[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.

[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, analytics options and privacy challenges for WordPress site owners.

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 Derek Ashauer.

Having spent over 15 years in the WordPress arena, Derek has transitioned from building client sites to creating specialized WordPress plugins. Today we get to hear about his journey creating Conversion Bridge, a tools specifically designed to streamline the process of implementing analytics platforms and conversion tracking on WordPress websites.

We start with an overview of analytics, tracing its evolution from the simple server logs of the early internet days, to the sophisticated data gathering mechanisms provided by Google Analytics and others.

We explore how the introduction of European privacy laws has significantly impacted the data landscape, challenging marketers and businesses to adapt to a new era where data privacy is regarded differently in different locales.

Derek offers his perspectives on this rapidly changing field, discussing the rise of modern privacy focused analytics platforms like Fathom, Plausible and others. He explains how these technologies employ cookieless tracking techniques to respect user privacy, while still providing valuable insights for website owners.

We also address the problem of data accessibility and user privacy. Derek, sharing his personal views as a marketer, acknowledges the complexity of balancing effective marketing strategies with ethical data use. He explains his thoughts on why modern solutions might strike a better balance, ensuring that user data remains private, while allowing businesses to glean just the insights they need.

Whether you are managing a WooCommerce store, or building sites for clients, Derek’s insights into conversion tracking will be of interest. He talks about some of the hurdles site builders face with traditional systems and how Conversion Bridge simplifies conversion tracking across various platforms and plugins without the need for extensive coding.

If you’re an agency, developer, or digital marketer, this discussion will help equip you with the knowledge and strategies to navigate the ever evolving landscape of web analytics.

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 Derek Ashauer.

I am joined on the podcast by Derek Ashauer. How you doing, Derek?

[00:03:40] Derek Ashauer: I am doing well, thank you so much.

[00:03:41] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much for joining me. We’ve had various chats over the years, but this is going to be a chat that we’ve never had before. This is going to be all about analytics.

We’ll talk about all of the different bits and pieces, perhaps get into the future of analytics, the past of analytics, who knows? But stay with us, dear listener. It’s going to be a really interesting conversation. I feel like things are at a bit of an inflection point, and people definitely have strong opinions on this, and I think that can often lie on geographical grounds, where you live in the world and things like that.

So before we get into that conversation, Derek, do you just want to give us a little potted bio? Tell us who you are.

[00:04:15] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, my name’s Derek Ashauer, I’m in Colorado US. I’ve been in the WordPress community for, well, I guess I’ve been working with WordPress for about 15 years, I think. Doing client sites and things like that. So I’ve done the independent freelancer agency, but now I’ve moved to making WordPress plugins. So I have one for photographers called Sunshine Photo Cart.

But my big one that I’m working on lately is called Conversion Bridge, which really makes it easy to add analytics platforms to your WordPress website, and also make it really easy to do conversion tracking, which is something that a lot of agencies and people are building sites for clients just neglect to do. And one reason why is because it’s kind of a pain in the butt.

So the goal is to make it a lot easier so that I can do it for myself, and my client sites that I’ve worked on, but also then to make it easier for everyone else. So that’s how I got the idea for that.

[00:05:02] Nathan Wrigley: Prior to hitting the record button, Derek and I were saying that, you are on a journey with this, you know, you’re not putting yourself up here as the definitive authority. I think you were basically saying that a little while ago your knowledge was not that deep in this arena and you’ve really had to educate yourself. And I think it’s fair to say that you were trying to summarise it as you’re still learning.

So let’s have a conversation about this and see where we end up. The thought occurs to me that if we were to go back, oh gosh, I mean the internet, every time I say this sentence the internet does obviously get a little bit older, but let’s go for 20 years, something like that. I feel that if you went to a website, there wasn’t even the thought that there was any kind of analytics. Maybe there was some server log somewhere that was recording that, okay, we served up a page, but that was about it.

And then at some point analytics software came along and very quickly started to leverage all of the existing technologies and became really, really sophisticated ever so quickly. You would copy and paste a code, and it was typically Google, I think that dominated the arena right from the outset. They offered a free service, Google Analytics. You could copy and paste one line of code. There was no barrier to entry to that technology. And it would give you all sorts of fascinating information really quickly.

I think everybody was happy with that status quo, but in the more recent past, let’s say decade or so, but definitely it seems to be ramping up at the moment. There seems to be concerns about who gets the data, why is this data necessary? Is this data consumable by, I don’t know, an American company looking at a European who’s browsing on a particular website and things like that?

With all of this, just give us your overarching opinion on it, and then we can go from there. What’s the state of play at the moment with analytics? Where are we? The year 2025 at the moment. Do you have any sort of overarching insight into where analytics, in air quotes, is at the moment?

[00:06:55] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, it’s a lot harder because of the European privacy laws for the analytics platforms to get the data that marketers and other people have been used to for a long time. Where people came from, you used to be able to get like exactly what search terms people were looking at and landed on your site and what they did. You know, if someone searched Fort Collins landscaper, local landscape company could see that that’s exactly what they searched, and then what that user did on their website from that search term. And that’s just kind of gone. That deep level of data is unfortunately not possible anymore to follow those type of European laws, and privacy restrictions and things like that. So there’s a lot of people who are struggling to get the data that they were used to. That’s kind of the short of it, I guess.

[00:07:40] Nathan Wrigley: Do you think that we kind of let the horse escape from the barn a little bit, and we’re now just trying to get the horse back into the barn and get it under control again? And what I mean by that is, do you think that these technologies, the analytics and what have you, do you think it kind of just crept up upon us? There was this slow but inexorable extension of what analytics software could do. And all the while it felt like completely benign, you know, there’s no problem with it. How could anybody possibly make use of this in a way which might be harmful or, I don’t know, intrusive or what have you?

So the software became more and more clever. But then I think people, especially like you said on the European side of things, started to take a look at it and thought, hmm, it’s interesting, a lot of this data is going to, in many cases, big North American companies. Google, I suppose would be a perfect example, but you’ve obviously got other things like Facebook and what have you.

Just try to maybe restore something a bit more where the user is in control, as opposed to these giant corporations being in control. So just trying to bring it back to the starting line, if you like, to the moment before the horse got out so that we can reestablish some rules.

So, I don’t know. It sounds from what you were saying as if you’re kind of regretful that the analytics solutions can’t do what they once could. I suppose the European argument would be, well, that’s because it never really, with hindsight, we should never have let it get that far in the first place. What’s your thoughts on that?

[00:09:07] Derek Ashauer: I mean, I kind of see it. The way I often describe a lot of things is like a pendulum swing. In the beginning it went really far in one direction, we got all kinds of data, and then the laws popped up and now it feels like, we can’t get nearly enough data for advanced marketing, for large corporations that are really doing massive campaigns.

And then there’s the alternatives, Fathom, Plausible, Pirsch, you know, lots of great, Usermaven. There’s a lot of new alternative analytics platforms now that are out there, and now finding clever ways to claw back some of that.

It’s never going to be nearly as detailed as it was a decade ago, that was kind of like the heyday of marketing where you could get so much great data on stuff. But you know, so we had too much maybe in some people’s opinions, and then maybe there’s a bit of not enough, and now those companies are finding some ways to move maybe towards a middle ground of what works for everyone.

And as an American, I’m like, yeah, whatever. You saw that I visited these several websites in a row, I really don’t care. That never really bothered me, I haven’t understood the massive problem with it.

Going through all this, I have learned, you know, maybe there’s a few spots where it would be good to protect that and maybe they don’t know that but, yeah, I’m the person that does accept all on every single website that I got to as a marketer, because I’m just like, yeah, great, I’ll give this website some data on me, I don’t mind.

[00:10:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’ve got a very open mind to all of that, haven’t you? And obviously, you are digging into this and your business is kind of largely tied up to that, so very understandable position to have.

You mentioned there several platforms, and you rattled them off one after another, Fathom and others. So a lot of these will be unfamiliar, I think, to this audience. What is the proposition?

So it sounds like many of them are quite new. What is it that they bring to the table, and are these SaaS based products, or are in some cases a WordPress plugin? Or something that can install on your own hardware? What’s going on there? Just rattle off those names again and maybe just give us the low down on what they do, and how they’re getting into the market, and competing against giants like Google.

[00:11:01] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, so there’s definitely some great new options and a lot of the initial ones were SaaS based. So there’s ones, like I said, Plausible, Fathom, Usermaven, Pirsch is another great one that I really enjoy. My plugin Conversion Bridging integrates with like 12 different analytics platforms, so there’s tons of them, and there’s still many more that I have on my list to do. So there’s lots of alternatives, which there weren’t any before, until Google Analytics 4 kind of came out and people were like, we don’t like GA4, and that opened the door for a lot of platforms.

But to get back to your question, yeah, one of the differences that they offer is they do what’s called cookieless tracking. So that’s one of the big things that the privacy laws in Europe were like, it was around cookies and tracking the cross websites. So that the user, they go to landscaper website, then they go, no, I’m going to go to Home Depot and I’m going to look for my own lawnmower, and now I’m going to price check against Lowe’s and all these different things. And Google Analytics could see where they were going, and all these different places. Or Facebook ads could track all these different websites that they went to and gauge this type of person and who they are and what they’re shopping for and things like that. So trying to crack down on that.

Well, these alternative platforms do it without cookies. They have a way, a method, without getting too technical of just basically fingerprinting the user, and know for that one session when they’re on your website, what they’re doing. But then it stops there. It doesn’t go to all the other websites and give your entire four hours you were online, and all the different websites that you’re browsing to a company to let them know what you’re doing everywhere.

So that’s kind of their main offering. And they are SaaS, you know, they’re just like Google Analytics, but they do cost. So that’s, they can be affordable. They’re anywhere, I think there’s some that are like $6, $7 a month for what a basic blog would ever need, up to $50 to, or even $100 a month depending on the amount of traffic, which is hard to reconcile for a lot of people who were used to free Google Analytics.

So it’s hard to make that leap when you’re going, wait, I could do Google Analytics for free and there’s some countries, and even like a state or two in the US that have some laws where it’s like, erm, what’s the setup involved in that? There might be law violations, simply by using Google Analytics you could be violating some of those things in a couple countries.

But there are some setups you can do to try and make it work with European privacy laws and stuff. Takes some extra work. But it’s a challenge. Is it worth it? We’ve been so used to, for 20 years, for having free analytics to then now suddenly switch and pay for analytics can be hard for some site owners.

Or as if you’re an agency doing that to convince your client’s like, well, we should actually start paying for this. And because you get 200,000 visits a month, it’s going to cost you $100 a month. They go, or I could use the free version. Yeah, well, I’ll just stick to the free version. So it is, it’s a hard conversation to have. When is it worthwhile? It just really depends on, I mean, you’ve got to really try it out.

[00:13:44] Nathan Wrigley: I suppose no matter how wonderful the staff at Google are, they’re not in the business of losing money. And so I’m guessing that at some point the pendulum does swing in Google’s favor. So what might be free at the point of use, so in other words, you download a snippet from Google, and you put it into the back end of your website, or you pay, let’s say $20 a month, or $50 a month, or whatever. I’m guessing that Google are doing quite well, let’s say, in terms of the data that they gather, and the way that they can use that themselves. Or, I don’t know if they sell that data onto any other brokers or what have you. But presumably there’s that concern.

Just going back to what you said about these other, and I’m going to use modern platforms, let’s go for that, the ones that you mentioned. You said fingerprinting, and I’ve heard this phrase before, and I have the merest idea of what that means. So Google Analytics traditionally came about with a cookie, and we get what that is. But what are the ways around that, that fingerprinting, well, essentially, what is fingerprinting? What are some examples of how that works?

[00:14:40] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, it’s a term that I just use in this moment. It’s not necessarily a term that you’ll see as you go around, it’s just the word that came out. But it’s just a way to uniquely identify somebody through various different points. You check these five different things about a person, and because of exactly what they are, those five elements, then we can say, that’s this person. So that’s kind of, each platform, I call them alternative platforms, you said modern platforms, they have their slightly different way of doing it, but they have their way of identifying without using cookies.

So the traditional way is like Google Analytics, you set a cookie, random value in the browser, and then every time they go to a new page, you just check for that cookie and that value. That’s how we know they are, because that’s how we know who they are. Again, the modern platforms are doing it every time the page loads, it’s saying, who is this again? Let’s check these five points. I think sometimes it’s browser, it’s various different elements that they’ll check to then determine who that person is, and then know who you are as you go down the path on the website, but it’s not setting cookies to do that.

[00:15:38] Nathan Wrigley: So what kind of information might it be? I mean, I can imagine an obvious one would be things like, okay, what browser are you using, for example? That might be one indicator, and then if you match that with another indicator, and then a third one, and a fourth one, over four or five different indicators, you are going to be, well, what are the chances that that’s a different person?

[00:15:58] Derek Ashauer: General location, stuff like that, yeah. Using this specific browser, this version of their browser. In my stuff, I haven’t fully identified what those platforms are actually using. I’ve just kind of, at this point left it. They do cookieless tracking, they have a way of doing it, okay great.

Some are better than others. To be honest, there are, Fathom has improved this. I know it was a struggle when I started Conversion Bridge about a year ago. For example, when someone landed on your page and then they did a conversion, say they fill out a form or made a purchase 10 pages later, those two weren’t associated with, because it was just one page view at a time, wholly independent things. They couldn’t tell that you are that person on that page view, and that person on that page view. I actually did this, I think last week just to check in on them, and it actually did finally say, okay, yeah, that was the same person. That came in and did that. So yeah, they’re finding ways to make it work and better identify those across one website.

[00:16:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, is the promise of these platforms though that they are different, or are they trying without cookies to get back to the point where cookies were? In other words, a cookie, until it was cleared out, could literally follow you everywhere. You know, it would know which website you’d been to, and could last for a long, long time and all of those concerns.

Is the intention of these other analytics platforms to sort of step away from that and say, okay, we’re going to track you on this one domain. So if you’ve got example.com as your domain, and it’s an e-commerce store, whilst you’re there, our platform will keep an eye on you, and we’ll learn if you have gone through a bunch of pages, and whether you’ve converted and bought a thing or not. But once you step away from that domain, that’s it, we are done with you.

Or do you get the intention that they are somehow just, humans always figure out a way, right? If we give them enough time, they’ll figure out a way. Is the intention for these other platforms, do you perceive that they would like to get to the point where cookies were?

[00:17:45] Derek Ashauer: No. They’re number one selling point, I think if you went to the homepage of every single one of them is they do privacy first analytics, is like the banner thing. That’s what they’re offering. And that’s why it’s so much bigger in Europe than it is here in the US and North America and stuff like that.

But, yeah, that’s their main thing, their privacy focused analytics. Google Analytics alternatives that are privacy focused is their main draw. I think someone reminded me of, Katie Keith from Barn2, she reminded me of the story from Fathom. They specifically sent Google Analytics a cake to thank them for being so bad at what they do that they allowed them to create a whole industry as an alternative to them. Stuff like that. So, I think they’re trying to do the privacy focused stuff, and then backfill in the features to give people as much data as they possibly can that they were used to in Google Analytics.

[00:18:39] Nathan Wrigley: You said earlier, and we’ll just touch on this briefly, you said earlier that, the implication of what you said, and you may not have meant this, but I’ll say it as if you are saying it, and then you can criticise whatever I say. It sounds like, if you could rewind the clock and get rid of the European legislation and what have you, you would do that, and you’d be happy with that position. You are okay with being tracked and all bets are off. So firstly, let’s address that. Would you be okay with all of that?

[00:19:03] Derek Ashauer: I think there’s got to be a balance between the two. I get that there’s, you know, for me it’s a thing. I don’t care if you know all the different things of where I went. You know, you see those futuristic movies where it’s individualised ads on video screens, and I’m like, that’s actually kind of cool. It helps give me gift ideas for my wife, stuff like that, because I’m a terrible gift giver. So, yeah, recommend me some products. I wouldn’t have thought to do that. I’ve bought things off of ads I’ve seen on Facebook or Twitter, things like that. Because I was like, that was a great gift for my dad. I never would’ve purposely found that if I hadn’t been shown that ad because for whatever reason, so I’m not against that personally.

[00:19:37] Nathan Wrigley: My guess though is that it’s not really that that’s the problem in most people’s minds. It’s like, who’s holding that data, and where does that data get moved to? Just the idea that, as an example, there might be a data broker firm who may purchase that data. And in some cases, let’s imagine that you ended up on a website which you regret going to. You can read into that, dear listener, whatever you like. But you end up somewhere and all of a sudden connections are made between you as a person. And you can also imagine scenarios in which, I don’t know, data gets linked from various data brokers and they start to create an impression of who you are.

I can imagine scenarios where that could get out of hand, and potentially come back to bite you as an individual. So I suppose there’s a little bit of that muddled up in it. It’s not that the business, the WooCommerce store or whatever, is going to have any nefarious reason to have that data. Or wish to know where you’ve come from, where you’re going to, what ad you might have clicked on, what were the previous page that you came from, and so on and so forth.

It’s more that there just seems to be this fairly bizarre industry of data brokers who managed to get their hands on this data, and at that moment, you don’t know what’s going to happen with it. And we’ve all made mistakes in life, but we can erase them just with the passage of time. But with the advent of the internet, some of those mistakes might stick with us for a long time. Does that make any sense?

[00:21:04] Derek Ashauer: No, it makes sense. I mean, I could see how someone would visit, again, visit the landscaper website, and all of a sudden they did not know that the fact that they went to a landscaper website was sent to Meta. They’re like, well, I didn’t know that was, I was going to a landscaper website. Why does Meta need to know that I was checking out who was going to cut my grass?

I get that in some regards, that there’s just not a knowledge of where things are going. I think it’s a pretty safe thing to say that cookie popups, that was just not the right way to go about it. That’s just made things, made the internet significantly worse. What are the solutions to give website owners the data they need to make good marketing decisions?

Because otherwise, I mean, I think of it even on a bigger macro level that that landscaper, if they don’t know any of the ads are working or what’s going on or what people are doing, then they don’t know what ads, where to spend their money that works best. Now they have to increase their costs to cover the blanket marketing that they have to do because they don’t know exactly what attribution, what marketing channel is actually working for them. So to pay for the 50 different marketing channels they have to do, they have to increase the cost for everybody.

So if they were able to narrow it down and say, well, we know that mailers and these Google ads are actually our best ways to make money, we don’t need to spend on email newsletter, or all these different things, our marketing spends only 5% of what it would be otherwise, that means we don’t have to charge as much.

So it goes to bigger macro level discussions of economics of, in some ways for the consumer, it could be better for these companies to have some data about you.

But I understand what you’re saying though. It is like, again, I don’t want Meta to have it, I want the landscaper company to have it. That’s okay. And that’s the line that I think a lot of people, I think would agree that, yeah, I don’t want Meta to have that data but, yeah, I’m okay with my local landscaper having the data so they knew what ads worked and things like that.

And those privacy or the modern analytics platforms do at least get you a good amount of that data. So they are some good alternatives to that. But it’s not going to get you, those mega corporations are not going to get the, okay, well they clicked on our ad, they went to these other places, then came back to our site, and then did this and they came back to site, and then did this and came back to our site. And to get those really deep analytics. They’re not going to and that’s the challenge. But I would say, the WordPress space, that’s 90% of people are going to do fantastic with modern analytics platforms and get the data that they need.

[00:23:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really interesting because you are owning the domain, you’re running the domain, you probably don’t have any interest in brokering the data out to Facebook anyway. So what you can get out of that is probably useful. We’ll dig into that in a moment.

I’m just curious, being a resident in the USA, and I’m obviously, you can tell by my accent, I’m based in the UK, we may have, and I don’t know if we do, we may have a very different experience of browsing the internet.

I, for my part, if I was to open up a brand new browser, clean out everything that’s ever happened in that browser and start again, and browse around a whole variety of websites, I am inundated with cookie banners. Go to any large property, I am going to see cookie banners a lot, a very significant amount of the time because that’s how it goes over here.

They can be confusing. They can be deliberately confusing. And in some cases they can be eye wateringly difficult to understand. The language is inverted so that you are kind of clicking on something you didn’t intend to click on. There can be so many options. I mean, it is really remarkable how many options there can be. You open up this little popup and you scroll, and you scroll, and you scroll, and you scroll, and you could do that whole scroll thing for like a whole minute and you still haven’t run out of options. And so we are living through this, and I don’t know if it’s the same where you are, I don’t know if you encounter any of this stuff.

[00:24:51] Derek Ashauer: I definitely see them, but it’s not on every single website because those cookie banners can be configured so that they can be region specific. So if someone is located in a space where there are no laws around that, then just don’t show on the banner. And I happen to be in that one. So there’s some that aren’t as complex that have that feature, and so I still will see those. But I mean, yeah, it’s not every single website. Honestly not sure how many, but I would say maybe 50%.

[00:25:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, if I was going to a website which is just purely, I don’t know, informational in content, it’s like a blog basically, then I’m sure I won’t see those kind of things because, what possible thing could they be doing? But if it’s a website where there’s some sort of login option or an option where they clearly are using analytics and they’re intending to sell that on, you do get bombarded with, there’s so many things that you can opt into and opt out of. It’s bizarre.

[00:25:40] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, it’s a challenge. And it’s definitely an area that I am working on with my plugin and stuff, and trying to wrap my head around and understand to help guide people on it. But that’s one great thing about like the modern ones. For example, if you use Plausible, you do not need a cookie banner because of Plausible. You don’t need one. It doesn’t set cookies. It doesn’t use cookies. So just because you have analytics doesn’t mean you have to have a cookie banner.

And that’s one thing I think is something that some people may not understand. You may need it for other reasons, depending on what you have going on your site. But there are sites where you just, I think there’s a lot of sites that have cookie banners that don’t actually need them because they’re so terrified of the EU cookie laws or those privacy laws that they’re like, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Lets just throw it up there and put it on there, CYA type stuff, cover your ass. Let’s just put it on there so that we don’t have to worry about it.

But Google Analytics is a little like, probably should but, you know, if you are using one of those alternatives, that analytics platform, just that itself does not mean you have to have a cookie banner. And so it’s worth investigating to see if you could switch to alternatives. Some of them have free plans that you could stay within for a website, have your clients set up their own account. And if they have very small usage then use their free plan, and stick under that limit. And then you don’t even need a cookie banner on their site. And that can help annoy their visitors less. It’s something definitely worth investigating.

[00:27:04] Nathan Wrigley: I think what I’ve noticed is that, and I could be wrong about this, my intuition though, because I see the same UI often. The cookie banner is clearly provided by the same company. Everything is the same apart from the choices that you can make, but obviously at some point they’ve ticked boxes and what have you. And it does feel a little bit like that. We don’t have the capacity to figure out what we really need to do, so what we’ll do is just enable every single option. Here’s all the choices that we could possibly provide.

And of course that itself, that feels very self-defeating. Looking at it from the end user perspective, no matter what you think about the legislation and the merits of it, the fact that every single one of us is being caught up in this sort of dragnet of clicking away, rejecting cookies and what have you. That does seem like something which is not a good experience. I mean, I don’t know how many hours humanity wastes every day rejecting cookie banners.

[00:27:57] Derek Ashauer: I mean, yeah, the cookie banners is a whole other thing. In my opinion it should be, if you’re going to do it, it should be in the browser. There should be a setting in the browser and the analytics code snippet that you have obeys the browser setting so that there’s not, there should be no need for independent, every single website owner to do their own remediation of, you know, through cookie banners of doing all this kind of stuff.

