for me, I’m rude enough to say to somebody, okay, enough, let’s go on.

[00:25:01] Nathan Wrigley: So the intention then is to sort of figure out the personality behind the thing. So let’s say, for example, it’s somebody that we’ve all heard of in the WordPress space, they’ve got a thing, we’re all familiar with the thing that they’ve got. Okay, we know that about them. That’s a given. So your idea is to drill in and figure out, okay, just tell us something quirky and interesting about you, your life, and let’s talk about that.

[00:25:23] Bud Kraus: Yeah, I mean, I try to ask like crazy questions to elicit some unusual, crazy response. And sometimes it happens, you know? Sometimes it does and sometimes it does. A couple of things. one I find the older you are, the more interesting you are to me, because you’ve lived a life. I don’t have anything against 25 year olds. I’ve had them on the show, but they don’t have the breadth of time that I’m looking for. That’s one thing.

And the other thing is some of the people I know very well, and some of the people I don’t know at all. I think Brian Gardner, I didn’t know Brian, and I had a great time talking, you know? or Andrew Palmer, wow, those were so much fun. So it isn’t necessarily. In fact, to me, those are the best episodes when I don’t know the person, because I just, I’m more inquisitive.

[00:26:07] Nathan Wrigley: How do you handle, or maybe you’ve not had one yet, how do you handle the guest who is not quite as talkative as you’d hoped for?

[00:26:16] Bud Kraus: Boy, that’s a good question. I’ve had a few of those. I just do the best I can. You know, I mean, everybody’s a little different. You know, the other thing too is I do interviews with people that English is not their first language, and you’ve got to keep that in mind. You’ve got to give them the space to go slow, let them talk, and then do a lot of editing.

Because what they tend to do is have what I call warmup words, where they’ll say the, the, the, the, and I don’t want four the’s, one is enough, So I’ll cut out the three the’s. That’s very typical of somebody where English is not the native language, because they’re thinking of how to say something. And I don’t necessarily think that makes for a good listening experience. So out it goes, and then they sound really good. You know, and I can think of a whole lot of people that, you know, I’d made them sound a whole lot better.

Now, I want to tell you another little quirky thing about the show. I always think like, well, when I do Nathan Wrigley, which I’ve done, right? wow, everybody’s going to be listening to that episode, you know? Because he’s so well known. Now this is not necessarily you Nathan, but it doesn’t work that way. It does not work that way. At the end of the day, I’ve realised I don’t know how many people listen to an episode, there’s so many factors. But one of them is not how well known they are. That is not a factor. Contrary to Bob Dunn, who when I first started this, he said, well, if they know the person, if people are really well known, then everybody will listen to that episode. Not true.

[00:27:41] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I guess maybe there’s that whole thing, who would listen to a podcast with me on it, because they can always listen to podcast with me on it, because that’s what I do. So yeah, that makes sense. And also, if you’ve heard from them, whoever the guest may be in a thousand different places, then yeah, I can understand that.

[00:27:57] Bud Kraus: It turned out to be sort of like the lesser known people, if you will. They get more plays. It’s just that people are just more curious. You know, they maybe they’ve heard of that person and they’re a little more curious.

Or, here’s the other thing that really increases. If so and so, let’s say it’s somebody in India or Australia or whatever, you know If they wanted to share this with their family and their friends, I see a lot of that kind of stuff going on. You get a lot of plays. So I look at, my podcast as not a WordPress podcast per se, and that’s why I think it has legs and, potential beyond the WordPress world.

[00:28:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that was another question I was going to ask. Because you’re not really bound by anything other than, here’s a human being who can speak, and they’ve got a story to tell in some way, or at least we’ll try and pull a story out of them. I was going to ask if you were going to expand it beyond WordPress and just see where it leads you.

[00:28:43] Bud Kraus: I have no interest, but I have people coming, friends and stuff, will you interview me and stuff? No, I’m not interested. I don’t have time for that kind of stuff, There’s enough fascinating people in the WordPress world, and it’s definitely a way for people to get to know other people in the WordPress, see that’s, you know, it’s a platform. So that they can get to know you, me, whoever it is, beyond the typical, what’s your WordPress journey stuff, or what do you do with WordPress? It’s the story. It’s the person. It’s the biography.

[00:29:09] Nathan Wrigley: Have you ever had episodes that you were not able to get something that you’d hoped out of it? So in other words, you pressed record and then by the time you’d finished the episode, you thought, oh gosh, that didn’t work out as anticipated, or that just went off the rails, or there was nothing of interest there. Let’s can that one and either retry it or just bin it.

[00:29:30] Bud Kraus: Well, I’ve had two, one episode that the interviewee said, I don’t want you to air this, so, okay, I didn’t. And then another one said, there was a whole thing about something that this person said, I had it cut out because this person did not want me to air it. So I did. But for the most part, no. Now some of them I get off and I go, wow, that was really great. I do have that, like, whoa, what a story. And then sometimes it’s just okay, it didn’t go anywhere, or I thought it’d be better or whatever. So, I don’t know. I don’t know everybody that I interview and, the more I do this, the fewer people I really know, which is good.

[00:30:07] Nathan Wrigley: I set the expectations, like I said, with shared show notes, but also prior to hitting record, I mean, I know you so we didn’t do so much of that, but I always make time to, maybe even like half an hour or something just to chat before we hit record. So I’ll make sure that we just talk. And very, very often, very often I will do a call with somebody who wants to be on the podcast but doesn’t know if they can do a podcast. And we’ll just have a chat. And at the end of that chat, I’ll say, that’s what it’s like. Do you want to record it another day? And I’ve yet to find somebody that’s turned me down on that basis.

[00:30:45] Bud Kraus: You know, that’s an excellent point. because I’ve had a few people where English is not their language and they’ll say, well, I’ve never done a podcast. Now Anna Hurko, I was the first person, right the CEO of Crocoblock. My podcast was her first, her episode went through the roof. Absolutely went through the roof. And now you can’t get her off podcasts Like I see, she’s everywhere now, which is great. I love it. And you know, English is not her first. She speaks 85 languages, so it was great. Anna was fun. It’s an adventure. I guess it’s fun. I mean, God, Nathan, I have fun at everything I do, whether I’m writing, or spot podcasting or, you know, talking to you even.

[00:31:23] Nathan Wrigley: Even, yeah.

[00:31:24] Bud Kraus: One last thing I was about before the show, I try to keep that very short. Because I don’t want to not record something that’s really good. And I’ve noticed that a lot of really good stuff was being said before and after the recording. So I don’t want for that to happen. I want it to be recorded.

[00:31:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting because I have the opposite intuition. I have the intuition that if I get to know them, and put them at their ease, that rapport that is built up over 20 minutes or half an hour, will then lead to a better experience because we’ll both feel a little bit more relaxed and comfortable.

[00:31:54] Bud Kraus: Well, for what you do and how you do it, that makes a lot of sense. For me, it doesn’t because I’m going to leave stuff out. Now, here’s the problem though, and you probably realize this too. If you don’t know somebody, you don’t have a pre-established speaking pattern, and you tend to step on their words and they tend to step on yours. But like you and I, we pretty much have talked to each other, you know, for a while and different times. And so we now know, this is when I stop and this is when he stopped. You know, that kind of thing. It’s really hard when you’re first talking to somebody on a podcast and you don’t know them, boy, you’re going to be stepping on each other like crazy, in many cases.

[00:32:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s kind of curious. So here’s an interesting thought then. You said that you’re enjoying it, which is lovely. I still very much enjoy doing podcasting. I have to pinch myself. What about the scenario where you have made podcasting the center, the fulcrum of what you do, and how you earn your money, and the sponsorships and all of those kinds of things. And then what if you don’t enjoy it anymore? Would it be a bit like the clients, would you be willing at that point to drop podcasting? Or do you feel like this is you for life now, this is what you’re doing?

[00:32:58] Bud Kraus: This is it now. I have to say, there are some days, if you ask my wife, that I get, oh, it’s not growing. It’s like flattened out. It’s like, she goes, because I realise well, what else are you going to do? There’s nothing else for you to do. This is like the perfect thing for legally blind people. What else are you going to do?

[00:33:14] Nathan Wrigley: You’re going to keep going.

[00:33:15] Bud Kraus: Well, as long as, I mean, I’m not a kid. I’m sort of, you know, on the senior side of life. But there’s no reason to stop as long as I can keep doing it, you know? And I just got started doing it, so who knows.

[00:33:26] Nathan Wrigley: The barrier to entry is low. The enjoyment is high. So it sounds like the perfect way to spend the next few years certainly.

I’ve discovered that about 35 to 40 minutes is about the sweet spot for a podcast episode, because it seems be the attention span that most people have got.

So that is a neat little segue for me to say we’re at minute 37 and a half, which is more or less exactly in the middle of that sweet spot. So I’m going to ask you just to sort of sign off. Tell us where we can find you. Where is the website, as in the URL? I know we’ve said the name of the podcast many, many times, but where can we find you? And where do we find you on socials and things like that?

[00:34:03] Bud Kraus: Oh God. Alright I have a website called seriouslybud.com It’s kind of easy to remember if you can remember the name. One little quick thing, I know we’re running out of time. It doesn’t have the word WordPress or WP in it, which is different than a lot of podcasts. So it could be done for anything. And it wasn’t a name that I came up with. It was my graphic designer came up with it.

Anyway, seriouslybud.com Now, the good thing about that is you can get all the episodes from the past. It’s very easy to access all those episodes. And eventually I’m going to be launching a blog which will discuss the show, the people in the show, the behind the scenes, all that kinda stuff. So I’m working on that. And as far as social, just, Bud Kraus, or seriously bud? That’s Kraus, No, E. Only one S. How’s that?

[00:34:45] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect. I will make sure that those links and any others that we mentioned during the course of this recording go into the show notes. Head to wptavern.com/podcast, search for the episode with Bud Kraus. And, Bud, it just remains for me to say thank you very much for chatting to me today.

[00:35:00] Bud Kraus: It’s always a pleasure to talk to. Well, let’s just say this. The pleasure was all yours, okay.

[00:35:05] Nathan Wrigley: You’re too modest.

[00:35:07] Bud Kraus: Alright, take care.

[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’s new for developers.

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 Ryan Welcher. Ryan is a developer advocate sponsored by Automattic. He focuses on removing barriers to adoption for developers working with Gutenberg and WordPress. He’s a seasoned WordPress developer, and regular contributor to WordPress and the Gutenberg project. He also streams on Twitch as RyanWelcherCodes, where he focuses on custom block development.

This interview was recorded at WordCamp Asia 2025 in Manila, where Ryan was giving his Block Developer Cookbook workshop for the second year running. Ryan spends much of his time creating documentation, running live streams, and writing articles, explaining the knots and bolts of new WordPress features for developers.

He shares his journey from admiring the platform evangelists of the Flash era, to finding his own dream job helping developers understand and implement the new technologies in WordPress.

We talk about some of the biggest recent updates to WordPress Core, including the Block Bindings API, Plugin Template Registration API, Preview Options API, and the new Data Views. Ryan breaks down what these new tools are, why they matter, and how they’re making WordPress Block development both more powerful and more accessible.

He also discusses the growing emphasis on intentional high quality documentation and resources over the past few years, and how many teams are working to make life easier for developers of all skill levels.

We chat about the balance between the increasing flexibility of WordPress’ UI, and the risk of overwhelming new users, as well as exploring how emerging technologies like AI are shaping the future for WordPress developers and hobbyists alike.

If you’re interested in what’s new in WordPress development, want to understand where the project is heading, or are curious about the real impact of recent changes and features, this episode is for you.

If you want 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 Ryan Welcher.

I am joined on the podcast by Ryan Welcher. Hello, Ryan?

[00:03:37] Ryan Welcher: Hello. How are you?

[00:03:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’m good. Very nice to meet you. This is my second interview in Manila. It’s WordCamp Asia. You have a presentation coming up. No. You’ve got a workshop.

[00:03:47] Ryan Welcher: I do. Yeah. I’m really excited. It’s actually the second year in a row that I’ve given this workshop at WordCamp Asia.

[00:03:52] Nathan Wrigley: And it’s a sellout.

[00:03:54] Ryan Welcher: It is a sellout, yeah. And not in the bad way. It’s a sellout in the sense that there’s a wait list apparently and everything. So I’m very excited. I’m very flattered and very excited about it.

[00:04:02] Nathan Wrigley: So before we get stuck into what it is that you are doing here, and that’s going to be the focus of this conversation around the topic of, well, I’ll explain that in a moment. Would you just tell us a little bit about who you are, what kind of work you do in the WordPress space and who you work for?

[00:04:16] Ryan Welcher: Sure. Well, I am a developer advocate. I’m sponsored by Automattic. I’ve been with Automattic for, I guess it’s going to be my third year. Prior to that I was, I used to work at 10up, I’ve been at a bunch of agencies. I’ve been using WordPress as a developer since maybe 2009.

I’ve been around in this space a while and, yeah, my current role is a lot of fun. I get to do things like this. I get to chat with people in exotic places, and go to conferences and lead workshops and write code that nobody ever has to use in production. It’s fantastic.

[00:04:43] Nathan Wrigley: So you’ve got a really public facing role. Is that the kind of job that you’ve always wished to do, or is it something that you more or less fell into?

[00:04:51] Ryan Welcher: If you’ll indulge me with a bit of an anecdotal story here. When I first started in web work, I used to do a lot of work with Flash. I don’t know if I’m aging myself by saying that, but we used to do a lot of work in Flash. And there was this conference called Flash in the Can, and it’s still around now, it’s not called that anymore. And there was this guy who used to work for Adobe, his name was Lee Brimlow. I think that’s how you say it. He was a platform evangelist. His job was literally go to conferences and give really fun, cool talks on the latest, greatest in Flash.

And I remember seeing this guy, going, this is like my dream job. This is phenomenal. And I just wasn’t at a place in my career where there was anything like that. And then, fast forward however many years later, and there was an opening for Dev Rel. And I was like, yes, this is exactly what I would love to do.

I love writing code. I’ve always enjoyed being a developer, but now this is kind of like, I’m also pretty outgoing, extroverted, so this kind of fills both. You know, I get to write code and like my dream is just like sitting down writing code with some obscure API, and that’s literally all, like I just get to tinker, and that’s what I love about it. It’s so much fun.

[00:05:50] Nathan Wrigley: And is that full-time then?

[00:05:52] Ryan Welcher: It is, yeah. I’m full-time. Yeah, it is fun. It is very cool. And I realise fully how lucky I am, because this is a fun job and I get to hang out with really cool people all the time. And being public facing is fun, but it’s, you know, it’s got its downsides too.

[00:06:06] Nathan Wrigley: We have this expression in the UK and it’s called painting the Forth Bridge. And there’s this bridge in Scotland called the Forth Bridge, and essentially when you’ve finished painting it from one end, you go to the other end and begin again. And I feel that WordPress, maybe for somebody in your position, is a little bit like that. It’s this constant treadmill of, okay, that’s changed. Yeah. Now we need to adapt new content. And yeah, okay, that bit’s changed over there in the meantime. New content. Is that what it’s like a bit?

[00:06:37] Ryan Welcher: A little bit, yeah. I mean it’s, when we started, there wasn’t really a Dev Rel team for the open source project that is WordPress. We were like, you know, there’s a joke, it’s like, yeah, there’s five of us or six of us for 43% of the internet. So there’s like a lot of work to be done, right?

And so there’s a lot of that. We are doing a lot of work around documentation and all that sort of stuff, so it’s like improving that. But every release, there’s like a new cycle of things that, you know, the new stuff like 6.7, all the block binding stuff and, you know, Interactivity API and all that really cool, fun stuff.

And we get to do that, but then it’s like, okay, well then now there’s new changes to the Interactivity API, so we have to kind of like talk about that a bit and stuff. It’s always new, but then there’s always, I love it when we’re like, hey, remember that bug that people have been talking about for two years? Like, oh, it’s fixed now. So we get to also be the harbinger of really good news about things like that.

[00:07:23] Nathan Wrigley: And do you get to put your own roster together of work each week, or does it come in from on high?

[00:07:28] Ryan Welcher: We kind of, it’s usually based around the next release. So whatever’s coming out in the next release, there’s always sort of like, you know, the featured items that are coming out. So that kind of dictates what we focus on for the next release.

There’s no like on high declaration of what we need to work on. It’s more like we’re fairly autonomous in what we do, but I mean, it makes the most sense. If there’s like new features coming with the next version of WordPress, we should probably get that out and, you know, talk to developers and get people testing it and get people working with it, so we can take that feedback, good and bad, and give it back to the teams that are actually working on those features and stuff like that.

[00:07:59] Nathan Wrigley: So given that it’s a Dev Rel job, developer relations, is that your target audience? It’s definitely developers, a hundred percent developers, not novices?

It could be a 101 article on how to use WordPress or, you know, a video piece of content or something like that. Right up to, okay, here’s the nuts and the bolts of exactly how this thing works.

[00:08:22] Ryan Welcher: Yeah, exactly. Like, I did an article on the developer blog, developer.wordpress.org/news. It was on like the internals of webpack, which is like, if you’ve ever messed with webpack, nobody ever wants to deal with internals of webpack, but WordPress handles it. It does this really elegant thing where you don’t have to actually install packages that WordPress provides. It kind of like all of a sudden just uses the ones that are coming, that are with the install.

So like explaining all that, it’s cool, I get to nerd out and get right into the details but, you know, it’s not for everyone. Yeah, but then we’re like, I’ve also written our articles on like an introduction to SlotFill or an introduction to Block Variation so, yeah.

[00:08:55] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like, if we were to rewind the clock like three or four years, there wasn’t so much emphasis put on documentation, knowledge base articles, video content, learn.wordpress.org. But it feels like in the last two or three years, a much greater emphasis has been put on getting the pieces of documentation right. Getting the Learn resources, you know, putting the courses together and those kind of things. Just looking at it from the outside, that’s what I think. But is this on the internal side, is this what’s happening?

[00:09:22] Ryan Welcher: Yeah, there’s definitely a focus on that. I mean, when you’re a developer and you don’t have the resources to get the answers that you’re looking for, that’s extremely frustrating. We’ve always had documentation, we’ve had, you know, it’s like 20-year-old documentation. It’s been around a long time.

But we’ve spent a lot of time improving that. Like, we’ve focused a lot on the Block Editor Handbook because block development is something that can be very difficult, especially if you’re coming from, you know, solely a PHP background, and you’re not really up to speed on React or you just don’t know JavaScript as deeply as other folks do.

And I mean, our job is to like make that transition easier, as much as possible, right? So that’s why there’s a lot of tooling around it that abstracts away the things, like the scripts package, which is like the build process that the Gutenberg plugin uses it, but it’s also like the defacto build process for building blocks.

That handles all that webpack stuff, that handles all that config stuff. You just have to like build your files. Like, you don’t have to worry about that. So there’s a lot of trying to make life easier, simpler. And a lot of that is in improvements to documentation, but there’s also like quality of life fixes for people who are working in the code specifically.

You know, like I spent a lot of time working, like the Create Block package is like my baby. I absolutely love it. It’s not my baby, like I didn’t build it, I’ve just been trying to maintain it as much as I can and adding new features to make life a little bit easier so you can like reuse it and, I don’t know, I could get into the minute details.

But I love that kind of stuff because as a developer, having been one for a long time, I know what I like and I think, I’m not saying like, what I like everyone should like, but I know when something is getting in my way versus helping me. And I think that’s a really, that’s kind of like my compass that I try to work with. It’s like, okay, it’s great, but it’s done all these things I don’t need, now I have to go and delete all that and figure out all this other stuff to get around this scaffold and, I don’t know, I’m really in the weeds right now.

[00:11:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. But it feels like, I’m kind of asking the same question again really, about the materials being created in a much more, well, intentional way. Yeah, the backstory to that, presumably though, is that there’s more boots on the ground. And I don’t know if it’s, in your case, it’s Automattic sponsoring you into the project. Is there more focus on that from, well, let’s just go from the Auttomatic side, so more investment from them, yeah?

And if that’s the case, is that a reaction to anything? Like, perhaps the rise of SaaS platforms, proprietary platforms, you know, the Wixs and the Squarespaces. Because that’s interesting. It kind of feels like that’s always been talked about, you know, WordPress versus all the other platforms. Pay your $20 over there per month, and you get this, and you get access to their platform and it’s well documented and so on. So I didn’t know if it was connected to that.

[00:11:57] Ryan Welcher: I don’t think there was any, I think that the rise of Dev Rel played a large part in that. Like, I don’t know the reasoning behind the creation of the team, that was decided before I joined. But I think that in the past four and five years, there’s been a real, like just across the tech community, there’s been a real like surge in the concept of developer relations and improving developer experience.

Because I think people realise that developers, like a lot of these platforms, developers are literally their client base, right? And so I think Automattic recognised that and thought, hey, it’d be great if we had a dedicated team of folks that were just making life easier for developers. You know, I always say that there’s no, like I have no KPIs or whatever, I just make things, my mandate is to make things better, as much as possible.

[00:12:40] Nathan Wrigley: Where do you make things? So is it things like YouTube videos, written documentation, knowledge base articles, blog posts?

[00:12:48] Ryan Welcher: A bit of everything. I tend to focus a bit more on the, like I have a live stream that I do on Twitch every Thursday at 10:30 Eastern. I tend to do a lot more of that sort of stuff. That’s kind of like more my wheelhouse. I write articles. I’m not the best writer. I rely on ChatGPT to help me clean that up a little bit. I write the articles, but then I, you know, smarter brains than I help me make it nicer to read.

Yeah, so I think we all, like everyone across our team has their own sort of strengths and we all kind of like play to our strengths a bit. Mine is definitely more like in the video side. I try to use my development experience as much as possible to do more complicated things. That’s not to say that the other folks on our team don’t either, but, I mean, I think I’m in a position to be able to be like, here’s a really complicated issue that people are having and how would we solve that? And it’s fun because I get paid to solve that. And other people who have clients that don’t want to pay them 20 hours just to fart around on a problem is, that’s where I can come in and help with that.

[00:13:39] Nathan Wrigley: Give that to us again though. Where do you do your YouTube stuff? And what handle would that be?

[00:13:44] Ryan Welcher: I stream on Twitch and YouTube. I multistream to both platforms. Thursdays, 10:30 Eastern, every week.

[00:13:50] Nathan Wrigley: And what handle would that be?

[00:13:52] Ryan Welcher: Ryan Welcher Codes.

[00:13:53] Nathan Wrigley: We’ll drop all of the links that we stumble across during this episode into the show notes. Yeah, so you can find it all there.

So WordCamp Asia, the workshop that you are giving is called the Block Developer Cookbook. And I am just going to read the blurb so that you, dear listener, get some idea of what it is that Ryan’s doing. And it says, this is the second year for the Block Developer Cookbook Workshop at WordCamp Asia. Last year in Taipei, we covered lots of topics like block transforms, adding editorial notes, creating a custom format and more.

This year, in addition to the existing recipes from the last year, we will have new ones to choose from that leverage the newest features released in WordPress 6.7, such as Block Bindings API, Plugin Template Registration API, Preview Options API and more. And there’ll be a workshop all about that.

And so I think your intention at this workshop, should the internet hold up, is to do like an interactive thing where the audience say, I want to do this, and you hopefully help them out with that because that’s very brave.

[00:14:58] Ryan Welcher: You can say that, yeah. I’ve had this idea for a while of a workshop where the attendees pick the content. Because, especially with a topic like block development, it’s like saying, come to my WordPress workshop. Like, there’s so many things, right? So like picking something for everyone is really hard.

And so I thought, well you know what? I’ll build this little website and they can go in. It’s like chef theme because it’s block developer cookbooks. So, you know, you login, you have a little chef hat on your avatar and stuff like that. But you can vote on which of the recipes that you’d like to work on. And so that’s the idea. And then they vote and then we go from top to bottom. We get as many done as we can in the 90 minutes or whatever it is.

I’ve been going to conferences and speaking at conferences long enough to know better than to rely on the wifi, but I thought, I’m just going to do it. So this is the second year in a row. I did this last year as well at Taipei. So I’m like super flattered that they accepted my submission is a second time in a row, so.

[00:15:49] Nathan Wrigley: I think there’s a push to make WordCamps a little bit more, and I’m going to use air quotes, exciting, interactive. Yeah, it seems like, you know, Jamie Marsland’s, the thing that he does with the Speed Builds, just sort of grabbing the attention of the audience a bit more. Does it feel a bit like that?

And workshops, they seem to grab the audience a little bit more, because it’s more interactive. It’s kind of less being presented to and more interacting with. So I don’t know, kind of opening up the laptop, trying things out. What do you think? Is that a way that you think events should go in the future?

[00:16:23] Ryan Welcher: I think so too. I think for me personally, I gravitate towards workshops more than talks. I’ve given talks and I’ve done workshops before and I think I enjoy, personally enjoy the workshop aspect because there’s a lot more like interaction and back and forth. And like if you have a question, you just raise your hand and we answer, you know. And it’s just more organic, I guess is maybe how I’d describe it.

But, yeah, I think you’re right. These sort of like fun interactive things. I have some 3D printed swag that I’m bringing. I don’t have nearly enough, so I’m going to have to come up with a, maybe whoever asks a question gets a, it’s a little like key chain of like a chef hat with the WordCamp 2025 on it.

[00:16:57] Nathan Wrigley: I am sure it’ll come out on WordPress TV at some point in the near future. But yeah, good luck with that at least anyway.

But some of the bits and pieces that you are going to be talking about, we’re going to get into that now. And the way I want to take this interview is we’re at WordPress 6.7 at this point. It depends really on when you’re listening to this, but we’re at that point at the moment.

There’s a whole bunch of stuff that has dropped, and I feel that the audience for this podcast, there’s a ton of developers. But there’s also lots of people who are not really inside the ecosystem too much. You know, just regular users. Maybe they’re using a page builder, maybe they’re a freelancer, something like that, and they don’t follow the project, they don’t really obsess about it as much as I do, and probably as you do as well.

So let’s just take a couple of these and discuss them. And if we could go in at a low level. So we’re not able to do a video and open a code editor on this podcast, it’s all about the audio, but let’s start talking about the Block Bindings API. What does it do?

[00:17:56] Ryan Welcher: Oh, I love the Block Bindings API. So there has been a long standing need in WordPress to be able to connect custom meta or custom fields with displaying them basically. And so, in classic themes, we would always just have a meta box that you would put some stuff in, and then in your templates you would just pull that information out of the database and show it.

With block themes, it’s a little bit different because we don’t really have, you can do that in some places, anyways. The idea behind Block Bindings is that you can connect a block with a piece of post meta, or a custom field and have it display. So you take a paragraph block, let’s use the example of like a personnel list maybe.

And so you’ve got like job description, you’ve got the date hired, all these pieces of metadata. And so what you can do with the Block Bindings API is you can connect that to say a paragraph block. So you can insert just a regular old paragraph block and then in the UI you can go over and say, okay, I want to connect the content field of that paragraph block with this piece of post meta. And it just shows up in there.

And then you can actually edit it in the block editor, as opposed to having to open up like the custom fields panel down at the bottom. You can edit it and it goes both ways. And it’s like extremely powerful. It’s the beginning of how powerful it’s going to get, but currently it supports, there’s four blocks that are supported. There’s the paragraph block, header block, the image block, and the button block.

So you have to use one of those four blocks, unless you want to get into custom bindings, which is sort of the second piece of it, which is like a means of defining your own binding sources. And then you can connect those binding sources to a block as well.

So if you wanted to connect to any sort of custom field manager plugin that’s out there, you could write your own that connects to that, and then you can have the block just read from that and it’s inline. You get a visual representation of it. It’s really, really cool.

[00:19:41] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s the kind of thing that in the past you would probably have got a plugin to do. Something like, I don’t know, maybe you would’ve downloaded Pods or something like that to do that.

[00:19:50] Ryan Welcher: I mean, it doesn’t manage the custom fields for you. So some of those plugins do that very, very well. But what it does do is it connects the block editor with that meta, which has been the missing piece for a while. It’s still kind of in its infancy, but already it’s shown to be super powerful.

Like, now we’re seeing a lot of people who are not writing custom blocks for this anymore. Like, it used to be like, okay, I want to show the job description, so I have to write a custom block that introduces something in the sidebar where you input the meta there and then that block displays that because you’re handling that, it’s a dynamic block, you’re pulling the meta out and the PHP, all that sort of stuff.

Now you don’t have to do that. Now you can just do a block variation of a paragraph block to auto set the meta that you want. You don’t even have to do that. You can do it right in the admin. But I would recommend doing a block variation, because setting that up every single time is a bit tedious. And especially if you’re doing it for clients, you can just do a block variation that says like, job description, and then you click on it and it just goes in.

[00:20:46] Nathan Wrigley: So you, your face, gave away something a moment ago. And it sounds like you are quite excited about what’s coming and is not yet there. But I guess one of the nice things about your job is that you really have that high level view of what’s going on in the project. And you can imagine scenarios in the near term, maybe 6.8 or something like that. For example, in this case, the Block Bindings API will enable novice users to do, well, more than you’ve just described. Yeah, that’s kind of a nice position to be in.

[00:21:13] Ryan Welcher: I don’t have, I will say this for the record, I don’t have an inside track to anything that’s not available on like Make. But I know some of the folks that are working on it, and like just in conversation, I’m very excited. I can see where it’s going, and that’s not because I have inside information, it’s just because the logical next step, it looks really cool.

Like, more blocks. Being able to do it with custom blocks will be huge once you have a custom block that you can now connect it to meta and stuff like that. There are some technical hurdles that need to be addressed to do that, but it’s going to be a big, I hate using the word game changer, but it’s going to be a game changer.

[00:21:47] Nathan Wrigley: One of the things which I always find interesting when I speak to people who are really in the weeds of it all, is that the stuff just, well, it just keeps on coming out. Because you are in there every day and it’s so self-evident to you. You know, you use all these acronyms, you know where everything connects, and you know how to make everything work. How do you feel like that is project wide?

We’re sort of going off piste a little bit here, but we’ll come back to your presentation, your workshop in a minute. How straightforward is it for people to keep up to date with this, and where would you point them? If somebody was really wanting to find out, for example, about the Block Bindings API, where’s the best place?

And I think what I’m trying to say is, there’s so much coming that it’s hard to keep up, for somebody that it isn’t paid to do it like you are. Is the documentation easy to find? There’s not really a question in there, but it’s just a, well, everything’s just coming so quickly, so fast, and it’s so disparate and you’ve got to spend, you know, like a whole week trying to track everything down and map everything to everything else.

[00:22:48] Ryan Welcher: I would say start with, it is a bit like drinking from the fire hose for sure. Like, there’s a lot of information. You’ve got stuff on the make.wordpress.org. where they sort of talk about what’s coming. You’ve got the Gutenberg releases. Like the Gutenberg, it’s on a two week release cycle, so there’s constant things coming out.

So one really great way of keeping up with that is there’s a, what’s new in Gutenberg post that comes out every two weeks, that talks about high level features. And then it’s got like a change log of everything that was merged in those two weeks. So that’s a really great way to like see what’s coming at a higher level, but also really get in the weeds.

Like, you can say, okay, this bug that I know about, oh look, they fixed it or whatever. That’s a really great place to start. You can hang out in the WordPress Slack where they do the Core Editor meetings, the Block Editor meetings, and sort of like ask questions in the open floor or just see what people are talking about.

Depending on what you’re trying to do, the GitHub repo is kind of an okay place to get some information. You’re going to get a lot of information, but that would be a place. I mean, it’s, I do it full time and it’s hard, so I get it. But the reason, that’s why I exist because if I can compile this stuff and make it palatable and easy to find for others, that’s what Dev Rel is, right? Like that’s what a lot of what we do is.

So like I’ll spend the time messing around with the Block Bindings API, and then I’ll do a live stream on it, where I’m like, okay, so we’re going to do this, and this is why I did it this way, and this is why you should do it this way because it’s easier, you know? And so like I can do all that busy work to help others who don’t, you know, because ain’t nobody got time to do all that, right? You know what I mean? So.

[00:24:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s kind of a nice summation of where I was trying to get to. So let’s move on.

Another thing which is going to be mentioned, well, who knows whether it’ll come up, maybe somebody will ask about it. But the questions basically the same. What is the Plugin Template Registration API? What would that be and why would you want to use it?

[00:24:32] Ryan Welcher: So the example that I have is that you’ve registered a custom post type that manages people. This is going to be a common theme throughout this. And you want to inject a single page template for that particular post type that’s curated, that isn’t part of the theme that’s being shipped.

So it allows you to add templates to the active theme from a plugin, from a WordPress plugin. Which is really, really, really handy. Because if you have a plugin that, you know, you have a jobs list plugin, you probably want to provide some default templates so you can just display all the custom fields and everything, and the person that’s installed your plugin just gets that.

They can just go to the single page for each job and they have a default template. It’s a fairly straight, it’s like one hook, or a filter, I think. So it’s fairly straightforward, but it’s super powerful, it’s like a quality of life thing.

[00:25:16] Nathan Wrigley: I wondered if it was something that developers had been clamoring for.

[00:25:20] Ryan Welcher: I can remember like a year and a half ago spending half an afternoon figuring out, how can I do this? And it’s possible but, wow, is it ever in the weeds? So now it’s not. Now it’s like a filter that you just tell it where your template is and it shows up in your templates list.

[00:25:33] Nathan Wrigley: Once again, we’ll put the links into the show notes. Okay, next one. Alright, Preview Options API.

[00:25:41] Ryan Welcher: That’s a really big, fancy title for a new slot, for a slot fill. So in the preview panel where you can preview it as like a, you know, on mobile, desktop and tablet, there’s a slot that you can put something in there, and that’s kind of what it’s. So you can do whatever you want with it.

I’ve seen an example where people were toggling light and dark mode. You could have it, I mean, whatever you can imagine, you can put it in there because it’s a, like a slot is sort of like a hook, like an action.

[00:26:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, nice and straightforward. This one for me is probably the most interesting one. I don’t know why, I just find myself drawn to this one. And it’s not an API, we’re talking about data views. What is that?

[00:26:16] Ryan Welcher: The data views is wildly powerful. It’s a component, a component in the sense of like a JavaScript component. It’s what powers a lot of the views that you get in the site editors. So if you go into like your templates, or your pages was the first one, you can see it in a grid view, you can see it in a list view.

I believe the intention is that, as the site editor sort of spreads into other parts, you’ll see it being used for things like the post list view and stuff like that. So it’s a super powerful component. It’s being used in Gutenberg. I believe it’s still technically experimental because they’re still working on it.

[00:26:48] Nathan Wrigley: Feels like a nice one, that one, not just for developers who are building websites, but also for clients themselves, because they can suddenly, I don’t know, you’re selling houses, real estate websites, something like that, and suddenly you’ve got this house, custom post type, something like that. And there’s this image and there’s a number of bedrooms and you can make it sortable and filterable. We want to drill into the houses that are between 150,000 and 300,000. We want to reverse the order, that kind of thing.

And the end user, the real estate agent will be able to do that. And so it’s going to make the whole project easier to understand, easier to maintain. So custom post types, pages, posts, users, that’s my understanding anyway. Is that done through a UI? Is that going to be done through a UI, or is that going to be something like opening up templates?

[00:27:37] Ryan Welcher: It’s a React component that you will provide the information. So right now it’s a little lower level I think, than they maybe want it to be because there’s a lot, I’m kind of just going off what I think rather than, like no one’s told me this. But having used it a little bit, there is definitely some API refinement that could be done, in the sense of like being able, because you have to provide literally everything for it to handle all of the actions for like sorting and all that stuff. And I think what they’re trying to do is make it a little bit easier to use. So you just give it data, as opposed to like having to define all the callbacks when you click a specific button and stuff like that.

[00:28:09] Nathan Wrigley: It’ll certainly make the UI, the admin area more, I don’t know, more feature rich. Hopefully this will bring it more into parity with all of those other platforms out there.

Have you, and again, this is not really something that you are talking about, but this was just something that occurred to me. The biggest visual change that I saw in WordPress 6.7 was zoom out, zoom out mode.

Yeah, I just think the first time I, okay, I’ll explain. So let’s say you drop a pattern into a post or a page or something like that. Suddenly the whole thing kind of just zooms away. The page, the pattern is somehow distant. Everything shrinks almost like a mobile view, and it kind of just happens without you invoking it. And so that’s what that is, I think. What’s the point of that?

[00:28:55] Ryan Welcher: So you could get a sense of what you’ve just inserted in the overall size of the content. So like, if you’re writing really long pieces, my workshop website, I have very long content because it’s like a step-by-step, huge code blocks. For me to be able to insert something and get a sense of where it is on the page and look at it, that’s kind of what that’s for.

[00:29:11] Nathan Wrigley: I have a fairly small laptop, and by the time that the left sidebar and the right sidebar and the block editor have all gone in there, by the time I’ve dropped a pattern in, there’s basically no real estate left on the screen for me to see what’s above it or below it. And this pulls it right out and gives you the impression of, well, there’s the whole blog post.

And although that sounds really trivial, if the branding and everything really matters and you want one thing to follow another, I don’t know, it’s a landing page or something like that. It just gives you that overview and you can obviously move things around. Yeah, it’s hard to describe how profound it is. But it makes that editing experience, especially for novices, just so much more straightforward.

[00:29:50] Ryan Welcher: Oh, for sure, like, and if you drop a complicated pattern in the wrong spot, you’ll see that immediately. So yeah, it’s like a, I keep using the phrase quality of life, but it really is like a, oh, that’s just a nice touch. It’s made your life a little easier. And that’s kind of like, you know, I know there’s a lot of refinements going into the UI to make the writing experience better and easier, so yeah.

[00:30:07] Nathan Wrigley: A little bit off piste, and I’m putting you on the spot here. If you had to pick one thing that’s coming that people may not know about, I mean, it doesn’t have to be something revolutionary, but just something that you are curious about that is going to drop soon. I don’t know, the next 6 or 12 months, something like that, that you think people will get something out of and enjoy and be excited about. I know that’s putting you on the spot.

[00:30:31] Ryan Welcher: I don’t have one thing per se. I’m super excited about the concept of bits. It’s a very complicated thing, but being able to define areas that you can edit in the editor. So for example, the example that probably makes the most sense without me showing, like using my hands because nobody can see me, is like when you have a block binding that is connected to a piece of post meta. That’s it. Let’s use the, whatever the byline aspect, you know? So it’s like a bio or something that’s connected in post meta.

If you just want to edit one part of it, you can’t. You could edit the whole field, but you can’t edit just one section of it. Or if you have something like, my block developer cookbook site’s got a cooking time block that says, it’s got a little like cooking timer icon, and then it’s got 10, and then it says minutes.

And, well, the 10 part is actually the post meta. But I can’t edit that in line in the block editor because the whole output is, it’s like a span tag with some stuff, right? And so what bits would allow me to do is delineate that, I want to be able to edit just the 10, just that number. And that’ll be super, super powerful. It’s like an editable area inside of a larger editable area.

[00:31:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. And I can see that being powerful in a whole bunch of different ways. Yeah, that’s interesting.

[00:31:37] Ryan Welcher: Yes. Yeah. And there’s obviously the Interactivity API, obviously, but it is one of the most exciting things that I’ve, I mean, it’s already out and there’s just more stuff coming and they’re just doing really, really cool things. I just love it. It is so cool.

[00:31:50] Nathan Wrigley: Do you think, again, just kind of dropping you into it a little bit, do you think we’re at any risk of overcomplicating the amount of things that you can do in WordPress at the minute? Here’s an example. Let’s say I just took somebody off the street and said, here’s a brand new installed WordPress website. It allows you to make content, publish websites, off you go.

How realistic do you think it is with all the different bits and pieces that are dropping? I know you don’t have to get into the weeds of all this, but how easy do you think the UI is right now? Do you think it’s getting more complicated at the expense of, my question basically boils down to, are there too many options right now in the same UI, which make it difficult for people to understand who are new to the project?

[00:32:30] Ryan Welcher: That’s an interesting question. WordPress has had a philosophy of decisions, not options for a long time. And I think Gutenberg is providing more options now, which is good.

So like, if I were to take my mother who’s not technical at all and sit her down and say, build a website, she would probably have a better chance of doing it with Gutenberg than she would’ve pre 5.0, because she can control every part of it. I mean, I’d have to tell her how to do it all because she’s not technical.

But I think that there is a lot of options, but there’s also a lot of potential for creativity. And you have access to almost everything that you would need in the editor experience now, whereas you didn’t before. If you wanted to build a very customised theme, like in classic, and this isn’t like taking a shot at classic, but if you wanted to have a person post type, you couldn’t do that. You needed to edit code to be able to output that meta.

I mean, I’m sure there were plugins and stuff, but now you don’t really need to do that. You have everything that you need as long as you know where to click to find it. But it’s like, anybody who’s never used WordPress would have to figure that out in any platform. You’d have to sort that out. I mean, there’s a lot of options, which can be confusing, but now you can do whatever you want to do, for the most part.

[00:33:38] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s curious because for the longest time people have been sort of saying, you know, the sky’s falling in, the job market for WordPress developers is just going to get hollowed out because the UI, you know, the ability to do things, a novice being able to do things, it’s difficult. We should make it more straightforward. There’s going to be no left work for, I don’t know, freelancers, implementers, that kind of thing.

I don’t think that’s the case. I think all of these options are getting put in and some of the things that we talked about, you know, the Interactivity API and all of that, that’s the technical stuff. So there’s all of these new possibilities that are getting created, but it’s not going to be, it’s not probably going to be in the boundaries, at the beginning anyway, of a complete novice.

So it’s creating new workflows for developers to push what’s possible inside of a WordPress website, and kind of maintaining the job market for people who are implementing already. But hopefully that fear will go away because of all these different things.

[00:34:32] Ryan Welcher: Yeah, I think it’s kind of like the way a lot of developers are looking at AI right now. People are terrified AI’s going to take over. It’s not, you’re just going going to have to learn to use AI to get the job done. You still need to have the skillset to tell it what you need to do, right?

It’s the same with all this. Like, so the interactivity API, it’s really cool, and it’s ripe for someone to write a library of interactions with a UI. So the implementers who don’t maybe write that level of JavaScript, or any JavaScript, can just install that plugin. And now they can make their animations, and it’s like an animation library that’s got a UI.

I think it’s just going to open up other opportunities for the people writing code and building plugins and things like that. I mean, I think with change, change is hard. People fear change, right? It’s figuring out what the new opportunities are.

[00:35:16] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, let’s just talk about AI for just a minute. I really don’t want to get too much into AI because I’m coming from a real point of ignorance. But like you said, there’s a ton of information, misinformation. I don’t know what the right word is, that AI is basically going to be able to make it possible for anybody to speak a sentence and have a website. Give me a website, I want to read all about cars. And you just go off and it’ll come up with a website for that particular purpose. Is WordPress aligning itself to be useful with AI, do you think?

