-wordpress-org-tour/\">Idea: translate.wordpress.org tour</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-project\">Project</h2>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/project/2023/04/13/wordpress-at-20-in-print/\">Building Blocks: The Evolution of WordPress 2013-2023</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-support\"><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/support\">Support</a></h2>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/support/2023/04/support-ticket-triage-session-april-26th-2023-at-0800-utc/\">Support ticket triage session – April 26th 2023 at 08:00 UTC</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/support/2023/04/request-for-input-support-stats/\">Request for input: Support Stats</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-test\"><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/test\">Test</a></h2>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/test/2023/04/17/fse-program-testing-call-21-front-page-fun/\">FSE Program Testing Call #21: Front Page Fun</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/test/2023/03/29/fse-program-exploration-build-a-block-theme/\">FSE Program Exploration: Build a block theme</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/test/2023/04/25/test-chat-summary-25-april-2023/\">Test Chat Summary: 25 April 2023</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/test/2023/04/24/table-leads-needed-for-wceu-2023-contributor-day/\">Table Leads Needed for WCEU 2023 Contributor Day</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2023/04/24/test-team-update-24-april-2023/\">Test Team Update: 24 April 2023</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-theme\">Theme</h2>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2023/04/04/theme-handbook-overhaul-proposal/\">Theme Handbook Overhaul Proposal</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2023/04/26/themes-team-meeting-notes-march-25-2023/\">Themes Team Meeting Notes – April 25, 2023</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2023/04/25/themes-team-update-april-25-2023/\">Themes team update April 25, 2023</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-training\"><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/training\">Training</a></h2>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/training/2023/04/18/meeting-recap-for-april-18th-2023/\">Meeting Recap for April 18th, 2023</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/training/2023/04/18/developments-and-customizations-for-training-and-learn-website/\">Project: Developments and Customizations for Training and Learn Website</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/training/2023/04/05/proposal-creating-learning-pathways-for-learn-wordpress/\">Proposal: Creating Learning Pathways for Learn WordPress</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-tutorials\"><a href=\"https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorials\">Tutorials</a></h3>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/custom-post-types-and-capabilities/\">Custom post types and capabilities</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/gu-getting-to-know-the-wordpress-dashboard/\">વર્ડપ્રેસ ડેશબોર્ડને જાણવું</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/developing-with-user-roles-and-capabilities/\">Developing with user roles and capabilities</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/creating-a-custom-template-with-the-wordpress-site-editor/\">Creating a custom template with the WordPress site editor</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-online-workshops\">Online Workshops</h3>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=creating-a-custom-template-in-the-site-editor\">Creating a custom template in the Site Editor</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=building-a-page-with-only-patterns-2\">Building a page with only patterns</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=introduction-to-block-themes-a-qa\">Introduction to Block Themes: A Q&amp;A</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=wp-dev-livestream-developing-for-multisite\">WP dev livestream: developing for multisite</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=five-for-the-future-how-to-succeed-by-making-ongoing-contributions-to-wordpress\">Five for the Future: How to succeed by making ongoing contributions to WordPress</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=organizing-diverse-inclusive-wordpress-events-apac\">Organizing Diverse &amp; Inclusive WordPress Events APAC</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=how-to-add-a-blog-news-page-to-a-wordpress-website\">How to add a blog/news page to a WordPress website</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=how-to-set-up-a-free-wordpress-test-website\">How to set up a free WordPress test website</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=wp-dev-livestream-wordpress-multisite-experiments\">WP dev livestream: WordPress multisite experiments</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-courses\"><a href=\"https://learn.wordpress.org/courses\">Courses</a></h3>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://learn.wordpress.org/course/converting-a-shortcode-to-a-block/\">Converting a Shortcode to a Block</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-wp-cli\">WP-CLI</h2>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/cli/2023/04/05/wp-cli-v2-8-0-release-date/\">WP-CLI v2.8.0 release date</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-wptv\">WPTV</h2>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://wordpress.tv/category/year/2022/\">Latest WordPress TV videos</a></li>\n</ul>\n</div>\n</div>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\" />\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-related-news\">Related News:</h2>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.php.net/archive/2023.php#2023-04-13-1\">PHP 8.2.5 Released!</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://www.php.net/archive/2023.php#2023-04-13-2\">PHP 8.1.18 Released!</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://262.ecma-international.org/13.0/\">TC39</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://github.com/composer/composer/releases/tag/2.5.5\">Composer 2.5.5</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-theme-palette-7-background-color has-background\">Thanks for reading our WP dot .org roundup! Each week we are highlighting the news and discussions coming from the good folks making WordPress possible. If you or your company create products or services that use WordPress, you need to be engaged with them and their work. Be sure to share this resource with your product and project managers. <br /><br /><strong>Are you interested in giving back and contributing your time and skills to WordPress.org?</strong> <img src=\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f64f.png\" alt=\"🙏\" class=\"wp-smiley\" /> <a href=\"https://wordpress.org/support/article/contributing-to-wordpress/\">Start Here ›</a><br /><br /><strong>Get our weekly WordPress community news digest</strong> — Post Status&#8217; <a href=\"https://poststatus.com/news/week-in-review/\">Week in Review</a> — covering the WP/Woo news plus significant writing and podcasts. It&#8217;s also available in <a href=\"https://poststatus.com/newsletter\">our newsletter</a>. <img src=\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f48c.png\" alt=\"💌\" class=\"wp-smiley\" /></p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-spacer\"></div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-media-text alignwide is-stacked-on-mobile has-background\"><a href=\"https://poststatus.com/\"><img src=\"https://poststatus.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/vertical-post-status-logo-250.png\" alt=\"Post Status\" class=\"wp-image-85823 size-full\" /></a><div class=\"wp-block-media-text__content\">\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left has-normal-font-size\" id=\"h-get-ready-for-remote-work\">You — and <a href=\"https://poststatus.com/#Agency\">your whole team</a> can <a href=\"https://poststatus.com/#choose-membership\">Join Post Status</a> too!</p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left has-small-font-size\"><strong>Build your network. Learn with others. Find your next job — or your next hire.</strong> Read the <strong>Post Status</strong> <a href=\"https://poststatus.com/newsletter/\">newsletter</a>. <img src=\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/2709.png\" alt=\"✉\" class=\"wp-smiley\" /> Listen to <a href=\"https://poststatus.com/podcasts/\">podcasts</a>. <img src=\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f399.png\" alt=\"🎙\" class=\"wp-smiley\" /> Follow <a href=\"https://twitter.com/post_status/\">@Post_Status</a> <img src=\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f426.png\" alt=\"🐦\" class=\"wp-smiley\" /> and <a href=\"https://www.linkedin.com/company/post-status-llc/\">LinkedIn</a>. <img src=\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f4bc.png\" alt=\"💼\" class=\"wp-smiley\" /></p>\n</div></div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-spacer\"></div>\n<p>This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.</p>\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Wed, 26 Apr 2023 16:34:56 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:18:\"Courtney Robertson\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:31;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:103:\"WPTavern: WP Feature Notifications Project Progresses Towards MVP for Standardizing Admin Notifications\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:30:\"https://wptavern.com/?p=144049\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:114:\"https://wptavern.com/wp-feature-notifications-project-progresses-towards-mvp-for-standardizing-admin-notifications\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:3828:\"<p>The WP Feature Notifications project, formerly know as <a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/core/2019/08/05/feature-project-proposal-wp-notify/\">WP Notify</a>, is <a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/25/wp-feature-notifications-2023-status-update/\">making progress</a> towards creating a better way to manage and deliver notifications in the WordPress admin. Core contributor Jonathan Bossenger started the project in 2019 with a <a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/core/2019/08/05/feature-project-proposal-wp-notify/\">proposal</a> to build a unified notification center in WordPress that would replace the chaos caused by developers hooking into admin notices, which was not designed to be a notification system.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the latest 0.2.0 update of the feature plugin, contributors have implemented a more robust JavaScript-based system for standardizing how notifications appear in the admin.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;What originally started as a<a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/07/21/request-for-feedback-feature-notifications-proof-of-concept/\"> UX proof of concept</a> has evolved into a more sophisticated JS-based system for displaying notifications based on serialized data,&#8221; WordPress core contributor Joe Bailey-Roberts said. &#8220;At the moment this uses static dummy data, however in a future update this will interface with the upcoming REST controllers to display persistent data.&#8221;</p>\n\n\n\n<img />\n\n\n\n<p>The project is restructuring its leadership with Bossenger stepping down as the lead and Bailey-Roberts taking over the position. </p>\n\n\n\n<p>Although WP Feature Notifications currently exists as a feature plugin, its contributors are intent on seeing it merged into core when ready, instead of kept as a canonical plugin. They are eager to see the project&#8217;s design and functionality work in concert with the planned modernization of the admin as part of Gutenberg Phase 3.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Notification functionality is indeed fundamental, and already in constant use via the admin_notices hook, a workaround that has major issues of standardization and <a href=\"https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/50486\">accessibility</a>,&#8221; Bailey-Roberts said. &#8220;The new API needs to be universal, and available by default, otherwise admin_notices will remain the de facto option.&#8221;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Contributors plan to remove the demo content from the plugin in version 0.3.0 and make it into an MVP (minimum viable product) with a functional notification system. </p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;The next (and largest) piece of the puzzle is persistent database storage of notification data,&#8221; Bailey-Roberts said. &#8220;We’re working on finalizing the proposed schema, as well as discussing other issues such as retention, translations, multisite support, and more.&#8221;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>In order to keep moving the project forward, contributors are seeking a partnership with a core committer for guidance on preparing the plugin to be a good candidate fore core, as well as additional contributors with PHP and SQL expertise. The feature plugin is <a href=\"https://github.com/WordPress/wp-feature-notifications\">available on GitHub</a> for testing.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>A solution for notifications in WordPress is critical for improving the admin experience for every user. A standardized way of displaying notifications will make site management a more predictable and less cognitively draining task. The WP Feature Notifications project is still in the early stages but it has some momentum and it needs help. Contributors can join the team&#8217;s weekly office hours on WP Slack in the<a href=\"https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C2K1C71FE\"> #feature-notifications channel</a>, and the project will also have representation at WordCamp Europe&#8217;s Contributor Day.</p>\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Wed, 26 Apr 2023 14:03:25 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"Sarah Gooding\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:32;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:100:\"WPTavern: #73 – Ryan Welcher on Using the create-block Tool to Quickly Scaffold a New Block Plugin\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:48:\"https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=144046\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:114:\"https://wptavern.com/podcast/73-ryan-welcher-on-using-the-create-block-tool-to-quickly-scaffold-a-new-block-plugin\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:51496:\"Transcript<div>\n<p>[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 a block plugin creation can be speeded up with the create-block tool.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you&#8217;d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you have a topic that you&#8217;d like us to feature on the podcast I&#8217;m keen to hear from you, and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So on the podcast today we have Ryan Welcher. Ryan is a developer advocate sponsored by Automattic. He has been developing with WordPress since 2009. And before becoming a developer advocate, worked for agencies large and small, and as a freelancer.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you&#8217;ve been using WordPress for any length of time, you&#8217;ll have come across the new paradigm for content creation, blocks. Every part of your website can now be created and amended as a block. Pages, posts, text, images, headers, footers, navigation, and more.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>This has widened what&#8217;s possible for those who don&#8217;t want to mess around with the code of their website. You can add in blocks for almost anything. And change how it looks and behaves from within the block editor interface.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is an excellent move forward, but there&#8217;s still an impediment for non-technical people because creating a block of your own is difficult. If you are able to use the selection of blocks that ship with WordPress Core, or you can find a third party block which does what you need, great. But if you need something specific, you&#8217;re going to have to create your own block solution. And that can be hard.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ryan is on the podcast today to tell us about the create-block tool. And how it can make your pathway towards block creation a little easier.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We start off talking about Ryan&#8217;s background and how he became interested in WordPress.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We then move on to how he thinks that the adoption of blocks is becoming more widespread given the maturing of tools and learning materials available.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The conversation then turns to how the create-block tool can help you scaffold your blocks. It&#8217;s not a tool which is going to build the blocks for you, but it will help you set up the environment and build process, which you need to get started. Really it&#8217;s all about saving you time and effort on things which don&#8217;t really you get you building your blocks, but which you need to do that work.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We discuss what you can expect from the create-block tool, and the prior knowledge that you&#8217;ll need to have once the tool has you up and running. What level of expertise do you need, and is the tool under continual development?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We spend a few moments talking about the live streaming which Ryan does each week in which he lived code solutions to view as block-based problems.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you&#8217;ve thought about creating your own blocks but have been put off by the technical barrier, this podcast is for you.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you&#8217;re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast. Where you&#8217;ll find all the other episodes.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so without further delay, I bring you Ryan Welcher.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>I am joined on the podcast today by Ryan Welcher. Hello.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:04:29] Ryan Welcher: Hello. Thank you for having me. Super excited to be here today.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:04:32] Nathan Wrigley: I&#8217;m really, really happy to have you on the podcast today, because I really need to learn what it is that you are going to be talking about. We&#8217;re going to be talking a great deal about the Create Block Tool, how it works, what it does, how to make it come onto a local computer near you. But before we do that, I wonder Ryan, if you wouldn&#8217;t mind spending just a few moments telling us a little bit about yourself, your backstory, your relationship with WordPress, who you work for, all of that&#8217;s good stuff.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:05:00] Ryan Welcher: Yeah, so I am a developer advocate. I&#8217;m sponsored by Automattic. So I&#8217;m part of the five for the future, giving back to the open source project that is WordPress. I&#8217;ve been a developer since about 2004. I started doing flash development. I don&#8217;t know if anyone remembers flash development, but I started doing that. In 2009 I was introduced to WordPress and I haven&#8217;t looked back.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Since then I&#8217;ve worked at, I was a freelancer. I worked at small agencies, large agencies, shout out to 10up, which an amazing place to work, I love that place. Yeah, and so I&#8217;ve just found my way into Dev Rel, which is a very, very fun and exciting and challenging, and way different than what I was doing two years ago. But it&#8217;s been great.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:05:41] Nathan Wrigley: Can I go a little bit off piste, against the flow of what the conversation will be about? Could you just tell us a little bit about the way that that job works? So you are sponsored by Automattic, is that a full-time thing?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:05:52] Ryan Welcher: It is. I work on a team of Dev Rel, of developer advocates, and our job is to appear on podcasts, speak at conferences, create awareness and work on documentation and do all this sort of stuff. But, sorry, yeah, I cut you off.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:06:04] Nathan Wrigley: No, no, it was really just, I&#8217;m curious as to how that role is advertised. Was it something that you saw in like a WordPress space, and you applied for it? And also who is it that decides what your roster of work is? Do you have autonomy there or is there a panel of people that you have to report to and so on?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:06:24] Ryan Welcher: Those are great questions. So it was a role that was advertised. I saw someone mention it, and I think the WordPress Slack, the Make Slack. I applied and went through the process there. As far as the work that we do, it&#8217;s kind of a mixed bag. We do have a fair amount of autonomy. This is a newer team. There&#8217;s six of us for the entire internet, so. Sorry, for 43% of the internet. So there&#8217;s a lot of work to do.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We have a focus on improving documentation. That&#8217;s kind of our number one focus at the moment. But, there&#8217;s a lot of smaller projects as well. I try to maintain the Gutenberg Examples repository, which is a GitHub repository that shows examples of working with blocks and some of the various things that you can do with Gutenberg, like a custom admin page that interacts with the data stores in Gutenberg and things like that.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, I was just at WordCamp Asia, which was an amazing experience. I wasn&#8217;t speaking, but I was meeting with lots of developers and just kind of like schmoozing. I get to schmooze professionally now, which is a lot of fun.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:07:16] Nathan Wrigley: That&#8217;s amazing. I do wonder since Gutenberg dropped several years ago now. I mean, it really is, it has been going for many, many years. But there really was a fork in the road for WordPress there, and there was a little bit of tension. Some people didn&#8217;t see the purpose of Gutenberg and ultimately blocks. And I do wonder if roles like yours became more important after that. Do you feel like a need to message and get the word out and educate more after Gutenberg dropped?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:07:49] Ryan Welcher: I think yes. I also think that the tech industry, I mean, there&#8217;s always been developer advocates. I remember I went to a flash conference years and years and years ago, and I saw someone speak there who was, what were they called at the time? A platform evangelist for Adobe and was basically doing Dev Rel stuff, like showing what you can do with flash and the new features and cool stuff. So it&#8217;s been around.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think now people are really starting to see the benefits of it. Especially when you have a large community like WordPress. There&#8217;s so many people. And having people who can help, you know, the education piece. And there&#8217;s a lot of yelling into the void without people like me and our team to hear what you&#8217;re saying. Like, you know, the documentation needs work. Okay, well someone needs to work on that. Now that&#8217;s my job to work on that.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I definitely think that there&#8217;s, there&#8217;s benefits to Dev Rel in any industry for sure. But I think, to an extent, when 5.0 came out, I think that sort of showed the need for someone to come in and say, hey, you know, do you need help there? Or like, have you heard about this tool? Or what&#8217;s path of least resistance to move from a short code to a block? All those sort of things. So I think yes and no. I think it&#8217;s just overall, having a dev team for the open source project that is WordPress is a great idea to gather feedback and help and just help. Full stop.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:09:06] Nathan Wrigley: I think whether it&#8217;s as a result of endeavors from people like you, or just the passage of time. I get the feeling that in the year 2023, the message is really getting through. It seems like the inertia against using blocks seems to be dissipating. I really don&#8217;t seem to be exposed to too many YouTube videos or people on Twitter moaning too much about that anymore. Moaning is probably the wrong word. I should probably reclassify that, questioning it.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:09:38] Ryan Welcher: No, I think it&#8217;s a very accurate word.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:09:40] Nathan Wrigley: So it feels as though we are at an inflection point. That there&#8217;s enough time that&#8217;s passed. There&#8217;s enough projects out there. There&#8217;s enough people that have released resources and commercial products around the block space.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>It kind of feels like it&#8217;s moment has really arrived.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:09:57] Ryan Welcher: I agree, yeah</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:09:59] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe moving from a position now of teaching people that it exists and it&#8217;s an option, into teaching people how to use it and get the most out of it?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:10:07] Ryan Welcher: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think since 5.0 the block API has matured, and has stabilized. There was a couple of releases where every release, the function that you called to actually register a block in php, its name changed, and its function parameters changed.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then there was like one version, and then the next version was a slight variation but the next version was the same name as the first version, but with different parameters. So there&#8217;s some confusion there. And you know, with the introduction of block.json, it&#8217;s the json file that describes what your block does and what its functionality is. Having those pieces sort of stable and consistent have really helped the adoption of blocks and custom blocks.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think also, and this is a perfect segue into what we&#8217;re talking about today, the tools like to Create Block Package that we&#8217;re going to talk about introduced to best practice and showed people, how do I structure my blocks?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So when I was at 10up, I was at 10up when Gutenberg came out. And we spent a lot of time, the company spent a lot of time trying to figure out, trying to navigate how is this going to work for an agency? How do we build these things? What files go where and things like that.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so that&#8217;s a huge amount of cognitive dissonance. When you&#8217;re trying to figure out a new api. When you&#8217;re trying to figure out a brand new paradigm. And then you&#8217;ve got to figure out, well, where do my files go? A tool like the Create Block Package just shows you where the recommended structure is. And then that takes away a lot of the guesswork, and then everything becomes consistent at that point.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then if I&#8217;m working on a project that someone else has worked on, the files at least are in the same place. And, I think the maturity of blocks and the block API has really left a lot of the people who just didn&#8217;t like it kind of behind.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:11:39] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so given that we don&#8217;t really have any accurate statistics on who&#8217;s using blocks. What proportion of the 43% of the web that&#8217;s using WordPress have moved over to blocks, or perhaps are sticking with the page builder that they&#8217;ve been using for the last several years and so on. Given that we don&#8217;t really know that, what is the elevator pitch for blocks really? What are the small things that you can mention on a podcast in a short space of time, which really nail your colors to the master and say, okay, this is the promise of blocks? This is what blocks can deliver. This is why it&#8217;s new, and why it&#8217;s worth looking at.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:12:14] Ryan Welcher: That&#8217;s a great question. I think that blocks offer, well, first of all, there&#8217;s no theme or plugin lock-in. So that&#8217;s a big concern with, take the example of a freelancer that is hired to build a site and the client is non-technical, but they want to be able to manage their own content.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, you reach for some of these page builder tools, and now once you&#8217;ve reached for them, you&#8217;re locked into them. That&#8217;s not a criticism, but that is inherently one issue. So with blocks you don&#8217;t have that. Your blocks are part of core and you could still suffer a bit of lock-in, if you went with a very bespoke sort of block set or like a block suite or something, but there&#8217;s definitely some benefits there. You don&#8217;t have a lot of the overhead or any of the overhead that come with some of the larger, page builder plugins, just because they have so many features.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so there&#8217;s some load considerations there. I think it changes the way that you can look at your content. This is a bit more of a philosophical question, but, so historically when we built a site, we had a title for post content. We had the content, which was like the classic editor. And then we had post meta, and you know tags and categories. But if we wanted to store an extra piece of information with a piece of content, there was really only post meta available to us, because the template that was being shown for the front end that would represent that piece of content ,was controlling the layout.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so we had to store, let&#8217;s use an example of an author byline. Say we wanted to have guest authors on a site. So we wanted to store that author name. Well, on the template side you would use get post meta, the function, to get that piece of information and, and display it in your template.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, now we can do that all with blocks, because our template is the editor, and the way it looks is basically represented almost one-to-one in the block editor experience and the site editor. So you have this question of, do I need all this post meta now? Now I can just store it as a block attribute, and move it around and do what I need to do with it. So I think there&#8217;s lots of good reasons to use blocks. That&#8217;s a few of them maybe.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:14:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that&#8217;s great. Thank you. I guess the primary issue is that using something like a page builder, whether or not it&#8217;s got bloat or whether or not you&#8217;ve got the lock in and all of that, is that it&#8217;s relatively straightforward. You just click some buttons essentially. Drag things onto the canvas and you&#8217;re done. In Gutenberg we&#8217;ve got some core blocks, and increasingly you can really start to lay things out with group blocks and cover blocks and things like that. You know, you really can start to finesse the overall design.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>But if you want to do anything bespoke, in other words, if you want to create a block which does something that you wish to do, something new, something interesting. Then you&#8217;ve got to create that block. And the barrier to doing that I feel is quite high. I wonder if you&#8217;ve got any thoughts on that? Whether or not the creation of blocks is still in the domain of, how to describe it? You&#8217;ve got to have a certain fairly high level of understanding of all sorts of technologies to make these blocks come into existence. Or do you?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:15:12] Ryan Welcher: Well, you do and you don&#8217;t. It&#8217;s kind of like, it&#8217;s the classic developer question, you know. It depends, is always the answer. Whenever you ask a developer something, it&#8217;s always, well, it depends. But, I think yes. You do need to have a certain amount of information. But take blocks out of the equation. If you wanted to make a bespoke WordPress theme, with custom templates, you still need to have a certain level of development experience and a certain level of prowess in php, html, css and things like that.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now, that&#8217;s not to say that the barrier to entry hasn&#8217;t been raised. Because when I learned WordPress in 2009, I could just copy and paste everything I did into a theme and it worked. Now we&#8217;re with blocks. We&#8217;re looking at, build processes and learning some JavaScript frameworks in React, some knowledge there. So there is, there&#8217;s definitely some things to learn.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now, there are some tools that can help. Again, this Create Block Package that will kind of get you started and get you a basic scaffold of a block, that you can just then change and add your flourishes to.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think in general, web development is more complicated than it ever has been. I mean, that&#8217;s maybe because I&#8217;ve been doing it for a long time and I&#8217;m an old man who fears change a little bit, maybe. I don&#8217;t know. But I think that knowing JavaScript and Matt said, you know, learn JavaScript deeply, and it&#8217;s true. I think I felt that pain when I was, starting to work in Gutenberg. I&#8217;m a php first developer. That&#8217;s what I learned. I did a little bit of JavaScript, but not a lot. Learning these new concepts was hard. But, I think it&#8217;s well worth it.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I think you can do things where you don&#8217;t need to know, you don&#8217;t need to be an expert in React. You don&#8217;t need to be an expert in Webpack and build process. You don&#8217;t need to be that level. If you choose to be that level, you can, but you can do some pretty complicated blocks, with sort of a base understanding of some of the pieces that you need to put together.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I think part of my job is to help people navigate that stuff. I&#8217;m a big proponent of the Create Block Package. I&#8217;ve worked on the package. I&#8217;ve helped to add features that developers have asked for to make life easier. One big feature was the ability to have multiple blocks be part of the plugin that is generated when you run the package.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I think there is a barrier to entry, but I think it&#8217;s mitigated by, like, you don&#8217;t need to be an expert in all the things. You don&#8217;t even need to really understand the build process, for example. It&#8217;s provided, and it&#8217;s just run a command and just know that this command does this and this command does that. And really, if you don&#8217;t want to look under the hood, you don&#8217;t have to. It&#8217;s going to work for you.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:17:30] Nathan Wrigley: We&#8217;ll get onto the Create Block Tool in a moment, if that&#8217;s all right. But just one last question around this whole education piece and learning about blocks. It feels that there&#8217;s a real concerted effort now to create learning materials. There&#8217;s obviously learn.wordpress.org, and a whole bunch of other things.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>I see a lot of videos being created in amongst the community. People like Jonathan Bossenger and Anne McCarthy and so on. And I&#8217;m just wondering if you, well, firstly, if you feel that that&#8217;s the case, if the education piece is a lot better now than it was when you were trying to learn at 10up? In other words it&#8217;s less of an uphill struggle because you&#8217;ve got somewhere to turn to.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:18:09] Ryan Welcher: So much less, yeah.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:18:11] Nathan Wrigley: So let&#8217;s do that one first. Yeah.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:18:13] Ryan Welcher: Absolutely. I think, yeah, you&#8217;re right. I mean, I think that when Gutenberg came out, there was no real pragmatic, like practical, how to use this information. Because it was a new thing and there was a lot being changed and people didn&#8217;t have the resources.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>They didn&#8217;t have the knowledge to build the resources. Now we&#8217;re four years in now, and that&#8217;s obviously built up. The folks that learn.wordpress.org doing a fantastic job. Jonathan&#8217;s stuff is great. I&#8217;m going to shamelessly self-promote here. I stream every Thursday at ten thirty Eastern on Twitch, where we do block development live. and I put that on my YouTube channel. And I&#8217;m not the only one. I&#8217;m sure there&#8217;s, there are people that are putting out content that is up to date and accessible and easier to figure out the things that you need to do.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now, there&#8217;s always going to be gaps in that knowledge because the APIs are still evolving, and every time there&#8217;s a new release to the plugin, the Gutenberg plugin, there&#8217;s new features and things like that. But yeah, I think now compared to when 5.0 came out, I think there&#8217;s a lot more really good information out there.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m finding that there&#8217;s older information that hasn&#8217;t been updated. That&#8217;s one of the pitfalls of the writing a tutorial on your blog post or creating a video or doing whatever, is that it&#8217;s sort of a snapshot in time of the APIs. And so it&#8217;s there, but then there&#8217;s, well, hey, did you know that there&#8217;s this new way of doing whatever it is that you&#8217;re doing that&#8217;s a little bit easier, you know, faster, better, smarter, or whatever, right?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:19:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Going back to your shameless plug. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? So you say you go live, every Thursday, and we will get from you the URL and will post it into the show notes. Do you have an agenda for that? Do you know what you&#8217;re going to do in advance? Or is it driven by who shows up and what questions they want to be answered?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:19:53] Ryan Welcher: it&#8217;s a bit of both. I&#8217;ve been doing it now for about a year and a half. I&#8217;m on Twitch, which is an interesting experience. So I live code. I usually show up with some kind of agenda. Like, for example, right now, last few weeks, every other week I do a stream on the new features that have been released in the Gutenberg plugin.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you&#8217;re not aware, the Gutenberg plugin is on a two week release cycle. So every two weeks we get a new version of that plugin, and then all those versions get rolled up and released into the next version of WordPress Core. I go through the release posts on make.wordpress.org, and we call out some of the more developery refocused things like, a new component is added or a new whatever. So we do that.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The off weeks, I usually build something. Like right now I&#8217;m building a block that integrates with OpenAI to generate images. But the images that are being generated are terrifying because I keep doing like people laughing. I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;ve ever seen OpenAI generate people&#8217;s faces. It&#8217;s the scariest thing I&#8217;ve ever seen in my life. Have a lot of fun doing that.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m actually going to be doing one and I haven&#8217;t done this yet, and again, sorry for the shameless self-promotion here, but in a couple of weeks I&#8217;m going to be doing a bring me your block development issues stream, where I&#8217;m hoping that people will submit these problems that they&#8217;re running into and I&#8217;m going to try to see if I can kind of like fix &#8217;em live. And we&#8217;re going to stream that and see how it goes. It&#8217;s going to be wildly successful or it&#8217;s going to be crickets the whole time. I don&#8217;t know. That&#8217;s usually the only two extremes you get on live.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:21:19] Nathan Wrigley: I do like the idea of a, like an open surgery in a way. Where people can show up and give you their problems and presumably the further in advance they can give you the problems, the more of a chance you&#8217;ve got of actually solving them. But that&#8217;s a really interesting idea and an excellent way to help educate people live, watching somebody else do it, not just on a forum or an email chain. Actually seeing it happen and get an explanation for why you&#8217;re doing things and possibly even watching you make mistakes along the way and having to fix your own things, yeah.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:21:48] Ryan Welcher: If anyone comes to my stream, you will watch me make mistakes Yeah, I can&#8217;t type when people are watching. There we go, that kind of sums my stream up. But yeah, it&#8217;s a lot of good fun. And we have pretty good community of people who hang out in the chat and discuss things and answer questions and help me. There&#8217;s one guy, I always make fun of him because he shows up and saves the day every time if I&#8217;m running into an issue, he&#8217;s like, here&#8217;s your code. And he just pastes it, and I&#8217;m like, oh okay, great. So now we can move on because Kevin saved my stream. So shout out to Kevin.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:22:14] Nathan Wrigley: That&#8217;s a, lovely community feel to it though, isn&#8217;t it? There&#8217;s something really nice about that. But definitely, before we hang up on this call, I will get the location for that and we&#8217;ll post that into the show notes. So if anybody wants to go and hang out with Ryan on a Thursday and watch him live code and possibly take your own troubles and problems and share it with Ryan, yeah, that would be a really amazing enterprise.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Okay, let&#8217;s get onto the, what we probably should have started talking about a while ago, but never mind the Create Block Tool or the Create Block Package. So one of the problems that you highlighted right at the beginning when I said, what makes blocks difficult, is you talked about the tooling and the requirements that you need just to get started. So describe the problem that the tool is solving.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:22:58] Ryan Welcher: Sure. So if you want to build a block, there&#8217;s a number of ways that you can do it. But if you wanted to build a block using React and JSX, which is the HTML extension, the JavaScript that React uses, you need a build process. You need the ability to take your JavaScript code and transpile, it&#8217;s a fancy word of saying turn it into something else, into JavaScript that the browser can read.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So to do that you need a build process. And so a build process can be very complicated. Now, build processes have been around forever. If you&#8217;ve heard of Grunt, or you&#8217;ve heard of Bower. There&#8217;s a few, so what we use is Webpack. Now Webpack can be extremely daunting to set up and deal with. The story that I always tell was the first React app I ever built was when I was working for an agency, and they wanted to use Webpack and we went to the Webpack documentation page and all it said was work in progress.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And, it was very funny because the only comment on it was a giant picture of that meme of Picard with his arm stretched out going, why? I wish I had a screenshot of that because that&#8217;s best story ever. Anyway, so that&#8217;s your first issue.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Your second issue is how do you even structure blocks? There&#8217;s a number of files and a number of pieces to a block. And, you know, if you put 10 developers in a room, those 10 developers will have 10 different ways of scaffolding this. So that was always a bit of a problem as well. So what this tool does is it solves those problems first.