It’s bonkers to me when every single website, if every single website needs to follow this, then put it at the browser level. You can just configure in your browser, in Chrome, say, I want to accept marketing cookies and I want to not accept these types of cookies or whatever, and then call it done. And every website you go to then just includes Google Analytics, includes whatever thing. It just can look at the browser settings and follow that, and you’re done. And it saves everyone thousands of dollars, hours of headache and all this kind of stuff, and it is what it is.

[00:28:47] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like a very sensible position. I’m just wondering, is that a clarion call that is in the industries that you are following, the analytics and the marketing side of things, is that something that’s gaining momentum or no?

[00:28:59] Derek Ashauer: I haven’t heard of any movement to actually make that happen. I don’t know why I haven’t looked into it too much, but I haven’t read in the stuff that I’ve come across and reading and learning about it on my journey through this and educating myself about it. To me it seems like a pretty simple approach.

[00:29:12] Nathan Wrigley: Let’s imagine a scenario in which cookies across the board are just outlawed universally for this kind of thing in the future. And obviously that’s not something that you would desire, but let’s just imagine a scenario where that was the case.

As you call them, these modern solutions, if we were to bind that, let’s say into WooCommerce website, and obviously with Conversion Bridge, you’re all about the conversion. Does somebody arriving at the website end up doing a particular action? Do they purchase something? Do they end up at a landing page after a particular transaction has occurred, or something along those lines?

How credible do those things feel to you now? And it said that a year ago you couldn’t do it with this particular platform, and now you can. Does it feel like that whole conversion industry, you know, conversion tracking in particular, does it feel like it’s fighting a losing battle? Or does it feel like with those modern analytics companies that you’re still in the game. You can still get the data that you probably need all be it, it’s not going off to some giant third party?

[00:30:11] Derek Ashauer: So the first answer that came to mind when you’re asking that is, for example, in my testing of some of the various modern platforms, even on those, you’re getting 70% of the conversions actually getting tracked. And that could be for various reasons of JavaScript blockers, ad blockers, or things like that. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m really focusing on doing API based tracking, so that it’s server to server, not aligned to JavaScript. Because server to server, behind like, through PHP and APIs and stuff like that. If you can track what people are doing, then it’s going to be a lot more accurate actually.

That’s one thing that I’m working on for my plugin is so that whatever analytics platform you’re using, it can be as accurate as possible. But yeah, I think you’re trying to hint at it, are these other modern platforms going to go the way of Google and try and sell data? Is that kind of what you mean?

[00:30:58] Nathan Wrigley: No, what I was meaning was, do you feel that they are credible in that, okay, so let’s imagine that I own a WooCommerce store, I’ve been using Google forever and it’s been giving me this incredibly valuable data, and I really don’t want to let go of that. But I feel, for one reason or another, maybe that’s legislation, or just a moral compulsion that I feel I have, I want to move over to these platforms. Am I throwing away a ton of useful data that I’ll never get back? Or are these modern platforms slowly but surely offering a solution, which gives me more or less what I need.

[00:31:31] Derek Ashauer: Yeah. From my perspective, what I’m seeing is when Google Analytics 4 came out, they haven’t been able to get the same level of data they used to 10 years ago with UA, Universal Analytics. Which was what we were, most of us were used to when we said Google Analytics, that’s what we had for a very, very long time, and then Google Analytics 4 came out.

I would say the platforms, some are better than others. There’s definitely some that have a lot more advanced features than others. Fathom, for example, is pretty straightforward. I wouldn’t say it’s very well geared towards detailed conversion tracking and getting good, detailed, in-depth insights. It’s good at getting page views, where they came from, what country they’re at. Something you would hand to a client so they could look at a nice little dashboard.

And Universal Analytics, it used to be great. I used to say, hey, here’s Universal Analytics, go check it out. Didn’t even have to walk them through any of it. They could look at the screen, understand the data, it made sense. Now, Google Analytics 4 is a cluster. It is for professional level marketers, and that is it at this point. You have to really know the software. There’s week long classes on how to use Google Analytics 4 these days, because it is so overwhelmingly complex. And I think it went almost too far in that regard.

But anyway, I think these modern platforms can get most site owners the data they need to make good decisions about, are my ads working if I’m doing Facebook ads? Or am I doing Google ads? Are they working for me? You know, if I’m doing link building from another site and you can tag those same UTM codes, that might be something, if you’re familiar. There are codes that you can add to the URL, with the little query and the query variables, to kind of identify that this link came from this source.

And then that can track that user throughout the process. You know, the add to cart, checkout and complete the purchase. And then know that that user came from that UTM tracking code from either somewhere on your own website or from an external website. So it can do all those great things.

So for a lot of mom and pop, WooCommerce stores I think can get a lot of great, useful data. It’s really when you are more an enterprise company, and maybe you’re doing like a million dollars a week in ad spend, you’re going to want something that is really, these crazy reports that you can run. And it’s more about the reporting than anything that you can do in GA 4 that maybe these modern platforms can’t quite do yet.

And so, like I said, for my clients, any of the clients that I’ve built sites for over the last 20 years, they don’t need any of that stuff. They would be very happy with the reports from, say, Plausible. Many of them would be happy with even Fathom, which I said, which isn’t the most conversion oriented platform. Even they would be great with those ones.

[00:34:14] Nathan Wrigley: So your plugin, which is called Conversion Bridge, what does it do? It feels from the outside as if it’s almost like a Zapier for analytics meets website, if you know what I mean. You bind your website to the analytics platform, and then you can give it, I don’t know, if this, then that kind of functionality to figure out, okay, what are the conversions?

And also it just feels like you are stripping out the technical burden of learning those platforms. Is that basically what it’s doing or have I missed the target?

[00:34:46] Derek Ashauer: That’s very close. The idea is, when I was building sites for clients, I didn’t set up any conversion tracking for a lot of them. One, because it’s just the cost, because you go buy Gravity Forms well, this site we’re going to use WS Form. Well, this site we’re going to use Ninja Forms, or this site we’re using WooCommerce, this other one we’re going to use this other, you know.

There’s so many different ways that you could do a form, do a purchase. Page builders, what button? How do I add a click tracking? Like, every time someone clicks on the buy now button on my homepage and goes to that. So we want to really track all this kind of stuff. It was a challenge of, how did you add that to your WordPress site? And so oftentimes it just didn’t happen because it was such a pain in the butt to do it.

So what Conversion Bridge tries to do is makes it easy to add the analytics tracking codes. A lot of people just cut and paste it into the header, footer, code snippets, type plugins and all this kind of stuff. That is a way to do it. It’s not really the ideal way. But it does allow you to quickly and easily add one of, I think I have 12 different analytics platforms, whether it’s Google Analytics, Fathom, all that kind of stuff. Toggle, copy and paste your just like little ID number. And then the analytics code has been added to the site where it needs to. Make sure it does it for the right users. Like, I don’t want to track admin users, let’s make sure we don’t track admin users. Stuff like that.

But the real benefit is, is that conversion tracking. So say you have a form that you’re using, and it’s just a simple, yes, add conversion tracking, done. That’s all I had to do. Click a toggle. I didn’t have to think about code snippets. How do I do it? Researching the form plugin, where does it need to get output? When does it need to get output? All this kinda stuff, it just was a pain in the butt.

And then the real benefit for agencies is that, regardless of what site they’re doing, whether they’re using Bricks Builder or Beaver Builder, using WS Form, Gravity Forms, it’s all one plugin that works for any site that you would need, because it integrates with 50 plus different WordPress plugins to just have one click toggle conversion tracking.

And websites really need conversion tracking. They need to know what users are doing on their site. And I think it’s a huge value that especially professional site builders could add to their plugin stack that they put on every client site to just, oh, all I have to do is copy, paste the little ID number from Fathom, and then I just need to check one little box in WS Form, and suddenly I have, not only analytics on the site, but I’m also tracking every single form submission.

And we can see where they’re coming from and which ones generate the most contact form leads on this website that is for a landscaper to fill out forms and get lead quotes. And now I can tell my client, these resources, whether it’s this external blog that linked to us, oh my God, we got mentioned in this blog, and all of a sudden they’re generating 50 leads a month from us. We need to do more outreach to all these blogs. And to really understand where your leads are coming from. It’s a huge value to add to client sites.

[00:37:28] Nathan Wrigley: I have a couple of questions following on from that. The first one is, have you got any examples, like curious examples, maybe unexpected examples? Because everybody gets the, okay, I want to convert, I want to track that a person arrived at the website, looked at this product and then ended up buying it, you know? Brilliant.

But are there any quirky ones that people have reached out to you that they’ve used and you thought, oh gosh, I never imagined people would want to track that conversion?

[00:37:52] Derek Ashauer: Not yet. It is pretty straightforward, you know, the things that you need to track. Form submissions, email newsletter signups are a good one. I mean purchases, stuff like that. What buttons on your page? You know, maybe you have a homepage and you want to know which button on that page actually got them to go to the buy now?

So maybe you have one in the main banner. Maybe you have one near the FAQ section. Maybe you have one near the testimonials. Which one actually got people to actually go to that page. So button tracking, link tracking is good ones. Yeah, there’s not too many surprises on that regard.

[00:38:23] Nathan Wrigley: And then the other one is about the plugins that you work with. So, and again, it sounds like your UVP really is that, look, we’ve looked at how their plugin works, how the code works, and you just tick the button. You say, I’ve got WS Form, I’ve got Gravity Forms, or whatever it may be, and now it’s just done. That’s part of the deal. You’re buying it so that you don’t have to do any coding.

[00:38:45] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, because that’s, you know, what everyone wants these days. There’s no code. And they don’t even want to, even cutting and pasting code snippets. Before it was, a lot of plugins were like, add this, you had to use this hook, and then add this code. I mean, they provided this snippet, and then you had to kind of customise it and all this kinda stuff. It’s no. Just toggle and it’s done.

You know, like for WooCommerce, it’ll send all the detailed data about the purchase. What product they purchased. How much it cost. What the order total was. So you can get all that good data in there so you can do some advanced reporting in Google Analytics or even Plausible and some other, Pirsch, and stuff like that. So these alternatives you can do as well.

[00:39:18] Nathan Wrigley: No code solution. Yeah, that’s nice. And the other one I suppose would be, where do you feel your audience is? Is it kind of agencies, or do you have customers who are, I don’t know, just building their own website and really don’t have any technical background? Or is it more, like I said, is it more kind of agencies who are deploying this for their clients and they have an understanding of how to set these things up?

[00:39:39] Derek Ashauer: You know, I’m doing my own market research and learning that as a business owner of how to do your, what is ICP? Ideal Customer Profile. And I’m kind of identifying that it, I think agencies would, so far, I think are the top of the list.

I know there’s some people that have bought it that are single site owners, but then I’ve learned, you know, they bought a one site license, but then I learned that they were just trying it on one site to see how it worked.

And they’re like, okay, yeah, this makes sense, and then they’re going to upgrade to, you know, a 20 site license because then they’re like, now I’m going to use this on all my client sites. This is what I’ve noticed those one site license purchases have been so far. So yeah, I think agencies do get the best of it.

But it’s also a great tool to try out because I can actually, and I have it on my development test site, but I can enable 12 different analytics platforms at once. It’s obviously not something that you would do, but you technically could. And it’s great because you can actually test different things.

Say, if you’re using Google Analytics, I want to test out Plausible. Let me try it out. Well, let me just add Google Analytics and Plausible, and everywhere you’ve checked that box on WS Form to do conversion tracking, it’ll send it to every single platform for you. You don’t have to then do a different snippet or code for, okay, now let me cut, do this snippet for WS Form in Plausible. Do this snippet for WooCommerce and Plausible. This snippet for Google Analytics and WooCommerce. It just takes care of all that for you.

So you could try, do the free trial for a week for three or four different analytics platforms. Look at the data. Okay, we ran it for a week, let’s see which one I actually do like. So it’s one little side benefit. I allowed multiple analytics platforms to make it easy for me to develop, but then I quickly realised, this is actually an advantage to test out these different platforms and see if I can get good data, and data that is usable without losing Google Analytics data while you keep maintaining that.

[00:41:13] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like there’s very few parts of our industry where politics gets in. There’s just no politics in the kind of things that I deal with. You know, what I mean by that, international politics. Not the kind of politics within the kind of baseball of WordPress, but the international politics.

It feels like this is a bit of a moving target at the moment. And it’d be curious to see if we were to do this episode again in a year’s time, whether or not the sand has shifted, and you’ve had to pivot your product because it’s moved in one direction or another. Yeah, just absolutely fascinating.

I wish you all the best. Just before we wrap it up, where do people find you? What’s the URL or the social network or both? Where can we find you? And of course, Conversion Bridge.

[00:41:55] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, conversionbridgewp.com is the Conversion Bridge plugin, and then I am pretty active on Twitter. You can find me @derekashauer on Twitter or X, I guess, sorry.

[00:42:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. As is always the case, I will drop all of the links for anything that we discuss today, including the host of analytics platforms and what have you that we mentioned. I’ll put all of those into the show notes. If you head to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Derek in, all of the links will be right there.

So, Derek, it just remains for me to say thank you very much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it. It.

[00:42:24] Derek Ashauer: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

[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, trying to figure out a way through the tech world.

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 wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Anthony Jackson.

Anthony is a true technophile whose journey has been shaped by a constant pursuit of understanding new technologies.

From a young age, Anthony’s curiosity about technology laid the foundation for a lifetime of exploration. Starting from modest beginnings in computer repair, he steadily transitioned into the world of WordPress, and the complexities of server management.

This episode really is a story, the story of trying new things, being creative, and always following curiosity wherever it may lead.

Anthony talks about his early experiences describing the moment computers first sparked his interest, and the subsequent path he charted in the technology space. Despite hurdles and frustrations, particularly with initial web development and WordPress hosting, his story is a testament to determination and resilience.

As you’ll hear, Anthony learned the ropes of many technologies from grappling with CSS for website customization, to exploring cloud computing, and the command line in Linux.

His journey took a big turn when he discovered automated Bash scripts that facilitate the deployment of open source applications like WordPress. This is what Anthony is doing right now, but you’re going to hear many stories of different pathways that led to this situation.

Throughout the episode, Anthony sheds light on his philosophy of embracing technology. He speaks about the numerous technologies he’s explored, the trials he faced along the way, and the value of cultivating his technical skills. With his Bash scripts ready to streamline server setups and deployments, Anthony envisions a future where technology is not just a tool, but a powerful ally for businesses and personal projects alike.

If you’re keen to hear some inspirational stories about overcoming tech challenges, resilience and learning, 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 Anthony Jackson.

I am joined on the podcast today by Anthony Jackson. Hello.

[00:03:32] Anthony Jackson: Hello, Nathan. How are you?

[00:03:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, great. I’m very, very pleased to chat with you today, not only because you’ve got some really nice audio equipment, which makes you sound amazing, but also it’s very nice to meet new faces, new people for the first time ever. That’s what’s happening here. I’ve never met Anthony before.

But in order that both you, dear listener and I, the interviewer, get to know a bit about Anthony, would you mind giving us your little potted bio. I guess it would be best to keep that in the sphere of technology, perhaps WordPress. But just tell us a little bit about yourself, but not too many spoilers about the episode to come.

[00:04:03] Anthony Jackson: Yeah, so my name is Anthony Jackson. I’m a technical person by nature. I’ve always loved technology, always had a thing for it. Went to school for computer technology. I have my own computer repair business. So I do that on the side, part-time, while I work a full-time job, as well as grow the business that you’re going to learn about here in a little bit.

So I stay pretty busy, obviously. I love technology, I feel that it can help a lot of people. I don’t think you should ever be afraid of it. I think you should always embrace it. It’s one of those things, if you don’t get on the bandwagon now, you kind of get punished for it later.

So I’m just really excited to share with your audience my journey because it hasn’t been easy, and I’m really glad I took the leap of faith because if I didn’t I certainly wouldn’t be where I am now. So I’m just really excited to get started and talk about it and share it with you guys.

[00:04:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s great. Thank you so much. Can I just ask, I don’t know your age, but when I was at school, so I’m now in my very, very early fifties, but when I was at school, a child at school, computers were just starting to be something that was in the market, it wasn’t the domain of universities occupying an entire room. It was something which you could hold in both arms, but they weren’t ubiquitous.

You know, maybe the school had one. It was very rare for an individual to own a computer. And so it wasn’t really until I was much older and had left school that computers became a bit of a thing which people could tinker with.

What was the experience for you? Again, I’m not trying to wrangle your age out of you, but just give us an insight into how much computing had progressed by the time you were sort of at school?

[00:05:28] Anthony Jackson: Oh my gosh, Nathan, I’ll tell you a little backstory. So my mom left me when I was younger. My dad had passed away. It was kind of just me and I lived with my aunt. She had given me a computer to go live with my mom. She had found my mom is what happened.

I turned it on and it was just an old compact, it booted up so slowly. I had no idea what it was, how it worked, what the purpose of it was. All I knew was I wanted to be on the internet. At that time it was AOL, that was the place to be.

I remember turning it on and I pressed the button on the DVD player and the tray opened, and I was like, wait, what is the sorcery? Like, and I’m like, oh, that’s cool. Okay, we’ll go with that. And the neighbor knocked on the door and said, hey, you’ve got some mail, and she gave me this disk, remember the AOL 3.0 Running Man disk? And I was like, what is this? Like, 30 minutes of the free internet. I’m like, what is the internet, right?

And I put it in this tray and I ended up setting up my account and the first words I heard were, welcome, you’ve got mail. And I’m like, no I don’t, I just checked it. And I got totally hooked immediately on this whole email thing. And I just, it blossomed, man, and I’ve been doing computers for, God, 20 years now.

So I love the backstory on it because it really changed my life. Like, I discovered the internet, email. I spent five years homeless without the internet. I never would’ve known like who to ask for help, how to get help. It truly changed my life, Nathan. It really did.

[00:06:40] Nathan Wrigley: I think there’s something quite addictive about it, but also I think, and this is from personal experience, I have no reference to psychology of the human race in general, but it would seem that some people really from a very, very early age are drawn to it on a level which is indescribable. You just have this desire to be in close proximity to a computer that’s switched on, and to be tinkering with it.

I have that, but I know people who are very dear to me that if you put them near a computer, the first thing they want to do is get out the chair and walk away. You know, there’s just no interest in it whatsoever. But I think it is something that you can be passionate about in a heartbeat.

So in your case, you know, you press the DVD button, something happened, you did it on a keyboard and something happened elsewhere over there. It’s like, ooh, these two things are connected. There’s something clever going on there.

And all of a sudden alarm bells are ringing. Like, wow, I’ve got to dig deeper into this. I know already though that you are younger than I am because you joined the computer world at a time when the internet existed. When I was playing with the first computers, basically, you switched it on and a cursor blinked, and that was it. That was the fun that you had, you had to type things in.

[00:07:45] Anthony Jackson: My first experience was Windows 3.1, back when the briefcase was around.

[00:07:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so as a child leaving school, you’ve got this interest in computers and what have you. So where did the journey go from there? What were the next steps from Windows 3.1? What are some of the things that began early on? What were the dominoes that fell?

[00:08:00] Anthony Jackson: Well, I discovered Windows XP, it was the hottest thing since sliced bread. I loved XP. Vista was a hot mess. Fast forward, seven was good, eight was terrible. And then Windows 10, and now Windows 11. I figured if I learned Windows 3.1, I kind of had to follow the journey. So I started Googling the different features of Windows, realised quickly that an operating system is an operating system, it’s just where you find stuff, right?

I love the fact that I could see it progress, that I could be a part of that and help people. And that’s what really turned me onto it. So the technology thing is what really kind of gets me. I love technology. I love the fact that we can use it to have a good time, to leverage it, to grow our businesses, to do a lot of things, like podcasting and other things.

[00:08:40] Nathan Wrigley: Are you the kind of person that upon receiving a computer, desktop computer, do you like to take it apart and see what the bits are inside there, or assemble your own? Or are you purchase it from the store and let the dust gather on the inside and then dispose of it at some point, 5, 10 years later whatever it may be?

[00:08:55] Anthony Jackson: The thing that I love the most, Nathan, this is going to sound so crazy, I don’t enjoy building them. I actually don’t know how to build them. I tried once and failed miserably. But what I love nothing more in my computer repair business is when somebody comes to me and says, Tony, I need to buy a new one, I don’t know what to do, where do I start?

I love that conversation because it’s so overwhelming for a lot of people, and I have a unique way. I took a Tony Robbins class a long time ago for personal development, and they did this whole assessment on me and the results yielded that I had a way of breaking down technical information into a manner that someone can understand.

So when someone comes to me and says, I need a new computer, I’m like, okay, I got you, it’s okay. What do you need? What are you looking for? What are your concerns? And I can have a nice conversation and ease them into making a confident purchase instead of buyer’s remorse. It makes such a difference.

[00:09:43] Nathan Wrigley: I’m firmly on the Mac side of things, and when you purchase a Mac, you really only have three or four decisions to make, one of which is color. What color do you want the computer to be? But beyond that, it’s things like how much memory, how much ram, there’s very few components that you really get to choose about that.

But on the Windows side of things, for a family member, I have recently built a computer and I was actually fairly alarmed at how many choices there were for every single thing. And it really did make me realise that there’s a whole career in just being able to understand what range of graphics cards there are, what range of CPUs there are, what kind of panel could you have as a display, what the keyboards are, what the mouse are.

And that was really interesting to me. Is that something that you nerd out on then? Do you know all of the kind of serial numbers of the different graphics cards which are available?

[00:10:32] Anthony Jackson: I’m not that big of a nerd. My nerd comes out when I started Learn WordPress, that’s when the nerd came out.

[00:10:38] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Well, we’ve established your nerd credentials. That’s lovely. Let’s move on to WordPress then. When did you, firstly, when was the first time you came across WordPress, and in what context? What did you need it for?

[00:10:48] Anthony Jackson: So a long time ago I started my computer repair business, probably about eight or nine years ago. And the first thing that came to mind was a website. I was like, I have to have a website. I have a business, it’s a known fact you have to have a website, right?

Well, I didn’t know WordPress had never heard of WordPress, so I went where any other person would go, and that was to the internet to find web hosting, and I found godaddy.com. And I was like, GoDaddy it is.

I had a budget of around $3,000, and what happened was they ended up coding me a really nice HTML, CSS, web development website. But I realised quickly that I’m a picky person. I wanted things changed. I didn’t like how things aligned. OCD, like the CSS and stuff wasn’t aligning. And I wanted more control. I wanted to be able to control that.

And I remember Googling how to control your website and it said WordPress, the number one platform. I’m like, what the hell is WordPress? Okay. And I clicked, best decision of my life. I ended up going back to GoDaddy to get hosting, WordPress hosting. I didn’t know what it was, I had to kind of figure it out. And I realised quickly about shared hosting, and what it was, and how it acted, and I didn’t like the fact that I was being shared with people, it made me very angry.

I went through seven different hosting providers, 15 different WordPress for Dummies books, trying to figure things out. Was very, very hard. One day I ended up going to like, I think it was Namecheap or something, and getting a little bit better WordPress hosting with more resources because I thought that would help. And I was sitting there so frustrated because I saw a template but had no idea what to do.

And all of a sudden after tinkering with WordPress in the back end, I put the word home in what we call the primary menu. And at that point it clicked. I was like, oh my God, I can build a fully fledged website with content that’s branded to me without having to pay extra to add revisions and stuff like that.

And so for like two weeks straight, I learned how to install WordPress. I learned the art of the primary menu. I had so much fun just adding the same buttons every time, home, about, services, contact. And then I discovered page builders. That’s when things really turned. Divi was my first love, and always will be.

[00:12:50] Nathan Wrigley: Did you have to really persevere then, because it sounds like you’ve got all of the equipment in your head for dealing with technical problems. You’ve got that sort of passion to see it through to the end. I think I get quite frustrated with certain tasks and give up fairly quickly, but it sounds like you’ve got all of the bits and pieces.