[00:35:47] Ryan Welcher: Yeah, I think so. I mean, AI is the new hotness, right? And it’s getting less and less expensive to do the AI stuff, you know, the LLMs and all that stuff. And it’s getting better, and it’s only going to get better and smarter and faster. I think that there’s, again, it’s just going to change what you have to do as a developer, right?

I am behind on AI, but I’ve made a concerted effort to start using Cursor AI, which I think is a lot of fun. I’m finding that like, I still have to be a developer to tell it what I want, right? But you can absolutely say, hey, build me a website that sells cars. And it’ll build you a website that sells cars. Who knows what the code looks like, and if you can maintain it, and if there’s a bug in there, can you find it?

So I think there’s like, I don’t know, I’m sure there are people listening that are like, oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You can already do that in AI and it’s amazing. Because I’m just not, it’s like the running joke, in JavaScript it’s like, there’s a new library released every other weekend. I feel like there’s a new AI tool that’s like better and better and better like at every day.

[00:36:37] Nathan Wrigley: I am finding it fascinating that a lot of people who are putting out content into the WordPress space, videos and things like that, they’re making a concerted effort to bind AI into WordPress. It’s not like they’ve just pivoted completely to, let’s build websites with AI. It’s more, let’s find a thing in WordPress that we can do in a heartbeat, and we actually want to do it inside of WordPress, and let’s just add a piece of AI on top of that to enable me to do this curious thing, and solve this problem that I’ve got with a client website.

So it seems like people are using AI just to build stuff on top of WordPress, and not really the opposite. I haven’t seen any sort of move away. I don’t need WordPress anymore. That just doesn’t seem to be what I’m seeing.

[00:37:22] Ryan Welcher: And I think it’s because the people that are doing that are, that’s where they work is in WordPress, right? Like, if you’re using, I don’t know, Wix or whatever, or like Next.js or any sort of like other platform for web stuff, I think you would see people trying to apply these AI things to that.

I think it’s a huge opportunity for an AI to be able to create block patterns and create templates that work properly. It’s hard to do right now because I don’t think the LLMs really have the information for it. Like, it’s not because of the way that the data’s stored, it’s sort of different than, like it’s not really that well documented, maybe. I may not be making sense right now. There’s no real like example, right? Because it’s sort of different.

[00:37:58] Nathan Wrigley: We need you to create more examples, yeah.

[00:38:02] Ryan Welcher: I think what’s really exciting is that having to be in an, like an encyclopedia of APIs, having to like to the documentation site all the time, I think that’s going to go away. It’s already going away. Things like GitHub Copilot and these intergrated AI tools in IDEs and everything. Now you can just be like, write me a plugin that does this. Or like, what’s the parameter name that I need for WP Query to be able to do a taxonomy query, right? It’ll just tell you.

You can just do that. Let it do its thing while you’re working on other things. And I think the days of like Stack Overflow, you know what I mean? That’s like, you Google the problem and the first example, and most upvoted answer, gets copied and pasted, right? I think that’s going to, maybe not replace, but the new Stack Overflow is like these AI tools that you can ask questions on, how do I do this? I don’t know, I think it’s just changing things.

[00:38:45] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s a really interesting time and it doesn’t make me feel I’m nervous. I’m more sanguine about it, in all honesty. Yeah, maybe a year ago I was kind of assuming a bit like the sky was going to fall in, but it really does appear that people who are making interesting things in the AI WordPress space are just finding curious holes, yeah. And filling them up.

Okay, so Jamie Marsland did something the other day where he put a video together where he created a little iPhone app where he could upload images and click a button and it was able to do what Jamie wanted. And I think the same will be true, you know, for clients that will come to you. I’ve got this unique problem. Maybe that would’ve taken a week of developer time in the past. Maybe now it will be able to be done in a heartbeat, in more like an hour or a couple of hours or something like that. So it makes the possibilities for real bespoke websites much more possible.

[00:39:33] Ryan Welcher: Yeah. And like hobbyists, kids who want to get into coding, that’s fantastic. You can just say, I want to build a website for my dog, and then all of a sudden they’re like learning by osmosis how coding works and that sort of stuff.

The number of times that I’ve talked to a developer, and I’ve done this myself, where I’ve built a little like one-off thing, like my wife likes to track, she’s really into gut health. So like all the different like vegetables and stuff, you know, this like little point system. So I built a, just a like a really simple little app for it. It was like a weekend project. I probably could’ve done it in like half an hour in AI, and like that would’ve been nice. And it’s, you know, she doesn’t care about the features. She doesn’t care about what the code looks like. She just wants this thing that she can track information on.

[00:40:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that’s going to be the curious thing. The thing that probably would’ve been a real cost benefit analysis in the past. They’re going to take, you know, something along the lines of that it would take three to six developers, six weeks to pull it off. Whereas now it’ll be, it’s going to take two developers an afternoon to pull it off. I mean, it might be that things need tidying up, but it just suddenly makes the possibilities, I don’t know, much more possible.

[00:40:38] Ryan Welcher: For sure. Like, there’s a classic joke about like unit tests in code. Like, ain’t nobody got time for unit tests, because once you’ve written the code, you’re never going to go back and write those tests. What if you told an AI, hey, go write all my unit tests for this code base. And even if it gets some of it wrong, you’re still going to get, you know, it’s going to save a lot of time, it’s going to do a lot of that busy work for you.

And I mean, I’ve never tested that. It would be really interesting to see, if we pointed it to like the WordPress repo, which has got, I don’t know what the percentage of test coverage is, but it just said, cover everything else in tests and see what happens. That’d be super fun. Who knows if it’d work, but yeah.

[00:41:11] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s a really exciting time in WordPress. I think there’s so much going on. You’ve just described a whole ton of it over the past 40 minutes or so. Yeah, it’s really, genuinely feels like there’s a lot of scope for WordPress.

Well, whether the number goes up from 43 or stagnates kind of isn’t really what interests me. It’s more what’s possible, and the kind of crowd that you are going to be speaking to this week are the very, very audience that are going to make this stuff possible into the future.

So good luck and thank you. And I hope that the presentation goes well, and I pray that the internet holds up for you.

[00:41:43] Ryan Welcher: It’ll be a very one-sided, vote free presentation. So hopefully, hopefully they get it sorted out.

[00:41:50] Nathan Wrigley: Ryan Welcher, thank you so much for spending time with me today. It was really interesting. Thank you so much.

[00:41:55] Ryan Welcher: Thank you so much for having me.

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

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, why open standards matter, and how WordPress fits into an open 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 that URL into most podcast players.

[00:00:53] Nathan Wrigley: 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 Aaron D. Campbell.

Aaron is an international speaker, open source advocate, and self-described outgoing introvert. He’s been a regular contributor to WordPress for more than a decade, and is currently director of product at A2 Hosting. His longstanding enthusiasm for WordPress stems from its role as a necessary counterbalance to closed web solutions, providing a vital, open source, alternative that fosters accountability among digital platforms. Aaron’s vision of WordPress’s importance has fueled his sustained commitment, and excitement for the platform matching his initial zeal from years ago.

Today we talk about a topic that’s integral to Aaron, and likely resonates with many of you listeners, the importance of the open web. With the advent of closed platforms, open standards and open source have become more crucial than ever.

Aaron shares his journey in the WordPress space, and how his commitment to the open web has kept him passionate about it over the years. We discussed the evolution of open web concepts, maintaining interoperability, and ensuring your digital creations remain under your control.

We compare this with the growing dominance of closed corporate platforms, and examine the impact of profit motives versus the more altruistic goals of open source. Aaron articulates why preserving the openness of the web is essential, not just for innovation, but for the entire fabric of global society.

If you’re curious about the role of open systems and the future they shape and why the open web matters now more than ever, 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 Aaron D. Campbell.

I am joined on the podcast by Aaron D. Campbell. Hello, Aaron.

[00:03:13] Aaron D. Campbell: Hey, thanks for having me.

[00:03:14] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I’m really pleased to talk to you today. This is a subject which is fairly close to my heart. We’re going to approach it, first of all, from the non WordPress angle, and then we’ll get into it from the WordPress angle. It’s all about open standards, open source.

I guess before we begin, Aaron, I’ll just explain that this is the first interview that I’ve done at WordCamp Asia, which is in Manila. How are you finding it here? Did you have a nice journey over.

[00:03:36] Aaron D. Campbell: You know, my journey over was smooth and uneventful, which is exactly how I like my journeys to these things to be. And I’m finding the place to be fantastic, and the time zone change to be very difficult.

[00:03:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s exactly my experience as well. I think we’re both fairly tired at this point.

It’s the first day, it’s Contributor Day, so there’ll be all of that excitement later. Aaron’s doing a presentation at WordCamp Asia, and this is what we’re going to talk about. It’s called The Future, why Open Web Matters.

Before we get into that, Aaron, do you just want to give us your little potted bio? Tell us why you are here, who you work for, what it is that you do in the WordPress space.

[00:04:13] Aaron D. Campbell: Sure, yeah. What do I do in the WordPress space? Well, that has changed a lot over the years, but I’ve been pretty actively contributing to the WordPress project for about 18 or so years now. Done everything from leading releases and leading the security team to helping put on some of these events like WordCamp US. I work for A2 Hosting, focusing on our products and helping to align what we do with the kind of open web, WordPress ethos that I have at my core.

[00:04:44] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask you, if you’ve been in the project for as long as you have, which is pretty much the length of the whole project, I think, 18 years or so. But basically you’ve been in it since the beginning. So it’s nothing to do with the topic at hand. Are you as excited about WordPress as a thing in 2025 as you were all those years ago?

[00:05:04] Aaron D. Campbell: Yes. Yes I am. I think that the thing that has kept me around this long, it’s not easy to do a thing for, you know, going on almost 20 years and to stay excited about it. But I think that the thing that has kept me there is this whole open web concept, and that I see WordPress as a very important counterbalance to some of the closed solutions that exist on the web.

Having a viable alternative that is open helps keep those other platforms accountable, if you will. And so I think that what’s kept me around is really that kind of idealistic thing that I have around how important WordPress is. And so, yes, I’m just as excited about it as I was back then.

[00:05:47] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like, if we were to rewind the clock 18 years ago, it feels like open was more normal, perhaps than it is now. And I think the closed platforms have monetised their way into the web and have kind of become, in many ways, the default, especially for people who aren’t in the inner circle of open source projects.

So for example, the way to carry out messaging online is to go to a closed platform. The way to communicate via email is to use close, well, the protocol’s open, but you know, the system that you might use may be closed, and so on and so forth. So that seems to be the default.

However, let me just read the blurb from your presentation so we’ll get a flavor of what it is that Aaron will be talking about out. So we’re talking about why the open web matters. And the blurb that went with that goes as follows.

The internet has revolutionised how we share information, enabling unprecedented collaboration, and accelerating human progress in ways once unimaginable. However, this powerful tool is now at a crossroads. In this talk, Aaron will explore the critical role that open systems and the open web play in shaping our future. He will delve into the potential consequences of a closed digital ecosystem, and argue why preserving the openness of the web is essential, not only for innovation, but the very fabric of our global society. Discover why the open web matters more now than ever, and what’s at stake if we lose it.

So there’s some fairly powerful words in there, you know, the future of society and so on. However, underpinning it all is this phrase, open web. And it occurs to me that, dear listener, you may not know what that means. So my opening gambit to you Aaron, what is the open web? What does that even mean?

[00:07:20] Aaron D. Campbell: Honestly, you were talking a little bit about how we see more of these closed platforms now, and maybe it was more the standard 18, 20 years ago, and it’s true. When the web started around 1991, it was open in that information flowed easily and freely back and forth. And the things that we used to interact with the web, HTTP, HTML, all these things that we use were these open standards that could be implemented by anyone. You could implement them in some sort of closed web browser. You could implement them in an open source web browser. Either way, they were open standards that you could implement.

And I think that that, where we started is kind of the core of this open that I’m talking about. It’s the interoperability, the ability for things to work together for different companies to be able to give you that same experience that you might want to have with their flavor. But if you then choose to leave that company, you can go somewhere else and still have whatever it is that you built, or created, or were using.

And so open, while I love open source and a lot of what I do is around open source, I don’t think that open source in and of itself is the open web. It’s more about this freedom to be able to own your stuff and take it wherever you want to take it. It’s that interoperability that’s really at the core of open when I’m talking about the open web.

[00:08:48] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s kind of the ability to pick up your data from one spot. Let’s say that you’ve got, well, in the case of WordPress, you’ve got a blog, you’ve got content that you’ve created, text, images and so on. The ability to say, you know what? I’m fed up with my CMS of choice. I want to move it elsewhere.

But the same would be the case for, okay, I’ve got a bunch of messages that I’ve written to some clients and to some friends. I want to be able to drop that platform and move it over here. So I guess email might be a good example there. You know, there’s the protocol behind the email, that’s completely open. It would be crazy if you could only email people who are using the same service that you had. And so you can move providers all the time, but you may not be able to move your email address. So it’s a sort of complicated picture, but transportability, yeah. Is that possibly it?

[00:09:30] Aaron D. Campbell: Yeah. I think that your example of, I’m fed up with my CMS, so I want to go somewhere else. That’s valid, I guess. But I look at it more from, let’s say that you’re a company that sells leather goods, and wherever you have your website has decided that they no longer allow you to sell leather goods on their platform.

You need to go somewhere else for your own livelihood. You need to be able to go somewhere else. Can you? And if your site is WordPress, and it’s your host that says, we no longer allow leather goods, you can just move somewhere else. But if your site is on Facebook, and Facebook says that you can’t do that anymore, you can’t just take what you have and move somewhere else.

And that’s a big difference because that’s a thing that is key to you continuing to, you know, I don’t know, run your business, make your money, put food on your table. And so it’s not just like, I got sick of this tool and wanted to move to another one. I think that part of it is like, who has control, and what are your options if what they want no longer aligns with what you want?

[00:10:36] Nathan Wrigley: So it really boils down, in your case, to the ability for you to choose where things end. Yeah, choice. A choice. Okay.

I really haven’t ever read a history of the internet, but the bits and pieces, the impression that I’ve got over the years when I’ve been reading around how the internet began, CERN and ARPANET and those kind of things. When the internet began, I don’t really know what the enterprise was to begin the whole thing.

But it felt like it was more or less a service to provide the capability for academics to communicate with each other. There was never this intention that, okay, we’ll be buying and selling goods online. We’ll all be communicating through messaging platforms online. We’ll be sending photos online. So how did the internet begin? Do you know?

[00:11:20] Aaron D. Campbell: It began open and it began specifically for the purposes of sharing information. The commercial internet exchange was trying to connect all these big networks that had tons of information in them at places like universities, governmental agencies, right? That were these silos of information.

They wanted to interconnect those networks, make the internet, be able to share data back and forth for the purposes of being able to learn from each other. It was very much an academic pursuit.

I think that that’s kind of how we grow our knowledge as people, right? We learn from what other people have learned, and then we learn some more on top of that. And they saw the value of having this kind of connected digital network to share information. And it was only useful if it was open, and that information could flow back and forth freely. And so, yes, you’re right, it wasn’t meant to be a commercial endeavor. It was meant to be a knowledge sharing endeavor.

[00:12:18] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of a really altruistic enterprise when you say it in those terms. It really feels like it’s for the betterment of humanity. But I’m sure all of us can imagine scenarios where we think about our use of the internet, and the words, betterment of humanity are just not, well, they’re just an anathema.

Because, you know, the internet has undoubtedly caused harms in various ways, and there’s misinformation being spread and all sorts of things like that, problems that we’ve got online.

But I’m wondering, well, if we were talking about open on all levels of the internet, so for example, the internet that I’m using, I’m using a CMS, a web browser. It’s HTTPS, CSS, JavaScript, those kind of things. But underpinning it all, here’s my Mac, and the Mac presumably talks to the TCP IP stack, and there’s a bunch of routers and all of those kind of things going on, holding the internet together. Does all of that stack need to be open, or is it okay for some bits and pieces holding the infrastructure together to be closed?

Because I’m not sure that you’d kind of want the hardware layer, if you know what I mean, some of those bits and pieces. Maybe they need to be, well, maybe they need to be proprietary and closed. I don’t know. What are your thoughts?

[00:13:27] Aaron D. Campbell: That’s a really intriguing question, and I think that for the purposes of just being able to use and enjoy and leverage the internet, no, all those layers do not need to be open. For the purposes of preserving the internet as this information sharing kind of altruistic tool, I think that there needs to be openness at every one of those levels.

I think that, for example, you were talking about the routers that shift all the information around, and they’re largely these hardware things, although they do have some software on them. But do all of those need to be open? No. But if one company is the only one that’s capable of shifting information around the web, then it becomes a problem. So as long as there are viable open alternatives, and some are closed and some are open, great.

But I don’t want any company, no matter who it is, you know, in this case maybe a, Cisco is maybe the biggest router company, right? I don’t want them to be the only one in control of what information can be sent back and forth across the world.

[00:14:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think our conversation is probably going to dwell on the information layer, the bit at the top. So the text that we send and, you know, the images, and the CMS and so on. Now, in the beginning of your presentation, there was a phrase which stuck out because you said, we’re in a time of unprecedented collaboration, and accelerating human progress is what the internet is kind of all about. It’s a fairly lofty phrase and I was wondering what you meant by that.

[00:14:59] Aaron D. Campbell: So first of all, the internet allows for a kind of collaboration that we’ve never seen before in history, right? Like, collaboration, we all hop on these Zoom calls all the time and think nothing of the fact that I am in an instant virtual video call with people in eight different countries. But that’s possible. I literally do that almost every single day. People on my team are in the UK, they’re in Bulgaria, that’s normal. That was not normal 20 years ago. It was certainly not normal, I guess, what, 40 years ago, pre-internet.

There is a level of collaboration that can happen now that just never was able to before. And we see that in tons of places. My wife’s neurologist, I think I gave you this example in some notes that I sent over. She collaborates with neurologists all over the world, live, almost daily. And that’s mind boggling. But the fact that a neurologist can immediately learn from other specialists, like that is fantastic. That’s so amazing.

And so, yeah, it sounds lofty when you put it into words, but the truth is, this is our normal every day, and maybe we’ve gotten a little used to it. But if you take a step back and look, it’s amazing what the internet has enabled.

[00:16:22] Nathan Wrigley: I occasionally, and it really is an example of how quickly you can become, something that is extraordinary becomes completely normal, and you don’t really expect what’s going on. But occasionally I have the thought that, I’ll be looking at my computer, on my phone, and I think what I’m doing, to my 10-year-old self, was the realm of Star Trek. It was science fiction that there was a device in somebody’s hand which enabled you to communicate.

There was a screen which held images on it, and it was all encapsulated in your hand, you know? And obviously Star Trek, well, we’ve still got a long way to go. We can’t transport each other across the universe and so on. But it’s incredibly profound. And the mere fact, just take a look and think about it for a moment. You’re probably listening to this on a phone, dear listener, and I don’t know, you’ve probably got a pair of Bluetooth headphones or something like that.

This incredible stack of technology, which is now completely normal. You and I collaborating for this episode on a Google Doc. The world has utterly changed, and it really does behoove everyone, once in a while, to take a step back and think, wow, I’m really lucky.

[00:17:31] Aaron D. Campbell: I mean, when I was in school, my teacher very specifically would not let us use calculators on tests because, quote, you will not always have a calculator in your pocket. You need to know how to do this. Well, they were wrong. I have a calculator in my pocket, which is actually also a computer connected to every other computer in the world. It’s astounding how much things have changed.

[00:17:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s pretty remarkable. I mean, I guess the next point that I want to raise is that the web, despite the fact that it’s marvelous in all these ways that we’ve just described, I think it’s, well, we’ve had an era over the last, let’s say, decade, maybe more, where it feels like the internet has been taken over largely by closed corporate platforms.

I mean, not to throw any aspersions out there, and not to name only these ones, but the ones which come to mind in my life are Google, dominating search, for example. You know, I basically have outsourced my brain most of the time to Google. I don’t really think I just Google something, and then trust that what Google gives me back is going to be credible and accurate. And I really give it a hundred percent of that. You know, I don’t question what it gives back. I assume that the algorithm is doing me justice and doing me a favor.

And equally things like Facebook over the years, I’ve invested large amounts of time into that. But it feels like in the last year, so we’re in 2025, most people have got a slightly different relationship. There’s maybe a bit more skepticism coming in. We can see the harms that maybe some of these companies are doing. And so this really does feel like a moment where open platforms, WordPress in particular, it’s an important moment to step up. So really there’s no question there. It’s more like, do you have any thoughts about proprietary platforms and their growing dominance?

[00:19:17] Aaron D. Campbell: Yeah. First of all, I hope that you are right and that in 2025 we’re seeing some of that, kind of, questioning of whether these closed, for-profit platforms are really doing what’s best for us. Because I know that they’re doing what’s best for them. The question is whether that is also what’s best for us. Companies like Facebook, like Google, they’re looking out for themselves. The question is, does that help us?

You’re right, we’ve all outsourced our brain to Google in many ways. I mean, when you talk about, I don’t know, researching a thing, you don’t even say, I’m going to go research it. You say, I’m going to go Google it. That’s what that means in our vernacular. And I think that, I hope that, people are really starting to realise, not that that’s bad because I don’t think it is, I am actually super thankful that Google makes it so easy for me to learn so many things. I love that.

But I hope that they, everyone’s starting to understand some of the potential risks there. Is it good that you don’t even question whether what Google fed back to you is the right thing? Does Google get to decide what we’re able to learn or not learn now? Is that healthy for us?

I would love if people are asking those kinds of questions, because it pushes toward having more alternatives. How do you go check, if you decide that you’re not sure if Google’s really looking out for you, how do you go check that? What do you use to make sure that Google’s still giving you what you ought to get? And if you go looking for that, that’s good. Going and looking for those alternatives, ensuring that there is a choice keeps us from being locked in, in a way that becomes unhealthy.

[00:21:11] Nathan Wrigley: I think my intuition is that increasingly these platforms seem to be tied up in profit motives, and so, the example that comes to mind in my head is the algorithmic feed in your social network of choice, really. Insert whichever platform you want there. But the idea that it will maximize engagement at any cost.

So if it can keep your eyes glued to the screen for another minute, that’s a win, regardless of whether or not that information that’s being given to you is good. And I’m doing air quotes. And so if that were to creep into, for example, Google search, okay, can we keep you on our platform? I know that’s a silly example because that’s not really the point of Google, but you get the point.

And what I’m wondering is, is profit really kind of the enemy here? Does everything have to be freely done by volunteers for it to be open? Because there’s this feeling, it feels that there’s a bit of that in the open source community. You know, if it’s done by volunteers, if it’s done for free, if you can access it completely for free, if the platform’s code is verifiable and open on the web, is that better? So, yeah, sorry there’s a lot there.

[00:22:18] Aaron D. Campbell: Well, first of all, I’ll go ahead and plant my flag on this one. And it’s maybe not the most popular opinion amongst the hardcore open source people that I honestly spend a lot of time with and work with regularly. But I don’t think profit is bad. I don’t. But if that is the core motive and that becomes the only tool that you have is one that is focused on profiting off of you, then yeah, there are concerns.

If Facebook, you’re right, or any of these social networks, they want to keep you around as long as they can because that’s their profit model. However, it doesn’t mean that you can’t profit off of open, and I am fine with profit as long as there is open. There are many companies in our space that make really good profit implementing WordPress solutions. That is open. The companies that they are implementing those solutions for own their own data. They can move it wherever they want. That’s great, even if there’s profit there.

And so I don’t think that profit alone is the enemy, but it does seem like most of these kind of closed solutions, yeah, are by for profit companies that are just looking to profit. And again, I think it comes down to choice. As long as there are enough options out there, you’re not beholden to just the one model from the one company. You know, social networks is a good example. If there’s something that’s a problem with you and Facebook, you can go to some other social network. There are other options. It’s when it’s a for-profit and just one option that it really starts to become a problem.

[00:24:03] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s really a difficult thread to get right in our community. Because the WordPress community in particular does seem to have two sides. There’s the real for-profit side, and obviously we’re here at WordCamp Asia, and if we were to walk into any of the sponsor booths, there’s a bunch of companies here. And I imagine the fact that they can sponsor, they’re making a healthy profit. You know, they’re sending staff here and they’ve got a booth and so on.

But then there’s also the more, and again, I’m doing air quotes here, there’s the more community side, which seem to see that as a bit of a trade off. We’ve got to have these people here, but on some level it would be better if they weren’t here. If we could just do the whole thing more non-profit, that would be better. So I feel that the community we’ve got, that’s a difficult tightrope to tread.

[00:24:48] Aaron D. Campbell: It’s a very difficult tightrope to tread. The way that I thread it, I get the altruistic, if we could do everything just volunteer, but we could also have diverse volunteers and many volunteers with different points of view, and different sort of technical backgrounds, right? So that we could build a thing that works for everyone, that would be great.

But that’s really difficult because you see many open source projects that had that and built up and then failed and have sort of disappeared, because it’s very difficult to have longevity in that. To have people that stay around long enough.

And so I think that what the for-profit side does in our WordPress space is it helps ensure the longevity because those companies, hosts, for example, are hosting many, many thousands, or tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of WordPress sites, they’re making money off of that. And so they have a vested interest in making sure that WordPress continues.

And so, yeah, there’s this fine balance between, they’re actually investing in a way that helps keep the platform going, keep the platform being built, keep the platform improving. But does that also mean that they want some influence in the platform? And I think that that’s that line you have to tread where profit helps with longevity. It does, it keeps people around. But it also leads towards a desire to influence. And are we watching out for that?

It is been a question that the WordPress project has been struggling with since its very beginning. I think that we’ve got it right at times. I think we’ve got it wrong at times. But I think that by and large, for 20 plus years, we have successfully brought those two things together, in a way that’s built something pretty amazing.

[00:26:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And also if you think about it in the long march of history, the internet is still in its infancy. And these open source platforms, this idea of volunteering your time for a global project is quite a new thing. We are just figuring it out.

And so whilst you and I are inside the baseball, we hear the arguments from both sides all the time, give it another a hundred years and no doubt things will have bedded down and the arguments would’ve been done this way and that way, and hopefully things figured out. So to me, it’s pretty remarkable that we’ve even got 20 years under our belt. Yeah, there’s going to be some disagreements along the way.

[00:27:15] Aaron D. Campbell: The internet sort of, as we know, it’s about 34 years old. It’s not been around long when you take a more, sort of, broader historical view alright.

[00:27:24] Nathan Wrigley: Over the last period of time, I’m going to say 12, 15 years, something like that, the internet feels like it’s become a sort of platform. So a good example of that would be social media, so X, Twitter and all the other ones, LinkedIn, and the multitude of ones that have come in to existence and even gone away in some cases. They’ve obviously got their proprietary technology stack, but it feels to me what you are proposing is that the internet shouldn’t be a place of platforms, it should be more a place of protocols. And what I mean by that is the underpinning technology.

So as an example, we could swap out X for something like ActivityPub or the AT Protocol. And then a variety of different platforms can build on top of that, change the UI, change the UX, change the experience for everybody. But we’d all be able to communicate using that same thing. Have I kind of got that right? Is that what you are hoping for?

[00:28:14] Aaron D. Campbell: I would love to see more of the platforms on the internet having open standards, open protocols, open data standards at their core. It would be fantastic if something like Twitter, X, whatever it is now, built on top of an open standard. And that was, like they built their own custom experience on top of it. They brought a lot of people together and gave a good experience, but that you could, other companies could also implement that protocol. And again, then you would have choice and options.

I think that at its core, like the easiest way to sum this up for somebody experiencing it is that, I really think that lock-in is unhealthy. If you can just choose to go somewhere else and you’re not locked in, then that company needs to keep you around by just serving you better, having a better experience for you, delivering more value to you. Rather than keeping you around because you’re locked in, and you’ve built a following there and you can’t get it anywhere else, et cetera.

And so, yes, I love all these varieties of platforms focusing in on specific things, you know, like LinkedIn on jobs and professional connections. I wish that more of them shared open standards at their core that could be implemented by others.

[00:29:35] Nathan Wrigley: Do you think there’s a realistic chance that these companies will move towards these more open protocols? Because obviously, you know, they weren’t, they weren’t there at the beginning. They developed their own code base and soon discovered, gosh, there’s a real economic lever here. If we can keep eyeballs on our platform, if we can lock data inside the platform so that they can’t go away, you know, users of LinkedIn, it’s just, you’re in LinkedIn, you can’t get stuff out of LinkedIn, it’s in there.

Is there any incentive for them to move to an open protocol? Apart from the fact that it’s just a morally good position to be in. Because it feels like if we were talking to the executives of LinkedIn, Facebook, et cetera, they would maybe make the right noises, but then they turn around and say, huh, we’re not going anywhere near that. We want to lock people in. We want everybody to be locked inside our silo.

[00:30:21] Aaron D. Campbell: Unfortunately, I think that there’s not a lot of, there’s not a good enough reason yet for them to move that way. So I don’t see a lot of the current platforms moving that way, at least not in the short term. I hope that some of these new platforms that are spinning up now, and that will in the near future, that might make use of that. We might be able to see new ones coming on with open standards, but I think it’s less likely to see existing ones move to that.

If I were talking to those executives though, and trying to talk about what the benefits would be to them, I think that the main things that I would try to focus on is, if there’s a chunk of your code, your system that many people are working on and improving, and you don’t have to fund every single worker on it, that there can be shared benefit from that.

I talk about this with WordPress and hosts all the time. Yeah, build some of your own custom cool stuff on top of WordPress, but also help improve WordPress itself. Yes, that improves it, the experience at other hosts as well. But if every host is doing that, then everyone’s getting shared benefit as WordPress gets better across the board. And so these existing platforms could benefit from that, not having to be the only one working on improving the protocols or whatever it is.

And the other thing is, if you are really confident that you’re building something great, if you really think you have a great product, then if you have shared protocols, that means you should be able to bring people in from those other companies that have those shared protocols. Because it means it’s easier to bring people from other places to you. They all tend to focus on the, saving what we have, preventing people from leaving. But if you really think that you can offer the best, then you can also win people in that way. And that’s sort of the approach that I take when I talk to them, but it’s difficult.

[00:32:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I wonder what the age demographic of these debates is. And what I mean by that is, when it comes to events like WordCamps, if I’m looking around and being honest, I’m not really seeing many young people. And I don’t really know what I mean by young, but it seems like the average age here is not really anywhere near 18.

And I wonder if the ship has sailed in terms of, let’s take a typical child in the UK, a 16-year-old child, something like that. The excitement is all around things like TikTok and Instagram. I would imagine that the typical 16-year-old doesn’t even know that there’s such a thing as an open protocol. It’s just more, I want to use that service.

And I wonder if, well, where we need people to be going with these debates is skewing it more towards young people because they’re going to be the future. Like you and I, we, well, we’re a bit older, and we probably understand that a little bit more. I don’t know where the younger people sit around in all of this, and whether or not their semi addiction to technology is something that we can get in the way of. Or if there’s an argument to be had, if we need to be going out and talking about these things in schools, encouraging it. Curriculums in colleges and what have you, to be talking about this more.

[00:33:30] Aaron D. Campbell: I think that you’re right, that it skews towards the older crowd a little bit. As a parent, I kind of draw a parallel here, right? You can tell a kid, don’t touch that it’s hot, don’t touch that it’s hot, don’t touch that it’s hot. But it’s when they touch that and get burned, hopefully not too badly, but that’s when they’re like, oh, it’s hot. I need to pay attention to that.

And I think that that’s the same kind of struggle that I have conveying this kind of thing to youths right now is. Yeah, they’re super into all these platforms, but what they haven’t experienced yet is spending a lot of time building a thing on a platform and then it going away, and them having to start all over.

And people like you and I, people our age, we probably have. We may have experienced that many times over and, sort of, you can tell them what the risks are, but if they haven’t felt it yet, maybe they don’t quite get the importance of it. And I wish that there was an easier way to help them learn from my painful experiences rather than make them experience it themselves. But I definitely struggle with figuring out how to properly convey that in a way that they grasp the levity. I do think it’s important if we can.

[00:34:43] Nathan Wrigley: We shared some show notes when we were arranging this episode, and the question that I think hit you, the question that hit home the most was one that I wrote and it went like this. How do we get open, in quotes, to be the default given the market forces that we’re working against?

And so again, the example of Facebook, Google, et cetera. You know, they’ve got deep pockets, an incredible amount of money to spend on ads. They can occupy all the app stores, and they’ve got incredible lobby groups and so on.

And you thought, well, I think you thought that that was the question in this interview that was going to be the most interest to you. So how do we get open to be the default given the power of these massive platforms?

[00:35:22] Aaron D. Campbell: It’s so difficult, right? I think that I said that this is the billion dollar question. I think that this is kind of the core of what we need to look at and figure out. And I do think that there are some people in our space, in the open space, but even specifically in WordPress, that are trying to figure this out.

WordPress is amazing in that it’s put together by volunteers all over the world, and there’s contributors in every walk of life. But it’s not coordinated in a way that a company like a Google or a Meta or whatever, it can be coordinated to funnel all of their funds together and invest in, whether it’s lobbying or advertising or whatever it is.

We need to bring all this variety of companies, and people in our space together in a coordinated way like that, and that’s so much more difficult when each one of these companies is their own entity. But you’re starting to see some groups like the Scale Consortium, some of the enterprise WordPress agencies in our space have formed this consortium to work together to put out this kind of like enterprise level marketing for WordPress at that level.

And I would love to see more of that kind of thing happening. I think that groups working together is kind of our only chance of trying to compete with some of these companies.

[00:36:50] Nathan Wrigley: What was the organisation called? The Scale Consortium? Yeah, the Scale Consortium. Okay. And do you have a URL for that?

[00:36:56] Aaron D. Campbell: I think it’s scaleconsortium.com.

[00:36:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, I’ll include that in the show notes. But is this something that you are involved with personally? Does A2 Hosting, or are you involved?

[00:37:06] Aaron D. Campbell: No. So in my past life, I guess, before I really got into hosting, I ran an agency for many years including working in the enterprise space. And so I’m just still close to a lot of the other agency folks, agencies that are a part of this or people like Crowd Favorite and Human Made and 10up. They’re forming this Scale Consortium, and it’s fantastic. I talk to them about it. Every time I can see them and talk to them I want to talk to them about this thing they’re doing.

[00:37:32] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of interesting and it’s fairly unique, I think, open source. The capacity of rivals, and again, I’m using air quotes. Yes, we can get together because, well, you know, Microsoft Bing getting together with Google, that seems really strange. I mean, maybe there’s a few web interoperability things that those companies, those proprietary companies get together on. But you know, they’re commercial rivals.

But in the WordPress space, that kind of thing’s possible. And in the open source space, that kind of thing is possible, because it’s more a case of a rising tide carries all boats. So not a case of, well yeah, we’ve got to kill the competition, kill the opposition. And that’s curious. And maybe that is the key to its success.

[00:38:08] Aaron D. Campbell: I think that you’re right about the rising tide lifting all ships. I think that in our space, WordPress especially, we have this amazing like coopetition thing where it’s cooperative competitors working together. And I think that that’s because, as long as we grow the open web, as long as we grow the people, the companies, the websites that are building on top of these open platforms, literally the pie is growing. So you don’t have to take away somebody else’s slice of the pie. As the pie grows, you can just have more and more and more of the pie.

And I think that companies in our space have really realised that. The more that they can get these enterprise level customers be building on us instead of Adobe’s platform, the more the pie has grown, and their piece of it grows. And so if they all work together, they can grow the pie better. And I think that that’s, honestly, that just makes it a more friendly, more fun area of the internet to work in.

[00:39:10] Nathan Wrigley: Do you think WordPress encapsulates a more or less perfect example of the open web? I mean, obviously we’ve got our own problems, but generally speaking, would you hold up WordPress as a really fine example of the open web or would you say there’s, I don’t know, room for improvement?

[00:39:25] Aaron D. Campbell: I think that there’s always room for improvement. I would hold up WordPress as a pillar of paving the way, right? Like, we’ve gotten it wrong a number of times, but we have pushed so hard toward building this open platform that really is truly open.

I think that there are single points of failure and stuff, even in how we have things set up. But by and large, I think we’ve done it right. I’m not going to say we’re perfect. That would be silly, because I think that we should continue to push to grow and improve. And if you think you’re perfect, you’re not motivated to do that. But, yeah, I think that we’ve done a really good job in WordPress of focusing on that.

[00:40:05] Nathan Wrigley: Well, hopefully people listening to this podcast, by the time this comes out, maybe Aaron’s talk will be out on WordPress TV. We’ll have to see. It’s a really interesting subject. It speaks to so many of the reasons why I enjoy the internet, and why I’ve skewed towards open source as opposed to proprietary.

There’s just something profoundly meaningful there for me. And let’s hope that if we would have this conversation in, oh, I don’t know, 10 years time or something like that, the arguments that you are portraying here, the powerful reasons for going open and not closed, let’s hope they win.

[00:40:36] Aaron D. Campbell: Let’s. That’s one of the most exciting things I could imagine.

[00:40:39] Nathan Wrigley: Well, Aaron, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:40:44] Aaron D. Campbell: Thank you for having me. This was fantastic.

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

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how the Interactivity and HTML APIs are transforming the way developers work with 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 Milana Cap. Milana is a seasoned WordPress engineer from Serbia working with XWP, and freelancing through Toptal. She’s not just a developer, she’s also active in WordPress community roles such as a co-rep for the documentation team, organizer at multiple WordCamps, and a member of the plugin review team.

We discussed some groundbreaking WordPress features that developers should be aware of, specifically focusing on her presentation at WordCamp Asia in Manila, titled, WordPress gems for developers: Fresh new features you’ll actually want to use.

We start the discussion with the Interactivity API. Milana explains how this feature allows blocks within WordPress to communicate seamlessly with one another. Until now, most blocks were just silos of information, they could not communicate with one another. This API enables developers to manage interactivity across multiple blocks without resorting to custom solutions.

Milana also gets into the HTML API, which underpins the Interactivity API. This empowers developers to manipulate HTML attributes using PHP, thereby reducing the reliance on JavaScript. This not only enhances page load speeds, but also simplifies the code management process. It’s not something that I’d heard of, but Milana explains how important it can be in rewriting the DOM for whatever goals you have in mind.

Throughout the episode, Milana shares examples of these APIs in action, demonstrating how they can simplify and optimize WordPress development projects, particularly at an enterprise level.

If you’re a developer looking to leverage these new WordPress features, 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 Milana Cap.

I am joined on the podcast by Milana Cap.

[00:03:32] Milana Cap: Yes. Thank you.

[00:03:33] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. I’ve had to practice that name several times. It’s lovely to have you on the podcast today. I’ve never spoken to Milana before, although I’ve seen her from afar many times.

And we’re facing each other because we’re in the Philippines. We’re in Manila. It’s WordCamp Asia, and Milana is doing a presentation at the event. It is called WordPress gems for developers: fresh new features you’ll actually want to use.

Before we get into that conversation Milana, will you just spend a moment introducing yourself. Tell us who you are, where you’re from, what you do with WordPress, that kind of thing.

[00:04:07] Milana Cap: I’m Milana Cap from Serbia, and we have the best community in the world. I am currently WordPress Engineer at XWP and also freelancing through Toptal. I am one of the co reps for the documentation team, one of plugin review team members. I’m also a classical musician and just, you know, being loud all around. I like traveling and speaking at conferences, and that’s basically it.

[00:04:38] Nathan Wrigley: Can you just tell us a little bit about the bits and pieces going on in Serbia there? You sound quite proud of it. You said it the best or something like that. You’ve got a vibrant, healthy growing Serbian community.

[00:04:49] Milana Cap: Well, it’s not really growing, and it’s not that vibrant as it was. But the core of community that started getting together in 2016, or even before that, we still stayed, and we are still active and they’re like my brothers. We travel, we plan together. We visit each other in Serbia as friends, and we plan for barbecues and all the other stuff, besides, you know, organising events.

[00:05:22] Nathan Wrigley: So it really is an actual community.

[00:05:24] Milana Cap: Yeah it is.

[00:05:25] Nathan Wrigley: You spend social time together. Oh, that’s lovely. Yeah, and you mentioned you work with, for, XWP. This is a name that I hear a lot, but I don’t really know much about the company. Just tell us a little bit about what you do for them, and with them.

[00:05:39] Milana Cap: First of all, they are sponsoring my time at wordpress.org. It’s an agency that works mainly with enterprise clients. So we do all of it, like building you a new website, or maintaining the existing one, or fixing problems. And it’s usually, mostly, just enterprise clients.

[00:05:59] Nathan Wrigley: Is that an Australian based company?

[00:06:02] Milana Cap: It’s kind of, yeah, based. It’s created there but we are completely remote.

[00:06:07] Nathan Wrigley: Everything distributed, like a global team. Oh, that’s nice.

Okay, so let’s just move on into the topic today. The presentation that you were giving, I’ll just repeat the title, WordPress gems for developers, fresh new features you’ll actually want to use. And then I’ll read the blurb as well because it’ll give the listeners some context. We’ll take a closer look at the innovative HTML and Interactivity APIs as the most significant game changers in today’s WordPress development, with a splash of WP-CLI magic for fast and more fun development. And there might be a surprise or two.

Well, obviously on the audio podcast, we’re not going to be able to breakout WPCLI, but nevertheless, we’re going to talk about those things. We’re going to concentrate primarily on the Interactivity API. Obviously this is something that you’d need to get your hands on, you’d need to be opening a laptop. But we can’t do that. It’s an audio podcast. So first of all, let’s just break into the topic by asking the question, what is the Interactivity API? And let’s do that from a total novice perspective.

[00:07:07] Milana Cap: Okay, yeah. Well, Interactivity API allows you to get back to the whole page. At least I see it that way. Because before Gutenberg, we were using only PHP, and PHP page is aware of all of its parts. So in header, you know what’s happening in footer and vice versa.

But then we got Gutenberg and these blocks didn’t know about their surroundings. They were just like, oh, I’m a block here, and I do what I do and I don’t care about others.

And it was difficult to get that in your head, like this is a completely separate entity that, once it’s in a page, you can work with that, but there is no way to connect to it to the rest of the page. And today you have a lot of requests for having interactive page. You know, not just showing the text and people come and read, you need to have something that’s happening on that page.

And it was very difficult to, for example, make one block do something and then you use that data in another block, that was insane. And people were trying to do those things in so many different ways. It was a mess. Like, I have a slide with dolls that have misplaced eyes and all of that. That’s how it looks like.