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it installs your build process, the one that is actually used by the Gutenberg project as well. It&#8217;s maintained, it&#8217;s got a million little features and you don&#8217;t have to worry about that anymore. And then it also will scaffold the files for your block and put them, give you the names, give you all the files, give you a starting point.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>When you run the scaffolding tool, it will prefill a lot of the, sort of, details of your block and give you the starting point. And it bundles it all up inside of a plugin, and so it&#8217;s a WordPress plugin that you can just enable and it installs all the dependencies and it even runs the build process. So you literally run it and then you press activate inside your plugin screen, and then you have an active block.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>That takes away so much guesswork and so much busy work of having to like, figure out the naming of things and add files. It doesn&#8217;t sound like a lot, but if you&#8217;re building 20 blocks, and you have to like, copy and paste all your files and go in and rename everything, that can take a lot of work.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:25:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I can well imagine how much time that&#8217;s saving. Are there any constraints about where you can install this? So, currently I&#8217;m on a Mac. I presume that we&#8217;re all good to go there. What about Windows, Linux?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:25:22] Ryan Welcher: The only thing that you have to have is Node. So you have to have Node installed, because you can run it using a command called npx. And what it does is it, it won&#8217;t download it and add it to your project, but it will just kind of reach out and run it once and then do its thing. So you need to have Node installed.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>This does work, to the best of my knowledge, it works pretty well across all the platforms. I believe there is an issue in Windows with a very specific configuration that doesn&#8217;t copy a file to the right place. But that&#8217;s less about the scaffolding tool and more about the build process. But there&#8217;s a lot of people that work on this stuff. So I&#8217;m sure it&#8217;s going to be remedied pretty soon, yeah. The only dependency is Node, which is cross platform.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:26:02] Nathan Wrigley: Right, okay, perfect. So if I&#8217;ve never done this before and I want to get my first block done. Realistically, how long is it between me thinking, hmm, create block tool, I&#8217;m going to start using that, to having my first block on the page? Are we talking 10 minutes, an hour, less?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:26:20] Ryan Welcher: Two minutes. Assuming you have Node installed. Let&#8217;s assume that. You can go to the documentation page and you can run npx at WordPress slash create block and give it a name, and it will prompt you for a bunch of questions. Like, what do you want to call this thing? What name space should it be in? You know, what&#8217;s the description?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;ll ask you a bunch of questions and it&#8217;ll just scaffold out the block for you. And the most amount of time is waiting for the dependencies. So that the block needs to be installed and then run. And that, honestly, I did a YouTube video on my channel where I timed it. And I think it took four minutes from start to finish and it was done.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And you have a fully functional plugin with a single block in it. And you enable it, and like I said, the block is available for use immediately. No, the block doesn&#8217;t do anything. It&#8217;s a very, very simple block. But that&#8217;s how quickly you can get up and running with it.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:27:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think it&#8217;s probably very important at this point to describe the limitations, because when I heard about Create Block Tool, I thought to myself, oh great, a tool which is going to help me to create blocks. Not literally create a block, but, you know, add in options and different, custom data and all of that. And that was what I was thinking I was going to get. So just draw a line, make it really clear what you get when this process is complete.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:27:34] Ryan Welcher: You get what&#8217;s referred to as a static block. So there&#8217;s two types of blocks, static and dynamic. And I can get into that if you want, and with no controls. So basically the block will, it shows you a message when you insert, it says hello from the post editor. And then it&#8217;ll render that same message on the front end, and there&#8217;s some CSS that&#8217;s supplied to the front end and the back end.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it&#8217;s a very, very, very basic block. The tool doesn&#8217;t have the ability to say, I want to be able to insert post meta. We can&#8217;t do any of that level of customization, because there&#8217;s just too many options. Like there&#8217;s too many ways that you can build a block, and too many things a block can do. So there&#8217;s just no, there&#8217;s no way for us to build a tool that says, I want to build a block that accesses the REST API to retrieve this custom post type and display all of the information and do all the stuff.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s not something that the tool can do. But, what you get is a fully functioning, working block that is scaffolded to best practices, follows best practices. That shows you how to deal with the CSS, and how to enqueue all your different files, and everything is just built and ready to go for you.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then at that point you have a starting point. So, as a developer, I used to hate having to do the busy work. What this does is this basically gets me a starting point, and now I can add the things that the client is paying me to do, right? I can add the controls. I can add the interface items, whatever you&#8217;re building in your block. Iit gives you the starting point to actually build the thing that you want to build, not the, you don&#8217;t have to do any ramp up to get there.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:29:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so within two or three minutes you&#8217;ll have a block. All of the files in the right place. Everything&#8217;s set up. Good to go. And then, really, dear developer, it&#8217;s over to you. You got to figure out where to go from there. Do you have any, is there any sort of commenting in the files that&#8217;s been added additionally to give you some sort of pointers as to, okay, this is what this is doing, this file is used for this and so on?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:29:24] Ryan Welcher: There is. It&#8217;s commented fairly decently. There&#8217;s kind of a fine line because if you want to use these for production, you know you&#8217;re going to be removing a lot of those comments. There&#8217;s a couple of files that every time I use it, I hate how well commented it is because I like to structure my files in a specific way. So there&#8217;s a lot in there.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then, at this point too, the sort of, the structure, the file structure&#8217;s very well documented and it&#8217;s just been adopted. People can change things and people can, it&#8217;s very flexible. You can do it whatever you want, but the best practice has been well defined at this point.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s like that muscle memory thing. People just know that, oh yeah, okay. So I want to go to the edit.js file, because that&#8217;s what I, that&#8217;s what I changed to get it to make changes in the block editor experience and so on and so forth.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:30:05] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know if, well, WordPress&#8217;s mission, I suppose, is to democratize publishing. And it would be, I suppose, an endeavor worth undertaking to have a tool which did carry you on from where the Create Block Tool got you to. In other words, a tool which helped you along the process of creating the block.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Do you know if there are any endeavors, any quiet whisperings in the dark corners of Automattic about this kind of tool? Is there any plan to do anything like that so that blocks can be created by, well, non-technical people?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:30:38] Ryan Welcher: There are tools out there in the community. Like I would hesitate to say that Automattic has any sort of secret plans, because that&#8217;s not really how it works. It&#8217;s more, it&#8217;s driven by the community. I mean, I know Automattic does employ a lot of developers who do contribute to the project.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>But a lot of these tools come from the community and, for people like me to talk to folks and be like, hey, that&#8217;d be a really cool feature to add, to Create Block. There&#8217;s been a number of features where we&#8217;ve been like, you know what? It&#8217;s a really great idea, it&#8217;s too specific. So it might be better served as a tool.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I will say this, the create block package does have the ability to, you can provide what are called templates. So you can create your own custom template. So you can build a block that does X because you&#8217;ve built a template. So I could build a template that is like, all right, I want to block that interfaces with custom post meta. And so I could build that template and when I run the package, I can point the package at that specific template and it will scaffold the files out, and I will have all of those starting points in there.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s not an interactive tool. I don&#8217;t think where you&#8217;ll see, what do you want this block to do? Like, unless somebody comes up with this really cool OpenAI integration, which might be a lot actually.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:31:43] Nathan Wrigley: Somebody will probably do it.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:31:45] Ryan Welcher: I&#8217;m sure they will. Blocks can do so many things and they&#8217;re so versatile and they&#8217;re so, it&#8217;s sort of like, how do you even start to define the questions that you ask in the automation process to say, what do you want to do? Like, do you need to access data stores? Sure. Is it a custom data store or is it one of the ones that Gutenberg provides? You know, so there&#8217;s a lot, there&#8217;s a lot that goes in there.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:32:06] Nathan Wrigley: Does the tool itself get regular updates? I&#8217;m imagining that the technology behind that is fairly fast moving, and there&#8217;s a lot of new updates.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:32:15] Ryan Welcher: It is being updated regularly. The package itself gets updated every two weeks when the Gutenberg project, so when the Guttenberg plugin is in release candidate. But there are features being added all the time.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>For example, we added the feature not too long ago to be able to copy php files around. And, there&#8217;s a lot of sort of under the hood things that, I&#8217;m drawing a complete blank of all the features that I&#8217;ve added to this thing, but we&#8217;ve added a whole bunch. Here&#8217;s an example. So when you scaffold out the block, all of your JavaScript files sit inside a SRC or a source folder. And people, they may not necessarily want that because they might already have a source folder.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>They might want to call it something like, so if you have an existing project, you might want to call it blocks instead of source. So what we did was we added the ability to be able to target that differently. So you could call it something else. And this works with the scripts package too. So you could define it a certain way and then have scripts look at that. Or one big feature that people were asking for was, we don&#8217;t want to scaffold a plugin every single time.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>If we have an existing plugin, we just want the block. So we built a no plugin mode where you could run it inside your source directory and it would just give you the block files. And now you&#8217;ve got a second block inside that plugin. So those sort of things. And those all came from the community. They all came from people using the package and saying, this is stumbling block for us because we have to copy and paste and move things around.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Why can&#8217;t we just add a command that does it? So we were able to add that stuff in and it&#8217;s, I mean, I think it drives adoption, but it also. The whole point of this is to make people&#8217;s lives easier. If it&#8217;s more work to use the tool than it is to do it manually, then it&#8217;s, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s worth, you know, the juice isn&#8217;t worth the squeeze, so to speak.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:33:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that&#8217;s a good point. It just occurs to me that we never said where we find this tool. Do you happen to have a handy URL available?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:33:54] Ryan Welcher: Yeah, you can look in the developer.wordpress.org. I&#8217;m not going to read the whole url, but just do a search for create block. All the documentation is available there. It&#8217;s actually hosted on npm. So, I&#8217;m sure we&#8217;ll add it to the show notes, but the documentation is all there and it explains how to use it and all the available flags and all the available commands that you can do.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>There&#8217;s even a more advanced page on creating custom templates. I really love the custom template idea. Well, what do they call it? They call it external templates. External project templates is the official name. And what it allows you to do is like, if you&#8217;re an agency and you want to build blocks in a very specific way, you can define that and then everyone in your agency is going to use that same template with this package.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And you can use local packages, or you can host them on npm if you want to share them. It&#8217;s very, very, very, very versatile. With that, the sky&#8217;s the limit. You can literally do whatever you want.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>You can scaffold the block to do anything, and then just target that particular sort of style of block. Like I built one that would do dynamic blocks because at the time the tool didn&#8217;t support dynamic blocks, and now it does, by the way. My template is obsolete now, but that was a thing that we needed. So if you wanted to build a dynamic block, you would just target my template instead of the built-in one, and you would get that sort of flavor of block.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:35:06] Nathan Wrigley: You, mentioned a little while ago, maybe 20 minutes or so ago, that there was this dynamic block, and you said you might digress into that, but we never did. So let&#8217;s go down that little path just for a moment, yeah.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:35:16] Ryan Welcher: Sure thing. So like I said before, there&#8217;s two types of blocks. We have a static block and we have dynamic blocks. So a static block, the difference is basically where stuff is saved or if it&#8217;s saved. So, in a static block. So all, I&#8217;d say the majority of core blocks are static, meaning that when you hit save, it actually saves the markup into the post content.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it&#8217;s saved to the database. A dynamic block doesn&#8217;t do that. A dynamic block uses php to render the front end, the way we would always sort of, add run until the pages loaded and that file is run, and then it displays its information. And that&#8217;s basically the difference.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now there&#8217;s some trade offs for both. With static blocks, when there&#8217;s markup changes, you have to do this thing called deprecation. So you tell Gutenberg, if there&#8217;s any developers listening, I&#8217;m sure there are. If you&#8217;ve ever seen that, like, you know, the block, we couldn&#8217;t render the block. There was an error. Everyone&#8217;s seen that error. That&#8217;s because some markup has changed.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>You need to deprecate that. So that&#8217;s an extra step. Where with dynamic blocks, you don&#8217;t need to do that because it&#8217;s always run live, so to speak, right? So there&#8217;s some benefits to using a dynamic block for that regard. But the trade out there is you have markup in two places. So that&#8217;s, at a high level, the difference.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:36:26] Nathan Wrigley: And the create block tool will point you in the right direction of creating one or the other, depending on which your.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:36:33] Ryan Welcher: Yeah, it lets you choose. So there is a flag called a variant, and you can choose between static or dynamic. I believe the default is static. It&#8217;ll give you a static block if you don&#8217;t run that flag. But if you say variant dynamic, it&#8217;ll do a dynamic one. And then there&#8217;s actually, within your templates, this is getting really the weeds, but if you define a template, you can actually have multiple variants. So you could have your own variant. You could have a TypeScript variant for your particular template. Or like a, I don&#8217;t know, Tailwind CSS one. So there&#8217;s a lot of flexibility there is where I&#8217;m going with that.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:37:03] Nathan Wrigley: Amazing. So much going on in the WordPress space at the moment. On every level. From straightforward to incredibly complicated. And feel this is on the incredibly complicated side, but really interesting work. You mentioned that you are obviously into this, but there were a couple of other names which came off your tongue earlier. I&#8217;m wondering if in the round, you could just drop some of those names, people that we might like to go and find, as well as yourself, who are working with you, pushing the Create Block Tool.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:37:36] Ryan Welcher: There&#8217;s the folks that I work with on my team. I&#8217;m sure you&#8217;ll know all these names. Birgit Pauli Haack is on the team. She&#8217;s the Brains behind Gutenberg Times and all that stuff. Justin Tadlock is on the team as well. I&#8217;m sure everyone knows Justin. There is Michael Burge who is on our team, and think that&#8217;s it.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:37:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Well if there&#8217;s any that you&#8217;ve missed out, you can always fire them over in my direction and we&#8217;ll make sure, that they get into the show notes. If anybody has been listening to this episode and they&#8217;ve thought, you know what, this is curious. This is something that I need to begin to play with, but I would like to find out a little bit more first. We know you&#8217;ve got the Twitch channel, and we&#8217;ll push people towards that. But what other places can people get in touch with you Ryan?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:38:19] Ryan Welcher: Sure. I have a YouTube channel as well, so I&#8217;m Ryan Welcher Codes in both places, Twitch and YouTube. I try to answer the comments on YouTube as often as possible, but sometimes I don&#8217;t get to them right away, but I&#8217;m at Ryan Welcher on Twitter and my DMs are open, so feel free.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m Welcher or Ryan Welcher or Welcher Ryan in a million different Slack channels. So, I think I&#8217;m Welcher in Make Slack. I&#8217;m on Post Status. I&#8217;m on Discord in a few places. So just search my name or variations of my name and I&#8217;m sure you&#8217;ll run into me and, I&#8217;d be happy to speak with anyone one-on-one in a public forum, whatever, whatever works.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:38:54] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for making yourself available, and thank you for talking to us today about the Create Block Package stroke Tool. That&#8217;s been really, really interesting. Ryan, thanks so much.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:39:04] Ryan Welcher: Thanks so much for having me and I hope I can come back sometime.</p>\n</div>\n\n\n\n<p>On the podcast today we have Ryan Welcher.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ryan is a developer advocate sponsored by Automattic. He has been developing with WordPress since 2009 and before becoming a developer advocate, worked for agencies large and small and as a freelancer.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you’ve been using WordPress for any length of time, you’ll have come across the new paradigm for content creation, blocks. Every part of your website can now be created and amended as a block. Pages, posts, text, images, headers, footers, navigation and more.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>This has widened what’s possible for people who don’t want to mess around with the code of their website. You can add in blocks for almost anything, and change how it looks and behaves from within the block editor interface.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is an excellent move forward, but there’s still an impediment for non-technical people, because creating a block of your own is difficult. If you are able to use the selection of blocks that ship with WordPress Core, or you can find a third party block which does what you need, great, but if you need something specific, you’re going to have to create your own block solution, and that can be hard.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ryan is on the podcast today to tell you about the create-block tool, and how it can make your pathway towards block creation a little easier.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We start off talking about Ryan’s background, and how he became interested in WordPress. We then move on to how he thinks that the adoption of blocks is becoming more widespread given the maturing of the tools and learning materials available.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The conversation then turns to how the create-block tool can help you scaffold your blocks. It’s not a tool which is going to build the blocks for you, but it will help you set up the environment and build process, which you need to get started. Really, it’s all about saving you time and effort on things which don’t really get you building your blocks, but which you need to do that work.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We discuss what you can expect from the create-block tool, and the prior knowledge that you’ll need to have once the tool has you up and running. What level of expertise do you need, and is the tool under continual development?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We spend a few moments talking about the livestreaming which Ryan does each week in which he live codes solutions to viewers block based problems.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you’ve thought about creating your own blocks, but have been put off by the technical barrier, this podcast is for you.</p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Useful links.</h2>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https://10up.com/\">10up</a></p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg-examples\">Gutenberg Examples GitHub repository</a></p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https://asia.wordcamp.org/2024/\">WordCamp Asia</a></p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/reference-guides/packages/packages-create-block/\">create-block package</a></p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https://learn.wordpress.org/\">learn.wordpress.org</a></p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https://www.npmjs.com/package/@wordpress/create-block\">create-block documentation</a> on npm</p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/\">Gutenberg Times</a></p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ryan&#8217;s <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/c/RyanWelcherCodes\">YouTube</a> and <a href=\"https://www.twitch.tv/ryanwelchercodes\">Twitch</a> channels</p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https://twitter.com/ryanwelcher/\">Ryan&#8217;s Twitter</a></p>\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Wed, 26 Apr 2023 14:00:00 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:14:\"Nathan Wrigley\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:33;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:76:\"Do The Woo Community: Do the Woo Joins WordCamp Europe 2023 as Media Partner\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:28:\"https://dothewoo.io/?p=74926\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:75:\"https://dothewoo.io/do-the-woo-joins-wordcamp-europe-2023-as-media-partner/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:413:\"<p>We are proud to join others as a Media Partner for this year\'s WordCamp Europe. See you in Athens in June. </p>\n<p>&gt;&gt; The post <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https://dothewoo.io/do-the-woo-joins-wordcamp-europe-2023-as-media-partner/\">Do the Woo Joins WordCamp Europe 2023 as Media Partner</a> appeared first on <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https://dothewoo.io\">Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community</a>	.</p>\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Wed, 26 Apr 2023 12:29:22 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:5:\"BobWP\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:34;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:46:\"WPTavern: Ollie Block Theme Now in Public Beta\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:30:\"https://wptavern.com/?p=143977\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:57:\"https://wptavern.com/ollie-block-theme-now-in-public-beta\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:5758:\"<p>WordPress developer Mike McAlister has <a href=\"https://olliewp.com/introducing-the-ollie-wordpress-block-theme/\">launched Ollie</a>, his first block theme, into public beta. McAlister, whose theme company Array Themes was <a href=\"https://wptavern.com/wp-engine-acquires-array-themes\">acquired by WP Engine in 2018</a>, along with the Atomic Blocks plugin, recently departed from his role at the company to pursue other projects.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ollie supports all the latest Site Editor features, including global styles,&nbsp;patterns,&nbsp;templates,&nbsp;and template parts. It is a beautiful, multipurpose theme of the high caliber one might expect from McAlister, a veteran developer whose past products were well known for their minimalist and clean design.</p>\n\n\n\n<img />\n\n\n\n<p>Ollie includes an impressive set of more than 50 custom block patterns, making page building a delight. There are page sections for testimonials, company logos, multiple hero designs, pricing tables, various headers and footers, calls to action, and more. Ollie includes six different full-page patterns for the homepage, about, profile, features, pricing, and a download page. They are featured on the theme&#8217;s <a href=\"https://demo.olliewp.com/patterns/\">live demo</a> under the Patterns menu item.</p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Ollie includes seven style variations, with blue, green, orange, pink, red, and teal accent color palettes in addition to the default. </p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like many other block themes, Ollie is speedy, getting top scores on Google’s Pagespeed Insights.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;One of the most powerful performance features is the selective loading of assets,&#8221; McAlister said. &#8220;Instead of loading a large stylesheet on every page, Ollie only loads the styles needed on the page. This results in a much smaller page size, far less page requests, and an instantly-loading page, which search engines love.&#8221;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>After testing Ollie, I found the user experience to be friendly and an accurate representation of one of the taglines for the theme: &#8220;Get a 40 hour head start.&#8221; As soon as users install the theme and click &#8220;Customize,&#8221; they are taken directly to the Site Editor with the front page template pre-populated to match the demo site. This, combined with all the improvements in the Site Editor in WordPress 6.2, creates a smooth editing experience.</p>\n\n\n\n<img />\n\n\n\n<p>Although it hasn&#8217;t been officially released yet, Ollie could be one of the next majorly successful block themes, with its sheer number of patterns and flexibility for so many different use cases.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ollie is currently <a href=\"https://github.com/OllieWP/ollie/\">on GitHub</a> during the public beta but McAlister plans to get it approved for WordPress.org after more testing. He is not yet sure whether he will be jumping back into the commercial theme market.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;With this first block theme, my goal is simply to learn as much as possible about block themes, how users are using them, and what kind of potential there is for a premium offering,&#8221; McAlister told the Tavern. &#8220;This flagship theme will remain as an educational tool and will be free for all to use. 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Building block themes that people will want to use is a new frontier, even for McAlister whose former company was a war-horse in the Classic Themes era.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Block themes are going to be a game changer for many different personas of WordPress users,&#8221; McAlister said. &#8220;Being able to customize virtually every aspect of your site is super powerful, but it means that block themes have a lot more moving parts than classic themes. Theme.json, global styles, patterns, templates, template parts — all of these have to be accounted for and they all have to work together seamlessly for an excellent block theme experience.&#8221;</p>\n\n\n\n<p> WordPress theme developers are still getting a handle on these changes but the Themes Team is putting a stake in the ground by making block theming the focus of the <a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2023/04/04/theme-handbook-overhaul-proposal/\">Theme Handbook overhaul</a>. Although Classic Themes will still have a chapter in the handbook, the Themes Team has made it clear that block themes are &#8220;the present and future of WordPress.&#8221; </p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Since a lot of the block theme building is done in the editor, it requires a new mastery of the editor that few are intimately familiar with yet,&#8221; McAlister said. &#8220;To build patterns or layouts, you need to know which blocks to use, how to structure them effectively, how to leverage your design system in theme.json, and you need a good design sense to pull it all together. </p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;However, when it all finally comes together, block themes provide an unmatched site building and editing experience in comparison to classic themes. I’m very optimistic about the opportunity to revitalize the WordPress theme space, but it’s going to take a lot of work and collective education to get there.&#8221;</p>\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Wed, 26 Apr 2023 04:20:16 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"Sarah Gooding\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:35;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:82:\"Do The Woo Community: CloudFest, WordPress Day and a Hackathon with Carole Olinger\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:28:\"https://dothewoo.io/?p=74912\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:60:\"https://dothewoo.io/cloudfest-wordpress-day-and-a-hackathon/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:408:\"<p>For WordPress and WooCommerce builders, CloudFest might be an option to consider for your conference calendar. </p>\n<p>&gt;&gt; The post <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https://dothewoo.io/cloudfest-wordpress-day-and-a-hackathon/\">CloudFest, WordPress Day and a Hackathon with Carole Olinger</a> appeared first on <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https://dothewoo.io\">Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community</a>	.</p>\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Tue, 25 Apr 2023 12:42:58 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:5:\"BobWP\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:36;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:71:\"WPTavern: CertifyWP Launches WordPress Management and Design Credential\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:30:\"https://wptavern.com/?p=143990\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:82:\"https://wptavern.com/certifywp-launches-wordpress-management-and-design-credential\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:2781:\"<p>CertifyWP has launched its first credentialing exam for a <a href=\"https://certifywp.com/design-and-development-credential/\">WordPress Management and Design Credential</a>. The non-profit organization was founded by Talisha Lewallen with the goals of helping job seekers better demonstrate their skills to potential employers and giving businesses a way to understand prospective employees&#8217; skills.  </p>\n\n\n\n<p> The new credential costs $150 for the exam and includes three courses towards mastering frontend development: </p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p><a href=\"https://certifywp.com/design-and-development-credential/\">WordPress Management and Design Credential</a> holders have validated their understanding of important aspects of WordPress and its websites. This credential is designed for anyone who wants to work in the WordPress space or learn to build WordPress websites. Once certified, these individuals are ready to pursue WordPress Web design, e-commerce, JavaScript, databases and other fields.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>Many of items under the beginner and intermediate levels of the credential essentially describe a WordPress &#8220;power user,&#8221; or someone who knows their way around the platform and its more advanced features, including skills like navigating the admin panel, hosting, web optimization, and more.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>CertifyWP administers a proctored exam for the credential and those who meet the requirements will be required to re-take the exam every three years to maintain their credentialing. The exam will be updated as necessary by CertifyWP&#8217;s advisory board.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are 110 questions in the exam, spread over three levels, as well as a practical component. The questions must be answered within 60 minutes with 80% for a passing score. 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You can submit them to <a href=\"mailto:wpbriefing@wordpress.org\">wpbriefing@wordpress.org</a>, either written or as a voice recording.</strong></em></p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Credits</h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Editor:&nbsp;<a href=\"https://profiles.wordpress.org/dustinhartzler/\">Dustin Hartzler</a><br />Logo:&nbsp;<a href=\"https://profiles.wordpress.org/javiarce/\">Javier Arce</a><br />Production:&nbsp;<a href=\"https://profiles.wordpress.org/cbringmann/\">Chloé Bringmann</a><br />Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod </p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Show Notes</h2>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://wordpress.org/news/2021/02/wordpress-is-freedom/\">Episode 2: WordPress is Free(dom)</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt\">OpenAI ChatGPT</a> and <a href=\"https://github.com/features/copilot/\">Github Copilot</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/14/wordpress-6-3-planning-proposal-call-for-volunteers/\">WordPress 6.3 Planning Proposal &amp; Call for Volunteers</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://wp.me/p2AvED-qS9\">Preparing for the Next Underrepresented Gender-Led Release &#8211; WordPress 6.4</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://wp20.wordpress.net/\">WP20 — Celebrating 20 years of WordPress</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Transcript</h2>\n\n\n\n<span id=\"more-14836\"></span>\n\n\n\n<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00]&nbsp;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hello, everyone! And welcome to the WordPress Briefing: the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open<strong> </strong>source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks.&nbsp;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go!</p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40] Start of Show</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Just over 50 episodes ago, I shared some basic thoughts about the four freedoms of open source. I also talked through the most quoted phrase in open source&nbsp; “free as in free speech, not free as in beer.” And honestly, what podcast about the freedoms of open source would be complete without that? If you haven&#8217;t listened to that episode, I suggest you do, but if you don&#8217;t have time, I&#8217;ll start by reminding us all of the definition of free software, which is most commonly referred to as the four freedoms of open source.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:12]</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So the first thing is the freedom to run the program as you wish for any purpose. The second thing is the freedom to study how the program works and to change it so that it does your computing as you wish. As a side note, access to the source code is a precondition for this.&nbsp;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The third freedom is the freedom to redistribute copies so that you can help others. And the fourth freedom is the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this, you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes, and of course, also access to the source code is a precondition for this.&nbsp;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:47]</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The TLDR version of these freedoms is, essentially, that users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the software. Now, normally when I speak about the freedoms of open source, I&#8217;m talking about it either from a practical or a philosophical standpoint, but I also spend a lot of time thinking about it from a leadership and organizational perspective.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Every once in a while, you might hear me talk about the effects of “open source at scale,” or you might hear Matt say that the four freedoms are essentially the “Bill of Rghts for the open web.” I almost never really dig into either of those topics because it&#8217;s just really complicated. But for starters, anytime you talk about what someone is entitled to or deserves or expects, there is a feeling of political bias.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:40]</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And while I personally believe that creating software is inherently political or, at a minimum, concerned with the needs of people, that&#8217;s not what convinces anyone to participate in open source, and it&#8217;s certainly not what convinces people to use WordPress. But here&#8217;s the thing, as a leader in a widely used, free, and open source software project, as a leader in WordPress, I also know that every new user to our platform or any other open source platform represents a little more freedom in the world.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>A little more access to tools and jobs that weren&#8217;t available before. A slightly more open door to networks that undergird the success of entrepreneurs across the globe and a little more equity to the world of democratizing publishing.&nbsp;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:28]</p>\n\n\n\n<p>When I look at the four freedoms of open source, this Bill of Rights for the Web, I see not only the freedoms that we should have but also the things that we should have freedom from.&nbsp;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We should have the freedom to know how our tools work, the freedom to know what information they need from us, and also the freedom to have some way to make that software work specifically for us because that&#8217;s why we have software because we have humans that need it. But we should also have freedom from having to hide our hacky enhancements or freedom from fear of losing our earned audience, or even the fear of losing access to copious amounts of content that we have created ourselves over the years.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:13]</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And honestly, the things that we should be free from just include a lot of fear of loss. Loss of opportunity or relevance or livelihood. And I feel like for our project, and maybe for open source as a whole, we&#8217;re encountering a lot of that right now, whether we are aware of it or not. We&#8217;re seeing advancements like GPT3 or ChatGPT if that sounds more familiar and co-pilot.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And while it&#8217;s not quite in the same vein, also things like Gutenberg. Advancements that are coming to technology around us, technology we&#8217;re familiar with. And it&#8217;s hard to see what&#8217;s in them sometimes. It&#8217;s hard to see what drives them. It&#8217;s hard to know how we can make them work for us. So I have to remind us all, as citizens of an open source community, that what protects us from those things we should be free from is directly connected to how active we are in the things we are free to.&nbsp;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We hear that in a slightly more routine way from folks around open source communities. Basically, the whole concept of open source software is being built by the folks who show up. You can&#8217;t influence the future of anything if you&#8217;re not showing up in the spaces where the influence happens.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:35]</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So be an active participant in these new technologies. Learn how GPT works and how it could work for you, even if it&#8217;s just writing better prompts. Learn how Gutenberg can support your needs, not subvert your needs, even if it&#8217;s just learning how to arrange a series of blocks into a pattern or patterns into a page.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>But as with all fast-moving technological advances, I encourage you to leap in feet first, not head first. Get in up to your neck in the &#8220;why&#8221;s and &#8220;how&#8221;s of that new technology you&#8217;ve been worrying about. Be the first to become best at this arcane new thing because that&#8217;s why we open source at all so that you have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve your software.&nbsp;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:33] Small List of Big Things</p>\n\n\n\n<p>That brings me now to my small list of big things. It&#8217;s a very small list, but it is very big, as always. The first thing is that we are gearing up for the remaining major releases of the year, WP 6.3 and 6.4 in an atypical moment for our project. You can volunteer for both simultaneously if you want, and hopefully, you do want.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Second thing is that there are many ways to celebrate WordPress&#8217;s 20th anniversary on May 27th. But one of the things you can do right now is record a short video or sound clip about a great memory or experience you have had in this community or just generally because of WordPress. Those will be featured on the WP 20 website, and maybe even a lucky few will make it into the second volume of the WordPress history book.