10 years ago when you installed WordPress, I’m guessing it was a much more difficult enterprise than it is now. You know, you’ve got these hosting companies that you basically click one button and not only will they set your WordPress website up, they’ll send you the login links, you can probably just click a button to log in on the backend and what have you. Was it fairly frustrating, and do you think that, if you’d had a different personality type, you would’ve just thrown the baby out the bathwater and gone, nope?

[00:13:29] Anthony Jackson: A hundred percent. If I did not have my technical background, I would’ve gave up years ago. I called GoDaddy so many times for support. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I called them. And I enjoyed calling them because when I did call them, I got to give them some great feedback because they understood completely what I was trying to do. So it was really cool. I got to see them improve and I got to see myself improve. But it was also nice to be able to call them and get it fixed because I didn’t have to explain what I was trying to do. I knew what I was trying to do.

And the design element stuff did not come until later. I spent so much time tinkering with WordPress, buying plugins. Nathan, I’ve got a repository on themeforest.net of plugins and themes that I haven’t even touched. I bought anything from caching plugins, to improve performance, to membership plugins, not knowing any idea what they’ve been. I just went on as spending spree and just bought everything. And now I’m like, what do I do with it all? Like, I don’t even know what I want to build.

[00:14:27] Nathan Wrigley: There’s a definite learning curve there. Just dealing with the nature of the internet. I don’t know quite how to put this. When I talk to people about how interesting I think the internet is, I can very often sense that people’s eyes are glazing over. You know, oh Nathan, dear Nathan, what’s the matter with you?

But I think on a very profound level that it is amazing that we live in a time where you can download free software, and with a few dollars invested in hosting, and it doesn’t have to be a lot, you can have something that the entire world, well, by that I mean people who have access to the internet, the entire world can see.

And conceptually, I just think that’s utterly remarkable. And I don’t know if it ever sort of hits you in the same way that it hits me. But you said, you know, you put the word home on your webpage, or you put something for your home screen and you have that moment of, I can do the internet. I can be on the internet.

I think that is something which gets lost so quick. But occasionally I stare at what I’m doing and think, I just click publish and there it is, and everybody can see it. And I think that’s phenomenal.

[00:15:35] Anthony Jackson: That hit me when I discovered the actual blog portion of WordPress. When I discovered that my content could go out to anybody and everybody with a click of a button. I was a little blown away. I was a little overwhelmed because I was like, this is really cool. I’ve created a piece of content for somebody that might need my help. They can just click a button and within a few seconds potentially see it. Like that is, you’re right, it’s remarkable. But it’s also really overwhelming for somebody who’s never experienced it.

[00:16:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and I guess, you’ve got to be a little bit careful about what you publish and what have you. But I still think we are in an age where I think it’s easy to forget how privileged we are that we have access. Well, you and I, for example, we’ve never met. We’ve only communicated on the internet via a social network. I messaged to say would anybody enjoy coming on this podcast? You contacted me. Here we are. We’re using a browser based application to communicate with each other. And this is just totally normal now. And yet my 14-year-old self staring at the computer in the school, what we’re doing now was the realm of Star Trek.

This was the kind of thing that people in spaceships did, and yet now it’s totally normal. And sometimes I try to sort of impress upon my children how remarkable it is, but for them it’s just, no, no, no, this is what all humans have had for all time. And it just gets lost.

[00:16:49] Anthony Jackson: It is remarkable.

[00:16:50] Nathan Wrigley: Where from there then? So we’ve reached the point where you’ve discovered WordPress. What’s happened subsequently since then? It sounds like you’ve got your business all pivoted around WordPress as well. What’s the next step in the story?

[00:17:01] Anthony Jackson: Well, I went through multiple page builders, never really learned another one because I got so comfortable with Divi. I tried Elementor, didn’t really like it all that much. Tried every block builder. Discovered Gutenberg was the worst thing known to mankind. Tried buying Astra, some other, I forget the other company that has the block builder.

[00:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: Kadence maybe.

[00:17:21] Anthony Jackson: Kadence, yes, I tried them. But the thing that I didn’t like about WordPress, I loved the page builders, they made things easy, but the one thing that I hated the most is I never really had control of where to put stuff. It always was just like, this is your block, this is where it goes. I didn’t know CSS. I didn’t know HTML. I did not know how to move things, and I hated that.

Because the whole point of me going to WordPress was to have control. And when I lost control, it turned me off. I was the person who built the entire website and canceled my hosting because I wanted more control. That’s how I learned. I canceled, and bought, and canceled, and bought and thought it would get better and it didn’t, and I just pushed, and pushed, and pushed and learned.

So I started to just Google how to move things with CSS. I taught myself the basics of CSS and HTML, and a little bit of JavaScript. Not a lot, just enough to be dangerous. But I wanted control, Nathan. I wanted to be able to do things, and when I discovered that I could do that, that put me in another whole new rabbit hole. Then I discovered plugins that control CSS, selectors and all of that, so it gave me an opportunity.

[00:18:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I always think that WordPress kind of has been pitched at me by other human beings as this kind of catchall, easy to use solution. I think maybe you’ll get lucky and you’ll be satisfied in a way that you clearly are not, you know, if you want every pixel to be mapped perfectly from your head onto the screen, that’s not going to be the case. But maybe for many people it’s enough.

Okay, I’ve got this templated layout, it’s fine, I’m happy with that. I’ll click publish and whatever’s there is fine. But if you do want to move things around, and you do want to have a particular layout, and you want to show only these posts here and these posts here, but you want it to look entirely different from the theme that you’re using, I think it’s still very confusing.

And I think the underlying languages of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which really these days are the underpinnings of certainly the front end of web development, they’re fairly difficult to acquire if it’s not your job. If you’re just doing this evening, weekend, it’s a bit of a hobby, I still think those things are really difficult to acquire and they’re not slowing down. You know, in the year 2025 when we’re recording this, CSS is really on a clip, it’s really modifying itself quickly. All these different sort of layout systems, flex, grid to learn and what have you.

So I think the promise of the page builders in WordPress is probably why it’s as successful as it is. If you rewind the clock 10 years, when they just started to come about, you mentioned Divi and there was Beaver Builder and, oh, all sorts of other ones. I would imagine that if you could chart the growth of WordPress, it would’ve been the novice user wanting a sort of what you see as what you get, point, click, drag, save solution that meant that WordPress grew. And it sounds like you fitted into that niche quite nicely.

[00:19:56] Anthony Jackson: Yeah, I wanted to know why. Why it wasn’t working. Why the block couldn’t move. I was very irritated by that because I had certain expectations for my logo to be correct. And what really got me into WordPress was the fact that it was drag and drop. And I love the word drag and drop, because if you don’t know how to code, well, drag and drop is the alternative, and it’s your best friend. But it’s not a true, genuine, drag and drop experience.

Because to me, drag and drop genuine experience means to put things where I want to put them. I don’t want to be limited by the block builder, you know, the blocks that you’re provided. I want to be able to move it, control it, customise it. Because at the end of the day, people buy into you and not your products and services. But at the same time, your website never gets built because you spend way too much time customising, Googling the 20 best page builders of 2025, and buying a whole bunch of stuff you never needed in the first place, right?

[00:20:45] Nathan Wrigley: So have you doubled down on your page builder of choice and your website building experience is based upon the UI, and becoming an expert and having the perfect muscle memory for doing things in that? Is that how you build your pages, and themes, and structures for web pages now?

[00:21:00] Anthony Jackson: So, ironically enough, Nathan, I’ve actually got away from doing WordPress. I transitioned into something different, which we’re going to get to here in a minute. I learned everything about WordPress. I wanted to learn. The only thing I didn’t learn was WooCommerce. I understand what it is, I just didn’t want to learn it. I didn’t have a need for, my business didn’t sell digital products.

I got out of it because it just became frustrating because I just couldn’t do what I wanted to do, and I didn’t have the budget to pay someone to fix it. I knew if I did, I would probably just cancel anyways because I wanted it to look even better. So I just stopped because I didn’t want to do it. I discovered that I wanted to learn how to actually deploy WordPress for myself instead of using a hosting provider because that’s the easy way.

So one day I was Googling and I came across the word Linux. I was like, Linux, okay, that sounds like a fun rabbit hole. Let’s check it out. I discovered my first cloud computing company, which was Linode. I called them up and, you know, I got to be honest with you, I wasn’t super impressed with them, because the one thing that I realised quickly is that there’s no support at all. It is all community driven. If you think about WordPress, the open source, there’s no support. It’s all just learning community based forums, podcast episodes, wherever you can get content. Thank God WordPress, the audience is so big that you can get help. But to this day, there’s still things that I still want to know the answers to about WordPress, but I just can’t find anymore.

But I discovered Linux and I had a very, very difficult time of spinning up a server. I struggled so badly with the command line, so badly. And then I discovered that Linode had one click apps and one of them was WordPress. I was like, here we go again. I installed WordPress. I grew a little bit of a fascination with trying to find my credentials inside the terminal, realised quickly that shared hosting was not the only option to deploy WordPress.

My biggest problem with the server stuff was there was no support. I struggled very badly. Everything I Googled said, copy this, copy that. I’d copy and paste, I wouldn’t get the result. I was throwing things around, spinning up servers left and right, getting so frustrated. I’m like, what do I need to do?

So I ended up buying a course on Udemy, and went through this very, very great course for absolute beginners and discovered quickly what I was doing wrong. Completely stopped the course and started learning again, because I’m not that type of person who takes the course. I find my fix, and then I go back to like tinkering with things. I spun up, I don’t know, probably 300 little VPSs trying to figure things out. Needless to say, I’m a master of installing WordPress with Linode now.

[00:23:24] Nathan Wrigley: Have you got into Linux server admin, sort of sys admin as a way, well, that was just the fun that you were having at the time, and then discovered that, okay, WordPress can bolt on top of that. And so now the two things have combined and you are back to WordPress, or have you entirely stopped with WordPress?

[00:23:40] Anthony Jackson: I never got into the sys admin stuff, but the next journey for me was, I Googled Linux and I had WordPress. I hated the command line, Nathan. The commands, the black and white was so overwhelming. As it turns out now it’s like my best friend. I can’t live without it because it’s so much easier if you know what you’re doing.

But I discovered something called cPanel, and when I got into cPanel I was like, okay, this is cool. I got a GUI, I can look at something, and lo and behold, guess what I found first? Install WordPress. I’m like, it’s back again, right? Everywhere I turn, WordPress kept coming back.

So I learned how to install cPanel on my own server, trials galore, WordPress. Ended up getting super frustrated with cPanel, because cPanel is extremely technical, if you are not in a shared hosting environment where it’s managed. It’s extremely technical. They started giving me questions, I started asking for commands. I started taking notes of those commands, so when I broke something, I would know what to do.

And I learned cPanel pretty proficiently, but got overwhelmed with it just because the technical. There’s a difference between documentation and technical documentation. Documentation is, click here, do this. Technical documentation is, before you get started, make sure that cPanel’s installed properly on your server. It’s like, okay, first of all, what is cPanel and how do you install it properly? Is there such a thing?

Like it feels so overwhelming and you couldn’t contact Linode, you had no support. The only thing you had was cPanel. So I went through hundreds of cPanel trials trying to figure things out. Grew a fascination with the command line and installing cPanel. And I discovered pretty quickly that, even though I didn’t want to learn WordPress anymore, I wanted to provide hosting for WordPress.

I wanted my own hosting provider. I wanted to be the guy who said, you know what you need, WordPress hosting, I got you. But as it turns out, hosting WordPress on your own server is difficult because you don’t have that system admin background to fix things. Makes it extremely challenging and it, your confidence goes way, way, way down, because you cannot provide that quality of hosting that you want to provide.

So upon Googling more, I discovered something called WHMCS, Web Host Master Complete Solution. Loved this concept. This was a dark rabbit hole. I went down this rabbit hole, and discovered quickly that I would have to install it on my own server, which I lacked knowledge of. Biggest problem was the file manager, figuring out the file structure, how to navigate to the path, trying to figure all that out.

And I finally got that installed and I learned about WHMCS. And through some Googling and YouTube, I hooked up my first server and I click install and it provisioned an instance of WordPress inside of WHMCS. I saw a button that said, log into WordPress. And I was like, oh my God. There’s a button.

And I clicked this button and I was like, oh my God, it just launched WordPress. I was blown away, so I was like, let’s get a business going. So I started writing documentation and yeah, it wasn’t that easy.

[00:26:26] Nathan Wrigley: Boy, I mean, you get the prize for commitment though. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve got just bucket loads of time on your hand, or if you are just the kind of person that, once you’ve set yourself a task, it’s going to annoy you until you finally cross that Rubicon. But you’ve got a lot stickability.

[00:26:42] Anthony Jackson: I’m a determined individual. I went through multiple attempts at WordPress hosting, but I discovered that I was going to need help. I was going to have to find a way to provide this because I didn’t have the system admin background. So I discovered reseller hosting. And this is kind of where things blossomed.

Reseller hosting was great, because they not only provided the WHMCS license free, they provided a cPanel license and I didn’t have to manage it. It was the perfect setup. I was like, oh my God, this is perfect. So I really started to dig into my business then. But then I discovered really quickly that without customers, this is going to be really difficult.

[00:27:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s the crucial bit that you have to have somebody to resell it to.

[00:27:17] Anthony Jackson: So after three, four months of messing with tech and mastering the art of cPanel, WHM and WHMCS, I stopped because I didn’t have any customers. Why pay 40 bucks a month if you’re not making any money, right? Didn’t make sense. So I was like, well, I need to figure out a different way to provide hosting. I came across something in Linode called Bash. Bash scripting.

I did a little Googling, looked at some images, and I’m like, okay, it’s coded. I’m not a coder. How am I going to do this? And I went back and looked at cPanel, because I had installed it one day and I noticed that the word Bash was in their installation command. And I was like, what the hell is Bash? And what is it doing in this command?

So Google, Google, Google. I discovered some commands, curl, Wget in Linux, all the stuff, and realised that I could pull a file down from the internet and run it as Bash. I was like, this is wicked cool. And I wanted to be able to deploy WordPress, but I wanted to be able to provide it to somebody else so that I didn’t have to deal with the server side. I wanted to be able to give them a script and say, you can download this script, click a button, add your domain, make sure your DNS is set up and you’re golden. And I was like, this is cool.

But then I realised like, I need a way to deploy WordPress because I can’t use Linode because then I’m doing it. I don’t want to help them get to where they need to be because I don’t know how. So how do I offer WordPress hosting in a manner that they can do it in a session that they can understand? So what I ended up doing was I discovered Docker.

[00:28:35] Nathan Wrigley: You have been everywhere.

[00:28:36] Anthony Jackson: I discovered Docker, and I was like, okay, this is overwhelming, right? Docker Hub, command line. I installed my first WordPress image and I saw the welcome screen. So what we know as WordPress, when we log in, we just log in with our credentials and we’re good. This brought me to the actual installation screen of WordPress. Pick your language. And I was like, oh, this is where it really begins, right?

So when I discovered Docker, I found the first image and I launched my first instance of WordPress using Docker, and it was local. And I went to go do everything and it said, error, database not found. I was like, this isn’t good, because I knew that the database was the core, right?

So I learned in Docker how to set up a database with my SQL. And after some serious frustration around coding YAML files, I got with a guy on Fiverr and I said, listen, I said, I need you to make me a script.

I need a Docker install that can install WordPress, have a database, and also be able to get an SSL on the domain, because adding SSLs in Linux is a pain in the butt. I don’t know if you’ve ever been down this road. One of the biggest things about cPanel and the shared hosting is the automatic SSL feature is flipping amazing. It’s one of the things you’ll fall in love with, because your site has to be secure for multiple reasons.

But regardless, he ended up using something called Caddy server. Reverse proxies, all that stuff. He ended up just creating the script. And he goes, just run it. I’m like, how do I run it? I have no idea. He’s like, just make a file, do this. And I put the code in and all of a sudden I hit enter and this thing started running. It started updating packages, and servers, installing Docker, Docker Engine, Docker Compose, running and running and running and running. And I’m just watching it running. My eyes are just lighting up the whole time. I’m like, oh my God, what is doing?

[00:30:14] Nathan Wrigley: It’s like watching the Matrix or something, isn’t it?

[00:30:17] Anthony Jackson: It would pause, it would extract, it would unzip files. I thought it was broke. I restarted like seven times. And all of a sudden it stopped, Nathan, and said, your WordPress instance is ready, go here. And I was like, no way. No way. And I’ll be damned, man. I clicked the link and there it was on my own domain secure, and I was blown away.

I didn’t even log in because I knew it right then and there that I could deploy WordPress and everything would be fine, right? And so I saw this WordPress and I was like, oh my God, I just deployed WordPress in minutes, not hours, on my own server with nearly no technical knowledge.

[00:30:51] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t know, I think you’ve acquired quite a lot of technical knowledge on the way.

[00:30:55] Anthony Jackson: Well, thank God, right? Because running that script was extremely challenging, but I was just, you know that moment when you discover something and you’re clapping and you’re smiling and you’re putting your hands over the air? I was clapping away. That’s where my mind was at. And when I did that, that’s when the business really started, because I wanted to be able to offer WordPress hosting without having to worry about the sys admin stuff. So I figured if I just provided a script.

So now I have a script that’s made in Bash that you just copy and paste a command and the script runs and does what it needs to do. All you need to do is just add your A record for the DNS and your SSL and you’re good to go.

[00:31:28] Nathan Wrigley: So is that, dare I ask, is that where you’re at now? Or is there another sort of, I don’t know, you just sort of, quick, pivot left? Is there something else coming?

[00:31:36] Anthony Jackson: No, there’s more. So Bash is kind of where I stopped. I didn’t really learn Bash, but as you know there’s a lot of drama in the WordPress community, and it seems to shine on X. And I made a decision that it’s going to be really hard to market because of all the competition with WordPress. And I kind of stopped.

And so the business now, this is where I’m at, I’m creating Bash scripts for popular open source applications. Because if there’s one thing that I’ve learned through my journey with WordPress and learning servers and Linux, it’s that the open source community is so powerful. Your privacy, your focus, your respect, your content, your everything is so important. So I’m actually creating Bash scripts that automate the process of those popular open source applications like WordPress, Plausible Analytics, Nextcloud, all those popular ones.

I’m in the process of making scripts for all those, and it makes the process easy because when I first started deploying open source applications, my biggest challenge was the documentation. Trying to understand it, trying to read it, trying to make sense of it. And when I saw that WordPress script run, man, I was like, oh my God, I can make anything run, and now I’ve got five scripts.

[00:32:46] Nathan Wrigley: And so is that going to be the business in the future there? Where you come along and you, I don’t know, you want Moodle or something, or you want Joomla or WordPress or whatever it may be, and you’ve got a script which you basically just put it on your server, run it, find the path to it, run it, and you’re off to the races.

That’s an interesting business model and not one, well, I mean, obviously, that business model is encapsulated in many, many, many hosting companies and hosting solutions like cPanel and what have you, but yours is going to be just, buy the script, off me, run the script, and then you’re on your own.

[00:33:16] Anthony Jackson: Because the biggest issue that I’m finding with people, it’s not so much the command line, it’s tying the SSL into it. And a lot of people are hosting these open source applications locally, but there’s a problem with that. There’s a big problem. We talked about at the very beginning of this podcast episode, it’s not on the internet. It’s local to your computer, nobody can see it.

What Caddy does is creates that reverse proxy and puts it on your own domain so that the world can see it. It solves a big problem. Because Linux is so big, you not only have to learn the operating system. You not only have to learn the command line. You’ve got to learn the commands itself. You’ve got to have serious patience. You’ve got to be able to do a lot of things to get to where you need to be with Linux to be comfortable.

These scripts make it super easy. Literally, like you point your A record, you let it propagate, you press a button and it goes. And I went as so far to this, this is really cool, I had someone else create a script that secures your server as well. So when you run this WordPress script it disables root login, it does all the security best practices, uses public key authentication, the whole nine yards. Then it installs Docker, Docker Compose, Docker Engine, runs the file, runs Caddy, installs WordPress, and you have a secure server set up in 10 minutes with your own WordPress instance on the internet ready to go.

[00:34:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I remember the famous five minute install for WordPress, but this is more like five minute install for all the stack. Click the button, go off, make yourself a coffee, and by the time you’ve come back everything is done. That’s so interesting.

[00:34:40] Anthony Jackson: There’s a couple of manual processes because of the way the script is built. But if you have a technical background, you’re good to go. And one of the reasons I did this, Nathan, was because I realised there was no support as we discussed, right? Well, I didn’t know everything about Linux. There’s no way I could be a system admin, no way in hell.

So I wanted to make a way to where I could give it to someone and say, hey, here it is. Heads up, we’re not responsible. This is your server. You break it, you fix it. I’m here to give you the script, I’m here to troubleshoot why it’s not working and that’s it.

[00:35:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’re just the beginning. You are the first step on the journey, and then it’s hands off from your perspective, and then it’s over to you. I’ve got it.

[00:35:17] Anthony Jackson: The scripts are all one-time fees. So you own it, do whatever you want with it. Remodify it, I don’t care. Make it better, improve it.

[00:35:22] Nathan Wrigley: Where do you sell them then? How has that as a business idea gone down? Have you managed to find customers for that?

[00:35:28] Anthony Jackson: I have not found customers yet. That’s part of the reason I’m on here, to help get exposure. I’m still trying to kind of validate the business idea. Anybody that knows anything about Bash scripts knows that they’re not sold. They’re free. I’ve put a lot of money into having these things created for me, so I want to get a little bit of return on them.

And they’re not, I mean, the WordPress one is 27. It’s nothing crazy. You can deploy WordPress as many times as you want, SSLs, et cetera. It’s a slow process. I’m very much, my business in a phase where I’m building my audience. I’m trying to find out who that audience is, what their pain points are, what their problems are. And things will probably progress from there. So right now my biggest challenge is just trying not to learn anything else because I’ve learnt so much.

[00:36:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it would seem that your history is littered with, well, not dead ends, but kind of temporary dead ends where it leads you to the next thing, and it leads you to the next thing. But actually the thread running through your story that I’m picking up is that each time you drop a piece of technology and move on to another one, it’s kind of elevating you towards something a bit more difficult.

The technologies that we’re using at the beginning, the next one was a little bit more difficult to manage, and the next one, and the next one, and the next one. And it was that inexorable kind of rise to now where you are doing the full nine yards in this one script. That’s really interesting. What a fascinating story.

I tell you what, you have more patience than I have. And I don’t know how many times you’ve thrown things at walls, but I suspect if it was me, it would’ve been quite a few. When those moments of clarity that I don’t really know what’s going on here, but I’m going to persevere. Remarkable.

We kind of hit the sweet spot in terms of time. So we’ll sort of wrap it up. What a fascinating journey. I love that story. Tell me, Anthony, where would people find what it is that you are mentioning here, these Bash scripts? Where would we find those? And then another question, very much the same really is, where would we find you? Where do you hang out online, and where could people discover you?

[00:37:19] Anthony Jackson: So my primary home is x.com. I really like X. You can visit my bio, there is a link to the website. Please note the website is being updated from what it is to something else. I was going to do the whole WordPress thing, but things changed a little bit. So I’ll leave you a link, Nathan, with a link to the shop and you can take a look at the scripts and decide if you want to purchase one. If you do, just know that I truly appreciate your support. Running a small business is extremely challenging on a very tight budget.

I really feel that this is something that can help a lot of people get where they need to be because there’s a lot of digital scams in the world. And the one script that I love that I have is the Nextcloud script. And I love the fact that I can store my data securely and not have to worry about privacy and my data being sold. So if you’re looking for an alternative to keep your stuff safe, definitely a robust option.