So now with Interactivity API we finally get that connection, but it’s not like hacky thing, it’s in Core. So every block can be aware of the other block, and you can send the data from one block to all other blocks. And that’s really what was missing for a long time. And not just in WordPress, we have the same things happening before WordPress, in Symphony, in Laravel. So now we have that too.

[00:09:04] Nathan Wrigley: So let me just try and sum up what you’ve just said, and see if I’ve parsed it correctly and understood it. So prior to Gutenberg, given the PHP nature of WordPress, the bits and pieces that were displaying on the page, so header, footer content and what have you, they had some recognition within PHP of what one was doing and what the other was doing.

And then along comes Gutenberg and we shatter the experience on the page into a variety of different blocks. There’s an image here, and a paragraph here, and some more text over here, and a heading and what have you. And each of those little blocks is a silo. It lives by itself, for itself, it’s erected walls around itself so that it can’t be communicated.

[00:09:41] Milana Cap: It’s a diva.

[00:09:41] Nathan Wrigley: It can’t talk out and it can’t hear things in. And that’s a problem. I mean, it’s a brilliant solution if you want to move content around, but If you want one thing to shout to another thing and say, look, I just got clicked, go and update yourself. Add one to yourself, or whatever it may be. So that possibility evaporated.

But now with the Interactivity API, we’ve come up with a Core solution. So it ships with WordPress, everybody has it. And suddenly we’re able to say, okay, I’m a block, I’m a button, and when I get clicked, I want you to add one to the cart. And the shopping cart number can increment by one and what have you. So suddenly everything can communicate with everything else. Have I got that about right?

[00:10:23] Milana Cap: Yes.

[00:10:24] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, perfect. Okay. And so I’ve seen examples of Interactivity over many years since Gutenberg came around, and I’m imagining that each developer, therefore has had to create their own way of doing it. And presumably that works for them, but it doesn’t work for the project as a whole.

[00:10:44] Milana Cap: Not just that. It might work for them but, let’s say you have a plugin and your plugin is doing that interactive thing with your own blocks. But me as another developer, I want maybe to enhance your blocks, but I don’t have access to whatever is happening in your blocks. So whatever you are doing, like counting stuff and changing something, I don’t have that info. So I have to do, again, hacky thing.

But with Interactivity API, I have a standardised access to that. So I can, you know, set my blocks to support Interactivity API. And I can get, with just one function, I can get all the data from your blocks and work with them, and it’s completely in Core. It’s standardised. And anybody can take my data and, you know, this data and do whatever they want with that. And it’s not just that it’s easy to get that data, but we all do it the same way. So when I open your block, I know exactly what I will find there. I know exactly how to get that data, and how to provide to others.

[00:11:58] Nathan Wrigley: So the benefit is basically that it’s a standard mechanism. Everybody knows what the rules of the game are. So in the past, the experiences that I’ve seen online where plugin A has been able to clearly demonstrate this interactivity, a different developer coming to that would have to learn how plugin A does it, and then if they go and try and do the same thing for a different plugin from a rival, for example, they would have to learn that one.

And every time you wanted to do it, you’d have to learn how that system does it. So there’s no interoperability. It’s just little silos of interactivity. They worked, but they were a sort of stepping stone to what we’ve got now.

Okay, I think I understand that. That’s great. Hopefully the audience has got that as well. That should be good. Can you give us some nice examples that you’ve seen where the Interactivity API, you describe it, the audience can hear it and readily understand, okay, that’s something that it can handle.

[00:12:49] Milana Cap: Well, there is a beautiful demo that is used for demonstrating the Interactivity API by people who created Interactivity API. It’s a movie demo, and you can find it if you go for introductory post of Interactivity API at Core blog, you will find it. So it’s a simplified Netflix made with WordPress. So you get simple things like there is a favorites. So you can heart a movie, and it’ll show the number, how many favorites you have. But when you dig deeper, you can open one movie and play the trailer, and it’ll have a minimised video on the bottom. And you can, you know, browse the website and switch pages, and the video is still playing in the corner and it doesn’t even hiccup.

The thing that is happening there is you think you are reloading pages. You think you are going to different pages, but it’s really the same page and it’s just being reloaded in what you need to reload. So it’s the hardest thing for developer to do, to switch page, but doesn’t really reload the page. And if you take a look, if you try that demo and you take a look, you will see that URL changes, everything changes, but you really didn’t move from the first page.

[00:14:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so what you’ve just described then, you’ve got a, like a tiled selection of videos, and underneath it is like a little heart icon. So it’s just a demonstration that if you click the heart icon, it says, I like this one. And then it keeps a record of that somewhere else. Like, how many of you hearted over here? Or, click this heart icon and it’ll take you to the ones that you favorited. That kind of thing. But also it gives the impression that you’re reloading pages, but really it’s all just happening within that one page session.

[00:14:46] Milana Cap: Yes.

[00:14:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So that’s a really easy to understand version of it. And I would imagine something like, let’s say a shopping cart, I think I mentioned that earlier, where you, I don’t know, you click that you want to add something to the cart, sort of similar process. It’s a bit like hearting, isn’t it? You add something to the cart and you get that interactive cart icon in the top right of the screen if you’re on a desktop. And it says you’ve got three items in there, and you click it and you’ve got four items in there, and so on. Those kind of things. So again, it’s one part of the website, one block if you like, updating another thing. Are there any other examples that you think are quite useful?

[00:15:21] Milana Cap: Well, I saw like countdown. So if you want your website to show the countdown until launching something. There’s also we have already two examples in Core working. So you have a query block, and you can select to have it paginated, without pagination. That’s Interactivity API.

So anywhere you would use Ajax before, you can use Interactivity API. It’ll give you that feeling of nothing has been reloaded, so it’s just loading in that place. You don’t use Ajax, you just use Interactivity API.

[00:16:05] Nathan Wrigley: So this would be, I don’t know, a list of posts or something like that. And at the bottom of the screen, we’ve seen the first 12, 12 more, you would typically click two or the right arrow or something, and that would do some sort of Ajaxy request. But in this case, that’s now been removed and we’re using the Interactivity API, and it will give you the next 12, and the next 12, and so on. Yeah, that’s a really great example.

So presumably, if this is moving into WordPress Core, does that mean that a lot of the Core features that, like for example, pagination, has that now moved over in WordPress Core to using the Interactivity API?

[00:16:37] Milana Cap: Well, I know that that specific feature has moved to Interactivity API, and also the image block has the option for lightbox. That’s also Interactivity API. That’s currently in Core. And I imagine a lot of other things can be moved. But also it doesn’t have to. The only thing that it needs is a good documentation, and option that you can use it so you can do with it whatever you want.

[00:17:07] Nathan Wrigley: What is the documentation like? You know, if I was a developer and I wanted to begin using this because, sounds good, I’d rather not maintain my own bucket load of code for my interactivity in my plugin, for example. Let’s just throw all that out and go with what WordPress has. Is there a ton of documentation to get developers started?

[00:17:25] Milana Cap: There is. They are not making the same mistake we had with Gutenberg. I think for Interactivity API, the most difficult thing is to actually understand it. Because we had, I had, as PHP developer primarily, I had a problem to understand Gutenberg and to understand how React works, and why React doesn’t understand how I think, you know? And I was always over-engineering it because I was covering all the cases.

But React doesn’t care about all the cases. It was very difficult for me to understand how that works on components based, and these components don’t care about anything else but themselves.

So Interactivity API now connects all of this. And we are coming back to the system that is aware of all its parts. But not just that, in Interactivity API you have the option to write the code where it makes the most sense.

When I was playing with it, I had two blocks that were supposed to talk to each other, and I realised that something that was one block doing, it made the most sense to write the code for it in another block’s VueJS. So I was using the, there is the template that you can use for Interactivity API, and it’ll run the Create Block Script, but just use the Interactivity API template. And then you get the block that has switch from light to dark theme.

There is a toggle. The first was, it was only the toggle, and I was very disappointed. Like, the toggle shouldn’t use any JavaScript at all. But it was a good example for what Interactivity API can do. And now with the theme switching, it’s kind of complete. You understand all the things that Interactivity API is.

So this toggle was another button, and you click on it, and it shows the paragraph. And then you click on it again and it closes the paragraph. And then I used another block, and I wanted that other block to count how many times I opened and closed this toggle. It was mind blowing that that code for counting how many times I open and close it, I will show the data in this other block.

But it made much more sense to write the code for it in this first block, because I already have there code that is aware that this is open and closed. So I could just, you know, add one line of the code, and update the number there in another block. So that’s kind of the most difficult thing with Interactivity API, to understand how that functions, and that you can really achieve a lot with one piece of code, one line of code, but put it in a right place. And it can be in different places. So that’s something, you know, for you as a developer to document where I wrote things.

So with the Interactivity API, the most important thing is to actually understand how that works. There is very good documentation there for the basic stuff, definitions and all of it. And also, examples. But really, it’s not just copy, pasting from example, it’s playing with it and understanding how it is connected.

And once it’s clicked in your mind, it’s mind blowing. It’s like a game. Well, the coding for me is like a game. That’s why I started coding. But it is very interesting that you can, you know, play with it, you can break it, you can find different ways. And I was playing with putting the same code in different places to see if it will work, it will.

So there is a new skill that we will see with Interactivity API, like the most beautiful code and the most beautiful place where you put that code. And I think it’s very much open for optimising code. And you’ll see there the level of expertise of developer for how much they understand the optimisation of JavaScript code.

[00:21:45] Nathan Wrigley: Is the Interactivity API, how to describe it, is it finished?

[00:21:49] Milana Cap: No.

[00:21:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I mean, basically nothing in WordPress really is ever quite finished, is it?

[00:21:54] Milana Cap: If you software, then it’s never finished.

[00:21:56] Nathan Wrigley: No. But would you say it already has pretty much everything that you require it to have? Or can you imagine scenarios where it would be really nice to have this feature or this feature? What I’m trying to get to is, is it still under active development? Can people listening to this podcast who think that that would be an interesting use of their time to help contribute to that, is there still work to be done? And where would we go to get involved in that?

[00:22:21] Milana Cap: You can go to, there is a GitHub issue that is called Interactivity API showcase. It’s in Gutenberg repository. And you’ll see a lot of different ideas, how people want to use Interactivity API. And you will, when you start looking at those examples, you start to get ideas, what you could use it for. And you get to remember all the projects you had that you could really use Interactivity API there.

I don’t think it’s done. I don’t think it’ll ever be done because, you know, clients get very creative with things they want. And I think we can’t even imagine what we would want until we get to the request to do it for a project. So there’s a lot of things to do, as in feature terms, but there’s always, you know, fixing code, optimising here and there and cleaning things up. And then there’s an update from library that it depends on, and then you have to, you know, do that. So there’s always maintenance if you use software. It’s never done.

[00:23:31] Nathan Wrigley: I feel like if you are, let’s say 18 years old, you’ve been brought up in an era where you’ve had a phone in your hand and the apps on the phone are kind of what you’ve grown up with expecting from things online. And everything over on the phone is interactive. There’s just this expectation that you can click a button and it will do some desired action over there.

And it feels like a website that doesn’t have interactivity is almost, well, I mean, I know you can have brochure websites and things like that where it’s just static content. It feels like that’s the expectation and it’s more and more going to be the expectation. So if a project like this hadn’t come along, WordPress websites would’ve felt really strange. You know, stuck in the past in a way, because of that lack of interactivity.

And now hopefully developers who haven’t got the time, the budget or the experience to do this on their own, hopefully they can start offering solutions by just reading the documentation and not having to dig into the weeds of absolutely everything, just implement what’s been written for you, and hopefully that’ll bring WordPress more into the year 2025.

[00:24:36] Milana Cap: Well, I think that if you take from that perspective, like you are 18 years old and have everything, all the apps you want in your phone, I think that WordPress is already weird to them. They are not using CMS, it’s too much effort for the things they can do with another app in their phone.

But I don’t think that WordPress is for them. I mean, WordPress is CMS. So it’s meant to be used with purpose while kids today still look for, you know, quick content that they can, my daughter is 21 years old and she sends me, you know, memes and videos all the time. Most often than not, yeah, I tell her I don’t understand this. And she says, well, it’s funny because it’s stupid. I say, I still don’t understand this.

I mean, she understands the life cycle of something that is meaningful, something that is important. And that is something that we would use WordPress for. But their concentration and focus span is just, give me this stupid video, that’s funny because it’s stupid, and I’ll move on. So I don’t think we should even try to put WordPress there and try to satisfy that request. But still there are requests that Interactivity API does satisfy. And that was needed to be added to WordPress.

[00:26:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s certainly nice for developers not to have to, well just basically roll their own solution and waste tons of time doing something 1,000 times, literally 1,000, maybe 10,000 times done differently. Whereas now everybody can just lean into this one implementation, and it’s baked into Core. And then everybody can inject things into, on top of your code, and you can look at other people’s code and extend it in that way. So hopefully that will mean that, you know, the project as a whole can move forward.

Let’s move on to something that I literally know nothing about, HTML API. You’re going to have to go from the very most basic description and I will try to keep up.

[00:26:46] Milana Cap: Well, HTML API is actually what powers Interactivity API. So we wouldn’t have Interactivity API as it is right now, if we didn’t have HTML API. For now we have two classes that we can use, HTML tag processor. Which is idea to use PHP to modify attributes in Gutenberg blocks, in their markup. Because it was so difficult to approach the block to get to that code and modify anything once it’s on the page.

So the HTML tag processor is just working with the attributes in markup. But it was meant to be used for Gutenberg blocks, but it really doesn’t matter what you use, it’ll process any HTML if it finds it. And it’s very useful for many things that we would use jQuery for before, and we would load the whole JavaScript file. You can add, remove, classes. You can set the aspect ratio for iframe. You can set image size attributes. You can add accessibility attributes where you need them.

And it’s all happening in PHP, you know, on the page load. It’s very fast. It’s amazing. And that’s what is powering those HTML directives that we have in Interactivity API. So in markup you will find data WP and then the rest of directive. And those directives are connecting the server side and the client side in JavaScript for Interactivity API. I think it’s called WP Directive Manager, the class that is really internal class, and it’s just being used by Interactivity API.

But then there’s a class that’s called HTML processor. And this one is doing more things than tag processor. This one knows about the closing tag, and this one will support inserting and removing nodes from the page, or wrapping and unwrapping tags on the page, then reading and modifying inner content. So everything that you were loading JavaScript for, you know, all the makeup stuff, and if something is clicked then, you know, wrap me this paragraph in this div, and then we will change the class or whatever.

You can do that with PHP now, and it feels so much less hacky. You have it. I had actually example for removing the no-follow attribute for internal links. So searching for internal links, before HTML tag processor, you would have to use regex, and regex is invented by extraterrestrials to make fun of humans.

So it’s also, you cannot cover all the cases with regex. There are always surprises. There is always some edge case you didn’t think of and cover. And when you look at that code, even five minutes later, you don’t understand anything. It’s something that you Google, and you trust the code that you found on Google.

But this one, when you used a tag processor, you actually understand everything. And it covers all edge cases. There are no surprises because it’s been built with HTML standards. So it supports every type of HTML that we will probably never see in our lives. You know, all the broken stuff and all of it, it supports it. And it’s been built by Dennis Snell. That is something unlike Interactivity API.

So we saw that Laravel has it, and Symphony has it, and Phoenix first did it. But this is something that nobody has. This is our own. And Dennis now built it from zero, completely custom. And he’s now working in putting it into PHP. So it’ll be available, yeah, to everyone. That’s a really big thing.

I gave this talk in September at PHP Serbia and people were sitting, you know, PHP developers who are working with Symphony and Laravel and doing custom PHP, and they were like, oh my God. And I was like, yeah, WordPress has something you don’t have. That was really nice feeling. Yeah, I like that Dennis is actually putting that into PHP.

[00:31:30] Nathan Wrigley: So again, like I did with the Interactivity API, I’m going to do the same here. Let me just see if I’ve understood what it is. So the idea really, if you want to interact with the DOM, right now, the typical way of doing that is with some JavaScript or other. So let’s say for example, I don’t know, you want to do the third child of a div, and you want to put a border around that.

With JavaScript, you’re going to find that third div, and then you’re going to insert some class, which will then get modified by the CSS to add a border and a border radius, and what have you. So that’s all done on the client side. Page loads, JavaScript loads, and then the DOM gets rewritten by the JavaScript.

But in this scenario, it’s going server side. It is PHP. So it’s really much more readable and maintainable, and it all just lives in this one spot with all the other PHP. And then you would write something, basically the same thing, but in PHP, to do the same job. And then WordPress, so there’s no rewriting of the DOM. WordPress writes the DOM with that in mind. So the output HTML already has that in it. You’re not using JavaScript to rewrite what’s already been written, so it speeds things up as well.

[00:32:39] Milana Cap: Yes, yes. You have less requests because there’s no file that you are requesting. There’s no waiting on, you know, everything to load. And to rewrite it, it’s just going right there.

[00:32:51] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s the same process though. The way that you would do it in JavaScript, you’re now just transferring that into PHP, but the method that you’re using to do it would be the same, you know, search for the third child of this parent div, and then give it an extra class and that’s what happens.

[00:33:04] Milana Cap: Yes.

[00:33:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, that’s really straightforward. And really, really, really powerful.

[00:33:09] Milana Cap: It is.

[00:33:10] Nathan Wrigley: Because not only can you write your own thing in that way, but if you want to upend what’s already been written by, I don’t know, let’s say there’s something strange in a plugin that you’ve downloaded. Would this be able to rewrite the things that the plugin is injecting?

[00:33:23] Milana Cap: Yes.

[00:33:23] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so you can, I don’t know, let’s say there’s a plugin which does something quirky in the HTML, you don’t like it, you want to strip something out or add something in. It sits between where the plugin injects its code and where the end user receives the HTML.

[00:33:35] Milana Cap: Yeah.

[00:33:35] Nathan Wrigley: That is interesting. So it’s a total rewrite of the HTML.

[00:33:38] Milana Cap: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:39] Nathan Wrigley: That is fascinating.

[00:33:41] Milana Cap: Yeah, and it’s fast. It’s actually working faster than when you would load JavaScript for that.

[00:33:48] Nathan Wrigley: So in many cases it renders much of the JavaScript, the JavaScript that’s being used to modify the DOM. It completely negates the need for that?

[00:33:59] Milana Cap: Yes.

[00:33:59] Nathan Wrigley: Have you found it easy to learn this?

[00:34:01] Milana Cap: Yeah, yeah. It’s very easy. It’s even easier than Interactivity API. It’s just, you know, you instantiate the class, pass the string to it that you want to, you know, search for tags, and then you have methods. You call the method and loop through the things, or you don’t have to loop, depending what you are looking for. And there is a method, remove attribute, add attribute, remove class. You know, it’s that easy.

[00:34:28] Nathan Wrigley: And, like everything in WordPress, you said earlier, it’s never finished. There’ll always be work done on it. But as of now, we’re recording this late February, 2025, is it pretty complete for all the things that you’ve wished to do? Does it have an answer for that, or is there still work to be done?

[00:34:42] Milana Cap: The HTML processor needs to be optimised, so it’s not completely production ready yet. Tag processor is optimised and ready to use, and we actually used it in 2023. We waited for new release when it was coming into Core. We waited for two weeks and delayed the deployment to get it in to actually, because that example that I used for removing no-follow attribute from internal links, that’s the real world example that we had. And it was really annoying problem that was so easily fixed with five lines of code, once the HTML API got into Core.

[00:35:25] Nathan Wrigley: I obsess about WordPress, like that’s all I think about most days basically, and yet this is somehow completely passed me by. The Interactivity API, somehow that captured my attention. There must have been some press release, or something to explain that this is happening. But the HTML API completely passed me by. I wonder if that’s just my lack of trying hard enough.

[00:35:46] Milana Cap: No, that was actually the case for many people. So for that WordPress release, I was leading the documentation focus. So I know, I wrote the field guide, and I knew that was there. But many people didn’t know.

And that idea behind this new series of talks that I do. So to find these, it’s very good that these things come into Core slowly, like piece by piece. What is ready? What is optimised? But because they are small, people don’t hear about them, because we don’t advertise that. And Interactivity API is, it gets the same treatment as any other Gutenberg feature. Like, oh, it’s flashy, it’s new, come see this.

But HTML API is completely PHP. It actually powers Interactivity API, but nobody knows that. And those were like small pieces getting in, because its purpose was to serve Gutenberg. So it wasn’t really advertised as something you can use for other things. But you know developers, they find ways to use something for different things.

And that’s why I wanted to create these talks to actually show people there are so many things you can do with WordPress now that are new. And you can use them today, and tomorrow they will be even better.

[00:37:14] Nathan Wrigley: I guess with the Interactivity API you are solving a really hard problem. So to be able to modify one part of the page, it’s content and it’s a separate block, that’s a difficult thing to overcome. So there’s a lot of work to get over that. But if you just want to add a border to the third child of a div, everybody’s using the same JavaScript technique to do it. So there’s a well understood way of doing it.

And so that, I suppose, leads to the question, what is the benefit over just using JavaScript? Why would we want to use the HTML API instead of just the familiar thing, which probably everybody’s doing, you know, just rewrite things with JavaScript. Is it basically coming down to ease of readability for everybody, and speed?

[00:37:57] Milana Cap: Yeah. I think if you take a look at, for example, enterprise projects. The way developers optimise the code, it’s like every piece of millisecond counts because these projects are huge, and they have a lot of visits. So if you can remove all the JavaScript, I mean, that’s huge. That is making such impact, and it brings you like 10 places before your competition. Doing just that is enough to use this over JavaScript.

But also, it replaces not just need for JavaScript, but need for regex as well. And again, in enterprise projects, when you have huge databases running regex and having potential to not work everywhere where it’s supposed to work, as opposed to this, that is very straightforward. Not too many lines of code, and it’s actually faster. You would take that chance.

[00:39:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess if you’ve just got like a five page brochure website, that’s for a mom and pop store, you’re probably not going to be worrying too much. But if you’ve got an enterprise page, you know, an enterprise level website which is maybe getting, I don’t know, 50,000 hits every hour or something like that. Shaving 10 milliseconds out, multiply that by 50,000, I mean, not only is it quicker, so Google likes it, but also the cost of everything goes down. You know, there’s less bits flying across the internet. It’s all been optimised. And I guess at the enterprise level, all of those things matter.

[00:39:36] Milana Cap: Yeah, everything matters.

[00:39:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s fascinating, genuinely fascinating, and something that I’d never heard of. So I will go and, when I’ve edited this podcast, I’ll go and preach the gospel of the HTML and Interactivity APIs. That’s everything I wanted to ask. Milana, is there anything that you wanted to get across that I didn’t ask?

[00:39:53] Milana Cap: No.

[00:39:54] Nathan Wrigley: No. In that case, Milana Cap, thank you very much for chatting to me today. Really appreciate it. I hope you enjoy the rest of your time in Manila.

[00:40:01] Milana Cap: Yeah, thank you for having me.

[00:40:03] Nathan Wrigley: You’re very welcome.

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

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case what the WordPress Playground is, and how it’s transforming the scope 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 Birgit Pauli-Haack. Birgit is a longtime WordPress user, an influential voice in the WordPress community. She’s known for her role as the curator at the Gutenberg Times, and host of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast, and she brings her wealth of experience as a Core contributor to WordPress as well.

She joins me today for an in-person conversation recorded at WordCamp Asia in the Philippines, and we are discussing Playground, a remarkable development that’s set to redefine the WordPress development landscape.

Playground allows users to launch a fully functional WordPress instance directly in their browser, without the necessity of a server, database, or PHP, playground breaks down barriers, offering developers, product owners, educators, and everyone in between a new way to interact with WordPress.

We explore how this technology not only simplifies the testing and development process, but also sets the stage for more interactive and immediate web experiences.

We explore the concept of Blueprints within Playground, tailored configurations that enables a bespoke user experience by preloading plugins, themes, and content. This feature helps developers to present their work in a controlled environment, offering users an insightful hands-on approach that can significantly enhance understanding and engagement, and it’s all available with just one click. It really does eliminate the traditional hurdles associated with installing WordPress.

If you’re curious about how the WordPress Playground is set to usher in a new era of friction free web development, 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 Birgit Pauli-Haack.

I am joined on the podcast by Birgit Pauli-Haack. Hello Birgit.

[00:03:28] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, hey Nathan.

[00:03:29] Nathan Wrigley: We’re actually looking at each other, not through a screen.

[00:03:32] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. It’s a total different feeling.

[00:03:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Birgit And I chat a lot on various other channels, and it’s a pleasure having you right in front of me. That’s lovely.

[00:03:39] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, same here. I’m always glad we meet at a WordCamp.

[00:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. So that’s the introduction then because here we are, we’re at WordCamp Asia, in the Philippines. It’s the first day of the conference in general. We had the Contributor Day yesterday, and we’ve got another day tomorrow.

And we’re going to have a chat with Birgit who is going to be talking to us today about Playground, because you’ve got a slot at the event all about creating a demo in Playground. And we’ll get onto that in a minute. But first of all, for those people who don’t know who you are, just a few moments for your potted bio. Tell us about yourself.

[00:04:09] Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I’m the curator at the Gutenberg Times and I’m the host on the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. And I also am a Core contributor to WordPress, and I work for Automattic. I live in Munich and I’m married, 37 years.

[00:04:22] Nathan Wrigley: There we go. That is a very potted bio. Thank you, I appreciate that.

So here we are, we’re going to talk about Playground. And I figured the best place to start is answering the question, what is Playground? And just before we hit record, it was pretty obvious that both you and I are very excited about this. And so I want to encourage people to really pay attention because this genuinely, for me is one of the most exciting developments, not just now, but ever, in WordPress. It truly is a transformational technology. But for those who don’t know what it is, just tell us what Playground is.

[00:04:54] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m totally with you there on the magic, yeah. And it’s not just for WordPress, it’s for web development. So WordPress Playground is a WordPress instance in your browser. Yeah, you go there, put in playground.wordpress.net. You get a full WordPress instance in your browser, and you can add plugins, you can themes, you can content. Test it out. Whatever you do with that and want to learn with Playgrounds, you don’t need a server, you don’t need a database, you don’t need PHP installed or something like that. So it’s just there.

And for someone who has been in the web development for many, many years, it’s like magic. Because before you’re always kind of, oh, where do I host things? What’s with the database? What’s with the server? And it’s all gone. Yeah, so it’s really cool.

[00:05:43] Nathan Wrigley: I think probably it’s best on this particular podcast to avoid the technicalities, but I would point the listener to a podcast that I did on the WP Tavern with Adam Zielinski several months ago now, where Adam came on and tried, in an audio form, it’s very hard to do, but explained in an audio form exactly what the underpinnings are.

And the only words I can use to describe it are, it’s voodoo. It is literal magic. Just two or three years ago, if you’d have said that Playground was possible, I honestly would’ve thought that you were talking nonsense. It could not happen. That will never happen.

[00:06:18] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Snake oil.

[00:06:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, exactly. And yet Adam managed to pull it off. And so just to re-explain what Birgit just said, it’s all in the browser. When you go to playground.wordpress.net, there is no server. Just say it again, there’s no server. There’s no PHP that you need to install on your local machine. It all happens inside the browser. Close the browser down, it goes away. We’ll come to that. Maybe that’s changed.

But the idea is it’s happening in the browser, and so you can have any combination of website that you like immediately inside of Playground, and it really is remarkable.

I liken to the moment that the iPhone got the App Store. The iPhone was a very useful thing to have. You know, it did phone calls and it looked beautiful, and you could upload music to the phone with a cable. And then along came the App Store, and suddenly a thousand, a million, different developers could get their hands on it and tell you, here’s a different way you can use the iPhone. And here’s another way, and here’s another thing that you can do. And it feels a bit like Playground is WordPress’ moment like that. You know, it just suddenly prizes the lid open, and makes developers able to show you what they’ve got in a heartbeat.

[00:07:25] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And that’s pretty much, that’s a very good analogy because we also have a Blueprints gallery that could be something like an app store where you can learn how you can assemble it. So the core technologies is not not, I don’t know any of the technology that’s underlying. It’s based on Web Assembly. And that has been around for about 10 years, trying to get a lot of different programming languages talk to each other in the browser.

And then it’s based, not on MySQL, but on SQLite database. And then Service Workers and worker Threads API, that are browser APIs. For storage, for instance, yeah, or for sending commands to other different applications. But that’s all I know, yeah. I have never worked with Web Assembly, yeah. And MySQL, I know that, just really amazing.

So you can use that. Many people use it to spin up a fully functional WordPress and demo that. So you can use it in educational settings. You don’t have to download a whole lot of stuff. You don’t have to, as a teacher, you don’t have to set up, talk to your IT department to set up a server for all the students. You can just point them to the Playground and then give them instructions on how to work with that.

It’s a sandbox environment. It could be, yeah, if you want to. You can upload your content and then see what else can you change with it without messing with your live site. You can integrate it with your development. There is a WP now, VS Code extension where you can, so when you’re working on your plugin and you click on the button, it loads up a local Playground for you with the plugin that you’re working on already installed, and that’s really cool.

Same with the theme. The training team has been working on interactive demos in terms of having code examples on one side, and then you make changes to the code and you see it in the right hand side. How it changes the website. So that’s really cool.

[00:09:20] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the things that you said there, you’ve got an understanding of some of the underlying technologies, but you were stressing that, basically you don’t need to understand them. Having a knowledge of them is fun, you know, it’s interesting. But a bit like I don’t have the faintest idea how to build an iPhone app, but I can still use an iPhone. And I can still benefit from this application, the maps, navigation app. I don’t need to understand how that’s built, but I can use it, it works.

And really that’s, I think the purpose. The developers over there, thank you so much, but most people are never probably going to want to get into the weeds of that. They just want to click the button and see what happens.

And just to be clear on this, if you’ve never done that, I, at my home, have a fairly good internet connection, so I don’t know if I’m in a sort of slightly privileged position, but when I click the button at playground.wordpress.net, I’m imagining it’s somewhere in the order of three to four seconds before that website is ready to go. Basically it’s the length of time it takes me to blink and grab the mouse again. It’s in a heartbeat. So there’s literally no friction.

But if you go to playground.wordpress.net and click the button, what you’re going to get there is a vanilla version of WordPress, which is fine. Then you can do whatever you like with that, put plugins in, what have you. But wouldn’t it be interesting, wouldn’t it be great if somebody came up with, oh, I don’t know, let’s call them Blueprints or something like that, where you could pre-build something that then somebody else could use.

So this is the App Store, isn’t it? You know, somebody’s built the maps navigation app. Somebody’s built the note taking app. Somebody’s built the whatever. This feels like what the Blueprints are. But I want to make sure that you are describing it and not me because I am not sure that I’ve encapsulated it perfectly.

[00:11:00] Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, you did. But in opposite to the App Store, you actually can look at other people’s Blueprints and steal them. Blueprints are written in JSON has nothing to do with Jason. It’s JSON. It’s a data format for JavaScript. And there is a schema for it, so when you put it into your code editor, it gives you signals, yeah, that you formatted right.

And then you have two different ways of configuring your Playground instance. One is to do settings. So you could do which PHP you want to use? Which WordPress version do you want to use? Also, do you want to have network enabled? And most of the time you want it enabled because you want to import and install themes or something like that. Those are the settings.

And then you have steps. And those steps are also just formulated in JSON format. For instance, you can log in. Automatically log in the person in the Playground. Or you can say, I have a landing page that should land, so when somebody uses that blueprint, when Playground is ready to completely load it, you should land in the block editor, for instance. And you should have that particular block plugin already active on that post, so you can really play with blocks. Nick Diego with his plugin Block Visibility has done a great way for a live preview of his block from the repository.

Another way is to, so install a plugin, add content to it. Use WP-CLI to instantly load up new versions, add new pictures, or use an export from another website, an XML file from another website and load it into the Playground instance.

But sometimes you have, you said you get the vanilla if you just do that, if you just do playground.wordpress.net, you get the vanilla WordPress. But it’s one post, Hello World, and it’s one sample page. But you don’t see how content kind of interacts with whatever feature you want to demo. So you need some content there, yeah. And the Blueprints Gallery has actually some nice examples on how to configure that.

[00:13:08] Nathan Wrigley: Let’s come back to the gallery in a minute. Just to recap what you just said. So there’s a bunch of settings, probably more for developers. You know, you might want to test something in a particular PHP environment or what have you, so you can select those. And then you can do these steps where you can essentially design, if somebody was to use that Playground and somebody was to click on your link, they would wait the 2, 3, 4 seconds, whatever, and then, depending on the steps that you’d set up, they would arrive where you chose them to be.

So for example, you might pre-install the latest, greatest plugin that you want to share with the world. And you want people in a post for that. And you want them inside the block editor. And you can make it so that upon clicking the button, the first thing they get is, we’re inside your plugin, we’re about to use it. So the profundity of that is pretty amazing. You can really tailor the experience.

So rather than going from being like Playground, which sounds like children, you’re messing about, larking about a little bit. It also becomes like serious ground a little bit, you know? Serious developers can use this to circumvent, I don’t know, support tickets, the capacity to demonstrate to users who’ve never seen your product before, your plugin, your theme, or whatever it may be.

You can point them to a link. They can click the link. You as the developer configure everything within an inch of its life, so they get exactly where you want them to be. And in that way you can use it as a sales mechanism, as a support mechanism.

[00:14:29] Birgit Pauli-Haack: And sometimes it’s really hard to tell people what your plugin does unless you show it them in the video. But then they still don’t get their hands on it. And with that feature, with the Playground combined with the Blueprints, you can actually make them feel the thing. How it works with them, and what ideas they get when they play around with it, and have better questions, educated questions for you, for the product, yeah.

[00:14:51] Nathan Wrigley: So a Blueprint then is a version of Playground in which somebody has pre-configured things. Is that basically what it is? You know, let’s say that I have got this fabulous new plugin and I want you to experience it. I don’t necessarily want you to land on a particular page, but I just want the plugin to be available to you and you can do things.

If I install my plugin, use Playground to do that, I can then share a link. And because I’ve tinkered with it, it becomes a Blueprint because it’s not the playground.wordpress.net version, it’s my doctored version, adapted version.

[00:15:26] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, it also goes to playground.wordpress.net, but it has a query parameter, to be a little technical term, that says, use the blueprint at this URL. So a plugin developer for the repository, at the repository there are live preview buttons now. And the plugin developer can put in a separate directory Blueprints on the WordPress site, put all the assets, all the image that they want to load, and the configuration file, which is written in this JSON file, and put it there, and then make that live. And every time someone clicks on the preview button, they go to playground.wordpress.net with the Blueprint kind of loaded, the configuration files.

[00:16:09] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s all happening through playground.wordpress.net. But then there’s JSON configuration file, which gets sort of sideloaded, if you like, through the URL. That tells it, okay, add this and then end up here and what have you. The important part is that JSON, that’s what makes it the Blueprint. It’s going to playground.wordpress.net, but the JSON file means that it does something else.

And you said the word gallery, which tells me that there’s a whole host of these things. Pre-configured, pre-built, put into a box if you like. And we can go to that gallery and explore. What kind of stuff is in there?

[00:16:38] Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, what kind of stuff is there? So there’s one, how do I put an admin notice on top of the dashboard? How do I add a dashboard widget and load it up with my Playground? So most of the time, when you want to log into a WordPress site, you get the dashboard. And if there’s a widget, you can actually guide people to go some other places. You can say, okay, I have a plugin that needs 50 posts, for whatever reason. So there is a Blueprint there and how to use WP-CLI to create 12 or 50 posts automatically, that are then loaded into the post content.

So there’s also a Blueprint for a specific WooCommerce extension. So it loads WooCommerce, it loads the extension, it loads some products, and then you land for a shipping page where you can say, okay, this shipping plugin, what does it do for me? And you see it working with products on a Playground site. So that is really remarkable. It takes a little longer when you have content to load.

[00:17:38] Nathan Wrigley: Goes up to like 10 seconds.

[00:17:40] Birgit Pauli-Haack: So you go and get your coffee and come back.

[00:17:42] Nathan Wrigley: But it’s still profound.

[00:17:43] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, remarkable. Yeah, you don’t have to do anything, kind of just wait a bit.

What else is in there? Oh, there is a demo of 2025. So when you load 2025 theme automatically and go to your website and see it, you get the post, the blog site, where all the posts are in one one big site with the full content. And not a whole lot of people have that kind of blog. And in the demo, you actually go to the magazine front page, and then see all the patterns that are in there. You can see all the templates in that Playground demo.

That’s interesting for plugin developers that have experimental themes or experimental settings on the settings page that you can actually preload them as well. There’s an example in there for the Gutenberg experiments. They’re on the check marks on a setting site. And you can take that and replicate that for your own plugins site, how to do that, with the areas.

Because you can do site options. So the site options is not only site title and tag descriptions, also, oh, make my block editor have the top toolbar instead of all the other things or the distraction free model, yeah. So these kind of features, you can also preload there and have examples from the Blueprints Gallery.

[00:18:57] Nathan Wrigley: I think we’re just at the beginning really, aren’t we? Of of this journey. And basically, the underlying technology is now provisioned. It’s there. And we’re at point where, okay, people, developers, explore. And we’re really just at the beginning of that. And the gallery is probably a good place to go.

But if you wanted to put one of these JSON files together, do you know, is there some credible documentation out there that would help people to get started, learn the ropes?

[00:19:25] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, there’s definitely, there’s documentation of all the steps that are there, yeah, like how to run PHP, how to have additional PHP extensions installed and all that. So when you open the Playground, there are three, and you’re not going to the full page, so you have three panes. On the left hand side you have some menus, and one of them is the documentation link. So that’s good.

And another link is there, it’s the Blueprint Gallery. So in the middle of the section of your Playground, you see all the list of all the gallery content. And then when you click on the preview or the view site, the Playground loads that for you, and then there’s another menu item where is says, view Blueprint. And that gives you a Blueprint editor.

So you see the Blueprint loaded in, but then when you want to edit from the documentation, okay, what happens when I put that in? And you click the run button, and it reloads that Playground with your changes. So it’s really, very hands on, and you still don’t have to create a server or a local environment or something like that.

[00:20:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s this really virtuous cycle of, okay, so you’ve used something from the gallery, but you’re curious about how it works. Look, here’s how it works. Here’s the buttons to click to go and explore. Oh, and whilst you’re at it, if you want to edit anything, here’s the option to edit it. And when you click save, it’ll restart that whole thing and you’ll get the new version.

So all of the sort of helpful tooling is now built into it. Because when I talked to Adam, none of that existed. I mean, the version selection for PHP didn’t exist. The ability to land people on particular destinations when they first load up the playground, none of that existed. It was literally the technology of getting it working.

So now built into it is this knowledge base, if you like. Not really a knowledge base, but more, you want to know how this one works? We’ll show you. And it’s that beautiful, well, the purpose of WordPress, democratising publishing. In this case, it’s democratising the nuts and the bolts, and the bits and pieces of publishing.

Yeah, so that’s really nice. And that’s all built inside. So just follow the prompts in the UI, and you can adapt what you want, and what have you. But also there are some 101 articles out there, perhaps on Learn or something like that where can see in text format how do all.

[00:21:40] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, the developer blog has, on developer.wordpress.org/news has three articles about Playground. One is about the underlying technology from the Web Assembly people. That was really good for those who want to explore that even further.

And then there is one on what use cases you can do with a little bit of an example. And then also, so we are right now always talking about playground.wordpress.net. But you mentioned something that someone could put this on their website, and you can.

Playground can be self-hosted. It does not have to go through the wordpress.net site. But how to do this is in the documentation. It has a seperate section there. So if you say, okay, I don’t have my plugin in the repo, but I want to use it through my own website, then you can actually put it there, and it’ll have your own branding around it. So it’s even get further than just the WordPress part.

[00:22:35] Nathan Wrigley: So that’s a really important distinction to make. So in the cases that we’ve been talking about so far, if you want to go to playground.wordpress.net and you use your own JSON file, it will be able to suck in anything from the WordPress repo. And that’s the sort of, the WordPress way, if you like. I’m doing air quotes.

[00:22:51] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Also from GitHub.

[00:22:52] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, thank you. Yeah, that’s an important distinction. I’d forgotten that. Also from GitHub, but you know, it’s everything that’s open source out there, free to download already.

But a big part of the WordPress community, one of the things that makes it popular, is the ability to sell commercial plugins. And so that was another question that I had. Is possible to do it?

And so, yes, but you need to take the technology that builds WordPress at playground.wordpress.net, you put that onto your own server, and you can do whatever you like with that. So you can put your premium products in there on a, I don’t know, two day free trial sort of basis, and show people how that all works.

So Playground suddenly becomes more interesting outside of the free to play area as well. And you can imagine that being a really, really useful tool. Because we’ve always been able to play fairly straightforwardly with free things on the repo, but suddenly the moment where you’ve got to pay $100 for a thing, the capacity to see that really is the bit which opens the wallet.

Okay, it’s $100, maybe I’ll buy it, maybe I won’t. It’d be nice to see it. Okay, they’ve got a 14 day trial, but I’ve still got to pay for it. This opens up the capacity to, look, there it really is. Play with it for two days or whatever it may be. That’s fascinating.

[00:24:05] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely, yeah. And if you want to test that plugin, yeah, you still would need a local server or a hosting server to load it on. And you have that 14 day trial. And now you can really test it right now.

[00:24:16] Nathan Wrigley: Right. And that’s the other big thing. Because if you buy a commercial plugin, you then have to spin up a site somehow. You have to download the plugin, upload the plugin, get the plugin configured. This gets rid of all of that, because you don’t need to download and upload anything, and it can be pre-configured.

So the author of the plugin can say, okay, if you want to use my LMS plugin for this kind of thing, here’s playground version with everything just right. And if you want to do it for this kind of thing, I don’t know, you’re an elementary school teacher who might use my LMS plugin in this way, or you’re a university lecturer, who might use it in this way. Let’s build it a perfect version for you.

And you can imagine that a million times over for all the commercial plugins out there. You know, form plugins. Okay, this is the contact form that we’ve pre-built. This is the, I don’t know, the form which integrates with WooCommerce or whatever. So the developers can do all of this. And that really makes it super useful to them.

[00:25:11] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, absolutely, yeah. What’s coming down the pipeline for Playground. One is that you can also use it with private GitHub repos. Which right now is not possible, but it’s in the works. And there was a problem with the proxy, that you get some cross site downloading errors because some servers are not set up to have images downloaded from a machine. They have created a proxy server now, where that is kind of circumvented that you can also from non WordPress sites download stuff, like images and content, or PHP plugins.

What also comes is, so SQL, MySQL, for some plugins Playground does not work yet, because they use very specific MySQL query, the union query, for instance. Select union and other commands like that. The SQLite doesn’t have those yet. And they are however working on it to replicate these kind of behavior of a database also with Playground. So to make it even more compatible with all the plugins that are out there.