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I&#8217;m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I&#8217;ll see you again in a couple of weeks.&nbsp;</p>\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Mon, 24 Apr 2023 13:55:06 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:15:\"Chloe Bringmann\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:38;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:99:\"Gutenberg Times: Gutenberg Changelog #82 – Gutenberg 15.6 and proposed schedule for WordPress 6.3\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:53:\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?post_type=podcast&p=23907\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:113:\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-82-gutenberg-15-6-and-proposed-schedule-for-wordpress-6-3/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:39241:\"<p>Nick Diego and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss the most recent Gutenberg plugin release 15.6, the proposed schedule for WordPress 6.3 release in August of this year and a few things that are in the works. </p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-69-gutenberg-releases-wordpress-6-0-1-the-create-block-theme/#shownotes\">Show Notes</a> / <a href=\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-82-gutenberg-15-6-and-proposed-schedule-for-wordpress-6-3/#transcript\">Transcript</a></p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>Music:&nbsp;<a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/xirclebox\">Homer Gaines</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li>Editor:&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandy-reed/\">Sandy Reed</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li>Logo:&nbsp;<a href=\"https://markuraine.com/\">Mark Uraine</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li>Production:&nbsp;<a href=\"https://icodeforapurpose.com\">Birgit Pauli-Haack</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Special Guest: Nick Diego</h2>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>Follow on Twitter: <a href=\"https://twitter.com/nickmdiego\">@nickmdiego</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li>WordPress.org: <a href=\"https://profiles.wordpress.org/ndiego/\">Nick Diego</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Announcements</h2>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/14/wordpress-6-3-planning-proposal-call-for-volunteers/\">WordPress 6.3 Planning Proposal &amp; Call for Volunteers</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/07/preparing-for-the-next-women-nonbinary-release-squad/\">Preparing for the Next Women &amp; Nonbinary Release Squad</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/test/2023/03/29/fse-program-exploration-build-a-block-theme/\">FSE Program Exploration: Build a block theme</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/test/2023/04/17/fse-program-testing-call-21-front-page-fun/\">FSE Program Testing Call #21: Front Page Fun</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2023/04/using-template-patterns-to-build-multiple-homepage-designs/\"><strong>Using template patterns to build multiple homepage designs</strong></a> (Dev Blog) </li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Community Contributions</h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>GiveWP:</strong> <a href=\"https://givewp.com/visual-donation-form-builder-beta/\"><strong>Visual Donation Form Builder in Beta</strong></a></p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Bring me your Issues with Ryan Welcher</h3>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aut0EcsKbxM&t=6s\">Bring me your Issues #1</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2SYJhh3PGs\">Bring me your Issues #2</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qalDqYnFRA&t=856s\">Bring me your Issues #3</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/tooling-using-create-block-scaffolding-and-3rd-party-templates/\">Tooling: Using Create-Block Scaffolding and 3rd Party Templates</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Gutenberg 15.6</h2>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/19/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-6-19-april/\">What’s new in Gutenberg 15.6? (19 April)</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-15-6-introduces-experimental-details-block-and-command-center-for-site-editor\">Gutenberg 15.6 Introduces Experimental Details Block and Command Center for Site Editor</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2023/02/intrinsic-design-theming-and-rethinking-how-to-design-with-wordpress/\">Intrinsic design, theming, and rethinking how to design with WordPress</a> (Dev Blog)</li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://twitter.com/nickmdiego/status/1649055649542856704\">Nick Diego&#8217;s Video on Twitter on Spacing for the Spacer block.</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What&#8217;s discussed or in the works?</h2>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/49607#top\">WIP &#8211; Add a UI to allow saving patterns 🚧</a>#49607</li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/48458#top\">The wp:pattern block</a>#48458</li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/49912#top\">Experimental: Global styles revisions</a>#49912 (alternative to #<a href=\"https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/46667\">46667</a>)</li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/49601#top\">Editor: expose revisions in the UI for all available post types</a>#49601</li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/15682\">Blocks: Provide a general solution to customize the list of allowed blocks for inner blocks with block attributes</a>&nbsp;</li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<p></p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-large-font-size\">Stay in Touch</p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-group is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container\">\n<ul>\n<li>Did you like this episode? <a href=\"https://lovethepodcast.com/gutenbergchangelog\"><strong>Please write us a review </strong></a></li>\n\n\n\n<li>Ping us on Twitter or send DMs with questions. <a href=\"https://twitter.com/gutenbergtimes\">@gutenbergtimes </a>and <a href=\"https://twitter.com/bph\">@bph</a>.</li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>If you have questions or suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to <a href=\"mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com\">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a>. </em></li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Please write us a review on iTunes! <a href=\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/itunes/\">(Click here to learn how)</a></em></li>\n</ul>\n</div></div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-large-font-size\">Transcript</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Hello, and welcome to our 82nd episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. In today&#8217;s episode, we will talk about the Gutenberg plugin version 15.6, the proposed schedule for WordPress 6.3, and a few things that are in the works again. I&#8217;m your host Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and full-time core contributor for the WordPress Open Source Project. I&#8217;m thrilled to have with me today, co-host Nick Diego, plugin developer, core contributor as well, and we are both part of Automattic’s Five for the Future project. Nick and I teamed up to manage the Gutenberg plugin release 15.6, so this is fresh from the press, so to speak. Thanks for joining me today again at the Gutenberg Changelog. Nick, how are you today?</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: I&#8217;m doing great. I&#8217;m very excited that 15.6 is out in the wild now.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, me too. And this is a daily dose of Nick Diego for me because the last two days we were in communication about the release.&nbsp;</p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Announcements</strong></h3>\n\n\n\n<p>But before we head into the Gutenberg 15.6 release, let&#8217;s do a few announcements from the WordPress project. As mentioned in the intro, the release schedule for WordPress 6.3 proposal is published and includes a call for volunteers for the release squad. A beta is proposed to be, beta one, is proposed to be on June 27th, 2023. So it&#8217;s after WordCamp and “after after” WordCamp, so to speak, WordCamp Europe. Release candidate and dev notes. Deadline is proposed for July 18th, 2023, and then the final release is proposed to be scheduled on August 8th, 2023. So you raised your hand right, Nick? I raised my hand.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: I did. Yeah. Yes, exactly. So yeah, I&#8217;ve been in the editor triage lead for the last three-year releases and it was a new role when I started. I&#8217;d love to help somebody grow into that role because I love doing it, but we want to see other people in that role as well. And I think it&#8217;s a fun role. It&#8217;s pretty unique. Yeah, it&#8217;s not very technical. It&#8217;s more organizational and just engaging with other release leads and kind of keeping everything moving smoothly. So it&#8217;s a great lead for somebody who maybe is not as technical but wants to really engage with the release.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Yeah, I want to change my role. The last three releases, I did documentation pieces and especially the Gutenberg dev notes wrangle them through GitHub and that is definitely something that somebody that is not technical can do as well. I&#8217;m open to mentor somebody for 6.3 and the proposal for the schedule comes actually on the heels of Josepha Haden Chomphosy’s post, which preparing for the next women and non-binary release squad, AKA underrepresented gender squad.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And if you want to be part of it, you can raise your hands in the comments there. And of course we have the links and show notes, but if you haven&#8217;t worked on the major WordPress release squad before, it would be really good and you want to be part of the underrepresented gender squad, it would be good that you also look at the schedule for 6.3 and raise your hand there because quite a few mentors would be available to skill up contributors to be part of 6.4 because that&#8217;s how you get new people in that you need to&#8230; We need to shepherd them through the responsibilities and how things work and who to talk to and how this all&#8230; It can be very intimidating when you haven&#8217;t done this before.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So not to throw you into the deep end of the water to swim.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: It&#8217;s always good to see how the sausage is made and there&#8217;s so much going on and so many people involved. I know when I first did it, I was very intimidated, but after you see it once, it starts to make a bit more sense. So yeah, mentor for 6.3 and then get really well-prepared for 6.4.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Yeah. And if you want to learn more, yeah, you find us on Twitter or on the WordPress Slack and you can just kind of DM us or ask us some questions there. Well, I volunteered you now. Big sorry.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Yeah. Oh, if anybody has any questions about the release, feel free to reach out to us. We&#8217;re here to help, here to get more people on board with the release. I know for myself, it kind of kicked off my journey in contributing more to WordPress and it really made me kind of fall in love with the process. And so I highly encourage anybody else who might be even a little bit interested to start exploring it.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And if you want to help the quality race on some of the products, you can also follow the FSE outreach program that has been in place for two and a half years almost. And there is, Anne McCarthy runs the program and you still have until April 26th to follow the testing call number 20. And that is using the create block theme plugin to create a block theme and you get some instructions on the call for testing. It&#8217;s another six days, but if you are not so much into theme development, maybe you want to do the new call for testing that just came out and have some front page fun with a block scene and create some templates that are for the front page. And there is actually also a developer news blog out, blog post out that just came out last week, and that is by Justin Tadlock using the template patterns to build multiple homepage designs. So I don&#8217;t know exactly if they&#8217;re related, but I&#8217;m pointing you to it as well, so you get a little bit broader picture of it. Yes.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: And I want to stress that these call for testings, even if you&#8217;ve been building with blocks forever and you&#8217;re very engaged, it&#8217;s a great exercise to go through. I consider myself very entrenched in WordPress and know what&#8217;s going on, but sometimes when you go through these testing calls, you find pitfalls or issues that somebody who&#8217;s maybe brand new to blocks would encounter. It&#8217;s a great way to find problems or things that can be fixed to make that onboarding experience smoother. So I know I always find things that I don&#8217;t expect, but the goal of these call for testing is to make WordPress better. And so even if you use WordPress every day, I encourage you.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, that&#8217;s a good point. Absolutely. And if I want to get something done on my theme, for instance, for the Gutenberg Times or for my personal blog and try to do this, I always find something that might be a little quirky, that might be a little bit, oh, I haven&#8217;t thought about that, but now that I use it, maybe there are some things that could be easier to handle or more intuitive or I run into some problems.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s so fresh from out of the releases that there&#8217;s always&#8230; There is no bug free software. That ship has sailed when we so many people are involved. All right.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Absolutely.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. But that&#8217;s also something if I get asked, I want to contribute to WordPress, but I don&#8217;t know how. So I&#8217;ll appoint them to the testing calls because it&#8217;s gets them hands-on with the WordPress site and also contribute back by just giving feedback. You don&#8217;t have to know the processes. You don&#8217;t need to know any development, but when something doesn&#8217;t work right and you can raise your hand and say, I found something and explain that to other people. And Anne has been very good in creating GitHub issues for the developers and to feed that back into the development process.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Absolutely.</p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Community Contributions</strong></h3>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: For the community contribution, I wanted to point out Ryan Welcher started a new series on his Twitch stream and it&#8217;s called Bring Me Your Issues. And he uploaded the first of the few issues for persistence on YouTube, and I wanted to point you to it. He also went through the work and added chapter timestamps to it, and especially for the first one that was really helpful because that&#8217;s a two and a half hour Twitch session. I really admire his persistence and his patience.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So you can look through the list of the topics that he covered and one of them&#8230; So I can only say three things, but that it was more so how to use the create block scaffolding tool. It&#8217;s always interesting to see that and how to build an edit block for the lockdown user. So edit post block I should say. And that&#8217;s certainly something that could come to core, but if it&#8217;s easier&#8230; Yeah, relatively easy to build, you can build it yourself. Then he answers the question, what and why inner blocks, which is a component that is for block building. And then another question is how to create a placeholder and parent and child relationships for your block development and using the example of a post pickup block. Yeah.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: It&#8217;s a goldmine of tools and how to do different things, so if you haven&#8217;t checked out Ryan&#8217;s streams, you definitely should.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, and there&#8217;s a second edition of it, where you can learn more about the get post type selectors in the data store and the use entity records, all technical terms, that you will know so easy after you listen to that. The render appender, I like that. The render appender on the inner box. And then in the third edition here, Ryan also talks a little bit over the Gutenberg 15.5 release and how to create a external template for APIs for the great block scaffolding tool. Always a good thing to know so you can create your own templates for the tool. There was actually also a topic at one of our Gutenberg live Q&amp;As was Grzegorz Ziolkowski and Fabian Kagy. It&#8217;s a couple of years old, but it&#8217;s still very, very current with demos and additional background on how to create those templates. So we share all this in the show notes. I know it&#8217;s a little bit tech and developer happy, heavy, happy too, but I just wanted to point out these new resources and additional resources.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Yeah, absolutely.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: So GiveWP published a block-based visual donation form builder. That&#8217;s a mouthful, and it&#8217;s in beta. So GiveWP has, in an earlier episode, we discussed GiveWP&#8217;s way to rebuild the powerful donation plugin with our block first mindset and starting off with a WordPress native components and scripts to build the interface and only use custom code to augment it. And the visual donation form builder, it&#8217;s getting better, is the first product that comes from this effort. And if you work for an agency that helps nonprofits fundraise using the GiveWP Plugin, this beta is definitely for you. It&#8217;s also for you when you are working at a nonprofit organization and you are responsible for the fundraising and creating the campaign-related forms. This is also a beta for you. So it gives you early insight in what&#8217;s coming to GiveWP in the version 3.0. And it also gives you a better feel for what will be possible with a new form builder that isn&#8217;t available right now. So check it out, GiveWP. We have the link definitely in the show notes to the beta announcement, and that&#8217;s it from our community contributions.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Lots of good stuff.</p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What’s Released &#8211; Gutenberg 15.6</strong></h3>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. So what&#8217;s released this week? We have Gutenberg 15.6 and we are coming right from it. It was released yesterday and the release post is also available now. It includes a total of 112 PRs. It&#8217;s a smaller release in comparison to the ones that come closer to a major WordPress release. It was authored by 45 contributors and seven of which were new contributors. So congratulations everyone on the good work and let&#8217;s get into what&#8217;s in there. And we&#8217;re starting out with, we now have spacing presets to the spacer block.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Yeah, this is what I&#8217;m so excited about. We&#8217;ve had&#8230; Since 6.1, presets were added to WordPress, which allow you to do a little slider for margin and padding and block app. It&#8217;s configuring margin or padding can be kind of complicated, but when you have a preset of small, medium, large or 1-2-3-4-5, it just makes it a little bit easier for the user. And the way that you could apply those, is you could actually make them fluid, using clamp to make them fluid, which allows for really interesting designs that don&#8217;t require media queries because you can make all your one margin for desktop, another for mobile. We didn&#8217;t have that for the spacer block, which adds vertical height between different blocks. So if you had a hundred pixel spacer block, you wanted it to be smaller on mobile, you would need to use custom CSS.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, now spacing presets come to the spacer block, which also in turn allows for fluid spacer blocks, which people have been asking for forever. Because the spacer block is such a natural tool. It&#8217;s so easy to add for end users. It makes sense. I want to add some space between these two items. Okay, add the spacer block, but now that they&#8217;re fluid&#8230; Now that you can make them fluid, it allows for dynamic websites where you have one size on desktop, another for tablet and another for mobile. And it&#8217;s all on this fluid spectrum and you don&#8217;t need media queries. You don&#8217;t need anything else. You&#8217;re just using these spacing presets. So I couldn&#8217;t be more excited. I&#8217;ve only have just began exploring this and I know other theme developers are as well, so exciting stuff.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Awesome. Yeah, thank you so much for telling us about it. I also want to point out a blog post that&#8217;s on the developer blog and it kind of talks about that fluid part of intrinsic design versus media queries for theming and thinking about how designing WordPress makes it a little bit more modern when you&#8230; Because the proliferation of screen sizes, you are probably not very content with just three media or three sets. You might need 12 sets or 6 sets, and who keeps track of all the different settings for all these presets? Intrinsic design, that&#8217;s a fluid typography. That&#8217;s a fluid spacing. It&#8217;s definitely a way to go.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>It doesn&#8217;t say that you cannot have any media queries, but it&#8217;s definitely for the strategic way to build websites. It&#8217;s the way to go now.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Definitely.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And then we had, the cover block had border support, but now you also have these pop over resizable box and I think it also was in 15.5, but cover block has now a great border support. You can have the radios. You can have the colors. You can have the resizable block kind of&#8230; Resizable blocks adhered to those. Yeah, that was really nice when I tested it. I&#8217;m not quite sure that&#8217;s 5.6 native, but it&#8217;s definitely improved with 15.6</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: In 16.1, we did a huge effort to add all these design tools to most blocks, but border was left off a handful of them. One of them being cover block because of the clipping so if you did a background image and you tried to put border radius on it, you&#8217;d need to use overflow. It just became tricky with CSS and it took some more time to figure out how to implement that correctly. And so we finally got there and I think that this has been one of those things, why isn&#8217;t there border control? I thought, well, it was a little more tricky than we expected. So it&#8217;s nice to see it here and it really opens up a lot of designs and again, removes some extra custom CSS that you may have needed in the past to achieve a specific design.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: So next thing on the list of change of was, add styles section to the&#8230; Well, they call it browse mode sidebar, but it&#8217;s the style editor of the style. Well, somebody called it site editor dark side as well, so which I don&#8217;t feel slightly better. It&#8217;s the left sidebar that is on the site editor. And now there is a style section where you can see all the styles that come with the theme, the style variations, and when you click on it, you see how your site changes, but there&#8217;s also an edit button there. So you can then go and open up the right side and change some of the settings for the style variation. And that is a very fluid workflow. I really love that. And it&#8217;s now in the Gutenberg plugin, so it&#8217;s really cool.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Before you had to know where the style variations were. You had to click into the template, then go to the style panel. And so this just makes it much more surfaced for users, allowing you to easily switch your style variation out. Great improvement, and also that name to be determined left-hand sidebar. That will get more features as we go on as well. But this is one additional addition beyond templates and template parts and navigation.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Those are the four main items right now. Yeah, navigation, global styles, template and template parts. And there might be a pattern in the future.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Hopefully.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Hopefully. Yes, yes, yes. And then in Gutenberg 15.6, there&#8217;s also two experiments. One is a new block that the details and summary block, which mostly was working by Carolina Nymark and she did a fantastic job, shepherding that for maybe a year until it actually got merged as an experiment into the plugin. It&#8217;s how you can hide things. You write a movie review and you want to hide the spoiler part where you reveal some of the drama in the movie, but you want your users to know or readers to know that you making a choice here. You open it up and it&#8217;s a spoiler. You can also hide some details on certain things. There are numerous of use cases and it&#8217;s quite nice because it has all the design tools. It has the typography. It has the spacing. It has the backgrounds, the colors. So it&#8217;s actually a nice little block and it can use some testing, but you need to go to the menu of the Gutenberg plugin into the experiments and check it on. Yeah. Have you used it Nick?</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Yeah, I played around with it quite a bit. I think that the colloquial term would be an accordion, is basically kind of what we&#8217;re talking about here. It&#8217;s really hard to do in an accessible way, which is one of the reasons why this has taken so long to get into WordPress. Core, that is. And so I think Carolina did a great job. The current experimental implementation includes a number of a parent block and then a number of child blocks. There&#8217;s another exploration that&#8217;s maybe trying to simplify that. But either way, we&#8217;re getting closer and closer to having this block and core and it&#8217;s something that everybody&#8217;s asked for. So why isn&#8217;t this in core? We want this in core. So it&#8217;s, it will get there and I think this is a great first step. Encourage everybody to try out the experiment. Find problems with it. Find out how we can make it better.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Excellent. And then there&#8217;s another experiment. It&#8217;s called a command center for the site editor. And that is really a rough interface right now if you switch it on. Yeah, don&#8217;t expect too much user-friendliness in there because it&#8217;s still in an experimental way. So if I understood this correctly, you get a little search bar like the spotlight on a Mac or so, and then you can say edit something or change color or so and it will get you to the place where you can actually do that. So you wouldn&#8217;t need to know all the 15 levels of menus to get to a certain place. I have not played with it. Did you test it a bit?</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Yes, so we&#8217;ve been all hearing about artificial intelligence these days. AI is everywhere, and this is not AI, but it&#8217;s an experiment to start exploring one, how you can move things around. How you can move around the site. You could tell it, I want to add a new page, but you can also start to see where in the future you could hook in&#8230; third-party extenders could hook in a different additional functionality into this command center to do, write me a post about Mars, whatever. You can start to think about where this could eventually go, which is why this is currently an experiment, but the baseline is going to be take me to the styles panel, add a new page, simple things. But it could be huge. It could be a really important component of what WordPress is. And so really test it out, start exploring it. The idea behind it is it&#8217;s going to be very extensible, so you can add additional functionality as a third-party extender. So really excited to see where this goes.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, me too. And then there are quite a few, I call them or we call them here, quality of life kind of enhancements you don&#8217;t know that you need it until you see that what you get. And one of them is the smoother animations for the drop zone and what is a drop zone? It&#8217;s not a movie thing. You go from drag and drop and to drop, you need to know where you it’s is actually going on your canvas and the animation that&#8230; So there&#8217;s a blue line appearing on your canvas and it tells you, okay, your drop thingy will drop here when you release the button if you wanted to. And the animations are much smoother. It&#8217;s actually a delightful experience now to drag and drop blocks from one section to the other or from the list view over&#8230; From the list view over to your canvas. So that&#8217;s a very nice addition there.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Yeah, it&#8217;s really nice. And then there&#8217;s some improvements to list view itself around dragging. I&#8217;ve run into it too. You see sometimes you drag items within the list view and it’s&#8230; Things don&#8217;t go exactly where you want them to. And one of those was dragging underneath a container like a group block was a little challenging. And then they&#8217;ve improved that as well. So dragging and dropping and got it much easier across the board.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, and that I think were all the highlights that we wanted to point out today from the Gutenberg 15.6 release. We will have the release post in the show notes so you can follow up on things.&nbsp;</p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What’s in Active Development or Discussed</strong></h3>\n\n\n\n<p>And now we want to talk to you about what&#8217;s in active development and what&#8217;s coming down the line. And first off is the work with patterns. So I hear this over and over again. I want to create my own patterns. Why can&#8217;t I do this with WordPress? I need a plugin. And we know all the good plugins. There&#8217;s a, Justin Tadlock had a plugin to create patterns and Block Meister was one, and then WP Engine came out with a pattern builder. And so Ari has a work in progress to add UI to allow saving patterns. And we definitely share that and it&#8217;s coming along fine, but it&#8217;s still a work in progress. And I don&#8217;t know what are the problems they&#8217;re hitting? Do you have a feeling on how that&#8217;s difficult?</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Well, I think it&#8217;s one of those things where we have all sorts of different entities in the block editor. We have reusable blocks. We have templates. We have template parts. What do you use when? What do you use where? And so I think that not only the functionality of being able to save a pattern, but also the UI around saving a pattern and making it clear to users when you should use one over the other and in what context things should be used. So there&#8217;s a technical issue and then there&#8217;s also a UI understanding user experience issue as well. So it&#8217;s getting there. It&#8217;s great to see this happening in core patterns are such a great way to create content and then use it in different places. And being able to do that in core would be such a huge benefit. It would allow you to design something, save it as a pattern, go to a different page, use your pattern. There&#8217;s just so many delightful applications of this and really excited to see it moving forward.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, it definitely needs to be in there. And there&#8217;s also a work done on the WP pattern block, which allows you to create patterns or use patterns in template parts. So that&#8217;s also reusable designs that are already available to use them in templates, so you can reuse, have them on every type of page that you want to be on. That is also in the works. It definitely comes together with the UI for the patterns as well. So look out, we have the links for the PRs, will be in the show notes, so if you want to check it out and keep a tab on it, feel free to do those.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Yeah, and I think that the long and short of it is patterns are under the hood a very simple thing. It&#8217;s just a collection of blocks. And the initial implementation of patterns was just that. It was a collection of blocks that you could deploy in different places. Now that people are starting to expand and adopt block-based WordPress, it&#8217;s become very clear how powerful patterns can be. And now we&#8217;re seeing all these like, well, can it do this? Can it do this? Can we do it here? Yeah. And so we&#8217;re trying to address those things.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And I just want to&#8230; Just had the idea, we talked about pattern before and I pitched that developer news post where you can have patterns for particular templates, and that&#8217;s also part of that idea where you can expand. How you can use it. How can theme developers support users in creating what they need to create on their websites and be fast with that? Yeah. So that&#8217;s also part, yeah.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another thing that was definitely had a lot of questions and a lot of requests was getting revisions on the global styles for the interface. So contributors look to implement revisions and display them in the global styles. There&#8217;s current and experimental implementation that shows a separate revision menu item in the global styles. And when you selected, you can see the latest revisions, the preview of them in the editor, and you can also go back to the latest revision and change it again. Or there is also a restore of unsafe changes and also a reset to the science of the theme. So there was, the design team did lot of thinking about how that can be displayed. And now developers are working on some iterations on the PR before it&#8217;s merged. And it will certainly need some thorough testing, but I wanted listeners to know that that is coming as well.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Yeah, revisions are such a big thing when you make those changes in the site editor can be a little discerning because you&#8217;re like, I&#8217;m making all these changes. How do I get back? How do I get back to a design that I liked before and it was clicking the back button a million times or just a little&#8230; It was tough. So there&#8217;s a revision, especially visual revisions where you can go back and see what the changes that were made I think is going to be really important for broader adoption of the site editor. So great to see.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, definitely. And when users do make their own designs or make changes on their design, sometimes they don&#8217;t know what the final design looks like until they actually have it and then they don&#8217;t like it anymore and then they need to go back and that these revisions definitely will help with that process. I&#8217;m that way. Yeah.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Oh, yeah.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And the last item that I have in the list for, or we have in the list for you to learn that is discussed and in the works is again, a little bit more developer oriented, but now there is a PR one issue discussed on how to get allowed blocks into the blockchain meta. It is an attribute for the inner block. So if you have a custom block and you want other blocks in there, you can restrict which blocks can be put in there, but you are not able to add this to your&#8230; A data point to your outside block. And that is something especially for developers that restrict them or they find solutions around it. And if you&#8230; Yeah, one is if you want to restrict an instance of the media and text block, that it only can do heading, paragraph, and image, but you can tell the media and text block that is what you want them to put in there. So developers do all kinds of interesting things to work around this, but there should be a standard in core and the developers are working on it.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Yeah, I&#8217;d love to see this extensibility. When the block editor is being built, obviously, you need the core components to be built, but I think we&#8217;re finally out of time where a lot of things are stable and now is really how do we allow people to make changes, extend different components. One of the beauties of WordPress. You can change anything. You can configure it in many ways and getting some of that configurability into more configurability into the block editor is great. So these little things that may seem minor have huge impacts for developers&#8217; lives and what they&#8217;re trying to implement. So great to see this happening.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And I was thinking about, well, this is an issue that&#8217;s discussed for four years now. And finally there are enough use cases, there have been enough ways to use the block editor and extend an editor, and now there&#8217;s a real need there to actually have that discussion come to fruition into a PR or into a new feature that helps the developers to extend things. And I think we will see through the year of 2023, the next two major WordPress releases, certainly additional things that add more extensibility to the block editor, especially to the site editor and to custom blocks. And it&#8217;s exciting times and I&#8217;m really glad that we are there now just before the next phase of Gutenberg.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, absolutely. And with that, dear listeners, we are at the end of the show. It was a shorter show, but I&#8217;m glad I had Nick with me for you and could talk to you about a few things that are beyond the Gutenberg plugin release.&nbsp;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So before the end of the show. I remind you if you want to help WordPress get better, heed the call for testing, either building a block theme with a block plugin in the 20th testing call or rating front pages, different kind of front page for your website. So anything else that you want to add to things that we haven&#8217;t talked about that you were top of your mind?</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: No, just encourage people to go check out 15.6 and that call for testing. Embrace blocks and try to push the block editor to his limits. And if there are issues, let us know and we&#8217;ll help make it better.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: All right, so you changed jobs, Nick? Have anything but you are not new to our listeners. That&#8217;s why we kind of cut through the introduction a little bit. But have anything&#8230; If people want to get in touch with you, has anything changed?</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Nope. The best place usually is just on Twitter or obviously WordPress Slack at NDiego. On Twitter, NickMDiego. So feel free to reach out to me with your questions, comments, suggestions about WordPress. Here to help.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And we have a new video of you, Fluid Spaces.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Yeah, I&#8217;m going to make more of those. I&#8217;m going to be trying to do more little shorts about different features that come out in WordPress so we&#8217;ll see how that goes.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And the first one is out today and we will have the link in the show notes and it talks about the spacers, spacer block. And so let Nick know what you think about and what your ideas are for new little shorts.&nbsp;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>As always, the show notes will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is the 82nd edition or episode. And if you have questions or suggestions or news you want to send, include them to <a href=\"mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com\">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a>. That&#8217;s <a href=\"mailto:changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com\">changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com</a>. Thank you everybody, and I wish you a great weekend and a new weekend of spring eternal. Hopefully, and the weather getting better and talk to you in two weeks. Bye-bye.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Nick Diego</em>: Bye-bye.</p>\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Sat, 22 Apr 2023 21:15:05 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:19:\"Gutenberg Changelog\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:39;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:82:\"WPTavern: Virtuozzo Launches Version 2.0 of Its Application Platform for WordPress\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:30:\"https://wptavern.com/?p=143923\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:93:\"https://wptavern.com/virtuozzo-launches-version-2-0-of-its-application-platform-for-wordpress\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:2573:\"<p>Virtuozzo, the software company behind the virtualization and cloud management capabilities of many popular hosting service providers, has launched <a href=\"https://www.virtuozzo.com/company/blog/wordpress-as-a-service-the-new-kind/\">version 2.0</a> of its <a href=\"https://virtuozzo.com/application-platform-for-wordpress/\">WordPress platform</a>. The company&#8217;s 450+ customers include GoDaddy, IONOS, InMotion hosting, and other hosts.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Virtuozzo&#8217;s WordPress platform  enables service providers to sell containerized hosting as a service. The most recent update introduces a new user interface designed for WordPress customers that makes it easy to configure resources, adjust scaling, pay invoices, and deploy WordPress websites.</p>\n\n\n\n<img />\n\n\n\n<p>Version 2.0 of the <a href=\"https://virtuozzo.com/application-platform-for-wordpress/\">Virtuozzo Application Platform for WordPress</a> includes automatic scaling up or down in response to traffic spikes, the ability to offer consumption-based pricing, automated WordPress deployment for single instances to multi-region clusters, and efficient hardware utilization with fully isolated containers and automatic failover. </p>\n\n\n\n<p>The new platform makes it possible for any hosting provider to offer some of the same features that more expensive managed hosts provide. Virtuozzo pioneered the platform with <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.azpocket.co.jp/\" target=\"_blank\">AzPocket</a>, a Japanese WordPress host, as the first adopter, who used it to expand the features of its shared hosting offerings.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>“There is a significant gap in the WordPress hosting market, between cheap shared or VPS hosting services, and more expensive managed WordPress from companies such as WP Engine and Kinsta,&#8221; Virtuozzo VP of Strategic Product Development Carlos Rego said. &#8220;Our solution enables any service provider to offer modern, containerized WordPress-as-a-Service at a fraction of the cost of those ‘premium’ providers.” </p>\n\n\n\n<p>Virtuozzo will be hosting a webinar on <a href=\"https://www.virtuozzo.com/sell-wordpress-as-a-service-brand-new-ux/\">how to sell premium WordPress hosting</a> on May 4, 2023, at 11AM EDT/ 5PM CET. Planned topics include the opportunity for hosting in the WordPress market, the drawbacks of current hosting products, and how to create a &#8220;WordPress as a Service business in a box.&#8221; Virtuozzo representatives will demo the new WordPress platform and answer questions from attendees at the conclusion of the event.