So I’ll send you a link, Nathan, to the scripts. I’m still in the middle of updating links and things like that. I’m just excited to finally have it off the ground and finally have a business after learning nine different technologies in a matter of two years.

[00:38:17] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like a lot. So what I’ll say is, when Anthony sends me the link, I will embed it into the show notes. So if you head to wptavern.com/podcast, if you search for Anthony Jackson, then you’ll be able to find that episode and I will make sure that all of the links that he sends me finally end up on the show notes over there.

What a fantastic and interesting story. Anthony Jackson, I really hope that your endeavor, all of that hard work pays off. Good luck for the future. Thanks for joining me on the podcast today.

[00:38:46] Anthony Jackson: It was great to meet you, Nathan. Thank you everyone for listening. I hope you enjoyed this story. I hope that it inspires somebody. Technology is an amazing thing. Remember, never fear it, always, always embrace it. It can take you places you’ve never imagined.

[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 managing a growing plugin business.

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 Anna Hurko.

Anna is the CEO of Crocoblock, a company with a suite of dynamic plugins designed to help developers build complex websites. With a background in computer science, Anna transitioned from support roles to leading Crocoblock, and has been with the company for over 11 years.

Anna quickly rose through the ranks due to her technical knowledge and effective communication skills. Crocoblock, which started with just a handful of team members, has now grown to 85 employees. They offer a wide range of specialized plugins, such as JetEngine, JetSmartFilters, JetBooking, and more, primarily aimed at agency and freelance developers.

Anna shares her journey and discusses the growth of Crocoblock. She highlights the company’s flexibility and commitment to meeting developers’ needs, adapting to both the rapid changes within WordPress and the increasing demand for dynamic site capabilities.

Anna also talks about the company’s marketing strategies and their active, and growing, participation in the WordPress community through WordCamps and Meetups.

If you’re interested in how a company evolves within the WordPress ecosystem, and the challenges and successes that come with it. 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, Anne Hurko.

I am joined on the podcast today by Anna Hurko. Hello Anna.

[00:02:53] Anna Hurko: Hi Nathan.

[00:02:54] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to connect with you. I should probably say at the outset, Anna has several names. So if you know Anna better as Vanessa, or any combination thereof, it’s the same person. So do you just want to clear that up? How is it that you’ve got two different names?

[00:03:09] Anna Hurko: So it’s from the beginning. I have started to work as a supporter, and it was like tradition to choose a nickname for support agent. And I decided like okay, I’m already Anna, I want something other, but which will suit me. And I decided to be Vanessa.

And for a few years I was Vanessa, but somehow all my colleagues remembered me as Vanessa, and we used it till now, even if I don’t need it anymore. And that’s how it works. But now I feel more Vanessa than Anna because in whole work, so even financial departments, they say Vanessa, not Anna. Even the ex coworkers who are not anymore working with me, but they’re my friends, even their children say I’m Auntie Vanessa.

[00:03:46] Nathan Wrigley: So several names, but hopefully by the time this podcast is finished, you’ll have figured out, dear listener, who it is that we’re talking to. But I’m going to go with Anna because that’s probably the easiest thing for me to say.

So Anna, we are a WordPress podcast, so I guess it would be a good idea right at the outset to give you an opportunity to just tell us who you are, where you come from in terms of the geography and maybe the company that you work for, things like that. So really it’s a short bio moment. So could you just tell us a little bit about yourself?

[00:04:13] Anna Hurko: Yes, sure. So I’m from Ukraine, from south of Ukraine, and the company is the Crocoblock is project I’m working with now, and it’s located in Ukraine as well. All our team members are in Ukraine, in one city actually. So now a little bit different. So I’m CEO of Crocoblock and I work for the holding company about 11 years for now.

[00:04:32] Nathan Wrigley: So, what is Crocoblock? And I hope I’ve pronounced that correctly. By the way, everything that we mention will be linked in the show notes. So if you head to wptavern.com/podcast and look for the episode with Anna in it, then you’ll be able to find all the show notes. But, what is Crocoblock and what does it do?

[00:04:49] Anna Hurko: So Crocoblock, I have always a long and short answers. Crocoblock is project who is making plugins for developers to build dynamic complex websites. And the idea was to have ecosystem which has all tools for developers needs.

But for me as a CEO, Crocoblock is a team. So it doesn’t matter which technology will come tomorrow and what happened to WordPress, we are a team who can build products. So that’s why I have two answers.

[00:05:14] Nathan Wrigley: Now, you mentioned at the outset that you are from the Ukraine originally, but just before we hit record, you talked about the fact that you are no longer in the Ukraine. But maybe that would be an interesting way to begin this podcast properly.

I’m guessing that from the description, living in the south of Ukraine, that you moved against your will, possibly. You’ve had to move because of the situation over there.

[00:05:36] Anna Hurko: So the are three years of the situation. I was in Ukraine, I just moved in September after WordCamp US. I just didn’t come home and then stayed in Europe because I am trying to visit more WordCamps and WordPress meetups. And if you’re in Ukraine, it takes too long time to get out, because you don’t have planes and you need to go with a bus to Europe and to take plane, and every country in Europe takes me two days to move.

So I decided to stay in Romania because it’s kind of in the center and then can visit more events. So last year I visited about seven WordCamps, because I want to go closer to community, to customers, to speak offline with them, and we have results. So we have already ran a little bit growing in comparison.

[00:06:20] Nathan Wrigley: The situation in Ukraine in terms of web development and tech, it always seems like Ukraine punches above its weight. I don’t know if there’s a particular kind of, I don’t know, like drive in school or anything like that to head towards technology and software development. But it seems, when I look at the about page of a lot of products, especially in the WordPress space, but technology more generally, it always feels like Ukraine is overrepresented with the amount of companies. I don’t know if that’s something that you think is true or if that is true.

[00:06:53] Anna Hurko: It is true, but I think it’s not because of good reasons. Somehow we didn’t have good factories and job places, and web was very easy for people to just find a job and to have good salary because a lot of companies working as outsource, or they have customers from US and Europe. For example, like Crocoblock, we don’t work with Ukrainian market actually, we work with Europe and US.

And it’s not something, we have good studying in school and university. Unfortunately it should’ve developed better. For example, I have studied computer science, but it was like old technologies in university. Just because we don’t have normal working places, people starting to self-educate and they work in IT. And somehow it’s very good now. So even government programs, they’re all digitalised.

So from my phone, I can pay taxes, I can marry now from phone, but only with Ukrainians, of course. I can get any document I need, I don’t need to go anywhere. So now, for example, I’m outside of Ukraine, but I can have any document, new driver license. I can sell car with one application. So it’s somehow built in us.

[00:07:59] Nathan Wrigley: So the propensity of Ukrainian web developers is as a result of people looking to improve their own lives and finding that distributed work was something that they could do, and they could earn a good, in air quotes, good salary if they took the initiative and did, what? Self-taught learning, that kind of thing.

[00:08:17] Anna Hurko: Yes, yes. Because in university, school, it’s really bad now, I’ll say. It’s not practical. But, for example, as I have studied computer science, it was all technologies. It was like Pascal Delphi, if you even know, C++. Something very difficult and not attached to WordPress, for example. But it gives me understanding how database works, for example. And it helps me a lot, even now, I don’t work with WordPress itself, so I don’t build product, I mean. I work with a team. It helps me to understand my developers and how it works.

[00:08:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, well, it’s a nice idea that the CEO of the company actually has a background in technology. I think that’s interesting to be able to speak to the developers on their level.

How did you start in the WordPress space then? I think you said that you started working with the support side of things over at Crocoblock. And if that’s the case, going from support to where you are now, CEO, that’s a pretty big move. How did it all begin?

[00:09:09] Anna Hurko: First I need to say that I didn’t realise it’s a big move before attending WordCamps. Because it’s for me everyday life and it was kind of 10, 11 years. So when I have studied computer science, by side I was in NGO and Youth Politic. And I told, I will never have anything with programming languages, or with IT, or even with websites because we had website building in university as well, but it was, you know, when it was on the tables and HTML and so on. And the teacher was so awful. So I told, I will never do it, and now I’m here.

So after I finished with Youth Politic, I have started to just looking for a job which need English language. So because I didn’t want IT and I sent a CV for everyone with English knowledge, and they picked up me in the holding company as a support member because I knew English. But somehow as I knew computer science, it was very easy for me to deal with WordPress. And in three months I was already a night shift team leader and I have started to mentor people and so on. So I have started with support, but my background with computer science helped me to be very good, very fast.

So until now, I think it was the best thing I can do in my life is to be a supporter. Even now I think so. And because I have done Youth Politic, I had soft skills which helped me to communicate with customers in a nice way. And we have started to rebuild the support team as well, and there are rules in support and so on.

[00:10:31] Nathan Wrigley: So you started out in support, and fairly quickly you rose through the ranks. And you mentioned just there that, you called it the, what did you call it?

[00:10:38] Anna Hurko: Holding company.

[00:10:39] Nathan Wrigley: The holding company, that’s it.

[00:10:40] Anna Hurko: Yeah, we have holding company, it has several projects on side. And now Crocoblock is totally separated project.

[00:10:45] Nathan Wrigley: So what’s the holding company, and is it a sort of WordPress thing, or is it just technology in general?

[00:10:50] Anna Hurko: It’s a recent WordPress thing. So we have started as a team in Template Monster. And, yeah, I was a support member in Template Monster first. Our developers started as well with templates before the templates were starting to die.

[00:11:04] Nathan Wrigley: And do you have a background in using WordPress, or has your experience with WordPress been on the journey in Crocoblock?

[00:11:12] Anna Hurko: I don’t have my private experience, so I never worked for an agency. But what I need to say is that in support, when I have started support, it was not like just us answering general questions. I was very technical support member, very quick. And customers in Crocoblock even now, but even before when I was working, they come with the real projects. And they just come and say, I don’t know what is wrong, just do something. And you log in on the website and you start building it.

And that time, to start working in support, we had training for one month. About four hours theoretical training, and then five hours of homework. And this first month, I never went out of my house, only for my grandmother’s birthday. And what we have done, we haven’t learned WordPress, we have learned CSS, JavaScript and HTML. We have built websites, and working with database was as well. So somehow I started to work with the websites first, but just I don’t have commercial experience, I think.

[00:12:07] Nathan Wrigley: And what’s the structure of Crocoblock then? How many people do you have deployed into that project? If you are the CEO, I guess you’re at the top of that pyramid, how many people are working with you, for you? However you want to describe it.

[00:12:18] Anna Hurko: We have started six years ago with five people, five, seven people. We don’t know exact number. All of us have different story of it. Now it’s 85.

The story begins when we were in Template Monster and we have built templates. In some point we had new people for it and we needed more amount of it and so on. And we have started to build frameworks to speed up the process, and to have less errors because if every quarter developer makes it in own style, we have too much issues with it.

And then we started to sell it. So because it was product for ourself, but it was too good and we have started to like, okay, can we just start to sell plugins? And then we have started it, it was enough, seven people. It was developers, one support member, and guy who was before me, the CEO.

[00:13:00] Nathan Wrigley: So if I go to the Crocoblock website, which is crocoblock.com, and I look at the products that you’ve got. It opens up a fairly giant mega menu, and there’s literally dozens of things in there.

When I first heard the word Crocoblock, firstly I assumed that it was plural, that it was Crocoblocks, and my assumption was that, okay, that’ll be a suite of WordPress blocks. So you’ll download a plugin, and then you’ll have a bunch of blocks that you can put into the block editor.

And you go to the website and you realise, no, that’s really not what it is. That’s not even close to what it is. So what is it that you are offering into the market? What are the different products that I can find in your product section? I mean, there’s too many to talk about, but maybe just pick your favorites or a few that are particularly popular.

[00:13:47] Anna Hurko: Yeah, so short answer is, well, it will be JetEngine and JetSmartFilters. But the issue is that we have invented the Crocoblock name before Gutenberg. There were no blocks, it was Crocoblock, and we have it because it was an old project that we had already some traffic and we left it.

Now we have actually two names, Crocoblock and JetPlugins because all of our plugins are JetPlugins.

And the issue is that the project was started with supporters and developers. We didn’t have marketer for a few years. So I have a head of marketing only last one year. That means we didn’t thought about the things like name, and now we have a lot of difficulties with it.

And when I had started Crocoblock we have the first document with idea about what Crocoblock is, and it was one sentence that will make us laugh for even now. Crocoblock is not about dynamic, it’s only about static and nice design. And what is fun about it? Because it’s now only about dynamic plugins. So now we have big menu with a lot of plugins because it’s like our history and we can’t delete them, because people use them.

But our main focus is on dynamic websites, and that means JetEngine, which is a competitor for ACF, but it has much more inside. JetSmartFilters, JetThemeCore, and all plugins, which helps you to create complex structured websites, like real estate, multi-vendor and so on. You can track user data, and you can manage what to show to different users, or see the user behavior and connect to it.

[00:15:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there really is a lot in there. You really do run the whole gamut of what WordPress can do. So for example, there’s something called JetBooking, which I’m imagining helps you with booking. And JetGridbuilder, again, it speaks for itself. JetProductTables, JetWooBuilder, JetProductGallery, Jet Appointments, JetFormBuilder. You get the idea. You’ve got your fingers in everything.

[00:15:35] Anna Hurko: The idea was to build this structure where developer has ever seen. We have started with Elementor. When Crocoblock was invented, it was few builders on the market, new builders. Elementor, Oxygen, and maybe, I don’t remember, Brizy or something like that. And they were on the equal stage. And our previous CEO came to us, I’m like, what will we choose? He asked me, and he asked our CTO. And we choose, both of us choose Elementor because of user experience and because of the cleanness of the code.

Our idea was to build everything except hosting and page builder for building websites. So we have tried, at the beginning, to close all the tasks for users and it was very fresh. So we appeared at the same time when Elementor was developing. And Elementor had less features inside of it.

So first of all, we have tried to close all tasks, and now we’re more specifically working on dynamic. For example, Elementor, in JetElements we haven’t added any new features for few years, but it’s still our best plugin in sellings. But we don’t develop it because we don’t like to develop, so I mean we’re fixing bug issues or compatibility issues, but we don’t add new features because Elementor has added all new features, HappyAddons. And we don’t want to build, if it’s already on market, we don’t build it. It’s a philosophy of Crocoblock. We don’t want to build anything which already exists.

[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: So over there I can see, what is it? 21 on the mega menu, there’s 21 things there. I’m guessing that, probably started with 1 went to 2, 3, 4, and we’re up to 21 at the minute. How do you keep this going? Are you intending to go from 21 to 22, 23, 24? Do you keep adding products, or is this more a case of, okay, we’ve got what we’ve got. We’ve covered everything? How are you making decisions about what it is that you’re going to do in the future?

[00:17:18] Anna Hurko: So as I came from support, when we invented Crocoblock, we had only one support member, and all developers were supporting as well. We have very tight connection with customers and what we’re building, we’re building after customer’s request. So it depends. If it will be need on market to build one more plugin, we’ll build it. If not, then not.

So I can tell you we have strategy for number of plugins. We have strategy to cover developers’ needs. So now, for example, we have user interviews, some pools, research and market to find what else developers need. So it’s not about number of plugins, it’s about to close the needs.

For me, I don’t want more plugins, so it’s not the goal. But if it would be better to build it as a separate plugin, we’ll build it. For example, the JetProductTables, it’s a new plugin. It was a result of R and D departments, I would say. We have new department, new for one year and they made resource. It’s like an experiment. So we don’t have any goals and number of plugins. It’s just to make developers life easier.

So we have some projects, for example, we have ideas for projects not related to plugins itself, but to developers. I can’t tell you now what will it be.

So for me it’s, you know, like CEO, I don’t like a lot of plugins and I don’t want to have more team members. It’s always something you don’t want, to have more, because it’s easier to focus on one plugin. And as you say, it would be easier to focus only on JetEngine, but somehow Crocoblock can’t stop.

[00:18:44] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned at the start that you began the business with Elementor in mind, and Elementor, if you haven’t been keeping a track, dear listener, Elementor really has had just the most astronomical growth since its inception, and I think really is singularly responsible for a large proportion of WordPress’ rise.

Now, I don’t know if that is the sort of page builder of choice that you’ve hooked yourself into, or if you’ve got into the sort of more WordPressy way of doing things. And what I mean by that is, you know, the Block Editor and Full Site Editing and things like that, because that’s obviously where the Core of the WordPress project is focusing its energy. But obviously on the periphery of that, you’ve got all these different page builders.

What do you do with all of that? Do you hunker down and stick with Elementor, or do you decide you’re going to go with like the Core way of doing things? How does that all fit in?

[00:19:33] Anna Hurko: So we of course love Elementor and it helps us in the beginning so much. We have the same philosophy as Elementor in a lot of things, like treating customers and so on. And I think it was right choice to start with. But once it was announced, the Gutenberg project, and then WordPress started with Gutenberg, the same in half a year or something like this, we have started to rebuild our plugins.

So all our main plugins, not design plugins, but all our main plugins for dynamic websites. So when the Gutenberg project was started, we rebuilt them, and they all are working with Gutenberg as with Bricks now and Elementor. So Elementor is just one of the builders customers need. And then Gutenberg is the core. So we have rebuilt inside the plugin, the code in the way it can work with Gutenberg and we can easily add other integrations. And we always perform something with WordPress and Gutenberg native features. It’s in the core. So of course Elementor has grown up.

So the company itself, it’s 20 years in market and we have all the 20 years experience. And we know it can shine as a star and it can die next day. But WordPress, we believe will stay for a long time with us. That’s why all our main plugins are built for WordPress and Block Editor. And we try to connect it more natively.

The issues we have, it takes a long time. For some of our projects, for example, we have JetThemeCore, it’s a plugin which builds templates for archive pages, WooCommerce card, profile page, so all sorts of pages you can make the structure with it. And for some time we haven’t developed it because we were waiting for FSE, for some new features from WordPress itself. But it take too long time, and we didn’t want to build something that WordPress will build natively. Or you need to wait or you build it, and then users will have it twice, once in Crocoblock and then in WordPress.

So we have these issues, but we’re trying to work around. For example, we have JetStyleManager, it’s a free plugin. It was created specifically for Gutenberg, because when we have made integration and compatibility for our plugins, Gutenberg was very new and it didn’t have a lot of style options. And we have built separate plugin just for Gutenberg to make styles possible. And now users have this solution from every plugin provider different, and we will rebuild it because WordPress have changed and so on.

So what I wanted to say, and it took a long time, even if you use Bricks, Elementor, and we will add some other integrations for Builder, WordPress is in Core and we would never ignore it. We’re part of WordPress, first of all.

[00:22:04] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned a few sort of little frustrations there with the pace of WordPress. So for example, you may want a particular feature, and you know it’s coming, but you take your foot off the pedal of your own project so that you’re not building it twice as you said. But what about the way that Gutenberg and Full Site Editing, but Gutenberg in particular has changed over the last six or seven years?

I mean, there must have been times when, the fact that it was altering so rapidly, and in such a drastic way, you know, from one release to the next it might be an entirely different UI for a particular thing. And then you’ve got to scratch your head and think, okay, we just shipped something, and we did the documentation, and it all looked like that, and now it looks like this, we’ve got to redo all the documentation.

Being honest, has it been a straightforward process or has it been a fairly frustrating process? I mean, it could have been a bit of both, I guess.

[00:22:53] Anna Hurko: It’s both. It was frustrating because we so believe in WordPress, and we have waited for some changes before, early, and it took too much time from our opinion. But it’s part of WordPress life. So it’s part of probably open source and so on, so we’re okay with it. And I can say that probably we don’t feel that frustration all the time because Crocoblock itself, growing and changing so quick as well.

In six years we started with five people, now 85. You can imagine how quick changes processes inside our team as well. Because every time, in marketing, you have few new people, you need new process. Or in developers teams, they have started like three, four developers and now 15. Every two, three, developers, you need to change the process. So what I mean, in our philosophy of Crocoblock, we are okay with changes. It doesn’t frustrate us. What frustrates us, if nothing happens.

[00:23:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And over the last decade or more, we’ve just seen the line of market share for WordPress go up and up and up. And if I was a product maker in the WordPress space, that would’ve made me feel great. I’ve got a credible product, it works. We’ve got a load of people using it. And look, the amount of people who might use it just keeps rising. And then we get to about 43% of the web, whatever that means, I mean, we can ignore exactly what that means, but the point is the line just kept going up.

More recently there’s more discussion about stagnation in the marketplace, and maybe that line tapers a little bit and it goes flat. Or, and I don’t really want to get into that, we’ve got this period of change at the moment, there’s a lot of politics inside of WordPress. I’m just wondering what your thoughts are on where the business is pitched. The fact that you are using WordPress is great, but do you have any concerns about the market share sort of stagnating, or do you feel that you still have a massive audience in WordPress that you’re still yet to reach?

[00:24:41] Anna Hurko: We have different periods. For example, last years were very challenging for us. Because Crocoblock started, when we started it grows in geometrical progress, it was very quick growing. And then of course as a five, six years project, you have not so big changes in your revenue, but it’s good, it works. And last few months we have very good results. So I think we don’t feel that stagnation so much because we have started Crocoblock without marketing, it was selling itself, and of course with help of community influencers.

And we have just started last year to build a brand and to work with marketing. It means we have a lot of potential yet. So if market is stagnating or it still feels for us to develop our customer base and so on, because we didn’t use it before. You know what I mean? So if you haven’t selling in right way, then now we have started. So we still have a lot customers.

[00:25:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh I see what you mean. So it was more kind of organic growth, or maybe it was social media or YouTube or what have you.

[00:25:38] Anna Hurko: We have started with product team, and that’s why we didn’t have real marketing. No one from us really understood the marketing itself, because we have just done what people need. And somehow the product was built first for ourselves and for our needs. That means we know our customers, not only from support team or interviews, they know them because they are we. So we didn’t need marketing.

And it was a time in our Crocoblock life when we didn’t believe in marketing. And we thought like, okay, marketing is just wasting of money. It changed. So last year we had head of marketing and I developed a marketing team as well. That’s why it’s very new for us and we still have where to grow.

And about market share, we could say something about stagnation, but after we see new numbers of Elementor, and we can see where is no stagnation. And about the drama and the situation with WordPress, which we had since September, we don’t feel it.

So for me, it was surprising that my life was only about the drama and no one in Crocoblock community talked about it. So we have 30,000 people in Crocoblock community in Facebook, and it was only two posts asking about what happens, that’s it. With five comments. So I think the companies care, but customers not so much.

We have some feedback from agency customers. So our customer is an agency or freelance developer. They had few issues from clients, but not so much. So the main reason is to keep ecosystem healthy and that’s it.

[00:27:05] Nathan Wrigley: And now that you’ve moved into marketing, by the way, I think you were right about marketing. If you spend your marketing money badly, it probably is an absolute waste of money, but if you spend it wisely, it’s probably the most effective money that you can ever spend. So where are you pitching that then?

So if I just rewind and re-ask that question, who is your audience? Who are the people that are using this? Is this a product which is used by agencies to deploy to their client websites? Do you find that you are being purchased by, I don’t know, people who’ve just got one or two websites? Maybe it’s just a solopreneur, something like that. Is there a segment of the market that you identify with?

[00:27:41] Anna Hurko: Yes, of course. First, when we have started, we were growing just naturally and we didn’t ask ourselves these questions. Now, we have made a lot of researches, and it’s the same answer. Our customers are agencies and freelance developers. They’re about 30, 35, 40 years old with five, six years experience.