I think they did a test of 10,000 plugins that are in the repo, and test every month kind of how many plugins don’t work with it yet. And they got it down from, I think 7% to 5%. So it’s always kind of progressing very well towards zero.

[00:26:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s a lot of things going on in the background that the likes of you and I probably, you know, because we’re curious about it, we’ll probably know about, but maybe the average listener who’s not wedded to this subject maybe doesn’t. But that’s really interesting.

So the intention is to get it so that more or less anything works in more or less any scenario. And really nicely putting it out there so that you can do things which aren’t bound to GPL, WordPressy kind of things, if you know what I mean. So, you know, you can use your commercial product over here, and you can use your GitHub repo over here. That’s really nice.

My understanding is that when Adam began it, he was immediately repurposed. So Adam Zielinski, he was an, was, still is, I think, an Automattician. And I think that it was immediately understood, this is profound. Let’s get Adam on this full time. You know, it’s no longer a hobby project. But I also think that he’s got other people from Automattic involved. There’s like a little team around it now, pushing the development of that. Is that still the case? Is this a team which is growing, or stagnating at, well not stagnating, maintaining at a certain number?

[00:27:33] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, it’s growing in scope. So they’re also working, and that was a focus starting in last fall, that they’re working on using Playground for the Data Liberation Project. And that’s what Adam was doing also full-time now in the last few months. That he looks, okay, what kind of parser do we need to do really good data liberation from other systems, or from WordPress?

Yeah, because the import and export in WordPress only gets you so far, yeah. And there are some quirks in there, and they want to really have a perfect data liberation through Playground. They have a browser extension. It’s all beta right now. It’s not functioning yet. But it’s really coming along quite nicely.

[00:28:20] Nathan Wrigley: So Data Liberation then is this very laudable project of being able to bring into WordPress, I guess data liberation on some levels is the whole point of open source really, isn’t it? Is that you can grab your data and just pick it up and take it somewhere else.

[00:28:34] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Open content.

[00:28:35] Nathan Wrigley: Right, yeah. It’s your content. This platform is no longer being used, or you’ve fallen out with it. You know, you no longer love it in the way that you did. You want to now move it here. And you’ll be able to, let’s say, go Joomla into WordPress, Drupal into WordPress, or as you said, WordPress into WordPress.

Which suddenly kind of opens up the whole idea of migrating websites, which a real mess frankly. It’s a really difficult thing to do. And I often think that people are bound to products and services that they’re purchasing on a monthly basis because the migration process is so difficult. And they don’t want to be caught up in all of that because things can go wrong. You know, it might not work perfectly and there’s all the just carrying it out.

But if you can essentially do migrations, and Playground is the sort of go between. It’s the bit which talks from, I don’t know, one hosting company to another. So it goes from hosting company A to Playground. Playground then serves it up to hosting company B, which is where you want to end up. And all of that happens through Playground. That’s remarkable. And you can do the inspecting in the middle bit, the middleware, Playground if you like. Check it’s all working before you deploy it. That’s amazingly powerful.

[00:29:41] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And that’s actually the vision of Playground’s part of Data Liberation. They also have a browser extension to kind of identify a non WordPress site, the various pieces like the pages, the posts, the news, the events, kind of the custom post types. And then kind of teach Playground what it all is. But that’s kind of, it’s very technical on one side, but it’s also, you need to have a total different concept about content management systems to actually make that. So that’s not really for a normal consumer.

[00:30:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because if you’re coming from Drupal and you’ve got like 1,000 different modules in there, you know, think plugins in the WordPress space. Then it’s going to be difficult to one-to-one map that over to WordPress. But the endeavor is to do a half decent job and in the middle you can step in and say, okay, this might need modifying, that might need modifying. And then you can go back to your Drupal install, change things a little bit, try again because it takes no time to do it. That is really a key, interesting part. You do kind of wonder actually if hosting companies in the future will just offer Playground in as part of their bundle, you know, their onboarding migrating bundle.

[00:30:47] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. A lot of hosting companies have their own plugins for that. So I know that Pressable and SpinupWP, they all have their, or wordpress.com has their own plugin that they then connect with. I think it’s BlogVault most of the time. Pantheon, same, yeah. Where you can migrate in. But that part in the middle, that kind of always takes a long time.

And you are bound to the hosting company to actually offer that, yeah. And that’s not a cheap plugin. But if you go from one small hosting to one, another small hosting, you don’t have that luxury.

[00:31:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and if you’re crossing platforms as well, say Joomla into WordPress and what have you. That’s also really different.

[00:31:25] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. There are a few agencies who have built for their customer things, but it’s not open source and it’s, well, it’s open source, but it’s not meant for a huge amount of public to kind of use it.

[00:31:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’d imagine that it’s fairly proprietary technology, isn’t it? It’s probably locked down because it’s the secret source of getting the Drupal installs into WordPress on their platform.

One of the things which Adam spoke about when we talked, I don’t know where we’re at with this, but I raised the question of the destructibility of it. So essentially when I spoke to Adam, when you launched Playground, you fiddle with it, played with it, the moment you click close on the browser tab everything went away. That’s how it was designed. But he said that at some point in the near future, and maybe that moment has already been passed.

[00:32:09] Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s here.

[00:32:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so now we’ve got a more permanent version. Tell us about that. Are there any constraints on that? Like, can I close the browser tab? Can I shut my computer down, for example? I mean, will it last forever? Could I even use it as a, I don’t know, as a temporary website in, let’s say I work in a school and I want an intranet for my staff or something, could for those kind of things?

[00:32:29] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, it cannot be, it doesn’t have a domain or something like that. So that wouldn’t work. But yes, you can save. You have two options to save the site that you’re working on, so you can come back tomorrow. One is in the browser. So it uses the local storage of the browser and really downloads the whole WordPress stuff there. And then you open up the browser again, you get the site again. You cannot load it from another computer because it’s a different browser.

And the second option is to load it in your local file system. So you can, it downloads the whole thing, gives you a directory and that’s your website, and you can load it then back into Playground a day later, or a week later, or two months later, because it’s still on your computer.

You can also have multiple sites now in one Playground instance. So you can say, okay, save this site, and then now I use another blueprint, load it again and it’s another temporary site. And you load it, you save it again, then you have a second website there.

[00:33:29] Nathan Wrigley: A curious version of version control or something like that. You’ve added this plugin in, I’m going to save a new version marking that this plugin got added. Let’s see how that works. And then if it doesn’t work, we can roll back to the, just delete that one and go back to the previous one. Oh gosh. So essentially permanent. Locally permanent maybe is the better way to describe it.

[00:33:50] Birgit Pauli-Haack: And you need to think about the saving part. If you do a second site and you close it, a browser without the saving part, it’s going to go away. Yeah, it’s still ephemeral there. Which is also a good thing sometimes.

[00:34:02] Nathan Wrigley: But obviously as you said, you know, the point of hosting in the end is that, you know, it connects to a domain name, it goes through the DNS process and you you can see it online. No.

[00:34:10] Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, not yet.

[00:34:11] Nathan Wrigley: This is not. Oh, not yet. I wonder.

[00:34:12] Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, no, I don’t think that’s ever going to be. But what can be, soon hopefully is kind of pushing it to a hosting company. And that, I think it needs to be just finalised which hosting is going to be there. And the Playground team learns a lot from wordpress.com, because the new development, local development system that wordpress.com has, Studio, is based on Playground. They develop some of the features also for, that wordpress.com can use them in their Studio. And what was the bug fixes? Come to Playground.

[00:34:46] Nathan Wrigley: That makes real sense though, for hosting companies to be clamoring all over this, to build a Playground import functionality. Because then developers all over the world, you know, maybe if in teams it might be a little bit more difficult, but you know, a solo developer, certainly at the moment, you’ve been working on something. You’ve got this perfect version of the site, you’ve got all the plugins that you want, you’ve set it up, it’s working on my machine. Now I go over to my hosting company of choice, click the import Playground button and there it is. Why wouldn’t the hosting companies offer that frankly, it just seems too straightforward.

[00:35:17] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Syncing up with the live site or there’s also a GitHub deployment there. It opens so many ideas, yeah. And when you ask Adam, well, if I think about this, and can you do that? He said, sure.

[00:35:28] Nathan Wrigley: Give a few weeks. I’ll add it to list of 1,000 things that people have already suggested.

[00:35:32] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, we need to develop that. Yeah, the ideas are there, the prototypes are there, the proof of concept is already done. Just a matter of resources now, yeah. I can for instance see one thing is, if you have a documentation and you need people to contribute to documentation, you load the documentation in Playground, you make the changes, and then you push it to GitHub as a pull request. And then somebody can review it, load it in their own Playground and approve it so the documentation could be updated.

Something like that is already in use. That scenario, that’s in prototype. It’s not there yet, but we know that it can work, because some theme developers have that process. They’re not developers per se, that they go into the files. They load the theme into Playground, use the Create Block Theme plugin. Make the changes to the theme. Save it and create the block theme, so it’s in files. Then push it to GitHub as a pull request for this theme, and then have all the changes there. So that’s how a lot of designers work with their developers on the themes. They don’t have to touch any code, but it’s still all saved in code.

[00:36:48] Nathan Wrigley: It’s just such an interesting beginning of everything. It does feel like we are at a moment where there’s just so many different roads that could be taken, and lots of people coming up with lots of different ideas.

Just quickly circling back to the Studio thing that you mentioned. So Studio is a local development environment. You’re going to be downloading this as a software bundle for your Mac or your Windows machine or what have you. You’re saying that’s a wrapper for Playground, is it?

[00:37:13] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Exactly.

[00:37:13] Nathan Wrigley: But that’s immutably stored. That’s not dependent on.

[00:37:17] Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, it’s on your machine, yeah.

[00:37:19] Nathan Wrigley: Right. So it’s going for the files on the machine approach as opposed to being stored in the browser. So if you download and make use of Studio, you can close that machine down, come back to it whenever you like, it’s there until you decide to delete it.

[00:37:32] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Like any other local environment that you can, yeah.

[00:37:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. And that’s available free you to download for anybody.

[00:37:38] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Free, open source.

[00:37:39] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Is there anything else you wanted to cover off, apart from the fact that we’ve both got ridiculously excited about this. Was there anything curious, interesting, quirky, novel that you’ve seen out there that we haven’t yet touched?

[00:37:50] Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, not yet. But I’m starting now to kind of dream about it. And sooner or later I come up with something, yeah.

What I would want and what I want to pursue is that I can have a Playground instance for writers. And I know writers who are not very keen on using the Block Editor, because it gets in the way. But the Block Editor has these settings where you can do distraction free, where you can do, put the toolbar on top, yeah, and hide it as long as I write, and just let me have when I’m not writing kind of thing, and log in and not have to go to the menu.

Right now, if I’m a blogger, I have to log into WordPress, and then I need to look at post, new post. This would give you, start writing, and don’t have to worry about the rest of it. And then click a button and then your WordPress site is updated with it. That’s kind of what I’m working on. I don’t know if really helpful, but.

[00:38:44] Nathan Wrigley: No, that’s really great. I mean, one of the things that I always thought was curious about it would be the idea in education, for educators literally standing in front of pupils, children who, you know, depending on what the kind of curriculum they’ve got. It might be we’re doing about poetry. We want everybody to upload and modify a poem, or comment on a poem or something like that.

And here’s the link. You know, we’re in an environment where everybody’s, we’re in the computer lab, everybody’s got a computer. Just click on this link, scan the QR code, whatever it may be. Give us your modifications, what have you. And I know that’s a sort strange example, but it’s the fact that instantly, very, very inexperienced users are in the same exact interface as all the other experienced users. And the level of difficulty was clicking a link. You just needed to click a link.

And the educator didn’t need a great deal of technology to set it up. The pupils needed zero technology to access it. And so it’s that one to many thing, where lots and lots of people can access the same thing in a heartbeat. And I’m imagining that the tooling to create the Playground installs, and to create the Blueprints is going to make it more and more easy in the future. So possibly not the perfect example, but I do like the example of one to many.

[00:39:56] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. What I like about it is that it’s not about WordPress. It’s about poetry. It’s about writing. It’s about, well, even image uploading and editing, yeah. You could certainly do that. Technology gets out of the way. And for the last 25 years, that’s always been in the way, yeah, and now it’s out of the way.

[00:40:14] Nathan Wrigley: Well, because the internet is basically a reading experience. I mean, I know we’ve got forms, but really all you’re doing is submitting a form so that somebody can read that. But you go to any website and largely websites, you know, if you’re going to some sort of SaaS app, that’s a different thing, it’s configured probably to be more interactive. But broadly speaking, you’re going to consume information.

But in this, you click a link and you’re reading information, but then you can do things with it. Oh, I think it would be better if there was an image there in that poem. Or, I don’t know, it’s an explanation of some principle of physics or something, and a diagram would be really useful at this point, and I don’t like the way they describe that, that could go in bold. And you are interacting with the internet. And it’s totally free, and it will be easy to deploy, and it’ll take seconds to load. And all of a sudden the internet became more interactive. And it’s just the beginning. It’s very exciting.

[00:41:05] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it is.

[00:41:06] Nathan Wrigley: Birgit Pauli-Haack, thank you very much for talking to me today.

[00:41:09] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you for leading me down the road of all the ideas here.

[00:41:13] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for explaining it.

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

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the efficacy of website usability testing for WordPress projects.

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.

Today I bring you the first in a mini series of podcasts I recorded in person at WordCamp Asia in Manila. This flagship WordPress event brought together hundreds of WordPress professionals, enthusiasts, and all manner of interested parties under one roof for a three day event. One contributor day, and two days of presentations.

I tracked down several of the speakers and workshop organizers and recorded them speaking about the subject they were presenting upon. I hope that you enjoy what they had to say.

So on the podcast today, we have the first of those conversations, and it’s with Jo Minney.

Jo based in Perth, Australia, is passionate about user experience, data-driven decision making, cats, pockets, and travel. She’s a small business founder, and works with organizations creating digital platforms with WordPress. She also freelances as a UX consultant. She volunteers with Mission Digital to address social issues using technology, and is an ambassador for She Codes Australia, promoting tech accessibility for women. Recognized as a 2023 Shining Star by Women in Technology, Western Australia, Jo is an international speaker on topics like user experience, accessibility, and gender equality. She’s committed to ensuring a seamless user experience, and today shares her insights from practical, everyday usability testing.

Joe’s presentation entitled, Budget Friendly Usability Testing for WordPress, helped attendees understand what usability testing is, and clarified why it differs from other testing methods. She shares examples from her work showing how small changes can significantly impact user experience, which is better for you, the website builder, and your client, the website owner.

We also discuss how usability testing can transform a website’s effectiveness by improving conversions. Joe explains the importance of recruiting novice users for testing, and highlights how usability testing pushes for real, user-centered, improvements.

Towards the end, Jo share’s practical advice on when and how to integrate usability testing into your process. Advocating for early and iterative testing to preemptively address potential issues.

If you’re looking to gain a deeper understanding of usability testing and its benefits, 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 Jo Minney.

I am joined on the podcast by Jo Minney. Hello, Jo.

[00:04:06] Jo Minney: Hi. It’s good to be back again Nathan.

[00:04:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’ve been on the podcast before. But this time it’s different because this time we’re actually facing each other. Last time we were doing it on, you know, something like Zoom or something like that, but here we are staring at each other because we’re at WordCamp Asia. We’re in the Philippines, Manila. It is the second day of the event, kind of. We had Contributor Day yesterday. Today is presentation day. It’s the first day of the presentations, and you are doing one.

[00:04:29] Jo Minney: I’ve done one actually. I did it at 11 o’clock this morning.

[00:04:33] Nathan Wrigley: How did it go?

[00:04:34] Jo Minney: It went really well, I think. I had very good feedback from it. Half of the things on my slides didn’t work. I think that’s normal for a conference though, and I’m pretty experienced now at just winging it, and rolling with it anyway, so. It was really exciting because it’s a topic that I’m super passionate about and I haven’t had a chance to speak about it at a conference before. So, yeah, it was really nice to be able to share something that I do on a day-to-day basis and can stand up there and really confidently talk about.

[00:04:58] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t think I’ve ever spoken about this subject before in any of the podcasts that I’ve done. That is quite nice, and it’s novel. I’ll just introduce the topic. The presentation that you gave was called Budget-Friendly Usability Testing for WordPress. And obviously that sort of sums it up. We’re going to talk about usability testing.

But before we do that, Jo, just to nail your colours to the mast a bit, tell us about you. Where you’re from. What you do for a job, and anything that you think is relevant to this podcast.

[00:05:22] Jo Minney: Okay, I really like cats and pockets.

[00:05:25] Nathan Wrigley: I saw that in your show notes. Why pockets?

[00:05:27] Jo Minney: Okay. So I think pockets are a great example of something that can be both a fantastic and a terrible user experience. You are like, oh yeah, maybe I know what you’re talking about. But, let me ask, do you live with a woman?

[00:05:39] Nathan Wrigley: I do.

[00:05:39] Jo Minney: I know that’s a very personal question, sorry Nathan. But, how many times on average a month does she complain about not having pockets in her clothing?

[00:05:48] Nathan Wrigley: Never, she carries a bag.

[00:05:50] Jo Minney: Yeah, but why do we have to carry a bag, right? She has to carry a bag because her clothing doesn’t have pockets. So I spoke at a conference late last year, and I asked this question. This has been a life goal of mine, was to speak about pockets at a conference. And I managed to do it. I asked all of the women in the audience, hands up if you’ve ever thrown out clothes or gotten rid of them because they didn’t have pockets in? And every single woman stood up and was like, yes, I’ve gotten rid of clothes because they didn’t have pockets in.

Most of the people that were there were men. And I said, stand up if you don’t have pockets in your clothes right now. And 400 men stayed seated. But this is an example of something where, yes, there’s a subsection of the population that’s experiencing this problem, but it’s a big problem for us. It’s very frustrating. You’re at a conference, you don’t want to have to carry around a handbag. So, pockets. They’re a great example of user experience.

[00:06:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, I get it. I understand now. Tell us a little bit about your sort of day-to-day work, though. You work with WordPress, I guess.

[00:06:51] Jo Minney: I do. So I run a small agency. We’re what I usually call a micro agency, and we have only three of us that are working on the WordPress team. We do website development, but specifically for charities, nonprofits, cause-based organisations, so a lot of social enterprises and that sort of thing.

On top of that, I also do consulting for user experience research. I’m not a designer. UX and UI often get lumped together. They’re very different. UI is about the interface and what people see, and UX is about user experience and how people use things. And they can’t be completely separated, but they’re also very different.

So I am lucky because I work in the niche that I work in, that I’m able to do a lot of usability testing and it’s something that a lot of people don’t get the experience to do. And so I thought I would share what I’ve been able to learn over having this sort of unique opportunity to do so much usability testing, and share with people how they can do it more cost effectively, but also the benefit that it can have for a project.

[00:07:54] Nathan Wrigley: Let’s dig into it and I’m going to actually crib the questions which you posed to the audience today. You put four questions surrounding your subject. And the first one is this. And I’m sure that the listeners to this podcast, if they’re anything like me, they’ll probably have some impression that usability testing is a thing that you could do. And I think the word there is could, as opposed to do, do.

I imagine most people have an impression of what it is, but whether or not they do it is another thing altogether. But that would then lead to this. What even is it? So what is usability testing, and what are you actually testing for? So that was a question you posed to the audience and now I’m throwing it right back at you.

[00:08:34] Jo Minney: Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s probably the sensible place to start. So usability testing is not the same as user testing, or user acceptance testing. And it’s focusing on, how do we identify what the problems are with something that we have created?

So a lot of UX research is focused on what we call quantitative testing. So, meaning we’re looking for quantities of something. It could be the amount of time it takes someone to do an action. It could be using heat maps. So we have a thousand users, let’s see where their cursors most often are going. Let’s see how often they scroll down the page. And quantitative testing is really good at showing you comparisons of whether one thing or another thing works better, but it’s not actually good at identifying what the problem is, only that there is a problem.

So you can do a lot of testing and still not know what the problem is. Usability testing is different because it’s what we call qualitative testing. So it means that we’re not looking for big numbers, we’re not looking for lots of data. We are looking for really deep user experience examples. And in a nutshell, the way that that works is you recruit some participants, usually five people per round is ideal. And often I get asked, well, how can you have statistically significant data with only five people? That’s not the point of qualitative testing. The point of qualitative testing is not to have statistically relevant data, it’s to have the actual user experiences.

So you recruit your people, you come up with your research questions and that’s the problem that you’re trying to solve or the question you’re trying to get an answer to. So, an example might be, are users going to recognise this label that I’ve used in my navigation? Is this button going to get clicked if I put it in this location? It’s often a thing that, if you’re working with a customer to develop a website for them, what we find is that often the things that we are testing for in usability testing are things that the customer and I disagree on, or things where they weren’t sure when they made the decision in the first place. And they’re a great example of things that you want to test for.

But the research questions are only the first part because if I say, the example I used in my talk today is that we had a support service directory. And this was for people who are experiencing family domestic violence. And they didn’t want to use the term directory because it’s a very harsh term. So they had called it support services, which sounds, on the surface like a good idea, but a lot of the people that are using their platform are not English first language. And they also tend to be in a really stressed out state as you can imagine.

And so what we actually found is that when we said to them, can you imagine you’re helping someone, can you help them find a legal service that will enable them to get a restraining order or something like this? What we found is that repeatedly they didn’t go to support services to start with. The minute we changed that to service directory, they started to find the thing that we wanted them to click on.

It’s such a small change, but it made a huge impact, the usability. Now, we found that out after the second test, which meant that we were able to change it after the second test, and then we had three more tests where we could show that every time they were able to find the thing that we wanted them to be looking for.

So this is an example where the research question and the research task or the activity that we’re giving to the user, they’re not the same thing. If we said to them, find support services, find the service directory, if we use that language, obviously they’re going to look for that label. But instead we asked them to do an activity that would hopefully take them to the place we wanted them to go to.

And then finally the last step is to iterate that and to actually take that data and make decisions, and make improvements to the project iteratively to try and make it better. That’s the goal, right? Is to find what the problems are and fix them. So we still have to work out how to fix them, but at least we know what the problems are and not just that people were not clicking on the button and we don’t know why.

[00:12:27] Nathan Wrigley: I have a couple of follow up questions. First thing isn’t the question, it’s an observation. So that’s really cleared up in my head what it is, so that’s amazing. But one of the things that I want to know from that is, do you filter out people who, let’s say for example, you’ve got a website, the kind that you just described. Do you filter out people who are not the target audience? So in other words, I don’t know, maybe that’s not a perfect example. But let’s say, on some websites, would it be better to have really inexperienced users of the internet as your five candidates?

[00:12:59] Jo Minney: That is exactly the ideal person.

[00:13:02] Nathan Wrigley: So people who are just, I’ve never come across this before. You want people who are potentially bound to be confused. If somebody’s going to be confused, it’s you five.

[00:13:10] Jo Minney: That is the ideal participant for a usability study. And often people say, I want to start learning how to do usability testing. Where should I start? And my advice to them is always the same, with your mum.

Recruit a person that’s a generation older than you, because I can guarantee that in most cases, sorry to generalise, but they tend to be less efficient and less used to technology because they haven’t grown up with it. So for millennials and younger, we have had technology for all of our adult lives and most of our childhood.

For my parents’ generation, they have had to learn that technology as an adult, and so their brains have a different mental model, and they don’t take for granted things that we take for granted. Like, when I click the logo, it will take me back to the homepage. I know that, you know that, your mum might not know that.

And I think that is something that is really valuable is to understand the benefit of testing with people who aren’t as experienced with technology. Who don’t speak English as a first language. Who are experiencing some kind of accessibility challenge. Whether that’s using assistive technology, being colorblind. Things like that are really good things to try and get some cross-sectional representation in your testing participant pool.

[00:14:25] Nathan Wrigley: So the idea then is that you’ve got these novice users who hopefully will immediately illustrate the point. And it’s driven by questions. So it’s not just, we are just going to stand over your shoulder and watch you browse the internet, and when you do something and describe, you’re looking for something and you can’t find it, that’s not how it’s done.

It’s more, okay, here’s a defined task, do this thing and we’re going to ask you to do five things today, we want you to achieve them all and describe what you’re doing, but it’s more of that process.

And then the idea is that you go from an imperfect website, slowly over time, iterating one problem after another towards a better website. The goal is never reached. It’s just an iterative process.

[00:15:01] Jo Minney: That’s it. Perfection does not exist.

[00:15:03] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that’s interesting. So we start with the novice. We’ve got a small cohort of people. We ask them specific questions, and we get feedback about those specific questions.

So the other thing that I wanted to ask then is, when do you do it? Because it feels like you need to build the website first, then show it to people. So there’s got to be something. This isn’t process of discovery prior to the website. You need pixels on pages. Buttons that are potentially mislabeled or what have you. Is that the case? Build first, then usability test afterwards. There’s no usability testing prior to the initial build.

[00:15:37] Jo Minney: It’s kind of a trick question because you can usability test at most stages. Probably the only stage you can’t usability test at is when you don’t yet have a site map. Having said that, my recommendation is, assuming you had unlimited budget and unlimited time, I would do at minimum two rounds of usability testing, and I would do one before you have any design, and I would do it just using wire frames.

So we build interactive wire frames using WordPress. So for the demo that I did today, I spun one up. I used InstaWP. You can get like a seven day website or something through there. It took me 42 minutes to build out the website in just the block editor, with no design or anything, just the layout of it. And I was eating a loaded potato at the time. So if I can do that in 42 minutes, eating a loaded potato, and that’s not my job, I think it’s a pretty efficient and cost effective way of being able to do early usability testing.

And often the thing that we’re testing for there is like, have I got the right navigation structure and hierarchy? Are the labels that I’m using sensible for people? Do they fit with the mental models of what our users are actually expecting? And the benefit of doing it that early is that when you don’t have a design applied, it’s a lot easier to identify problems.

Because there is a thing that happens in human psychology, and there’s a lot of psychology in user experience. And there’s a thing that happens where if something’s pretty, we will say that it is easier to use. Our experience is that it’s easier to use because it’s nice to look at. And that’s great. That means that UI is really important, but it also means that, if you have a really nice UI, it can mask problems that you have in the background. It is great that things can be easier if they’re pretty, but imagine how much easier they would be if they worked well and were pretty, that’s what we should be aiming for.

So typically we would do one round of usability testing when we just have a framework and just have the navigation. When someone lands on a page, sometimes we’ll just write a message on there and say, congratulations, you found the service directory where you can find this thing, this thing, this thing, this thing, and then we put a little button there. When they click it, it releases confetti on the page. So they get a dopamine hit and it’s like, yay, I completed the activity. You don’t have to have all of your content in place to be able to do testing, and identify early that you’ve got problems that you need to fix.

[00:18:02] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds almost like an overly complicated design is the enemy of usability. We are drawn towards beautiful, but sometimes maybe beautiful just is overwhelming. You know, there’s lots of colors on the page, the buttons get hidden, there’s just too much text on there. Looks great, but it might be sort of masking the thing that you’re really trying to show. And it feels like there’s this tight rope act of trying to balance one thing against the other. Yeah, that’s really interesting.

So, with the wire frame thing, in that case, you are really just testing, can the person find the thing? But I’m guessing once you’ve move beyond the wire frame stage and you’ve got a website, it’s literally out on the internet, it’s functional. It’s exactly what we hope would be the perfect version, then you’re drilling into more detail. You know, can a person find this resource? Do they know that this button is what we are intending them to click? Those kind of things.

[00:18:49] Jo Minney: Yeah. So I think things like searchability and discoverability are much easier to test for in the early stages when you’re just doing, say, using like a wire frame or a prototype. And things like usability, you really do need to have the complete designed product to be able to test for them well. And I say that, there’s actually kind of four categories of the different types of tasks that we can do. I’ll give you the link to the blog post that I wrote that has all of this in detail because we do not have time to go deep into that today.

But things like, does my search form work the way that I want it to? They’re the sorts of things that you do have to do some development to be able to get them working. So it’s not always practical to do that at the very early stages when you do want to start testing your navigation and stuff like that.

Something that you can do is if you’ve only got enough budget, or enough time, to be able to do, say, five usability tests total, you could do two of them early, and then you could do three of them towards the end, after you have the majority of the design and the development work in place. Users are pretty forgiving when they’re doing a usability test. If you say, this is still a work in progress, there might be a couple of pages that look odd and aren’t quite ready to go live yet. If you get somewhere and you’re not sure, you can just go back, it’s okay.

It’s not meant to be a perfect experience. The point is that you are getting their real time thoughts and feedback as they’re doing it. So it’s really important that you try and encourage them to follow the think aloud protocol, which is really outlining every single thing that goes through they’re head, just brain dump on me please. Like, I just want to hear all of your thoughts and thought processes.

And the only thing as the facilitator that I will say during a usability test is, tell me what you’re thinking. And other than that, I am completely silent. So even when it comes to giving them the activity, so if I’m asking you to do an activity like help somebody find a legal service that they can use in this particular state. I would actually send that task to you via the chat or something like that.

I would send the task to you via the chat, and then I would get you to read that task back to me, because I don’t want you to be thinking about how I’m saying it. I want you to be able to go back to that task and look at it, and think about it, and process everything inside your own head. But I want you to be telling me all of that.

So often we’ll find people ask questions during that, like, what should I do next? And the answer to that is really hard to train yourself out of replying to them with anything other than, what would you do if I wasn’t here? And I think that’s the hardest thing about learning to facilitate a usability test.

[00:21:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and in a sort of an ideal scenario, you wouldn’t even be in the room. But in some strange way, you’d be able to just get into their head and say, okay, now I want you to do this, but every time you’ve got problem, just figure figure it out, and we’ll watch. But you have to be there because you have to be able to listen to what they’re saying and what have you. Yeah, that’s curious.

[00:21:40] Jo Minney: Yeah, and we do, at the end of each activity, we’ll then ask them for feedback on how they found it. If they had any suggestions or things that they didn’t say out loud while they were doing it that they wanted to share with us. How confident were they with the activity, and did they think that they were successful in it, which is a really good way of telling, I wasn’t really sure what the activity was meant to do. Or I wasn’t really sure if what I found really met the needs that I was looking for.

Then we ask them, how certain are you with the answer that you just gave? And if they’re like, three out of five, you’re like, alright, this person didn’t understand what it was that I was asking them to do in the first place. Maybe the problem is actually with my question and not with the website.

[00:22:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so the whole process is, you’re not just asking for feedback about the website, there’s a whole process of asking for feedback about the process as well which is, that’s kind of curious. Meta, meta processing.

[00:22:27] Jo Minney: Very meta, for sure.

[00:22:29] Nathan Wrigley: We’re in an industry where at the moment everything is trying to be automated.

[00:22:32] Jo Minney: Is this the AI question?

[00:22:34] Nathan Wrigley: Well, no, this feels like it’s a very human thing. You need actual bodies on the ground. So it’s really a question of economics. Because I’m wondering if this often turns out to be a fairly expensive process. And because of that, I wonder if people push against it, because the budgets may not be there. If this is something that clients typically would say, well, okay, tell me how much that’s going to cost. It’s a nice idea but, okay, it’s going to cost us X thousand dollars because we’ve got to put five people in a room and we’ve got to pay for your time to moderate the event, and come up with the questions and so on.

How do we manage that in an era of automation where everything is, the dollar cost of everything has got to be driven down. This feels like the dollar cost is going up because there’s humans involved.

[00:23:14] Jo Minney: Yeah, it’s a great question. Have you ever run a Google ad before?

[00:23:17] Nathan Wrigley: It’s expensive.

[00:23:18] Jo Minney: It’s very expensive. It’s very expensive to get a new lead. It’s a lot more cost effective to convert a lead than it is to get a new one. And the point of usability testing is to improve conversion of people being able to do the thing that you want them to do on the website.

So my first answer to that would be, look at the cost benefit analysis. It’s worth it in most cases to do usability testing. Something that we’ve found with positioning of usability testing is that if we offer it as an add-on, then people don’t want to do it because they don’t want to pay for it. They see the value in it necessarily. However, we don’t offer it as an add-on.

We actually have it just as part of our proposal right from the start where we’re like, this is part of the point of difference between what you get when you build with us versus when you build with someone else. They’ll tell you what they think is the best way to do something. If we are unsure about the best way to do something or we disagree on it, it’s not going to ultimately be me making a decision or you making a decision. We’re going to test and we’re going to get real evidence from customers.

And they’re the ones that are going to be developing it so you know that the final result that you get is going to be the best possible version of the website. And often we might be more expensive than our competitors, but people will go with us because we are not competing on price. We’re competing on offering a service that nobody else is offering. I asked today in the presentation who has done usability testing before and not a single person put their hand up.

[00:24:42] Nathan Wrigley: That would’ve been my assumption actually.

[00:24:44] Jo Minney: Yeah. And honestly, I don’t think any of the people that we’re competing against in the industry that I’m in are doing the same thing as what we’re doing. And so it is very much a point of difference. I think it’s not a well understood technique, but it’s so valuable that it is a really easy way to position yourself as being different, and really actually do a better job for your customers, for the people that you’re building websites for. Because ultimately you are going to have a better result at the end of it.

[00:25:12] Nathan Wrigley: The interesting thing there is, when I say usability testing, somehow in my head there is a connection between that and accessibility. And that’s not where I’m going with this question, but there’s just something about it being unnecessary. And I’m not binding that to the word accessibility. What I’m saying is clients often think, I don’t need to do that. Obviously, we’re moving into an era where legislation says otherwise. But I can just leave it over there. I don’t need to worry about that, usability testing, not for me.

However, the lever that you’ve just pulled, it completely changes the dynamic because you’ve pulled an economic lever, which is that if we can get everybody to follow this action, I don’t know, fill up the cart with widgets and then press the buy now button, and go through the checkout process. If that’s the thing that you’re usability testing, you’ve made direct line. You’ve joined up the dots of, okay, user, money.

So it’s not just about it being a better website so that people can browse around it all day. It’s also about connecting the economics of it. So the usability is about people buying, converting, getting the resource. And so there might not be an economic transfer there, but it will be some benefit to your business. There might be downloading that valuable PDF that you want everybody to see or whatever.

So that’s kind of interesting. That’s changed my thoughts about it a little bit. And it is more about that. It’s getting an understanding of what you want out the website, getting an understanding of what you think should be happening is actually possible and happening. Have I sort of summed that up about right?

[00:26:40] Jo Minney: Yeah, I think that’s a really good summary it. I think the only thing I would add there is that a lot of the times the conversation around accessibility and the conversation around usability do have a lot of crossover. They are fundamentally different, but one of my favorite examples is actually something that I think applies to both.

So two of the common problems that we find very early on in design is often to do with colour. And so one of them is colour contrast and the other one is colourblind accessibility. And I think it’s a great way to get people to change their thinking, and their perception of the way we have these conversations is, if you have an e-commerce website, Nathan, what would you say if I said to you, I can instantly get you 8% more customers?

[00:27:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’d say that’s great.

[00:27:24] Jo Minney: And I’d be like, cool, change your buttons so that colourblind people can read them, because 8% of men are colourblind. So actually it’s only 4% of people because assuming half of them are men, then you’ve actually only got 4%. But still 8% of men are colourblind, that’s a big percentage of the population. So if your button is red and green, then you’re going to have a problem. People are not going to be able to find the thing that you want them to click to give you their money.

Likewise, if you want people to be able to use your website when they’re outside and using their phone in sunlight, then you need to have good colour contrast on your website. So often this conversation is around, well, I don’t have people who are disabled, I’m not trying to cater to people that are using screen readers. It doesn’t matter because not very many people that are using my website are blind. And I’m like, well, I’m not blind but I still struggle when I’m looking at something where the text is too faint, and I’m looking at it on my phone, and I’m standing outside in the sun because we naturally don’t visualise as much contrast there.

So I think being able to position it in a way where people can see the value to themselves. I want to use a website that has better contrast, and so it makes that conversation easier with a customer.

[00:28:32] Nathan Wrigley: I hadn’t really drawn the line between accessibility and usability, but it seems like they’re partner topics, basically. There’s like a Venn diagram, accessibility over here, usability over here, with a massive overlap somewhere in the middle.

[00:28:43] Jo Minney: A hundred percent. That’s why we always encourage having that sort of intersection between accessibility and usability in our testing pool. So we always try and have one person who experiences some kind of accessibility challenge, whether that’s being colourblind, hearing impaired, if we’ve got a lot of video on the site, for example. And I think that it can be a really valuable way of collecting multiple data points at one time.

[00:29:04] Nathan Wrigley: When you have a client that comes to you and they’ve obviously, by the time that they’ve signed the contract with you, usability is already part of the deal it sounds like. How do you decide, what’s the thing in round one that we’re going to pick up on? Is there sort of like a copy book that you go through? Is it like, I don’t know, buttons or the checkout or colour or? Where do you go first? And sort of attached to that question a little bit, this process never ends, right? In theory, you could do usability testing each month. But I was wondering if you did it like on an annual cycle or something, yeah.

[00:29:34] Jo Minney: If you’re not changing stuff super often, I would say, there’s probably more cost effective ways that you can collect information about it. Typically we encourage, long-term, have things like heat maps and stuff like that. They will help you identify if there is a problem. If you know that there is a problem, let’s say you’ve got a heat map and you’re like, why is nobody clicking on our buy now link? That is a good instance of where you would do some usability testing to figure out what the problem is.

But if everything’s working and you’re getting conversions, then probably doing usability testing isn’t the most valuable thing that you can do. If you’re looking at making significant changes to the way that your website works, that’s another good time to introduce a round of usability testing. So we don’t do it just for the sake of doing it. We do it because we need to do it, and because there’s value in it for our customers.

[00:30:18] Nathan Wrigley: Do you keep an eye on your customer’s websites so that you can sort of get ahead of that, if you know what I mean? So let’s say that you put heat maps in, very often that would then get handed over to the client and it’s somebody in the client’s company’s job is to check the heat maps. Or do you keep an eye on that and, oh look, curiously, we’ve seen over the last 12 months, yeah, look at that. There’s not much going on over at that very important button over there. Let’s go back to the client and discuss that. That could be another round of usability testing.

[00:30:44] Jo Minney: Yeah, so I think we’re not uncommonly, a lot of agencies now do have some kind of retainer program where they will maintain communication and assistance for their clients. So we call them care plans. I know everyone has a different name for it. I think it’s pretty standard now in the WordPress ecosystem. It’s a very common thing to do.

As part of our care plans we have scheduled meeting with our clients once every three months or six months or 12 months, depending on how big the site is. And one of the things that we’ll do at that time is review their analytics, review the heat maps, that sort of thing.

Ask them, have they experienced any problems? Have they noticed a downturn in the people signing up for the memberships? Or have they noticed, have they had any complaints from people about something? Is there anything that they’re not sure about? Are they going to be changing the way that they operate soon, and introducing something new into their navigation that we need to consider where does that fit in the grand scheme of things?

I find if we’re having those conversations early and we are the ones starting those conversations, then often we are coming to them with solutions instead of them coming to us with problems.

[00:31:46] Nathan Wrigley: I think that’s the key bit, isn’t it? If you can prove to be the partner that comes with, we’ve got this intuition that there’s something that we can explore here. You are proactive, you’re going to them not, okay, anything you want? Is there anything we can help you with, you know? And the answer to that is always, not really.

Whereas if you go and say, look, we’ve got this idea, based upon some data that we’ve seen, we’ve got heat maps and what have you, shall we explore that further? That seems much more credible. You are far likely, I think to have an economic wheel which keeps spinning if you adopt that approach, as opposed to the is there anything you want doing, kind of approach?

[00:32:18] Jo Minney: Absolutely. I think every developer’s worst nightmare is having a customer come back to them and say, I’ve just noticed that I haven’t had anyone send through anything in my contact form for the last three weeks. And I’ve just noticed, when I went and tested it, that the contact form’s not working anymore.

I’m sure I’ve had that nightmare at least once. And I think if you can avoid being in that situation where they’re coming to you with something like, oh my God, it’s broken, how do I fix it? If instead you can go to them and be proactive about it and just kind of keep your finger on the pulse.

Yes, there’s a little bit of ongoing work, but like honestly, I jump on, I check all of the analytics maybe once every three months for my clients. I set aside one day to do it. Go and have a look through that. If I notice anything, I can usually fix it, make sure that we’re collecting the data again before it becomes a problem.

And then that way when there is an issue, we’ve got data that we can back up and we can start from there and go, okay, yes, we’ve identified, here’s where we need to do more research. And then we can apply something like usability testing to that.

[00:33:16] Nathan Wrigley: How much of your time on a monthly basis, let’s say as a percentage, do you spend on usability of existing clients? Is this something that is a lot of the work that you do? What I’m trying to figure out here is, for people listening, is this something that they can turn into a real engine of their business?

Because you might get two days, three days work a week just on the usability of pre-existing clients. So in a sense, you’ve created interest and work out of thin air, because these clients already exist, they’re in your roster, but there’s a whole new thing that we can offer to them. So, how much do you spend doing it?

[00:33:50] Jo Minney: Yeah, so it’s a great question. I would say it’s cyclical. I couldn’t really say like, I always spend this much amount of time. There might be entire weeks that go by where my whole life is usability testing, and there might be a month that goes by where I don’t do any. And it really does often depend on where our projects are in the life cycle at any particular time.

So we’re often working on projects that will span over years. And because of that, they might introduce a completely new part of their project. And that’s a good time to reintroduce that usability testing. As I said, like you don’t really want to do it just for the sake of doing it, but at the same time, if you can show that there will be value in making a change, if you can show that there is a lost opportunity somewhere, then a hundred percent you can sell that, the value to them of, hey, you could spend $1,000 now, but you could be earning $5,000 more every month for the next several years. That’s a no-brainer, right?

People are happy to make investment if they can see that there’s going to be a cost benefit for them in the future. Or if the thing that they’re trying to do is maybe their government website or something, and they’ve got a particular thing that they need to meet, they’ve got KPIs. If you can show that you are able to help them meet those KPIs, then they are going to invest in doing that thing that you’re trying to offer them.

[00:35:02] Nathan Wrigley: We talked about the Venn diagram of accessibility and usability, and the fact that there’s a lot of an overlap. In the year 2025, this is a year where, in Europe at least anyway, accessibility, the legal cogs are turning and the screw is getting tighter. So accessibility is becoming mandated in many respects.

And I was wondering about that, whether there was any kind of overlap in legislation on the usability side. The accessibility piece is obviously easier to sort of define in many ways, and it’s going to become less optional. But I was wondering if there was any usability legal requirements. I don’t know quite how that would be encapsulated.