</p>\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Sat, 22 Apr 2023 16:13:56 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"Sarah Gooding\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:40;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:100:\"Gutenberg Times: Custom CSS, front page fun, Gutenberg outside of WordPress – Weekend Edition #251\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:35:\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?p=23915\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:104:\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/custom-css-front-page-fun-gutenberg-outside-of-wordpress-weekend-edition-251/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:15293:\"<p>Howdy, </p>\n\n\n\n<p>Although, I found great content for you  and I was co-leading the Gutenberg plugin release, it felt like a quiet week. No family drama, no moving stress. Nowadays, I cherish the quiet moments, when I can sit and read a book, that&#8217;s not technical in nature. Or just sit with loved once and chat about life, or go for a walk along the Rhine. Or take a stroll through Tinguely Museum. What are your moments of quiet, you cherish, and you don&#8217;t have enough of? </p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"https://www.tinguely.ch/en.html\"><img /></a><a href=\"https://www.tinguely.ch/en.html\">Méta-Harmonie II &#8211; Tinguely Museum</a>\n\n\n\n<p>This will all change again next week, I am confident. 🤷🏻‍♀️</p>\n\n\n\n<p>How was your week? </p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hopefully, you can take a quiet moment for reading through this newsletter. Enjoy</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yours, 💕<br /><em>Birgit</em></p>\n\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-group has-light-background-background-color has-background is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container\">\n<p><strong>Table of Contents</strong></p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-sortabrilliant-guidepost\"><ul><li><a href=\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#0-word-press-release-information\">Developing Gutenberg and WordPress</a></li><li><a href=\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#0-p\">Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners</a></li><li><a href=\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#2-word-press-6-0-1-and-6-1-scheduled\">Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks</a></li><li><a href=\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#3-building-themes-for-fse-and-word-press\">Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor. </a></li></ul></div>\n</div></div>\n\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"0-word-press-release-information\">Developing Gutenberg and WordPress</h2>\n\n\n\n<p>This week, <strong>Gutenberg 15.6</strong> was released. Nick Diego and I were leading the release and published the release post: <a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/19/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-6-19-april/\"><strong>What’s new in Gutenberg 15.6? (19 April)</strong></a>. We highlighted </p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/19/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-6-19-april/#details-block-experimental\">Details block, experimental</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/19/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-6-19-april/#spacer-block-gets-spacing-presets\">Spacer Block gets spacing presets</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/19/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-6-19-april/#style-variations-in-browse-mode\">Style variations in browse mode</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Sarah Gooding</strong> also reported <a href=\"https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-15-6-introduces-experimental-details-block-and-command-center-for-site-editor\"><strong>Gutenberg 15.6 Introduces Experimental Details Block and Command Center for Site Editor</strong></a>. </p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Nick Diego </strong>and I also recorded the <strong>Gutenberg Changelog episode 82</strong> together and discussed not only the latest release but also what&#8217;s in the works, like revisions for Global Styles, or a Pattern creator. It was a great pleasure speaking with Nick again on the podcast. The episode 82 will arrive at your favorite podcast app over the weekend. </p>\n\n\n\n<img /><strong>&#8220;Daily doses Nick Diego&#8221;</strong>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-group has-light-background-background-color has-background is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container\">\n<p><strong>🎙️ </strong> New episode:  <a href=\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-82-gutenberg-15-6-and-proposed-schedule-for-wordpress-6-3/\">Gutenberg Changelog #82 – Gutenberg 15.6 and proposed schedule for WordPress 6.3</a> with Birgit Pauli-Haack and special guest Nick Diego</p>\n</div></div>\n\n\n\n<p>A new call for testing is available for you! In <a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/test/2023/04/17/fse-program-testing-call-21-front-page-fun/\"><strong>FSE Program Testing Call #21: Front Page Fun</strong></a>, <strong>Anne McCarthy</strong> invites you to create and modify the front page of a site utilizing patterns that are available on a pre-built site, thanks to the <a href=\"https://instawp.com/\">InstaWP </a>service. Share your experience on the post by May 8th, 2023. </p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"0-p\">Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners</h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Wes Theron</strong> posted a video on <a href=\"https://wordpress.tv/2023/04/18/building-a-page-with-only-patterns/\"><strong>Building a page with only&nbsp;patterns</strong></a>. In this demo, he used a variety of patterns to create a Services Page. Patterns allow you to add beautifully designed, ready-to-go layouts to any WordPress site with a simple insert or copy/paste.</p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\" />\n\n\n\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://twitter.com/jasontheadams\">Jason Adams,</a></strong> announced <strong>GiveWP&#8217;S  Block based: </strong><a href=\"https://givewp.com/visual-donation-form-builder-beta/\"><strong>Visual Donation Form Builder in Beta</strong></a>. We discussed in an earlier edition that GiveWP is rebuilding their powerful Donation plugin with a block first mindset. The revamp started off with the WordPress own components and scripts to build the interface, and the GiveWP team augmented it with custom code where necessary. &nbsp;The Visual donation Form Builder is the first product to come from this effort.&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paRW3BWsdgw\">More info is also available on YouTube</a></p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you work at an agency that helps their nonprofits fundraise using the GiveWP plugin, this beta test is for you. Furthermore, if you work at a nonprofit organization and are responsible for fundraising and building campaign related forms for your website, this beta test is for you. It gives you an early insight into what coming to GiveWP with its 3.0 version, and also a better feel for what will be possible with the new form builder that isn’t available right now.&nbsp;</p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\" />\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Munir Kamal</strong> released his <a href=\"https://shop.gutenberghub.com/ai-writer/\"><strong>AI Writer on Gutenberg Hub Shop</strong></a> &#8211;  plugin that integrates ChatGPT into the Gutenberg canvas. Your writing prompt is return with content, and then you can also ask for some rewrites, translate into various languages. You would need an OpenAI API key to enable the plugin, after you paid and installed the plugin. </p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\" />\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexandra Yap,</strong> Stackable wrote a tutorial on <a href=\"https://wpstackable.com/blog/how-to-use-countdown-timers-for-marketing-campaigns/\"><strong>How to Use Countdown Timers for Marketing Campaigns</strong></a>. &#8220;Countdown timers in web design are digital timers that display the remaining time until a particular event or deadline. In this article, we’ll discuss how you can use countdown timers to boost your marketing campaigns.&#8221; she wrote. Congratulations to <strong><a href=\"https://twitter.com/bfintal\">Benjamin Intal </a></strong>and his team to passing the milestone of 80,000 active installations of their plugin <a href=\"https://wordpress.org/plugins/stackable-ultimate-gutenberg-blocks/\">Stackable</a>. </p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\" />\n\n\n\n<p>There are now <strong><a href=\"https://wordpress.org/themes/tags/full-site-editing/\">282 Block Themes in the WordPress repository</a>.</strong> Here are three you could test. </p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://wordpress.org/themes/abisko/\">Abisko</a> by Anders Noren, also <a href=\"https://wptavern.com/anders-noren-releases-abisko-a-new-free-wordpress-theme-with-30-block-patterns\">mentioned on WPTavern</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://wordpress.org/themes/spectra-one/\">Spectra One </a>by Brainstorm Force, developers also of the classic Astra theme, also <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNIeW9QQIc4\">reviewed by Jamie Marsland, PootlePress</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://wordpress.org/themes/ctlg/\">CTLG</a> by Automattic, specifically designed for creating lists, directories, and catalogs</li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\" />\n\n\n\n<p>What&#8217;s the difference between a block theme and a classic theme? <strong>Jamie Marsland</strong> explains it in a few minutes in this video <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ1kruAnQso&t=1s\"><strong>WordPress Block Themes vs Classic Themes: A Beginners Guide</strong></a></p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"2-word-press-6-0-1-and-6-1-scheduled\">Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks</h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Justin Tadlock</strong> wrote tutorial on how to work with <a href=\"https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2023/04/per-block-css-with-theme-json/\"><strong>Per-block CSS with theme.json</strong></a>. &#8220;<code>theme.json</code> supports enough CSS features to cover most common styles. But it cannot reasonably cover every scenario and still have a matching design tool in the editor UI, which is an important consideration. If the interface covered every possibility, the user experience would suffer.&#8221; Tadlock wrote. He also answers the question, why not add everything to a style.css and be done with it. Learn how to add custom CSS per block. Tadlock also added a few thoughts on pitfalls, and has some tips and tricks for you. </p>\n\n\n\n\n<p><strong>&nbsp;<a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">&#8220;Keeping up with Gutenberg &#8211; Index 2022&#8221;</a>&nbsp;</strong><br />A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test and Meta team from Jan. 2021 on. Updated by yours truly.  <a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index-2020/\"><em>The index 2020 is here</em></a></p>\n\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"3-building-themes-for-fse-and-word-press\">Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor. </h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Nathan Wrigley</strong> talked to <strong>Steve Brunner</strong> and <strong>Timothy Jacobs</strong>,  both founders of a SaaS app called&nbsp;<a href=\"https://engineawesome.com/\">Engine Awesome</a> in the latest WP Jukebox podcast: <a href=\"https://wptavern.com/podcast/72-steve-bruner-and-timothy-jacobs-on-using-gutenberg-outside-of-wordpress\"><strong>#72 – Steve Bruner and Timothy Jacobs on Using Gutenberg Outside of WordPress</strong></a>. They discussed Gutenberg, but not how you might expect. It’s Gutenberg outside of WordPress, but Gutenberg nonetheless.</p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\" />\n\n\n\n<p>The recording of the <a href=\"https://wordpress.tv/2023/04/18/developer-hours-introduction-to-the-interactivity-api/\"><strong>Developer Hours: Introduction to the Interactivity API</strong></a> with <strong><a href=\"https://twitter.com/c_z_a_p_l_a\">Michal Czaplinski</a></strong> is now available on WordPressTV. It featured a live product demo of the Interactivity API.  Michal is one of the developers on the team that brought the Interactivity API to fruition. Following the demo, Michal answered attendees&#8217; questions. </p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\" />\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Ryan Welcher</strong> uploaded the recording of his <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qalDqYnFRA\"><strong>3rd edition of &#8220;Bring me your Issues&#8221; serie</strong></a>s to YouTube. First he gave an overview of the Gutenberg 15.5 release and the showed how to create a custom external template for APIs for the create-block scaffolding tool.&nbsp;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The latter was also a topic of a Gutenberg Times Live Q &amp; A with <strong>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</strong> and <strong>Fabian Kägy</strong> a couple of years ago, with demos and additional background: <a href=\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/tooling-using-create-block-scaffolding-and-3rd-party-templates/\">Tooling: Using Create-Block Scaffolding and 3rd Party Templates</a></p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\" />\n\n\n\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://twitter.com/ajaydsouza\">Ajay D&#8217;Souza</a></strong> showed you in his post <a href=\"https://webberzone.com/blog/wordpress-block-development-building-multiple-blocks/\"><strong>WordPress block development:&nbsp;Building multiple blocks</strong></a>, how to use the create-block scaffolding tool to add blocks to your plugin. </p>\n\n\n\n\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/need-a-zip-from-master/\">Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg&#8217;s master branch?</a></strong><br />Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review. <br />Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><img alt=\"GitHub all releases\" src=\"https://img.shields.io/github/downloads/bph/gutenberg/total?style=for-the-badge\" /></p>\n\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right has-small-font-size\"><em>Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? Don&#8217;t hesitate to send <a href=\"mailto:pauli@gutenbergtimes.com\">them via email</a> or send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph</em>. </p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right has-small-font-size\">For questions to be answered on the <a href=\"http://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast\">Gutenberg Changelog</a>, send them to <a href=\"mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com\">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a></p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\" />\n\n\n\n\n<p>Featured Image: <a href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lego_blocks.jpg\">Ypiyush22 Lego blocks lying on floor closeup</a> &#8211; found on Wikimedia. </p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-css-opacity is-style-wide\" />\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left\"><strong>Don&#8217;t want to miss the next Weekend Edition? </strong></p>\n\n\n\n<form class=\"wp-block-newsletterglue-form ngl-form ngl-portrait\" action=\"https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/\" method=\"post\"><div class=\"ngl-form-container\"><div class=\"ngl-form-field\"><label class=\"ngl-form-label\" for=\"ngl_email\"><br />Type in your Email address to subscribe.</label><div class=\"ngl-form-input\"><input type=\"email\" class=\"ngl-form-input-text\" name=\"ngl_email\" id=\"ngl_email\" /></div></div><button type=\"submit\" class=\"ngl-form-button\">Subscribe</button><p class=\"ngl-form-text\">We hate spam, too and won&#8217;t give your email address to anyone except Mailchimp to send out our Weekend Edition</p></div><div class=\"ngl-message-overlay\"><div class=\"ngl-message-svg-wrap\"></div><div class=\"ngl-message-overlay-text\">Thanks for subscribing.</div></div><input type=\"hidden\" name=\"ngl_list_id\" id=\"ngl_list_id\" value=\"26f81bd8ae\" /><input type=\"hidden\" name=\"ngl_double_optin\" id=\"ngl_double_optin\" value=\"yes\" /></form>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-css-opacity is-style-wide\" />\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Sat, 22 Apr 2023 09:15:50 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:18:\"Birgit Pauli-Haack\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:41;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:84:\"WPTavern: Newly Rewritten WordPress SQLite Database Integration Plugin Needs Testing\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:30:\"https://wptavern.com/?p=143887\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:95:\"https://wptavern.com/newly-rewritten-wordpress-sqlite-database-integration-plugin-needs-testing\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:5938:\"<p>WordPress contributors are making progress on officially <a href=\"https://wptavern.com/sqlite-database-integration-now-available-as-a-plugin-for-testing\">supporting SQLite in core</a>, a project that would benefit less complex sites (small to medium sites and blogs) that don’t necessarily require WordPress’ standard MySQL database. In a recent <a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/19/status-update-on-the-sqlite-project/\">update</a>, Yoast-sponsored core contributor Ari Stathopoulos said the <a href=\"https://wordpress.org/plugins/sqlite-database-integration/\">SQLite Database Integration</a> feature plugin has been rewritten, with the help of Automattic-sponsored core contributor Adam Zielinski, to be a more future-proof implementation.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;The code has been completely rewritten to use an SQL Lexer and is now stable and able to handle all WordPress queries properly,&#8221; Stathopoulos said. &#8220;The SQL Lexer is part of the <a href=\"https://github.com/phpmyadmin/sql-parser\">PHPMyAdmin/SQL-Parser</a> project (licensed under the GPL 2.0) and it was adapted for WordPress, effectively implementing a <a href=\"https://github.com/WordPress/sqlite-database-integration/pull/9\">MySQL to SQLite translation engine</a>. This provides improved security, as well as compatibility.&#8221;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Stathopoulos contends that the next step is to implement these changes in WordPress core &#8220;instead of using a plugin,&#8221; because in its current form it can only be tested on pre-existing websites that already have a MySQL database.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Using the <em>featured</em> plugin is a great way to allow users to test the implementation and iron out any issues etc,&#8221; he said. &#8220;However, long-term, it doesn’t make sense to use it as a plugin.&#8221; </p>\n\n\n\n<p>Stathopoulos created a <a href=\"https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/pull/3220\">draft Pull Request</a> and an accompanying <a href=\"https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/57793\">Trac ticket</a> proposing the new implementation be merged into core.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Although the effort has received positive feedback and support from the community and WordPress lead developer Matt Mullenweg, the feature plugin has only 30 active installs and the new implementation has received very little testing.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Multiple participants in the discussion, including core committer Aaron Jorbin and lead developer Andrew Ozz, expressed concerns about the proposal&#8217;s call for merging the changes to core as the next step. </p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Talk of merging to core feels incredibly premature for a couple of reasons,&#8221; Jorbin said. &#8220;The plugin now only has around 30 installations. I think there needs to be much higher adoption in order to understand how the near-infinite number of plugins will work with this deep underlying change to WordPress.&#8221;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jorbin also referenced WordPress&#8217; philosophy of building things for end users who don&#8217;t want to have to make decisions about the underlying tech but simply want things to work.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Assuming that a user is going to understand different database engines and the potential tradeoffs feels far stretched to me,&#8221; Jorbin said. &#8220;Therefore, any implementation really needs to be rock solid and extremely thoroughly tested.&#8221;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jorbin also echoed concerns of other contributors in previous conversations, about <a href=\"https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html\">SQLite&#8217;s bizarre religion-infused &#8220;code of ethics</a>.&#8221;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ozz suggested the plugin could be added to WordPress as a mu-plugin or a &#8220;drop-in&#8221; similar to how caching add-ons are implemented, pushing back on the rigidity of the requirement to fully merge it into core.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Both of these methods are also better/more suitable for the users as they can be done by the hosting company or the script used for WordPress installation,&#8221; Ozz said. &#8220;There are some other benefits like independent updates, etc.&#8221;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Stathopoulos responded to these concerns, saying that he sees the merge to core as a long-term goal, although the proposal communicated more of an urgency that confused participants in the discussion.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;It is premature,&#8221; Stathopoulos admitted. &#8220;However, looking at the bigger picture, it is not premature to plan for the future and get ready for it.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;It may be premature now, but it won’t be 2 years from now… The problem is that we won’t be able to do it in the future unless we start working on it now.<br />SQLite is not something that can – or should – happen in Core now, or even a year from now. It’s a long-term goal, and should be treated as such.&#8221;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Stathopoulos agreed that the plugin needs more adoption to see how it works with plugins across the ecosystem. He also responded to concerns about users not fully understanding the implications of the database engine they select on installation.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;The proof-of-concept UI I put in place in the Core PR is just that – a proof of concept,&#8221;  Stathopoulos said. &#8220;Something to trigger discussion and allow us to find solutions. It can be anything, even installation scenarios (do you want to create a blog? A small e-commerce site? A large news outlet? The next Amazon?) That is a discussion that will need to happen when the time is right to discuss UI, but it’s is a bit too early for that, I don’t think we’re there yet.&#8221;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Stathopoulos recommends contributors test the new implementation with all the plugins they normally use, via the <a href=\"https://w.org/plugins/sqlite-database-integration/\">SQLite Database Integration plugin</a> or by testing the <a href=\"https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/pull/3220\">draft pull request in WordPress Core</a>.</p>\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Fri, 21 Apr 2023 21:37:28 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"Sarah Gooding\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:42;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:100:\"WordCamp Central: WordCamp Jinja 2023: Empowering the Future Generation of WordPress Users in Africa\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:39:\"https://central.wordcamp.org/?p=3164522\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:124:\"https://central.wordcamp.org/news/2023/04/wordcamp-jinja-2023-empowering-the-future-generation-of-wordpress-users-in-africa/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:7502:\"<img src=\"https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2022/files/2023/04/WordCamp-Jinja-2022-attendees-in-the-Computer-Lab-at-Jinja-College-on-2nd-Sept-2022.jpg\" alt=\"WordCamp Jinja 2022 attendees in the Computer Lab at Jinja College on 2nd Sept 2022\" />\n\n\n\n<p><em>Inaugural WordCamp Jinja 2022 attendees in the Computer Lab at Jinja College School on 2nd Sept 2022</em>.</p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">At the heart of every revolution lies a spark that ignites the collective spirit, driving the wheels of change and inspiring the future. In the realm of WordPress, this spark is the passion for innovation, collaboration, and creativity. <a href=\"https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2023/\">WordCamp Jinja 2023</a> is proud to stand as a torchbearer in this journey, with a mission to empower the future generation of WordPress users: our students and their teachers.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Scheduled for the 4th and 5th of September, 2023, at <a href=\"https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2023/location/\">Iganga Secondary School</a> the prestigious girl&#8217;s school in Eastern Uganda. WordCamp Jinja 2023 embraces the theme, &#8220;<em>There is always more to learn!</em>&#8221; &#8211; adapted from the <a href=\"https://learn.wordpress.org/\">learn.wordpress.org platform</a>. This year, we aim to create a platform for students and teachers to engage with the vibrant WordPress community, empowering them to harness the true potential of this versatile platform. </p>\n\n\n\n<p>But WordCamp Jinja 2023 is not merely an exclusive domain for students and teachers. Oh no, dear friends! The invitation extends far and wide, reaching out to the local tech communities to partake in the festivities. We believe that learning is a lifelong journey, and WordPress is a great companion along the way. Whether you are a student, a teacher, a developer, a designer, a blogger, or an entrepreneur, there is always something new to discover and share with WordPress.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The event will feature hands-on and minds-on workshops that encourage participants to explore the depths of the <a href=\"https://learn.wordpress.org/\">Learn WordPress platform</a>, while also offering an Entrepreneurship Track with breakout speaker presentations. The extra Contributor Day, scheduled for the 6th of September at <a href=\"https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2023/location/\">The Innovation Village in Jinja</a>, will feature a Website Hackathon to further engage and inspire the attendees as their skills are put to the test to create stunning websites with WordPress in a limited time, working in teams and competing for prizes and glory!.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We believe that by fostering a spirit of learning and collaboration, we can help shape the minds of the future, ensuring a legacy of innovation and progress. To achieve this, we are extending a warm invitation to speakers / trainers. If you have a story to tell, knowledge to share, or inspiration to spread, please submit your proposal through our Call for Speakers page: <a href=\"https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2023/call-for-speakers/\">https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2023/call-for-speakers/</a></p>\n\n\n\n<p>We are also seeking sponsors who believe in our mission and would like to support WordCamp Jinja 2023. Your contribution will not only help us create a memorable and impactful event but also pave the way for the future generation of WordPress users. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, please visit our Call for Sponsors page: <a href=\"https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2023/call-for-sponsors/\">https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2023/call-for-sponsors/</a></p>\n\n\n\n<p>Together, let us embark on a journey of learning and empowerment at WordCamp Jinja 2023, and create a brighter future for the next generation of WordPress enthusiasts at the heart of Africa and beyond!</p>\n\n\n\n<p>PS: WordCamp Jinja 2023 is the second WordCamp to be organised by <a href=\"https://www.meetup.com/jinja-wordpress-meetup\">Jinja WordPress Meetup</a>, after a successful <a href=\"https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2022/6-places-1-wordcamp-wordcamp-jinja-in-pictures/\">WordCamp Jinja 2022</a> on 2nd &#8211; 3rd Sept last year at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/TheVillageUG/status/1566795035672207360?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1566795035672207360%7Ctwgr%5E32eb924a43ac83d945af849afc873ce8ce128b6d%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fjinja.wordcamp.org%2F2023%2Flocation%2F\">The Innovation Village</a> in Jinja City. WordPress Jinja Meetup holds regular meetups for WordPress enthusiasts in Jinja and nearby towns.</p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"wp-embedded-content\"><a href=\"https://jinja.wordcamp.org/2022/6-places-1-wordcamp-wordcamp-jinja-in-pictures/\">6 places, 1 WordCamp: WordCamp Jinja in Pictures</a></blockquote>\n</div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\"><a href=\"https://twitter.com/hashtag/Kudos?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#Kudos</a> to the partners, speakers and participants who made the inaugural <a href=\"https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordCampJinja?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#WordCampJinja</a> a success. The engagements, trainings and hackathon were great and insightful. We strive to stay committed to providing platform where young people can meet, connect, and share ideas. <a href=\"https://t.co/o75W402ID4\">pic.twitter.com/o75W402ID4</a></p>&mdash; The Innovation Village (@TheVillageUG) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/TheVillageUG/status/1566795035672207360?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">September 5, 2022</a></blockquote>\n</div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Impact : Mbale SS <a href=\"https://twitter.com/ICTClubsUg?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@ICTClubsUg</a> students presenting thier <a href=\"https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordPress?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#WordPress</a> powered website project earlier today at thier school. They are grateful to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/Kawauganda?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@Kawauganda</a> for inviting them to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordCampJinja?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#WordCampJinja</a> where they learned about website development with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/WordPress?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@WordPress</a> for the first time! <a href=\"https://t.co/OEUGkoazlE\">pic.twitter.com/OEUGkoazlE</a></p>&mdash; Jinja WordPress Meetup (@WordPressJinja) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/WordPressJinja/status/1575556334493507584?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">September 29, 2022</a></blockquote>\n</div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Thanks to all who turned up physically at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/TheVillageUG?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@TheVillageUG</a> Jinja for our <a href=\"https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordPressMeetup?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#WordPressMeetup</a>, and those who joined in virtually, including <a href=\"https://twitter.com/ICTClubsUg?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@ICTClubsUg</a> students from Jinja College. It\'s been great!<br /><br />We\'ll do more meetups in the runup to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordCampJinja?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#WordCampJinja</a> slated for 4th-5th Sept 2023. <a href=\"https://twitter.com/hashtag/WP20?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#WP20</a> <a href=\"https://t.co/g7xkAmBlIc\">pic.twitter.com/g7xkAmBlIc</a></p>&mdash; Jinja WordPress Meetup (@WordPressJinja) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/WordPressJinja/status/1648199585272037377?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">April 18, 2023</a></blockquote>\n</div>\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Fri, 21 Apr 2023 18:18:47 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:15:\"Mukalele Rogers\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:43;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:70:\"Do The Woo Community: Do the Woo Friday Show with Vito Peleg and BobWP\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:28:\"https://dothewoo.io/?p=74823\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:69:\"https://dothewoo.io/do-the-woo-friday-show-with-vito-peleg-and-bobwp/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:421:\"<p>In this Friday show we talk about community burnout, the size of larger WordCamps and charging enough for your website builds. </p>\n<p>&gt;&gt; The post <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https://dothewoo.io/do-the-woo-friday-show-with-vito-peleg-and-bobwp/\">Do the Woo Friday Show with Vito Peleg and BobWP</a> appeared first on <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https://dothewoo.io\">Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community</a>	.</p>\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Fri, 21 Apr 2023 11:00:00 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:5:\"BobWP\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:44;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:97:\"WPTavern: Gutenberg 15.6 Introduces Experimental Details Block and Command Center for Site Editor\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:30:\"https://wptavern.com/?p=143837\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:108:\"https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-15-6-introduces-experimental-details-block-and-command-center-for-site-editor\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:4226:\"<p><a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/19/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-6-19-april/\">Gutenberg 15.6</a> is now available with a new <a href=\"https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/45055\">Details block</a> tucked under the Experiments menu. Once enabled, it can be used to toggle the visibility of hidden content. This can be useful for presenting things like text transcripts for video blocks or simple spoiler alerts. By default the toggle is open in the block editor but closed on the front end. This is the first iteration, so the behavior of the toggle is still somewhat rough.</p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Another interesting experiment that shipped in version 15.6 is a command center for the Site Editor. It was created to be a quick search for jumping to other pages or templates in the editor. </p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;This can be seen as a start on an extensible command and quick search component that can be used for way-finding (<em>go to About page</em>; <em>edit Archive template</em>) and running commands (<em>toggle top toolbar</em>; etc),&#8221; Gutenberg lead architect Matias Ventura said in the <a href=\"https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/48457\">ticket</a> outlining the feature. &#8220;The first milestone is to power quick search for content and templates within the site editor.&#8221;</p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Gutenberg engineer Riad Benguella said his goal with the <a href=\"https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/49330\">initial PR</a> is to build the APIs and components for the command center but not necessarily implement all the commands. Ultimately he aims for this feature to do the following:</p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>The command center can be loaded in any WPAdmin page</li>\n\n\n\n<li>The commands and the command center are independent: Commands can be registered dynamically depending on the context</li>\n\n\n\n<li>Some small hierarchy of commands to be able to organize the items</li>\n\n\n\n<li>Allowing dynamic searches for commands</li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Gutenberg contributors are still considering how to organize and display commands better based on context, which is one reason why this feature remains behind the Experiments flag.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Version 15.6 also brings spacing presets to the Spacer block settings, allowing theme authors to create sensible presets and users to adjust spacing in a way that will look good across devices.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Since the introduction of spacing presets, it became clear from community feedback that <a href=\"https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/44002\">spacing presets</a> should also be available for the Height control in the Spacer block,&#8221; WordPress developer advocate Birgit Pauli-Haack said in the release post. &#8220;This enhancement in 15.6 gives theme developers much more flexibility over how spacing is applied throughout a site and enables fluid Spacer blocks.&#8221;</p>\n\n\n\n<img />\n\n\n\n<p>WordPress core contributor Nick Diego filmed a short video about spacing presets for the Spacer block, which demonstrates how fluid spacing work to help a site&#8217;s content and design adapt better to different viewports.</p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Gutenberg 15.6 came out yesterday, and one of my favorite new features is spacing presets for the Spacer block.<br /><br />Fluid spacers anyone? <img src=\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/2728.png\" alt=\"✨\" class=\"wp-smiley\" /> <a href=\"https://t.co/k9NJSy05Xd\">pic.twitter.com/k9NJSy05Xd</a></p>&mdash; Nick Diego (@nickmdiego) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/nickmdiego/status/1649055649542856704?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">April 20, 2023</a></blockquote>\n</div>\n\n\n\n<p>A few other highlights in Gutenberg 15.6 include the following:</p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>Adds border support to the Cover block</li>\n\n\n\n<li>Makes Style Variations accessible in Browse Mode</li>\n\n\n\n<li>List View now allows dragging underneath collapsed non-empty container blocks</li>\n\n\n\n<li>Smoother animations for Drop Zone in the canvas</li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Check out the <a href=\"https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/04/19/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-6-19-april/\">changelog</a> to see all the enhancements, bug fixes, and performance and tooling updates.</p>\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Thu, 20 Apr 2023 22:15:39 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"Sarah Gooding\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:45;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:64:\"Post Status: Launching a WordPress Product in Public: Session 10\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:32:\"https://poststatus.com/?p=149055\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:74:\"https://poststatus.com/launching-a-wordpress-product-in-public-session-10/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:85524:\"<div class=\"wp-block-group eplus-wrapper has-theme-palette-2-color has-theme-palette-8-background-color has-text-color has-background is-layout-flow\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container\"><div class=\"wp-block-post-excerpt\"><p class=\"wp-block-post-excerpt__excerpt\"><a href=\"https://twitter.com/coreymaass\">Corey Maass</a> and <a href=\"https://twitter.com/corymiller303\">Cory Miller</a> look to the future of WordPress as they continue the development of their new WordPress plugin, <a href=\"https://crop.express/\">Crop.Express</a>. From sharing tips on how to keep your WordPress website safe from hacks and vulnerabilities to insights on how to optimize website performance, improve user experience, and enhance website accessibility, this episode is packed with valuable takeaways. </p></div>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-spacer eplus-wrapper\"></div>\n\n\n<span class=\"span-reading-time rt-reading-time\"><span class=\"rt-label rt-prefix\">Estimated Reading Time:</span> <span class=\"rt-time\"> 43</span> <span class=\"rt-label rt-postfix\">minutes</span></span>\n</div></div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https://poststatus.com/planet/feed/#h-transcript\">Transcript</a> ↓</p>\n\n\n\n<p>In this episode, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/corymiller303\">Cory Miller</a> and <a href=\"https://twitter.com/coreymaass\">Corey Maass</a> discuss the future of WordPress. From the adoption of the block editor to the rise of headless WordPress, they consider the impact on the growing WordPress community. Gain insights on how WordPress professionals can stay ahead of the curve, the importance of keeping up with the latest updates and developments in the WordPress ecosystem, and the significance of fostering a strong and supportive community. This is an honest and hopeful look at the current and future state of WordPress.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Top Takeaways:</strong></p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Keep up with the latest WordPress updates.</strong> It&#8217;s important for WordPress professionals to stay up-to-date with the latest WordPress updates, including security patches, bug fixes, and new features. This will ensure that your WordPress site stays secure and runs smoothly.</li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Invest in continuous learning.</strong> As WordPress evolves, it&#8217;s important to invest in continuous learning to keep up with the latest trends, technologies, and best practices. This can include attending conferences, networking with other professionals, and regularly reading blogs and publications related to WordPress and web development. Keeping up with the latest trends and best practices can help professionals stay competitive and provide the best possible service to their clients.</li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Focus on user experience.</strong> User experience should be at the forefront of any WordPress professional&#8217;s mind. This means designing websites that are easy to use, fast-loading, and visually appealing, as well as ensuring content is relevant and engaging for the target audience. By focusing on user experience, WordPress professionals can create websites that are both effective and enjoyable to use.</li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n\n</div>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading eplus-wrapper\" id=\"h-mentioned-in-the-show\"><img src=\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f517.png\" alt=\"🔗\" class=\"wp-smiley\" /> Mentioned in the show:</h3>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://crop.express/\">Crop.Express</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://jetpack.com/\">Jetpack</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://automattic.com/\">Automattic</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://woocommerce.com/\">WooCommerce</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://twitter.com/photomatt\">Matt Mullenweg</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://twitter.com/chriscoyier\">Chris Coyier</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://css-tricks.com/\">CSS-Tricks</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://codepen.io/\">CodePen</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://yoast.com/\">Yoast</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://wpengine.com/\">WP Engine</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://github.com/\">GitHub</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://www.atlassian.com/\">Atlassian</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://trello.com/\">Trello</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://asana.com/id\">Asana</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://basecamp.com/\">Basecamp</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://zapier.com/\">Zapier</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dropbox.com/\">Dropbox</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://www.zoom.us/\">Zoom</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://www.notion.so/\">Notion</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://www.figma.com/\">Figma</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://www.sketch.com/\">Sketch</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://www.invisionapp.com/\">InVision</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading eplus-wrapper\" id=\"h-you-can-follow-post-status-and-our-guests-on-twitter\"><img src=\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f426.png\" alt=\"🐦\" class=\"wp-smiley\" /> You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:</h3>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"eplus-wrapper\">\n<li><a href=\"http://twitter.com/coreymaass\">Corey Maass</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://twitter.com/corymiller303\">Cory Miller</a> (CEO, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/post_status\">Post Status</a>)</li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://twitter.com/lemonadecode\">Olivia Bisset</a> (Intern, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/post_status\">Post Status</a>)</li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"eplus-wrapper has-background\">The <strong>Post Status Draft</strong> podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. <img src=\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f4dd.png\" alt=\"📝\" class=\"wp-smiley\" /><br /><br /><a href=\"https://poststatus.com/category/post-status-podcasts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Browse our archives</a>, and don’t forget to subscribe via <a href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/post-status-draft-wordpress/id976403008\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS8ySkU5c2M4UA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/c/PostStatus\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube</a>, <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/krogsgard/post-status-draft-wordpress-podcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://wordpress-post-status-draft-podcast.simplecast.