The issue is the Crocoblock is quite complicated solution. It gives you total freedom. You can build from admin panel anything, we have query builder where you can use SQL and other complicated stuff. You don’t need to go to database. You can reach your SQL database from the admin panel, or complex relations and so on.

But to use it, even from admin panel by clicking buttons, you need to understand how it works. The learning curve is complicated. And our developers building product quicker is that all other 80 people can produce a content for it and tutorials. That means, so if you need one website, it’s not a marketing answer, but if you need one, two websites, you don’t need Crocoblock. It’ll be too complicated for you. But Crocoblock will save your time and 50, 60% if you have more websites, if you’re an agency.

[00:28:47] Nathan Wrigley: Right, I understand. So if you’ve got a portfolio of websites and you’re willing to put the time in to learn over 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20 projects, you’ll get a return on your time back. But if it’s just one website, maybe the learning curve, unless you really into that kind of thing and you just want to learn for the sake of it.

[00:29:04] Anna Hurko: I have visited a lot of WordCamps last year and meetups, just to talk to our customers. And we have a lot of fans who paid us once lifetime, but they’re still our fans and they talk about us on meetups and so on. Even unpaid, it’s so pleasure when someone talked about you, about meetup, and had presentation and you never paid for it.

And it’s always about four or five people in agency who are building websites. And because of Crocoblocks, they can build one website in a week, starting from design into the launch. It’s very nice because we have components and query builder and glossary, so you can make some predefined elements and then reuse it all the time if you have some websites you built then, for example, booking and so on.

[00:29:47] Nathan Wrigley: So do you sell your products separately? So all of the different ones that I mentioned, plus all ones that I didn’t have time to mention. Do you sell them as individuals or do you tend to sell it as a sort of bundle that people buy? How do you pitch that?

[00:29:58] Anna Hurko: You can buy them separately or a bundle. So it’s a subscription for one year, but you can buy one plugin, we have custom subscription, you can choose a few plugins, so you can buy a lifetime with all the plugins or all inclusive yearly for all plugins. So it depends what you need. So of course the most popular is lifetime.

[00:30:16] Nathan Wrigley: Do you get yourself involved in the community? I know personally you said you’d been to a load of WordCamps and things. Does Crocoblock give back? Do you sponsor events maybe locally or some of the bigger ones? I don’t know, maybe you even contribute time to Core in terms of developers or something, I don’t know.

[00:30:30] Anna Hurko: So it was our plan. Honestly, we haven’t started to contribute into Core, but we sponsor WordCamps and we attend a lot of WordCamps. We have started from last year, I think, but because of the war, we couldn’t start before. So I mean, the Crocoblock started with all of these things. But from last year we started to sponsor big WordCamps and small WordCamps.

[00:30:50] Nathan Wrigley: I mentioned the URL earlier, but I’ll say it one more time. It’s crocoblock.com, so C-R-O-C-O-B-L-O-C-K dot com. That’s where you can find all of the different bits and pieces that Anna’s been talking about. If anybody wants to speak to you, Anna, personally, do you hang out on any social media platforms, or have a thing that you’d like to mention where people can find you?

[00:31:10] Anna Hurko: Yeah, Facebook or Twitter, but I’m as well in LinkedIn. And I can tell you the secret, and if you write in Facebook room community, you can find our CTO Andrew. And if you write him in DM, he will answer you as well.

In all WordCamps I told to customers if they have complicate, but interesting case, they come to contact Andrew, and if it’s really interesting, he will help you. And even make some changes to plugin sometimes because of customer requests. So we are very reachable. I mean, all Crocoblock team will answer you if you write in DM.

[00:31:42] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you very much for chatting to me today, Anna. I really appreciate it. One more time, if you want to find out what they’re doing, crocoblock.com is the URL. Anna, thanks so much for chatting to me today, I really appreciate it.

[00:31:52] Anna Hurko: Thank you.

[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 underpinnings of modern theme development and artistic exploration within 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 podcasts 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 Tammie Lister. Tammie is a product creator focusing on WordPress. She has a hybrid background as a full stack product creator. She contributes to WordPress, and is passionate about open source and the WordPress community.

Tammie has a rich history with WordPress, having worked with themes and the platform for many years. Her journey melds her artistic flair with technical expertise, something which is, I think, quite rare. Her experience spans theme building, design, development, and more recently guiding product developers through Guildenberg, an initiative which she co-founded.

The fact that Tammie is both a designer and a technical expert has allowed her to offer a well-rounded perspective on the evolution and future of WordPress themes.

We explore the shift from Classic Themes to the era of Full Site Editing and theme.json, and discuss whether the lower than anticipated adoption of these new tools signifies a deeper trend or just a transitional phase.

Additionally, Tammie shares her insights on the necessity of beauty versus utility on the internet, the importance of experimentation in design, and how our definition of art and themes needs continual rethinking.

We also get into her personal artistic endeavors, where she balances her tech workspace with an art studio, highlighting her lifelong passion for photography.

If you’re curious about the current state of WordPress theming, the impact of emerging technologies on the platform, or how to infuse more creativity into your web projects, 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 Tammie Lister

I am joined on the podcast by Tammie Lister. Hello, Tammie.

[00:03:14] Tammie Lister: Hello, how are you?

[00:03:15] Nathan Wrigley: Very good. I love the way that on these podcasts, we talk as if we’ve just started the call, whereas Tammie and I have already managed to chat for about an hour at least about all sorts of things.

But the endeavor today is to talk about themes. We’re going to come at it from a whole bunch of different angles, I hope.

But before we do that, I think it’s probably good that Tammie gets an opportunity to paint a picture of where her experience lies with WordPress and themes. So really I’m just asking you for your potted bio, Tammie, if that’s all right.

[00:03:43] Tammie Lister: Themes is really a thread that’s run throughout. I kind of started doing that within WordPress, and it’s actually the reason why I started doing WordPress. The best way I describe it is I was torturing my own CMS. And then I found, like everybody was doing that, right? Everyone had their own PHP insecure thing.

And then I found WordPress because I was blogging about design and development and then I just found themes and just fell in love Kubrick And then just really got into, through BuddyPress themes, through theming, and that’s kind of been my thread.

I would say I kind of work more on the product side now, and I also describe myself as a hybrid because I just like to do all the things. I like to do product, I like to do design and development. And I’m currently working both in creating things and supporting product developers through co-founding of Guildenberg, where we work with product makers, and I also work on so many different things, but I also work with themes as well.

[00:04:36] Nathan Wrigley: Are you one of those lucky people who is a hybrid of designer and technical?

[00:04:42] Tammie Lister: I mean, we could go that I’m not very good at either of them, but let’s go with I’m lucky in that I do both of them, yes.

[00:04:48] Nathan Wrigley: And have you always, dare I ask, have you always had a sort of an artistic flare? You know, when you were at school, were you always drawn to sort of putting paint on canvas and those kind of things?

[00:04:58] Tammie Lister: Yeah, so one of the things is because of my age, the web did not exist. I was creative, so therefore it was considered that because I was creative I had to go and do art. That was quite a narrow vision quite a few decades ago.

And I always had this love of computers, Acorn Electrons, all those kind of early computers. I still loved all of that kind of stuff. I’m lucky enough to have been, I’m 50 coming up this year, so I was lucky enough to have been from the start of computers, going all the way through. And I think if you have that, you are hybrid by nature, because you got to see the technology as it happened, even if you are kind of more on the artistic side.

So I did the art first of all. I actually did psychology, then I did art, and then I got to kind of retrain in software engineering. Most of my life I’ve done one, and then I’ve done the other, then I’ve done one, then I’ve done the other, and then this thing called product appeared in the universe, which we found a label to put on everybody. And I’ve adopted that because it actually fits.

[00:05:56] Nathan Wrigley: Coming from somebody who is profoundly unskilled in the artistic side of life, I’m quite jealous that you have that in your background.

[00:06:03] Tammie Lister: Thank you for saying I’m skilled. I’ll go with that.

[00:06:06] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry, I know this is going off piste little bit, do you keep your hand in with the artistic side of things? I mean, I know that the listeners can’t see what I can see, but it looks like you’re in an environment where art materials may be a part of your daily life. Do you still do that?

[00:06:20] Tammie Lister: Yeah. I’m really lucky. So my office is half working for tech, like my desk, and then the other half is my art studio. And the half of my art studio has over the years, got bigger and started invading. So my art forms are primarily, either digital art, painting, and it’s an easel the other side, or photography.

So even like one of my art forms is very very technical. So when you actually study art, you have to pick mediums and those were the mediums. So photography is one of the mediums that’s run throughout, and that’s probably like one of the most technical art forms that you can do as well.

[00:06:52] Nathan Wrigley: I am going to ask you a really unfair question, but if the universe conspired so that you could only keep one form of art, be that photography, painting or the online stuff or, I don’t know, Photoshop. What would be the one which speaks to you the most? The one that you would jettison as a last resort?

[00:07:11] Tammie Lister: Photography, because it’s been something that I’ve just in different mediums. We were talking before, one of my, projects is weird cameras. I am currently playing with a camera that does thermo printing onto receipts. But, I love the idea that you can take pictures into different things, even if you do like pinhole cameras. So yeah, the idea that you can capture pictures that way, or that you can capture pictures and then even like through AI, manipulate them. That’s something that super interests me.

[00:07:37] Nathan Wrigley: I always think there’s something really magical about holding that piece of equipment in your hand as well. I don’t know what it is, the internet, you can’t get your hands on it in the same way can you, as you can with a piece of art or a camera or what have you? And I think there’s just something very human there.

[00:07:48] Tammie Lister: You get so nerdy about your cameras. If you find the cameras, I’m a Fuji person, and you find your kind of kits and your, yeah. That’s a different podcast. But like I could get equally as nerdy about themes as I could about my camera set up. So yeah.

[00:08:03] Nathan Wrigley: So pivoting more towards the internet then, and again, we’re not getting into the subject at hand, but I’m enjoying this conversation, so lets keep it going for a few minutes. Do you think the internet requires beauty? Or is that kind of like an added benefit? So a typical website, does it need to be beautiful or is the internet a more utilitarian thing, or is it more of a website by website, case by case basis?

[00:08:26] Tammie Lister: So I think it’s a little bit of case by case. It depends. I will always love experimentation, but I studied art in the days of installation rooms, and the really weird nineties art. So that’s kind of like my grounding is like the weird stuff. The modern art that a lot of people look at and go, huh I quite like a lot of that. But also, through experimentation, we also find out what can be maybe applied to more usable content.

And I think that that’s something to be said like, will a real pushed experiment be used by everybody? Nope, not probably. But can it push the medium? Yes. And that is also something that’s been done time and time again in art.

But I think it’s really careful to, the word art is used a little bit too broadly. Art means something very different from design, and those need to be defined separately a little bit when we’re saying it. The whole first year of studying art is trying to define the word art, when you study it. Trying to define the word art as a whole thing. And we just, particularly in the digital world, we’re like, yeah, it’s art. I don’t think the people that studied art, and art history, would be saying that as well. Sometimes we apply words in our industry that we are maybe applying that we shouldn’t as well.

So where I like to see it is experimentation, and I think we need more experimentation in our medium to get it forward a little bit. But then for use case, yeah, that deviated quite a lot in saying it.

[00:09:52] Nathan Wrigley: No, no, but that’s interesting because I guess with things like the advent of CMSs and the growing popularity of CMSs, it is possible to go into a very cookie cutter kind of approach to websites. You know, it’s got a header, it’s got a footer, it’s got a hero and what have you.

And the internet for many people has become a bit of a stale place, and there’s not much innovation. You know, if you go to a bookshop and you look at the magazines, especially if you’re probably not looking at car mechanics, but if you’re heading towards the more artistic side of things, the innovation there is really profound. And I know you can find examples of that on the internet.

[00:10:24] Tammie Lister: But that happens also in art. Homogenisation of art also happens. So you’ll find that, you’ll go through periods where great art, artistic periods and just liveliness and periods where boundaries are pushed in art, and it’s amazing and it’s great. And then this homogenised periods of just like beige art comes out, and doesn’t feel that anyone’s pushing any boundaries or anyone’s doing it, and it just all feels the same.

We are maybe going through one of those. I would argue that what we are going through is maybe some of the technology is the bit that’s changing, and experimental. So maybe the things that we are not seeing on the top are the things that are changing, and the top needed to distill anyway. And I think that that’s probably the biggest change we are going to be experiencing or we should be experiencing is the top doesn’t matter. And I think that’s going to be quite ground breaking to a lot of us.

Back not too long ago, we used to be very precious about the design. You’d get this design and you’d be pixel perfect making it, and you’d be measuring it, and you’d be getting out your, how many widget screen rulers, right? And you’d be measuring it and doing break widths, and points and all these kind of things. And I don’t know what that word is, the break points and doing all these kind of measures and being very precise about it.

And now that time is changing. Now you are looking at fluid typography. Now you are looking at, how does this respond? And it’s not that it responds in breakpoints, you don’t know what device someone’s going to be viewing on. They could be viewing it through goggles. All these kind of different experiences, and you may not have ever used the device that they’re experiencing on. Try browser testing every single browser in the world, good luck.

But that’s the reality that you’re working in now. And when you’re working in that, the interface has to be secondary, and personalisation is quite key for the user. And that’s quite hard for us to understand, that the interface could be heavily changed and should be heavily changed depending on the user need, rather than it being this perfect vision.

But then again, some things are just going to be an experience. So you are going to wander in, and it’s going to be a beautifully kept shop front because it feels like that. It’s use case, right?

[00:12:31] Nathan Wrigley: The changes that have happened in the WordPress space, let’s say over the last five or six years. So we went from what we might call Classic Themes. I guess that’s the term that most people would be familiar with, where you are interacting with template files. And now we’re in an era of Full site editing or Site Editing. The interface in WordPress, if you don’t install a Classic Theme, allows you to do all of that in a, kind of more or less what you see what you get. You can interact with the templates, for want of a better word, inside of a GUI, and you can use the mouse instead of using a text editor and what have you.

Now, that project, on the face of it, five or six years ago, obviously it was hoped that that would receive wide adoption, and I think maybe the upper echelons of the WordPress project were maybe assuming that people would jump on board with this. But it seems like that really hasn’t happened.

I have a memory, I don’t really know if the numbers I’m about to say are correct, but I have a memory that it was hoped that within a year of Full Site Editing coming around, that there’d be 5,000 themes inside the .org repo.

I think we’ve really only just now, so five years later, gone past 1000. I wonder if you’ve got any intuitions as to why it hasn’t been adopted, not just by end users, but also developers, and agencies, and all these different people? Has it stagnated? Is it a project which has got no legs? Are people going to use classic themes forever? What’s your thoughts?

[00:13:52] Tammie Lister: So I think there’s a lot of points there, but I think there’s a couple points. Splitting out the infrastructure from the interface is kind of important. So are people using the underpinning technologies? Or are they only using the interface? And I think that’s something to consider.

So the, page builder, the site editor is different from, using theme json maybe. So that’s also something to consider. So some agencies maybe aren’t turning on Site Editor, but they’re using theme json. That’s like a really basic example of that.

I think that, is actually probably quite a strong case. Using the org theme repo as the measure. I’m not sure that necessarily holds up to adoption, all the time. Whilst I would love there to be so many things available for people and all that kind of thing, I don’t know whether people or times are different, I don’t know the answer to that. I think that, what I try and look at are agencies using it? Are people using it? Are people separating their plugin from their theme? Because that’s one impact. Are people looking at ways to improve their classic base to onboard off? Are they looking at ways to do it slowly and all those kind of things. And that has been happening more and more. So I think that.

But honestly, it takes a change. Theme development has been the same for a very very long time. Yeah, I was lucky enough to be around when the changes happened. So it’s easy to change if you are around when the changes happen. It’s easy, right? Like I can understand that. I also, for me being a hybrid, it’s a little bit easier to adopt different things, because I can just be a bit more flexible, I think about different things.

But if you are using a big stack, agencies as well go to, if you’re an enterprise agency and you’ve got a big stack, and you are pre-compiling SaaS, and you’re doing all these kind of things, to then suddenly change to theme json, that’s a big mind flip to suddenly do that.

And that requires you to either pause, do lots of retraining, or to look at your foundation theme that you’re using, or to do some refactoring of infrastructure. So maybe to do some training. There’s all manner of different things that you’ve got to do, so I don’t think you’re going to do it in that kind of turnaround time.

And also the time it happened was quite a boom time for agencies to be actually creating sites, which is kind of awesome. Lots of agencies were creating lots of sites at the same time. So for them to pause and say, hang on, not going to go and work on all these projects.

What I actually saw was people thinking how they could sprinkle bits of it in, that has been really good. I think now most agencies that have found their path ,or found their groove with it,` or found the way that they are doing it. That’s kind of most pieces. But we haven’t necessarily seen that reflecting in the theme repo in the amount. So that would probably be a reflection of whether that number is going to be that measure or not.

[00:16:43] Nathan Wrigley: So let me just try and sort of parse everything that you’ve just said, and see if what you’ve just said makes sense to me. So, what you are saying is that the adoption might not necessarily be reflected solely in the repo numbers. So whether it’s 2000, 1000, what have you. It’s the, and I think you called it underpinning technology, so the move to, for example, theme json and what have you. And you can dip your toes into bits of that.

[00:17:07] Tammie Lister: Yeah, there was actually a really good post by Anne McCarthy right back in the day where she was like, here are the little pieces you can use, right back at the start And that was really powerful because I think before people were like, I have to do everything. No you don’t, is the answer. And once that message started to get out, there was a bit of a shift to people starting to be able to be, okay, I can do some sprinkles.

[00:17:28] Nathan Wrigley: I think also the reality is, WordPress has been incredibly good at being backwards compatible, and really not changing a great deal for huge swathes of time. And then this fairly magnificently large change came along, and in other projects when they go through point releases, so Drupal is one that I’m familiar with, they sort of throw the baby out with the bath water a little bit. And as a result, I think over time they do lose people because of that, in their communities I mean, because of that backwards compatability thing has gone.

And I’m just wondering if, like you said, if you’re an agency, and you’ve got a bulletproof process that you’ve worked out for the last decade or more, it would be unrealistic for you to suddenly change to the new paradigm, and to do everything with, for example, blocks or theme json. Rather than to just pick, well, either we’re going to do nothing, we’re going to stick with the way we’ve always done it, or we’re just going to take little bits here and there, because we can’t afford to just do everything. We’d have to retrain all of our staff, we’d have to retrain all of our clients and so on.

So it sounds like you are buoyant. You don’t see the number in the repo as a negative thing, it’s just, this is the journey we’re on, but there’s way more, if you peel back the curtain, there’s more bits of in intel which need to be brought to bear. So that’s interesting, you are fairly sanguine about it.

[00:18:40] Tammie Lister: Not everyone’s always going to have the interface on, or they may even use a different page builder. I think that’s something to kind of be aware. Maybe they are using the technology underneath, the infrastructure underneath, but they’re using a different page builder.

Maybe they are using everything up to a point, but because their client doesn’t want it for the end user, they aren’t turning on the Site Editor interface for users. That is really common in enterprise, because they do not want color palettes and, all those kind of things, for end users. So those kind of like sliding scale.

But also I think, from a release perspective and themes, I think we now need to be, and this is kind of a really curious conversation, is do we measure it by themes, or do we measure by patterns, or do we measure by templates? And if you look at the pattern directory, there have been quite a lot of, patterns, and there have been a lot of, the Museum of Block Art and the amount of patterns that have happened. Or if you look at Twenty Twenty Five, the amount of patterns in there. Now, that’s quite a lot. So if you think about that, that to me is almost like how we would consider themes to have been done.

And we are getting to a point where, what is a theme? And that’s like a whole different discussion, which I love. Because for me, I’ve gone backwards and forwards in this every few years, of I think initially I was like, themes have to be a thing. And now I’m not in that position anymore. I wish I could time travel back and flick myself on the nose, but you know that’s age. Because I definitely feel that as

long as we have a lot of the infrastructure, and we have a lot of the firm things in place, it’s a design system, and that’s what a theme should be. So what you are doing is you’re setting the tone and style as you load it. So this is the weird analogy I use, which is when you change clothes, you don’t take your arm off. Bear with me. The whole idea is that you should be able to take a theme on and off site without having any implications to it. That’s the whole point. It shouldn’t impact it. You should be able to use it like clothing. And it shouldn’t style it. So that gets to, is a theme just styles? And that’s the whole conversation of don’t put blocks in themes.

Don’t just have it for super light. All those kind of like, that take the functionality out, don’t have plugins in it. All those kind of things that we go back to where we were a few years ago, which is don’t put plugins in themes as well. So yeah, there’s a lot there.

[00:21:06] Nathan Wrigley: I remember probably three or four years ago, Rich Tabor, who at the time wasn’t working with Automattic but now is, raising the question of whether we should just have a theme, singular theme for WordPress. And everything else falls into the domain of patterns. And that was a really curious thought at the time. But the more that I’ve played with it, the more that I am fascinated by patterns, and not so much the theme. The theme is more of a sort of set it and forget it enterprise, you just do it this one time, set some basics in there.

[00:21:36] Tammie Lister: See I guess now I’d be like, okay, what is the theme if it is the theme, and do we even need the theme? And is the package just, like I think we’ve come so far because WordPress has a design system. We’ve come so far that probably, like over the holidays because everyone does a project, right? Yet again, I did a theme and I literally used Site Editor’s Dreamweaver. That’s the best way I can describe how I create. I loaded it up and I haven’t used any custom CSS. I literally within a few hours had a theme. Hardly any customisation. No templates, anything, and that’s relying on mostly native stuff. I’m not relying on anything, and I move that across four different sites.

It works. Am I going to release it and package it? No. I’m not going to give that to anyone else, because it’s not ready or worth it or like anything yet. And that may also be part of this. Maybe, going back to our initial conversation, maybe what we’re doing is encouraging more experimentation. That could be a problem if we’re not sharing our experiments. And that’s a whole different conversation about, we should share our experiments more, and we shouldn’t just leave them as experiments.

But, to me what all of this has done is encouraged me to have that early. You know remember Kubrick? Being able to just experiment freely. And it probably was actually quite a hurdle we had to experiment. It was harder than, now looking back at it we’re like, that probably was really difficult. But I remember the first time, twice a year you would do the whole thing. Style switches were a big thing. I’ve now got a switcher on my site, just because I’m back there. What’s old is new again and all those kind of things.

We could never settle on one style because we always wanted to do more than one. It was so easy to do. We were always obsessed with changing our themes because it was so cool to do. We were making them so many times. Maybe that’s part of, we’re in a period where everyone’s just experimenting and learning so much that we are not quite releasing yet. And that’s okay because we’re learning and we’re in our sketchbook, learning those boundaries.

[00:23:36] Nathan Wrigley: Do you remember CSS Zen Garden?

[00:23:38] Tammie Lister: Oh, I love that. Yeah, we should have that for block themes really.

[00:23:42] Nathan Wrigley: It was fascinating, wasn’t it? How the content layer, and that was in the day when CSS was a brand new thing, and the idea that you could separate the markup from the styling was really revolutionary. And I remember being bowled over by that.

[00:23:54] Tammie Lister: I mean the thing was with themes, that was why WordPress struck me originally was, I can just change, I don’t have to manage my content. I don’t have to worry about being insecure or being hacked. I don’t have to worry about that. I can just do the fun stuff. And then CSS got really cool, and then it got really complicated with SaaS. And then I started using JavaScript, I got really overly complicated. And then Modernizr, and all those kind of things. And life just got way too complicated.

And one thing I like now is life is really, really easy when I want to make a theme. I’ll do a sketch, I don’t even do it in Figma anymore. I just do a little bit of a sketch, work out my colors, and then I just use it as Dreamweaver. But that’s not release ready that way. It would be taking it. You know I use Create Block Theme plugin and then I parse it, I clean it, and all those kind of things.