[00:35:41] Jo Minney: Sort of. An example that comes to mind is that there are a lot of practices that historically have been really prevalent on the internet, and they’ve been identified as being really bad for usability. And they’ve actually now been identified as being so bad that they’re almost evil. And they’ve started to crack down on those.

And an example of that is, have you ever tried to unsubscribe from a gym? It’s basically impossible. And so now if you, at least in Australia, I know if you have a subscription on your site, you legally have to have a way of people being able to unsubscribe without having to call someone or send an email somewhere.

And that is an example where that is actually usability. And I think there are definitely things where we are picking up on stuff that is maybe a shady way of working, and a shady way of developing websites. And those things are starting, we’re starting to cut down on them.

I’m not sure if that is purely usability, or just like not being being a bad person. But I think that there is definitely, the only reason that we know that those things are a problem is because we have all had those bad experiences. And ultimately that’s all user experience is, it’s just how good or bad is experience of using a platform.

[00:36:49] Nathan Wrigley: I share your frustration with those kind of things because I’ve been through that process. Not just canceling a subscription but, I don’t know, something that you’ve got yourself accidentally into and you don’t want to be on that email list anymore. Seemingly no way to get off it.

[00:37:01] Jo Minney: They’ve changed the unsubscribe link so it doesn’t have the word unsubscribe in it. And now you just have to look for the word that’s not underlined, or highlighted in a different colour. That when you hover over it, something pops up and you’re like, oh, that’s the link. That thing that says manage preferences down the bottom, hidden in the wall of text. That is a shady practice. That is a poor user experience just as much as it’s just a bad thing to do.

[00:37:23] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s got the label of deceptive design now. It used to be called dark patterns, didn’t it? But deceptive design. This notion of doing things in such a way to just deliberately confuse the user so that the green big button, which is the exact opposite of what you want to click, is the one which is visible. And then there’s this tiny little bit of greyed out text, which is the one which, clearly, you’ve ended up at this page, that’s the one you want. That’s the enemy of usability in a way. But for the business, it may be exactly what they want because it keeps the economic engine rolling.

Yeah, that’s interesting. I wonder if there’ll be more legislation to tighten those things up so that they’re not allowed. Yeah, that’s fascinating.

Last question. We’re running out of time. Last question. And it refers to something that we talked about earlier. I’m guessing this really never ends. This is a journey which you begin, you tweak it, you do a little bit, you fix, and then you start again a little bit later and what have you. Is there ever a moment though where you go to a client and say, we did it? This site, as far as we’re concerned, is now perfect. Or is it never a goal? It’s a journey and never a destination.

[00:38:23] Jo Minney: I think you’ll probably agree with me here, Nathan, that it’s basically impossible to be perfect, because ultimately someone is always going to have a different opinion. Someone’s always going to think that your shade of purple is too dark. Someone is always going to dislike the font that you chose, because it’s not loopy enough, or it’s too loopy, right?

So I don’t think there is such a thing as perfect. But through doing five usability tests, five people, you can pick up at least 85% of the potential problems with your design. And I’m not aiming for perfect, but I know that for me, if I can confidently say to my customers that I’ve been able to identify 85% of the potential problems that they might experience in their project, then they can confidently go away and say, hey, we’re pretty happy with what we’ve got.

We can definitely improve on that over time. But that is a huge milestone to be able to hit. And being able to have enough data, and enough research to confidently say that, I think is a really big win both for us and for our customers.

[00:39:26] Nathan Wrigley: Sadly, Jo, time is the enemy, and I feel like we’ve just pulled back the lid a teeny tiny bit on the big subject of usability. Honestly, I reckon I could talk for another two hours on this at least. You know, because you’ve got into colours there and all sorts, and there’s just so many tendrils that we haven’t been able to explore. But we’ve prized it open a little bit, and so hopefully the listener to this has become curious. If they have, where would they find you? What’s a good place to discover you online?

[00:39:53] Jo Minney: Yeah, so I think the best place is to hit up my personal blog, jominney.com. So it’s J O M I N N E Y .com. And I have a lot of stuff on there about usability, usability testing. I have a blog post that I wrote specifically for this talk that shares all of the resources that I used to put together the slides and everything. The talk itself will be on WordCamp TV. If you’re on socials and you want to hit me up, pretty much the only platforms I’m active on nowadays are LinkedIn and Bluesky, and I’m Jo Minney on both of them.

[00:40:23] Nathan Wrigley: Jo Minney, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:40:27] Jo Minney: You’re most welcome, Nathan. Thanks for having me again.

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

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, WordPress, security, and the OSI model, which underpins the entire internet.

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 Robert Jacobi. Robert has a long standing history with the tech and CMS industry, having worked in senior positions at Joomla, Cloudways, Perfect Dashboard and more. He’s now the Chief Experience Officer at Black Wall, a company formally known as BotGuard.

Robert talks with me today about the transition from proprietary systems to open source, and the seven layer OSI model that underpins the internet. Drawing from his experiences in tech, Robert and I try, and perhaps fail, to break down the complexities of how website traffic is rooted over the internet. This is done to try to understand how Black Wall can position itself to mitigate risks before they reach hosting companies infrastructure.

We also discuss the evolution of bot traffic on the web, where upwards of 10% of internet traffic is identified as malicious. This kind of insight is particularly important for those interested in the security aspect of web hosting and website management.

We also get into Black Wall’s rebranding journey, and its continued dedication to the WordPress community by participating in events like WordCamp Asia and Europe.

If you’ve ever wondered about the unseen layers of internet security and infrastructure, or the strategic moves involved in rebranding a tech company, 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 Robert Jacobi.

I am joined on the podcast by Robert Jacobi. Very nice to have you on. I think I’m going to muddle up the company that you work for, because a little bird tells me that in the very, very recent past, the company that you work for became, well different in some way. Perhaps a name change, a logo change. Who did you work for and who do you now work for? And are they the same thing?

[00:03:08] Robert Jacobi: Well, I still have my original swag, the BotGuard polo, which all of us have at the team, but we are now Black Wall. So Black Wall, formerly known as BotGuard. So we’ve done a full rebrand. I’m sure a lot of folks have seen already. But yep, just bringing it forward. Allowing ourselves to take on more of what we do, on top of the highly focused bot security monitoring and mitigation.

[00:03:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That’s a perfect introduction then. So give us your potted bio in tech, in CMSs. I’m not going to say WordPress because it’s a bit bigger than that. And maybe just throw in the BotGuard, Black Wall bit at the end there, and what your role is there. So just a couple of minutes. Just tell us who you are and whatnot.

[00:03:49] Robert Jacobi: Minutes, I could spend all day talking about myself. So I’ve been in the industry for a number of years. Mumble, mumble, how long it’s been. Let’s go with CMSs because, actually a big passion way back in the day, had an agency where we created our own, of course proprietary CMS because that’s what you did.

And then moved into open source for a number of reasons. Primarily, which I hope all agencies don’t need to talk about anymore, because I think it’s pretty obvious. It was the hit by a bus theory that, we put all our eggs into a proprietary basket, and we get hit by a bus, then that customer is stuck. With open source, there’s the community of the ecosystem, and it’s huge.

And, you’ll always have your preferred vendors for many, many, reasons, but if something happens, you’re not locked into that code. You’re not blindsided. That was a fairly quick transition, and wound up working at the time, sorry WordPress universe, went to Joomla because hey, back in that day Mambo slash which became Joomla, was honestly just more of a stack that our team leaned towards. It was MVC based. It was geeky. There were tons of features, and functions that the types of customers we were working with, it resonated with. Especially multilingual at the time.

Fast forward, let’s say 10 years, and now WordPress is beyond a competing product. It’s got an ecosystem a, value with its name brand, and literally the immense community that’s been built around it.

From there went to, transitioned off of the Joomla space, and popped into a company called Perfect Dashboard. Oh, I forgot, I actually was the president of Joomla, briefly, so.

[00:05:31] Nathan Wrigley: Just a little fact there, yeah.

[00:05:32] Robert Jacobi: You know what, I should not forget that because that one year felt like 10. It’s a lot to work with a huge community, for many, many reasons. You have so many stakeholders. People whose lives depend on the product, the solution, the community, the ecosystem. Certainly not going to get into WordPress drama, but I understand how difficult it is to bear those responsibilities. And, it’s a lot. Immense amount of work. And WordPress has done amazing things in sustaining that for decades.

So, moved over to the WordPress side of the universe. Company called Perfect Dashboard. We were acquired. Moved to running the WordPress business unit of Cloudways, also now acquired by Digital Ocean. And today I’m at Black Wall. I’m the Chief Experiences Officer for Black Wall. So that includes community, includes evangelism, includes investor in government relations. It’s really making sure that there’s an ability to communicate all the things that we do to the right people.

[00:06:32] Nathan Wrigley: And what does well formally BotGuard, now Black Wall, what do they do? What do they offer up into the market? Is it a WordPress thing, or is it more of a, we’ll get into the OSI model in a minute, but is it more of an operating system thing?

[00:06:46] Robert Jacobi: It’s at the top of the stack. So while, let’s just call it 50%, I know that’s not the exact number, but it’s close enough that I, think it’s fair to say, 50% of the web is run by WordPress. We’re still very heavily involved in the community. So we were just at WordCamp Asia. We’ll be at WordCamp Europe. These are places want to meet folks, communicate our solution, and engage with hosting providers because, when we get to running through our little OSI stack that you and I are obviously super experts in, we’ll kinda see where WordPress falls into it and where security matters, up and down that stack.

We’re trying to help WordPress end users and hosting companies before you ever actually have to get to WordPress, because we already see that a significant portion of internet traffic, 40% of internet traffic is bots. AI agents, whatever you want to call them. And 25% of that 40%, so 10% is completely malicious. And you don’t want to get near the hosting company, the actual application, or anywhere further down the stack if you can avoid it.

[00:07:50] Nathan Wrigley: So it sounds, just the name, and I confess, I don’t know much about what BotGuard, Black Wall do, did. But it sounds to me from the naming of it, that it’s a bit like you are literally a sentinel. You are standing in the way of things. Examining things that are coming your way and saying, no, you may not pass, but you may.

And a bit like throwing it into dev null, if something is unable to pass, you are just black walling it, as it were. You are just saying, nope, off you go, drop, you’re outta here. Is that basically the principle? You are a security firm preventing things that are bad happening to whoever it is that uses your services.

[00:08:25] Robert Jacobi: Some of it’s super, super bad, so you’re going to dev null it. And then there’s a spectrum of how bad those connections can be. We want to focus on humans getting to human content. Our key, sort of value propositions, humans are secure, humans are actually visiting your site. That’s what’s important.

But there are good bots, and there are good bots who accidentally do bad things. And then there are the bad, bad bots. We obviously want Google to index our sites. We may or may not want Open AI indexing our sites. We certainly don’t want it. causing an accidental denial of service by how much it’s scraping our content. Which we have seen many a time. Where it’s like, great Open AI, come on in, take one quick look and get out. But it’s like, I’m going to stay there and I’m going to churn through everything. And we’ve seen it and it knocks sites out. And the AI engines, agents are particularly bad about that, because they’re trying to fill in and understand that data.

[00:09:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay, so we’ve got some idea of what you do. Just as an aside, what a shame that the internet has a need for a company like yours. I don’t mean to take the food off your table, but back 20 years ago this just wasn’t really a thing. Just this promise of the internet to be this philanthropic place with unicorns and rainbows everywhere, where we were all going to throw our content in, and we were all going to consume it and it would be wonderful.

And now we have well, human beings presumably started the whole thing, but now human beings have written codes such that they can step away and let their robots carry on. And what a shame that we need to have things like captchas on forms. and we need to pay security companies to do all of this stuff.

And again, I’m not trying to say that your business doesn’t have a place. Clearly it does. But from a philosophical point of view, I wish that they didn’t need to exist, because the place was benign and harmless all the time.

[00:10:19] Robert Jacobi: I’m going to poke a tiny hole in that bubble.

[00:10:21] Nathan Wrigley: Please do.

[00:10:22] Robert Jacobi: Actually, this is not a bad thing because we’ve actually moved most of the troublemaking away from us locally. You want to go back 20 years ago and we’re dealing with Norton Antivirus on everything, and crossing our fingers and praying that something doesn’t sneak into our immediate homes.

We’ve actually been able to, because we’ve gone to cloud, push a lot of that super local personal risk a bit further downstream. So these security issues didn’t magically appear, they were much more, in fact, they were much more terrifying before. And I, oh my god, my Windows PC got hacked and now I have to like completely just throw it on the grill, light it on fire five times, and then reinstall Windows.

Most folks don’t worry about doing that with their laptops, with their phones or whatnot anymore. The scalable risks are completely different, because me getting hacked was one person. Now a cloud website platform application, and then I’m, 10 million people get hacked. But we’re pushing it further away and away and away.

[00:11:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting. I remember in the dawn of computers that I had, I didn’t begin my computer journey right at the very, very beginning. You could walk into a store and walk out with a computer in more or less, every town and village in the country, when I began using them.

But the media, the way that you got things onto the computer was a physical thing. You held the object in your hand. It was either a CD or some kind of media that you could physically hold. And now of course literally nobody is installing anything off a CD. And so I guess the, inexorable rise of the internet, and everything coming down a, well, telephone line, and we’ll get into that in a moment. Putting it in the cloud makes way more sense, doesn’t it? It doesn’t really seem to have so much utility having the antivirus, if you like, on the computer. I know it does, don’t get me wrong. But I can see that the shift to mitigating the risk and detecting the risk and doing something about the problem in the cloud. Obfuscated, abstracted away, so that you never even really know what’s going on is probably the best way forward. So, yeah.

[00:12:25] Robert Jacobi: For 99.9 9, 9 9 9% of people, they’re not going to know or understand that they just want it to work. They don’t want to be robbed from, or in danger online. I always put it, as techy as I appear to be, I am the worst car person on earth. So when I think about internet security and what most people want to know about it, it’s pretty much what I want to know about cars.

I want my car to turn on. Go forward, go backward, get me to where I need to be as safely as possible. I don’t know, or care about anything else that’s going on under the hood. It’s a tool that I use and I want it to work like I expect it to work.

[00:13:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Given the population at large, it must be, one in a hundred thousand who care about the internals of their machine, probably even less so. Doesn’t matter really what you’re using, be it Mac, Windows, Linux, Chromebook, whatever it is, you just to flip the lid open and you want to just.

[00:13:18] Robert Jacobi: Check my email, log into my social media, buy something, call it a day.

[00:13:23] Nathan Wrigley: But because it’s becoming an increasingly crucial part of our lives. Certainly where I live in the UK, more or less everything has gone online that’s of any use. So shopping has gone online. Appointments for doctors have gone online. Dentists, it’s gone online. Pharmacy appointments, it’s all gone online. Paying your taxes, it’s online.

And so we really do need to protect this stuff. Really need to protect this stuff, because if it’s possible to, I don’t know, inject some problem in that path, we’re not just going to take out the beautiful experience of buying from a shop. We’re going to take out our ability to get fuel into our houses and into our cars and all of that.

[00:13:58] Robert Jacobi: Yeah, if you need that prescription, you don’t want that to go down, so.

[00:14:01] Nathan Wrigley: It’s become almost like, almost like a human right. That seems a bit of a ridiculous thing to say, but on some level, it seems like the internet or access to the internet is almost on that level. It certainly feels like it is as important as other key parts of the country’s infrastructure. So power and gas all of that, and the road network and what have you.

[00:14:20] Robert Jacobi: It is the information utility. So you have your power utilities, you have an information utility. It’s got to be available. In the States we always have our last mile issues, especially for very rural folks, about how connected are they, how fast is it? We always do this to ourselves. We got this great new toy, now let’s see how, great we can make it. Yeah, but if you’re not running at a hundred megabits a second your experience might really not be functional.

[00:14:46] Nathan Wrigley: So we’re going to talk today about something that I confess, I don’t know anywhere near enough of. So, Robert and I have shared an article, and I’ll put the article in the show notes. And essentially this thing that we’re going to talk about is what’s called the OSI model. And the OSI model comprises various different layers.

And basically, dear listener, if you’ve never thought about the gubbins of your computer, you, might just have this fairy tale notion that you open it up and start typing and it just works. I can send an email, of course I can send an email, you just click send and it’s gone and that recipient receives it.

But the breathtaking quantity of things going on in the background disguised from you. Really, honestly, Robert, none of this should work, and yet it does work.

[00:15:36] Robert Jacobi: Which is why I love my car analogy. I have no idea what is going on 99% of the time. I still have a gas car, so I know there’s a larger motor than an electric car. I know gas gets in there and lit on fire and moves pistons around, but really, in the most abstract sense of it. It goes, and that’s what I want it to do.

[00:15:56] Nathan Wrigley: There’s explosions happening all the time, and fuel is being funneled around, and things are turning because they’ve been lubed with oil and all of that. And honestly, your car is nothing compared to the internet. The complexities in the internet, because I know that electric cars have taken over from, or are taking over from gasoline cars, but broadly speaking, the gasoline engine probably hasn’t changed terrifically much in the last a hundred years. Whereas I think the infrastructure comprising the internet, although the OSI model probably hasn’t changed much either.

The things that are coming down the pike, and the things that have happened in the last 20 years, it’s breathtaking. So, dear listener, get out your tinfoil hat as Robert and I attempt and probably butcher what the OSI model is. And if you’ve got the capacity. Perhaps pause this podcast, go to the wptavern.com website, search for this episode and read the article. And the one that Robert came up with, which was a good one, is called What is the OSI model? It Standardizes How Computer Networks Communicate, and it’s on bluecatnetworks.com, but I’ll provide the link.

[00:17:00] Robert Jacobi: The best one I found that had the good pictures to also help. Because visually it’s hard to, you think you have a server, some wires and a browser and it’s like me saying I have an engine, some gas, and a steering wheel. There’s a lot of pieces that go in between all those parts.

[00:17:18] Nathan Wrigley: The amazing thing is this all happens really at the speed of light and. Okay, a perfect example is Robert is literally half a world away from me, and I’m talking to him through a browser, and I imagine that there is the most fractional delay between the words that I’m saying and him hearing it.

It’s probably like a thousandth of a second or something. And yet somehow that sound and that image is getting consumed by my camera. Traveling down a cable. Getting into my computer. The computer’s making decisions about, what the heck am I going to do with this? And then pushing it down a wifi network.

That wifi network is then thinking, where do I put this thing? And then it puts it there. That then decides to shunt it along somewhere else, which shunts it along somewhere else. And eventually it gets to Robert’s computer. Robert’s computer does all of it in reverse. Unpacks it rather than packing it up, and puts it on the screen. And it’s all happening like thousands of times a second, and it shouldn’t work.

[00:18:20] Robert Jacobi: It’s more live than live.

[00:18:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:18:22] Robert Jacobi: Because not only do we have the video, we have a chat window on the side. It’s all encapsulated. Use some of these acronyms, but, we have our streaming protocol for the actual video and audio. And then we have our standard internet protocols for the content and everything else that’s holding the streaming protocols together.

It’s crazy. Why I’m excited to have this conversation with you is like, I feel, very anecdotally, but people are like, I’m just going to spin up a WordPress site. I’m going to be a WordPress agency. And they just do it. And there’s just all this stuff in the mix that, while it’s great to take for granted, it might help to know just a few of the pieces that are critical in that security portion of infrastructure.

[00:19:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it feels to me like a bit like you’ve been to a really nice restaurant and you’ve eaten a fabulous meal, and then you realize the 12 hours of labor that went into creating that tiny little sauce on the side or something like that. And you get real appreciation for it. And hopefully something like that will come out of this.

Again, caveat emptor, we’re not going to get everything right. Please feel free to give us a comment when we do get things wrong. But the OSI model is basically, it’s a seven layer stack and I think we’ll start at layer seven, because it sounds easier to describe it from the top down. So seven through one. And I’ll just say what all the layers are.

So they go from the application layer, that’s layer seven. Presentation layer is six. The session layer is five. Four is transport. Three is network. Two is data link. And then the final one is the physical layer. And this point, I completely stand back and say, Robert, tell us a little bit about the top one, and Robert puts his hands on his head, the application layer.

[00:20:06] Robert Jacobi: It’s funny, it’s like the top most layer and the bottom most layer are the, I feel, the easiest to like grok. Let’s use geek terms, to understand.

The application layers is as well as a WordPresser, I can explain. It’s really the top, you’re connecting from the client, your client application, so a browser, email, whatever, with specific protocols.

And what we primarily use is TCP IP, because that’s that magical thing that is able to grab a bunch of information, split it up into a billion pieces, and somehow put it all back together. How are we communicating with other devices is the way I look at that layer. It’s very high level, very abstract, it’s sort of fundamental. It’s like the air we need to breathe to actually get stuff done.

[00:21:00] Nathan Wrigley: It’s the layer, if I’m correct, it’s the layer closest to us, the user. It’s the layer which we can most readily understand, because it’s the layer closest to which we do things. So I think maybe a poor example, or an incorrect example, would be to imagine it’s something like Microsoft Word or something like that. Because it isn’t, the application itself isn’t that layer. It’s more how that interacts with the protocol underneath. So it might be HTTPS or FTP or something like that. But you are writing an email or something like that, and you hit send, and then the application layer gets in the way and says, what do we do with this?

[00:21:38] Robert Jacobi: Bingo. That’s exactly it, so we use all these, and generically they’re just called clients. So whether it’s Word, Microsoft Word, whether it is Safari, whether it’s Chrome, whether it’s Apple Mail. This will only entertain a few people, or Eudora mail. Just taking it back. Those are discreet applications on our devices.

And then the application, to your point, you hit send, you hit go on your browser. And now we’re like going crazy, okay, what do we do? We have a request. A request needs to go somewhere. That’s where the application layer kicks in.

[00:22:11] Nathan Wrigley: So we have this protocol in the application layer, which then makes decisions about what to do. And each of the layers is collapsing into the layer below it. And that layer then takes something that the previous higher layer gave to it and does, some shenanigans with it, and we get something which can then move into the layer below.

[00:22:30] Robert Jacobi: Everyone knows the application layer, because we’ve all typed in HTTPS://. That is literally the application layer request.

[00:22:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so in the case of a browser, it’s the capacity for the browser to send something through HTTP, what have you. And then we get into the presentation layer, which is the layer beneath. And I think, again, I’m just cribbing from this article, if I’ve parsed this correctly, it says that this layer comprises things like translation, encryption, decryption compression. And it turns all of the bits and pieces into machine readable data. So for example, it says it will convert all of the binary ones and zeros into machine readable data. If the devices are using a different communication method, the presentation layer translates that data into something understandable, so that it can be received from layer seven.

And there’s a lot more to it than that. It’s like this layer of converting what came to it, into something else, which can then be moved down the stack into five.

[00:23:34] Robert Jacobi: Bingo, that’s literally exactly it. And it’s something us as humans completely don’t interact with unless you’re the person building out that infrastructure. It’s really just we’re having computers talking to computers at this point. So when you typed in HTTPS WP Tavern, that was your human interaction. Now we’re all like, what is the process? So presentation is making sure that that data moves forward the stack.

[00:23:59] Nathan Wrigley: And my understanding as well is that this is the moment where encryption and decryption occur. And so it’s high up in the stack. That is to say it’s near the layer seven, because you obviously can’t have it encrypted before you do anything with it. It’s high up in the stack so that at this moment, before it’s gone anywhere, it has become encrypted, before it’s passed down the stack and sent down the wires. But also, this is the moment if it’s coming up the stack, towards you so that you can read it in your browser, so that it’s getting decrypted at the last possible moment as well. So the encryption, I guess is at the first possible point on the way out, and the last possible point on the way back in. Have I got that right?

[00:24:40] Robert Jacobi: Yeah, and that’s a great way to look at it is, when we look from the top of the stack to the bottom of the stack, it’s almost in physical proximity to you as the human end user.

[00:24:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:24:49] Robert Jacobi: Because at first you’re typing in something. Now something’s happening, that encryption is happening locally, because otherwise it wouldn’t be safe. And as we get further down the stack, you are physically further away from what’s going on.

[00:25:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And the other thing that’s going on here is compression. So you’ve got some giant blob of data that the stack can compress to make it more efficient to fly over the wires, then that will be handled at this layer as well, is my understanding.

[00:25:17] Robert Jacobi: We have compression on the servers as well in the applications layer as well. Don’t forget, you can compress data on the protocol.

[00:25:22] Nathan Wrigley: So that all sounds really remarkable, but also quite humanly understandable, because everything that I’ve said makes perfect sense. And we start from five down. It starts to be really the domain of networking experts, and people who really obsess about computers and understand this stuff. But if you’re just the person using the web and WordPress casually, honestly, it may be that you’ve never come across this stuff, and I found it just breathtaking, to be honest.

So layer five, is called the session layer, and it is literally that. It’s managing sessions, so it’s figuring out who’s connected to who. How that communication should begin. How it should end. When it’s decided that, okay, that connection should be destroyed. We’re not using that anymore, but okay, now we’ve got something else that we need to do. And it figures out, yeah, sessions basically, which I guess is the easiest way to describe it.

[00:26:15] Robert Jacobi: Everyone knows what a session is. It’s me being connected, and my information being managed for me, so that when I log in, Nathan doesn’t get all my information.

[00:26:24] Nathan Wrigley: And also, an understanding here is that usernames and passwords, so authentication is happening at this layer as well. And again, that kind of makes sense. So you would have to authenticate before the decryption happens in the layer above and vice versa. But yeah, this is opening up connections between, in this case, you and I are chatting in a browser, so we’re occupying one session, and then there are million, literally millions of packets of data just flying around over the internet via who knows what route. They’re all going in completely different routes.

[00:26:57] Robert Jacobi: Some of these packets can literally be going through Australia or South Africa or Brazil, and back and forth and they, catch up.

[00:27:05] Nathan Wrigley: Incredible, isn’t it? Literally. It’s like, I don’t know. Imagine getting a handful of rice and chucking it all down on the floor, but it assembles itself into a tower. It just lands and it just assembles itself. That’s basically what we are dealing with.

[00:27:19] Robert Jacobi: That’s a good one. Yeah, like I have my own rice tower at home. I throw it on the ground. It gets shipped by FedEx to you, but when you open up the box, it reassembles itself.

[00:27:28] Nathan Wrigley: Just in perfect condition, yeah. So the next layer four, is the transport layer. And this is the bit which actually I guess begins the process of sending my stuff to you, and your stuff to me. And typically the protocols for that are something called UDP, which is User Datagram Protocol or TCP Transmission Control Protocol.

And my understanding, which is very basic, is that UDP differs from TCP in that UDP can be more of a stream of data, because it doesn’t require everything to come through perfectly to say, yeah, that’s now finished. So a perfect example would be us talking to each other, streaming. If bits get lost along the way, it doesn’t want to say, right end the call.

We haven’t got one bit. We need to just stop. Until that bit has been found, it just keeps going and just disregards the missing bits. Whereas TCP, this is just incredible. This is the rice tower, isn’t it?

[00:28:28] Robert Jacobi: TCP is the rice tower, exactly.

[00:28:30] Nathan Wrigley: It requires every single piece to be sent. Acknowledged. Counted out. Counted in at the destination, and for the both ends of the connection to be saying, did you get that bit? Yeah, I got that bit. What about this bit? Did you get that bit? Yeah, I got that bit. 23, did you get 23? No, 23 has gone. Where, where’s 23? Oh, I’ll send 23 again. Here it is. A million times a second for this conversation that we’re having. Well, it’s probably not a million times a second, but you know what I mean.

And I’ve summed that up very badly, but these packets of data that are flying around. They egress my computer. They go through 7, 6, 5, now we’re in 4, and they’ve got to go through further layers. But they’re not just going in a straight pipe, like a hose pipe from your faucet, spraying the garden. These are just going anywhere they choose. So one packet, like you said, might go via Australia, one might go through South Africa, and then somehow they just reassemble themselves magically at the other end.

[00:29:26] Robert Jacobi: Routers, because that’s what those do. Obviously that’s a physical component further down the pipe. They’re saying, this is the order of information. I’m going to just spew out, and everyone else needs to figure out how to put it back together, one piece. It’s crazy.

[00:29:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it is crazy. My understanding is that back in the day, when the internet was conceptualized, I think it was possibly something like Darpanet, or something like that, but it was a, I think it was a military endeavor, the enterprise was something along the lines of, we need a communication system which if various nodes are taken out, let’s say, I don’t know, bombed out of existence, or just the power is cut, the system is intelligent enough to just work round the problem, and figure, okay, we can’t go there anymore, let’s just go a different way. And that is what we now have.

[00:30:12] Robert Jacobi: It’s all about redundancy. I’m going to take just a slight tangent on federated social media. Any kind of federated application. Those exist in a lot of ways to ensure redundancy. I’m going to go way, way back, to where most of the audience probably wasn’t born. So we had these things called modems, and they would be attached to a phone, and you would run something called a bulletin board system. Those were single points of failure.

So you actually saw groups of independent bulletin board system providers create these distributed federated networks. So if you sent an email to a specific person, at a specific BBS, if that phone line was busy, it could go to another one that would take it, and keep pushing it along until you actually got it to the right place. This idea of distributed and federated systems is really what makes the internet functional because we take care of failure points. We ignore them and just work around them.

[00:31:17] Nathan Wrigley: And obviously we know that works as well because parts of every country’s infrastructure are breaking all the time. One router somewhere will just go down, even if it’s a crucial router, it doesn’t in the end stop the system. It probably creates bottlenecks in various places.

[00:31:31] Robert Jacobi: Slow it down.

[00:31:32] Nathan Wrigley: Slow the egress of traffic around, yeah. But in layer four we’re dealing with the ports that things fire out of as well. And then when we get down to layer three, that’s when the actual data is divided up into little packets and little segments. So data four and data three, honestly, to some extent they feel very similar in my head at least anyway.

But layer three is using things like IP addressing, to decide where this packet’s going to go. And I think wraps the packets up in the IP address, if you like. It’s almost like wrapping up a Christmas present and as it travels down the stack, by the time it gets to layer three, it’s being told, this is not what it’s being told, but this encapsulates it. This is a gift for Robert Jacobi. You must find Robert Jacobi.

Then it reads that, and then finally, it’ll rip off the wrapping and finally give you the gift at the end as it goes back up the stack. So, there’s not a lot to say on layer three, I don’t think, other than it’s using things like IP v4 and IP v6 to make decisions about how it’s going to be spread around. Have I got that about right? Do you think?

[00:32:35] Robert Jacobi: That works for me. I think that’s enough information for most folks. Again, we’re trying to give a taste of how complex security is, for what we do day to day. But also how we can apply it to how WordPress understands it.

[00:32:48] Nathan Wrigley: And then we’ve got the two layers where, the data link layer and the physical layer. The data link layer is handling the data transferred. So the actual data moving around. So it’s getting pushed around on the same network is my understanding for layer two. So that’s when you are, for example, in the same office building. I think layer two is just for that. I could be wrong.

[00:33:11] Robert Jacobi: It’s getting to your router and then your router will start moving stuff around. Cause don’t forget, your router is on your network as well as any other computer in that closed. So, our 192’s. Our internal network, so that’s the closest on the networking side, that hardware side, because as soon as it hits our router it goes to the cable, or whoever you’re using, outside of your office, home, your LAN.

[00:33:35] Nathan Wrigley: And then the final layer, the physical layer is the cables, the actual infrastructure out there in the world outside of your house, basically. Or your office building. Well, maybe there’s some of it in the office building as well, but the majority of it, the miles and miles of things are all in the physical layer. And it says here on the bit that I’m reading. Finally, this layer encompasses the equipment that carries data across the network, such as fiber network switches, and so on.

And so finally, our packets of data that we started off at the beginning, writing the email to Robert Jacobi. Finally, that packet has made it out. It’s escaped into the wild, and is now just rattling around on the internet desperately being told, very quickly, where to go. And then hopefully it’ll arrive. Travel to Robert’s computer. Travel in the reverse direction of the stack, and he’ll get a nice email from me with cat pictures in it.

[00:34:27] Robert Jacobi: Why is it always cat pictures?

[00:34:29] Nathan Wrigley: Why not? Okay, so all of that shenanigans is happening, and honestly, I feel a, it’s very difficult if you’re inexperienced like me, to get the words out in the correct order so that I have demonstrated that I understand it. Because I do on a very, very slight level.

And I know that entire careers, very, very, well paid careers can be built upon really understanding what we’ve just spoken about. But in there, I presume, is the capacity for threats, and the capacity for things to go wrong, and the capacity in all of these layers for people to inject things which shouldn’t be there. For clever people to figure out ways to disrupt that information. To take that information. To delete that information. To rewrite that information. And is that essentially what your company does? Prevent those things?

[00:35:18] Robert Jacobi: So when I look at it from a CMS stack, and again, let’s focus on WordPress. My mental model that is slightly different. I’ll use, I think what most of us feel like is WordPress infrastructure. I know, the really smart folks are going to yell at me for this. You have a server somewhere. It has an operating system, it has PHP, MySQL, it has WordPress, and then whatever else is in front of it.

So there’s a whole stack and layer on layers of communication that go from when I hit my browser and type in WP Tavern and hit go. And let’s move away from all the really highly technical networking protocol issues.

At some point, it’s going to make a request to a hosting company that needs to be able to say, oh, yes, let’s give them the WP Tavern homepage. In that process there are caching services, firewall products, local security on the networking side of that hosting company. What I feel personally, but also which is what makes products like Black Walls critical is, detect and defend as far away from the website as possible.

So if there are a million bots coming at you, get them before they even hit the hosting company’s infrastructure. Some will always sneak through because it’s a battle that’s just never ending and, you’re going to keep learning and fighting and learning and fighting. Mitigate the risks as close to the bad actor, and as far away from the site as possible. So, mitigate, mitigate, mitigate, mitigate, mitigate. And there are tools and solutions up and down that entire stack.

So you’re going to have stuff way before you hit the hosting company. You’re going to have some solutions closer to the hosting company. You’re going to have solutions directly on WordPress. There are security plugins that are running on your install of your site. Those are great. I personally feel that you don’t want to even get that close if you’re a bad actor. Mitigate that problem as quickly, as soon as possible.

And even solutions that work at the operating system level, or at least the language level. There are products out there that are constantly monitoring, looking for and mitigating PHP corruption. So, you really don’t want to let everyone have access all the way down to that level, because then you’re already, you will have problems, how to put it nicely. We don’t say bad words on the show.

[00:37:53] Nathan Wrigley: So do you sell your product into the WordPress space? So, you know, to freelancers, agencies, or are you more at the hosting level, or is it even more like infrastructure level? So at the router level. So in our case, this sort of physical layer that we were talking about. Is that the kind of place where your products go? I honestly don’t know where your product sits in all of that.

[00:38:16] Robert Jacobi: So, if you look at it from a hardware perspective, there’s going to be the end user is going to make request. It’s going to get routed somewhere. We sit between where it’s getting routed and the hosting company. So our goal is to prevent the hosting company from wasting physical resources. Now we need to amp up our service because there’s so much traffic coming in.

Now we need to amp up our customer support because more stuff is happening with our virtual machines or hosted infrastructure. So that’s our place in the universe. Get the bad guys before they get to the critical infrastructure.

[00:38:51] Nathan Wrigley: And another question, forgive my ignorance. Is Black Wall’s solution, is it software? Is it code that sits on an operating system? Or maybe you even have hardware that sits in the way of things, the packets have to transfer through your hardware and be inspected in a way, like a router might get in the way of those things.

[00:39:10] Robert Jacobi: Our secret sauce is that we are software that emulates the hardware that used to be required. So there are hardware companies buy this kind of routing and prevention, traffic mitigation. And we do it on the software side so that you as an agency or MSP, if you’re running a bunch of virtual machines, you can deploy this on your own. Certainly as a hosting company, you can deploy this across your entire enterprise.

[00:39:36] Nathan Wrigley: So you are dealing with very technical, the people that purchase from you they’re not me, for example. They are very technical. They’re in the data centers. The sort of technical end of the hosting companies. They understand what I’ve just butchered during this episode.

It’s not like a freelancer market. You will not be selling Black Wall as a plugin. You are dealing with, directly with hosting companies and the tech side of those hosting companies.

[00:40:01] Robert Jacobi: There’s a wonderful German word called Jein. So yes and no.

[00:40:04] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that is a good word.

[00:40:05] Robert Jacobi: For all the Germans listening. You still want to be able to control a lot of times exactly what kind of traffic comes in. You might want to get scraped by AI bots more than someone else does. Or you might want to turn off all scraping if you’re an e-commerce store and you’re worried about people taking your pricing and not allowing you to sell at your level.

We’ve had, and are currently reworking our entire WordPress plugin, to enable that end user control of that infrastructure. So it’s not running on your WordPress install, which is great because it’s not taking up resources, filling up your hard drive. But you can control, as an end user, the granularity of the traffic that’s able to access your site.

[00:40:45] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so you have a plugin, so you are reading what the hosting company is doing. You can view it through a GUI on your WordPress website, but you are not actually, it’s nothing to do with your WordPress install. You’re getting the data from your hosting company, and that is another layer away from you. Okay. That’s interesting. I didn’t realise that.

[00:41:04] Robert Jacobi: Yes, it empowers all these website owners, agencies, MSPs, to fine tune, for lack of a better term.

[00:41:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And then do you offer a sort of GUI for data breakdown, tables, graphs, charts, and ways to block things that you imagine are suspicious, and alerting and things like that?

[00:41:20] Robert Jacobi: Yep, as well as defaults for all sorts of things of course, just to make life easier for folks. You can go and visit our site and get some initial monitoring for your site for free. We enjoy having that as part of just an offering of the reporting and monitoring, you can see it. My traffic has been great, and then all of a sudden you look and it’s oh wait, it’s just been Chat GPT.

[00:41:40] Nathan Wrigley: Sad realization that the million visitors that seemed to be going to your excellent article were in fact Chat GPT.

[00:41:47] Robert Jacobi: Bots stealing that information.

[00:41:49] Nathan Wrigley: Sadly, time has got the better of us. We’re at the time where Robert has to walk away. I know he’s got a hard stop. Firstly, my apologies, dear listener for utterly butchering the OSI model. I’m sure there’s a lot of geeks out there who were just throwing things.

[00:42:01] Robert Jacobi: They’re going to kill, but my hope is everyone looks it up, a lazy Sunday afternoon understanding.

[00:42:06] Nathan Wrigley: Exactly. And that, really was my capacity to understand it. Doesn’t matter how much more I read it, I will be able to get no more out of it. But an important conversation, and one that we’ve never had before. We never get into the weeds of all of that. It’s always WordPress all the way down.

And this is what’s happening before, WordPress gets to put the bits and your screen. So really important and hopefully, like Robert said, it will encourage people to go and have a little look.

Robert Jacobi, thank you so much for chatting to me today, and good luck with the new rebranding of BotGuard into Black Wall. I hope that goes well too. Thank you so much.

[00:42:39] Robert Jacobi: Thank you Nathan.

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

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, creating a successful business in enterprise WordPress, and working to foster the WordPress community.

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 Rahul Bansal.

Rahul is the founder and CEO of rtCamp, a large agency that specializes in enterprise grade WordPress projects. He began his journey quite differently, starting as an individual blogger back in 2006, discovering WordPress in 2007, and gradually transitioning from being a publisher to a freelance developer, before founding rtCamp in 2009.

Today, rtCamp is an enterprise grade WordPress consultancy agency operating globally and trusted by clients such as Google, Meta, Automattic, News UK and Al Jazeera.

Rahul sheds his light on working with enterprise clients in the WordPress space. Many of us are familiar with WordPress in the context of small businesses and blogging, but the enterprise space demands additional layers of security and scalability. Rahul explains the factors that set enterprise projects apart, and why meticulous code reviews, and security audits are essential when working at this level.

He talks about the opportunities in the enterprise space, recounting how rtCamp initially stumbled into enterprise level projects, not even realizing their potential until a client’s high expectations led to a decision to market themselves as an enterprise agency.

We also discussed the role of WordPress in enterprise environments, from why Gutenberg has become a credible selling point due to its powerful editing capabilities, to how the platform’s flexibility supports varied enterprise needs.

Rahul also gets into the importance of positioning. How historical context offers advantages, and the expanding market that makes WordPress a compelling choice for large clients today.

Towards the end, we explore rtCamp’s innovative intern program, aimed at growing the WordPress talent pool, and the way they’re contributing back to the WordPress project, a win-win for the business and the broader community.

If you’ve ever considered what it takes to work with WordPress at the enterprise level, 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, Rahul Bansal.

I am joined on the podcast today by Rahul Bansal. Hello.

[00:03:47] Rahul Bansal: Hello.

[00:03:48] Nathan Wrigley: It is very nice to have you on the podcast today. We’re going to talk about the enterprise, which I confess is something that I only really know about because people talk about it. I’ve never worked in the enterprise, I’ve never worked with enterprise clients. So Rahul is here. He’s very much in the enterprise as you’re about to find out, and he’s going to educate me all about that.

So Rahul, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind just for a minute or two minutes, just tell us who you are, what you do in the WordPress space, where you work, your position there, and so on. A little potted bio.

[00:04:18] Rahul Bansal: Currently I am founder and CEO of rtCamp, which is a large agency specifically dealing in enterprise grade WordPress projects. I started quite differently, like I started as a individual blogger, back in 2006.

In 2007 I found WordPress. I started developing with WordPress in 2007. And slowly from being a publisher, I become freelance developer, and then around 2009 rtCamp started. So I’ve been with rtCamp for the last 16 years.

[00:04:46] Nathan Wrigley: That’s been quite a journey. I see the name rtCamp everywhere. And we should just say, so it’s spelt, lowercase r, lowercase t, and then Camp with a capitol C, a m p. Go and Google that, and have a look at what the team over there doing.

How big has the team grown to? How many employees, staff do you have over there now?

[00:05:05] Rahul Bansal: So currently we are 230 people, all spread over.

[00:05:08] Nathan Wrigley: That is truly an enormous agency. So bravo for growing that. That’s really incredible.

The first question that I want to ask though is, when does normal WordPress become enterprise WordPress? At what point do we cross the Rubicon where a site is, I don’t know, big enough, or your agency is working with a different type of client? Can you define what you think that means? And I’m sure that if you’re on the cusp of being an enterprise agency, this is something that, you know, may be slightly confusing.

[00:05:37] Rahul Bansal: Firstly, there is no formal definition to that. Many agencies believe they’re serving enterprise space when they’re not. Some people are actually serving enterprise space, but they don’t realise it.

So in my opinion, it’s where the requirement changes a lot. Like, for example, if we’re building a small WordPress site, which I don’t consider as an enterprise site, we will be tempted to pick first theme and plugin that matches our need, like if it works, if it gets a job done, that’s it.