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Simplecast</a>, or <a href=\"https://feeds.simplecast.com/2JE9sc8P\">RSS</a>. <img src=\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f3a7.png\" alt=\"🎧\" class=\"wp-smiley\" /></p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading eplus-wrapper\" id=\"h-transcript\">Transcript</h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Session 10 Corey &amp; Cory Launch a WordPress Product Live</h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Cory Miller: [00:00:00] Nice. Um, so it makes it really nice to stream YouTube. Um, okay, so<br />session 10. Now turn off YouTube. Um, so session 10, we&#8217;re talking, um, last week we said<br />we&#8217;re good on the version for Crop Dotted Express, and we had saw a new direction with the<br />project you had been working on anyway. Mm-hmm. And we spent some time just privately<br />discussing that.<br />And so, um, we were just chatting in the pre-roll before this about okay is, you know, building it<br />in public, but we&#8217;re, we&#8217;ve pa not paused, we&#8217;ve put a bow on that one and said, okay, there&#8217;s<br />something else here. And now it&#8217;s time to kind of explore that and figure out what&#8217;s, what could<br />that product be. [00:01:00] Um, you just had a couple really good, um, comments about that<br />whole process of here&#8217;s that one, but we&#8217;re going onto this next one.<br />Hmm. Can you share some of that you&#8217;re just sharing with me? Cause I think it&#8217;s really good<br />and I don&#8217;t want to Sure. Oh, your butcher, you&#8217;re your top.<br />Corey Maass: Um, so, uh, for the sake of accountability, I do wanna say that Crop express, uh,<br />is pending a read me update that you and I worked on, I think last time. And there are a couple<br />of tweaks to make to the product itself.<br />The plugin itself. To in fact put a bow on it cuz I wanted it. It&#8217;s gonna be, you know, so, so a little<br />digression here. It&#8217;s very easy for, uh, any product team as we now are to go, uh, that was<br />yesterday&#8217;s new shiny, [00:02:00] today&#8217;s new shinies over there. Um, and if we are not<br />abandoning crop express, which we are not, then it&#8217;s important that I sit down at some point and<br />actually put a bow on it.<br />And we don&#8217;t just keep saying we&#8217;re gonna put a bow on it and let it ride, but, um, you know, let<br />it be a whole product unto itself. I think that&#8217;s important. So that&#8217;s on my list. Um, but yeah, we,<br />in, in the process of talking about crop express and where the value add is, um, one of the<br />things that you talked about really well, um, is the, Difference between, you had a little graphic<br />that, you know, pain solving a pain versus adding value.<br />Um, and obviously these things are not mutually exclusive by any stretch, but, um, crop Express<br />solved a problem for us. That&#8217;s why, why we started the conversation in the first place. I built this<br />little web utility. You went, holy crap, this [00:03:00] needs to be in WordPress. Uh, and that<br />launched our journey, but we kept having these great meta conversations about image images<br />in WordPress as a whole.<br />And one of the things, problems that I&#8217;ve been struggling with for a while, for my own blog and<br />again for, um, client sites, not only is it cropping images correctly, which solves a pain point,<br />ideally, um, but is you write a blog post and, and then what? Right. You need other assets to go<br />along with it. Uh, and then in a perfect, you know, so we&#8217;re talking, now we&#8217;re talking about<br />marketing, right?<br />We&#8217;re talking about marketing assets, things to put on Twitter, images to put on Twitter images<br />to put on Instagram, and, and having to go over to Canva to do that or some other tool. Um, and<br />so now we&#8217;re talking [00:04:00] about that, which is, you know, there is pain involved. These are<br />extra steps, but it&#8217;s the difference between, to me, you know, the difference between trying to<br />write a, a basic blog post with an image inward press, and that it&#8217;s.<br />You get to the end of the words and you&#8217;re like, oh, this is such a pain. I need to do something<br />with an image and leave WordPress. Versus traditionally, I think we&#8217;d write a blog post in<br />WordPress and then go, okay, the WordPress part is done. Now let me jump over to Canva,<br />Photoshop, whatever it is to generate these other images.<br />Um, and so now we&#8217;re sort of switching over to a value add potentially.<br />Cory Miller: Yeah. I, um, most of my product experience is in the pain threshold. Um, you know,<br />backup, security, all that, you know, updating stuff, very [00:05:00] utilitarian, um, practical<br />things, and I really appreciate it. That&#8217;s part of my personality too. I like utility things. You know,<br />there&#8217;s this pin, for instance, is the big. A pin.<br />And in my belief, there&#8217;s no other better pin than this pin. So I take &#8217;em from everywhere that<br />has &#8217;em, that gives &#8217;em out. And I promote all Napa Valley Winery. Um, so I, I&#8217;m practical in that</p>\n\n\n\n<p>utilitarian, like, do something for you. And it was great to see some of the products, like people<br />just, they needed it, you know?<br />Um, I always aspired to the ones that help people look good, make money, all that. And we built<br />those into those products for sure, where people could use those things and what labeled them<br />or package them into a bigger thing. And so a lot of the products were very utility products, but<br />the marketing and things we did was very aspirational.<br />Um, [00:06:00] this one so interesting because you had already been working on something and<br />you showed it to me and I was like, oh, wow. And. As I can do anything, I can blow something<br />real big up, you know? And that&#8217;s what we did. We, wow. The compelling thing was, you know,<br />I&#8217;ll take some of the marketing tools, like for instance, uh, the one I just kind of default to think of<br />is Optum Monster.<br />Hmm. When you see what, whatever time they came out with the Optum Monster, um, when<br />you see that a popup and what they, what you could do with that, you instantly kind of go, oh<br />wow, I could do that too. And that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s really compelling for me. Um mm-hmm. When you&#8217;re<br />able to show an outcome that people go, I mean, it&#8217;s marketing product for sure.<br />It helps you build your email, um, email list. It helps you potentially, [00:07:00] uh, get some<br />purchases from coupons and things like that. Not to go into the full thing about Optum Monster,<br />but. You go right there, you can see what the product does. Mm-hmm. And if you don&#8217;t have<br />that, you can go, wow, this could make, make it easier.<br />What&#8217;s compelling about what you said was, or what we, we, you showed me is this, one of the<br />many things we talked about was the social images, being able to, you write your post and then<br />you&#8217;re, you&#8217;re ready to promote it and like you said, go to Cam and do all these things. Um, I<br />think in this conversation, what I&#8217;ve kinda learned from Crop Drive Express and then past stuff is<br />particularly with this idea, we can give that aha oh wow moment for someone.<br />And we talked about using it on some of our client sites, post status and different things. Um,<br />because then when you see. That&#8217;s where I [00:08:00] think, you know, when they see<br />something going out that has a nice treatment, um, yeah. Where it&#8217;s not just a link. I mean,<br />that&#8217;s what I tend to do personally. Um, then I think there&#8217;s, there&#8217;s some merit there of you want<br />your base hub to be your website and they&#8217;re promoting outs through your social channels, and<br />then those to look appealing and good, whether it&#8217;s Facebook, Instagram, whatever those things<br />are.<br />Yeah. Um, and kinda lead back. And that&#8217;s where I go. I&#8217;ll tell you, I in this, in this whole project<br />that we&#8217;ve been working on together, it just keep, I keep coming back to you and I talked about<br />our, at our product owners meet up this week. Um, getting as close as you can to the pain that a<br />potential customer has, um, or that desire to do for them to look better, make more money.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Um, I don&#8217;t know. This is the work I need to do more is getting closer to that, you know? Mm-<br />hmm. Where it&#8217;s not just theory, us talking, it&#8217;s like, [00:09:00] you know, do, is this an issue?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And there&#8217;s, um, you know, a book out called the Mom Test and mm-hmm. The thing is, when<br />you have an idea and you go to your mom, she&#8217;s always gonna say, I love it.<br />Yeah. So making it in a way where it&#8217;s more discovery. But that&#8217;s my thoughts about this and I<br />wanna be sure because this is a bigger project. Um, I guess the word would be validating. Yep.<br />Is there a pain point? Is there someone willing to, to, to pay for it? Um, so we&#8217;re really taking it. I<br />know we approached this as a hobby, but going, okay, give our best effort to make this into<br />something that actually does pay us my thought.<br />Corey Maass: Yeah. . And that was, and that was, I think, part of why, so I don&#8217;t remember the<br />summary to, to, we&#8217;re on session 10. So in session eight, I think we, we, the conversation came<br />to a point where we said, okay, so, so [00:10:00] cropping images is one piece of the puzzle of<br />consistent, good looking images on a WordPress site.<br />That could be a blog, that could be WooCommerce, whatever, right? Um, and so we were still<br />sort of solving, um, yeah, we were solving a basic problem. Um, again, a p a a point of pain that,<br />uh, we had. Um, I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m trying, in my brain, I keep drawing this analogy of, um, a basic car, your<br />Honda Civic from, I, my first Honda Civic, uh, that I bought in 2015 was from 2000.<br />So 15 year old, you know, but in good shape. But it would get you there, but no bells and<br />whistles. The, the crank windows, the whole thing, right? And so, um, and, and a lot of people, I<br />think this was a, you know, more traditionally [00:11:00] WordPress as a blog platform was that<br />for a lot of people, I&#8217;m gonna put words out.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Maybe people find it or they don&#8217;t. I&#8217;m gonna tell my friends about it along come social media,<br />uh, and, and other paradigms and, and the things go from, I guess you sort of hope for inbound,<br />you know, and we&#8217;re talking about amateurs or, or non-professionals is the better word, right?<br />But, um, you know, to outbound.<br />And then also I think there&#8217;s an expectation now, or most people blog for money, right? Most<br />people publish for money. Most people use WordPress for money a lot more than back in the<br />day when it was, you know, express yourself or put yourself online or, or, you know, build<br />authority, all those things. Um, and so taking that, uh, your, the, the bigger problem that we,<br />when we talked about with crop express of consistent [00:12:00] images and putting yourself out<br />there, and it&#8217;s like we&#8217;re talking about, um, Individuality, right?<br />So it&#8217;s not just cropping finding a, finding a, a stock photo one for each post, right? Or each, um,<br />product image. If you&#8217;ve, if you&#8217;re running Woo commerce, it&#8217;s like, yeah, it&#8217;s a square. Okay, it&#8217;s,<br />I sell, you know, this widget and that widget, and I crop them all to be squares. But it&#8217;s like, do<br />those images stand out?<br />Do those images have more information? So it&#8217;s like, if I go to the website, there&#8217;s all the<br />information next to a photo. But on Twitter, if I put that photo up and it&#8217;s just a picture of a<br />widget, it doesn&#8217;t list the benefits. It doesn&#8217;t, you know, so it&#8217;s not, um, a compelling bigger, and<br />this is where, you know, um, I think one of the things that really clicked for me was you sent me.<br />The, on the, on the post status blog, one of the threads there is, or tags or something is, you<br />know, here are all the [00:13:00] people we&#8217;ve featured. And I was like, wait, all of these banner<br />images not only are the same size, but they&#8217;ve all got the same treatment. They all have the<br />post status logo on the left. Um, you know, and we look at, and that, and that, that solidified<br />something for me that you&#8217;d touched on, but I, I couldn&#8217;t relate to as much.<br />Like, you, you really liked slides, um, and talked about using slides again to promote things.<br />And, and we sort of went, wow, what if, you know, you have, um, uh, your product images, you<br />or your, your, your blog post banner, image featured image, um, that had bullet points on it or,<br />you know, so it was like taking these, I guess what I&#8217;m trying to do is summarize, um, very<br />specifically, A little bit of how we got here, but also what we&#8217;re now talking about, right?<br />So we&#8217;re talking about image treatment, image generation, um, based around one post quote<br />unquote [00:14:00] post, which in WordPress can be a product, can be a blog post, can be an<br />article, can be your course if you&#8217;re running an l m s, whatever it is. Um, and so that&#8217;s kind of<br />the, the switch from solving a pain point, cropping an image to this huge value add.<br />And it&#8217;s like, and I guess, yeah, uh, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s coming together in my head. You brought in opt,<br />brought up Optum Monster. So it&#8217;s like you could have a website, you could have great content.<br />Optin Monster is this value add. If your end goal is promotion, money, fame, and fortune, all that<br />kind of stuff, being a reality TV star, um, optin Monster is this great.<br />You know, the going from, from your Honda Civic to the, the sport version, and then the fins and<br />the, you know, so now suddenly you&#8217;ve got, you know, you&#8217;ve gone from a basic way to publish<br />content to, you know, bells and [00:15:00] whistles essentially. Um, which isn&#8217;t to diminish it like<br />bells and whistles are often it&#8217;s, um, not it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s said in a condescending way or a bad way, but<br />we&#8217;re talking about like, okay, how can you, you know, make the, the basic car that gets you<br />from A to B be a fun experience, that kind of thing.<br />Um, enough restraining the metaphors. The point is, um, yeah, OptinMonster adds this extra<br />value and whatnot. So it&#8217;s like if we have, uh, if you write a blog post, what we&#8217;re talking about<br />doing is, is. A product in WordPress that can generate slides, can generate images, could crop<br />the image, but also could add potentially a, a graphical treatment.<br />Um, so it&#8217;s always got a blue fade or it&#8217;s always got a logo on the left, or it&#8217;s always got, and, and<br />these things would be auto-generated. Um, so you, you finish your post, you click a button and<br />[00:16:00] you&#8217;ve got an image for Twitter, an image for Facebook, an image that you know, I<br />mean, taking this to a, um, an extreme no idea if we can yet, if we can do this, but, um, anim an<br />creating an animated gift that has three slides that go by or, you know, things, so things you<br />could upload to Instagram.<br />You know, if it&#8217;s an animated gif it should be, we could create an MP4 out of it and then it&#8217;s, um,<br />a story for Instagram cuz it&#8217;s a video and da da da. So all these, all these shareable assets,<br />which again, take that basic blog post and just blow it up to, to create all these amazing things<br />that you could then do something with.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Um, when we came to, when we were starting to talk about that as a product in our previous call<br />or previous previous call, that was when I said, okay, let&#8217;s have a conversation offline cuz I think<br />maybe I&#8217;ve got a solution for this. Um, so in [00:17:00] parallel, for a few months now, um, I built.<br />Little SAS app, basically web service, um, called screenshot.express and haven&#8217;t launched it.<br />That was if, if you follow me on Twitter, or I think I might have mentioned here too, like this is a<br />product that I built, um, and the a p I works, it works as a, is a little screenshotting platform. Um,<br />but what I really wanted it for was, yes, it&#8217;s great for taking a screenshot of a website, but if it<br />can take a picture of, of, of a website.<br />But that website could be the size and shape of a Twitter banner or, you know, could be a, um, a<br />slide. Then we&#8217;re now talking about using H T M L to, to define a layout. Whatever we want that<br />to look like. And then taking pictures of it. And then there you&#8217;ve got your image and so, and CR<br />and [00:18:00] generating different types of H T M L pages and also taking advantage of res, the<br />responsiveness of, of layout.<br />So it&#8217;s like if you have a header and some text next to each other, but on mobile, the he, the<br />header goes above the text with one H T M L output. You take two pictures, one wide and one<br />narrow. You&#8217;ve now got a, uh, a Twitter banner and you know, a mobile screenshot or whatever.<br />So it&#8217;s like, I realized that in parallel, I&#8217;ve already got this little service that will potentially solve<br />the technical aspect of this.<br />Um, and so that was where sort of all this came together and we went, wow, that&#8217;s, that to me is<br />a much bigger thing. Um, and so as you said at the, the beginning of my ramble, like, we see<br />this as a, as a much bigger product to me, right away my gut says, okay, that&#8217;s much more of a,<br />something we could sell. You know, it&#8217;s, [00:19:00] it&#8217;s a big packageable thing.<br />Whereas crop Express, it was like, this is a great little utility. It solves a neat little problem. And<br />we could probably keep adding some things or, or splashing around in the problem until we<br />found something that would, people pay, would pay a little bit for. Um, but this to me seems like<br />something much bigger.<br />Cory Miller: Yeah, for sure. And I don&#8217;t, um, my tendency is always like, oh, let&#8217;s go, let&#8217;s go.<br />And I&#8217;m trying to really not do that because I, I wanna be careful, you, you in particular. Me too.<br />But you, um, as a developer on the partner, um, and lead on this, I, I wanna be really careful<br />with the time. Mm-hmm. Um, because I, I think we both go, we did something of value here, and<br />I wanna be a little bit more calculated than I have in the past about Okay.<br />Because I can blow these ideas up and go, okay, I see these, what I don&#8217;t wanna do is just do<br />that in a [00:20:00] vacuum. Um, not to like you and I are doing this, but I, I want to, I feel like<br />there&#8217;s something so powerful of getting to whatever the person is trying to do, like having<br />somebody in mind, or talking to people and seeing what they.<br />Talk about it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s funny. So with product at post status, I go, just to give you kind of a parallel<br />about how I&#8217;ve historically think about product and need to change and, and evolve, is I go,<br />okay, for our agency, we, we saw real quickly becoming an owner post status that, um, okay,<br />product people, smaller group of people than you got hosting companies, you have<br />professionals that do all the work.<br />But I really honed in on, there&#8217;s a lot of WordPress agencies out there, and I don&#8217;t see in this<br />space a lot of people that there are really cool companies doing really high-end work for<br />agencies like [00:21:00] Troy, Dean&#8217;s work, um, uro, different things like that. But I go, okay, I,<br />for me, Passion and ability and go.<br />I&#8217;d love to promote and help people tell stories and draw expertise. So long story short, besides<br />just Slack and e and our email newsletter, I think we can offer more to them. Where I&#8217;m at in that<br />product is really interesting for me. Frustrating. I shouldn&#8217;t say interesting. I don&#8217;t wanna say<br />interesting.<br />It&#8217;s frustrating as hell is I go, we could do mar co-marketing for these agencies. Now you know<br />how it is, you bring in an idea to somebody else. It&#8217;s so different from the my uh, the, my big Fat<br />Greek wedding when he goes, you have to make it his idea. And I go, oh, that&#8217;s so true with me<br />too. But, but I go, if you get to customer and see what they&#8217;re doing, um, potential customer and<br />just talk.<br />So like in my interviews with the agency owners, one of the things they stand up, but I<br />[00:22:00] think there&#8217;s a bias cause I&#8217;m coming at as post status. Um, and one of the features<br />we&#8217;ve had in our products is job listings. I go. That&#8217;s what they tend to have gravitated toward it.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I go, well, I don&#8217;t know what more else we could potentially offer in that, but keep getting<br />pros in there.<br />And so that&#8217;s like existing product, just trying to make it better, which is valid foundational. I<br />wanted to do more for them. Now this is where we&#8217;re in that process and, but I don&#8217;t want it to<br />be like, I got this cool idea. Cuz then you&#8217;re kind of just striking trying to try to hit a hit, a hit a<br />winning lado.<br />Um, but that&#8217;s where I&#8217;m at, you know? And, um, with this my mind went to, oh, I mean we, we<br />were talking about our own problems right now, and then we&#8217;re using some clients and different<br />things to think about that. But before we go, I wanna make sure [00:23:00] specifically first and<br />foremost on your behalf is we. Gets some validation.<br />A little spark of something. Yeah. And collect enough sparks that go, this could be a fire. Right?<br />This could be, I just, I wanna do that cuz my tendency is I&#8217;m an DF fair and you know, I dr at the<br />opportunity to work with a great developer like yourself and, and product person like yourself.<br />And, uh, so anyway, that&#8217;s where my mind tends to go.<br />But this is interesting to both of us. Um, now it&#8217;s like if you got a hammer, everything looks like,<br />like a nail. Uh, I wanna be careful of that in this.<br />Corey Maass: Yeah, sure. And I tend to build first and ask questions later. We know this, so,<br />which is<br />Cory Miller: freaking cool. I think that&#8217;s better. See, it would be better as an idea person to be<br />able to build it first too.<br />Right. And say, but I just, I wanna be careful cause I don&#8217;t have those skillsets.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Corey Maass: Well, and, and this one is, I think one of the other things I mentioned in the pre-<br />roll is [00:24:00] this is a much bigger lift. Yeah. And so I&#8217;m also, my brain is saying there&#8217;s, there</p>\n\n\n\n<p>are red flags here to that approach. Crop express, small, you know, crank something out, get it,<br />you know, we, the prototype is going to be straightforward, uh, or was straightforward and, and<br />you coming in and going start with featured images.<br />Great. Even simpler. So we&#8217;ve got one and it turned out to be replicable. So then media library,<br />um, block, um, we did have to hire somebody to get us over a couple of hurdles, but for the<br />most part, Replicable, um, reusable code and all at once. Whereas this, I mean, so I already<br />started my intention of spinning up screenshot express, which is abstract.<br />And I knew that. I&#8217;m like, this is probably isn&#8217;t a thing. I&#8217;m gonna, [00:25:00] I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m gonna sell<br />on its own. There are, and there are people who are making progress with, with other products<br />that take screenshots. And I admire that because I&#8217;m like, this is a, this is a service. This is a,<br />this a hundred percent a solution looking for a problem.<br />And so it&#8217;ll be other developers or me as a developer that uses this tool for whatever problem.<br />And so it&#8217;s like the, I said about building a, a WordPress plugin, which I think you and I should<br />review and start pulling apart and see what we can do with, um, But it&#8217;s, uh, to generate social<br />images to accompany a post.<br />Um, and so the good news is, yeah, I&#8217;ve, I&#8217;ve solved some of the, like, some of the problems,<br />like, what do I wanna say, as a product, it&#8217;s more complicated and involving a third party service,<br />like screenshot.express is more complicated. And [00:26:00] then setting up different images for<br />different use cases is complicated.<br />And, uh, and solving the right problems is complicated. It&#8217;s like you go to Canva, they&#8217;ve got like,<br />not only do they have all the assets and stuff, but they&#8217;ve got a gajillion templates. What do you<br />wanna make today? I wanna make an Instagram post. I wanna make a, you know, a music<br />video. I wanna make a dot, dot dot.<br />Like all these things. So somebody had to sit down and, and make templates out of all those<br />things. Um, and so it&#8217;s building, this is going, you know, as already. Even though I&#8217;ve solved<br />some of the problems connecting to the p i of Screenshot express and stuff is like, all of that is<br />more complicated, a much more complicated user experience.<br />Um, before we even get to the fun part of like, okay, now we can just build a gajillion templates<br />and hope that one of them is the right thing and, and, and on and on. So, um, so yeah, it, it<br />strikes me that you doing more interviews, re more research, [00:27:00] um, us getting more<br />answers, um, before I, like, I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m inclined to, I keep waiting for you to say, like you saying,<br />featured image early on was such a pivotal point, like, here&#8217;s how we simplify this big,<br />complicated thing to start with.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Um, so no pressure, but I&#8217;m waiting for you to come up with that again. Um, but I do think that<br />since I&#8217;ve got, since I&#8217;m close to having s a, an initial. Social image generator plugin forward<br />WordPress using Screenshot express that maybe we start there cuz it does solve the problem.<br />Um, enough for us to, for, for you to get eyes on it as far as user experience and go, yeah, no,<br />this is, you&#8217;ve made it as you, Corey have made it as simple as possible.<br />It&#8217;s good enough. You know, we can, we can [00:28:00] tolerate people, people will tolerate<br />stepping through this pro progress process, even though it&#8217;s a handful of steps to get the value<br />that we are creating at the end. Um, and then, and we keep having these conversations like we<br />did with Crop Express, where we go, okay, wait, but if we put this over here, it makes more<br />sense in context.<br />Or if we mm-hmm. You know, connected to a different service or we put it in front of certain<br />kinds of people, um, then. It&#8217;ll take us, it&#8217;ll take us to it. It&#8217;ll help us grow.<br />Cory Miller: Yeah. Uh, I just asked ChatGPT what are the most popular features of Canva?<br />Hmm. So that, that&#8217;s interesting. Um, excuse me, because we&#8217;ve mentioned that a number of<br />times and different photo editing tool.<br />Um, I think so two parts, making sure I really understand what Screenshotted Express can do at<br />the moment. Um, [00:29:00] but two, I think in this next experiment is having, having a default<br />customer in mind. Yeah. And, you know, sizing that market, the, the person that we know, that<br />we think we understand or have some connections with.<br />And then seeing how that market is. Because it cur, it occurs to me like I told you with backup<br />buddy. I go, well, that&#8217;s a hundred percent. Theoretically, theoretically, everyone should want a,<br />a backup for their WordPress site, right? Um, that was easy, right? Because the, you know,<br />we&#8217;re gonna go into this field and we&#8217;re gonna hit something.<br />Um,<br />Corey Maass: But to, but I think to your point, like your average non nerd or non-professional<br />doesn&#8217;t think about that. You know, there&#8217;s a reason why they are automatically that most<br />hosting companies [00:30:00] offer automatic backups. And even if they don&#8217;t, I almost can<br />guarantee that they&#8217;re doing at least some periodic, because the majority of their support tickets<br />are, I broke my site, or somebody hacked my site.<br />What? And I, you know, and, and support. A technician comes back and says, great, what<br />about, what do you have for backups? And the person goes, what&#8217;s a backup? And then they<br />go, oh, well you are lucky on our server in a very hidden technical way. I can at least restore it<br />from seven days ago or from yesterday or what have you.<br />You know, but you should have thought about this and then mm-hmm. You know, but, but your<br />average person doesn&#8217;t think about backups. Right. Um, so you still, you were solving a problem<br />that everybody has, but most people don&#8217;t know they have. Mm-hmm.<br />Cory Miller: Yeah. And, and where when we get the main product out, we&#8217;re able to do<br />[00:31:00] content marketing around all the reasons why it would be good.<br />We even created a content, um, content replacement calendar or something. We tried to say,<br />what&#8217;s the value of all your posts? Because I lost, uh, I lost things from my personal website<br />when we had a server crash. Now, you know, there they weren&#8217;t invaluable, but it was, it was a<br />headache. So we started doing that to try to map that out.<br />But, um, when we talk about avatars for a second, um, we have your clients content journey,<br />and then the, what I hear over, and it&#8217;s so interesting, my, my own perception of WordPress has<br />changed so much. Um, but what I hear over and over from our agencies and owners and things<br />is that the people running when they deliver projects, I, it&#8217;s really compelling that it&#8217;s marketing<br />[00:32:00] specific people.<br />Mm-hmm. I just got outta the, a agency owners meetup and it was again, like they&#8217;re turning<br />sites over and typically it&#8217;s marketing related type. People are actually the people using their<br />WordPress sites from enterprise. WordPress does really good in the enterprise because<br />marketers go, it&#8217;s cheaper, it&#8217;s faster, and I can use it.<br />So I, I would say like in this backup buddy thought, I go big market, I am a marketer. I go that,<br />that&#8217;s really compelling. Which is why when we talked about screenshotted express, I was like<br />the social images. I, but I don&#8217;t, I gotta admit, make sure I&#8217;m honest about this. I don&#8217;t do that. I<br />don&#8217;t really post to our website.<br />Um, we have team and content journey and different things that do that. But if we take that a,<br />that&#8217;s one big avatar. I can like say, generally speaking, [00:33:00] if we hit the marketing room</p>\n\n\n\n<p>and that&#8217;s the, the sexy make you look better, make money kind of realm. Yeah. So there&#8217;s one,<br />um, I think about yours as a lot of publishers, um, uh, publishers.<br />But even like a lot of the content journey, you know, clients, um, it&#8217;s, it kind of boils down to the<br />marketing people. They&#8217;re the ones interfacing with those clients. Yeah. Very.<br />Corey Maass: Yep. Um, yeah, we&#8217;ve got, I&#8217;ve got a couple of different scenarios. One is on one<br />team, we have a person dedicated to social media. Um, and I am, so, so there&#8217;s an interview I<br />want to have, um, customer interview, like talk to them about how they&#8217;re making stuff.<br />I think they&#8217;re using Canva. Um, and I think that they&#8217;ve got template set up so that, again, it&#8217;s,<br />they plug in a featured [00:34:00] image, they plug in a featured image, but it&#8217;s got the same<br />treatment every time. Um, I want to make sure of. And I&#8217;d love, we&#8217;ll have you talk to them if, if<br />you&#8217;re following the, um, mom interview methodology.<br />Um, cuz I&#8217;d also, I think what would be really interesting would be, I have a history of taking, uh,<br />blue ocean products and, and rebuilding them, repurposing them for WordPress. Um,<br />sometimes with legit value and sometimes just because it&#8217;s a smaller market, so it&#8217;s easier to<br />focus. And, and I&#8217;m still fascinated with the idea of WordPress being the control panel for a, a<br />person&#8217;s entire business.<br />Um, but I also would be curious if, you know, sorry. Um, if the people are who, if they are<br />jumping into Canva, are they struggling? Like, is it too many choices? [00:35:00] Is it, um,<br />repeatable? Uh, sorry, I gotta let a dog in. Hold on.<br />Cory Miller: Go, go for it. I, I&#8217;m opening up a y board to take some notes.<br />Corey Maass: And thankfully my spouse stepped in and cornered him. Um, but yeah, it&#8217;s, you<br />know, so is, is there value in generating these things from WordPress with the expectation that,<br />like I just wrote, wrote a blog post, and as we talked about before, you know, there&#8217;s the, the last<br />10% or the, you know, maybe it&#8217;s, let&#8217;s use 80 20, right?<br />Like 80% of what should be the process is writing a blog post. But at least in our experience,<br />80% of the pain is. Um, the technically speaking anyway is going and finding an image,<br />cropping [00:36:00] an image, all that kind of stuff, which is what we were trying to solve with<br />Crop Express. And so, um, you know, is it, is it parallel here where it&#8217;s like, okay, I&#8217;ve written a<br />blog post now what?<br />And I think that that&#8217;s a big problem, uh, to solve. Uh, or it&#8217;s a, a question that, that we wanna be<br />careful. We want to do a good job of defining the question to then come up with the solution.<br />Um, and so it&#8217;s, you know, our people. If, if, if we can get to the point where you&#8217;ve generated a<br />blog post, click a button, and then you&#8217;ve got assets, that&#8217;s amazing.<br />Um, is that enough? How hard or difficult is it to create those assets? Because it&#8217;s like Canva<br />offers creativity. Right. You can do anything all the time forever. But I, for me, um, like I have a<br />music blog, and so every time I, [00:37:00] or one of my writers writes a review, I go into Canva<br />and I open exa, I open the same design, I say duplicate page.<br />I change the title. I change the, so that it has the same treatment, right? Like, I&#8217;m not doing what<br />Canva kind of seems to want you to do, which is starting from scratch every single time.<br />Because I&#8217;m not, I&#8217;m not doing that. I&#8217;m not trying to be that creative, and in fact, that takes way<br />more time rather than, You know, a quick, simple 32nd, copy, paste, change, title, publish.<br />Um, and so I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m intrigued to find out if I&#8217;m right about that. Um, mm-hmm. You know, if, if our<br />team, if my teammate, somebody writes a story, publishes a story, like we have professional<br />writers who are writing, um, you know, long form content, and then we&#8217;ve got, again, a separate<br />[00:38:00] person whose job it is in part to create social media content from that story to then<br />publish everywhere.<br />Um, and I&#8217;d be interested to know if it&#8217;s a simple process for them or, uh, the hypothesis similar<br />to the crop express hypothesis is are they going, you know, the hard part should be. Putting all<br />this stuff out there, looking at the analytics, like creating a, essentially a, a mini campaign, um, to<br />promote this blog post.<br />But most of the pain is actually going in and, and cropping an image and adding the treatment<br />and all that kind of stuff. Um, and if, and if there&#8217;s value in having that sit in WordPress<br />alongside the blog post, um, you know, whether it&#8217;s under media or whether it&#8217;s going into the<br />post and then seeing a little icon that opens up an app or, you know, whatever approach it is,<br />um, you know, to make sure that there&#8217;s as much benefit there as we&#8217;re [00:39:00] hoping.<br />Cory Miller: Okay. I&#8217;m trying to make sure I take all these,</p>\n\n\n\n<p>um, okay. So, um, potential avatars, I think we&#8217;ve said marketing. I try to put a little bit. Thing<br />here. We got publishers I added in here. Um, because one thing that kind of, if you, if I just<br />camp out in this marketing realm, um, I thought about screenshot express, and I go ebook<br />creation or lead magnet creation.<br />Mm-hmm. Like the covers. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, some kind of cover. Now I think that would<br />also lend to this featured image creation in the sense of those graphics you talked about with<br />post status. Like we got the featured image graphic that we kind of pulled together, but it just<br />kind of made me [00:40:00] think like outputs, maybe I should put that here.<br />Uh, outputs,<br />um, social images, we said this, uh, featured images, uh, oh e let me just say ebook coverage,<br />just in the realm of possibility here. Yep.<br />Corey Maass: Slides was the thing that got you your gears turning early on.<br />Cory Miller: I was thinking of tip boxes. Lemme see if I can share my screen. Nope. I have to<br />close the Y board. I was on, uh, CAO&#8217;s website looking at their di i y lighting kit and they had a<br />pullout with a tip. Oh, okay. So I, I don&#8217;t know how to call, like pull out, pull out boxes and I<br />guess that could be quotes<br />they call to action. Hmm. Um, like, [00:41:00] well, let&#8217;s put ads, ads into Oh yeah. Post et<br />cetera. Wow. Yeah.<br />Corey Maass: Wow. Wow. Ads like auto ad gener, ad ad image generator from a Woo<br />commerce product. Mm. Holy crap.<br />Cory Miller: That could be coupons, like mm-hmm. I, I was even thinking your HTML side, cuz<br />you&#8217;re generating H M L and then you&#8217;re taking the snapshot of it.<br />But like, you know, Kohl&#8217;s or Bed Bath and Beyond, you know, they have a coupon and it looks<br />like a little coupon thing. And I mean, if there&#8217;s HTML, if we&#8217;re generating HTML, don&#8217;t even, you<br />don&#8217;t have to go to the screenshot if you don&#8217;t want to, but like, you could put that with a little<br />dressing that kind of calls it out, so.<br />Yep. Um,[00:42:00]<br />okay, let me, let&#8217;s do this for a second. Let&#8217;s take this marketing because I think we, there&#8217;s the<br />big market, bigger market there. It&#8217;s a lot of the users. When I think about creating a blog post,<br />I&#8217;m thinking about organic search traffic primarily. Um, But so that it gets placed in the search<br />engine, uh, it gets ranked and then traffic comes to that page.<br />When they get on page, then I want them to do something. This is where, you know, Optum<br />monitor or popup thing is like compelling because it&#8217;s, you get attention, like offer free offer<br />inside, right?<br />Corey Maass: Kind of thing. Yeah. It turns, it turns passive into, uh, there&#8217;s ac there&#8217;s<br />something&#8217;s actionable. Yeah. So it&#8217;s not, don&#8217;t just consume, like, and so this is where you&#8217;ve<br />got, uh, share these, bookmark these, you know, it&#8217;s like, so I&#8217;m reading somebody&#8217;s article and<br />yet I get a popup that says, [00:43:00] want more great content like this?<br />Sign up. Want an ebook of related content? Sign up. Um, here, share buttons. Please share this<br />on, you know, if you got value out of this, share this on Twitter. Um, email it to a friend. Um, but<br />thinking in terms of, yeah, images, um, so, you know, if we&#8217;re just talking content, written words,<br />then, um, my, the featured image that you&#8217;d see ideally would be stylized, something that fits in<br />with your site.<br />But if you ask a guest to share this story on Twitter, big pretty image is obviously more<br />compelling than just a, a headline. Um, but you don&#8217;t want to share the featured image because<br />the featured image probably doesn&#8217;t have, uh, the title of the post. Uh, it might or might not, but<br />it certainly, what I, what I thought you, a brilliant idea you came up with was, [00:44:00] you<br />know, a featured image with a, or, or a shareable image, which is the featured includes the<br />featured image, the title of the post, and then one or two.<br />It could be the excerpt, it could be one or two bullet points, but, so it&#8217;s like if I go to share, if I<br />read an article, You know, and it has a pretty image of a, some sunset and it says, best places<br />to retirement, retire to, okay. But if I&#8217;m sharing an image on Twitter, the image that I share should<br />say the best places to retire to should have the sunset in the background.<br />And then, you know, a, a tag, an excerpt that says the results will blow you away. Total click bait.<br />Or, you know, the top, you know, should say the top five, Hawaii, Alaska, blah, blah, blah. You<br />know, click to read the rest of &#8217;em, kind of thing. So then it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s, um, you know, and that&#8217;s<br />different from the featured image and that&#8217;s different from, that&#8217;s the type of thing you&#8217;d run over</p>\n\n\n\n<p>to Canva and, and generate and, and maybe [00:45:00] generate in a number of different sizes<br />and shapes to then push, you know, drag into buffer or whatever you use to schedule your<br />socials or to broadcast your socials.<br />I definitely wanna make sure we don&#8217;t get into that realm. Um, Because interacting with all those<br />APIs is a nightmare, and there&#8217;s a hundred of those tools already. But, um, oh, and, um, Yost, sh<br />uh, the OG image, uh, is the other one. So again, if an image that&#8217;s different from you&#8217;ve got<br />your featured image, you go and you, you pa paste the URL into Twitter or into Slack, and you<br />get that little preview card, that&#8217;s your open graph image.<br />Twitter now has Twitter cards, which is their version. And so again, having different, different<br />versions generated for all of these things. And some of this I think we can do even behind the<br />scenes, which I think will be really, really neat. And then some of this I think could be, and then<br />it&#8217;s like, [00:46:00] so maybe that&#8217;s where, you know, we&#8217;re, we&#8217;re, we haven&#8217;t yet talked about.<br />I mean, we&#8217;re not, we&#8217;re not ready yet to talk about business models and that kind of thing, but<br />hypothetically, a. Beginner version that just does a couple of the basic things. Here&#8217;s a<br />shareable image. Um, or here&#8217;s the, the open graph image for every post, every product<br />automatically generated, done. Um, and that&#8217;s not necessar.