[00:24:44] Nathan Wrigley: Just moving outside of the WordPress space for a moment, it seems like CSS is really interesting again. A lot of the JavaScript things that we’re familiar with only being possible with JavaScript, it feels like so much interesting stuff going on with just web standards and CSS in particular, and there’s a lot of fascinating stuff happening.

[00:25:05] Tammie Lister: HSL is my current love. I’m completely nerdy. I’ve been, playing with that and just, I remember just the sheer pain of even doing parallax years ago, and all those kind of things that we don’t have those issues with.

The fact now that we have such good libraries that we can have confidence in as well, that are open and universal as well for animations and different things that you can do.

I think sometimes it does raise the expectation, if I put my front end developer hat on, it does raise the expectation, makes front end developers life really difficult, because we were always told don’t use libraries in one part, right, from performance perspective. And now it’s about knowing the right ones to use, in the right combination. Because you can achieve some of this stuff without using some of those libraries, and some of them are React as well. So it is like the, kind of where you use or what, you don’t use.

[00:25:59] Nathan Wrigley: Just getting back to the conversation about the adoption, or lack thereof, of Full Site Editing and what have you, and theme json and all of that. We’ll obviously mention the fact that what you said 10 minutes ago is true. You know, the underpinning technology may well be being used by people.

I do wonder though if the Block Editor or the Site Editor interface, do you think there’s something to be said about that whole interface and the fact that it’s constantly in flux? And it is quite difficult to realise where things are happening. And the fact that you’ve got menus that you have to return to. You know, you might not be able to find your way there quickly because the sort of whole menu structure disappears, and you have to click buttons to get back to it, and then remember where they all are, and they get upended all the time.

I’m just wondering if the UI, where we are at the moment, January 2025, I do wonder if that puts people off because it’s in such a state of flux and it’s confusing and it’s not quite finessed yet.

[00:26:55] Tammie Lister: So I have my kind of predictions I guess, of like where I would like see over the next kind of few years. I think we’re going to see that interface is going to do what it’s going to do. It’s core and it’s going to be iterated, but I think you’re going to see a lot of solutions building on top of that, or adapting to it. And I see more variations. You know I’d love to be able to say, hey, now I’m in sketch mode. Just let me do my sketching, right. And be able to see it. In fact, I’ve been playing around with that, with my rubber ducky cursor and all those kind of things, and trying to work out that, and I don’t think I’m alone with that. Like trying to figure out how do you get the editor interface to be exactly what you want. But that’s exactly what I want. That doesn’t mean that I’m necessarily going to have that as a final product.

But I think that there’s an argument for types of users, and there’s definitely an argument for page builders for types. There’s definitely an argument for, niche, niches, could be a really big one. Or page builders that build on top of it. And we’ve seen quite a lot of that, like filling in the gaps. Core is always going to do the middle. Core is always going to be trying to, it’s always going to be the first attempt.

So a good example is fluid typography, that’s just come out. So that’s the first version of it, right? Like the first version of where the things are going to be. The things I worked on in phase one, if they still look like the way they did in phase one in the Block Editor, we would have a problem. They do not look like that now. Because time has moved on. And the Site Editor, a lot of the bigger interface things came last. Because if you bear in mind when you build a house, you build the foundations first. So a lot of the interface stuff came last. So a lot of that stuff still needs to be iterated on.

So, yes, it does need to be iterated on, point 1. But that doesn’t make it easy for what you were saying about documentation, for people learning and people doing things. So I do think there’s an argument for people having page builders. Page builders responding with a native layer. I don’t think there’s ever been an argument that people shouldn’t have page builders, or at least I personally haven’t said that. If you’re going to build a page builder on top of native, great. Find where the gaps are in the area you are pitching for, and make it work, and then keep a connection to it, and that’s going to work great. You know rise up. As Core rises up, rise up with your product. That’s kind of the open source way, right?

So I’m kind of curious to see what happens. I would love to see the ability to customise a little bit more if I had, ifs and buts and wishes. But I just think that that’s maybe an expectation of interfaces that we have now. We got it with light and dark mode, and we seem to really have that now with like everything should be draggable. There’s a difference, right? AI has happened in a year, but also draggable interface have happened in six months. Suddenly most interfaces have draggy handles everywhere, and you can reposition things and pin them. Like we’ve only got one pinnable sidebar. So I think that would be nice. Because at the moment it kind of just says, I’m here, and you have to live with it being here. So things like that.

My biggest thing has been able to just the latest situations of get out mode is the best way I can describe it is widescreen, right? I call it get out mode, because it just gets out of here. But that, things like that are polished. It’s done upon those extra bits. And they’re not bits that were there initially, and we often judge bits and we think the good bits we think have been there all along, well they haven’t been.

[00:30:11] Nathan Wrigley: That UI is so great if you’ve got a long piece of content, and you can’t really encapsulate in your mind what the top to bottom of it looks like.

[00:30:19] Tammie Lister: Remember like when, you used to have patterns out, then you’d lose sight of where the pattern was going to go, or like how it was going to look. Just the fact that it just goes a little bit small. It’s like yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s some perspective to what I’m creating, and it feels like okay, we’re not in like the inception world where I’m touchy feeling things and moving them around or whatever. We’re not in that. But we are kind of feeling like I’m building.

And for me personally, the editor has a couple of different functions, and maybe one of the answers is it should, back when I was working on it, there was this kind of concept of modes, and it kind of didn’t have distinct modes, it flowed. I go backwards and forwards on whether it should have distinct or flow. I think by its nature it is having distinct modes. And one of the modes I find myself in a lot is build mode. If I’m in site editor, I’m a Bob the Builder. That’s what I’m doing. I’m getting in there. I’m Dreamweavering it. I’m digging in, and I want a very different experience to that than I want to,. Like Figma is my, or Penpot is where I’m building. And when I’m composing, I’m in a very different experience to that. I wouldn’t write in Figma.

[00:31:24] Nathan Wrigley: I do like the idea, and I think you alluded to it earlier, I do like the idea of different, for want of a better word, editor modes. Where the UI is really different for a different user. And obviously we have the capability to kind of, historically WordPress, I don’t know, at the very least, remove a menu item for example, or a button doesn’t exist if you’re particular person. But the idea of amending the entire UI so that it binds itself more to the work that you are doing, that’s really interesting.

[00:31:53] Tammie Lister: With AI we’ve got a bit more possibility of looking at what task you’re doing and then adapt. So one of the things that really excites me about AI isn’t necessarily the content generation, but is the realizing what you’re doing. At the moment, we have the set options and get things out of your way. But what I like is when applications are learning my behaviors, or learning what I like. Maybe I’m just selfish. I like that, and I like the fact that they’re learning, rather than me having to, when it loads up, me having to put the sidebar out the way, every single time. It’ll be like, oh no, you actually really like this to be out the way, and this is where you go. So when I load it up, it just does that each time.

It’s such a small thing, but I mean it’s a persistent save mode of the screen and all those kind of things. But it feels magic when it works properly. Or recommending, it’s like hey, you like this? Have you tried this? Because you are obviously a builder. We’ve heard that other builders like this.

[00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: I imagine all of these things could come to pass. I know that there’s a lot of work to be done before those things. Just before we round it off, something that you said you wanted to mention, which we haven’t done, is something called hybrid themes.

Now, I’ve not really touched on this with anybody thus far in any of the podcast episodes I’ve done. And it occurs to me that I would imagine most of the audience won’t be familiar with that term.

[00:33:07] Tammie Lister: So I don’t actually like the term, that’s why we were talking about it. So it’s a term that currently is used for a theme that sits between Classic and Block Themes. And for me personally, and you can get into why it does, I don’t think we should use the term, that’s kind of why I wouldn’t get into them too much. And I know that there’s some really good documentation explaining them, and I don’t want to belittle or anything with that documentation. I think they have a place. But my kind of general point is I think they really confuse users.

If I am working with a client and I am saying to them, hey, we’re working on a theme. It’s hard enough to get them to work with a Block Theme, or I don’t even actually use the term Classic, although I actually have a site that says Classic, but generally they’re not thinking Classic. They’re thinking that it is their theme. And it’s a classic, what it’s old?

But generally to then say hybrid as well. I mean in cars it’s not so good at either. I made that joke of like, I’m a hybrid. I’m not good at either, kind of thing. It’s like the theme isn’t good at either. And really to me a Block Theme can just be, I go back to that post by Anne, you can just do a little bit, you could just have a little bit and it’s a Block Theme. But I think sometimes it’s used to distinguish when, and more templating all of those kind of things with hybrid. But there’s a lot more to it than terms like that. So I don’t want to dismiss it. But for me it’s a lot simpler if we think of it in those kind of opposites.

I’m weird about Classic. So themes and block themes maybe? That’s maybe a kind of, I mean honestly it’s themes, and it just depends on how you are doing the theme really. And that’s what it comes down to. And I think if we saw it that way, then probably people would be like, okay, I’m going to make a theme that suits this purpose. And then they’d be popping on it. Because there was a time when people were taking offense to it being called Classic Themes, and that’s not maybe what we should be doing if we wanting people to use it.

[00:35:05] Nathan Wrigley: I think it sounds from everything that you’ve said that you’re fairly bullish about the future with WordPress themes, and the theming engine that we’ve got, and the opportunities in the future.

[00:35:14] Tammie Lister: Not just themes. I think that WordPress is always going to need a front visual, right? And you are going to be packaging, one of the core principles we have is you can package that style up, and I can give you that style, and you can go and take that and put it on any site. What that package, that theme is going to be in the future, I don’t know. That might be just a json file. That might be a file of an emoji smile. I don’t know. That might just be literally a json file. That could be all it is, is one file going forward. And that might be amazing, and it will pull in all these patterns, and it’ll pull in everything.

But that still will be a theme, and that still will have had someone creative come along and determine that all these patterns and these colour combinations go. And they will work with an AI to come up with colour combination suggestion, all those kind of things. So you’re still going to have that. But it’s the idea that you can still take it from one site to the other, and still have that styling. I think that’s still there. I just think we’ve got to maybe be a bit more adaptive about what that term means, and maybe just all call it themes.

[00:36:22] Nathan Wrigley: I imagine there’s going to be a bunch of people listening to this who are going to stick to what we’re going to call Classic Themes until they simply are no longer an option. There’ll be other people who are somewhere along the journey, and they’re dipping into, well, for want of a better word, hybrid. Or there’s people who are doing the whole thing with the Site Editor.

Regardless of that, if people wanted to find you and talk to you about your journey and any help that you may be able to give them, making that migration, where’s the best place to get in touch with you, Tammie?

[00:36:53] Tammie Lister: Yeah, So you can find me at my site, tammielister.com. And you can also find me on all the socials at Karmatosed. I also have a theme site called ‘Classic To Block’.

[00:37:05] Nathan Wrigley: I will put all of those into the show notes so everybody can find all of the different places where you are available. But, Tammie Lister, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:37:15] Tammie Lister: Thank you.

[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, building a successful agency through strategically planned growth.

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 David Darke.

David is a Bristol based entrepreneur, and a longtime WordPress user. He is the co-founder of Atomic Smash, a digital agency specializing in WordPress and WooCommerce performance optimization.

Since its founding in 2010, Atomic Smash has grown from a two person team into a thriving agency, known for helping businesses improve their digital platforms with WordPress.

The podcast today traces David’s experiences growing the agency, and the many highs and lows he’s been on.

David’s story begins in a business incubator, where the affordable desk space facilitated invaluable networking, and relationship building opportunities. Through perseverance and strategic networking, David has grown the agency from these small beginnings into a robust team of 20 professionals.

We talk about the myriad challenges he faced, from overcoming the initial skepticism due to his age, to the trials of managing business growth and client expectations.

You’ll hear about the critical role that external business coaches have played in guiding his agency through different stages of growth, and how strategic learning has been pivotal in expanding beyond core web development skills, to mastering business acumen, and operational strategies.

David also discusses his current role, which involves less hands-on coding and more focus on technical oversight, sales, and strategic client interactions.

He shares his insights into the importance of delegation, finding work-life balance, and ensuring his team operates efficiently without overextending themselves.

We also get into the evolving web industry landscape, particularly the integration of AI and SEO into their service offerings, aiming to position his company as a strategic partner for client growth.

He emphasizes the importance of hiring the right talent, including freelancers, and the necessity of pausing business coaching to implement growth strategies effectively.

Whether you’re an aspiring freelancer, an agency owner looking to grow, or simply passionate about WordPress, this episode is for you.

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

And so, without further delay, I bring you David Darke.

I am joined on the podcast by David Darke. Hello David.

[00:03:46] David Darke: Hi there. How’s it going?

[00:03:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Nice to chat to you. David and I first met, well, we haven’t really met much because the role in which I met David is one where I’m typically quite busy. I help out with the WordPress London meetup, which happens each month in the city of London, and David was doing a talk there.

However, the nature of my role is that I am face down in an iPad trying to make sure that the recording happens, and then as soon as the event is over, I busily tidy up with everybody else.

So I never really got to meet David, but I did manage to catch his talk in great detail. Gave a presentation over there essentially about growing an agency, managing a successful agency. So we’re going to get into that conversation today, but before we do, David, would you just give us a potted bio? Tell us a little bit about what you do, the journey that you’ve been on with WordPress and your agency.

[00:04:38] David Darke: Yeah, yeah, great. And I’ll also say, you looked busy and not stressed, which is actually quite an impressive thing for all the equipment you were managing on the day, but yeah.

So yeah, my name’s David Darke, started a WordPress based agency 14 years ago. We are based in Bristol in the UK. And I’ve definitely worn many hats in that time.

So started off with myself and my business partner. I was the primary developer and only developer within the team.

We’ve grown the team now to just around 20, and my role has shifted in that time going from the only developer, to development lead, to operations management part of the actual business. And now I’m actually shifted away from operations, and more on the growth and sales side of the business. So definitely all inwardly focused, and then now outwardly focused.

Again, worn many hats and that’s been one of those challenges of owning and running an agency is the need to adapt and wear different hats.

[00:05:33] Nathan Wrigley: When you began with you and your business partner, did you have an intuition that you wished to grow? Was it more just, let’s start a business, let’s put food on the table and see where it goes? Or did you always have that light at the end of the tunnel, that thing that you were aiming for, growth, growth, growth, getting new business, grow the business, employ more people? How did that all work out?

[00:05:55] David Darke: Yeah, it’s really funny. In the first year it was that sort of approach of, we need to get clients. We had no money, we had no funding, we were all bootstrapped and self-manage. We literally worked for, it was about eight to nine months before, so in normal jobs, it’s basically the only job I’ve actually had.

I was actually part of a photography team, a photo editing team for a sportswear company. It’s a random role, but it was basically just get some money behind us so we can actually live in the first year, really.

And initially it was just, let’s do it, let’s try it. It was the perfect opportunity. It was directly outside of after leaving university. There was no risk. I had no family, you know, it was just case of, if it didn’t work, we’ll just get a job.

So the idea was, let’s try it, let’s get going. And as soon as we started moving the idea of, not necessarily, not aiming for massive growth, but the idea of having a team behind us was a real goal at that stage.

And we definitely took a long time to actually employ our first person, and that person’s actually still part of the team now. He just had his 10th anniversary. So from our side, we definitely took quite a while to actually get that first employee on.

But after that is really a case of, let’s work out what team size we need to be to facilitate all the things we need to do. Make sure that myself and my business partner weren’t overloaded. You know, there’s definitely a period in the middle growth of the business where we’re just doing too much stuff and were spread very thin.

So working out what sort of team size does it need to be to allow us to have the flexibility to give more responsibility to team members, and also give us the brain space to think about how the business should be shaped, grown, and how it should just maintain itself really, yeah.

So now we’re at the stage where myself and my business partner are definitely doing less on the tools jobs, I’m basically doing no production work at all, but we’re able to invest time in the business and the team.

[00:07:36] Nathan Wrigley: Do you work exclusively with WordPress based projects, or are you more of a broader church than that? Do you do web development in other areas, maybe even software development, things like that, or is it just purely WordPress?

[00:07:49] David Darke: We have a couple of sites where they’ve got a primary WordPress platform and they use some like Shopify for their e-commerce. So we do support a bit of Shopify on the side. We basically do no real software development or anything outside of the WordPress ecosystem. Every single one of our clients has some form of WordPress installation at some level.

That does, when you’re talking about WooCommerce and big sort of CRM integrations, it does mean we have to have our fingers in a lot of pies. We integrate with things like Salesforce and the other big CRMs. So we do have to interact with some middleware sometimes, but 99% of our clients are WordPress.

[00:08:24] Nathan Wrigley: If you were to hang out in Facebook groups, and LinkedIn groups, and things like that, there’s always a lot of conversation around where you were at the beginning of your journey. You know, I’ve got this agency, I’m a one person team, I would like to grow and what have you. And it feels like you’ve probably gone through all of the things, you’ve tripped over all the trip wires, hit all the hurdles, got past them all in some way, shape or form.

And one of the things that came out was, the bit that you just mentioned about, maybe it’s regret in some way of not making the first hire sooner. And I never managed to scale an agency, I was always very happy to just operate myself, but that was one of the things that concerned me a lot, was making that first hire, committing myself to somebody else’s welfare.

Am I right in saying that you, looking back, you think you maybe should have jumped off that a little bit sooner and hired the first person sooner, to free yourselves up to do other things?

[00:09:21] David Darke: Oh yeah, definitely. And you are right, it’s more about, we didn’t want to necessarily employ someone and then have to let them go because there wasn’t enough money to fund their salary. It was really that simple. Making sure there’s enough security in the business to make sure that we just spent the time and effort in getting them on, getting them into the team, and then having to let them go.

That’s from our side, and also from their side. We hadn’t employed anyone before, we didn’t want to disappoint them. They want to be part of the team, they want to be part of the journey, we didn’t want to then have to say, well, you got to go now because we didn’t think this through properly.

So we definitely spent a lot of time and I would definitely say at the start there was definite, we were doing too much stuff, and then we had too many projects on, and by the time we needed to have someone on the team, it was almost like too late because the recruitment process does take. You need two weeks to basically start looking for people, you need another couple of weeks to basically do interviews and do that whole process properly and meet them.

And this was obviously pre covid, so a lot of it was in person, it really was, interview process was getting people into our studio space to actually speak to them. And we really did it too late. We should have been doing it months before so they’re ready to join. So again, it’s just that sort of balancing, and it’s easy with hindsight, but actually the balancing of making sure that our capacity was right, and how we balance our capacity, we did it too late.

And if we look back now, we did have the security even with the upcoming projects, but it’s just quite big thing to do on the first time. And even from a legal side, just not knowing exactly every box you need to tick when you employ someone, like what contracts you actually have to have. Actually getting the contract and you need to pay someone to do that, or you need to get, you know, there’s a lot of things to do. So the advice is, try and do it as early as possible if you want it to do it.

[00:10:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the interesting word that you used there was capacity. And so there must be, in your head, looking back, obviously now with hindsight, you recognise what that capacity was. Do you have any rule of thumb that you could bring to bear to this conversation? Let’s say that somebody is, like I was, a web agency owner, or maybe there’s two or three people who’ve joined and they’re just beginning to get the intuition that maybe they could take somebody on. Is there a rule of thumb? Maybe that’s around finances or the, I don’t know, the bottleneck in the pipeline of work you’ve got? Do you have any sort of wisdom about when that first hire might be suitable?

[00:11:33] David Darke: Yeah, I think at the start, it wasn’t like an intentional approach, but I was definitely working seven days week. And definitely got burnt out around year three or four in that sort of process. And that idea of actually being able to be at a position, obviously finances are one thing, you need the money to pay their salary, that’s like an underlying thing of security that side.

But I would definitely say the idea of being able to deliver projects in a capacity where you are only working five days a week, and actually have a normal nine to five or whatever the timeframe is, in X number of hours, seven hours a day, without needing to work in the evenings, without needing to do all these things.

Actually, even if you are a freelancer, or just trying to grow, or just the idea of being able to do the work in a sensible timeframe, and if you can’t do the work, then you need help.

And that’s basically the rule of thumb. And that’s how we even work out our hiring capacity now, is we look at the team, we look at what needs to come up. Can we deliver this stuff with a team that we’ve got?

And that’s the sort of tipping point of actually how we scale and grow, and in the areas we need to grow and scale. So even within the team now, we only have one designer. We don’t do huge number of projects, but if we were doing more and more design work, we’re literally looking at, how much capacity does that designer have? When do we need the second designer? Or do we just need freelance capacity? That’s really how we balance it. So just trying to make sure we’re not over-delivering and just not doing insane hours, just making sure everything’s sensible and you can actually start to look back and enjoy the actual process rather than it being this burden.

[00:13:02] Nathan Wrigley: I think obviously the finance is a given. If there’s not enough throughput of cash, then the business is not really a business, it’s something else. But the intuition around seven days a week being something that is unsustainable, I think everybody can grasp hold of that.

So if you wish your business to be five days a week, seven hours a day, and it’s seven days a week, 12 hours a day, then maybe there is extra capacity, and assuming that you’ve got the finances. I think that’s an interesting one that everybody can grab hold of. If the amount of free hours in your week don’t match what you wish to have, then maybe it’s time to start looking around for additional help.

[00:13:38] David Darke: I really, really, wholeheartedly agree that actually, someone working five hours a day in a productive and structured way is actually probably more effective than someone working 12 hours a day. It really is a case of actually having the brain space to think about what you’re doing, and less procrastination and more focused on just doing what you need to do in this timeframe. That limitation actually really helps to make sure that you’re not twiddling your thumbs, you’re not doing things that don’t need to be done and really gives focus.

I think actually from our side, restricting our time, I now actually only work four days a week. So that’s brought another restriction around, every Thursday I’m not in the office, so I need to make sure what I need to do in the week is done, usually at the starts of the week, and then Friday, I’ve got the capacity to almost plan the next week, or do meetings, or do those other things.

So those limitations sound like there are limitations, but actually it’s more of a guide rails of how you need to use your time. And then as soon as I leave the office I’m not interacting with the business. That clear definition really helps from a, the classic work, life balance, you know, really just having that definition. And most of our team, that is the case. It really is a case of, once the time’s over, you pick up the next day. But it does take quite a lot of management and organisation to do that, especially personally. That’s something I had to learn. That was one of the biggest of skills I had to learn is just how to organise your own time.

[00:14:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think everybody can identify with that thing where, it’s late at night, you’re trying to read a book or something like that, and you realise that for every 10 lines that you read, none of the information has gone in. And you could map the same thing to your work life. It’s so easy to fall into the trap that 12 hours a day, good, five hours day, less good, just because I’m doing more hours a day.

But I think you’re right. There’s this sort of burnout which just builds up over time. It’s sort of compound interest, you just feel more and more burnt out, each hour becomes less productive. So taking that absolute time out, and in your case, four days a week, maybe it’s five hours in the office, something like that. Step out of the front door, you are back to social David, if you like, and normal life, and then walk back through the following morning and you’re back to work. I can really identify with that, and hopefully the people listening to that can as well.

[00:15:45] David Darke: Yeah, and also I’ve got a 2-year-old as well, so that really puts a clear definition of, when I’m at home, they’re the focus really, it can’t work both ways. You can’t work with a two odd running around basically, it’s almost impossible.

[00:15:57] Nathan Wrigley: A lot of people might be at this point saying, yeah, that’s all very well, David, but what about, where does the work materialise from? How do you get the work? And obviously now that you are more established and your name has been circulated many, many times, I imagine that’s a different jigsaw puzzle than it was in the beginning.