But then in enterprise space, there is a lot of security and scalability concerns. These two concerns are very big. Something might be working all right, but then when you look at the code, you realise that there’s going to be a security issues, or there could be scalability issues. Many times, indy developer person, they design small WordPress plugins. They don’t have data or big enough site to test it on a large installation. So those things are not tested on really high traffic website. So enterprise can mean really high traffic website, with a lot of scalability requirement.

On the other hand, the traffic can be less, but the security requirement can be enormous. Consider the White House website. It was on the WordPress with the previous administration, and it’s again, on the WordPress with the new administration. So in both cases, I don’t think White House, like a website we can classify as a very high traffic website, but it is a very sensitive website.

It would be a lot embarrassing if that site gets hacked. So every piece of code that goes into White House website, which agency is working on it, will be thoroughly checked for security attack, for audit, for all the compliances. And this additional efforts is what makes it enterprisey, in my opinion.

[00:07:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it’s not necessarily the size of the client, or the fame, for want of a better word, of the client. It’s more about the kind of work that you’re doing in the background. So custom code largely, because you simply at that scale cannot have something off the shelf.

[00:07:28] Rahul Bansal: So we can have things off the shelf. The thing is, you cannot just take it and use it. You still have to own it in that sense. Like, for our clients also, we go and use many things from WordPress plugin directory. But then when we put it on this website, it is kind of like signed by us. So it’s like we have to verify, even if it is not coded by us, we have to verify line by line that it is following best coding practices, database queries will scale with high traffic, if it is a high traffic website.

There are many checks and balances in place. So no matter if you are doing in-house, like as a custom coding, or we are buying a premium plugin or using a free plugin, everything has to go through certain checks. And those checks are very expensive to do, because that’s a human labor. You have to literally go through things line by line. And in many cases, you have to put extra efforts to make it scalable with their existing system.

Because usually a large enterprise won’t use just a website in silos. It’ll be part of multiple system like authentication system, where if an employee joins a large organisation based on some rule, they might get automatic access to their website. Likewise, if they leave organisation, their access should be automatically revoked, or they have some CRM integrations, data integrations, some kind of asset, like digital asset management solution integration.

So all these have to be connected, and this all need to work together. So a lot of effort goes in doing these extra things, which are either don’t exist for small websites. So, enterprise website that I’m talking about, this can be really unknown website. We have a client which is basically a government public origin fund. Common people don’t even know about them, but they basically want pretty much all the big companies we know. Like, they have stake in all the big companies. Their asset is something like $400 billion in under management.

Most people don’t even know that company. But then it’s very sensitive because that money they’re managing is public money, it’s not like VC fund. It’s actually state reserve. Now, seriousness, we need to demonstrate in the security is very high, because if something gets hacked or somebody uploads the wrong investor report or something like portfolio report, it can have a lot of consequences.

[00:09:32] Nathan Wrigley: It kind of sounds to me as if the assurance that you are giving an enterprise client is basically that what we’ve built is, as far as we can tell, it’s bulletproof. We’ve gone through it line by line. We may have custom coded bits and pieces, but certainly the bits that we didn’t custom code, we are totally guaranteeing that this is going to be robust.

And also it’s sounds a bit like, if a client at an enterprise level approaches you and they say, can you do this? Your answer is yes. Basically, yes, we can do it. We can do it with WordPress. There may be a cost, but we can do it. There’s almost no scenario where a client would come to you and say, can you do this, forget the money, can you do it? The answer’s never no. The answer’s always going to be yeah, yeah, we’ll figure it out.

[00:10:15] Rahul Bansal: So that’s the thing, like if the budget has no limit then there is no limit on technology. Most often, like even where enterprise agency, WordPress has this large spectrum. So we end up with a lot of low quality leads, where somebody knocks on an enterprise agencies’ door and they really have budget constraint. They really want something really good out of the box, but they don’t want to pay for it. Or they don’t want to pay as high as it’ll require to deliver that kind of solution.

For some enterprises, budget is no limit, but then we try to be mindful of resources. For example, many enterprise agencies, including us, if you go to their GitHub account, they would have list of published themes and plugins. Most commonly plugins, themes rarely are used off the shelf. So we will build these plugins to ensure that the cost of rebuild project is less, like if we have to deliver another project, we try our best that we reuse as much as possible.

And that’s the open source spirit, that the entire WordPress committee follows. We use many times solutions that are already put in open source by our competing agencies. They also use our solution. So that’s where the enterprise solution with WordPress is also affordable. The right enterprise client that we target, usually have higher budget than we would need to develop because we are competing against a lot of experienced managers, which are very expensive, super expensive.

And when I is super expensive, I’m just talking about licensing fees. Before you hire an agency to write custom code for you, you have already paid a lot of money just for the right to use the software. With WordPress, that right to use costs zero. And then all the nice agencies in WordPress space, big, small, no matter what size they are, try their best to reuse existing solutions, to bring the cost down.

So enterprise WordPress, relatively, cost less than other enterprise CMS, but then it certainly costs a lot than building a small website. Like, you cannot go to an enterprise agency and expect in $500 your site to be built perfectly, because the requirement gathering phase, like talking to all stakeholders and understanding all the solutions they use inhouse can take like many days.

[00:12:15] Nathan Wrigley: So you may have answered this question just now with what you’ve just said. I feel that you’ve definitely gone into this territory, but it sounds like there’s a lot of line by line checking of everything. So for example, if you use a plugin off the repo, you’re going to go through that one line at a time. And you said this can be an expensive process. You’ve also said that obviously there’s benefits of using WordPress because you can take things that other people have used and so on.

But I guess at some point there’s got to be some sort of tipping point where you think, okay, WordPress is going to be good for this project, but it might not be good for that project. Is it always WordPress for you? Do you always lean into WordPress, or does there come a point where you say, do you know what, with the custom things that this particular client wants and what have you, lets just build the thing ourselves, let’s not rely on the CMS, or do you always lean in on WordPress?

[00:13:01] Rahul Bansal: Maybe it’s the nature of our positioning that we rarely get things that we cannot do in WordPress, so we always do things in WordPress. The boundary varies with how much off the shelf WordPress we’ll use, and how much custom we’ll use. In one of the project, I remember there was a specific data crunching process that we needed to build. And we felt that it’ll be better if it is built as a microservice and run independently.

So we built that in Python, but then it was talking to WordPress REST API. So that freedom we have from client, for example like that microservice, that microservice was never visible to any of the client’s editorial team. Everything they were doing, their only interface was WP admin. There was no second login or no second interface to them. It was just something was running on some server and magically data was going inside and outside WordPress.

And that’s the power of WordPress. It has so many APIs to communicate with outside world, like rest API, GraphQL, and even from the traditional XML-RPC. That WordPress can coexist with other systems very nicely. And that’s where we never face that, can we do this on WordPress or not? It’s like, can we do everything on WordPress, or do we need to put some minor things outside WordPress?

And those decisions are not the engineering limitation. Like, that microservice, we could have put it in WordPress also, but we felt that its architecture was more suited for independent microservice. That was the right call, it turned out to be right call. Much later that microservice grew independently.

[00:14:26] Nathan Wrigley: If we rewind the clock to the beginning when you were just beginning with WordPress and beginning the agency that ended up being rtCamp with your 230 odd employees, did you intend for what’s happened to happen? Did you always know that you wanted to grow something to the point where it became, air quotes, enterprise with many, many employees, or did it just evolve over time unexpectedly?

[00:14:49] Rahul Bansal: Yeah, it all happened unexpectedly. Like, I started as a professional blogger. I used to make money from advertising, affiliate marketing. So it’s like, I wasn’t doing anything remotely related to agencies.

So one thing led to another and then I started freelancing. Then even after freelancing, when I started rtCamp as an agency, because I was coming from bloggersphere, most of my initial client were bloggers, like independent bloggers. Somebody wanted a theme, somebody wanted a plugin, somebody wanted a sidebar, which sidebar just used to be a lot more popular in those early days of blogging. Like, people used to have MySpace, like experience on the web, like lots of widgets, email submission form, this pop up.

So in fact, the first enterprise client that walked into our door, that’s why I said like many agencies don’t even realise when they mingle with enterprise space. I kind of felt very irritated because they asked so many questions. They got our reference from LinkedIn. We had zero, we were not even using enterprise word anywhere in our branding, marketing, anywhere at all. But back in 2010, also, we made a good name for ourselves.

So anybody who shouted, hey, any WordPress references, our name used to pop up on social media. So we got that. And they sent us a very large procurement checklist, which we never heard of. All of our projects were like email exchange, two, three emails, money via PayPal, and emails used to be contact. Like, whatever you committed on email is the contract.

And suddenly there comes like this long PDF, Excel sheets with check boxes. Do you have a data storage policy? This policy, that policy. If we end up filling this, we’re not going make any profit with this project. So then one of my teammates said, let’s price in that. Let’s price in and see if they can afford it. So we literally added another zero to our pricing, literally like 5 times, 10 times. And we said like, hey, this is our minimum, do you want to go ahead?

I said, sure, like this is peanuts. And they were worried like, do you understand the project? You are quoting very less, your starting point is very less than our internal budget. So they came to our office, they were based in India. Luckily they were in the same city. They came to our office to audit us physically. They put like remarks like, you don’t have a fingerprint scanner in your biometric sensors in your office entry. There is no employee log.

But we are not storing any of your data. So this office is not the building where your data will reside. Your data will reside on AWS, or all those cloud servers. And then they got convinced. WordPress was very small then, and we were the only known agencies, which was fully committed to WordPress at that point. So they didn’t have choice two, three, so they kind of crossed the fingers and gave us that project.

It took six months to close. I was very pessimistic. It’s only after two, three years that we realised that they’d become our largest client by a huge margin. All my blogger friend put one side, and this single client, one side. And that revenue was growing very nicely, year on year. Renewals, they had this retainers, every year they were renewing without asking questions.

So I realise that it’s very hard to win these big clients, but once you are in it becomes very smooth journey, henceforth, like after that point. And then I think 2014 around, after two, three years data, when I saw that this client was consistently, for the last three years in a row, our biggest client. Zero sales effort, zero account issues, no negotiation on pricing, and everything was smooth.

So then I thought like we should go in to some enterprise space, and luckily around that time I had a call with Chris Lema. Chris Lema used to be available for consulting calls on Clarity. I’m not sure if that service is still around. And I still remember it was exactly 33 minutes that I talked to Chris. He repositioned rtCamp. In 33 minutes he gave me some amazing breakthrough idea.

And after that call, first time we told ourselves, we are enterprise WordPress agency from today. Until 2014 we were not identifying ourself or branding ourself as an enterprise workplace agency. That moment was the first time when we put in bold letters on our homepage, in SEO Meta, everywhere we added, we are enterprise, enterprise, enterprise WordPress.

[00:18:35] Nathan Wrigley: Can you remember that moment? So if you cast your mind back, when you added the zero and sent it, and there was obviously some suspicion in your mind that nothing’s going to come of this or what have you. Can you remember the feeling? So it’s an odd question because I’m asking you about your feelings, but can you remember the feeling when they came back and said, oh yeah, this is not as expensive as we’d imagined? That really must have opened up an entirely new world for you.

[00:19:00] Rahul Bansal: Yeah. So firstly, it was very unexpected because we were selling like WordPress projects for $100, $50, $500. The biggest was $1,000. We still remember we built a complete BuddyPress plugin for $900. And we were like so happy when that client sent us $100 tip. He rounded up to $1,000 and we were partying, like with that extra $100, we throw a party to our team.

And suddenly this client comes and they said, $5,000 is okay? Are you kidding me? Because they sent so much data I didn’t want to fill in, so I just thought, let’s just give them a number and they will walk away. We’ll not appear as a company who didn’t want to fulfill their data request. I thought, I will give them a reason to walk away, but then it didn’t walk out.

Initially I was still skeptical because they really demand too much data. Just imagine, we were like some 20 people agency at that time, and we spent three to six months in back and forth sales call. We didn’t have typical sales team at that point. Writing those long answers. We were not even understanding questions. The problem was not that we didn’t want to give data or we didn’t take security seriously, there were things that we never heard of.

It was all like foreign language to us. What are they asking? Why do they want to do that? I was not expecting lifetime revenue, that concept was not in our books then. So it was project, money in, money out, end of email, site goes live. Then the recurring revenues hosting companies. We were not into selling maintenance contract.

So it was a project kind of thinking like big, big economy mindset. So even with 5,000, I thought like, the amount of effort they’re putting us, we won’t be left with any decent margin after this project. And that was a true case. For first year there was not much margin left because they had put us through a lot of work to fulfill that project. And then we realised we underquoted after that also, because when the data, we had to talk to their Microsoft vendor. They were using Microsoft SharePoint. There were many rough edges that we had no idea could happen to us.

In year one, they were the highest revenue, but project was in loss. It’s only a year, two, three, it was very good profit. And then we have the strategy that we call now land and expand. Land big accounts, no matter whatever price point you wanted to do, go aggressive, and then once you are in, then you spread within the organisation.

[00:21:08] Nathan Wrigley: Oh that’s an interesting insight. So land and expand. Land the client, the big fish, if you like, with the knowledge that if you maintain the relationship over many years, the profit can build up. Not necessarily year one, but maybe a bit in year two, and year three, and year four, it’s beginning to mature.

And, it sounds like such an interesting story. And, again, I’m going to rewind back to before 2014, so before you added enterprise to your website and have you. Do you think if you had begun your journey today, that you would have the same capability to expand in the same way? Because it feels like there are now quite a few players. Perhaps when you began that was less of the case. You were competing in a much less crowded marketplace.

But it feels like everybody’s intent now is to become an agency which can call itself enterprise. And I’m imagining that you got your foot in the door at a really nice time where you became a name that everybody could trust, and the recommendations come in because of prior work, but maybe that would be more difficult now.

[00:22:08] Rahul Bansal: The market is much bigger now. In fact, just imagine WordPress market share. When we were building the first initial websites, there was not even custom post types that were present in WordPress. So all the WordPress plugins, we used to do a lot of hacks. There was not standardisation. So a lot of things happened with WordPress as a platform. WordPress evolved. The market share has become so big. It’s easier to sell. We have so many examples like from White House to large publishers. And globally, it’s not like just the American companies are using WordPress. India’s second largest publisher also uses WordPress. So does Al Jazeera in Qatar.

So there are many big websites all over the world so it makes WordPress easy to sell. The market is big. There is a precedence where you can pitch somebody, this is WordPress used by so and so. I believe that no matter which lead you are dealing with, so if you have a lead from a certain industry, a certain geography, you will find a WordPress success story in their geography. You will find WordPress being used by your prospect’s competition. That makes it easier to sell WordPress.

So, yeah, the competition is more because opportunity is bigger. The pie is a lot bigger. Otherwise we would’ve stuck to the same size. Every year we are adding more people because we are able to get more work for them, even with these new agencies coming up. In fact, it’s easier to build WordPress agency, or any kind of enterprise grade agency now, because the recipe is quite clear. Because we can look at how other agencies are doing and you can take some lessons from them.

At that time we had no idea. Like, in fact, we didn’t have the idea that we should position ourselves enterprise grade agency, that was the call with Chris. Before that call, we had no idea that we should be labeling ourselves as an enterprise grade agency.

[00:23:42] Nathan Wrigley: If clients approach you, and it sounds like this may not be the case. It feels like people are approaching you because you build WordPress, not inquiring whether or not you would do a WordPress project for them. What are the one or two bits that you always bring out when a client says, well, why would we go with WordPress? What are the one or two top line items which you think, okay, if we’re going to build you a website, we’re going to choose WordPress, and here’s the best reasons at enterprise? So we’re not talking about a mom and pop store, that it really doesn’t matter if it goes down a bit. What are the one or two things which you bring out when an enterprise client wants to know why WordPress?

[00:24:18] Rahul Bansal: First we want to reassure them that WordPress is the right platform. So this is a difference between a product company and agency. A product has a landing page, which is more similar, it gets us to a lot of people. But an agency pitch is tailored for every client, every prospect. So our first goal is to find competition. So which are the competitors for this particular client, prospective client, and see if they’re using WordPress. If your competition is using WordPress, you will feel a lot more comfortable going after it, because nobody wants to be first, especially in large enterprises.

Another way we define enterprise is that, when you are not buying from out of your pocket. In a large organisation, your job is not to save the money or find cheapest solution, your job is to deliver result so that it can go very nicely in your annual review report. I still believe people, especially in enterprise, are looking for safety as a first because they know that they have budget to build anything under the sun.

So usually we say less like, WordPress can do this, WordPress can do that. Because for everything that WordPress or any platform doesn’t do out of the box, they have budget. What they need to know is that it’s secure, it’s safe, it’ll scale well. And if some government approaches us, so we show that public sovereign fund, that they’re managing. So that client has a special permission with us, like we cannot refer them publicly, that government agency, but we can refer them to other government agencies in private conversations. So that is how we convince like, okay, this is similar people to you who are using WordPress.

And I think safety is still the first thing that people are looking for because, it’s not even WordPress, it starts with open source. There is something, somebody did some marketing where people believe or have this misconception that open source will be easy to hack, because you can see the code, you can easily hack. That is our first step. If client mentions it explicitly, we go all in. Even if the client doesn’t mention it, if the prospect says that we are looking for rating interest, we still will verify. Are you sure that you are sorted on WordPress being safe? Any concerns, any doubts?

And then features, because WordPress has no match. And I’m not saying this as a WordPress agency. The Gutenberg editor itself alone is miles apart. If you go to any other platform, the editing capabilities are nowhere close to Gutenberg editor. Gutenberg editor demo itself is a deal breaker in many cases. We just show them Gutenberg editor, and they’re like, wow, is this possible? Is this thing real? Is this some mockup? No, this is website. After the call, we are going to send you a URL, go and try your hands on. This is no fake, that vaporware demo where you see something on my screen, but in reality it doesn’t work like that. This is the real website. Go and try it.

[00:26:53] Nathan Wrigley: That’s really interesting because in the non-enterprise, that message hasn’t necessarily landed. Gutenberg is, it’s very divisive issue, isn’t it? Whether you use it or not. And it’s curious that you are saying that it’s one of the key things which leads to the success.

Can you just dig into that a little bit? What are some of the aspects of Gutenberg which make the clients think, okay, this is great, this is perfect, this is just what we need? What are some of the features that you draw out of the block editor?

[00:27:19] Rahul Bansal: So I think the main difference that we feel like compared to the consumer WordPress, I would say. The consumer WordPress access technologies on very different platform, like proprietary. Just imagine somebody is using Instagram to create reels. With that mindset they come to WordPress Media Library and expect video editing experience like that to happen in WordPress, they will be disappointed.

But here we’re talking to people in large companies, very large companies, using legacy systems, probably from the nineties. They might have a desktop application to update a webpage, some ugly looking forms. We even have a memory where a client, their publishing workflow they had to write an article using a very poorly designed HTML web form, and they had to upload images via FTP. And then they had to reference images in document. There was no drag and drop interface.

So now if somebody like this person comes to Gutenberg, it’s like an iPhone moment for them. With that being said, Gutenberg itself is a very powerful editor. We haven’t come across a case where somebody said, oh, this is not flexible. As I said, like enterprise have a very good balance around the feature versus maintenance. For example, so Gutenberg may have one or two features less compared to a third party page builder, but then being part of Core, they’re assured that five years down the line, it will be very well maintained.

Security is more important to them because one less plugin means one less attack vector. Less things to break, less things to train, less things to maintain going forward. We as an agency develop so many sites on Gutenberg that we have our own libraries and our own patterns. So it’s like, whenever a requirement comes, we can easily map it to Gutenberg.

[00:28:51] Nathan Wrigley: I think that’s the difficult thing to imagine if you’ve never built your own block or you’ve never delved into patterns. But certainly at the enterprise level, if a client comes to you and said, we have this repeatable thing, and we need to put this repeatable thing on page every time. And honestly it’s real chore. And you can build a block, and they drop the block in, and now they just fill out some fields, drag an image in here, and suddenly, boom, it’s exactly on the front end what were expecting.

It’s that kind of thing, isn’t it? It’s that, almost like an app inside of an editor. So we’ve got a block which consumes perfectly the content that you want, and we can adapt it if your needs change. But if you’ve never really gotten into that, it’s hard to imagine. It’s just a bunch of paragraphs and images, but it’s not, it’s so much more powerful than that.

[00:29:34] Rahul Bansal: One thing I would say that, if you look at any large corporation, they have something called design systems, where they have their brand guidelines across products, not just websites like, across mediums like print and everywhere. With Gutenberg, it is very intuitive and easy to map the design system into WordPress. So that is where Gutenberg shines, that you can create patterns, you can create theme json. You can give them a starting point which blends very well with their existing design system.

That is where half of the job gets done. Like, compared to indie hackers or small businesses, large enterprises are not running after lots of plugins. They don’t want to try a hundred plus blocks plugin, a plugin with 200 blocks. They want to restrict number of choices. They want to have less number of blocks, but properly weighted with the user’s guidelines. So it’s like, the freedom they demand is easily given by Gutenberg, and with the assurance of, it is going to be around long term. It’ll be very well maintained. It’ll be very well supported, and performance. I still feel Gutenberg has much better performance, the markup, SEO qualities, top notch.

[00:30:35] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s just the constraints that you can put around that editing experience. So if the client comes and they want this inexperienced user to be able to create content but have boundaries so they can, I don’t know, they can add an image here and it will be, it doesn’t matter, they just put it in and it will output perfectly. And here’s where the text goes, but they can’t change the fonts, you’re not allowed to change the color and what have you. All of those kind of constraints around the editing experience. It’s just miraculous really what’s possible.

And I think it gets lost because the majority of people, I’m imagining using WordPress are sort of tinkering with Core blocks and it can become confusing. There’s lots of choices. You try one thing and it doesn’t work out, and you throw your hands in the air. But if you’ve built the perfect thing, then all of those guardrails are in place and it will output the perfect thing every time. I think that’s really interesting.

How do you grow, and how do you find your next employees? Because I’m guessing at the level that you are now at, you must have some fairly exacting specifications when you put out a job description. And WordPress is becoming an increasingly JavaScript based thing. Lot more technical difficulties. Where do you find your talent, and is it becoming harder to find?

[00:31:40] Rahul Bansal: This would be unique to literally us. We have what we call our own training center where we, every year we take some 50 students from college, who recently graduated. Every six months we take 25 to 30 students from colleges. We put them through six months of training, like a complete, they get paid to learn WordPress for six month. They have no obligation to continue with us. They can join our competition, they can do anything with the WordPress.

But we really get this talent and this job is very popular in India. So this training we run, the pay scales are very popular in India. So last year also we had some 90,000 applications for 60 positions. We literally have to build a platform. So we have a campus adding platform, its name is Chitragupta. Chitragupta is basically is responsible for managing the ledger of your good and bad work. So in Hindu mythology. So we built  Chitragupta, which basically scans your GitHub repos and assigns your grade.

And those 9,000 people gets graded. And then we interview from top to bottom until 60 positions gets filled. So last time we had to interview some 1,200 students, by the time 60 students got selected.

Then we put them to the six month training. Our course is public, so people know what is going to be in the course, and so we find a lot of passionate people. Many times by the time they join our course, I’ve already gone through it from the public website that we have learn.rtcamp.com. From there, they already have checked it. And then we put them through the six month training. After that, this thing we started this year only. After six month training, we put them six months into the WordPress.

So WordPress Core has a mentorship program running on for new contributors. So this year we enrolled 10 people, managed by Automattic and Google employees, senior employees. So they are mentoring this people for further. So first year we, we invest them heavily. Zero revenue, only investment in year one.

And then from year two, we start getting, like some client work done from them. And this is something turned out to be very great for us from last three years. At some point we felt, there are same number of people switching between agencies, and net new addition to the WordPress worker pool was getting stagnant, especially around Covid.

I felt the way people used to discover life with WordPress, or a professional life with WordPress was mostly through WordCamps or meetup groups, and when that Covid happened, we suddenly missed those years, when new people didn’t come to the WordPress, as many as they used to come before.

So there was this gap that started hurting large agencies, like us. Because if we look at a small website, then the enterprise budget appears a lot, but there’s always a limit. No company approves unlimited budget for any venture. Like for every project there’s a budget. It’s usually large enough, but there’s always a number and, as talent was getting more expensive, WordPress was getting unaffordable at some point.

So I talked to some medium publishers, medium sized publishers, not the big ones, who complain a lot. Like the good WordPress agencies are either sold out or too expensive. It’s like WordPress is suddenly getting unaffordable, and that is when we started in this hiding experiment, where we onboarded people every year. And this is, we are doing from last four years.

So we have been hiring for many years, but early it was 5, 10 people. This massive scale of hiring we started from last three to four years. And, it turned very well for us. Like all these people in second year clocked, like in agency billable hours is a very big metric, and in second year, these people clock 90%, more than 90% billable hours.

[00:35:08] Nathan Wrigley: That’s incredible. What a great idea. Can I just ask, just to clarify with that, is that an in-person thing? So you come to a place where 60 people gather, and the tuition is taking place in the same room, or is it an online thing or?

[00:35:23] Rahul Bansal: So before Covid it was, it used to be in the same room, but the scale was 20 people at that time only. After Covid, we made it completely remote. It’s now completely remote. It’s still in the same time zone because, these are the Zoom calls, recordings. The time zone synchronization is needed. So that’s why it’s currently India only. But we are expanding it to other territories, and we are seeing like if we can create similar talent pool in other part of the world. Because,early it was in n office, then it went remote over Zoom. And this year, it is going async. We have a dedicated department, which is called Learning and Development Department.

So our agency head has implemented most lessons in a synced way, so that people can wake up at different time. And so it’s like they won’t get blocked. They can learn asynchronously, they can complete this six month course asynchronously.

[00:36:11] Nathan Wrigley: It just sounds like the appetite is incredible. The numbers that you just mentioned there, I think you said something like 1200 or something like that, people for 90 places. That’s just remarkable. So the appetite really is there. It seems like such a commendable project as well, in that you are putting out a limited, you know what, you can manage. 60 people out into the workplace. Some of them may end up working with you. Some may end up working with your competitors. But you’ve put 60 people out there who are really credible at pushing the boundaries of what WordPress can do, and hopefully just making a start on their career.

[00:36:44] Rahul Bansal: Yeah.

[00:36:45] Nathan Wrigley: But I know that it’s not just limited to that. And, I would like to get into this just before we finish, because I think this is important. Over the last few years we see these metrics every year of companies who put time into the WordPress project in general, in a whole manner of different ways. They may be sponsoring events. They may be committing staff to Five for the Future and what have you.

And the company, your company, rtCamp, it always seems to be right at the forefront of that in a growing way. I’d just like to applaud you for that and give you an opportunity to say what it is that you do so that we’ve got an impression of just how much good you are doing apart from obviously, having a very profitable agency and what have you, how much good you’re putting back into the community as well. So just outline your commitments to the WordPress project.

[00:37:29] Rahul Bansal: So, as I mentioned that, so we have multiple ways of contributing. So as we hire a lot of from college, unfortunately we cannot have a lot of Core committers with us, but we take care of the other end. For example, these 10 people, we have a commitmentt now internally that every six months, so we will put 10 people full-time, like full-time as in literally full-time. A hundred percent of their time will go in working on WordPress project for six months.

And then this will be rotated by next batch. So in rotation there will be at least 10 people. As we grow further, then we’ll make it 15, 20. And we want to keep this ramping up this number. So there will be always, WordPress Core will have enough junior people to pick the task. So, that good first issues will, somebody will be looking at them.

Then we have a QA people, work into the QA team, other teams. I myself as WordCamp organizer, for WordCamp Asia. We have other people contributing to different part of WordPress.

We have a training course, which is public domain, in public domain. We started that much before learn.wordpress.org is there. Now  learn.wordpress.org is there, it is much better resource. But then this course was there for many years, and many other agencies use it. So that is one of the way to build human capital. So this word actually drives me a lot. We want to consciously put our efforts in developing human capital of WordPress.

Because in the end, it’s people that do the job, no matter how fancy it is. You need a human to put a prompt to the AI. ChatGPT won’t build things on its own. You need to, you need a human to ask creative questions. And we want to ensure that WordPress economy continues to grow, and it never falls short of people. So we hire a lot of junior people. We put into the workplace. We publish our videos tutorial. We publish our training material also in the public domain.

Many companies use it, and we expect no link back, also, no credit. Because sometimes they have a apprehension that if they know, this is why rtCamp course will, for, example, our training course site doesn’t require registration. So if you’re sending your employees to learn WordPress on our site, we won’t track them. We won’t solicit them. We have no way of knowing who’s learning. Google Analytics just shows traffic. A lot of traffic is coming to those training sites, but we have no personally identify information tracked there.

[00:39:45] Nathan Wrigley: I would imagine that in every aspect of your business, except this, maybe, there’s gotta be some measurable ROI. Okay, we put this in, we get this out. Do you have any metrics to measure your commitment to the community, or is it just putting your finger in the air and thinking, okay, last year, our business did this, let’s put, I don’t know, whatever it might be. Do you have a pro forma that you stick to? A number of hours, a number of people? Or is it just, yeah, this feels right this year. Because you can’t measure this. And in some cases, I imagine people would think, yeah, they’re probably overdoing it a little bit over there and what have you.

[00:40:21] Rahul Bansal: So, we have a top line mandate that, so it’s like, internally we divide engineers in three categories in rtCamp. The junior ones were like less than two years in rtCamp. The senior ones like two to five years. And lead levels were like more than five years with us. The junior one, we target 20% of their time for WordPress Core. And the medium level, the seniors, 10%, and lead level is 5%. Lead level is very hard, because we have very less lead engineers. The demand supply gap is more evident on senior and lead level. But then, these metrics are, so our office structure is that we have some called business needs.

So every people need to submit their 20% report. Not only they need to submit the hours report, like they have their hours went into the WordPress Core or different part. They have to compile what are the issues they solved. It’s not like you’re just making time entries. You have to tell in the leadership quarterly review that I have 50 people in my business units, and together they clock 3000 hours. And this is what we achieved in 3000 hours. And this is approved. The props messages we see in WordPress Slack, those screenshots, if our employee names is mentioned, are taken screenshots and filing into those review reports.

Three people got props from my team. The WordPress Core release notes, like with major releases. So those contributor list also presented by them. If somebody’s doing some make WordPress blog post or activity, those are also tracked by them. So the heads compile this report, from like bottom ups and then present in leadership meeting. So this is not accidental.

The material ROI is very hard to measure. We cannot say that, oh, we made like X dollars because of this effort. I think, as a salesperson, when I tell a client like, hey, I’m going to give you an engineer who knows WordPress very well. I’m more confident if that person has contributed six months to the WordPress Core. And their patches is weighted by some amazing people in WordPress community, especially senior ones. It’s like a win-win situation for all. This gives me a very, very well trained people to sell.

[00:42:16] Nathan Wrigley: That’s exactly how I was just thinking about it. This kind of win-win cycle of you put people into WordPress, and obviously at a junior level, more time and I can understand that. That makes sense. Presumably the ones who are more experienced, they’ve got other work to be doing. But also they’ve probably gained a ton of experience doing those prior years of extra hours.

So you put the hours in, but also they contribute to Core, but they get experience back out. They’ll be exposed to all sorts of different things that your projects would never have put them in front of, presumably. So they’ll be touching on subject matters. Getting into plugins, themes, blocks, code, Core, whatever it may be in a whole range of different ways than they would be. So like you say, it’s like you slap my back, I’ll slap yours a little bit. Win-win. WordPress wins, you win.

[00:43:06] Rahul Bansal: There are three wins here. The person, that student, who came right out of the college, and usually in college, people here, people have some negative perception about professional life. That companies are evil. You are going to do labor. Somebody will steal your credit, and here they’re on their own. Like they go into the WordPress community on their own. They sign a patch with their name. They file a Trac ticket with their name. They get props in their name. They get treated very well by contributor. If somebody makes mistakes, WordPress committee is full of nice people. Nobody’s going to pull them down. Nobody’s going to shout at them.

Everybody corrects them with respect and compassion, and that helped them grow as a person. Like, they become better human. They become better coder. And that empathy, we see that, when they become senior engineers, and when they’re reviewing some junior’s code, they remember that, hey, when I was, it was my first day in WordPress community, and I made that patch. I made one mistake, but somebody was nice to me, so I have to pass it on. So that niceness cycle continues.

And, the biggest win is that these people like, who has an incredible job satisfaction. They love open source more. Many of them don’t join for the love of open source, they’re at a point when they, join rtCamp, they’re at a point when their college is ending. They just want to get a job, and secure a financial life. Whatever jobs comes their way, they’re okay with it. Open source, closed source, not much preference. But once they’re in, and then we take them through this one year of tour, like six months in training center, then six months in WordPress community, they become the advocate of open source for life.

And that is a very most important win for us because we want people to believe in open source. We don’t want them to say open source is good because their company is selling it. We want them to have that faith that open source is the right way to do things. And that faith is very important for growth. You cannot mug up your mission statement and stand for it.. You have to believe in something to stand for it.

[00:45:00] Nathan Wrigley: What a profoundly interesting thing to have said. I think that’s just fabulous. I think your company is doing so many interesting things. It’s obviously, financially it’s working out, but just the position that you’ve painted there of the way that you are treating your employees, and the autonomy that you’re giving them, and the future opportunities that you are giving them. And the training opportunities giving them, just remarkable. And I’m profoundly impressed by what you’ve been doing.

Unfortunately, time is our enemy. We’re going to call it a day there. Rahul, thank you so much for chatting to me today. That has been an incredible journey. Long may it continue. I wish you and rtCamp all the success that you can possibly have the future.

[00:45:39] Rahul Bansal: Thank you, Nathan. Thanks for having me on this podcast.

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

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case WooCommerce innovations, and trends selling online.

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 James Kemp. James is the Core Product Lead for WooCommerce. After working with WooCommerce, running a plugin shop for 10 years, he joined the team at the end of 2023 to help shape the future of e-commerce.

James talks about his journey with WordPress and WooCommerce, and explains his role at Automattic, where he’s tasked with connecting the community’s feedback to the developments in WooCommerce, ensuring that the Woo platform continually evolves and improves.

He discusses the innovations within WooCommerce, the challenges of balancing the needs of small and large scale stores, and how the team navigates an environment filled with both competitors and opportunities.

He gets into the positive impact of WooCommerce’s recent rebranding, and how the system positions itself amidst the ever-growing competition from SaaS platforms like Shopify.

James shares his insights into the trends shaping e-commerce, like the seamless integration of newer technologies and consumer buying habits.

If you’re keen to understand the breadth of WooCommerce’s impact on e-commerce, or are curious about the direction of online shopping, 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 James Kemp.

I am joined on the podcast by James Kemp. Hello James.

[00:02:50] James Kemp: Hello, how are you?

[00:02:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Nice to speak to you. James is on the podcast today to talk all things WooCommerce. And he really is a very, very credible person to talk about WooCommerce, because James is the Core Product Lead for WooCommerce over at Automattic.

However, when I say that title, James, I don’t really know what it means. Will you just enlighten us? And also, if you feel like throwing some other biographical information at us about your history with WordPress and things like that, feel free.

[00:03:17] James Kemp: Of course. Yeah, I mean, we’ve spoken a couple of times on a podcast like this. I don’t know if we’ve done the Tavern one before.

But yeah, as a quick introduction, I started using WordPress in 2009, and I started building with WooCommerce in 2011. And from that time I worked with customers and specifically like building websites for customers who needed websites.

And in that time I built up a collection of plugins, which I sold on a premium basis, which eventually turned into IconicWP, which was a WooCommerce plugin shop with 14 or 15 premium plugins. Sold that, well, that was acquired in 2021 by Liquid Web, Stellar. And I stayed there for a couple of years, carried on working. My whole team came over with the acquisition. We carried on just working as we were really, but under this kind of bigger brand of products and WordPress software, which was quite nice. It was nice to kind of get that experience from companies selling products like we were, but they were at a much bigger scale than we were at the time. That was a nice experience.

And then, yeah, towards the end of that, I reached out to Paul, who was the CEO, at the time, of WooCommerce, and just kind of said, I feel like I could have a good impact on WooCommerce itself, is there anything there for me? And I was kind of open to whatever that might look like. There was no job description that I applied for. I just kind of reached out and said, this is what I want to do, this is what, I like doing, this is what I’m good at. And then, yeah, here we are just over a year since I joined.

I joined as a product manager. And like you say, now I’m a Core Product Manager, which is a new role within WooCommerce. So a Product Manager would be, and for context, there’s eight or nine Product Managers within WooCommerce. When I joined, we each kind of had an area of focus. So my area was order management. So any project or improvement or just, my day to day would be looking at order management and, how can we make this better? It kind of shifted outside of that a bit as well into other areas. But each Product Manager has that kind of role where they’re focused on one kind of key area of WooCommerce.

But there was never really any product manager that had an overall vision of the whole product. And that’s what the Core Product Manager role is. So I’m less focused on one specific area, and more focused on just, how can we make the whole thing better? And part of that role is kind of connecting the dots a bit. One team’s working on this, another team’s working on that, how do they overlap? But also connecting the community dots to the stuff that we actually put out there. So, what are people asking for? What are the common kind of requests that people have, or the complaints that people have? Or even the positives that people have and, how can we make those things better?

[00:06:12] Nathan Wrigley: So is there just one of you? So there’s one Core Product Lead. There’s not multiple of those.

[00:06:18] James Kemp: Correct.

[00:06:18] Nathan Wrigley: Oh gosh, that’s really interesting. So you’ve got like the 10,000 mile high view of the entire project. And so you are kind of open to suggestions, innovations, improvements, tweaks, that all comes under the purview of your job.

[00:06:32] James Kemp: Correct, yeah. There’s different areas. There’s what we call product, which is kind of the user facing experience. And by user I mean merchant, and probably customer as well, so the visual aspects of the product that people interact with. And then there’s the platform side of things, which are backend architecture and performance and all those kinds of things.

So I’m primarily focused on the front end aspect, not front end but, you know, the core experience we call it. I am actually focused a lot on the platform side of things at the moment as well, because the person who usually does that is on sabbatical, so I’m kind of helping out a bit there. And it’s quite nice to have, you know, that understanding as well, for approaching core experience type things. And it also encompasses the WooCommerce app and many of our premium extensions, many of our marketplace extensions, premium or free.

[00:07:22] Nathan Wrigley: I’m guessing that if you ask anybody the question, is their inbox pretty full? You know, the to-do list that you have is pretty full, everybody would probably say, yeah, I’ve got plenty on my plate. But it sounds as if you may well have a lot on your plate.

Now, I don’t know if there’s a lot that you’ve got to deal with in there, and you’ve got a lot of ideas, and innovations that you’d like to push forward. But is it fair to say that there’s a ton of innovation still to be done inside of WooCommerce?

[00:07:46] James Kemp: Yeah, for sure. It’s something that I’m still trying to figure out. Like, how do you stay on top of all of these things and, where is my input within this most valuable? Because I’m still working alongside all the other product managers.

And actually that’s been really nice to kind of connect with a product manager that’s working on something specific, and work with them to make that the best it can be for WooCommerce.

But yeah, I’m still trying to figure out how to like organise all of these things so they’re not just in my head, but they’re out there in a manageable way.

[00:08:18] Nathan Wrigley: How do you get intelligence about what needs to be done? I mean, obviously there’s the team within Automattic that you deal directly with, I would’ve thought of, but do you keep your door of your office kind of half open a little bit? Are you prepared to listen to community suggestions?

And again, I’m not trying to get you to give out your email address or anything, but is there that element still? Do you still listen to people out in the community, users, and what have you? Do they come directly to you, or is there some kind of filtration process which people have to go through in order to get ideas in your head?

[00:08:46] James Kemp: There’s many ways. Yeah, I think one of the things that I love most is talking to the people that actually use it. And I do that primarily on X or Twitter. I talk to a lot of people over there.

The downside to that is the majority of them are agencies and developers. It’s not a downside, the downside being that I don’t get that kind of open communication necessarily with merchants directly. So if I want to talk to a merchant that’s more of a filtered, as you say, it’s an intentional, you know, I have to reach out to a merchant and schedule a call and all that kind of stuff. There is the occasional merchant on X, but it’s not their stomping ground.

So yeah, I’m also in the Slack, the WooCommerce community Slack. Some of what I’ve implemented is these kind of external channels within our own Slack. So one example of that is a project we’re working on for fulfillment statuses, where I got Becca from Kestrel WP and Patrick Garman from Minesize into one of our internal Slack rooms to discuss and kind of help shape this project. So they’re directly involved in that way in stuff that we’re working on.

And I think something that we really want to do is be really transparent with like, this is what we’re working on. You may well have seen over the course of the last year or so that that has been the case, via GitHub discussions, via the Developer Blog, via Slack, the community Slack. But yeah, I love getting feedback from people on Twitter. I still don’t know what to call it, Twitter or X.

[00:10:18] Nathan Wrigley: I often wonder if the sort of inside baseball of WordPress is a little bit hard to penetrate, because I’m imagining there’s a lot of people who use WordPress that in a million years have never opened up the WordPress Slack, GitHub is not a thing for them. And I’ve always wondered how people such as yourself, you know, in senior positions get that information. How does it get to you? And X, Bluesky, whatever the alternative is, that’s a really interesting way of kind of completely circumventing that process. I will make sure that your profile, your X profile is linked in here and then people can reach out on that basis. Yeah, that’s great. Thank you.

Let’s just paint the picture of Woo, and how big it is because we keep hearing the statistic. The one that everybody talks about is this 43%, which is the WordPress statistic. And I never quite know how to manage that in my head, what that exactly means. But a fairly sizable number is also the e-commerce side, the WooCommerce side of WordPress.

Where are we at in terms of the web, and in terms of WordPress, how much of WordPress is WooCommerce, and how much of the internet is Woo? And every time I hear this number, it changes a little bit. But every time I hear it, it’s still breathtakingly large.

[00:11:24] James Kemp: Yeah, that’s an interesting one actually. In terms of how much of WordPress is Woo, I’m not sure on that. I think we could probably calculate that based on the figures I do have, which is how much of e-commerce is WooCommerce, and that is 37%.

[00:11:41] Nathan Wrigley: 37%. Okay, so whatever the percentage is, be it the top million websites or the top 10,000 websites, whatever that metric is, let’s assume that that’s solid and safe. 37% is done on a WooCommerce platform. That is breathtaking.

[00:11:56] James Kemp: Which is a huge amount, for the listeners, and for you if you want to check it out later. If you go to woocommerce.com/newsroom, we update these numbers every month. We have some numbers there, like there’s 3.6 million live installations. 37% of e-commerce sites are powered by WooCommerce. There’s 1,000 plus official marketplace extensions. That’s actually going to grow, I think substantially this year.