<br />That&#8217;s maybe something that people can set and forget kind of thing. But then we&#8217;re also talking<br />about, in my mind at least, we&#8217;re talking about something that approaches more of a Canva kind<br />of functionality for marketers. So it&#8217;s like, yes, the, the basics are covered, the incoming stuff is<br />covered, or the quick share, uh, in Slack preview is covered.<br />Um, but then talking about, you know, saying, okay, now I need the list of assets that I&#8217;ve<br />[00:47:00] predefined, I wanna slide for, um, you know, for social medias. Cuz it&#8217;s like, and if<br />you. If you&#8217;re doing it right, air quotes, right? You are not posting about a, a blog post once you<br />are not, uh, putting an image into or putting a product into woo commerce, tweeting about it<br />once and then hoping that it sells a gajillion, you are again, creating a campaign that says, okay,<br />you know, over the next six months, tweet about this every couple of days, every then, every<br />few days in it, every once a week.<br />And you sort of, you might peter off, but there&#8217;s this arc and you want those images to be<br />potentially to be different every time. And so it&#8217;s like, could you generate a bunch of images that<br />then get cued, um, you know, on all different platforms. And so it&#8217;s like potentially you&#8217;re talking<br />about, um, oh, I think the other neat thing that you mentioned in a previous conversation was<br />like, Answer a few questions, [00:48:00] right?<br />So it&#8217;s like word w WordPress is already gonna ask you for an excerpt fine. But it&#8217;s like, what are<br />three bullet points? What are two or three quotes? And then if it auto-generated a whole bunch<br />of images that had the quotes, that had the, um, oh, you know what, uh, uh, what&#8217;s analogous?<br />Like there&#8217;s, um, what&#8217;s it called?<br />Um, I have a book marked, um, avatar Image. Photo.<br />Cory Miller: Oh, yeah. Avatars.<br />Corey Maass: So there&#8217;s, um, yeah. Avatars. And so basically kind of creating little avatar<br />images for, um,<br />Cory Miller: I mean, profile cards, you know, like, right.<br />Corey Maass: So yeah. So p fp maker.com. P fp maker mm-hmm. Profile pick maker. Is what<br />it&#8217;s short for, right? But you upload a photo of yourself, it, it [00:49:00] strips the background out,<br />and then it, and then it just delivers you a page full of avatars.<br />So it&#8217;s your photo over and over again, but all these different funky backgrounds. And so you<br />scroll through them and you&#8217;re like, Ooh, I like that one. I like that one. I like that one. Um, I<br />think, yeah, go to my Twitter account and you&#8217;ll see one, and I use this to just like, I go, I upload<br />this to, we&#8217;ve looked at the, um, sticker mule background remover kind of thing.<br />Um, and I think there&#8217;s, remove.bg was one that I just found recently. That&#8217;s a great r l. But so<br />it&#8217;s like you create an image, you take an image of yourself, you use a tool to strip the<br />background, and then you upload it here. And now you&#8217;ve got, you know, a dozen or two or<br />three dozen different backgrounds and they&#8217;ve got ones with palm trees and the Eiffel Tower,<br />which is fun, right?<br />But so picturing like, You know, you write a blog post, you create a new Woo commerce product,<br />you go, you, you hit publish. And, and then, you know, our plugin essentially says, okay,<br />[00:50:00] you&#8217;re ready to create marketing assets. Um, what do you want to create today?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Twitter, Instagram, you know, and then, great, what&#8217;s, what&#8217;s the headline, which we can auto,<br />auto pull.<br />Um, what&#8217;s the excerpt? We, again, we can auto pull, um, featured image to start with, right?<br />But maybe you wanna upload other ones. Um, what are three bullet points? What are some pull<br />quotes? What are some benefi, you know, we can sort of customize a questionnaire that says,<br />fill these in, generate. And then now you&#8217;ve got essentially a matrix that&#8217;s like, you know, an<br />image for Twitter, an image for Facebook, an image for do, do, do, do.<br />And going across. You&#8217;ve got quote, quote, Bullet point, bullet point, bullet point, style, style,<br />style, um, you know, light mode, dark mode, play with fonts kind of thing. Um mm-hmm. You<br />know, and it, and so you suddenly, you&#8217;ve got a catalog of generated relevant images designed<br />to go on a bunch of different platforms and you&#8217;d [00:51:00] go, okay, yep, this one works.<br />This one works, this one&#8217;s silly. Ignore it, you know, whatever. Um, but<br />Cory Miller: so in, yeah, so in this, um, I went to the ChatGPT my researcher Yep. And, um,<br />image SEO came out and I was like, okay, if I&#8217;m embodying, um, I&#8217;m trying to do this, I&#8217;m<br />publishing site content in order to get ranked in Google. And you get on here, if you&#8217;ve done all<br />the work to do an SEO o keyword blog post, you&#8217;re using WordPress.<br />Great platform to do that. You go what was be one extra while you&#8217;re already there to get a little<br />bit extra stuff. Mm-hmm. And this Image SEO thing popped up in the list that I asked. Mm-hmm.<br />And it&#8217;s kind of compelling. Um,<br />and I read something just a second ago, uh, and I checked out your profile maker too. That&#8217;s<br />super cool. [00:52:00] Um, half of all Google searches end on the searcher. So wait, I&#8217;m sorry. I<br />thought I was saying how, how big SEO image SEO is, but we&#8217;re kind of saying that with the<br />social images too, is you&#8217;ve got this thing, there&#8217;s ways you can distribute your content in a way<br />out to the different platforms.<br />But I go Google too. Like I image should be, if we land on this should be a part of this<br />conversation. Mm-hmm. Because then you&#8217;re going, okay, ex. I mean, what if you could take<br />your blog posts, they get all this traffic and increase it by 10%? That&#8217;s a headline. Wow. Or the,<br />the product. So, you know, well, like you talked about e-commerce, um, what if there&#8217;s a way to<br />generate, easily an image that could be feature post featured image post or [00:53:00]<br />something in, in the thing.<br />But it also gets some SEO ranking when they&#8217;re going, and I don&#8217;t, I don&#8217;t do this myself, but,<br />um, I don&#8217;t look for images in Google necessarily, but it just compelling to kind explore that. Do<br />you? Okay. Yeah.<br />Corey Maass: Like we talked about, I think, I think it would be really interesting to know, like, I, I<br />make the assumption that Google looks at images more than alt tag, title tag.<br />Like, I think we&#8217;re to the point. I, I, I.<br />Safe assumption, I don&#8217;t know. Um, but I assume that Google can, if they look at a blog post,<br />they look at the image, they read the alag, but then they actually parse the image and say, yes,<br />this is in fact an image of a sunset when we&#8217;re talking about places to vacation. I don&#8217;t know if<br />that&#8217;s true. I&#8217;d love to find out if that&#8217;s [00:54:00] true.<br />But it&#8217;s like, so if you have an image that has words on it, I mean, at this point when I open an<br />image with words on it in, you know, Mac preview or Microsoft Paint, the words are editable. So<br />the, uh, algorithm for parsing text in an image is so commonplace now that it&#8217;s built into the, the<br />free image editor on, on Mac Os.<br />So I have to assume that it&#8217;s that pervasive everywhere. So, Um, you know, so is there a, an<br />SEO benefit to having words in an image that then gets shared? Um mm-hmm. Or no?<br />Cory Miller: Well, I mean, I would go, if you&#8217;re gonna post an image, you know, your tourism,<br />your e-commerce shop, you&#8217;re, why not? You&#8217;ve already got the images there.<br />Yeah. Um, you should be doing some image sto. I mean, that&#8217;s just easy, you know, a little bit<br />more effort and you&#8217;re able to, [00:55:00] I don&#8217;t know, cast a net water, but I go, if you&#8217;re gonna<br />post, uh, I don&#8217;t know, air compressors in somebody&#8217;s trying to find, you know, whatever the<br />reason they might be looking for that.<br />But you post a picture of the image compressor, that&#8217;s one thing. But I&#8217;ve seen more images too<br />come up where it&#8217;s like, put a little bit of text on there or it branded, you know, or I don&#8217;t know. I<br />like that mindset of going, how do we help them get a little bit more. Um, reach from something<br />they&#8217;re probably already doing.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Corey Maass: Um, right. I googled how to do image seo and one of the results that came up,<br />so the first sponsored post, uh, is the, the image next to it is dude on laptop. The, the image<br />adds nothing to the headline, how to optimize images for websites. And [00:56:00] there&#8217;s a<br />picture of a dude with a, with a laptop, no value, no context, like if that image came outta<br />context, there&#8217;s nothing there.<br />Scroll down, um, to another one. 10 steps to optimize images for seo, and next to it is a card<br />that has. People, you know, a little graphic of people. Awesome. But it&#8217;s in, in text, even though<br />the image is this big in text that almost fills the card. It has the same headline, 10 steps to<br />optimize images for seo.<br />And there&#8217;s a little logo of the website that it&#8217;s on, and if I click on it and it gets bigger, there&#8217;s the<br />subtitle that&#8217;s like, you know, who&#8217;s who. It&#8217;s by when it was posted. Um, you know, and it&#8217;s like<br />right there. That&#8217;s the image that we&#8217;re talking, we&#8217;re talking about generating, but somebody<br />had to go in and create that card.<br />Well, so I figure if, if, if the, if the third result for searching for Google for [00:57:00] Image SEO<br />is an article about optimizing images for seo, and they include an image that has words on it.<br />You know, and, and like, I mean, we we&#8217;re talking about Google, you know, the, the automation,<br />the bots, the algorithms, the, you know, the ai, whatever. But I mean, the obvious benefit is of<br />just human stuff is obvious. Like putting something on Twitter, an image that has words rather<br />than an image of just a dude on a laptop.<br />Yeah. Obvi, you know, obvious value, but, well, but we do, I thought about Pinterest.<br />Cory Miller: Mm-hmm. Yep. Oh yeah. It&#8217;s, I forget about it all the time, but I mean, there&#8217;s so<br />many that go, like, it&#8217;s a pin and you&#8217;re looking for stuff and mm-hmm. You know, taking, it&#8217;s a<br />way to get a tra traffic back to your post about it.<br />Well put enough detail that entices them to come over. Yep. Um, okay. I wanna get back to<br />[00:58:00] this. Okay. I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m doing a post and, and may, maybe there&#8217;s others, but I think about<br />just. I spent my career with the organic SEO content, um, and I get somebody to the site, and<br />that&#8217;s the first part of the big, the whole process, just getting someone to the site.<br />Um, it talked about like popups help you, you know, do that. Mm-hmm. There&#8217;s inbound content,<br />like now that we have patterns within Gutenberg, code editor, block editor, like inserting<br />something called a action within that. Um, my traditional has been get &#8217;em on the site and give<br />them some offer that fills irresistible discount, ebook, lead magnet, you know, opt into the<br />newsletter thing.<br />Corey Maass: Yep.[00:59:00]<br />And I&#8217;m, and I, what I&#8217;m thinking is, Sim similar to our previous conversations. You know, it&#8217;s<br />gonna take a handful of conversations to continue to unearth all of these possibilities, right?<br />This list, which already is 10 points long, is gonna be a lot longer. And so I want some<br />confirmation, like there&#8217;s, there&#8217;s an, to me, there&#8217;s an obvious benefit of like what I just<br />described.<br />I&#8217;m seeing a card, a text on it that somebody had to generate. Do we, can we confirm that your<br />average team of one a person who&#8217;s blogging, um, recipe, ooh, recipe cards, um, do they.<br />[01:00:00] More of these images generated and or are they already trying to generate these<br />images? Are they, you know, is, is the average, um, person, you know, a team of one or two,<br />um, who&#8217;s got a, a YouTube vlog or a recipe blog or whatever.<br />Are they posting their article with the recipe? And then what are the next steps they take? Like,<br />that&#8217;s the broad question. Do they then go generate images to then put on socials and how do<br />they schedule, you know, all that stuff? What are the images that they actually care about? Um,<br />to me the, the gut assumption is there are enough people doing something as a next step.<br />And so I&#8217;m inclined to. Um, again, get to a point where I&#8217;ve essentially solved a problem for<br />generating something. And to me, I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m, I have no problem solving this for me [01:01:00] and<br />you to start with. Mm-hmm. Um, where I&#8217;m generating my images from my music blog, I&#8217;m<br />generating a couple of basic templates for Instagram, whatever, me as a musician to promote.<br />Um, again, I&#8217;m looking at my clients like, what do they need? So a basic Twitter image with a<br />headline that has a logo on it. Um, and then for you, the post status, um, banners make, how do<br />we make them all look the same? So again, a logo and, you know, if, if these are all, um, I think<br />what we looked at, right? Were profiles of people.<br />So it&#8217;s upload a picture of the person, post status logo on the left, maybe their name and, um,<br />you know, and, and something from the, you know, and, and then. And then it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s, to me, it&#8217;s,</p>\n\n\n\n<p>it&#8217;s up to, again, we&#8217;re looking for feedback and or you doing some interviews to find out like,<br />yes, everybody, everybody wants Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, [01:02:00] LinkedIn, like the<br />obvious socials.<br />Um, or yes, people desperately wish that there were slides. Like, I love your interest in slides,<br />but you&#8217;re the only person I&#8217;ve ever heard of that says that. Um, which doesn&#8217;t dismiss it. It just<br />means like, that&#8217;s not the circle I&#8217;m in, right? So, um, yeah, that&#8217;s, to me, that&#8217;s not something we<br />want to generate first, but go find me 10 people that are gonna find that interesting.<br />Or if I get you to a point where you can sit down and generate pro templates yourself, you&#8217;ll be<br />like, cool, let me go build a slide one, because that&#8217;s what I want. And then, and then cuz it&#8217;s like<br />once, it&#8217;s kind of like Canva, like, you know, that they have somebody on staff whose job it is to<br />just crank out templates mm-hmm.<br />To solve all these little problems. Oh, whoops. We don&#8217;t have one for podcasts. Great. 3000 by</p>\n\n\n\n<ol start=\"3000\">\n<li>Go, go generate that. Oh, there you go. Podcast. Um, yeah. Add that to your list. Um, or<br />we don&#8217;t, you know, [01:03:00] people are posting record their, their new album on, on<br />Bandcamp. What, how do you know an image generator for Bandcamp that I&#8217;m talking about<br />back to Canva?<br />It&#8217;s like they, because they&#8217;re going, they&#8217;re going inch deep, mile wide, you know. Yeah. So<br />they, they want one of everything, but there&#8217;s, you know, and for them, there&#8217;s s e o value, like,<br />you know, there&#8217;s a landing page for every single template they have. Because that way<br />anybody who&#8217;s googling for anything, you know, album cover template, they&#8217;re, they&#8217;re hoping to<br />pop up.<br />Mm-hmm. We&#8217;ll get there once we have the delivery system for templates, essentially. Um, and<br />I&#8217;m not saying we necessarily want to, like, we don&#8217;t wanna start there, like let&#8217;s find some clear<br />answers of, of what templates to build first, what, what problems to solve first.<br />Cory Miller: I, I&#8217;m still, uh, still so compelled by the slide content and I put in the crazy ideas<br />column Here is, uh, LinkedIn [01:04:00] slide content.<br />So the AJ told me about, find this link for you. Um, this service, it&#8217;s like a LinkedIn. You&#8217;ve seen<br />this on Instagram too. Um, I&#8217;ll find it. It&#8217;s a LinkedIn image carousel creator. You put your tweet in<br />and it&#8217;ll give you the, the slide content. Oh, Uhhuh. You know, when I tested that on LinkedIn<br />several years ago, my slide content got way more views than anything else I was doing.<br />And, uh, so I think even like for LinkedIn, um, you think about it, it&#8217;s like busy professionals used<br />to a common language of slides. Yep. Uh, and then being able to quickly get the information<br />without having to go through 1500 words. Yep. It&#8217;s still compelling to me.<br />Corey Maass: Um, well, and, and a, a neat coincidence, right?<br />I was like everybody else, I&#8217;m looking at, um, Twitter threads [01:05:00] about chat g p t<br />prompts. Um, or you know, what, what are 10 neat things that have happened in the 48 hours<br />since they released ChatGPT four, um, you know, people have generated re had it generate a<br />working version of pong, uh, in 60 seconds. I&#8217;d mean ridiculous things.<br />But one of the things that I saw was that I, that I was like, oh, this is actually relevant to the<br />world. Um, other than recreating pong, um, Is somebody dumped in an article and said, make,<br />make 10 slides. And it did. And I, yeah, they&#8217;re not styled or anything, but it&#8217;s just, here are the<br />bullet points that you&#8217;d wanna put on each.<br />So it&#8217;s like, uh, you know, have this talk to AI that then gen, you know, write a blog post, click a<br />button, chat, g p t or some other AI generates the slide content. We generate the slide images.<br />Yeah. Yeah. Holy crap.<br />Cory Miller: Yeah. On that [01:06:00] link too for you.<br />Corey Maass: Um, okay, so we&#8217;re over an hour. Where do we go? What&#8217;s next? How do we<br />start?<br />What do you wanna do? What are you gonna do today? Um, what do you want me to do? Who<br />are we gonna talk to? How are we gonna get clients? I think,<br />Cory Miller: I think, um, one area to explore is, um, talking to content journey. Seeing the output<br />of what they&#8217;re doing, asking about the problems and challenges they have in that process for<br />their clients.<br />Um, I just forgot, I think there&#8217;s an opportunity here to potentially innovate in this of here&#8217;s how<br />this is going, here&#8217;s how people do, what is the way to help you stand out? Hmm. So the<br />standout, and that&#8217;s why I say innovate, not just helping cure the workflow issue, but I think<br />[01:07:00] one thing I wanna really explore this time is can we innovate with something?</li>\n</ol>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s where I think the slide content, you know, whether it&#8217;s a valid thing or not, is in that realm<br />of they&#8217;re doing something. What&#8217;s way, one way that could help that content stand out even<br />more. It, it includes social images, it includes STO image, SEO and stuff like that. Um, I was<br />like, Lindsay has a mental health treatment center client.<br />And, and that&#8217;s probably one of their best case studies because they took a, aside from, you<br />know, rarely getting any content to, uh, tenant, I mean considerable. And it drove a lot of<br />business for &#8217;em. And, uh, you think about it, like I, I, I remember talking to him cuz I did some<br />consulting with them, with the client and they&#8217;re trying to find images.<br />That&#8217;s another issue we&#8217;ve talked about, but it&#8217;s out, that&#8217;s out there. It&#8217;s for somebody else&#8217;s<br />saw potentially. But you go, if they&#8217;re doing the image, what&#8217;s something that could help that<br />stand out? And it&#8217;s maybe a pull quote. [01:08:00] Mm-hmm. You know, from it or something like<br />that. That&#8217;s where I want to dig in is, um, I&#8217;ll talk to Emily over there.<br />Um, And, uh, ask some of that. They&#8217;ve got another service called my marketing assistant too.<br />And I&#8217;ll ask, what are some of the anonymized, um, client requests they get? Yeah, sure. They<br />do have a podcaster in their beta program. Um, prolific podcaster who uses a lot of the<br />distributed media. Um, like I think he probably uses his website as the base, but, um, a lot of the<br />requests he&#8217;s getting is, you know, create the thumbnails for those things that they do, use those<br />tools that we talked about.<br />But, uh, I think one thing that might give us an edge on this is just like creating a new standard<br />where everybody&#8217;s going like, whoa, whoa, how&#8217;d they do that? I want that too. Like I was telling<br />you about the Casto little tip box and stuff. [01:09:00] Um, so that&#8217;s what I would like to explore<br />in this and then just understand their process a little bit better.<br />And what would be something that doesn&#8217;t take a lot of time. But then enhances uh, the content<br />and makes it stand out a little bit more. And I mean, it could be that whole call to action thing,<br />you know? Um, like a, being able to stylize some, you know, for the treatment center it&#8217;s call us.<br />Cuz if they call, if someone calls the treatment center, they can really help them and understand<br />what the right fit is and all that kinda stuff.<br />So their call to action is, you know, I think it still is the case, but if they get a phone call, that&#8217;s<br />great. That&#8217;s where they want to be. And then that turns over their sales operation. I&#8217;m trying to<br />think of another client. Um, there&#8217;s a lot of b2b, so, um, B2B there too. That seems like<br />[01:10:00] another area where maybe big companies have innovated with the B2B space.<br />Let me put that in here cause I don&#8217;t want to drop this. Like, I have a friend that has a<br />manufacturing company. He does the air condit, the cooling compressor stuff. He remanufacture<br />them. And, uh, I mean, there&#8217;s a space with people with money, um, and it&#8217;s business money.<br />They go, oh, if it helps increase whatever their KPI is.<br />I mean, that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s pretty big.<br />Corey Maass: Yeah. And I&#8217;ve got, I was just pinging, um, people within my client teams of like,<br />okay, who generates social media content so that I can line up an interview, talk to them about,<br />okay, what&#8217;s your process? Um, and I, and what&#8217;s kind of neat is, is again, I&#8217;ve got. It&#8217;s<br />technically the same, same [01:11:00] client, but I&#8217;ve got two websites, two teams that approach<br />things very differently.<br />One is, um, a lot more tech savvy and a lot more, um, trendy or, or, you know, they are active on<br />TikTok. We are advertising on TikTok, stuff like that. And the other one is, is a fairly traditional<br />news content magazine. Um, and, uh, with, and the, and the team is a lot less technical and we,<br />and we don&#8217;t need to be nearly as cutting edge or edge or trendy.<br />Um, and so I&#8217;m, I&#8217;ve kind of got a young hip social media marketer wizard, and then I&#8217;ve also got<br />people that are like, I write the article and then I go put it on Twitter. Um, and, and so I can kind<br />of see how, how two of these very different approaches go about solving more or less the same<br />problem. Yeah.<br />Cory Miller: And that featured image summary card type thing I think is still [01:12:00] really<br />compelling. I&#8217;m gonna highlight that. Where&#8217;s that? Yeah, I,<br />Corey Maass: I, that&#8217;s a very quick, easy win for anybody, not for us specifically. It&#8217;s like make<br />your featured image more compelling and, and much more valuable when shared.<br />Cory Miller: And because again, you know, look at outputs for that, you go, well that&#8217;s a<br />Pinterest thing. I mean, maybe that doesn&#8217;t get pinned, but it&#8217;s a social card. It could have<br />possibilities for the Pinterest stuff. It&#8217;s a visual thing that en might entice someone to go, oh,<br />that&#8217;s interesting. Um, and that stuff like to just do that pull image from post add overlay of.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>There you go. Print, you know, I mean, as simple as that with the brand logo. Yep. Dacon or<br />something like that. Yep,<br />Corey Maass: yep. [01:13:00] Okay. Yeah. And there&#8217;s, and there&#8217;s, yeah, and there&#8217;s, there&#8217;s a<br />couple of plugins out there that do something that touch on that. Um, and I&#8217;ve, I messed around<br />with one, not the other of the two that I know of, but they, they were, at least at the time, were,<br />were limited to generating, um, an open graph image.<br />I was like, generate image, paste it into Slack, you see the image. And I, and I was like, great,<br />but I, where do I write? Click Save as so that I can go post it to Twitter. Mm-hmm. It&#8217;s like, oh,<br />you know, it&#8217;s, you know, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s just in, it&#8217;s in your media library. It&#8217;s like, okay, well, And then<br />also what about all these other solutions or other scenarios?<br />Um, for me, I was just originally thinking the big socials, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,<br />Instagram. The big difference being 16, nine or square. But now we&#8217;re talking about, it&#8217;s like,<br />yeah, either easy ways to generate multiple variations and [01:14:00] stuff. It&#8217;s like this could go<br />a lot, a lot further. Um, so, but it&#8217;s, but I definitely, you know, there&#8217;s to talk about, you know,<br />people talk about competition.<br />It&#8217;s like, oh, the competition is Photoshop, Canva, um, nothing, nothing is always a, a<br />competitor. Um, you know, but also I, you know, there are other WordPress plugins that do<br />touch on this, so we&#8217;ll have to do a little research there too.<br />Cory Miller: Yeah, like the nothing part is me. Um, I created a blog post and then it&#8217;d be<br />probably nice to have some visual.<br />Icon, thumbnail featured image that, um, highlight some points in there, but, um, okay. That&#8217;ll be,<br />mine is exploring that with, uh, I&#8217;ll start with Emily cause she&#8217;s doing a lot of the team interface,<br />[01:15:00] cl team, client interface stuff. She seemed a pretty good volume of work. I like the<br />marketing angle. How do we, cuz that could go across any of these potential avatars if we&#8217;re<br />helping them do better marketing, um, redistribution, that&#8217;s the social images of seo, all that kind<br />of stuff.<br />Corey Maass: Yeah. Um, well, and um, again, I,<br />I wanna say I put my foot down cuz I think that&#8217;s a hilarious phrase. In a Mad Men 1960s<br />husband sort of way. I don&#8217;t make me put my foot down. Um, but I, I, I want to, I very adamantly<br />wanna draw the line at doing the posting or interacting with the socials. Um, other than like, we<br />can have a button that says, post this to Twitter and it just links, you know, we&#8217;ll throw you over<br />there kind of thing.<br />Cuz I&#8217;ve actually even, I [01:16:00] built a plugin at one point that you could queue up tweets,<br />but it&#8217;s like, it worked. But, you know, with all the drama around Twitter, a p i lately, let alone for<br />the last Yeah. 10 years, like, I don&#8217;t want to get into that. But, um, you know, one, one of the, we<br />were talking about. What are we talking about?<br />We must have been talking about, um, integration points with other tools, um, for Crop Express<br />anyway, it&#8217;s like, so if we generate images and then, and then I, you know, let&#8217;s, we can look at,<br />um, auto, you know, if you generate an, an open graph image that Yost automatically picks that<br />up. Um, so there&#8217;s an integration point.<br />Um, I use Buffer to post to mild my socials. Maybe they have an API or an integration point. So<br />it&#8217;s like we can, you know, there&#8217;s gonna be a potential for not only generating the images, but at<br />least getting them to the services that use those images. I don&#8217;t wanna become those [01:17:00]<br />services, but you know, there&#8217;s, we&#8217;ve, we&#8217;ve got an opportunity there too.<br />Cory Miller: Yeah. Okay. I put integrations with SEO plugins. Um,<br />That, that question<br />when I talk to Emily, I&#8217;ll ask, um, what, what are the common goals that they&#8217;re, are they trying to<br />push to a phone number? Are they trying to push to, um, an email list? It&#8217;s probably one of those<br />two, I would guess is building the appeal, unless social start<br />Corey Maass: higher up. Do they even, you know, are they thinking that strategically, like, not to<br />say the agency [01:18:00] isn&#8217;t or shouldn&#8217;t, but as a client, like if a client comes to &#8217;em as like,<br />we need images for Twitter, like, because everybody else does or because you under, you<br />know, they understand.<br />It&#8217;s the value in including a phone number.<br />Cory Miller: Now I do know, I do know, um, a lot of the clients they work with, and these are not<br />WordPress or tech people, um, social is hot, you know?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Corey Maass: Sure. Um, social hot, why, I guess, right? Mm-hmm. Cynically, are they doing it<br />because everybody tells them to, you know, are there, are there teenage kids telling them, dad,<br />you&#8217;ve gotta get your, um, shoe com, you know, your air compressor company on the tos.<br />And dad goes, okay, son, great, I&#8217;ll do that. You know, or, or are they measuring? [01:19:00] You<br />know, are they like, what, where does our traffic come from? Oh, we sell most of our air<br />compressors on Twitter, but not, or probably Facebook, but not on Twitter, and we&#8217;ve never.<br />Sold anything off of Insta, you know what I mean?<br />Like, I&#8217;m curious if, if, if, how companies are thinking about these, what am I trying to say? We<br />know in, especially in the context of this conversation, that there&#8217;s a potential to turn these pat<br />turn to turn passive images into valuable calls to action. Mm-hmm. To actually generate, you<br />know, it&#8217;s like I post an image, I post, I post something on Twitter.<br />It sucks In the featured image. The featured image is, you know, a pretty sunset. It, it might draw<br />a human&#8217;s attention, but that&#8217;s very different than again the card. Uh, the [01:20:00] s e o card<br />that I saw here, that&#8217;s like words that are also drawing me in to like a phone number. So it&#8217;s like,<br />wow, I don&#8217;t even have to click through.<br />To, uh, to find out a phone number. I&#8217;m just dialing eight eighty eight, et cetera. Mm-hmm. So it&#8217;s<br />like there&#8217;s, I, I&#8217;m curious how people are thinking about it, if they&#8217;re thinking about it, because if<br />not, like there&#8217;s great opportunity to ask for us to do education, um mm-hmm. And, or cuz it&#8217;s<br />like, we&#8217;ve, we&#8217;ve talked about, this is the first time you&#8217;ve mentioned phone numbers.<br />Um, so it&#8217;s like, you know, our, our default is like, oh, this is gonna go on Twitter and it&#8217;s gonna<br />look pretty, it&#8217;s gonna be the title of the post. Um, you know, with bullet points. It&#8217;s a tldr, but like<br />what you just said I think is amazing of like, imagine if for a small business, if it included the<br />phone number, the logo, and the phone number.<br />So it&#8217;s like nobody ever, or the address, right? Mm-hmm. So people don&#8217;t see it on Facebook or<br />see it on Twitter and they don&#8217;t even have to click through.<br />Cory Miller: [01:21:00] Mm-hmm. Then it&#8217;s an ad, right? Like, Retail shop coming up with<br />something, they&#8217;ve got an event, a coupon or something that could, they&#8217;re posting on their<br />website, so it&#8217;s RSVPs and then having a card that they could just easily go export or, you know,<br />save or whatever it is, and then they can go post that.<br />Corey Maass: How is the, we have a, a pie shop in town. How are they generating the image<br />for their daily specials? Are they going into Canva every day?<br />Yep. The sandwich shop, the, you know, all the food trucks that are posting their location, and<br />this is taking it way out of the context of a post.[01:22:00]<br />Which is where something like Canva makes more sense. Like people are doing it, generating<br />an image unto itself. Right. My friend, um, Mike has the epic food truck that makes unbelievable<br />brisket and meat filled happiness, um, out of his food truck. Um, so he has to consistently post<br />where he&#8217;s at, what are today&#8217;s specials, and this is, and I&#8217;ll post them on the local Facebook<br />groups and people go running us too.<br />So I&#8217;m like, okay, I should ask him how he&#8217;s generating and I need to think back. It&#8217;s like, is he<br />generating images? Is he upload? I kind of feel like he&#8217;s uploading the same logo every time<br />and then writing the content, but, and so is there value in all of the content being on the image?<br />I don&#8217;t know. I have to think about that.<br />I&#8217;m sure you&#8217;d wanna include the words [01:23:00] too, but, right. Yeah. I might have a<br />conversation with him.<br />Cory Miller: Yeah, I think that&#8217;d be great. Um, I&#8217;ll do one with, uh, Emily, see where that goes.<br />And then I, I just shared the, uh, this whiteboard with you in Slack. Great. I have a friend.<br />Thanks so much. This is, uh, this is good stuff.<br />Okay. So I got my marching orders to talk to Emily about that, see what they&#8217;re doing, see if<br />there&#8217;s ideas to like, drive the conversions that they need for post, explore some of the eBooks<br />too. I put course up here cause I think that&#8217;s another thing. Yep. But, um, yeah, I was thinking<br />that too.<br />Corey Maass: Okay. Um, yeah, and I think I&#8217;m gonna talk to, I&#8217;ve got one or two people to talk<br />to.<br />Um, and I think, I think I will try to, I, well, I, like I said earlier, like I do want to. Make sure that<br />I&#8217;m wrapping up Crop express properly. [01:24:00] Um, but then, you know, out of sheer<br />excitement, I imagine I&#8217;ll reopen the, the plugin that I&#8217;d started to build and see if I can get it<br />working enough to send it to you.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Okay, cool. All right.<br />Cory Miller: Thanks dude. Talk to you soon. I&#8217;ll be talking to you. Okay.</p>\n<p>This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.</p>\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Thu, 20 Apr 2023 12:51:25 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:11:\"Cory Miller\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:46;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:114:\"Post Status: Jesse Friedman on raising the WP hosting standard across the industry with WP.cloud-Post Status Draft\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:32:\"https://poststatus.com/?p=149053\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:125:\"https://poststatus.com/jesse-friedman-on-raising-the-wp-hosting-standard-across-the-industry-with-wp-cloud-post-status-draft/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:51704:\"<div class=\"wp-block-group eplus-wrapper has-theme-palette-2-color has-theme-palette-8-background-color has-text-color has-background is-layout-flow\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container\"><div class=\"wp-block-post-excerpt\"><p class=\"wp-block-post-excerpt__excerpt\">In this episode, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/Professor\">Jesse Friedman</a>, Head of <a href=\"https://wp.cloud/\">WP Cloud</a>, joins <a href=\"https://twitter.com/corymiller303\">Cory Miller</a> to provide valuable insights and strategies for improving infrastructure and service to deliver superior hosting. They also highlight how managed hosting can help businesses focus on their core operations while leaving the technical aspects to the experts. </p></div>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-spacer eplus-wrapper\"></div>\n\n\n<span class=\"span-reading-time rt-reading-time\"><span class=\"rt-label rt-prefix\">Estimated Reading Time:</span> <span class=\"rt-time\"> 24</span> <span class=\"rt-label rt-postfix\">minutes</span></span>\n</div></div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https://poststatus.com/planet/feed/#h-transcript\">Transcript</a> ↓</p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><a href=\"https://twitter.com/corymiller303\">Cory Miller</a> is joined by <a href=\"https://twitter.com/Professor\">Jess Friedman</a> from <a href=\"https://wp.cloud/\">WP Cloud</a> discuss how hosting companies can improve their infrastructure and services to provide better performance and reliability to their customers. They also dive into the importance of customer support, the benefits of using managed hosting services, the ethics of data collection, and more. The experience and expertise offered are sure to inspire you to increase your standards of service</p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><strong>Top Takeaways:</strong></p>\n\n\n\n<ul type=\"video\" class=\"wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\">\n<li><strong>Outsourcing Infrastructure. </strong>WordPress hosting companies can benefit from outsourcing their infrastructure to specialized providers such as WP Cloud. This can free up their customer support team from dealing with infrastructure-related issues and enable them to focus on providing better customer service and value-added services.</li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Increase Customer Satisfaction.</strong> By democratizing publishing and providing a superior WordPress experience, hosting companies can reduce churn and retain customers who may otherwise switch to other platforms if their WordPress experience is subpar.</li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Set Up for Speed.</strong> While many factors can impact website speed, some of the most important ones include optimizing images, using a content delivery network (CDN), and minimizing the use of plugins. By focusing on these areas, WordPress agencies can help their clients improve their website speed and ultimately provide a better user experience for their visitors.</li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n\n</div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-columns has-theme-palette-8-background-color has-background is-layout-flex wp-container-21\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-column is-layout-flow\">\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><img src=\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f64f.png\" alt=\"🙏\" class=\"wp-smiley\" /> Sponsor: <a href=\"https://poststat.us/a2-hosting\">A2 Hosting</a></h3>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>A2Hosting offers solutions for WordPress and WooCommerce that are both blazing fast and ultra-reliable. WordPress can be easily deployed on ANY web hosting plan from A2: Shared, VPS, or Dedicated. A2 also offers Managed WordPress and WooCommerce Hosting. Take a look at a2hosting.com today!</p>\n</div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-column is-vertically-aligned-center is-layout-flow\">\n<img width=\"752\" height=\"470\" src=\"https://poststatus.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/imageedit_1_6433774706-752x470.png\" alt=\"A2 Hosting\" class=\"wp-image-104073\" />A2 Hosting\n</div>\n</div>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading eplus-wrapper\" id=\"h-mentioned-in-the-show\"><img src=\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f517.png\" alt=\"🔗\" class=\"wp-smiley\" /> Mentioned in the show<strong>:</strong></h3>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://wp.cloud/\">WP Cloud</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://wphostingbenchmarks.com/benchmark/2022-50-wordpress/\">WP Hosting Benchmarks $25-50</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://wphostingbenchmarks.com/benchmark/2022-500-wordpress/\">WP Hosting Benchmarks $201-500</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://kinsta.com/\">Kinsta</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://wpengine.com/\">WP Engine</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://www.siteground.com/\">SiteGround</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://www.bluehost.com/\">Bluehost</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://www.digitalocean.com/\">DigitalOcean</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://pressable.com/features/100-percent-uptime-guarantee/\">Pressable</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://cpanel.net/\">cPanel</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://www.plesk.com/\">Plesk</a></li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://www.cloudflare.com/\">Cloudflare</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading eplus-wrapper\" id=\"h-you-can-follow-post-status-and-our-guests-on-twitter\"><img src=\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f426.png\" alt=\"🐦\" class=\"wp-smiley\" /> You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:</h3>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"eplus-wrapper\">\n<li><a href=\"https://twitter.com/Professor\">Jess Friedman</a> (Head of <a href=\"https://wp.cloud/\">WP Cloud</a>)</li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://twitter.com/corymiller303\">Cory Miller</a> (CEO, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/post_status\">Post Status</a>)</li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https://twitter.com/lemonadecode\">Olivia Bisset</a> (Intern, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/post_status\">Post Status</a>)</li>\n</ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"eplus-wrapper has-background\">The <strong>Post Status Draft</strong> podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. <img src=\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f4dd.png\" alt=\"📝\" class=\"wp-smiley\" /><br /><br /><a href=\"https://poststatus.com/category/post-status-podcasts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Browse our archives</a>, and don’t forget to subscribe via <a href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/post-status-draft-wordpress/id976403008\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS8ySkU5c2M4UA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/c/PostStatus\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube</a>, <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/krogsgard/post-status-draft-wordpress-podcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://wordpress-post-status-draft-podcast.simplecast.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Simplecast</a>, or <a href=\"https://feeds.simplecast.com/2JE9sc8P\">RSS</a>. <img src=\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f3a7.png\" alt=\"🎧\" class=\"wp-smiley\" /></p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading eplus-wrapper\" id=\"h-transcript\">Transcript</h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Cory Miller: [00:00:00] Everybody welcomed back to post status draft. I&#8217;ve got a longtime friend<br />of mine in the WordPress space. I think we met like 10 years ago, Jesse. Um, but we&#8217;re gonna<br />be talking about WP Cloud today, and this is part of our product people series. Um, I heard<br />about WP Cloud, I know Jesse and I was like, Hey, I wanna know more about WP Cloud.<br />It&#8217;s really compelling from what I&#8217;ve heard. Um, but first and foremost, welcome to the podcast.<br />Jesse. Could you tell us a little bit about your.<br />Jesse Friedman: Yeah. Thanks Corey. And yeah, it probably has been a decade. It&#8217;s, it&#8217;s, uh,<br />it&#8217;s awesome to, to be able to, uh, know people like you and be able to work with people like you<br />for so long.<br />Um, and that&#8217;s one of the great things about the WordPress community, right? Oh, yeah. Uh,<br />yeah. So, uh, I, I, uh, got started in WordPress, geez, back in 2005, I think. Uh, I was, uh,<br />working as a professor at a university and, uh, trying to teach, [00:01:00] uh, students, uh, well<br />actually I was a student at the time and then later I became a professor and started teaching<br />WordPress.<br />Uh, but my professor, Hillary Mason, who&#8217;s actually, used to work at Bitly and is pretty world<br />renowned, uh, data scientist. She, she turned me onto WordPress and, uh, I never looked back.