So let’s cast our mind back to when it was just the two of you at the beginning and you were presumably scrambling around for work. Do you have any advice there? I mean, was it just that you just happened to be in the right place at the right time, the internet was taking off and so on and so forth. Or were there things, looking back, that you thought, actually, do you know what, we did that really well, and we did that really poorly?

[00:16:35] David Darke: I definitely see that the conversations we have nowadays are very different to the ones we had in the past. I think client’s knowledge of even WordPress is a lot higher. So they’ve, again, it’s just maybe just the maturity of the internet and the idea of project managers and digital teams have probably been through two to three websites in the last 10 years. And people’s sort of growth with that, and experience with it has changed.

So I think when we were sort of pitching WordPress websites, and actually the whole web development projects, there’s a lot less emphasis on how much money needed to be spent on a website, everything was cheaper. I think their expectation now is there needs to be good investment in sites for them to be effective, and that was a lot harder sell 10 years ago, I think.

So there’s definitely been shift and change in people’s understanding of what it takes to build a website. And we talked to project managers, digital project managers now, they actually understand that when you create a new website, it’s actually quite difficult to do content migration. You need two months to like move all the content and do an SEO plan. 10 years ago, no one cared. Just do the website, just get out of there. But they’ve been through it.

I think the internet is at that sort of age and maturity where, and the teams that work in businesses and digital managers, they kind of understand the pitfalls of rushing those things, and there needs to be time and thought.

I think when it comes to your question around how we find work. We started in a business incubator. That was more of a case of, there was some services tagged on, but it was basically the idea of, you join this incubator, it’s very, very cheap desk space. When you start, I think it’s every six months you are there, might of been like less than that. Every whatever time period you’re there, the desks get more expensive. So the idea is you start really cheap and it gives you the idea, within two to three years, it’s at the point where you should be sort of moving out of the incubator and thinking about other spaces or other options.

For us it was just cheap desk space. It was the ability for us to get out of the house, go to somewhere where we can work, and the idea is, well, we might meet some people while we’re there and, what actually happened is when we got dropped into this business incubator, we were pretty much the only web developers in this incubator. So actually being able to help and do favors for people have built to lasting relationships where we still talk to them now.

Some of them are freelance or contract UX people. Some of them are data people. And they were just there because again, they just wanted desk space. But the people they’re working with now are bigger organisations, bigger corporates, and those relationships have tied together. But at that time we were basically doing really small work for them, but we’re around a group of people that needed help and needed advice. And again, expertise and knowledge in general was limited 10 years ago.

So I think that really helped us in that initial stage of like, how do we just get these small bits of work? As the team grew, it was really about us being proactive with conversations with people we wanted to work with. That has been effective, very ineffective sometimes. But it’s finding, for us, our unique offering and the way we work, which is more of a maintenance basis and a recurring model, that we kind of really dialed into, and we found the benefits of that. And that’s, for us it’s our ability to sell that to clients.

You know, the idea of you don’t necessarily need a brand new website every three years. If you just work on the one you’ve got, adapt and evolve it, you can actually save a lot of money without needing to build a brand new site every three years. So that’s taken us quite a while to find our model, and our sort of unique offering. But actually finding people and being able to sell that has definitely shifted and changed as the business has grown.

[00:20:03] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like there’s a fair degree, in your business at least, at the beginning of what you might describe as networking or socialising. It’s not all about, I don’t know, posting Google ads and paying in that way. This is meeting real people in this enclosed space or out in the wider community or what have you. So it sounds like you were getting local business possibly, at the beginning.

That kind of leads me in a curious direction that I didn’t anticipate. And that is, did you rely, you and your partner, on your gregarious nature? Are you outgoing? Was that some sort of superpower that you maybe have?

I think it’s possible to say that a certain proportion of people who end up in the web development space are not that, they’re fairly introverted, and so the idea of mixing and socialising might be something that they’re feeling, yeah, a little bit uncomfortable about. So I just wondered if you wanted to speak to that, whether there was some element of your personality which enabled you to grow.

[00:20:57] David Darke: That might be a possibility. I would also say that at the time when we started the business, myself and a business partner looked quite young. When we’re talking to businesses and companies about how they want to be growing their website, we just generally looked like we just left university. So actually from a sales perspective, that wasn’t actually particularly a great thing. We didn’t look like we had the experience. We didn’t look like we’d done this process many times.

I think from our side some of the networking side of things was beneficial, but then actually hiding behind some of that other communication and other ways speaking and reaching out to businesses was actually beneficial. Because you could actually show expertise and experience in other ways. So it’s kind of like twofold.

But definitely from a networking side, the thing we’ve definitely found with networking events and just general things, you have to be quite careful if you are trying to find new business. For example, most WordPress meetups, you’ll be talking with people that use WordPress, or develop WordPress, build sites, and not necessarily clients or potential clients. So you then have to find those particular networking events that would actually have potential clients in them. And that might mean that you are going to something that’s a bit more random. Even something that’s maybe based around accessibility or something that’s based around, I don’t know, even environmental impact or something like that, where you’ll be talking with other people that potentially would have those challenges, and then you can speak to them about their website and what have you.

So it is about a selection of what events you go to. But I think the networking side of things is super important because as soon as you come across a challenge, and if you’ve spoken to someone, a great branding person that you met two weeks ago, that person’s at the top of your brain. As soon as you see someone with that challenge or you try and help someone, or even a current client that might come to you with a branding challenge, we basically don’t do any sort of branding at all, we just do development work and design work.

But as soon as we find someone has a challenge, you can just grab these people really easily because they’re just forefront of your brain. And that’s the power of networking more than just meeting people directly. It’s just getting people to know what you do, and when those challenges come up, they’re the front of people’s brains.

[00:23:05] Nathan Wrigley: So you are now at 20 people, I think you said, or thereabouts. So you’ve gone from two and you’ve added 18 roughly. During that journey, was it always upwards? Did it always go from two, to three, to four, to six or did it ever sort of slide down again? What I’m trying to get at in this question is, has it always been growth or have there been moments when that growth has stalled? When the anxiety, looking at the financial spreadsheet, has been more than it was less, put it that way.

[00:23:34] David Darke: Yeah, hundred percent. Definitely hasn’t always been up. There’s definitely times where we’ve had to go down. Some of that has been natural just churn of people leaving and then they have been replaced. Some of it has been from loss of projects or loss of clients and had to make difficult decisions. So it’s never as, well, for us, definitely wasn’t always an upward trajectory. I’d definitely, from my side, there was also points of stagnation and really from our side to actually work out how we get past those. We’ve needed external business coaches to really help us prioritise and work out how we utilise our superpowers and what we’re really, really good at, into better, more cohesive offering. And that will really help grow the team.

So I think from our side, we were kind of quoted these numbers of, when you get to around sort of 10 people, that’s certain number of challenges. Growing from 10 to 20 is another set of challenges, and getting beyond 20 is basically another set of challenges. So it’s almost like these milestones in growth.

And we were definitely lingering around 10, 11 for a long time, just because their natural, even the process you have internally to scale to that number, just needed a lot of internal help, internal and external help to get beyond that. So yeah, there’s definitely been points of stagnation. There’s definitely been points of retraction. But if you look to the graph in general, it has been upward.

[00:24:52] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like you’ve put yourself in the path of people who you recognise to be good teachers of whatever it is that you need to know. So maybe that’s some aspect of, I don’t know, web design for those people in your business that do that. But it also sounded there, like you have deliberately gone out to find business coaches.

So that maybe has nothing to do with web development, but you’ve got to balance the books and there are ways of doing that. Is that the case? Do you go out and find people who you think, okay, I need to learn this thing, rather than reading it in books, I’m just going to take the direct route and go and find a human being that can do that, or an agency that can do that? Because I guess that’s fairly important as a short circuit of trying to figure it all out yourself.

[00:25:34] David Darke: A hundred percent. Yeah, we were very active three, four years ago of finding a proper business coach. And business coach is like, that’s very much like a phrase that could cover a lot of things, like you’re saying, could cover financial, could cover operations or whatever. But actually when it boils down to what we needed, it was almost like a third party for myself and my business partner to be responsible too. To actually say, we’re going to be doing these things, we’re going to be doing this activity or whatever it might be, a task that needs to get done in the business or a KPI.

The first thing that they basically said to us when they joined was, your accounting’s terrible, go and get it sorted, like basically just go and do that. Look at this and just give that sort of advice and experience to say what’s working well, what isn’t. And you now need to go and do this. You’ve got two weeks to go and do this or however long, and get it done.

And actually there’s not many people that myself and my business partner are responsible to. We’re responsible to our employees for employee led things, but when it comes to business level things, we’re just responsible to ourselves, you know, each other.

So actually having this third party to basically wag the finger and say, you need to get this done and you need to get it done now was really helpful to actually make sure things got done. Yeah, that level of experience and that third party to be responsible to was really, really beneficial. And the thing that we kind of got to, and the point we got to was they helped us form KPIs, so key performance indicators for the business, and metrics we can track, and they helped with our accounting processes, they helped with our general capacity processes and all those sort of things that helped the business.

We then stopped using them because we basically had a load of work that needed to happen, you know, months and years worth of work that needed to happen. And the idea is we’ll probably pick up that relationship again when we are at the next stage because we now need to work on, we now need to do the growth, we now need to do these things. And we were at the stage where we kind of knew what we needed to do, and we were just basically checking in at that stage. We weren’t getting anything new.

But there are going to be set of challenges that we’re going to face in the next year, two years, where that relationship will be super beneficial again. So I genuinely think that having an external voice, an external ear as well, just to talk through problems, that whole classic rubber duck programming of just speaking your program out loud to someone, it really is super beneficial. And having a mentor, and actually being a mentor for other people is very, very important.

[00:27:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s almost like you’ve hired in a third partner or something like that. Somebody who’s got the right to tell you, you’re doing this wrong. There’s a better way to do this. And I think as a freelancer at the beginning, just you and your partner, it is easy to assume that everything needs to be done by the pair of you, and if it can’t be done by the pair of you, you’re failures. And of course, in the real world, nobody has the capacity to do all the tasks in every walk of life. We employ people to do almost anything that we come into contact with. So that’s really interesting.

Are you good at delegating? Because again, right back at the beginning when you are doing everything, and you’ve got to go from two to three, I think this is where probably I stumbled, and I’m sure a lot of people can share in my experience here.

I just seem to find delegating quite difficult. I don’t know what that is, but there’s this thought maybe in the back of my head that, well, I know what I need to do, so I should be the one to begin it, and end it and, what have you. Are you a good delegator or was that a skill that you had to learn?

[00:28:50] David Darke: Yeah, definitely had to learn. And I’d definitely say I’m a very average delegator. So my approach to it now is trying to be a bit more hands off. So if I’m not involved from the start, it’s a lot easier for me to not be involved in the future. Having oversight and seeing how things work is definitely beneficial. As soon as I’m trying to get into the, I’m quite detail orientated, so as soon as I get to know the details and I feel myself wanting to be more involved in something. If I’m a bit more hands off, and allowing our employees to have responsibility for things, that’s easier for me to then not be involved in the future and just allowing those things to happen.

I was definitely a bad delegator at the start, and it’s definitely something I’ve worked on and improved on in the years. But it’s more about techniques rather than naturally just this becomes a thing you can do. It’s more just allowing people to have responsibility for those things. And myself, just making sure I’m only checking in when I need to check in or whatever’s needed for the task at hand. It’s definitely a challenging thing and it’s

one of those tasks, that sort of soft skill which isn’t really something you can just do a course in or learn. That suite of soft skills is something that you don’t really get training for as a manager or a business owner, get trained for very meticulous or very particular things around accounting, or if you need to do a certain process, you can just get a course. But that soft skill stuff is super important, but it’s hard to get training in, and you kind of just have to learn as you go really.

[00:30:11] Nathan Wrigley: Do you ever have to pull yourself back from the opposite of delegating, just getting in too deep into the tasks that your employees are tasked with doing? You sort of find yourself looking over their shoulder and thinking, oh, that’s curious, let’s have a chat about that. When really your job now is divorced from that, you are one step back, one step higher if you like, and you’ve got to just pull yourself back from that precipice.

[00:30:34] David Darke: Yeah, I mean, not necessarily in the way, my role now within the business, because I’m more to do with the sales side and the growth aspect and less about the internal workings, I definitely find that’s a lot less. From my side, the things I’d be checking in now and making sure happens is once a client joins, making sure they’re happy and checking in from that perspective.

Definitely from my business partners side, who’s now more internally focused, it’s basically their role as a director to direct, actually steer the ship. So there definitely needs to be a certain level of oversight and seeing what is happening. But I think our personalities and characters, he’s very, very good at having a lot of different things, and having oversight of a lot of different things without needing the granular detail.

Whereas I’m, because I’m more detail orientated, I kind of need everything to help make decisions. But I think for my new role I’m definitely less involved and less overseeing and that side of things. But it’s almost important that it does happen to some degree, that people have oversight of stuff, just to make sure things are done in the right way and make sure that things are profitable, for example. And we have a set of business values, make sure things are being delivered with those values in mind. It definitely needs that in place. It’s never just about wagging fingers, just watching, making sure people are working or anything like that. It’s really the case of making sure the business is doing what it’s meant to be doing.

[00:31:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it sounds like you have to have trust on a fairly profound level, that the people that you have invested your time into, and they’ve invested their time into your business, you can trust them. You delegate a task, and the anticipation therefore is that that task will be done and they’re going to tackle it in the same way that hopefully you will have done, and the processes are there to make sure that happens.

So now that you are, I’m going to use the word manager, maybe you have a different word for yourself. I’m guessing, again, if we rewind the clock, I’m guessing that you probably weren’t able to look forward and think, yeah, this is what I’ll be doing in 10 or 15 years time, this is what my day will look like, because you generally concentrate on the next six months.

Do you enjoy the work that you are doing? I’m not meaning to back you into a corner there. What I’m sort of angling after is, there’s bound to be bits of this new role that are satisfying, but there’s probably bits that, oh boy, I just wish I could hand that over. And again, that’s part of growing the business.

Because it feels, sometimes I have conversations with people who are in similar positions to you, and in some cases they’re stepping back from the more managerial role and they’re going back to the, I want to be in front of a computer and I want to be doing coding again, and it’s still my business but I’m going to employ somebody else to do the managing part, and I’m going to go back to being a developer because that’s what I enjoy.

So it’s questions around that really. Do you find the same satisfaction in the work that you’re doing now, or do you find sometimes you look over at your employees and think, oh, wish I was doing that again?

[00:33:10] David Darke: I think from my side, the things I really enjoy doing, I really enjoy experimenting and having sort of technical oversight over things. My needs to be doing coding and delivering is slightly less. But again, a lot of satisfaction, enjoyment even just from the sales process of really delving into a client’s challenge and communicating with them about how we can solve those things. That actually requires me to actually have a lot of technical oversight, understanding, not necessarily prototyping, but actually being able to articulate to them how our work will improve their site.

And that does require, that does sort of scratch that itch from a technical side of me being able to work with clients, and talk with them, and do technical audits, and actual solution architecture and stuff for new potential clients and existing clients. So I definitely feel that my need to be on the tools is covered by that.

My real, I guess purpose within the business is to make sure the business is growing, that’s the key thing. That’s where I get real satisfaction from is seeing the team working, from seeing the business grow. And that’s almost like at a different level from my own personal need to do coding or those sort of things. So I get a bit of an itch, scratch from that side of things.

The definite story that we have when we employ people, and we really do look to try and grab freelancers to be part of the team, because they’ve had to deal with, I don’t know, some of the minutia of sending invoices, getting new clients, having to tackle all these things of being a freelancer. And when they have the opportunity to just do the work they want to be doing, you get really good results from people, and you get a really satisfied employee because they just get to worry about what they’re doing, rather than worrying about the work upcoming, and having to worry about were the invoices sent. Do they have to do their tax return? You know, all this other stuff that they just don’t get to do.

So I think from my side, it’s really like a character thing. And you do have to ask yourself what you want to be doing within your business. And there’s no reason why someone couldn’t run a business and be any sort of business. It could be a design business, branding, it could be developments, that they can’t build themself into the business in a way where they are still on the tools. They could be a solutions architect, they could be lead developer, but it’s about building the business around it so there’s still opportunity of growth and they still have ability to concentrate on other things.

There’s nothing against someone actually doing the work and running a business. Just you need to have that character to be able to handle that, and also want to be able to it.

And I think what we want to be doing within the business is something we worked on a lot with our business coach, because we have worn so many hats along the way, just actually picking those things that we did really enjoy and trying to build them into a role that we wanted to move forward with was a key part of the work we did with them.

[00:35:41] Nathan Wrigley: I think every industry, no matter what you’re in, you’re always staring over the horizon. You’re always trying to figure out where the next piece of work is coming from, or what the next big wave is. But I think particularly the web, technology, but the web specifically, that moves at a really incredible rate. You take your eye off for six months and you’ve lost sight of what’s going on.

And I’m just sort of wondering about that really, if there’s anything in the near term that you are thinking about. I don’t know, that may be AI, it may be something that you’ve seen in the WordPress space that you really like. So that’s an open-ended question really. Where does the business feel like it’s going to you? What pivots are you thinking about over the very short, near term?

[00:36:19] David Darke: AI is super interesting, it’s something we’re definitely keeping an eye on. And the understanding that AI is going to be part of everything, every app in the next 10 years. It’s going to be here, it’s here to stay, it’s not going anywhere, it’s going to grow. And the idea of how we utilise it. Most of the time, the way we deliver stuff to clients is understanding what is in the marketplace and making the good recommendations.

So you might have a particular brief that says, we want to be using AI as part of this project, you know, really delving down to what actually means. Is it a chat bot for sales process? Is it chat bot for support? Is it something around content creation? It could be anything.

So I think from our side, the things you want to actually be focusing on, again, it’s really delving into our, the way we work and trying to work with clients and find clients that really want to be digging in and helping them grow, not just helping them keep their website online, help them, support them.

The idea of us or anyone being able to produce a website that looks pretty good, either using page builders, or AI generator websites, or anything is becoming more and more easy. So the human connection there and the ability to actually be a strategic partner and help growth is going to be the key to businesses in the future. It’s more about the strategy and the consultation that happens around these things is going to be where the profit is, where the actual need for businesses is going to be really focused.

The way we’re adapting is basically bringing in bigger strategic brains, not just delivery, it’s about businesses and growth. That’d be business insight people. It could be even just SEO specialists, we don’t do much in the way of SEO, but that’s quite a simple thing. But actually having a specialist on the team for growth rather than just for building a website. We’re part of your team, your digital arm of your team, how does your website grow? That’s going to be our offering more and more in the future. So we’re not just delivery partners.

[00:38:11] Nathan Wrigley: Fascinting. Honestly, it’s been a really interesting chat. I’ve enjoyed very much hearing about your journey. If anybody else has shared my intuition and would like to contact you, maybe they’re interested in the way that you’ve grown, or maybe they’re going through some struggle that you have perhaps overcome already, where would be the best place to find you? Be that on social media or your website. What’s the handle that you would drop?

[00:38:34] David Darke: Yeah, probably the best place would be LinkedIn. I’ll give you a link. Yeah, I don’t actually have it off the top my head, but it should be just LinkedIn, David Darke. But, yeah, that’s probably the best place. I’m trying to be on social media less in general so, yeah, that’s definitely a good place.

[00:38:46] Nathan Wrigley: Well, in which case, I will put that into the show notes. So if you go to wptavern.com/podcast, search for the episode with David Darke, D A R K E, you will find it in the show notes there. So all that it remains for me to do is to say, David Darke, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:39:02] David Darke: Thank you very much. Thanks 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 the challenges of creating accessible websites 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 Elena Brescacin. Elena is an accessibility consultant from Italy who has been blind since birth, and working online since 2000 with Tangity Design a part of NTT Data Company.

Her journey with WordPress began in 2021, but she has been aware of it since 2003. A computer geek, Elena enjoys finding solutions to everyday challenges through technology.

Elena is here to discuss the significant accessibility advancements and challenges within WordPress, especially with the transition from the Classic Editor to the Block Editor. She shares how full site editing has empowered her to manage most of her site content and structure without needing constant visual assistance, despite some areas needing further improvement.

We talk about her experiences navigating the internet using screen reader software, the importance of adhering to HTML semantics for accessibility, and her involvement in the WordPress community, including her contributions to the Italian Polyglots, and speaking at WordPress events.

Elena also reflects on the evolution of the internet, personal experiences with various web accessibility tools, and her advocacy work in digital spaces. We get into real world challenges, such as inaccessible event venues, and the advantages of online events for better accessibility.

Elena shares her frustrations and triumphs in web accessibility, her insights on the impact of proper semantic web design, and her continued efforts to raise awareness and support a more inclusive internet.

If you’re curious about web accessibility, particularly how WordPress is used to create content, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Elena Brescacin.

I am joined on the podcast today by Elena Brescacin. Hello, Elena.

[00:03:28] Elena Brescacin: Hello. Thank you for having me as a guest.

[00:03:32] Nathan Wrigley: You are so welcome. I have to say, massive apologies to Elena, and we’ll get onto this in a moment. Elena has been more gracious than you can imagine.

We have tried multiple times to get this podcast recorded. And apart from this one time, more or less everything that we’ve tried has failed. And as I said, we’ll discover why that is in a moment. But firstly, my sincere thanks for sticking with me, despite the frustrating nature of it, seemingly being happy to carry on the endeavor. So I’m very grateful. Thank you so much.

Okay, so the endeavor today is to talk about your journey with WordPress, we’re going to land there in the end. But before we get into that, would you just give us a little bit of your potted bio, and hopefully that’ll paint a picture of what we’re going to talk about today. But just tell us a little bit about yourself, what you have done in the past. Maybe go back right to the beginning of all that. And then, yeah, just let us know what it is that you’re doing currently.

[00:04:29] Elena Brescacin: I am an accessibility consultant. I am blind, I have been blind since birth. I’m from Italy. I work online since 2000. 2002 I started working officially, and I work for the same company. It has changed names many times, but now it’s called Tangity Design. It’s part of NTT Data Company. It’s a Japanese multi-country company.

Currently I am working so much time with AI and with accessibility of websites and mobile apps. And of course, I’m involved into the Fediverse because I find that it’s the future of communication right now. I have no WordPress in 2003, but I started using it in 2021.

[00:05:26] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much. So earlier in your bio just then, you said that you had been blind from birth. Now I’m not entirely sure what the spectrum of that word means, but my understanding is that the word blind can be different things to different people. But in your case, is it fair to say that you are entirely blind, you have no sight at all, or do you have impaired vision?

[00:05:49] Elena Brescacin: No, no, no, I am totally blind. I don’t see anything.

[00:05:53] Nathan Wrigley: And clearly on a podcast like this, where we’re talking about WordPress, this is going to play into the conversation a lot. Is it the sort of blind nature of things that you are doing your accessibility work in? Are you helping people online, particularly WordPress website builders and app builders and things like that? Do they come to you with a requirement to understand how their interface, how their website is working, and you give them kind of an appraisal of, this works, this doesn’t work, you need to look at this and so on?

[00:06:22] Elena Brescacin: Yes, it happens. This is part of my job. I also teach to some customers when they have no idea of what accessibility is.

I have had many speeches for accessibility. I participated to TEDx in 2015. I did not use WordPress then. And I had the WordPress Accessibility Day in 2024. I have spoken in two WordCamps. Italy, WordCamp 2021, and Verona WordCamp 2023. Unfortunately, the speeches are in Italian. Accessibility is in English, WordPress Accessibility Day is in English. The speech is called the Same Editor, Same Language. It talks about Gutenberg. And I also participated to Core Days, WordPress Core Days in 2024, last November in Rome. And I presented my experience with multilingual website based on Gutenberg.