And then, yeah, some other stats that are listed there, which I think are useful to keep an eye on. And there’s, I believe the team that updates those numbers kind of, they take the data primarily from Store Leads, which is a data gathering outfit. And I think they kind of dial them back a bit, rather than, you know, inflating them, I think they actually go the other way.

[00:12:41] Nathan Wrigley: In terms of the trend of that, so the 37%, I’m not looking at that chart at the moment, but is your impression that, has it stagnated, has it gone up broadly in the last, let’s say five years, something like that? Is WooCommerce basically growing, stagnating, declining?

[00:12:54] James Kemp: Over the five year, I would expect it’s gone up. There’s no graph to look at. There probably is somewhere, but I don’t have it in front of me now. But I do know that this was updated this week, I believe. And it was updated from 35% to 37. So there’s definite growth there. And I would expect, just the nature of e-commerce in general, that that number’s grown over the course.

[00:13:16] Nathan Wrigley: When you say that, what’s the thing in your head which is promoting you to say the nature of e-commerce? Because I really don’t follow e-commerce, but I have this impression that during the lockdown period, 2019 and on, it felt like everybody, for very credible reasons, had to move whatever they were selling to an online format. So I imagine there was a bump there.

But also it feels like the world is now inundated with pocket size technology, which means that I can buy anything 24/7, no matter where I am. And so it feels like high streets in the UK, the shutters are going up. Bricks and mortar shops seem to be closing. Certainly where I live, that is a broad trend. It’s not particularly rapid, but it’s definitely a trend.

And I’m imagining that the confluence of mobile technology, ubiquity of internet connection, computers available all over the place, certainly in the country where you and I both live. It feels like this inexorable rise, this trend towards purchasing things at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, sitting on a sofa, a bus, wherever you might be. It does feel like that’s the way the world is moving. Are those kind of the intuitions that you have when you say WooCommerce is rising for obvious reasons?

[00:14:23] James Kemp: Yeah, exactly. I think just the nature of the internet and the online world has kind of exponentially grown since its inception, right? And I would expect that e-commerce will grow with it.

I think one of the greatest things about the internet is that you can buy online. I should look into the history actually, but I can’t imagine what the thought process was back when the internet was invented. Did they imagine that e-commerce would be a thing? That people would buy stuff, even from the other side of the world, and have it shipped out to them in a matter of days or weeks.

And I just think as technology evolves, and we’ve seen the boom in AI, and just the boom in like generational development on computers, and coding and all of that is advancing, and I think e-commerce will follow suit as well.

[00:15:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it feels like there’s no place but an upward trend for e-commerce. Now, whether or not WooCommerce fits into that landscape perfectly in the next decade, we’ll see. But it feels like I, and I can really only rely on myself, I feel like I’m going to buy more things online in the decade to come than I am this year. It feels like each and every year, my desire to get on my bike and go into the town centre dwindles, and I’m far more likely to buy things online.

And now the merchants have pivoted their offerings so that, you know, if you don’t like it, you can freely return it and things like that. So even the impediments that were there have suddenly changed, and it’s just remarkable.

And also the mere fact, just capture in your head for a moment, the fact that you can get all of this for no money down. The WooCommerce platform, and I know, in order to get the best out of it, you will definitely want marketplace things, third party, but other places as well. But the thing is free. It’s completely free. And I find that utterly remarkable. I just think that’s breathtaking in all honesty, that that’s available.

[00:16:15] James Kemp: Yeah, I think it’s one of the key selling points about WooCommerce is that you can get started for free, as close to free as possible, when you account for hosting and transactional fees that naturally come with any platform.

But on top of that, with WooCommerce specifically, and with the age of AI now, you could make WooCommerce do what you want it to do for free. And every site could be tailored to specific needs, and like a specific execution of functionality without too much technical knowledge, which I think is really interesting.

And you’ve seen people are building apps, and I’ve built a few as well, specifically for needs that they want to solve. I saw one yesterday, I think it was Maddie on, Twitter, I can link to it. She built an app to automatically put an emoji over faces in photos. I don’t know if you’ve seen, when parents share photos of other people’s children and that kind of thing, they typically put an emoji over the face. She said she was getting annoyed at having to do that with every photo. But we’re in that era now where you can kind of roll these things with no technical knowledge, whether the output is good, I think is questionable, but it’s pretty good.

[00:17:24] Nathan Wrigley: Does the advent of AI, and what you’re suggesting, you can add your third party stuff, if you like, for want of a better word, to WooCommerce with the assistance of AI. Does that undermine the longevity of the free, open source WooCommerce project? Because I imagine that there’s a lot of underpinnings there, you know, the marketplace that WooCommerce, as I imagine those plugins that are sold to add different functionality and what have you, that must in some way pay for the freeness of it all.

Does AI, does that concern you? You know, that if we erode the need to purchase third party software in order to get out what you desire, yeah, does that erode the possibility of WooCommerce being free in the future?

[00:18:05] James Kemp: I don’t think so. I think it assists. I think it depends what you’re making. Like, I wouldn’t want to build out a full subscriptions platform just using an AI prompt. And maybe that will become more advanced in the future. I think as someone running a business, you don’t want to be dealing with this code yourself, maintaining it, making sure it stays up to date. And I think that’s the case for, or that has been the case since e-commerce software existed. There used to be a trend of rolling your own e-commerce solutions, and I think that’s less likely to happen these days.

[00:18:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s a good point. If you think about just a regular WordPress website, if it’s just a brochure site with no e-commerce attached, go with the AI, you know, it seems like there’s loads of scope there. But obviously if you’ve got the compliance, and the financial obligation, and all of the law that underpins an e-commerce shop, I imagine there are impediments in people’s heads which will say, wait, did an AI make that? Are we really going to trust that? So maybe it inoculates itself given the nature of the websites which are in question.

Okay, just moving on, tell us a little bit about the kind of people that are using WooCommerce. Now, I know this is a very, very broad question, but in my head, for some reason I have it, that a significant amount of people that are using WooCommerce will be small stores. But I’m guessing also maybe WooCommerce really does dig deep into the enterprise as well. Does it run the gamut of everything? Or is there a kind of focus for you, and teams within Automattic because there’s a certain type of clientele which largely consume WooCommerce?

[00:19:37] James Kemp: Yeah, it does kind of span everything. So people just starting out either want low cost, in which case WooCommerce is an obvious choice. You can start setting things up, especially for brand new e-commerce, whereas they’re just selling single products. There’s nothing too technical there that would require an expense of some kind. So it’s super easy to spin up a WooCommerce site and test it out pretty much free.

So yeah, we have that audience. It’s not necessarily our focus, our focus is primarily the higher revenue, higher traffic e-commerce stores, because that’s the aspiration for anyone selling, right? They want to become successful, they want that to be their business, is e-commerce. And those are the users that we’re focused on. And then naturally anything we do for them is going to trickle down to benefit the people who are just starting out with the platform.

So it does span a wide range of users, but we do focus in on the higher revenue and high product volume, high traffic, those kind of things. Or at least that’s what we’re focusing on this year. That target evolves over time. But that’s been our focus for most of my time since I’ve been here. So it’s nice to have that vision of who’s using it and what we can do to make the platform as good as possible for them.

[00:20:52] Nathan Wrigley: We have this expression in the UK, Jack of all trades, master of none. I don’t know how that works outside of the boundaries of the UK, but it basically means if you try to be everything to everybody, you sort of succeed at nothing. It’s something akin to that basically.

And I’m wondering if there are bits of WooCommerce which you have to manage those sort of trade offs. Like, okay, if we build this thing, which feels like it’s a real enterprisey thing, how is that going to work with our more modest users, let’s say?

Or if we really focus on the more modest users, how are the enterprise going to feel like that? And it not being a niche, and it being the full spectrum of sites out there, yeah, at times that must be actually quite frustrating, I would’ve thought.

[00:21:29] James Kemp: It’s a challenge, yeah. It’s something that we’re working on at the moment, is making the base of WooCommerce have the majority of features for the majority of users, the features that you’d expect in an e-commerce platform, which I’ve touched on in other podcasts if you want to go and find them.

But it’s a process called More in Core, which is the kind of code name for it. Where we’re just trying to build out the base product to have the majority of things that merchants and builders need, without needing to go and find all these plugins and custom development and things like that.

But the challenge is which features. The features that people need are going to change depending on what type of store they’re running. So I’ve seen a lot of people want subscriptions in Core. And then I’ve also seen the complete opposite where people don’t want subscriptions in Core because they see it as bloat. There’s a challenge there for sure, to figure out what that kind of sweet spot is without being bloated, but also without nickel and dimming, and making the average number of plugins required too high or too low.

[00:22:28] Nathan Wrigley: I’ve often thought that if I worked at Microsoft on Windows, the software, the OS, it would be my constant annoyance that I had to think about every possible permutation of hardware that could ever be used. Whereas if I worked for Apple and was working on the Mac OS project, it’d be like, there’s just this one set of hardware, it’s just so much more straightforward, we build it.

And I imagine that commercial rivals, things like Shopify, and we can get into that in a moment, probably have it easier in that sense because there isn’t this, well, I know that they have an ecosystem of sort of third party apps, I believe they’re called. But there isn’t this whole backwards compatibility thing that 5,000 different plugins that bind into WooCommerce and what have you. And so I guess you’ve always got to be taking real careful steps when you develop a new feature or tweak anything, which maybe the other platforms don’t have to think about in quite the same way.

[00:23:16] James Kemp: Yeah, I actually posted about that exact thing on X or Twitter earlier. I’m just going to call it X. I want to call it Twitter, but I’m going to call it X. It’s a challenge because, and this touches on the 37% number, like any update we roll out is affecting over a third of all e-commerce stores online, which is a crazy number.

It has to be backwards compatible, it has to be rolled out in a way that isn’t going to break things. There’s a lot more consideration that needs to happen because of the multitude of environments that could exist. There could be bad hosting, there could be good hosting. There could be low performance, high performance, number of products, different plugins, different themes.

For a platform like ours, that is one of the greatest challenges, but also one of the greatest strengths as well, because of how flexible it is. In a platform like Shopify, like you say, they have an app marketplace, but it’s a lot more restricted. There’s only really a handful of ways to do something. Whereas with WooCommerce, you’ve kind of got full control because you are hosting it yourself. You can pretty much do anything. Which, like I say, is a challenge, but also a strength.

It requires navigation, and I touched on this in a, I do a monthly, Inside wooCommerce podcast. The last one that went out was with Julia, who is the lead for our release process. And it’s worth a listen, because it’s quite interesting to hear, now, how we roll out releases and how we’re able to test and watch for signals for issues that might arise. And be able to roll it back, fix that, and then roll out the updates. There’s quite a nice process there now, which we’ll obviously refine as time goes on, but yeah, it’s a challenge.

[00:24:59] Nathan Wrigley: More recently, and we don’t need to get into the story behind it, but there is a story behind it. But the Automatticians, so the people that work for Automattic, have in some cases been repurposed. So their work that they’ve been doing for many years in one direction has now been pivoted. And I think it’s probably fair to say that focusing on things which generate revenue is a crucial part of the decision behind that.

I’m wondering if that’s had an impact. So this whole thing is not really that old, it’s maybe only five, six weeks old, something like that, so maybe it hasn’t yet. But I’m wondering if it’s had actually a positive impact on the teams that you work with, or maybe there’s steady away, no change.

[00:25:38] James Kemp: I would say there’s no change actually. I mean, WooCommerce has always been, we’re building a free product, but we are also a business, and we’ve always been a business. We wouldn’t be able to afford to put out a product and not have any money coming in to continue developing it. There’s always been a business aspect to WooCommerce.

But yeah, the teams that have kind of moved off of the open source contributions that they were making previously, I haven’t seen any of them come over to WooCommerce. And maybe they have, if they come in as engineers, then I probably wouldn’t see that anyway. But yeah, in my day to day, I haven’t seen an impact. But, you know, Automattic has multiple products and experiments and things that exist outside of WooCommerce, and I honestly don’t dig into them too much. I’m very focused on the WooCommerce side of things.

[00:26:27] Nathan Wrigley: You’ve recently, I say you, WooCommerce recently had an entire upending of the branding. If you don’t follow it very closely, it may be that you haven’t seen this story, but maybe it was not that long ago in the last week or so. It feels like the message dropped that a lot of the branding has been redone, and I often look at rebranding and I think why all that effort?

What was really the point of that? What was the need to upend everything, and make people have to see something new? And I’m just wondering if you know what the point of that was? I mean, it’s nice. It looks lovely. Don’t get me wrong. I thoroughly love it. But I’m curious as to what the reasoning was. Did it feel stale previously? What was going on there? Do you know?

[00:27:06] James Kemp: All of the above, yeah. So I’ve known about the branding, in its current form of, what it’s gonna be like since maybe October last year. And it’s been really interesting to watch. If you compare what we had previously against this, it’s clear like why it had to happen. The branding that we had previously was the same branding that WooCommerce had when it was initially formed via WooThemes. If you compare it, it just looks out of date. The colors are flat and, not very inspiring. And the new branding now allows us to be a bit more modern, I think. It’s modernized the brand.

But it also opens us up to be able to go out and do more effective marketing and acquisition that we haven’t done prior. Branding isn’t just changing the logo and updating some colors. There’s a whole array of assets that come with it, and like a story behind the assets and what we’re trying to put out there into the world. Which we didn’t have before, we just had a logo and some colors.

[00:28:04] Nathan Wrigley: There’s this sort of nod to a shopping cart in the W of Woo, which is actually quite clever, I think. And you’re right, it does just smack of more modern.

Being a complete non-designer, I can never summon up the vocabulary to express why I think something looks good. But saw the new branding, and I saw the video that was associated with that, and I did think, yeah, that’s great. That looks really great, but I can’t for the life of me tell you why it looks great.

But interestingly though, was there a market push, not just because it was stale, and let’s move this conversation into the rise of the SaaS. Because over the last period, the Wixs, the Squarespaces, the Shopify and all of these other things, I’m sure there’s many more. They’ve brought to the market a fairly affordable alternative. There’s nothing free, as far as I’m aware, but it’s a fairly low monthly cost. And I imagine over time these companies are eating up some of the new people, maybe even taking people from WooCommerce. I imagine it’s a bit of ebb and flow and what have you.

But was it that, were they becoming more professional, more visible in the world? Super Bowl ads and all that kind of thing. Was there some of that in the rebranding as well?

[00:29:14] James Kemp: Yeah, I imagine so. I think if you look at our branding previously, I don’t think it was necessarily thought out as a brand as such. I think it evolved over time. Whereas this was, the rebrand was much more focused, who are we trying to connect with here? What type of customer are we trying to pull in? And how can we reach them? What do they want to see? And I don’t think we had that before.

And yeah, definitely it helps us compete with these SaaS solutions that are quite easy to pitch. You know, influencer can pitch this stuff, because they have cool branding and, it’s hard to say really.

Like I think you could say about any product, like if Apple had a really badly designed, like 3D Apple from the nineties as their logo. In this modern era of what you expect from a brand, and a brand that’s powering 37% of all e-commerce or, I don’t what Apple’s market share on mobile devices is, but I imagine it’s pretty high.

It’s just something that needs to be considered, and there needs to be a thought process behind why we look like we do, and who we want to attract with that. And we didn’t have that before with the previous speech bubble thing.

[00:30:25] Nathan Wrigley: I remember listening to, I believe it was Bill Gates, this is many years ago, and Bill Gates was asked a question by an interviewer and it was, what keeps you awake at night, in terms of the longevity of Microsoft? And he said three things. Google, Google and Google. And basically he’s terrified of Google.

I’m gonna pitch the same sort of question to you. Of the SaaS things out there, are there any bits out there which make the Woo team think, oh gosh, that’s interesting. We need to copy that?

Does the sort of gouging out of the pricing, their very affordable pricing, those kind of things. How do you cope with that? How do you compete with that, with something which is basically free? I don’t know if that keeps you awake at night.

[00:31:06] James Kemp: Obviously like any business has its competitors. There’s nothing that’s come up that we’ve been like, oh, we’ve got to copy that and we’ve got to get that in. It’s more like comparatively are we offering an equal playing field to a potential customer?

And this ties back into the More in Core stuff that I was talking about. Is there stuff that not just Shopify, but other platforms have in their core offering, and this may be like low priced or free plans, or there’s other self-hosted versions as well that exist. They are comparatively free. Are we offering the same functionality? Do we have those essential features available? Yeah, we do, but do we charge for them? Probably, if there’s stuff that’s missing, there’s probably a premium extension for it. Or there’s a free extension for it, but it requires the merchant to go out and find it, rather than like us presenting it to them as a solution when they need it contextually.

Yeah, things like that are definitely considerations. We need to be innovating, and we need to be keeping up as well. That could be said about any platform versus another platform that there’s always, again, going back to Apple, Apple and Samsung have this kind of to and fro.

So yeah, it’s a consideration for sure. The target audience of someone going onto Shopify versus someone going onto WooCommerce is slightly different. The kind of core things that they are looking for are what we need to be offering.

[00:32:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s interesting because if I was a WooCommerce user, which as I explained I’m not, that would be the sentence I needed to hear, I think. The people working in the offices and the places where you are working is, okay, we are keeping an eye on what the competition are doing. And if something is a moving, shaking feature, which is upsetting the industry and everybody wants it, then you’ve at least got your beedy on it.

[00:32:55] James Kemp: That’s one part of it as well. What are the competitors doing, but also what are our marketplace sales saying? What are the trends saying in e-commerce, even TikTok, Amazon, like all those kind of things that aren’t directly related to what we do, that’s accounted for as well.

And also what are the customers saying? And we touched on it earlier, but we have a whole, what we call the feedback river, which is just a big database of feedback from everywhere. From within the plugin itself. From support. From reviews and from wordpress.org, and like all of these places combined into one database. So yeah, I think you have to keep an eye on all of it. And the challenge is figuring out is this essential? What percentage of users actually want this specific thing?

And actually that’s always been a challenge, like even working on much smaller scale products at Iconic, it was always hard if a customer reaches out and says, oh, I wish it did this, it was hard to say no to that, because you are excited that someone’s using it, and they want to adapt it to their own use case. But you have to take into account, is the effort to implement this going to be valuable for everyone? Is this the priority for the majority, or is it just going satisfy this one person? You have to do that at scale now, or I have to do that at scale.

[00:34:14] Nathan Wrigley: I know that time is short, so I’m just going to pivot just for one final question before we leave and it’s, it really has nothing to do with WooCommerce specifically, although it may? And that is, I’m just curious if you know of any interesting things which are happening around the periphery of e-commerce that you personally are finding interesting and engaging. Something that maybe our general audience won’t have come across, because they’re not deep in the weeds of it.

That could be inside WordPress. I dunno, the Interactivity API, or it could be something the browsers are thinking about doing, or third party vendors who’ve got some curious technology that we might not have heard of.

So, really just any interesting thing that James has spotted lately that you think we might want to look at?

[00:34:54] James Kemp: Yeah, I dunno whether I have anything that nobody’s ever heard of.

[00:34:57] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fine.

[00:34:58] James Kemp: There’s a definite rise in platforms offering their own e-commerce. So, TikTok, commerce and all that kind of stuff is growing. And you touched on, something before we started the call actually, which kind of relates to that, the ability to see something on a device and just purchase it there and then. And within TikTok you get that experience. Within a typical e-commerce platform, you have a flow that you go through. You’ve got the cart, and then the checkout. You’ve got to populate details. So yeah, I think there’s gonna be a, an evolution into how quickly can I buy something. And that’s what the merchants want. Whether it’s good for the population and spending habits, I’m not entirely sure.

I personally love the experience on, like Amazon, for example, and I don’t know how long they’ve had it, it’s been there a while now. But on product pages, you don’t need to go through the cart process, you can just click buy now. Although that has tripped me up a couple of times.

[00:35:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, me too.

[00:35:54] James Kemp: You press buy now, and it goes on some card that you never use.

So yeah, I think that is a definite kind of trend, that I’ve seen a lot of. And I think we touched on something earlier as well, which I haven’t seen much in the way of solutions to it. But one of the key things about people buying from a brick and mortar is that they can try on the product and they can physically see the color of a product, and touch the product. Which is possible. You can order now and it’s getting a lot easier to return stuff. But can you do that with a sofa, for example? So, I expect that we’ll see some innovations around that.

[00:36:33] Nathan Wrigley: Sort of augmented solution, where you can drop room and, yeah, size it up, and things like that.

[00:36:38] James Kemp: Yeah. I don’t know what that looks like.

[00:36:40] Nathan Wrigley: No, and it will be sort of a strange simulation of reality, but probably enough to get a proportion of the people over the wire, I would’ve thought.

[00:36:48] James Kemp: Yeah, for sure. There’s been AR stuff for a while now, right?

[00:36:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and things like, you want to put a logo on a t-shirt, here’s what that look like on the t-shirt. Those kind of things.

I think for me, one of the most, most interesting things is what the mobile wallets have done to my capacity to spend. I just that is remarkable. Especially out in the real world where you take the Tube in London, the underground, and you just don’t do anything anymore. You just walk by a thing, and your phone’s in your pocket, and it registers it, and you walk out and at the end of the day you get a bill, and so these kind of seamless solutions.

[00:37:21] James Kemp: I don’t feel like you have that so much on a computer though.

[00:37:24] Nathan Wrigley: No, but I wonder if that’s coming with, I don’t know, biometrics. Like purchase this, put your finger print in, your done.

[00:37:33] James Kemp: I think that would be nice. I still populate, I use 1Password, so it does it for me, but I still populate the card.

[00:37:39] Nathan Wrigley: An intermediary, a trusted intermediary getting in the way. Yeah, it’s interesting. Again, I wonder if those kind of things might be handled natively by browsers, and things like that.

Anyway, we’re sort of staring into the future, and we’ve no idea. But I know that you’ve got to go in about 30 seconds time, so I will just round it off by saying James Kemp, fascinating chat about all things WooCommerce. I appreciate it, and all the hard work you and your team are doing to democratize e-commerce. Is there anything you want to add just before we round it off? Maybe a Twitter handle or something like that?

[00:38:08] James Kemp: I’m jamesckemp on most things. C, the letter C. Yeah. The only thing I’ll add is just, if you have questions, ideas, theories, my dms are open there, so I’m happy to hear it.

[00:38:21] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you very much, James Kemp. Been a pleasure chatting to you today. Really appreciate it.

[00:38:25] James Kemp: Thank you very much.

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how podcasting shaped our guests WordPress journey.

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.

[00:01:11] Nathan Wrigley: So on the podcast today, we have John Overall. John is a veteran in the WordPress podcasting world, bringing over 16 years of experience with the WP Plugins A to Z show. He’s an early adopter of WordPress, and has seen the platform evolve and grow, and has built a wealth of knowledge around plugins, which he thinks have been pivotal to WordPress’s versatility.

John shares his journey into the world of podcasting, initially using it as a tool to grow his business, and expand his expertise within the WordPress ecosystem. He gets into how the podcast landscape has shifted from its early days to the present, with technological advances making it easier than ever to produce and distribute shows.

We talk about the evolution of WordPress plugins, how they have shaped the WordPress platform over the years, and John’s unique approach to managing and understanding these powerful tools, making a podcast to help him better understand what each plugin does.

John also shares stories about his interactions with his audience, and how the podcast has forged connections that might not be the norm for client relationships.

We move into the ever changing WordPress environment, and John shares predictions and insights about the platform’s future, and how he’s using podcasting as a medium to continually learn and adapt, which in turn benefits his audience.

Something new for John is how he’s involving his family in his podcasting journey. His daughter has breathed new life and perspectives into the show, hoping to appeal to a younger generation while retaining his loyal audience.

If you’re passionate about WordPress, podcasting, or just interested in understanding a holistic approach to long-term content creation and audience engagement, 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 John Overall.

I am joined on the podcast by John Overall, how are you doing?

[00:03:20] John Overall: I am doing fantastic, thanks Nathan. I appreciate being on your show.

[00:03:24] Nathan Wrigley: I am really pleased to have John. I want to call you Jonathan. Is there a time when you were a Jonathan or have I just misremembered?

[00:03:31] John Overall: No, no, I’ve been called Jonathan, Johnny, Johnny Boy. I answer to all kinds of names. My mom actually calls me Alan because she refuses to call me John.

[00:03:40] Nathan Wrigley: Well, it’s an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast today.

Very frequently when I interview people, people tell me that they’ve listened to my podcast and I find that really, I get quite emotional when people do that, I think that’s lovely. But the tables are turned, because today I’m here to say that I have listened to Jonathan’s podcast many, many times in the past.

And I was just saying that there was a period of time in my life when my children went to music lessons. And I used to accompany them to those music lessons, and I had to sit in the, if you call it like a waiting room, basically. Every week I would sit there faithfully listening to your plugin podcast, you know, it was the, we call it A to Z, but you call it A to Z. And I would listen to you talking about plugins, and giving them ratings and what have you with your co-host. And so this is a bit of a stars in my eyes moment. I’m so pleased to have you on the podcast.

[00:04:31] John Overall: Well, I appreciate that. And yeah, the WP Plugins A to Z, and we do call it Z here in Canada. But when I had my American co-host in the beginning years, he called it Z. So we used to argue with it. And then we actually have someone, our intro, one of my listeners, he recorded it, and we have a minor intro that says, it’s WP Plugins, A to Z, not Z. It’s still something we use. It was generated years ago by one of the listeners. But yeah, it’s been a longstanding show. It’s been around for over 16 years now.

[00:05:00] Nathan Wrigley: So I really didn’t know that podcasts were a thing. And podcasts came into my life at the moment when mobile phones had apps that could do that. I didn’t listen to them on desktop or anything like that. And it was always for me, a bit of dead time. I wouldn’t listen to them in the car or anything like that. I would always listen to them in a moment where I was sat in a chair and had nothing else to pay attention to. And I just found them immediately really, really important in my life.

And then I found WordPress. And then quickly found a bunch of podcasts which I listened to, and yours was the one that somehow settled in my brain as the, I’m going to music now, I’m going to sit for half an hour and consume the podcast.

And really, without listening to podcasts like yours, my life would’ve been very different, I think. Because it occurred to me that, as I was listening to you and your co-host talk, I got a sense of, well, you’re not a media personality. You are not somebody who is sitting in some sort of CNN type studio producing content. You are a guy that does the kind of job that I do. And I got a real sense of, gosh, maybe this is something that I could explore at some point. And there we go, and the rest is history. That’s now all I’ve done for many years.

[00:06:07] John Overall: Well I will gladly take the credit for expanding podcasting. I’ve enjoyed podcasting since the beginning. I discovered it as I graduated from my applied communication program at college, which led me into the internet. And it was shortly after that that we saw the rise of it. And of course, Adam Curry from the No Agenda Show, who is known as the Pod Father, he created podcasting as it stands today with the RSS feeds.

And he’s even ensured that it’s going to stay a free and open source platform due to the now existing podcasting index. Which is where everybody gets that in their newfangled apps. Like I quit using the apps from the Apple store for my podcast. I use the newer apps, because they do a much better job and they go into the podcast and index for everything.

So, yeah, it’s really great. And the nice thing is, what it did was allowed me, with WordPress in particular, was to expand my knowledge. Because I used it to build my knowledge. I saw WordPress and what it was doing with the plugins. Because in the beginning, WordPress was great for a blogging platform. I started using it probably about version two, so they were like two, maybe two and a half years old when I discovered WordPress.

I’d seen it once before when it first came out, and one of my clients put it on my server and I almost banned it from my server because its use of resources was ridiculous. It was literally crashing one of my servers. But I ended up working with it, and it kept getting better and better and better. And then when they introduced the plugins to it, to expand it into a full CMS, I went, oh dear God, this is going to be huge.

And I’ve watched it as it climbed from like, I went back recently to look at my first episodes. My first episode there was less than 9,000 plugins available for WordPress. I watched it grow and grow and grow and grow. And now there’s over, hundreds of thousands of plugins. The WordPress repository has only 50,000. At one point they had 90,000, so they’ve cleaned out a big mess, it has expanded it, and it’s going to take, you know, WordPress is going into, it’s in a changing mode right now.

WordPress is in a massive flux right now, with all the things that have occurred in the last six months. But many people have been panicking, oh my God, It’s going to go away. It’s like, no, it’s not going anywhere. It’s going to change, and a lot of things are going to be different, but there’s too many people in the world making a living, depending upon their daily bread, their monthly rents, having WordPress fully functioning. And there’s companies that are as big as Automattic, if not bigger, that are using WordPress.

I was reading an article yesterday of the top 12 websites built in WordPress. We’re talking NASA, The Times magazine, well, we know whitehouse.gov is using it. And you look at them and some of them are just insanely developed. And if it wasn’t for the plugin capability of WordPress, it wouldn’t be possible.

[00:08:52] Nathan Wrigley: When you look back over all those years, so rewind until, let’s say the month, the year before you began your podcast journey, what was the thing that kicked you into doing podcasting? Was it just like a bit of serendipity? Did you know that you wanted to create audio content or was it just a bit of an accident?

[00:09:09] John Overall: It was a bit of everything. What it really was, was I was just starting, I had just sold my computer store, so I was working off of money from selling a successful sale of a computer store I had for several years. Because I sold out the computer industry just before it went full mobile and impossible to really make a living with a computer store. And I was going back to the internet and developing websites and I was exploring things.

I looked at Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, trying to figure out what would be the best CMS system so I wouldn’t have to write PHP code, and CSS by hand anymore, or at least minimise it. And I needed a way to reach people. And one of the ways, podcasts was just starting to pick up at that time, that was somewhere around 2010, 2011, right around there. And it was just starting to pick up, and I realised, wait a minute, people are listening to the podcast. I can start putting out a podcast and I can focus. And I looked at WordPress and I realised, you know, what would be the best component to focus on in WordPress?

And so I chose plugins. And I went, okay, well I needed a domain. I went, WP Plugins, well, A to Z. And I had this really crazy idea at the beginning, because there was so few plugins, I was going to cover WordPress plugins, literally from A to Z. My first 20 episodes was A, B, C, D plugins starting with those letters. I got that far into it and I went, okay, this ain’t going to work, there’s no way.

And people were adding them at a continuous rate every week. And I went, okay, this isn’t going to work, but it still constitutes, the name constituted everything. So I just started diving into what I thought was the best plugins, or if I used the plugin and I thought wasn’t very good, it was a way to warn people, please, avoid this plugin. Don’t make my mistake.

So it was all of those things. So it was a little bit of serendipity, but what I was more after was growing my business. And it literally did grow my business for several years. I would suddenly get a call, or an email from people, because I put my email and everything into the shows. I would get emails from listeners saying, hey, I’ve been listening to your show for several months and I’m having this WordPress problem, and you talked about it. Can you fix it? And I said, well, hold on, let’s see what we can do.

And so I still have six or seven clients from those early years, that have been clients ever since they came to me. And they came to me because, when people listen to you on podcasts they begin to trust you. They start to feel like they know who you are, because they’ve been listening to you. You’re a friend, you’re not a stranger. And because of that, what happens, I had people, they would contact me and I asked them for, I’m really cautious about what information I get from my clients to access their stuff, their hosting or whatever. And I get people and I ask them for this, and all of a sudden they’ve given me all of their keys to their castle. And they have no idea who I am. They don’t know if I’m trustworthy of that, but I’ve built that trust by the way they’ve heard me talk over the however period of time, months or years they’ve listened to my show.

[00:11:55] Nathan Wrigley: It is interesting because from your perspective, you haven’t given out any metric which might be a measure of trust, but you have. You really have. I mean, giving that much time and putting out your thoughts, and speaking like you speak, and talking like you talk, and the language that you use, and the way that you present yourself, it does lend trust.

And it is very, very similar with the podcasts that I listen to, dozens that I listen to each week. And I really do get a feeling that I know these people. I never thought of using a podcast as a marketing tool to be honest. But I do remember the sort of bits that you would drop in, and I thought, yeah, that was kind of interesting.

Yeah, perfect, it ended up creating new business, not just a bit of fun that you had to crowbar into each week.

[00:12:38] John Overall: It literally helped build my business, and it made it successful to sustain me for many years. And that’s what I’ve enjoyed. That’s part of what I’ve enjoyed about it.

The other is, I got to meet lots of people virtually, all over the globe. In addition to the, well, we’re going to do episode 642 next week, and in addition to those episodes for just the WP plugins, I did interview shows, which were a separate episode. And I’ve done over 150 of those over the years.

Plus I’ve also had three or four other podcasts, I kept thinking I was going to start different podcasts for different things, and I’d get maybe 20, 30, 100, 200 episodes into them, and then that’s like, okay, I don’t have time for these ones anymore, and they just fall by the wayside. In total I’ve probably got 2000 episodes of podcasts behind me for various podcasts.

[00:13:23] Nathan Wrigley: You really are a veteran of this industry. How has it changed? Just for those of us who are podcasting nowadays, it’s so simple. There’s a tool for everything. There’s a SaaS platform for everything. You can pay your monthly subscription, and it’ll more or less podcast for you really. But back in the day, when I started there were definite hurdles, but you were many, many years before me. So I’m imagining there was lots of hurdles to overcome just to get the thing out there.

[00:13:49] John Overall: In the beginning it was really hard, especially if you had a host, a co-host. It’s like we didn’t have the easy software like we’re using right now for recording back and forth. Even now, I don’t use this software for doing mine. I use Microsoft Teams for recording with my co-host. But in the beginning we had, oh, what the heck was it called?

[00:14:08] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll tell you what I used at the beginning and this will kind of date me. I used Skype.

[00:14:13] John Overall: That’s it.

[00:14:13] Nathan Wrigley: That was it.

[00:14:14] John Overall: That was it? Skype? I was trying to remember what it was. It still loads on my computer when I reboot my computer and I have to shut it off because I just haven’t got around to, well, I haven’t rebuilt my computer for almost 10 years. I’m getting a new one this next year, because my computer’s finally ending its life.

But yeah, Skype. And the other thing was, is we didn’t have the easy ways to clean up the audio feed that we have now. You get those high pitch wines, or bad cable, or background noise, or whatever, or even the mismatched audio levels. You had to actually go in and kind of edit that a little bit to get your audio as clean as possible.

Because the biggest thing from the beginning I knew is, it doesn’t really matter what you’re talking about, if the audio’s not clean, people will stop listening. If the audio’s got annoying noises or something, or they can’t quite hear, or one host is suddenly blaring in the air and the other host is like a mouse talking in the other ear, they go, oh, I can’t listen to this. And they won’t listen to you.

[00:15:09] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know, it’s really interesting because somebody warned me of this right at the beginning of my podcast journey, and they framed it even more than that. They said that if you’re watching a video and the quality of the video is poor, you’ll forgive that. But you’ll never forgive bad audio. You just can’t watch something on, let’s say, YouTube or a film or whatever if the audio is crackly or distorted. There’s just nothing, you know, unless you can lip read, there’s nothing coming at you that’s useful.

And I remember taking that to heart and thinking, okay, that’s important. But then being frustrated by the technology that, just things like Skype couldn’t keep up. There’d be dropouts in everything, and so editing was a nightmare.

[00:15:48] John Overall: Yes, it was. And although pretty much all my shows are live to tape, I discovered a program that’s called Level Later. And it’s a very old program, but what it does is you can take any audio file with multiple levels in it, you throw it into this, it runs it through some passes, some computer magic, and it comes out and all the levels are perfect in it. And I’ve been using Level Later for years now, because no matter how hard I try, I can never get the levels perfect when I’m recording it between two hosts. Because I’m not using intermediate software that’s doing it for me. I record mine straight to OBS.

[00:16:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, if you are thinking about getting into the podcasting world, and we can decide whether or not that’s useful these days given the dearth of podcasts. But if you are, honestly, it’s so straightforward now. I’m using, currently, an app called SquadCast, but there’s a whole bunch of rivals out there in the marketplace. There’s things like Riverside.FM and many, many others.

And they allow you to record through a browser, and in this case, John’s track and my track will be isolated, I’ll download them both. And so that never happened. Before it was just one track that you had to, if your audio is mucky, then so was mine. There was no way of separating those two.

But now yours will come separately, mine will come separately, and if I’ve got 10 guests, they’ll all be separate. And then I throw them into, similar to you, I throw them into an app which basically cleans things up and automatically levels things. And then will create transcripts, and it’s just miraculous. It’s so, so straightforward.

[00:17:13] John Overall: It’s gotten really good. I’m, re-embracing all of that stuff. For the last four years, I’d taken my business down to the minimal levels of what I had to put into it, and I focused on my farmstead that I have, my urban farmstead. And in this last year I realised I needed to get back to my roots, and my WordPress and all of my other work. And so this last year we’ve been rebuilding everything.

And the WP Plugin show, it went off the rails for a little while. I got a little political for a little while and lost a large chunk of my audience, and a lot of them are coming back now because I’ve got it back to what it was, the show it was before. It is allowing everything, and also I’ve got a new co-host in there, my daughter, been training in my business for the last five years to take over this business as I get ready for retirement time.

She’s become my co-host on there. In fact, she’s more of the host than I am now. She does more of the talking and more of the direction of the show each week. Which is kind of interesting. It makes for a more interesting show, having a different viewpoint on it than mine. Because I think I went, when Marcus left the show back in 2016 or 17, and I did like four years of just me on the show. And it’s really hard to be a single host on a show week after week after week.

[00:18:27] Nathan Wrigley: I feel your pain.

[00:18:28] John Overall: That’s why you need guests or you need to have a co-host to help keep some life in it. Anyone who tries to do a podcast, like podcasts nowadays. Yeah, anyone can do them and, yes, there is a dearth of them, but the problem is, if you go look at those podcasts, about 80% of them never make it past episode 30.

[00:18:45] Nathan Wrigley: Or even, I mean, it’s probably like 50% past episode one in all honesty.

[00:18:50] John Overall: Yeah that too. They find out, wait a minute, this is a lot of work, and it’s really hard. It’s usually the ones that try to do it by themselves and they’ve got the momentum for the first 10, 15 episodes. After that, you’ve got to keep pushing yourself.

[00:19:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s a grind, isn’t there? And although we’ve just made the case that making a podcast is straightforward, from a technological point of view, it’s easier than ever. But the grind hasn’t gone away. And in fact, new grind has been added in.

So when you began, and when I began, social media was a bit of a thing, but not really. It wasn’t kind of an essential component. But now it’s almost like the only distribution mechanism, outside of RSS, and perhaps a WordPress website.

All of those pieces have kind of got bundled in. So you have to make sure to promote it, and cross-promote it, and create, I don’t know, alternative, different snippets of it that go on this platform and that platform. So there’s a whole load of other things.

It isn’t something that, unless you’ve got a real passion for it, it’s something that, like you said, episode 30 is probably going to be where you get and give in because you start in New Year, brand new, New Year’s resolution. January, I’m going to do a podcast, and you keep going for a little while. And I was telling you that there are very few things in my life where I’ve had the capacity to stick at it, but podcasting for some reason has worked for me. I guess I just like listening to my own voice.

[00:20:05] John Overall: There’s that aspect too, listening to your own voice. Sometimes I listen to myself and I go, really? That’s me? You don’t get used to that. No matter all these years, I still can’t get used to my voice.

But the other thing is, for some people, a lot of people use it to help improve their knowledge in their particular area they’re podcasting about.

I like history podcasts from time to time. And those ones there, it means it’s a serious history buff doing a podcast about something he’s excited about. And what he’s getting a chance to do is share to the world what he’s doing.

The same I do with WordPress, I share things to everybody about what is in the WordPress world and what’s changing. And now our show has moved in a different direction. We dropped down from the number of plugins we do each week. We have more discussion about things we see happening. There’s new segments coming into the show that’ll be talking about, here’s a problem in WordPress we found, how we solved it, coming from my daughter’s perspective, who, she’s five years into this, so she’s relatively new and everything. It’s like everything’s brand new to her. A lot of it’s all, oh yeah, it’s just CSS. I don’t understand that Dad. And I was like, oh yeah, you’re kind of new at this. I have to explain things.

So when I’ve discovered problems, there’s problems I can solve in like 20 minutes and it takes her five hours because she doesn’t know where to go to see the problem. These are what I’m starting to bring back to the show. Stuff that used to be in the show and it had gotten lost along the way. And it’s also we’re talking about what we see changing in the WordPress environment, and how we see this environment evolving over the next couple years.

We did a show, our Christmas and New Year’s shows were prerecorded. We do prerecorded shows usually about that time, so we can spend time with the family and not worry about the show. But we’d made predictions of what was coming in the New Year that hadn’t yet come to pass. By the time we did our first show, a week and a half ago, by the time we did our first show for the New Year, we had already had two or three successful predictions of what was changing in WordPress.

We’re both starting to see this, which is exciting in the fact that, oh, okay, this sort of event is going to happen in WordPress and this is where it’s going to go. With all the doom and gloom, as I mentioned, the doom and gloom as I see, like I follow the forums over at the Reddits, and Twitters, and all over the place because I get our news from everywhere to keep up. And I see a lot of people, doom and gloom of people abandoning.

I tried abandoning WordPress at the introduction of Gutenberg. I even took my show towards ClassicPress. And that happened for about two years. And then I realised, unfortunately, ClassicPress didn’t have a community momentum behind it, and WordPress kept going. Even though I currently build in WordPress, I don’t use Gutenberg, because no matter how many times I try to wrap my head around it, I can’t get my brain to think that way. And so I use Elementor for all my builds. And it allows me to continue using the Classic Editor.

But that sort of thing is going to continue. They were going to supposedly stop supporting the Classic Editor, but unfortunately it’s not happening, because a good 50% of the WordPress community still uses the Classic Editor, and a page builder of some sort. Versus 50% that are using Gutenberg. And they can live together. It took me a while to realise that they can live together. You just have to work with it.

I have a couple of clients who use Gutenberg. I can sort of muck my way through it if I really work at it. But it’s going to continue, and these things are going to keep changing and evolving. The WordPress plugins, I’ve seen the developers creating some amazing developments. When we just launched the new website for our business, we actually have a whole WP Pro A to Z lineup, WP Plugins, WP Pro A to Z.

When we launched our new site, I found a plugin I didn’t know existed, which will be coming in one of my shows, upcoming. If you need a booking plugin and you use Gravity Forms, somebody wrote a full blown addition to Gravity Forms for a booking plugin. So you don’t have to go spend money on another third party service or a service as a software, SaaS service where you’re putting out money. You pay for this one plugin, integrate it into Gravity Forms and you get everything. And now it’s all in one form and you still control your data.

[00:24:07] Nathan Wrigley: I really like the idea that you had of having that kind of theme running through, because in any of the podcasts I do, basically each episode is atomised, you know, it’s just an episode and then you listen to a different one, and there’s no real connection necessarily between the episodes. And I really like the idea of having a thread which runs through.