<br />Uh, prior to that I was building like static websites. Um, and, uh, and WordPress, uh, is not just a<br />piece of software, right?<br />It&#8217;s a community of people that, uh, help to kind of raise the level of everyone who works on it.<br />Um, and that, that&#8217;s where I got my career jump off. It was, uh, it was definitely with WordPress<br />for sure. That&#8217;s awesome.<br />Cory Miller: Well, we met when you&#8217;re part of Brute Protect and uh, I was asking in the pre-roll<br />about your art in the background.<br />I&#8217;m a big fan of art. Yeah. I wanna get some from the walls, but tell me, tell me more about the<br />art in the background cuz I was like, Hey, we met when you were part of Brute Protect before it<br />was acquired by automatic. And you kind of pointed to the [00:02:00] lightning in the back. So,<br />yeah, tell me more.<br />Jesse Friedman: Yeah. So actually before we jump in here, this is an not an, uh, chronological<br />order, but I was actually working for a company called Astonish, uh, where I actually got to build<br />a, a, a large web team.<br />I actually still work with one colleague from that company, Jeff Kalinsky. He works at Automatic<br />now. Uh, when we were tasked with building, um, or converting a. source.net based cms, uh,<br />from an old product called Blue Squid, uh, to a new WordPress powered multi-site. And it was<br />gonna house like 4,000 sites.<br />Um, and so we, I found this at like a art show. Uh, bought it, hung it on the wall, and uh, and we<br />spent a year building this new platform. The funny thing about it, this is a really unique story.<br />Didn&#8217;t give us access to the source files. Uh, and they kind of held everything hostage. This third<br />party company that we were host, host, hosting everything with.<br />Um, so we actually had to build a, like a [00:03:00] w get scraper. To scrape our own websites<br />and convert them into WordPress themes. So we didn&#8217;t even like turn them into Ion out, we<br />turned them into full blown WordPress themes on a multisite. And, uh, we were able to move all<br />those sites over very quickly. Um, and so I asked that same artist, I said, Hey, can you paint a, a<br />harpoon now that Blue Squid is dead?<br />It&#8217;s this old product. And so we hung that up on the wall and that, and that was that. I left that<br />company and co-founded Brew Protect. Uh, brew Protect was a cloud powered. Um, Uh, botnet<br />prevention service. So like anyone who&#8217;s trying to brute force into your website, we used, uh,<br />data that we would gather from attack vectors from different various, uh, areas.<br />And it was really the first time that I was able to say like, we&#8217;re building something that leverages<br />information that we gained from multiple hosting partnerships to better the entire WordPress<br />community. Because everything that was happening before then was hosts would gather attack<br />vectors against their own infrastructure, and that was the only thing they could [00:04:00] learn<br />from.<br />But what we did was we grabbed that information from across different hosting companies, uh,<br />across customers who were around the globe, and we were able to really do a better job of</p>\n\n\n\n<p>thwarting those attacks. Um, and so that represents cloud data raining down on a, a botnet, uh,<br />going outta business there.<br />And then, uh, yeah, and so then we got, uh, acquired by Automatic back in 2014, and I joined<br />the Jet Pack team. Uh, I&#8217;ve been working on hosting partnerships and. Product development for<br />Jet Pack for almost nine years now. And, uh, then we started, uh, you know, launched WP Cloud<br />last year.<br />Cory Miller: So it has been 10 years.<br />Because I met you all right before the automatic acquisition. Acquisition. Yeah. Yeah. Um, man,<br />well, some nostalgia there. Um, so what&#8217;s, what&#8217;s, uh, really compelling, what you just said too,<br />is Jet. So when I knew you all got required and got got to meet you and Sam [00:05:00]<br />Hotchkis, and then at some point I realized, Sam, and you were on the jet pack team and at Ithe<br />we.<br />Felt like we were competitors to Jet Pack in many ways, um, from backups and security. And I<br />was like, oh no, these, these guys are gonna take jet pack to the next level. And I&#8217;ve definitely<br />seen, I think, what is probably the product of your work over the years where it&#8217;s like, oh no.<br />Okay, Sam, Jesse getting in there, um, with Jet Pack.<br />So, uh, that&#8217;s a, I wanted to mention that cuz I&#8217;ve thought that many times. I think I&#8217;ve expressed<br />that to Sam. Um, but. Anyway, thanks for that background. That&#8217;s, that&#8217;s really compelling. Back<br />to the old static h CML days. Woo. Thanks WordPress. Yeah. So Jesse, let&#8217;s talk about WP<br />Cloud. I know, um, we&#8217;ve talked a couple times about this and I, what, I know I can throw this at<br />you and you&#8217;ll, you just, you just hit it out of the part and, uh, but tell me really succinctly, what<br />do you [00:06:00] think? What is WP Cloud?.<br />Jesse Friedman: WP Cloud is a WordPress focus cloud platform that we built within automatic<br />to power the highest and most trafficked websites in the world. Um, and to provide a very unique<br />solution, uh, that gets very close to, if not a hundred percent up time. Um, and so we&#8217;re doing<br />something that&#8217;s a little bit different than what you see with other cloud platforms.<br />We provide vertical scaling and automated real-time fail. So what we want to do is provide a<br />solution that, again, is 100% WordPress focused, but allows you to stop thinking about hosting<br />altogether. You don&#8217;t have to worry about it anymore. We&#8217;re gonna take care of all the<br />infrastructure, keep it up and running, keep it high performance, and, uh, let hosting companies<br />or others focus on what they do best, um, to provide a, a fantastic experience to customer.<br />Cory Miller: Well, anytime you say something around wordpress.com infrastructure, I always<br />go, holy [00:07:00] cow. Yeah. When you can say, pretty near, I know you&#8217;re being humbled too,<br />but like that, that system is renowned because it&#8217;s incredible. I mean, people that work on, uh,<br />the platform and what it does, but. Now, who&#8217;s it? Who&#8217;s it really for?<br />When you think about WP Cloud, you kind of maybe mentioned this, but I wanna drill down on<br />that. Who do you think it&#8217;s really for?<br />Jesse Friedman: Yeah. All right. So if we look at the actual, uh, hosting, uh, platform itself, it&#8217;s<br />for anyone who wants to have high availability, high performant websites. Uh, but if we look at<br />the brand WP Cloud, what we&#8217;ve done is we&#8217;ve decided to take, um, the entire platform and, and<br />give.<br />A brand that we can then go to hosting companies with and, and provide services to hosting<br />companies. So WP Cloud is not interested in individual customers, uh, small agencies, things<br />like that. What we&#8217;re actually interested in doing is providing services to hosting companies<br />[00:08:00] to help them provide. Better hosting.<br />Um, you can think about WP Cloud as a utility service, like the electrical grid underground, uh,<br />providing services to customers all, all around the globe. But, um, allowing those hosting<br />companies to, uh, maintain their experience, the things that differentiate themselves, all of. But if<br />you&#8217;re, if you&#8217;re listening to this and you&#8217;re thinking, oh, I have one website or 10 websites and I<br />want to host them and I don&#8217;t want to have to worry about, um, downtime or, or speed issues or<br />anything like that, I would suggest going straight to one of WP Cloud&#8217;s partners, pressable, for<br />example.<br />Mm-hmm.<br />Cory Miller: So when we were prepping for this, I said, Hey, so this, this pa uh, this is<br />leveraging the.com platform, and you corrected me. Share a little bit more about that.<br />Jesse Friedman: Yeah, sure. So, uh, so what we did was we took the minds and, and the<br />people behind wordpress.com powering hundreds of millions of sites there.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We took the [00:09:00] same, um, experienced individuals who were helping to power some of<br />the, um, most powerful websites on v i p. Uh, we took the experience that we had from Running<br />Pressable, which is, um, like a, uh, a managed WordPress host that we, uh, use to, um, really.<br />Test and grow our own product base. And so we took all those things and we said, what, how<br />can we build a cloud platform that&#8217;s gonna service all of the needs that we have internally, um,<br />and, and provide the absolute best experience?<br />And so when we did that, we ended up launching, uh, what we called internally, uh, product<br />called Atomic, uh, and that is now powering uh, wordpress.com business and e-commerce<br />plans. Pressable News Pack. And so that was, uh, similar to like how a w s got born. You know,<br />a, uh, Amazon was an e-commerce platform that was dealing with scale issues.<br />They couldn&#8217;t compensate for [00:10:00] the amount of the influx of traffic, so they had to really<br />sit down and think about how they can rebuild their entire platform. Um, and so then that&#8217;s how<br />aw w s was born. It&#8217;s not too dissimilar from what we&#8217;re doing. We have built a platform that is<br />now powering, um, 13 billion page views.<br />Um, and, uh, with sites that are experiencing incredibly fast speed under load. Um, and, and<br />now we&#8217;re saying to ourselves like, well, we know we built something amazing here. We know<br />that it&#8217;s something that we can really give back to the community as a way to raise the bar for<br />cloud hosting across, across the board.<br />Um, and so now that, that is the, that is the effort there is we&#8217;ve powered. Internally what we<br />need to, to make sure that everything runs smoothly. So again, if anybody wants to try out WP<br />Cloud, sign up for a wordpress.com business site, sign up for pressable. Um, you&#8217;ll feel the<br />speed, [00:11:00] uh, the proof is in, in the, uh, experience right there.<br />Um, but then WP Cloud is really now focused on how it can provide services to hosting.<br />Cory Miller: Yeah. I love that I&#8217;ve observed from the industry being in as long as both of us have<br />that, you know, there was this day where you started seeing some of the really big hosting<br />companies start go moving. There WordPress stuff over to the cloud.<br />Yeah, there&#8217;s a lot of bumpy roads along that way, but um, your comparison with aws for<br />instance, cuz I&#8217;ve heard Google Cloud, aws, some of those offerings kind of moving over and<br />that&#8217;s the way it feels like it&#8217;s shifting. I&#8217;m not a technical person, but I&#8217;ve been in the space a<br />long time and I go, it makes sense to have cloud-based hosting, especially for WordPress.<br />And then you get specific WordPress expertise. That knows that application better than anybody<br />I&#8217;d, I&#8217;d, I&#8217;d challenge anybody to say, do you know more about WordPress and automatic teams?<br />Yeah. Um,<br />Jesse Friedman: we definitely leveraged our, our own internal expertise to solve for that. And,<br />and you&#8217;re right. I [00:12:00] mean, you look at hosting companies and they&#8217;re trying to figure<br />out ways to differentiate themselves outside of the infrastructure.<br />A lot of them are moving to Google Cloud or aw. Um, the shared hosting is still, you know,<br />mostly the same kind of solution, um, that everyone is kind of racing to the bottom on pricing on.<br />Mm-hmm. Um, and so, so how are hosts differentiating themselves? Well, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s, you know, it&#8217;s<br />made on top of promises of speed and performance and, and security.<br />But the reality of the situation is the, the infrastructure underneath is actually not. That different.<br />So hosting companies are really focused on trying to differentiate themselves now in the way in<br />which they market themselves. The onboarding experience that provide the partnerships that<br />they can leverage to provide a better experience to customers.<br />The speed at which you can launch your site, the customer service, those are all things that<br />HUS hosting companies really f are, are focused on, and. Frankly, the places where they can,<br />they can really win. One of the conversations I had at cloudfest, uh, which was a conference<br />that we went to, um, [00:13:00] two weeks ago, was about the power of diversity within hosting.<br />Um, and so I think that it&#8217;s really important to recognize that, especially when we&#8217;re talking about<br />WP Cloud, helping to power those hosting companies in terms of like a utility. Um, you look at<br />something like shop. And or, or w and they have these global solutions for every single, um,<br />customer across the world.<br />Um, but you know, we, we know why that&#8217;s not, uh, advantageous and why WordPress is better.<br />But one of the major advantages that WordPress has is that, um, the hosting companies can<br />define the niche that they wanna solve. They can solve problems specific for geographically<br />locations. WordPress has seeded itself into hosting companies around the globe.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So the solutions you get from a hosting company in let&#8217;s say the Netherlands, is completely<br />different than what you might get in Malaysia or Africa. Um, and so that&#8217;s an advantage that that<br />hosting companies have in that diversity. And so, uh, you know, if we can come [00:14:00] in<br />and try to help and provide better services at that infrastructural, Then that frees those hosting<br />companies up to think about ways in which they can differentiate themselves and provide the<br />absolute best experience to those, to those customers.<br />Cory Miller: Take care of wordPress, you got the power of WP Cloud, the.com top experience<br />and do other stuff on top that adds value for your customers. Yeah, exactly. So. I know having<br />been acquired, our company was acquired by hosting company, uh, been on the inside of that<br />and realizing how much, you know, they, they really worry all, all hosting companies about price.<br />Um, yeah. Anytime you, you know, c panel was this big conversation in the industry for a long<br />time because they started cranking at prices and everybody started fleeing because they&#8217;re like,<br />they felt held hostage. But I know every penny accounts in hosting. So Can you talk a little bit<br />about the pricing structure for WP.<br />And I know that this is still early.<br />Jesse Friedman: It is still early, and I [00:15:00] appreciate that and, uh, I probably shy away<br />from getting into the super specifics of pricing right now, but what I can tell you is this, is that the<br />way in which WP Cloud Scales is based on the number of pH p workers, uh, CPUs. Uh, and<br />storage that you want.<br />And so what we want to create are ways in which hosting companies can come in, um, and<br />create bespoke offerings to either power their managed WordPress offering now, or to start by<br />offering the higher tier hosting that they haven&#8217;t been able to offer before. If you look at most of<br />the hosting companies in the world, a lot of them cap out at a hundred bucks, 150 bucks a<br />month.<br />Um, and so then you leave, uh, the super high end. Hosting customers to, to either fend for<br />themselves with their own cloud platform to go to, uh, you know, higher, higher end managed<br />hosting. Um, or something like W P V I P. What we wanna do is be able to provide services that<br />go from that range, from, uh, 25 bucks a month to [00:16:00] $2,000 a month, um, and to be<br />able to provide consistent uptime throughout all of that.<br />So hosting companies will be able to come in and use WP. Um, and, and if they want to go with<br />a lower tier, like two PHP workers, two CPUs, this is getting super technical. That&#8217;s still built for<br />like 400,000 sustained visitors a month, uh, which is gonna compensate for, you know, most.<br />Customers that&#8217;s only gonna cost that hosting company a few bucks a month with WP Cloud.<br />Um, and then, and then it scales up from there. And since we&#8217;re talking about scaling, I&#8217;ll, I&#8217;ll, I&#8217;ll<br />just say one thing is, is that we offer something that&#8217;s pretty unique in that we don&#8217;t, uh, we don&#8217;t<br />reserve, uh, we, we don&#8217;t have any limitations on visits. So if you take a look at other hosting<br />companies, you&#8217;ll see that they create, uh, they&#8217;ll create really robust, powerful servers.<br />And then they&#8217;ll put traffic limits on it. Mm-hmm. I&#8217;m thinking of a hosting company right now<br />[00:17:00] that has, um, a robust amount of power, uh, allows for up to 40 WordPress websites<br />and only, uh, and stops at like 400,000 visits a month. Mm-hmm. Well, if you only have 10,000<br />visits a month, you don&#8217;t need all that power anyway.<br />Uh, even if you&#8217;re not sharing it across all of those things, that&#8217;s just a waste of power. That&#8217;s a<br />Lamborghini on the, on the back of a flatbed pickup truck. You know what I mean? Like you&#8217;re<br />not taking full advantage of that. WP Cloud is gonna come in and, and basically say, uh, we&#8217;re<br />going to create bespokes solutions that are designed to house the amount of traffic that you&#8217;re,<br />or serve the amount of traffic that you&#8217;re bringing.<br />Uh, but we&#8217;re not gonna limit you on, on the amount of traffic that you have there. Um, so there<br />are no real, uh, traffic limitations with WP Cloud, unlike other hosting companies.<br />Cory Miller: Yeah, it, I don&#8217;t know all the specs, but I know enough to go when they put a traffic<br />thing, there&#8217;s something underneath that they&#8217;re trying to be careful of when they put limits and<br />things.<br />But, um, [00:18:00] so that, that&#8217;s a conversation for another well, unless you.<br />Jesse Friedman: Well, I was just gonna say that it&#8217;s a way for them to mitigate their, their, their<br />risk and their costs. Yeah. Um, but we, we have built a platform that we know can scale to any<br />amount of traffic. So, uh, we&#8217;re, we&#8217;re gonna differentiate ourselves there.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cory Miller: Yeah. Um, so I think you said fully managed performance security and WordPress.<br />What does that mean?<br />Jesse Friedman: It means that we&#8217;re literally gonna take care of it all for you. So in terms of<br />security, uh, it has built-in backup solutions. So it&#8217;s actually pretty unique in the way in which we<br />do backups. I&#8217;m sure we&#8217;re gonna touch on automated failovers soon.<br />But the way we do our backups is that we do, um, daily file backups and hourly database<br />backups, but we don&#8217;t just store that on the same box. What we do is we put it onto another data<br />center. On another box that actually has power ready so that we can switch to that if we need to.<br />We can talk about that in a second.<br />Um, but we [00:19:00] do, it comes with s ssl, it comes with, uh, TLS encryption. It comes with,<br />uh, WAF DDoS protection. I&#8217;m telling you. Like we harden the heck out of it. Yeah. Um, and then<br />in, in addition to that, we automatically build in a c. No extra cost. It has a CDN built into it. Um,<br />and it, uh, also resizes your images.<br />So you&#8217;re only serving the size of the image that you need high resolution, but you&#8217;re not serving<br />these 10 megabyte images that people upload straight from their phone to their WordPress<br />instance, right? We&#8217;re resizing it and only showing the size that you need for the device that&#8217;s<br />requesting it. Uh, we also do, uh, automated caching built in too.<br />Um, and. It&#8217;s all run by our team internally, so there is really no tweaking or configuring or<br />anything that you have to do. Um, it&#8217;s 100% fully managed outta the box. That also includes the<br />management of things like P H p, uh, database. Um, it manages, uh, WordPress core [00:20:00]<br />files, certain plug-ins. It allows for templating and staging.<br />Um, and again, we handle all of that. It&#8217;s not, these aren&#8217;t things that you&#8217;re gonna have to.<br />Cherry pick based on price or anything. It&#8217;s all 100% inclusive in the product.<br />Cory Miller: So I, you mentioned principle way earlier. I&#8217;m a paying, and I wanna say that really<br />loud and clear. I&#8217;m a paying customer principle.<br />Yeah. So I&#8217;ve seen this, the performance, all these things. And, uh, so that, that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s pretty<br />awesome. But I, I wanted to push in on that because I&#8217;m a, this is my comment, not. But when<br />you say managed, you always, I always go, tell me what that really means. Yeah. Yeah. It&#8217;s like,<br />you know, the Tommy Boys, like you can slap a label on the side, but it&#8217;s, you know, what<br />actually happens inside.<br />And I think that&#8217;s one thing that differentiate, differentiates, uh, any automatic brand is it&#8217;s not a<br />label on the outside. Um, yeah. Okay. So tell me what automated realtime fellows.<br />Jesse Friedman: So we touched on this briefly, right? [00:21:00] So if we, if we back up your<br />entire site to another location and we put that back up on a box that has power, um, and you&#8217;re<br />serving traffic to one location, we can automatically detect some kind of, any kind of issue.<br />So even if there was catastrophic failure, uh, you know, a pipe got cut. Uh, the data center<br />actually you. We have tons of redundancies in terms of power and things like that, but like, let&#8217;s<br />just say like a volcano erupted or something like that, you know, something really catastrophic.<br />We can in real time redirect that traffic to another data center that already has your site live on it<br />and already has, uh, the, the power behind it.<br />So we can in real time, switch that traffic and people will not experience any downtime. And that<br />is something that is nearly impossible with other cloud platforms. It is possible, but it&#8217;s incredibly<br />expensive. And because of the scale that we operate at, uh, and the WordPress efficiency that<br />we [00:22:00] have, um, we&#8217;ve been able to, to build that into the platform.<br />Cory Miller: See, when you talked about backups earlier, it&#8217;s something to know about having<br />helped lead our product, uh, for backups. And when you said that one thing, it&#8217;s not on that<br />server. It&#8217;s somewhere else within a vast infrastructure. That&#8217;s really compelling to me because<br />we would tell customers all the time, don&#8217;t just don&#8217;t back up on that server because what&#8217;s,<br />what&#8217;s it gonna do for you when it crashes?<br />Um, so like, I love the secure, the backup feature of that. It&#8217;s not just a. A backup if something<br />happens. And this was way before all this technology existed today, but that&#8217;s how we got the<br />backup is like into our product. Is it crashed? We didn&#8217;t have, we had backups maybe on that<br />server. And literally the hard drive was like capoot.<br />And so that was our mantra. Always remote, offsite, you know, so that you can restore and. In<br />case<br />Jesse Friedman: we&#8217;ve, we&#8217;ve seen this, I, I&#8217;ll [00:23:00] leave hosting companies names out of<br />this, this conversation, but we&#8217;ve all seen hosting companies that have had. Catastrophic failure.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Um, data center fires, for example, things like that.<br />Uh, and if you&#8217;re not backing up, this is getting into like a conversation about Jet Pack two, but<br />like, if you&#8217;re not backing up your, your website offsite, you&#8217;re susceptible to that. Mm-hmm. Um,<br />and that, that can be, um, unbelievably painful. I can&#8217;t tell you how many conversations I had<br />with people who say, well, I&#8217;ll worry about security later, or I&#8217;ll, I&#8217;ll, you know, I don&#8217;t really care<br />about backups right now.<br />I just wanna get my site. But all the time you&#8217;re investing in that, right? You&#8217;re building your<br />website. Think about the dozens of hours of time that you&#8217;re spending tweaking all those things.<br />And if you lose that, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s not just catastrophic failure for the host, it&#8217;s catastrophic failure for<br />the site owner too.<br />It&#8217;s, it&#8217;s incredibly painful and to, you know, some, some people out there have stronger will than<br />I to start all over from the beginning, but I don&#8217;t, but that&#8217;s, [00:24:00] sometimes I felt that pain<br />you left with doing.<br />Cory Miller: Yeah, I, I felt that. Yeah. Um, we were, we were scraping. We had some clients at<br />the time and scraping data from Google Cash to redo websites, and so I felt that pain.<br />Yeah. So we&#8217;ve talked about, um, the power, performance, security, all these things that are<br />baked into WP Cloud, that powers.com business, eCommerce plans. But how about the,<br />Preserving and growing the hosting experience. What are your thoughts on that? So key, key<br />client for this is our hosting companies, um, to be able to really leverage all of this for, I mean,<br />when you said utility tool, it really rang a bell for me.<br />It&#8217;s like, okay, all of this at a re, very. Reasonable price, and I know they need to talk to you<br />about all those things. But yeah, let&#8217;s, let&#8217;s talk about that hosting experience a little bit. Tell me,<br />tell me your thoughts on that related to WP Club.<br />Jesse Friedman: So every single [00:25:00] host that, and I&#8217;ve worked with a lot of hosting<br />companies, every single host has a unique experience.<br />Uh, the signup flow is typically about the same, but the second that you get into that WordPress<br />instance being launched, Unique onboarding flows. You get unique sets of tools. Um, the<br />different combinations of the way in which they combine, uh, partnerships they have with<br />security or performance companies.<br />Um, And then the platform, the platform is always really unique. Um, a lot of them are built on<br />top of cPanel or Plak. I think something like 70, 80% of all hosts use that technology. Mm-hmm.<br />Um, and sometimes you feel it and sometimes you don&#8217;t. Like, there are certain hosting<br />companies that are just using cPanel.<br />It literally says cPanel and you, and you know what you&#8217;re on. But then there are other hosting<br />companies that have built a completely custom bespoke solution that&#8217;s layered on top of. No<br />matter what it is, um, that, that again is how you&#8217;re differentiating yourself. Um, so if I look at six<br />hosting companies that are using the same [00:26:00] basic boxes to do shared WordPress<br />hosting, they&#8217;re the only difference.<br />There is price, but we&#8217;re all. All hosting companies are racing to the bottom on price, and we&#8217;re,<br />we&#8217;re talking about a difference of a few bucks a month. Um, so then what is it that you get with<br />that hosting that&#8217;s really gonna differentiate &#8217;em? And so most people are either making<br />decisions based on the fact that they have a recommendation from a friend, or they&#8217;re taking a<br />look at, uh, you know, the, the, the bespoke solutions that are coming bundled with that.<br />The great thing about WP Cloud is that it has no platform. It has no user interface. It is 100%<br />API driven. So for any hosting company to use it, it has to work underneath every single thing<br />that they&#8217;ve already built. Um, and so it can work with C Panel, it can work with Plesk, uh, or it<br />can work with whatever bespoke solution you have.<br />Um, but your, um, Unveiling of the use of WP Cloud is up to you as a host and company. You<br />[00:27:00] can go one way and say, Similar to, I think like WP Engine does this with like a w s or<br />Google Cloud. They say like, you know, proudly like we&#8217;re partnered with this company to, to<br />launch this. Um, and the same way that Pressable does this with like WP Cloud or Grid Pain,<br />uh, you know, they say proudly powered by WP Cloud.<br />And that&#8217;s starting to mean something as we start to have more of these conversations and<br />more people understand what WP Cloud really is. But, um, WP Cloud also offers a completely.<br />Uh, an option that allows you to basically use our infrastructure without ever mentioning us. You<br />could even bring your own IP addresses if you wanted to, um, and then take use of the entire</p>\n\n\n\n<p>infrastructure underneath it, uh, without having to disclose that it&#8217;s not something that&#8217;s<br />homegrown.<br />Um, so however the host and company wants to work in that, in that area makes sense to us.<br />Uh, what we want to do is just really. Allow them to refocus their efforts away from things like<br />[00:28:00] managing WordPress or handling security or dealing with uptime. The other thing I&#8217;ll<br />talk about too is, um, cost to serve.<br />Cost to serve is something that&#8217;s on the mind of every single hosting company. Uh, when<br />Pressable moved onto WP Cloud, we saw a dramatic decrease in, um, support tickets related to<br />anything infrastructure rate, limiting DDoS, anything like. Um, and the same thing with<br />wordpress.com, uh, wordpress.com business and e-commerce customers.<br />They&#8217;re not, uh, reaching out and asking for support on anything related to the box or how fast<br />their site is performing. What they are asking questions about is more things around how can<br />they be successful. How can you know what plugins should I use for this? Or, or that that&#8217;s your<br />decision as a host and company decide pr provide support in that area or not.<br />But I can tell you that when you relieve your host, your, your happiness engineers, your<br />customer service team, from the burden of having to figure out why a site is down or why it&#8217;s<br />[00:29:00] performing so slowly, it gives them the ability. You know, focus on what keeps those<br />customers there for the long term, reducing churn, which is what every host and company thinks<br />about.<br />Pressable had something like 36,000 tickets last year. Less than half of a percentage of them<br />were even associated with anything, uh, related to to infrastructure. And I even read some of<br />them. And a lot of them were just questions about how, how Pressable goes about handling.<br />Um, so we&#8217;ve basically eliminated support for, for hosting.<br />Cory Miller: That&#8217;s the headline right there for, for WordPress hosting that, that&#8217;s the headline of<br />the interview today. For sure. Well, um, Jesse, we&#8217;ve covered a lot, but I wanna make sure we<br />didn&#8217;t miss anything. Um, I think it&#8217;s an incredibly compelling service. Could help really raise the<br />standard of the hosting industry for WordPress.<br />Um, that&#8217;s exactly. So what, uh, [00:30:00] and, and this is the note I wanted to say about the<br />hosting experiences like that, uh, I think that frees a hosting company to also innovate on that<br />application labor. What things, whether it&#8217;s plugins, themes, services on top that add value for<br />who their customers are and what they&#8217;re trying to get.<br />And I think that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s pretty dang cool. If I were in that seat hosting product, uh, manager, I&#8217;d<br />be like, okay, this is taken care of. It&#8217;s base lever, le level here. Now how can we set ourselves<br />apart by adding value to who our customers are? But is there anything with that, um, we left at,<br />or you wanna mention?<br />Jesse Friedman: Well, I&#8217;ll actually just pick up right there where you, uh, you mentioned about,<br />uh, hosting companies. I think one thing to remember is, is that, Our mission at Automatic more<br />than anything is to provide, um, and democratize publishing. We know that, but it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s also<br />about making sure that WordPress is not only [00:31:00] readily available, but performing at a<br />level that, um, allows you to focus on getting the word out about your business or your political<br />views or whatever it might be.<br />Um, but hosting companies, uh, are experiencing incredible churn right now. Uh, we. This was<br />like the number one topic at that conference I mentioned earlier. Cloud Fest, um, hosting<br />companies are seeing extreme churn, and the problem is, is that when someone churns from a<br />hosting company that is specifically for WordPress, they don&#8217;t churn and go, they don&#8217;t try<br />hosting company a.<br />Say, oh, my WordPress experience wasn&#8217;t so great there. I&#8217;m gonna go try hosting company B<br />and try WordPress there, and then I&#8217;m gonna try hosting company C and try WordPress there.<br />That&#8217;s not really What happens is that they give WordPress a shot on whatever hosting<br />company they&#8217;ve chosen. And if that fails, uh, or that doesn&#8217;t work out for them, a lot of them<br />end up going to something else.<br />And so that one opportunity to provide a [00:32:00] superior WordPress experience is really<br />where we want to help, right? So if we can take care of the, the infrastructure, the hosting, the<br />security, the performance, and make sure that everyone has this like level set, amazing hosting<br />experience in terms of the infrastructure.<br />I wanna touch on the exact, like, I wanna reiterate what you just said, which is that that allows<br />hosting companies to innovate on what they can do to provide better onboarding, reduce time to</p>\n\n\n\n<p>live, which is how fast they can launch their site, helping to make sure customers are<br />successful, focus your time on marketing so that customers sites, once they&#8217;re launched, they<br />can actually gain traffic and, and really help them to achieve their business goals.<br />And the other thing that I just wanted to touch on real quick too is, is just, uh, we talked a little bit<br />about scaling, but one of the things I do wanna mention is, is that, um, so these are bare metal<br />boxes that we built up that we own. They&#8217;re, we&#8217;re not outsourcing anything at all. Um, and we<br />have 28 data centers around the globe already that are ours, uh, powering this entire<br />infrastructure.<br />[00:33:00] Um, and then, uh, when someone. Hit with traffic, an extreme amount of traffic. What<br />typically happens with other, um, cloud platforms is that they replicate everything onto a<br />separate box and they try to throw additional boxes at the problem. But the problem is that if<br />you&#8217;re down, because you can&#8217;t service the amount of traffic that you&#8217;re handling, you have to<br />wait for that extra box to spool up, or you&#8217;re paying for it to be laying in weight.<br />Right. What we can do actually is what we do is vertical scaling. So we have the option to throw<br />more PHPs and more CPUs at the problem until we&#8217;ve compensated for the amount of traffic<br />that you have. But this is where things get really unique. We go when we build out hosting<br />plans. As I said before, hosts can build plans between two and say 30 PHP workers and CPUs.<br />That&#8217;s built for sustained traffic of 400,000 visits to 15 million visits. Um, but now let&#8217;s say you<br />have an e-commerce website that got featured on the wire cutter, or you have, uh, a product<br />that you&#8217;ve been [00:34:00] ready to release and you have a huge wait list, uh, and everyone&#8217;s<br />gonna slam your site at the same exact time.<br />WP Cloud has a very unique opportunity that we can burst to 110 PhD P workers in CPUs. And<br />then what we&#8217;re talking about then is, is handling the type of traffic that like the Washington Post<br />gets when they release an article about what&#8217;s happening in our, in our government, or. C n n<br />traffic, you know what I mean?<br />Mm-hmm. Um, and so those, those are the types of things that we&#8217;re, we&#8217;re mainly focused on<br />so that we can provide, you know, v i p level hosting, um, and allow hosting companies to break<br />out of that shared hosting and the cheaper managed hosting, and to really offer something to,<br />you know, to any of those customers that are, that are experiencing incredibly high.<br />Cory Miller: I wanna go back to something you said because I absolutely, it rings true with me,<br />is that if the hosting experience is not good, particularly on the WordPress as an application<br />layer, [00:35:00] um, yeah, we&#8217;re, we&#8217;re not, we&#8217;re doing a disservice to the entire industry<br />because we&#8217;re. Turning a WordPress person into another Com competitor.<br />And you know, I&#8217;ve been in this space a long time and I go, you know, I woke up a year ago and<br />go, wow, there&#8217;s very solid competitors to WordPress now out there. And if we want to, as the<br />business eco ecosystem of WordPress continued to have this incredible thriving grow.<br />Ecosystem and the software. Then we, you know, we used to say like, you need two things.<br />You need a domain name and you need WordPress hosting to Yep. To buy our products. And<br />then again to those agencies out there who we serve, um, at post tennis and are building on<br />that, that love, that inflow and growth that we&#8217;ve all enjoyed with the growth of WordPress, then<br />we need to be serious about this conversation in the hosting experience because, You hit it right<br />on the nail.<br />They&#8217;re not leaving the hosting [00:36:00] company. Just the hosting company. They&#8217;re leaving<br />potentially WordPress. And that&#8217;s the bell I want to keep ringing, is that as an industry, we need<br />to do things like this. This is, this is a key pillar. I think. Um, there&#8217;s other things that we need to<br />be doing as a WordPress business ecosystem to keep this healthy, thriving, growing.<br />And, uh, I&#8217;m glad you mentioned that because it&#8217;s something I&#8217;ve seen, um, too, but that just<br />gives a real world experience of like, if these hosting companies are having churn, it&#8217;s not just<br />them, it&#8217;s all of us. And there, there&#8217;s a brand that we&#8217;ve had with WordPress that has been<br />awesome and I&#8217;m incredibly grateful for the brand and the open source software.<br />So I appreciate you mentioning that .<br />Jesse Friedman: Yeah, of course. Yeah. If you remember the old days of the five minute install,<br />um, I do. That was basically, uh, yeah. And for anyone who&#8217;s listening, who, who may not be<br />familiar with that, cuz it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s been enough years now. Uh, when you used to get a, [00:37:00] a,<br />a new hosting account, it never really came pre-built with WordPress, uh, out of the box, you&#8217;d<br />have to.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Download WordPress from wordpress.org, re-upload it, sftp, build a database. Um, and then the<br />five minute install came out and it was like this brilliant way of like launching a WordPress<br />website super fast. And that was the moment I think that husband companies decided like, wait<br />a minute, we can actually like really create custom WordPress experiences.<br />Because it&#8217;s no longer in charge of the customer to actually launch a WordPress website. It&#8217;s<br />now up to the, the host to actually launch that instance. And that&#8217;s when they started packaging<br />their own plugins, their own themes into it, providing their own unique solutions. And that&#8217;s all<br />well and good. Um, but I think there is a responsibility to those hosts, to the larger ecosystem to<br />make sure that we&#8217;re, we&#8217;re furthering the mission across the board.<br />Um, and so their churn is definitely a reflection of the larger ecosystems. Hundred percent.<br />Cory Miller: I mean, that affects all of our members that post us from product companies,<br />[00:38:00] professionals that do WordPress love, being able to do pre WordPress as their career<br />and the agency serving their clients out. Across the world.<br />So a hundred percent agree. And this, this is something we&#8217;ll have to change the headline a little<br />bit and add to it because it&#8217;s my personal viewpoint that we need to, all of us collectively look at<br />the industry and go, what makes it healthier for everybody? And this is a, this is part of the<br />conversation, so it matters, this conversation today, even if they don&#8217;t choose to go with WP<br />Cloud, that we need to be thinking about this experience for the overall health of, of the industry.<br />Yeah. Absolut. For sure, Jesse, my friend. Um, so if somebody&#8217;s interested and wants to talk<br />more about W Cloud, what do they do?<br />Jesse Friedman: So if you&#8217;re a hosting company and uh, you wanna partner with WP Cloud, go<br />to wp.cloud. Uh, it&#8217;ll load so fast, you think it&#8217;s a local site. Uh, so that&#8217;ll be your first taste of the<br />power of WP Cloud.<br />Uh, funny [00:39:00] enough, that site is actually hosted by Pressable on just a regular account.<br />Nothing special. Um, so, uh, you&#8217;ll see, you&#8217;ll see how that works if you&#8217;re thinking. Moving your<br />own personal sites or your businesses sites, um, and you&#8217;re not a hosting company, but you<br />want to, you want to try out WP Cloud, take a look at our partners.<br />So we have, uh, wordpress.com Pressable, uh, if you&#8217;re a news site, you could try News Pack<br />Grid Pain now offers, um, uh, WP Cloud as well. And, uh, and uh, yeah, we have some other<br />partners coming down the pike too. Uh, that will be, uh, will be.<br />Cory Miller: Let me know when the new<br />partners come in. We wanna share that, um, to, to our members at Postes.<br />But Jesse, thanks. Sure. Uh, for this today. I appreciate your time sharing about what you&#8217;re<br />doing at WP Cloud and Automatic. Um, so thank you and everybody else. Thank you for<br />listening in to another post status draft episode I, the product People series.<br />Jesse Friedman: Yeah. Well, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.[00:40:00]</p>\n<p>This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.</p>\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Thu, 20 Apr 2023 12:39:39 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:11:\"Cory Miller\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:47;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:83:\"Do The Woo Community: From Database Developer to Product Manager with Prashant Rana\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:28:\"https://dothewoo.io/?p=74807\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:58:\"https://dothewoo.io/database-developer-to-product-manager/\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:423:\"<p>Listen in as Prashant from Avalara chats about his journey to WooCommerce and his insights into shop and agency tax compliance.</p>\n<p>&gt;&gt; The post <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https://dothewoo.io/database-developer-to-product-manager/\">From Database Developer to Product Manager with Prashant Rana</a> appeared first on <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https://dothewoo.io\">Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community</a>	.</p>\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Thu, 20 Apr 2023 09:14:43 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:5:\"BobWP\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:48;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:42:\"WPTavern: WooCommerce Launches Woo Express\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:30:\"https://wptavern.com/?p=143718\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:53:\"https://wptavern.com/woocommerce-launches-woo-express\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:9152:\"<p>WooCommerce has launched <a href=\"https://woocommerce.com/express/\">Woo Express</a>, a new managed hosting product that uses WordPress.com&#8217;s infrastructure and relieves store owners of the responsibilities of hosting and maintenance. The company soft-launched Woo Express in early March with a small selection of visitors but has concluded that phase and opened it up to the public.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Woo Express provides a selection of extensions already installed and professionally-designed themes but is built with the same open source platform that allows store owners to install any plugin or theme. Merchants can use WooCommerce Payments or any other payment gateway they choose. The plans also include automated backups, security scanning, and a custom domain and SSL certificate.