[00:07:29] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much. Now, it feels to me that if you’ve been working online, and I think you mentioned 2003 possibly as one of the earlier dates that you mentioned in your biography. Would it be true to say that at the beginning of the internet, so when we were all just getting online, and it was dial up modems and what have you. I was using the internet from a fairly early date, and it feels to me as if the internet might have been a more hospitable place for somebody who is blind back then.

Because my recollection of the internet back then was that really it was just text. There was text and there were underlying text links. There was very little in the way of imagery, but it was primarily text. We certainly didn’t have video, we didn’t have complicated platforms to publish things online.

Has the internet basically become more challenging over the previous two decades for somebody like you to navigate around? I’m not talking there about the ability to create content, I’m just talking about the ability to consume content. Is the internet more noisy, more difficult to navigate around now than it used to be, let’s say 20 years ago?

[00:08:42] Elena Brescacin: Oh, well, it depends on what you want to see, because you had much text-based content then, it’s true. But obstacles began into 1999 with the first visual captcha, the anti-spam, anti-bot control based on visual text. Copy this text into a box. If you are a human you can see, otherwise you are cut off.

[00:09:15] Nathan Wrigley: I know exactly what you mean. So it was those early captchas where you had to be able to see a particular thing. And if you could see it, it was fairly straightforward to carry on. And we all know what captchas are. We see them still, often it’s click on pictures of, I don’t know, cars or something like that. And without that pass, if you like, you are stifled, aren’t you? You can’t then go on to do whatever it is. It may be log into a platform, what have you. So that was your first experience, was it? Captchas was the first time the internet became something which you could no longer do. Suddenly there was a barrier which hadn’t existed before.

[00:09:49] Elena Brescacin: It has started to become common after 1999. The first to implement was Yahoo, Yahoo Groups. Then it came on Google, it came everywhere.

Now I have also another platform that concerns money. Some benefits of a service I have joined, they give a benefit, yearly benefit. And they have a captcha, a visual captcha on login, a visual captcha to change the password, a visual captcha for if you forget the password. I must ask for help every time I have to access that service.

[00:10:29] Nathan Wrigley: So the internet in that regard is an entirely frustrating experience. I’m sure that we’ll get into slightly more positive things.

But I want to spend a moment just discussing what it is that you do when you browse the internet. I mean, clearly it’s obvious to you what you do, but it may be that the listeners to this podcast, because we have a very wide listenership, and some of them are very experienced, they no doubt think about accessibility for their websites all the time. But there’s bound to be other people who really don’t know what it is that somebody like you is doing on a day-to-day basis to navigate the internet.

So can we just describe what it is that you are doing. When you are sat at your computer now, and we could talk about different devices like phones or whatever as well, but let’s just begin with a computer, a desktop computer. How is it that you are able to navigate the internet without being able to see what’s on a screen, how does it work?

[00:11:25] Elena Brescacin: So I do not have a mouse, I do not use a mouse. I have a keyboard, standard keyboard every person has at home. I used the computer since 1989. I was less than 10 years old, and I was nine, almost 10 years old. And I learned to use the keyboard to get confident with the keyboard. But computers now have some software. Some are expensive, some are free. They are called the screen readers. I currently use the paid one. It’s called Jaws for Windows, acronym for Job Access With Speech.

[00:12:06] Nathan Wrigley: We will add that into the show notes so that everybody can find that, thank you. Yeah, sorry, keep going, I interrupted.

[00:12:11] Elena Brescacin: It’s a software that renders by voice, or by braille device. There is a hardware device called Braille Display, which is for braillists like me, otherwise they use speech. I use, of course, I use a Windows machine.

Another open source software is called NVDA. It’s for Windows, Non-visual Desktop Access. I use those softwares on the computer, on Windows.

On Macintosh, I have also a Macintosh, but I use it rarely because it’s old, it’s about 10 years old. The screen reader there is called Voiceover, the same that is in my main mobile device, my iPhone.

And unfortunately the open source field, I’ve talked about Linux, it’s less careful to accessibility. There are some users, brave users that use that kind of system, but I find it less immediate, less straight forward. Let’s say I have to work, I have to have smooth work, not to go and check if everything works before working. Do you understand me?

[00:13:27] Nathan Wrigley: I fully understand. I think most people who have had experience with Windows, Mac, and Linux, I think there’s a certain level of dedication, shall we say, which is required to keep going with Linux. Some people have it, and other people don’t. But it sounds like it’s the same for you as it would be for somebody who has sight, only a different set of problems no doubt.

Now, when I go to a website, let’s say for example I visit, I don’t know, in my case the BBC website, which is a news organisation in the UK. And they present lots of written content, and lots of video content, and lots of images and so on. When I’m looking at that, I navigate my way around by capturing what comes into my eyes, and I decide what I want to look at based upon the prompts, text or what have you. And then I find the link and what have you.

It would occur to me that many people would imagine that you, as a screen reader user, are browsing the same way that I am. In other words, you are looking somehow at the same screen that I am.

But that’s not true, is it? Because you are kind of in a way navigating the HTML. And the way that the website has been constructed on the backend is much more important than it would be for me.

So for example, a font size of something enormous screams title just because it’s big. But in your case, the bigness of the text doesn’t say anything about its titleness if you like. And this same thing maps out in every single part of the website.

So can you just give us an idea of what it is that you have to go through, let’s say when you end up at a website like the BBC. What are you actually doing with the keyboard, and how are you getting information about what it is that you want to get to? Or how are you not getting information about what it is that you want to get to? So the frustrations as well as how it ought to be done.

[00:15:21] Elena Brescacin: Oh, well, you said about the big text saying title. I look for, if I have to read a piece of news, not the list of news, but the single article of news to search for the news. I look for the heading level one. It’s an HTML code called heading.

There are six levels of headings. Heading level one is the most important, the most evident, it’s the title. If I have to search for a new site, a brand new site, I usually search for the main menu, a navigation menu. HTML has a semantic, it’s called semantic. The layout is associated to specific code.

You know that if it has four legs, a tail, it can be an animal. The website, the concept is very, very restricted because navigation menu is a type of code. And often developers and designers create visually with graphics what should be created by code. So screen readers do not detect information correctly.

So with the example of before, the animal, it has four legs, a tail, but it’s a cylindrical chair. Sighted people always protest when I say your product is not tested for accessibility, and a website rather than mobile app, or a physical product and so on.

Then if I create some content, an article, a text, a word document, whatever else, they always protest. Sighted people protest because I have not checked the formatting, the text is too small, or too big, or I have no color, and I say, why should you protest? If I have no sighted person testing my product before I deploy it publicly, why should you protest if a sighted people have not tested my product, and why should I not protest being blind if your product is not tested by blind? It’s the same, the same frustration, but they don’t understand.

[00:17:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so with your screen reader you are going through and you are hoping to find cues inside the code of the website, for want of a better word. Let’s just say it like that. You’re hoping to find the H1s, which will indicate, this is a title, you’re hoping to find the H2s, which indicate this is a subheading if you like. And then, you know, H3 is under that, and H4 is under that, and all of that working out in a logical structure. So this semantic nature of everything.

[00:18:24] Elena Brescacin: Sequential.

[00:18:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, sequential. And my guess is that when you are browsing the web, this is very rarely the case. I’m going to ask you a question, it’s putting you on the spot a little bit. But if you had to put a percentage, so one through to a hundred, a percentage on how frequently you encounter a website which you can completely use without a great deal of effort. So it’s built exactly how you would expect it to be, how you would wish it to be. As a percentage, how often does that happen? If you were to visit a hundred websites, how many of them would satisfy you from an accessibility point of view?

[00:19:02] Elena Brescacin: Oh my god. Could I say 20, 30%? But the percentage would increase if, for example, some news websites, many of them are even based on WordPress, but the problem itself is not WordPress or the CMS, it’s the many, many, many advertising that they put inside. Moving advertising, moving sliders. Images without labels, or buttons without labels.

I had a very, very high frustration last week because Nathan was trying to interview me with a platform called SquadCast, but it did not give me the control for the microphone, the speakers, the headphones. It was labeled related to chat, help leave the call and so on, but not the setting of microphone. So no one could hear each other.

[00:20:03] Nathan Wrigley: It was a profoundly moving experience actually. And I say that in all of the wrong senses of the word, moving for all the wrong reasons. Because I have interviewed hundreds, possibly thousands of people at this point, but I don’t believe that I’ve ever interviewed anybody who has no sight. And so you are a first. And so honestly the guilt I’m feeling is fairly profound.

I sent you the link in order to open up the platform in the same way that I do every single time, and then there was just this wave of one frustration after another. And it never stopped, did it? It was just one problem, then another, then another.

There’s things that we were trying to set up like selecting the headphones to use, which is typically a one second exercise, and selecting the microphone that you wish to use. Again, it’s another fairly straightforward exercise if you use it in the way that I do. But we must have spent, what, half an hour, something like that, just hitting obstacle after obstacle. And it really did give me a profound sense of, well, this is just wrong.

Here we are trying to carry out a normal thing, I’m eating up your time, and you are eating into my time, and so there’s this sense of guilt in both directions that, well, we’re wasting each other’s time and what have you.

All the while the frustration is building for you because literally nothing that you were hoping to achieve was possible. And so that was the sort of apology at the beginning. We are recording it on another platform today, which thankfully has proven to be an awful lot easier. I’m sure in many respects it’s not perfect as well, but we seem to be having a little bit more luck but, again, describe that, this isn’t perfect either.

[00:21:41] Elena Brescacin: Yeah, not to speak about the calendar. When I talk about semantic, another good example should be table. The calendar Nathan has to book the podcasts has no table structure and no keyboard commands to select the dates. Overall you have no semantic, it’s just a visual. The time zone, which date can be selected. So for example, I was trying the 16th of December for the new reschedule of the interview, and it just gave me, sent me a calendar, the calendar invitation on 11th of December.

[00:22:27] Nathan Wrigley: The thing that I’m getting out of it is that the internet for me basically is a, how to describe this? The internet for me has usually been a place of joy. I go to it and everything, given the nature of what I have available to me, you know, my eyes function, my ears function, my arms and legs are all functioning, and I have a screen which is just at the right height for me and everything. Essentially everything in my scenario is working in the way that I would hope. And so the internet is this thing of joy. I go there and I can consume film, I can consume audio, I can write blog posts, I can take part in podcast interviews. It’s wonderful.

But I’m getting the impression that for somebody such as you, the internet is possibly anything other than joyful. I mean, maybe it is in some regards joyful, and that there’s no doubt moments where you’re profoundly moved by it, and it is wonderful. But I’m guessing also that it is also seriously annoying. It’s almost like you have to go the extra mile again, and again, and again, and again to do basic things.

And as we move more of ordinary life online, banking goes online. Booking things that you want to be delivered to your house goes online. The government, paying tax goes online. If it’s not set up for you, you are really being penalised for the way that the world is moving. And that must be frustrating and let all of that out if you want to, you know, is it a frustrating experience, the internet for you?

[00:23:55] Elena Brescacin: I think that internet was given the wrong dimension, make it more utopia than it really is. Because let’s remember that internet is made by humans. So if humans do not pay attention to other humans, the issue is the same you can find in the street outside. It’s not something worse than real world.

It can be amplified if you have, for example, social networks hate speech. I sometimes ask people to describe photos for me because they don’t. They publish a screenshot on their posts on social networks, a screenshot regarding conversation, regarding even politics and so on. But then I do not read the line because it’s a screenshot.

And if I asked, can you describe the photo for me? They just say something to me. What, are you stupid? Did you not understand? People like you should not come to the social network. If you are blind, how can you read, and can you write? They doubt my identity. And so not to talk about voting, voting elections. I have a person helping me. They come to the cabin with me, the room where we have to vote. They take a pencil and trace the sign to the right politician or whatever I say, but I have no proof. I have no proof if they have actually voted what I asked for.

[00:25:39] Nathan Wrigley: Gosh.

[00:25:40] Elena Brescacin: Yes, this is the reality.

[00:25:42] Nathan Wrigley: You sound much more buoyant about it. I was maybe anticipating the wrong thing in a sense there, but it sounds like you, rather than being, I don’t know, miserable about the failings of the internet for people who are blind, but it feels like you’ve gone in the other direction. That you’ve gone more in the, I want to make people aware that this is going on. So you are advising people when they don’t put alt tags on their social media posts. You’ve done that to me, which was really helpful, because I then know that that’s a requirement. And also, you’ve got yourself in the WordPress space and are educating people.

So I’m just keen to know what your posture is there. Is it going to be your mission in the future basically to be helpful and to fight the good fight about accessibility?

[00:26:28] Elena Brescacin: I try to help people and to help myself because just the frustration brings nowhere. If you just go on with frustration, it’s over. Online services give me a lot, for example, digital books, e-commerce and so on, online banking and so on. But if you do nothing for accessibility, you cannot expect others to do anything.

[00:26:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good point.

[00:26:58] Elena Brescacin: Overall, you cannot expect politician to do anything.

[00:27:03] Nathan Wrigley: In terms of WordPress, let’s just shift the conversation to WordPress now. We have the new, well, it’s not new anymore, we have the Block Editor, the Site Editor and what have you. And I’m going to link to a few bits and pieces in the show notes. So if you go to wptavern.com and you search for this episode, and it will be on the page there, we’ll add the links to all of the bits and pieces we’re about to discuss. You’ve written a few articles where you say that WordPress has basically made leaps and bounds, and it’s become an interface which is much better for you to use.

Now, let’s just rewind the clock like 10 years or more, when we had what is now the classic editor. What was it like as a content writer, a story writer, a blogger who was blind? What was it like back then, and how has it improved with the block editor?

[00:27:55] Elena Brescacin: So I have worked into the WordPress system. I knew it in 2003. My profile on wordpress.org is from 2005. And my activity in WordPress was very frustrating at the beginning, because I didn’t find very easily the controls on the classic editor. Strange, because many blind users I know are happy with the classic editor. For me, it’s different. Maybe it’s me, I don’t know. But when classic editor was the only one to use, I was using it in code mode. So I wrote HTML by hand. And in the end I abandoned the WordPress because it wasn’t so good.

But at that time, I was talking to the first Italian community manager, let’s say. He was called Paolo Valenti. And this guy was the first translator of WordPress. And he just said, remember you cannot leave WordPress totally, sooner or later you’ll come back. And he was right. This man, unfortunately, is no longer here. He died by cancer in 2022.

[00:29:19] Nathan Wrigley: So in the day when you were using the Classic Editor, and for many people listening to this podcast, that will be entirely familiar. But for those people who’ve joined in the last five, six years or so, it may be something that you haven’t dabbled with.

Yeah, you really did have to, in order to make the full use of it and to add things onto the page, it was possible to write some text and then highlight it, and then potentially, I don’t know, select that you wanted it to be a paragraph or what have you. In many ways it was more straightforward to write the HTML itself, wasn’t it? So you would write the P tag and what have you.

And this became an incredibly frustrating experience, which probably that kind of experience was the thing which promoted the idea of using a block-based approach where you drop the block in and you begin writing, and you can do the forward slash and select the kind of block that you want, and you’re off to the races.

So how is the block editor better than the classic editor? And obviously we know that some of your friends would disagree with that sentiment, but for you, why do you find it better? What does it do differently and better in your experience?

[00:30:23] Elena Brescacin: Because the block is an interface, basically it’s an interface, and it’s from the rules from WordPress Core, they say it’s accessible, second level accessibility guidelines. I do not enter into technical details now. But my opinion on Block Editor is because you can rapidly move blocks up and down with a key combination. You can even check the style, the colours and so on. That’s not my task.

But having to select a single block and work on that block without harming the other content. The possibility to add a block manually with the add block function or by markdown. I use markdown syntax for titles, for headings. Not links, but many other functions because I do not take my hands away from the keyboard, the letters.

[00:31:26] Nathan Wrigley: It hadn’t really occurred to me that the Block Editor kind of locks you into the block that you are currently working on in a way, doesn’t it? So you just said that you can’t kind of interfere with the other bits and pieces on a page unless you are editing within the confines of that block.

So if I’m in a paragraph block and I am writing, I’m in that paragraph. Whereas with the old Classic Editor, I was in all of the content, unless there was some plugin or something like that, that was going to inject something.

So an accidental keystroke could delete tons of content, including the markup that would’ve given that portion of the content some context. So, you know, it might have been the H1 tag. You could accidentally interfere with that, delete that somehow. Whereas all of that is then abstracted away inside the Block Editor, and it’s a selection you make, not a heading that you type. Although I suppose you could choose to do it that way. So that’s interesting. I hadn’t really thought about it like that. So it creates less mistakes, it’s easier to get started. And if you were to drop into somebody else’s piece of content, you’d be able to navigate your way around it more easily, right?

[00:32:31] Elena Brescacin: And even the templating system, the Full Site Editing has changed my point of view on templating, because before I had to hire someone for coding and so on.

Now, I have also hired a person for helping me with the styling, with graphics and so on. But this woman who has helped me, who spoke to the WordPress Accessibility Day with me, she has helped me with the styles, but was just teaching me the interface for what’s about the content and the structure of the site. It’s mine. Gloria just did the colours, and the size, and what visual, and what I cannot verify in person.

[00:33:20] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so you were able to do the lion’s share as we describe it, the lion’s share of the work. And really the bit that, I think you said Gloria was doing there, Gloria was helping you just to have that appeal for somebody with sight. So she was sizing the text so that it looked appropriate on the page, but the majority of it you were able to do inside the Site Editor. Interacting with, what is what you get templates, as opposed to having to employ somebody to fiddle with template.php files and things like that.

[00:33:46] Elena Brescacin: Yes, she just helped me because she is a freelance web designer and WordPress trainer, and she has trained me on Full Site Editing. The good thing is that she has believed in me from the beginning.

When I supported another person in a Facebook group, she contacted me, and then we started the journey to WordCamps. I have spoken to a couple of WordCamps in Verona, and one is online. Those ones are in Italian. And I have also participated with Gloria in the WordPress Accessibility Day 2024.

[00:34:29] Nathan Wrigley: What does WordPress still have to get right? So although it sounds like you personally are very happy with the Block Editor and it’s brought a lot of benefits that you can make use of. I’m guessing that there’s an awful lot frustration still. What would be the things for the year 2025 that you would hope would be addressed? What are still some of the things which are frustrating about being, well, not just the Block Editor, being inside a WordPress site in general? But maybe the Block Editor is a good target to begin.

[00:35:00] Elena Brescacin: Oh, for example, a more targeted search block. Because now the search block, you have just the search field and button, it could be like that. But when you place that block in a navigation or somewhere, you should be able to choose where it can search. Because if you are, for example, I have my site talking about a real world and a fantasy world, I should be able to say, search for content just in the real world and just in the fantasy world.

So when they click in the menu, in the search box on the main fantasy world page, they just got content from that category or from that post type. In fact, I have created a multilingual, experimental, and very basic site by using just Gutenberg and template.

They should also give the possibility to duplicate a template. Because now, Gutenberg, you can duplicate post, duplicate page. But if you have, for example, I have Italian header and English header, I would like to be able to clone the Italian header and then translate the content inside.

[00:36:26] Nathan Wrigley: There’s always going to be things, isn’t there? Edge cases. It really hadn’t occurred to me that search being a front end thing was something that needed addressing. But it sounds like it does. But what about the sort of backend of things, if you like?

[00:36:36] Elena Brescacin: The search block I mean is a backend thing that you can set up from the template. You can set up the block, the interface of the block in the block settings. That I mean.

[00:36:49] Nathan Wrigley: How do you feel about the importance that’s given to the direction the project in terms of accessibility? Do you feel it gets the attention it deserves?

In an ideal world it would obviously, every single thing about the WordPress project, the community, the code, everything would have accessibility front and centre. But we don’t live in that perfect world. We live in the world where we have the constraints on time, and the project has to move in certain directions, and maybe accessibility falls off for one of the releases and what have you.

But how do you feel, as a whole, WordPress does? Do you feel it is at the forefront? Do you think it’s lagging behind other platforms that you may have played with?

[00:37:28] Elena Brescacin: WordPress for now is the best CMS for accessibility in backend with its Full Site Editing. But I think it has to become more consistent. Accessibility team should get more people inside I think for testing, for coders, skilled coders. Because I feel that it’s, not being neglected willingly, but because few people are working in that. This is my feeling.

[00:38:02] Nathan Wrigley: Do you involve yourself in those communities? And if you do, are you able to tell us where you might go if having listened to this podcast, you think, actually, do you know what, that would be something I’d like to spend some of my time on.

So just drop some of the names of the, I don’t know, Slack channels or other places online that you go when you want to discuss WordPress accessibility.

[00:38:25] Elena Brescacin: I mostly go to the GitHub platform of specific project. Let’s talk about ActivityPub, let’s talk about single plugins accessibility.

There is the Slack channel in Make WordPress Slack. But I do not participate often into Slack because unfortunately at work I have not that time. So it happens that I miss discussions. Sometimes I have helped the Polyglots in the Italian community, Polyglot, to translate WordPress.

[00:39:04] Nathan Wrigley: It also sounds like you’ve been involved in real world events, plus some online events as well. I think you mentioned WordCamps that you’d attended as well, and I was wondering from an accessibility point how they have been.

But also you mentioned the WP Accessibility Day as well. Do you just want to mention your participation in those? Let’s start with WordPress events. How have they been from your perspective?

[00:39:27] Elena Brescacin: Accessibility, unfortunately it’s very difficult. Real world events are very difficult for accessibility because I need a person helping me to move through location, the WordCamp locations. It’s quite difficult without help.

There are many information that are conveyed by colours. The black signal is the track one, the white is track two, for example, and so on, or you have the locations. There are no, not many explanation. I must ask for help to move across tables on the contributor days. Now I am trying to apply to WordCamp Europe 2025. I don’t know how it goes.

I went to the WordCamp 2023 and to WordPress Core Day 2024. I got help from people there, but I had a person assisting me because otherwise I could not manage to go to the WordCamp alone. But the WordPress Accessibility Day was online.

[00:40:38] Nathan Wrigley: So that was a more straightforward undertaking.

[00:40:40] Elena Brescacin: Yes. But let me say that in-person events are more useful for networking. You get to know people, you get to talk to people, you get to confront. In few words, you get to exist, because otherwise you are a voice, you’re a face, you’re nothing else.

[00:40:59] Nathan Wrigley: Who are some of the people online in the WordPress space that you hang out with, who you communicate with? Do you want to just name drop a few people that it might be interesting for me to add into the show notes, so that people can follow them as well as you on maybe social media or something.

[00:41:14] Elena Brescacin: I think you know Michelle Frechette. Matthias Pfefferle from ActivityPub. Yes, you know him because you just interviewed him. I knew about your event because I was following him and I got you to the Mastodon network.

[00:41:31] Nathan Wrigley: Excellent. I’ll put some of those links into the show notes so people can follow them as well. But more importantly, Elena, where would people, if people have been listening to this and thought that they’d like to communicate with you and get your thoughts on the state of WordPress in terms of accessibility, where would we find you? Where’s the place where you hang out most frequently? I think you said Mastodon.

[00:41:50] Elena Brescacin: On Mastodon and on LinkedIn.

[00:41:53] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect. I will find the links for both of those and I will add them to the show notes. Anything else that we have mentioned today will also be in the show notes. Head to wptavern.com. Search for the podcast section, and within that search for Elena’s podcast. And from there you’ll be able to delve inside the show notes, and get a faithful transcription of everything that we said today as well, I hope.

So all that it remains for me to do is to say, Elena Brescacin, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:42:23] Elena Brescacin: Okay.