But also, I am really curious about plugins in particular, and I would love to have the excuse to play with them. Because then it would be, air quotes, then it would be work suddenly. The excuse of, what are you doing? I’m doing work. I’m playing with a plugin.

[00:24:39] John Overall: Play with a plugin, figuring it out, throw it on one of my dozens of domains that I’m doing nothing with, that collect all kinds of stuff.

No, the other joy is, as you mentioned with plugins, is of course, because once developers rediscover us, and the way we review stuff, and we give honest reviews, we tell them, truthfully what we find wrong and what we don’t. We give a good, honest rating. It’s very seldom we’ll give a rating as low as a two, but it has happened in the past.

We don’t automatically like give it a five, it has to be worthy of a five. Most of them fall between three and four, which is where most of them are anyway.

But the other joy is, is I get developers, they got a premium plugin and they go, hey, you want to check it out and I say, yeah, give me your premium plugin and a license, all give it a review.

So I get to play with premium plugins without having to spend the money on them, which is a joy. But it also allows people to find out what it might do. And the other thing that’s coming again, I used to have training videos, create training videos on how to use plugins. In fact, my training videos on my YouTube channel, some of them are still some of my highest rated plugins.

[00:25:38] Nathan Wrigley: I feel that I was really lucky being in the WordPress community, then discovering podcasting. Because I feel like all the pieces of the jigsaw, which go into making a podcast, are easily handled with WordPress. And so that was just a nice bit of serendipity. If you understand how to put a website up, well, that’s one thing you kind of really do need if you’re going to have a podcast.

And there’s plugins which will handle the RSS feed. There’s plugins which will handle the contact forms. There’s plugins which will handle the display of your website if you’re not using Core. And so I felt that talking about WordPress, and having the capacity to use WordPress was a real boon for me. Just made the whole thing much more straightforward. But like you’re describing about your daughter, not the same for everybody.

[00:26:21] John Overall: Yeah, well, one of the interesting things about, when you mentioned a plugin for this and a plugin for that, you remember the early days of the Apple advertising, There’s an app for that.

[00:26:29] Nathan Wrigley: For the iPhone, yeah.

[00:26:30] John Overall: We used to say for the longest time, well, there’s a plugin for that.

[00:26:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And there was.

[00:26:34] John Overall: There literally was, and there still is. And if you don’t think there is, it’s easy enough to build. It’s like, I’ve actually gone so far, in the last couple of years, to pay developers to create plugins for me. Sometime around the end of this year we’ll be introducing a plugin that has not been created yet for any of the things on WordPress. We’ve been working on something, and so that’s a little tidbit of what’s coming. As we get closer to the beta release, which is expected, the beta release is expected September, October of this year. Then we’ll be talking more and more in depth about this plugin.

[00:27:07] Nathan Wrigley: Do you still intend to keep going with your podcast into the, basically into the future, forever? Do you have a sort of timeline, like when you get to, I don’t know, a thousand episodes of this particular podcast, that’ll be it?

[00:27:18] John Overall: As long as the show has still got listeners, and some audience, and it still provides value for what we do, no. Because one of the biggest things, and even my daughters realised this. Because she has to do research for every episode, because a lot of people don’t realizse, okay, you do a podcast, oh, it’s about an hour long. They don’t realise that that hour long required three to four hours of research in preparation of your notes and everything for the show, plus whatever post-production, everything else. By the time you’re done, a one hour show is usually a five to seven hour investment of time.

The thing is, when you’re doing that research, what it does is that increases your knowledge, because you’re looking at things you hadn’t looked at before, and it helps increase and input more knowledge into you, and expand your knowledge as an expert in the field. Many, many people started podcasts as a side hobby, and turned into experts in their field, because of their podcast. That’s what it forces you to do, is it forces you to become an expert in whatever field your podcast focuses on.

[00:28:18] Nathan Wrigley: Did you ever get into creating podcast websites for people?

[00:28:22] John Overall: No.

[00:28:22] Nathan Wrigley: No, me neither. And there’s some part of me which regrets that, because I think that would’ve been a real good wheelhouse for me.

[00:28:28] John Overall: It would’ve been, and it would’ve been except for, you would’ve been changing a lot, and the investment in time and the screenshots for it would be even higher than the investment in time I’ve got now.

It was all about how much investment in time versus the return on that investment in time. It is how I’ve done it.

I did training videos, and my training videos are still some of the highest viewed videos on YouTube, and they’re old and ancient now, and they’re out of date. And I even got a question from one of the training videos, what was it, a couple of months ago, somebody contacted me and asked me questions. I said, oh, dear God, I forgot I did that.

And when I went and looked at it, I said, I’m sorry, it’s out of date. I haven’t used that plugin in four or five years now, so I don’t know. And this is the problem of it. And so I’m starting to create new ones, partly because I’m creating these training videos for my clients to be able to manage their sites. Because my job as a web designer is not to manage their website forever, but build them a website that they can do all their own content and not keep having me having to put the content in, because they don’t want to pay the fees for simple things like adding content.

And so we build websites to do that, but they need instructions on how to do it. So we build nice, simple training videos that they can go look at and remind themselves how to do it. And so I’m actually starting to do that with the plugins again. And for plugins, in fact, one of my training videos for a plugin I did a few years ago, the plugin developer adopted that video right into their code as their training video for how to use the plugin. I do do very detailed, and something people told me was, I’m very good at translating geek to English.

And that was the nice thing is, if you try to tell them how to do it in geek, and a lot of computer guys, they can’t translate geek to English.

[00:30:09] Nathan Wrigley: Also you have this strange thing on an audio podcast where in many cases you’re trying to describe the functionality of something, which would be so much easier if you could just see it. So it does this, and the way it does this, oh, okay, and you have to try and explain it. And sometimes that involves saying, well, you have to tick this box over here, and then go over here, and do this, and this.

And it really does make you stop and think, what’s the best way to describe this? What’s going to work? What’s not going to work? And I think you’re right, it does make you think around the problem. They say that if you can teach something, then you truly understand it. I think there’s a little bit of that in there.

[00:30:42] John Overall: That was the other thing I did in the beginning of WordPress. I actually taught WordPress. I had courses here in Victoria where I live. I had night classes that people would sign up and come pay me money to teach them how to use WordPress. And I did those for about, all the way up until version four of WordPress when YouTube got flooded with tutorials and my courses became irrelevant. But for a few years, that was another way I expanded my knowledge was I taught it to people, because in preparation to teach it, I had to know what I was telling people.

[00:31:10] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned that there was a period of time where you fell out with podcasting or it fell out with you, or whatever it may be. You sort of dropped away from it. Did you find though, that when you came back, you mentioned that the audience is sort of still there? The curious thing for me is, I noticed this just the other day, a podcast that is in my podcast player that I have never listened to for years, and the reason I haven’t listened is because they just went away, but it’s still there.

And then they came back. RSS is a bit brilliant like that. Because there’s no algorithm feeding it to you, there’s no algorithm like on YouTube saying, okay, now what about this. It jumped right to the top of my playlist. And I suddenly thought, gosh, I haven’t seen that one for a while. Click play, and the first words were, we’re back, we’ve had a couple of years off or whatever.

I thought that was really cool. So I did wonder if your audience, by just mere fact of the way RSS readers work, and RSS feeds work with podcast players, if they’d stock with you, even though they didn’t know they were sticking with you.

[00:32:05] John Overall: I’d say about one third of my audience, in truth, I never left it entirely. We would always put out a episode of WP Plugins A to Z. We would put out an episode, at worst it fell to an episode a month is what happened. It was never completely off the air. But the audience dropped down to, we’re about one third right now the audience we used to have.

And a lot of them left me during my period of despair with the world, is lack of a better term. A lot of them left me during that period there. I chased a few of them away. Some of them I will earn back, some of them I won’t. Some of them have retired, I imagine, because what was interesting is my audience for the most part is as old or almost as old as me. And I’m pushing, you know, the upper echelons of fifties now. Because I’ve been doing this since my early forties. And some people, they’ve aged out.

We’re actually, because my daughter is a millennial, she’s in her thirties now, we’re going after the people in her audience segment. We’re changing our audience focus. We’re no longer worried about the old time geeks, the ones that know what they’re doing. We want the younger people who don’t know where they’re going, what they’re doing, they’re looking for advice, they want to do these things.

We’re working the audience to go after the younger generation, the millennials and the Zoomers, who are just now coming up into, okay, I need to build a business. What do I choose for building my website? Do I go with WordPress? Do I go with Shopify? Do I get Wix? Do I go crazy and go on a Drupal website? You know, it’s like, what are they going to do?

And so we’re hoping that we can find these people that are hunting, and get them to look to us for the expertise and advice, and come see me. Like, I now have 25, actually 26 years now of experience in this industry. So I’ve just started offering consulting services for building a website. Because a lot of people don’t realise it’s like, you can dive into your website and you can spend, what’s your time worth? Is your time worth money, or is it not as valuable?

So you can spend the next 70, 80 hours trying to figure things out. Or do you want to buy a few hours of my time and get some direction, and save yourself hours and hours of time, and know where you’re going with your website. Like, we’ve been fortunate enough to, in the last couple of years, build some very high frontend websites such as we rebuilt the website for the sierraclub.bc.ca, here in Western Canada.

So we’ve had a few high-end websites like that we’ve built the last couple of years, to be able to showcase the kind of work and capabilities we have now. So it helps show that, yes, we have expertise in this. And I’m just going back and tying into all my years of knowledge now and bringing it back forward.

[00:34:44] Nathan Wrigley: I think that’s a really credible thing to be able to show as well. You know, I’ve been doing a podcast for 15 odd years or something, it’s definitely a lot of credibility. But also I think it’s great that you’ve managed to sort of co-opt your daughter into it. So not only has that breathed a whole new generation of an audience into the podcast, but it’s also binding you to a family member, a close family member, and I think that’s lovely.

[00:35:05] John Overall: Yeah, well, I’m also trying to co-op my granddaughters into it too.

[00:35:08] Nathan Wrigley: Really a different generation.

[00:35:10] John Overall: Neither one of my sons are much interested in technology, they’re so, so. But my oldest son’s become an electrician. My youngest son is looking at possibly going into trades as a welder. But my oldest son definitely is being an electrician, he starts as an apprentice as soon as he graduates.

But it’s really good to bring in your next generations. If you have them, bring them in. If they’re excited in any way, find which component of your business they might be excited in, and put them into it. That’s one less person you have to worry about. And you can help ensure that maybe your business will last a couple of generations.

[00:35:43] Nathan Wrigley: Well, Jonathan, unfortunately time has got the better of us. I really appreciate all of the content that you’ve put out there. I hope that it carries on and you’ll be able to make the new show with your daughter a real success. Where do people find you?

[00:35:55] John Overall: You can find us online at two places, WP Plugins, A to Z, or Z for the Americans .com. And that’s where the show is hosted at. And all of our show notes are there. And you can also find us at wpproatoz.com. That’s our company website.

[00:36:12] Nathan Wrigley: I will definitely put all of those links into the show notes. Jonathan Overall, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:36:19] John Overall: Thanks a lot, Nathan. It’s been a pleasure.

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

which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the move from agency owner to WordPress theme development company, and finally to plugin 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 Katie Keith.

Katie is a founder and CEO of Barn2 plugins. With a background deeply rooted in WordPress, Katie’s journey presents an interesting narrative of transformation, from the early days of running a WordPress agency, to now managing a flourishing plugin business Barn2 plugins has a portfolio of 19 premium plugins, many of which extend functionalities inside WooCommerce

Today, Katie previews her upcoming lightning talk, which she’ll be giving at WordCamp Asia. She talks about the transition from agency work to plugin development, highlighting early challenges and choices that shaped the business’ path.

We get into the initial allure of client projects, and their subsequent realization of the benefits offered by productizing their skills for global reach. Katie describes the decisions that led them to WordPress plugins with products like WooCommerce Protected Categories and Document Library Pro, and explores how customer feedback and market needs drove their product diversification.

As Katie explains, the plugin world wasn’t without its hurdles. There was trial and error involved in launching new products. This underscores the importance of market research. Additionally, she touches on Barn2’s current pivot into Shopify apps, aiming for diversification to help ensure that the business has stability by being available across multiple platforms.

Katie investigates the current WordPress and WooCommerce landscape, discussing how she perceives the industry will change, potential growth areas, and the necessity of staying agile.

If you’re curious about the intricacies of building a plugin business, or are seeking inspiration from someone who has already navigated 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 Katie Keith.

I am joined on the podcast by Katie Keith.

[00:03:29] Katie Keith: Hey, Nathan.

[00:03:30] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you on the podcast. Katie and I have met, actually many times in person over at a variety of different WordCamps. This conversation that we’re going to have today is inspired by a WordCamp, but a WordCamp which hasn’t taken place yet. Because Katie is heading off to Manila in a few days time to give a lightning talk at WordCamp Asia. Do you just want to, before we get a bio properly, do you want to tell us what you’re going to talk about and then we’ll learn more about you?

[00:03:52] Katie Keith: Yep. So my talk is going to be a lightning talk about my story, specifically the transition from being a WordPress agency into a WordPress plugin company.

[00:04:03] Nathan Wrigley: Now that’s the perfect opportunity to give us your little bio. So don’t reveal all the detail of everything that you want to talk about, but just tell us the one minute potted history of you, WordPress, technology, wherever you want to land with that.

[00:04:16] Katie Keith: Yeah, so I’m Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barn2 plugins. We are a, as you probably guessed, a plugin shop. We currently have 19 premium plugins, a few free ones, and that’s about it.

But as we’ll talk about this more later, we started life as an agency building WordPress sites for clients, and then over the years we’ve switched into plugins.

We mostly specialise in WooCommerce plugins. So about 14 of our 19 are building extra functionality for WooCommerce. And we’ve also got a really popular document library plugin, which is not for WooCommerce.

[00:04:54] Nathan Wrigley: Haven’t you pivoted a little bit in the direction of Shopify as well?

[00:04:57] Katie Keith: Yeah, that is in progress. So the current growth strategy is to continue what we’re doing with the WordPress side of things, and also to diversify into selling Shopify apps so that we are across multiple platforms, and largely as a sort of stability thing, so that we spread any risks. Because we’re all dependent on WordPress at the moment, which is obviously a good horse to back and always has been. But it feels like it’s a good idea to be on multiple platforms as well.

[00:05:26] Nathan Wrigley: So I don’t know a single person, personally, who began their journey into web development intentionally. That is to say anybody of my era, anybody that wandered into web development when I did, the industry wasn’t really an industry. It was kind of just beginning. People just did it as a hobby. You know, some friend came along and said, I’d like a website, well, I can dabble with that. I’ve heard about websites and I know how to code a little bit of HTML and things like that.

But I’m wondering if you were more intentional when you began looking around post school, post college, whatever you did. Did you and your husband, I know he was a big part of the business. Did you jump into web development, and you said you were an agency for a while? Did you do that intentionally or was it more, oh, let’s try our hand at this for a bit?

[00:06:11] Katie Keith: It actually was intentional. So, Andy and I spent our twenties with normal jobs, both government type jobs, talking about how we wanted to start a business together, and how much more flexible that would be. How much more our finances could scale if we worked for ourselves. But we just didn’t have any ideas.

And we talked for years about different ideas and never really saw anything through or had a killer idea. Andy particularly got quite fed up with his job in the civil service in England and we thought, we need to do something. And thought, okay, well, what would combine our skills, and he was a software developer, not really web but software, and I was a project management and marketing person. And so we thought, well, building websites for people actually combines those skills.

He didn’t want to go into like software consultancy or something because we are from the southwest of England, which is quite rural, and we would probably have had to move to a big city. Remote work wasn’t such a thing back then, and so we didn’t really want that lifestyle change.

So he thought, well, maybe he could scale down a bit and learn web development instead of enterprise level software. And then that allows us to run a kind of more small business that we can live where we want to work. And websites need marketing, SEO, copywriting, project management, communication with clients. So that fitted in my skills as well. So, yes, it was intentional having analysed our respective skills and what we could realistically get into.

[00:07:45] Nathan Wrigley: That’s really great actually. Looking back, you had the perfect blend of different things there. Maybe a bit of serendipity, but your marketing side, and Andy’s coding side, that is really the basis of a successful agency business, growing agency business. You need to have the capacity to code, but also to sell it into the marketplace. I mean, how many stories have you heard of people who can code but they can’t launch a business, because they don’t have the wherewithal to sell it and drum up business and things like that. So that’s fascinating.

In the show notes that we shared, one of the things that you said was that you didn’t quite go in the right direction at the beginning. Well, it turned out that you didn’t go in the right direction. You went with client websites, building one site, shipping it, launching another, and so on. But that didn’t turn out to be something that you wanted to maintain. Why was that?

[00:08:30] Katie Keith: Yeah, so we thought client websites are a really good way to get started because you don’t need to invest lots of money, and you just get paid by the project. So if you can get one client that brings in, back then it was like £500 or something, not very much. And then you just keep going and grow slowly. I’d never really been attracted to the kind of business that you need to put a lot of money into upfront.

I love the program Dragons Den, which is Shark Tank in the US. But I’ve never wanted that kind of business where you need a lot of investment. So web design, just stick out a few flyers or something in your local, actually, fish and chip shop got us one client. We just put some flyers on the counter and we actually got a website for a local cycling club. Things like that. So you could start small.

So it was a good way to get started. And it was really good because it got us into WordPress. So we didn’t initially think, let’s be WordPress specialists. We thought, let’s build websites. And then Andy started researching the right tools and discovered WordPress and told me about it. I thought it sounded like an awful idea, because he made it sound like a kind of a blogging thing and like, oh, you choose a template for your blog. And I was like, no, we want to build business websites for people. Why are you using this blogging software?

But that was about a year after custom post types came in, and it was becoming a proper platform. It was about 2010 back then. We started specialising in WordPress. And then, to answer your question, at this point, the client work was better than having jobs, but it wasn’t quite the lifestyle you wanted, in that we wanted more flexibility where we’re not like on call to clients all the time.

If someone’s website goes down when you’re on holiday, you’ve got to fix it. And we did try to get help, project managers and things. And we did do well getting freelance designers and developers, but we just couldn’t find anybody that we could trust to communicate with the clients for us. And that really put a limitation on the lifestyle benefits because we were on, mainly me, we’re on call to clients all the time. So we thought, actually maybe that’s not the right business model.

[00:10:38] Nathan Wrigley: You’re also selling your time for money, and going through that feast famine life cycle where one project is ongoing. And then at what point do you sort of cut that off and say, okay, we need to start looking for the next one, even though we haven’t quite finished this one. There’s inevitably going to be some overlap where that all just works out well. And obviously the agencies which grow and scale and become enterprise, they just have that figured somehow.

My experience with that was always that there was a period where you were quite uncertain as to where the next website was going to come from. And you were, like I said, just trading your time for money. And WordPress offers so much more than that. You’ve got yourself into a kind of global marketplace where you could build a thing and then sell that thing 1,000 times, 10,000 times over, which I guess, where we’re going next. But you didn’t go to plugins first. You actually went into themes, which was a bit of a, well, a bit of a dead end it turns out. But tell us about the theme building enterprise.

[00:11:35] Katie Keith: Yeah, so because of all those things you’ve mentioned, selling time for money and the lifestyle thing, we thought selling WordPress products would be a much better business model because it could scale more. You can build one product and then sell it an unlimited number of times in theory, instead of selling one hour for a certain amount of money.

So we thought products are good. And we looked at the products and thought, ah, themes are the way to go. Themes seemed to be a big growth area, well, they were a big growth area. This is 2013.

And when we started work in about 2012 on our first, our only theme, ThemeForest was just growing loads. Plugins existed, but you didn’t hear about super successful plugin companies particularly. Whereas you could go on ThemeForest and you could see the sales that the big themes were getting, and it was very tempting to be part of that. So we thought, let’s build a theme. So we did. And it took like a year because of all the demands of client work. So it was just a sideline, building this theme. And then in that year ThemeForest changed, which we didn’t see coming. ThemeForest changed in the year we were building our theme.

So we’d analysed the themes that were successful at the time, and they were quite simple. They were nice, designed, often quite bold, clear designs, a bit minimal, and didn’t have that many features. And then between 2012 and 2013, themes such as uDesign and Avada and that kind of thing became popular. And they were massive multipurpose themes with so many features. And that wasn’t what we wanted to do. We wanted a product that we could maintain and develop ourselves easily, and it wouldn’t be this massive headache or anything like that.

So it just wasn’t what we wanted. And of course, that meant they rejected our theme because it wasn’t the sort of theme they were looking for. I think they would’ve accepted it a year before, but they didn’t when we got actually ready to submit it. So we were like, ah, do we rewrite the theme and make it loads more complicated? Do we sell it independently? And I wasn’t confident in my ability to market a theme independently, because you’re competing with the giants. And I didn’t have experience of that. I wanted to be on a marketplace.

[00:13:51] Nathan Wrigley: I think back in the day, 2013, like you mentioned, ThemeForest was the place to go for things like that, wasn’t it? And although I wasn’t really in the WordPress space, I jumped in after that endeavor. When I got there, ThemeForest was already, basically saturated with themes that could, well, themes that claimed to do more or less everything. You just buy this one theme and it can do everything. Or there was also a dearth of themes which offered a specific kind of functionality, like a real estate, or you might say, realtor theme, or a portfolio theme or, I don’t know, I’m a gym owner, I need a theme for my gym.

Kind of felt like it went in that direction, but it seems like you were trying to build something which was more agnostic of industry. It was just a, here’s the bare bones of a theme, you now go and do the artistic work. But yeah, like you say, ThemeForest was going off in a different direction.

So what happened there? Was it a case of staring at each other and saying, okay, what do we do? Do we try to pivot this theme? Or did you just at some point say, no, abandon it.

[00:14:51] Katie Keith: We were fairly depressed and disappointed and just gave up for a few years. So we carried on with the client work, which was going fine. We had a successful business that was keeping us both going. We didn’t need to do products. So we just continued with the client work.

[00:15:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so steady away. And then what was the moment where you, kind of had the revelation about plugins? Because, again, coming into the WordPress space, 2015, something like that, plugins and themes were already selling like hotcakes. I don’t really know about the period in which plugins was a bit new, a bit maybe dangerous, a bit, putting your business on the line with plugins. Maybe that was a tough one back then, I don’t know.

[00:15:30] Katie Keith: By the time it got to 2016, I supppose frustrations accumulate over time. So we were again like, oh, the client works just kind of annoying. It’s not quite flexible enough, and it’s not scaling enough, it’s just going up a little bit. So we need to do products. What shall we do again?

And this time we thought, well, plugins could work because unlike these massive multipurpose themes, a plugin can be really tiny or it can be incredibly complex. A plugin can just be a line of code, you know, as an extreme minimum. So we thought, well, that way we can choose products that fit with the scale that we want to offer technically. I hated the idea of a big theme or a massive plugin because you kind of end up being responsible for basically the user’s whole website.

So imagine if somebody’s using a theme which takes over their whole site, and it affects every aspect of the visuals. They’re going to send you a support ticket for everything, even if it’s not the theme’s fault. And then you are going to have to prove it’s not the theme’s fault. And we just thought that’s not sustainable.

And I think the same would happen with really large plugins like, I don’t know, a membership plugin or an e-commerce plugin or something thing like that. So we thought, well, we are just the two of us, plus our freelancers, so let’s choose a more realistic plugin idea and build it and see what happens.

[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: So you always had the agency, the client based websites. That was the backup plan. Always something to fall back on if the plugin business didn’t work out. You took the plunge. What was the first plugin that you came up with?

[00:17:07] Katie Keith: So the first plugin, we found by going on a website, which used to exist, which was the WooCommerce Ideas Forum. They used to have a whole website where people just gave ideas and, basically feature request board. But they have that now if people want to look, but I think it’s per extension instead of a whole thing for WooCommerce. So you access it differently and it’s hard to find. But there was this whole website.

So we went on this and you can sort it by the number of votes for each suggestion. And we chose an idea which had the highest number of votes that wasn’t that complex to build, which was WooCommerce password protected categories, which is very specific.

[00:17:47] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a great title, I like that.

[00:17:48] Katie Keith: Yeah, nice and snappy. WordPress itself already has password protection for its posts and pages, but not categories, and therefore WooCommerce doesn’t have it for its categories either. And people were saying that they wanted it for things like building a wholesale site, or selling different products to different clients.

If you imagine that you sell products to sports teams and they each have a logo, so the product’s different for each team, you might create a protected category for that team to log in and order their branded sportswear. Those sorts of use cases. And we thought, well, that’s quite simple. You just add a category field to the page and a few other features like login and things.

So we built the plugin. It wasn’t that difficult, and we launched it. And because it was unique and I was a marketer, I wrote a few blog posts about it, like how to password protect categories in WooCommerce, really niche posts. They went right to the top of Google because you could then, and there was nobody else offering that. And we actually started getting sales after about three days. And we were like, we are getting sales for our plugin and we couldn’t believe it.

[00:18:57] Nathan Wrigley: That is quite remarkable because I know the story is harder now than ever. That story is very hard to replicate because, you know, the market is saturated.

But just going back to your actual plugin, realistically, when you built that and you saw that idea, okay, we’re going to password protect a category, and it will impact WooCommerce, so I don’t know, we could send it to company A and the category will be A, and they can access it with a password, and we’ll send it to company B, and the category will be B and they can access it and so on.

Honestly, what was your expectation at that point? Because coming into the community, it’s hard to understand, how big is WordPress? And then the layer underneath that, how big is the plugin which sits inside of WordPress, WooCommerce, how big is that? And then we’ve got this niche little one, just does one tiny thing. Honestly, what were your expectations?

[00:19:44] Katie Keith: Very low. It was an experiment. It wasn’t a huge amount of work. Basically, Andy stopped doing some agency work for a while, and I relied on the freelance developers a bit more while he coded it. It wasn’t a big sacrifice for us to build it, and we didn’t have any kind of a business plan or projections or anything. It was just, let’s launch a small plugin and see what happens.

And we were amazed. And it still exists now. It’s now called WooCommerce Protected Categories because it has different ways of protecting the category, not just passwords, like user role and that kind of thing. And it actually, a few months ago it met half a million dollars in revenue lifetime. So that tiny idea has done half a million dollars in 8 years.

[00:20:30] Nathan Wrigley: So how quickly did that money start to roll in? And so it doesn’t have to be about money, the amount of, I don’t know, plugin licenses that you sold or whatever it may be. But how quickly did your intuition turn to, oh, there is really something in this? Like you mentioned you got a sale or two within two or three days, which is exciting. But obviously if it then just sort of trickled along one or two a week, it is exciting, but it’s not that exciting.

And what was the point where you and Andy started to look at each other and think, woah, we could potentially forget all the agency work if we now pivot into this? How long did it take you to make those decisions?

[00:21:03] Katie Keith: Yeah, because that was just pocket money, the first sales. It was just nice because it’s an indication that it could work. So that kept growing. And we also launched other plugins as well. Like our second one came from a client project.

The client paid us to build a custom plugin, which was a searchable, sortable table of blog posts for their blog. So they had hundreds of blog posts and they wanted a more easy way for people to find them. So we built this table plugin, and we launched it on wordpress.org as a free plugin called Post Table with Search and Sort. So that’s just as good a name as WooCommerce Password Protected Category.

[00:21:40] Nathan Wrigley: Got the SEO juice going there, definitely.

[00:21:43] Katie Keith: Oh yeah, it does what it says. So that was a free plugin, but that led to a lot of sales because people started sending us feature requests once it was on wordpress.org.

So the first ones wanted custom fields, custom taxonomies, and custom post types, rather than just blog posts in their table. So they might want to create like a table of documents or members for a directory of consultants or something like that, like custom post types and data. So we built Post Table Pro, which was the premium version, and that’s done really well.

And then people started asking for even more features, which we used to develop different plugins. So we built WooCommerce Product Table, which is a WooCommerce version of that table, which has things like add to cart buttons and variation dropdowns.

And so that cluster of plugins that came from this free table plugin is what really kind of catapulted the success. So that within about six months of launching our first plugin we were making, I don’t know, several thousand dollars a month. And we thought, given that we have some revenue from clients like maintenance and hosting, so our existing clients were paying us for certain things, we can afford to stop taking new projects, and therefore put more resources into building more plugins, and improving our existing ones, and marketing them, of course. So it was about six months that we decided, let’s stop accepting new client projects.

[00:23:13] Nathan Wrigley: So the plugin that you just mentioned there, the sorting of the tables, it sounds like you got that out of a client project. So it was actually a client that came to you. We need this idea and, okay, we’ll build that. But then the back of that is, can we then take that code and run with it? Which you did. And then you’ve got the pro version, which adds in a bunch of different features. And now you’ve got two plugins and a third one came on quite quickly. We’re six months in, and the dollar signs are starting to make sense.

You can see that, okay, there’s a living in this. We’ll take our foot off the client websites, but we’ll keep it going just in case something goes wrong. So I’m presuming though, at this point you are all guns aimed at, we need more plugins, more and more and more plugins. And so when did it become, okay, let’s just go in on Woo? How did you end up as Woo as opposed to just WordPress?

[00:23:59] Katie Keith: We never did. Our biggest plugin now is Document Library Pro, which is not Woo, and that came from Post Table Pro as well. The biggest use case of Post Table Pro ended up being documents. So we built a document plugin that had download buttons and previews and stuff that’s specific to documents. Again, it’s just a table plugin, and that has been our biggest seller for the last three or four years since we launched it.

So because of the success of that and Post Table Pro, we never could actually just be WooCommerce. So we are not like, say Iconic, who specialise in WooCommerce, that’s all they do.

So we have this reputation of being WooCommerce. And I wish we were actually. Obviously I like having a successful plugin, but I wish that we had that clear identity because it’s, like I explained the business at the beginning in the introduction, I’m like, oh, we have these plugins, they’re mostly WooCommerce. It is not as clean as it could be.

[00:24:56] Nathan Wrigley: Sitting where you are now, and we can get into the numbers of how many plugins and all of that that you’ve got. Have you made any missteps with, like has any plugin that you’ve built misfired completely? You thought this would be a great idea, let’s build it, let’s market it. But then you build it and the customers do not come. Or has every single one had a fair degree of, they don’t all have to be super successful, but has everything stood on its own two feet and been worth doing?

[00:25:20] Katie Keith: It depends how you define success. But it’s largely relative. So if you’re doing one plugin that’s doing X a month, then if you have one that’s much smaller, that’s not necessarily worth it.

I would say my biggest mistake, repeatedly, has been thinking too small. So I have a very bad track record of building plugins that are too small and too niche to be worth bothering with. Lots of examples.

One example was WooCommerce Discontinued Products. So that adds a discontinued stock status to your store. We built it because we were hiring some new senior developers and we were doing a project for these developers. Before we hired them, we were paying them to build a small plugin to check how good they were. And we thought, well, the ones we hired, we may as well release their plugin. So we did.

We did WooCommerce Variation Prices, Discontinued Products. We had multiple plugins that were just trial projects for the developer, but they were good. And their first project after they joined properly was to complete the plugin, and make it sellable. But that’s a lot of work. You’ve got to create all the marketing images, the marketing content, the sales page, market it.

Each plugin has an overhead as well as maintaining it. And so with hindsight, I shouldn’t have released all of those small plugins. And we actually sold five of our plugins last year to a WooCommerce company called Kestrel, because we had 24 at the time, and it was just too many. And I did an 80 20 rule analysis of the business and how much revenue was coming from each plugin. And that cluster of five were all doing, they were all doing at least several hundreds a month, but generally less than a thousand a month.

And compared to our other plugins, that was a small proportion. So I thought, let’s group these plugins and sell them to a company who would appreciate and grow them more, where that fits better with their business plan.

[00:27:17] Nathan Wrigley: Are you still on the lookout for new ideas? Or do you want to just hunker down on the ones that you’ve got? In other words, do you constantly ideate and think, let’s find a new thing or is it more serendipity? You accidentally stumble across an idea, we should build that, and so we do. Or do you deliberately try, in the same way that you did previously going to the WooCommerce forum, do you try to find new products to build and see how they work?

[00:27:41] Katie Keith: I suppose a bit of both depending on our current priorities. So for example, in 2024 last year, that’s when we sold the five plugins. And I thought, we’ve got a handful of really successful plugins, we need to put our resources into making them as good as they can be to maximise their potential sales.

So for example, instead we did launch one plugin last year, our WooCommerce Discount Plugin, but we were already building that when I made this decision. So once I made that decision, I put all our developers on adding features to our existing plugins, including some really big features.

For example, we have a WooCommerce Product Options plugin, which adds extra options to your product pages. And dozens and dozens and dozens of people were saying to us, we want live image previews. So when you use our plugin to upload an image to the product page, we want that to appear superimposed on a picture of the T-shirt, for example. So if you upload your picture of your child, that will appear on the T-shirt.

And that was a big project. So we could have built a completely different plugin, but instead we added live preview. We actually did it as an add-on, so it’s sort of an extra plugin, but it’s dependent on the main plugin, and things like that. So we thought, what’s working and how could we make what’s working even more successful? But I do have a list of plugin ideas for the future.

[00:29:06] Nathan Wrigley: So there’s a laundry list of things that you might build, but the priorities are not to build them all right away? Just see how the market goes. Speaking of that, speaking of the market, you’re obviously heavily embedded in WordPress, heavily embedded in WooCommerce. What do you make of the landscape at the moment?

You’re obviously beginning to pitch into Shopify a little bit as well, and I imagine you’re at pains to say we’re not taking our foot off the WordPress pedal. How do you feel the landscape is shaping up in 2025? It does seem like things are plateauing a little bit in terms of market share for WordPress, whether or not they’ll go up or down. How confident are you in the future? Is it still WordPress all the way down?

[00:29:42] Katie Keith: I certainly don’t think WordPress is going anywhere, and it probably won’t shrink a lot, if at all. But I also don’t feel that we are having a rising tide that we can all ride the journey upwards like we used to. For example, in 2020 when everybody was locked down, there was huge growth for nearly all WordPress companies, because the world was going online so rapidly and we had a huge, huge growth very quickly.

And then since then it has slowed down. The growth has slowed down and now seems fairly stable. Stable is a good word, but it’s not really growing in a particularly measurable way. And you could argue that that is just a correction because it went up so much, so quickly during the pandemic that maybe it just took a few years to get back to where it would’ve done if there was no pandemic.

So if you imagine a steep line rather than a big bump followed by a plateau. So you could argue that. But it feels like we have to work harder than we used to to see growth, and make that happen through our own efforts, rather than just relying on a growing market.

[00:30:48] Nathan Wrigley: So obviously that would be nice if WordPress could keep going in that same way. What about Woo? Obviously we were just talking about WordPress. I don’t really involve myself with Woo so much, so I don’t really know what the statistics are. I know that in terms of e-commerce platforms, it’s the leader, but I don’t know if that’s sort of going up or going down. You got any insight in that?

[00:31:07] Katie Keith: It is very confusing because it depends where you look. So there’s two main websites that publish data about e-commerce usage, and one of them says WooCommerce is the leader and the other says Shopify is. And they use slightly different data sets. For example, the top X websites in the world, versus the whole internet, versus a sample of a million, which they use to extrapolate upwards.

So there are different ways of looking at the data. So I genuinely don’t know, there probably is no correct answer, which is the biggest e-commerce platform, but they’re both doing really well and neither are going anywhere. So that’s why it felt that it made sense for us to be building products for both.

I think WooCommerce is really interesting because it has a good reputation. It has, I think the best leadership team around it that I’ve seen in the 8 years I’ve been building plugins on top of it right now. But I wish they would do more marketing. They’re not promoting their platform in the way that say Shopify is, and that scares me. I would like to see them doing more centralised marketing.

They’re a company, they make money from WooCommerce, even though it’s free. They have extensions, they have revenue sharing from their Stripe and they have lots of ways of making money, which they’ve recently talked about publicly. And so I’d like them to be doing some proper marketing like Shopify does.

[00:32:29] Nathan Wrigley: It is interesting, I know you no longer live in the UK. I do, and it doesn’t take many trips down high streets to realise that the high street is really in decline. You only have to walk down one street in more or less any town to realise that the shutters are going up, the wood is going over the doors, bricks and mortar shops are really struggling.

And it’s this inexorable rise. I can only imagine that, well, people are still buying things, but they’re buying things increasingly on the internet. My age group, I imagine has been fairly straightforward, because we grew up when the internet was coming around. Children that are growing up now, I think they’re really just not interested in doing things like going into town in a sort of social way like I did. So I imagine that eCommerce’s future, just generally e-commerce, platform agnostic, you’ve got to imagine its got everything going for it, I would’ve thought.

[00:33:24] Katie Keith: Yeah, that makes sense. And we often look at things like market share data, but that’s just a percentage. So even if WordPress’ market, or let’s say WooCommerce’s market share did go down at some point, if the whole of e-commerce was growing, then WooCommerce could still be growing. And it doesn’t really matter so much if it’s smaller percentage, if the whole cake is bigger.

So I think that’s the case. And you do see quite regularly published e-commerce data about, particularly after Black Friday, like the most revenue ever went through e-commerce sites this Black Friday. And it does seem to be constantly growing. And I think that is primarily through websites. A lot of people are buying through apps, of course, instead of websites, particularly something like Amazon or even Temu or something these days. But I think e-commerce websites are still huge and I can’t see that changing.

[00:34:15] Nathan Wrigley: No, because in most of the towns that I’ve visited where I can see this, the big, we call them department stores in the UK. An example might be something like Marks & Spencer. They’ve got a branch in more or less every town. You kind of feel that they’re immune. They’ve got their online bit as well, so they’ve probably inoculated themselves in that way. They’ve just got so much kudos, and so much loyalty built in that you feel they might be immune for a period of time.

But all of the little shops, the little jeweler, the little corner shop selling a thing that they build, whatever it may be, you kind of feel they are going to struggle because the footfall is less. They really do fit into what you sell. I’m reasonably technical, but I can’t build, I can’t code, I can’t do any of that, so I need a solution.

I think the future for WooCommerce and the kind of things that you create and sell, I think the future’s really bright because I see that market just going up and up. The younger people are going to be wanting to use their devices because they’re all really fascinated by them, everybody’s got a mobile phone nowadays. The footfall is sort of falling away, and it all seems like a perfect storm for e-commerce to grow. I could be being overly optimistic there, but it feels like it’s fair weather for the next decade or so.

[00:35:26] Katie Keith: Yeah, I know what you mean. And it’s a good example to use those small shops because even if they keep their storefront, which probably isn’t profitable, they should be selling online. And small shops, they’ve got a few choices, that could be WooCommerce. That might be harder to set up in the first place, they might need to hire someone. But then their costs are super, super low compared to most platforms.

They could go for Shopify, which is slightly reversed in that sense. Or they could use something like Etsy if they’re a jeweller, to use your example. So there’s lots of ways for them to sell online, but they do need to be thinking of it for their survival because of the decline of things like the high street, as you say.

[00:36:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think so. Looking back, again, just casting your mind back to 2013 when you began all of this. Do you think that you were lucky when you decided to pivot into making plugins? What I’m really saying is, if you were beginning now in 2025, everything was the same, it was just 12 years later, 2013 to 2025. Do you think you’d have the same degree of success with the exact same kind of approach to it?

Basically, has the market got harder, more saturated, more difficult to sell into, more savvy? Anything around there. Do you feel, basically, you were lucky in terms of timing?

[00:36:38] Katie Keith: I think to an extent. I don’t believe it’s fully saturated yet, but it is more full than it was when we started. So when we started, there were no WooCommerce protected category plugins, there were no WordPress dynamic table plugins, there were no document library plugins, there were no product table plugins for WooCommerce.

So we managed to do that because those were gaps. Now they’re not. And now we’ve done successful plugins in those categories people have copied. So we have competition now, which came along after we launched. So those are no longer gaps. But I do firmly believe that there are still gaps that you can fill.

And the way to find them is through already being in WordPress in some way, which most typically is through building sites for clients, or doing some kind of client work. Because they will always find a gap and ask you to fill it through a custom plugin or something like that. So if you concentrate hard enough on the client work that you’re getting, you probably will find gaps.

And if you find something that doesn’t already exist, then yes, you could get to the top of Google quickly for a very specific keyword. Of course, WordPress and WooCommerce are much bigger now than they were in 2016 when we launched our first plugin. So even if it’s slightly more diluted with competition, the market is bigger. So there is potential now you’re a part of a bigger market.

[00:38:03] Nathan Wrigley: So last question really, Katie. Do you see WordPress being the thing for you and your husband, the business you are going to pursue for the next decade or so, or do you think you will be scrambling around for more opportunities in the Shopify space? I don’t know, other CMSs, pivot completely, who knows? What does the future hold? What’s the next decade looking like from where you sit right now?

[00:38:24] Katie Keith: I must admit, I’m not very good at long-term planning. I just do what feels right for the short and medium term.

[00:38:31] Nathan Wrigley: It’s worked.

[00:38:32] Katie Keith: Well, yeah, exactly. Does it matter? You do something and then you focus on what works and learn and keep iterating. I think that’s why I haven’t created, I don’t know, hundreds of million dollar worth business because I’m not a visionary that has this long-term view that I’ll do anything to make it happen.

Instead, I try something and keep learning, which has created a successful business, but in a more steady growth kind of way. So I’d rather be that visionary, but I’m not. It’s hard to know personally. I think you wanted to talk about the fact that my husband left the business about 8 months ago now. He’d lost his passion for it and wanted to reflect on other things he could do for the rest of his career, which he’s still doing.

So I’m now running it on my own and he owns half of it, so that might affect the future. We talked about whether he should sell his share, for example, at the time, and he decided, oh, WordPress is growing so nicely, it’s so stable, he’ll leave his money in the business.

Well, since then there’s been all this drama, so we are thinking, was that the right call? Should we get some money out?

But I love what I do and want to stay doing what I’m doing for the foreseeable future. But we could do something like take on a partner or investment or something if Andy wants to, say, invest his half elsewhere. So there’s that, which might affect our future.

[00:39:54] Nathan Wrigley: Oh gosh, that’s interesting. So, you heard here first. If people wanted to get in touch with you, Katie, not necessarily about taking on half the business or anything like that, but they’re just curious about what we’ve talked about today, or anything else related to WooCommerce plugins, et cetera, where would you be hanging out online? Is that a social network or an email? What’s the best thing?

[00:40:15] Katie Keith: So for company stuff, it’s Barn2.com to check out our plugins and so on. And for me, the most active place that I am would be Twitter, which is katiekeithbarn2.

[00:40:27] Nathan Wrigley: So Katie Keith, I appreciate you chatting to me today. Thank you so much and every success for 2025 and beyond. Thank you.

[00:40:34] Katie Keith: Thanks for having me.