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>At WooSesh in October 2022, the company <a href=\"https://wptavern.com/hosted-woocommerce-solution-coming-to-wordpress-com-in-2023-following-recent-launches-from-godaddy-and-bluehost\">announced it was working on a hosted WooCommerce solution</a> just as GoDaddy had launched an open access preview of <a href=\"https://www.godaddy.com/hosting/ecommerce-hosting\">Managed WooCommerce Stores</a> to US-based customers, and Bluehost launched its <a href=\"https://www.bluehost.com/wordpress/woocommerce-hosting\">WooCommerce offering</a> a month prior.  The drive to provide a more customized, user-friendly onboarding experience beyond simply having WooCommerce pre-installed, is getting more competitive. </p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pricing for Woo Express&#8217; hosting plans comes in slightly more expensive than GoDaddy&#8217;s introductory $20.99/mo pricing (renews at $29.99/mo) for the most basic plan, but cheaper than GoDaddy&#8217;s mid-tier and upper-tier plans which start at<strong> </strong>$99.99/mo and $149.99/mo. </p>\n\n\n\n<p>Bluehost sits at the budget end of the WooCommerce hosting spectrum with plans starting at $9.95/mo (renews at $24.95/mo) and an upper end plan at $12.95/mo (renews at $39.95) that adds the ability to manage product inventory across Etsy, Amazon, and eBay from a consolidated dashboard via Ecomdash.</p>\n\n\n\n<img />Woo Express pricing on 4/19/2023\n\n\n\n<p>Comparing plans across managed WooCommerce hosts isn&#8217;t straightforward as they all offer different features for a variety of stores at different pricing tiers. One major differentiator is the extensions bundled with the plan.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Although WooCommerce may be late to the game in offering a managed hosting solution, the makers of the e-commerce software have a clear advantage with their position in the WooCommerce ecosystem and a marketplace of more than 800 products. Woo Express has launched with a compelling set of commercial <a href=\"https://woocommerce.com/document/woo-express/#section-4\">extensions bundled into the hosting plans</a>, including product add-ons, product bundles, gift cards, min/max quantities, back in stock notifications, brands, product recommendations, subscriptions, in-person payments, shipment tracking, and more. Storeowners who were to purchase all of these extensions individually would spend far more than the annual cost of Woo Express hosting. </p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Woo Express Goes All-In on Block-Based Stores</h3>\n\n\n\n<p>WooCommerce is still working through the process of &#8220;blockifying&#8221; all aspects of store templates, and Woo Express is ready to carry the standard with a block theme as the default when customers sign up.</p>\n\n\n\n<img />\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;One of our goals for Woo Express is to give new merchants the best of everything WordPress offers — the site editor and the blocks we&#8217;ve built for WooCommerce mean you can create a beautiful site to express your brand without coding knowledge,&#8221; WooCommerce COO Warren Holmes said.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Woo Express ships with <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://wordpress.com/theme/tsubaki\" target=\"_blank\">Tsubaki</a> as the default, a modern, commerce-focused, block-based theme. We&#8217;ve made it easier for new merchants to get started with this theme by creating default content powered by our blocks. That includes the new <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://woocommerce.com/checkout-blocks/\" target=\"_blank\">cart and checkout blocks</a>, which provides a more delightful experience for shoppers and better conversions for merchants.&#8221;</p>\n\n\n\n<p>A few other commercial themes Automattic designed for Woo Express include <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://wordpress.com/theme/amulet\" target=\"_blank\">Amulet</a>, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://wordpress.com/theme/zaino\" target=\"_blank\">Zaino</a>, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://wordpress.com/theme/tazza\" target=\"_blank\">Tazza</a>, and <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://wordpress.com/theme/thriving-artist\" target=\"_blank\">Thriving Artist</a>. Store owners are also free to install any theme from the wide world of WooCommerce themes, not just the ones included in the hosting plan.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Woo Express has a 14-day free trial so prospective hosting customers can try out the bundled extensions, themes, and the environment to see if it will fit their needs. The onboarding experience was designed to be friendly for merchants but developers still have access to everything under the hood.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;With every managed WordPress.com environment, you get access to a native GitHub integration, you can run WP-CLI commands, check server logs, access to DBs directly and set up your workflows through SSH and SFTP, and much more,&#8221; WooCommerce developer advocate Stephanie Pi said in a <a href=\"https://developer.woocommerce.com/2023/04/17/a-developers-look-at-woo-express/\">post</a> outlining the new product on the company&#8217;s Developer blog.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>As WooCommerce has become the most used open source e-commerce software, powering <a href=\"https://trends.builtwith.com/shop/\">23% of the top million online stores</a>, managed hosting products have the potential to drive this growth even further. Users have an expectation that things will just work, but the reality is that much of WooCommerce&#8217;s open source ecosystem has grown up like wildflowers in a field. There are many great solutions out there but they don&#8217;t all work harmoniously together, which can drive people to proprietary, turnkey e-commerce solutions.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>On a recent <a href=\"ttps://dothewoo.io/woo-express-with-beau-lebens/\">Do the Woo podcast episode</a>, WooCommerce Head of Engineering Beau Lebens discussed how curated solutions like Woo Express bring some uniformity to the WooCommerce ecosystem. Putting a bunch of disparate solutions together hasn&#8217;t always provided the best experience for merchants, and it introduces complexity that can drive users away.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>WooCommerce announced its intention to collaborate with hosting partners in October 2022 with WordPress.com as the first to pilot the new managed hosting solution. At that time Lebens said &#8220;details like different versions and white-labeling are still under consideration&#8221; but WooCommerce is interested in making customization available to suit the specific needs of hosts and their customers.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Holmes said his team is also currently in the process of evaluating an affiliate program to enable developers and the broader community to spread the word about Woo Express. </p>\n\n\n\n<p>When asked about the status of other hosting partners offering Woo Express on their own infrastructure, Holmes said WooCommerce is still evaluating the possibilities.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Many merchants experience WooCommerce with the help of one of hundreds of amazing independent WordPress / Woo hosts around the world, and we regard that as an indispensable part of Woo’s success and place in the e-commerce landscape,&#8221; Holmes said. &#8220;We’re hard at work on a way to expand our collaboration with hosts in the future through Woo Express. At the moment we don’t have anything specific to announce, but we do currently have multiple teams looking into this.&#8221; </p>\n\n\n\n<p>Launching a managed hosting product puts WooCommerce in a unique position to tailor the core software to better serve the needs of store owners and hosting partners that are furthering its adoption, benefiting all who are using WooCommerce and building products for it.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re very much using this as a way to drive improvements on the merchant experience in WooCommerce Core,&#8221; Lebens said on the Do the Woo podcast. &#8220;So that will be available to everyone, including all other hosts. </p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;But it also means that, as a package, we can start to say, because we do partner with other hosts, we work with them very directly, and we can say, &#8216;Hey, look, this stuff works better.&#8217; If you bundle all of this together, if you offer this with a free trial, if you keep your pricing in this range, whatever it is, the learnings that we have from doing this ourselves, absolutely we intend to share this with hosts and work with other hosts to implement this for the whole ecosystem.&#8221;</p>\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Thu, 20 Apr 2023 03:20:38 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"Sarah Gooding\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}i:49;a:6:{s:4:\"data\";s:13:\"\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n	\n\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";s:5:\"child\";a:2:{s:0:\"\";a:5:{s:5:\"title\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:89:\"WPTavern: #72 – Steve Bruner and Timothy Jacobs on Using Gutenberg Outside of WordPress\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"guid\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:48:\"https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=143647\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:4:\"link\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:103:\"https://wptavern.com/podcast/72-steve-bruner-and-timothy-jacobs-on-using-gutenberg-outside-of-wordpress\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:11:\"description\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:56034:\"Transcript<div>\n<p>[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case using Gutenberg to build the Engine Awesome SaaS app.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you&#8217;d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcasts players.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you have a topic that you&#8217;d like us to feature on the podcast, I&#8217;m very keen to hear from you, and hopefully get you all your idea featured on the show had to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So on the podcast today we have Steve Bruner and Timothy Jacobs.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Steve has been active in the WordPress community for the past 17 years. He&#8217;s a WordPress developer, co organizer of the WordPress NYC meetup, and has organized many word camps in New York City.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Timothy is a WordPress core committer for the REST API, and has been a WordPress developer for over 10 years. At StellarWP he leads development of the iThemes security plugin.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>What brings them together is that they&#8217;re both founders of a SaaS app called Engine Awesome, where Steve is the CEO, and Timothy is the CTO.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>What has this got to do with WordPress, you might ask? Well, they&#8217;re here today to talk about Gutenberg, but not how you might expect. It&#8217;s Gutenberg outside of WordPress, but Gutenberg, nonetheless. Like all of WordPress, Gutenberg is open source. You are free to download it, modify it and use it in whatever way you like.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>When Steve and Timothy began working on their new project and needed a way for their clients to interact with it, they found Gutenberg was the perfect tool for the job.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We talk about what benefits they&#8217;ve gained by using Gutenberg. How it saved them time, and how it&#8217;s fast becoming a stable and mature product which is easy for non-technical users to understand.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We get into the details of which parts of Gutenberg they used, and which parts were not suitable for their app. They&#8217;ve been building their own blocks, which work well in the UI, but which are more suited to the kinds of data that they&#8217;re gathering.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The discussion then moves on to what Engine Awesome actually does. It&#8217;s an app builder in which you can construct your own data containers and theme them so that it displays in any way you like. They tell us about the features, which they have so far, as well as the items which are on their roadmap.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Towards the end we talk about their commitment to continue contributing back to the Gutenberg project, and how they feel that it&#8217;s in everyone&#8217;s interest if the project gets better from any updates that they have made.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you&#8217;re looking to build your own SaaS app, or you&#8217;re just curious about how Gutenberg is being deployed outside of WordPress, this podcast is for you.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you&#8217;re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you&#8217;ll find the other episodes as well.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so without further delay, I bring you Steve Bruner and Timothy Jacobs.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>I am joined on the podcast today by two gentlemen. I&#8217;m joined by Steve Bruner and Timothy Jacobs. Hello.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:04:23] Steve Bruner: Hey Nathan. Nice to meet you.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:04:24] Timothy Jacobs: Hey.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:04:25] Nathan Wrigley: Steve. Firstly, did I pronounce your surname correctly?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:04:29] Steve Bruner: You did absolutely.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:04:30] Nathan Wrigley: First try. Yeah, that&#8217;s great. Well, thank you for joining us on the podcast today. We&#8217;re going to be talking about something which we literally haven&#8217;t covered in any way, shape, or form at all. We&#8217;ve talked endlessly about Gutenberg and the Block Editor, and blocks and patterns and all of that. But we&#8217;re kind of staying away from that, despite the fact we&#8217;re going to be talking about Gutenberg. Because we&#8217;re going to be talking about an app which has been built on top of Gutenberg, but really not that connected to WordPress. So buckle up. This will be an interesting episode.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We like to orientate the listeners as to who you are so that when they&#8217;re listening, they know that you are an authority on what you&#8217;re talking about. So can I take you in turn? Can I go Steve, first? Would you mind giving us your little potted history of who you are, what you do for a living, where you live, and what your relationship has been with WordPress?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:05:18] Steve Bruner: Sure. So back in my previous life I was in like marketing and sales. I embraced technology back then and using spreadsheets and eventually Microsoft Access, I was able to do more than anyone else on my team, right? I could do 10, 20 times the amount of work, just writing macros in Excel or, do database config in Microsoft Access.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I loved playing with technology and started playing with HTML, and a friend of mine about 17 years ago, 18 years ago, introduced me to WordPress, said, this is pretty cool, you may want to check it out. And I really loved it. It was easy and it was hackable and it was a lot of fun.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Eventually somebody asked me to build them a website. Somebody else offered to pay me to build them a website. And that just grew over the years until I became a full-time, I guess, solopreneur. I have an agency, but I do hire out contractors on a regular basis. I have relationships with many contractors who I&#8217;ve been using now for over a decade.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>I also ended up back then taking over the WordPress meetup in New York City. It was about 400 members, now it&#8217;s 9,000. That really gave me a good introduction to WordPress. It introduced me to a lot of people, and I learned. In the very beginning of a meetup, for those of you who are trying to start one, if you don&#8217;t have somebody who will present, you are the presenter.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So for the first year, year and a half, I presented every month, third Tuesday of the month. Did that for a year and a half until we started getting more presenters in. So that grew and yeah, I&#8217;m a full-time WordPress developer now.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:06:56] Nathan Wrigley: Isn&#8217;t it curious how, if you have been using the internet, let&#8217;s say, and building websites for anything like 20, 30 plus years, you kind of more or less fell into this job. I&#8217;ve yet to come across anybody of my age, shall we say, who&#8217;s been doing this for that length of time who sort of decided from the outset, that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m going to do.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The story is always the same. I was doing something else and then I discovered HTML and played with CSS and realized, oh, I could actually make a living with this. What fun.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:07:23] Steve Bruner: That&#8217;s exactly right. The fact that WordPress is open source. You can run it locally. I learned how to code, and this is not an uncommon story, right? I learned how to code by changing code in WordPress. By commenting things out and changing things, and just seeing how it worked.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:07:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. A verified tinkerer. It sounds like a man after my own heart. Okay, so let&#8217;s move on to Timothy. Timothy, same question really. Give us your background story and particularly your relationship with WordPress.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:07:52] Timothy Jacobs: For sure. I&#8217;m also based in the New York City area, so you can guess how I met Steve at the WordPress New York City Meetup Group, which I also help co-organize. But aside from that I&#8217;ve been working with WordPress now for about ish 10 years or so. My day job is I work over at StellarWP on iThemes security. So I&#8217;m the lead developer over there.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I also have yeah been involved with the WordPress community for a bit. I&#8217;m right now a WordPress core committer. I help work with the REST API in WordPress Core. And then also try and, you know, work with the Gutenberg team as well on REST API things and bringing the two together and helping everything work.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:08:29] Nathan Wrigley: Well thank you. At the outset of this podcast it might be useful if you are listening to this and you&#8217;re anywhere near a computer. Just pause for a moment and go to the URL engineawesome.com. It is exactly as you&#8217;d imagine. There&#8217;s no funky spelling there, engineawesome.com.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Go and have a poke around because I feel that the context that you&#8217;ll get from doing that will put you in a good position to enjoy this podcast episode more. So come back and we&#8217;ll get on with the ride. So first of all, whoever wants to answer the question, what is Engine Awesome? We should probably clear that up straight away.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:09:03] Steve Bruner: Great. So yeah, I can answer that. Engine Awesome is a SaaS application, and for those interested it is built using Gutenberg, but Gutenberg using Laravel, not WordPress. But it&#8217;s a SaaS application that allows you to build applications for your business with absolutely no code, just using blocks. You could build your own CRM. You can build an order management system, a donation system, project tracking, to-dos. Anything you want in the config that you need.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:09:33] Nathan Wrigley: So the ability to do that in SaaS software, there&#8217;s probably a multitude of apps that we could go to that offer, I guess, something fairly similar. You know a no code tool which allows you to build something custom. But the unique bit which has got you on this podcast today is the fact that you&#8217;ve chosen to do that outside of WordPress, but still using Gutenberg.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I want to know why. I want to know why was it that you decided to take that on board? I can imagine there&#8217;s a whole bunch of reasons, but they would be guesses. So let&#8217;s delve right into</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:10:09] Timothy Jacobs: Yeah, so I think one of the big things is that the user experience that the block editor provides, while there&#8217;s always places that it can be improved, is really excellent. There are so many tools out there where the first years of their development are, how do we build a good UI for dragging things onto the screen and making it look like you would expect it to look.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And how do we, you know, have settings that adjust things and make tweaks and have visual changes? And how do I navigate to different areas, and how do I present blocks of content? I think WordPress, the block editor in Gutenberg, isn&#8217;t really the only block based system that&#8217;s out there. Lots of different tools have come to realize the power of the block.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>But the block editor in Gutenberg being open source, lets us have tons of customization ability. So it really gave us a great headstart for building out an application user interface, where we could get right down to the meat of it, instead of worrying about all of the bits that go into building a WYSIWYG block editor interface.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:11:13] Nathan Wrigley: It&#8217;s almost like the use case for using WordPress to build a website in a way, isn&#8217;t it? Because it does a bunch of the heavy lifting for you. You don&#8217;t have to invent all the user permissions yourself, and write all of that code. You can get yourself off to a flying start by implementing something which is freely available and ready to roll.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:11:31] Timothy Jacobs: Exactly. It gives you that same kind of headstart. And it also provides like a great prototype experience. The first prototype that we built out was just by building some custom blocks in a WordPress, Gutenberg system. Not even with a whole Laravel side of things. It&#8217;s just a great place to prototype.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:11:48] Nathan Wrigley: So Steve, I don&#8217;t know if you have anything to add to that, but basically why Gutenberg? If you&#8217;ve got a different answer than Timothy&#8217;s, go for it.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:11:56] Steve Bruner: Tim&#8217;s the CTO, so his is a little more technical. Mine would be a little more business oriented, I guess. First off, the Gutenberg UI is proven, right. It&#8217;s a proven UI that works well, and millions of people and millions of websites use it every day to build websites. So not having to deal with that, not having to work on a UI and go through the whole trial and error process really was appealing to us.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Gutenberg gave us, we probably would&#8217;ve taken two years, three years to build this out if it wasn&#8217;t for Gutenberg. So having that head start, having a UI that&#8217;s proven, that works. And if you&#8217;re coming from the WordPress world, you&#8217;ll feel natural. You&#8217;ll feel comfortable in Engine Awesome, because it&#8217;s Gutenberg, right? We have some custom blocks and some custom workflows, but at the heart of it is Gutenberg, and you will, you&#8217;ll feel very comfortable using it.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:12:48] Nathan Wrigley: So given that Gutenberg itself has been how to describe it? It&#8217;s been tumultuous over the last few years. You know, there&#8217;s been a lot of changes, a lot of rapid iterations. I guess that&#8217;s slowed down a little bit more recently when the whole project seemed to move over to full site editing and all of that. Is that a concern of yours? Have you frozen your version of Gutenberg in time? Or are you keeping up with the very latest and greatest that that project offers?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:13:13] Timothy Jacobs: We are keeping very up to date. I think we are one version of Gutenberg behind usually. And that&#8217;s where we like to keep it at. But yeah, just a couple of weeks ago, we added support for fixed positioning. Which was a feature that the main Gutenberg team had just introduced. So we see that the, like, iteration speed of Gutenberg is a benefit.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>A big thing is that as Gutenberg is maturing, and now we&#8217;re seeing Gutenberg with the isolated block editor project and coming to the wordpress.org forums. And of course what Automattic is doing with Tumblr, that the core WordPress Gutenberg packages, while they are moving very fast and you do have to keep up with them, they are kind of stable enough that you can build on top of them in this way.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And they have to be so that those projects don&#8217;t just keep breaking. And so WordPress.org doesn&#8217;t just keep breaking. While it is not as stable, let&#8217;s say as WordPress Core pre 5.0, and just building on top of the WordPress Core PHP. I think it&#8217;s stable enough to build on top of, for sure.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:14:19] Nathan Wrigley: Did the nature of what you were trying to achieve, and we can dig into exactly what it is that you are solving in a little while, but did the paradigm of blocks fit pretty neatly? In other words can you. atomize your workflow inside of Engine Awesome into a collection of blocks basically? Drag in blocks, reposition blocks, fill in data into blocks, and that&#8217;s essentially what the app is doing.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:14:43] Timothy Jacobs: Yeah, I think so. At its core in Engine Awesome, each field, each bit of data that you&#8217;re putting into your, let&#8217;s say CRM or invoice management system, each one of those fields is a block that you create. So starting from that level of, hey, we have a block, which is a field that data can be entered into. And it doesn&#8217;t just look like, let&#8217;s say a plain text field, it looks something a bit more of a rich application user interfaced.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The field and the block being like that common low level bit that we build on top of. Yeah, it does make, I think the block-based paradigm a good fit. There are some struggles with a block-based paradigm, and achieving some more complex layouts where things aren&#8217;t just neatly stacked in rows and stacked in columns, like a grid.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>But that is something that&#8217;s getting more and more possible to with Gutenberg every few releases. But I do think that the block-based nature, being able to map over to every block as a field did make it a good match, of philosophically in that sense.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:15:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, right from the outset. Matt Mullenweg ages ago, I don&#8217;t exactly know when, he had this, what felt like a really almost crystal ball gazing idea that Gutenberg as the editor would become almost synonymous with entering data across the whole internet. It would become something which was used everywhere.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Gutenberg itself would become bigger than WordPress and all of that kind of thing. Do you see this? Do you see people doing what you are doing out there? In other words, does the Gutenberg interface, is it increasingly cropping up in places just like Engine Awesome?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:16:20] Timothy Jacobs: I&#8217;m not sure if I&#8217;ve seen many cases. There are some that are out there. There is a Laraberg, as I believe the combination of names and how they landed on that one of combining Laravel plus Gutenberg, more for like a page editor context. The same way that is used in WordPress Core.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>As well as I believe there&#8217;s a Drupal integration. And I think a couple of other things. Of course, there&#8217;s the isolated block editor project and what Tumblr is doing. I haven&#8217;t seen a lot of people though that are doing it to the degree that we are doing it, in terms of, hey, we&#8217;re letting you build an application as opposed to letting you design a webpage.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so I don&#8217;t think we are there yet. But I think the stabilization over the past year has made it more of a possibility for projects who are looking to adopt Gutenberg in that way absolutely can, and I think it&#8217;s something worth looking into.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:17:10] Nathan Wrigley: How much of the core Gutenberg blocks do you bring along? And how much of it is bespoke work for your application? I&#8217;m presuming, I mean, you alluded to it earlier. I think you said you&#8217;ve got some of your own custom blocks in there. Do you bring almost everything along for the ride, including, I don&#8217;t know, the Vimeo embed block or whatever it may be? Or do you pull out a certain amount and keep a certain amount only?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:17:32] Timothy Jacobs: Yes, this is actually, it&#8217;s a really interesting question in terms of how functionality in Gutenberg these days gets divided. So we don&#8217;t bring in any core WordPress Gutenberg blocks. But what we are able to do is, as we&#8217;ve had the introduction of global styles in the full site editor experience. There&#8217;s been more of a separation of, what are things that are really blocks and what are things that are settings that your blocks can opt in to.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So for instance in Engine Awesome, you can use the margin tools, and the padding tools, and the sizing tools, and the colors, and the text sizes. All of these different systems. And the way that we support that in Engine Awesome is we just say in our block.json, hey, we want this feature. Gutenberg, render me the UI for it. Build me the styles. Save all of it to the block metadata information.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Gutenberg, you handle all of that. And what I&#8217;ll do is I&#8217;ll render the part that you see in the canvas, the actual block UI. But core Gutenberg is able to handle those types of controls. So that&#8217;s where we&#8217;ve really made the delineation, is that we don&#8217;t use the core blocks, but we use all of the features that the core blocks use. And are able to pull them in without having to copy thousands of lines of code. So we for instance, have a text block and a group block, and they&#8217;re a few dozen lines of code that are really just implementing the WordPress core APIs around layout and around rich text.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:19:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it&#8217;s interesting because I&#8217;m looking at your homepage now and there&#8217;s a video on there showing what is obviously to me, the Gutenberg interface. I guess to your customers maybe they&#8217;ll recognize it as that, maybe not. But it shows the inserter, the panel on the left opening up, and it really does look the same.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so I made the mistake of thinking they were core blocks because many of them map really similarly. You know, you&#8217;ve got a text field and then you&#8217;ve got a URL and the iconography looks remarkably similarly. You haven&#8217;t really tweaked that in any way. It really, really looks like the interface right down to the colors and everything is exactly the same. Black text, black icons, blue buttons, looks similar. That&#8217;s a curious choice that you decided not to fiddle with the design of it.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:19:54] Timothy Jacobs: Yeah, I think the design of the block editor, like Steve was mentioning, is really well proven. And I think there are places where maybe in the future that we do more customization, based off of how our users are going to be using Engine Awesome. And the differences between the block editor in WordPress Core for designing pages and the block editor in Engine Awesome for designing applications.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I don&#8217;t think we wanted to take an approach of, well, let&#8217;s just redesign it for the sake of redesigning it without knowing hey, here are these specific UX benefits that we want to change and we want to improve.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The other aspect of it, to be honest, is that some of these components are harder to tweak than others. Like the inserter, for instance, is a very complex component. So we don&#8217;t want to just say like, okay, let&#8217;s rip it all apart. That&#8217;s one of the aspects where I think you can get into a little bit of trickiness with the rapid pace of Gutenberg development. Is that if you rip everything and everything and everything down to its very bare bone bits, then it is a lot harder to stay up to date with Gutenberg and to be on the latest versions. It makes each upgrade a little bit more of a chore. Whereas for us upgrading Gutenberg isn&#8217;t very difficult.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:21:15] Nathan Wrigley: So I guess if you&#8217;re a listener to this podcast, the chances are that you&#8217;ve played with Gutenberg in the past and you&#8217;ve experienced how it works and this whole process in Engine Awesome will be really familiar to you. But it also raises the question, you know, in WordPress there&#8217;s a whole ton of different blocks out there now. If you, you know, you can go to the internet and download thousands, possibly tens of thousands of different blocks. And, so you are using that block methodology in your application.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>It feels like we&#8217;ve sidestep the, the most important question, which is what on earth, what an earth does this SaaS platform actually do? So it might be a good idea to bring Steve back in at this point and ask what is Engine Awesome? What is it doing?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:21:56] Steve Bruner: Yeah. So like I mentioned before, I&#8217;ve been running a small business for almost 20 years. Full-time for, you know, close to 10. And I&#8217;ve tried every piece of software out there to help you run your business, right? I&#8217;ve tried every CRM. I&#8217;ve tried every project management tool and to-do list and anything you can imagine, I&#8217;ve tried.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And to be honest with you, I haven&#8217;t loved any of &#8217;em. And anybody I&#8217;ve spoken to has said the same thing. Usually when you try these out of the box solutions, you feel like you&#8217;re overpaying for a product where you&#8217;re only using 50, 60% of the features. And they keep loading it up with more features and they keep raising the price.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>With Engine Awesome you get to build exactly what you want. You build the CRM that you want in the way you work. The way your team works. The way your business works. We have had clients that have taken paper forms that they&#8217;ve used in their business and replicated them in Engine Awesome. And their employees just log in and they know how to use it. There&#8217;s nothing strange here anymore. They see the same form they&#8217;ve been using for years, it&#8217;s just a digital version. So training comes down and training costs come down.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now, there are other no-code platforms out there. We realize that there are others that are doing this. Our goal is to make it simple. To make it really, really simple for you to get your application up, right. Tim and I always talk about getting our clients up and running in minutes, not months. You don&#8217;t have to know anything about databases to use Engine Awesome. You don&#8217;t have to know about key fields and indexing fields. You don&#8217;t have to know how to build relationships. You don&#8217;t have to do any of that stuff. Engine Awesome takes care of it for you very easily. Just drag and drop some blocks, check a box, press save, and you&#8217;re ready to go.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:23:55] Nathan Wrigley: I&#8217;m seeing when I&#8217;m on your homepage, I&#8217;m seeing what looked like the two UIs. I&#8217;m seeing the Gutenberg UI, which obviously has a purpose, but I&#8217;m also seeing like another UI where I don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s going on there. Is it, do you have a UI to build the blocks themselves and then they&#8217;re created inside of Gutenberg to drop in whatever data it is that you need to put into that particular block?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:24:18] Timothy Jacobs: Yeah, so we have two different base points. They&#8217;re both Gutenberg. But the first step of building your Engine Awesome application is deciding what fields that you want to support. So what data you want to collect. And this is just dragging from the inserter, a URL, or a name, or a color, and bringing them into a separate editor where you see all the list of fields that you&#8217;ve created for this particular, what we call an object type. For WordPress users it would kind of be most analogous to a custom post type.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so your contact, for instance, might have a name field, a phone, an address, things like that. Those fields that you define when you&#8217;re editing your object type, make up the inserter, make up the block library when you then edit your layouts. So you first define your kind of data that you&#8217;re looking to collect. And then you can define as many different user interfaces that you want to show that data or collect that data. And Steve can give some good examples of how that interface building portion happens.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:25:19] Steve Bruner: Yeah, so a lot of our clients come from using spreadsheets, for instance. Just giant spreadsheets. 30 columns, thousands of rows. And it&#8217;s really easy for them to work with Engine Awesome, right. So as Tim mentioned, first they define their object and then they literally are transferring those fields from a spreadsheet to Engine Awesome using the blocks.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then they go and start creating their layouts. And the layouts are, they could be forms, right? Where you&#8217;re entering data. They could be tables where you are viewing data. They can be queries where you&#8217;re searching for data. And those layouts also are conditional.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>They can change based upon data that&#8217;s entered. So, for instance, if you have quote that you provided through an Engine Awesome system, and that quote is in maybe an open status, you will see certain fields that are there. But once that quote gets changed to an approved status, those fields will be locked, right?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>You&#8217;re not changing the quote after it&#8217;s been approved. So fields are locked. Nobody on your team can enter data or edit data anymore. And then you can move through a process. And again, I just want to reiterate, that is not a set process in Engine Awesome, that&#8217;s a process that somebody would&#8217;ve built, right? Everything is custom.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So those layouts, change in Engine Awesome. One other UI I guess that we have. We recently brought in the full site editing experience, or I guess the full, Tim can talk more about this, but the full site editing UI as the actual application UI. So when you are building your object and building your layouts, you see the inserter, the settings, Gutenberg like everyone is really familiar with it. But when you&#8217;re using the application, when your team is using the application, when they&#8217;re in the field or in the office, we are using the full site editing experience with the full site editing menu. And Tim, maybe you want to elaborate on that?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:27:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, please.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:27:21] Timothy Jacobs: Yeah, so you can kind of see this, if you go into our post, Engine Awesome has a new look. And you can kind of see that delineation there. Basically the Gutenberg team introduced a really fantastic collection of navigation elements. And so we were able to use those to say, here&#8217;s how you navigate between different views, between different object types, between different sets of data. And use that navigation experience that the core Gutenberg team provided.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:27:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I will link to that post. But anybody listening, there&#8217;s a blog post. Currently it&#8217;s linked in the footer, but I imagine over time it will disappear from the footer of the main homepage. It&#8217;s called Engine Awesome has a new look and you can see the site editor panel on the left and all of that. Yeah, that&#8217;s a really interesting implementation.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So you build out the structure of the data you want to consume, you then have the option to display that. Presumably there must be a whole piece of making that data interact with other data points.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, you know, you just mentioned that something is marked as approved. So certain fields get locked up. But presumably there are relationships, child, parent relationships, one-to-one, and so on and so forth, that bind the data together. Otherwise, you&#8217;re looking at a spreadsheet, aren&#8217;t you, really? So there must be something more in here.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:28:35] Timothy Jacobs: Exactly. So when you edit your object type, you can set up a relationship between another bit of data, and then when you do that by dragging a block. So you&#8217;ll see in your inserter, for instance, let&#8217;s say that you are editing a contacts object type, and you already have a company&#8217;s object type set up.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The only thing that you need to do is drag a block that says that this contact has one company and then Engine Awesome takes care of the rest. And so then when you&#8217;re building out a layout, let&#8217;s say for a company, you can easily display a list of all of the contacts that are associated with that company or vice versa.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>When you&#8217;re editing a contact, you can say, hey, here&#8217;s a snapshot of information about this company. Maybe their address, their website, a photo of them. Just to give that contextual information. So you can set up all of those object types and all of those relationships just by dragging a block into the block editor.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:29:29] Nathan Wrigley: Steve, it sounded like you wanted to chip in there.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:29:31] Steve Bruner: I was just going to give you a couple of use cases so you can get a good understanding of how people are using Engine Awesome. So recently a non-profit provided us a spreadsheet, a thousand rows, 26 or 30 columns, and they were tracking their donors in it. And it really is not the best way to do that. In five minutes, and I really mean this, I&#8217;m not joking.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Five minutes, maybe six, on a Zoom call with this prospective customer, I built an application for him where he was able to enter donors and then keep a record, a log of donations. See those donations, filter those donations, and get a good understanding of what&#8217;s going on. So it was really really quick and is going to change the way he does his job and his team&#8217;s job, and everyone&#8217;s just going to be, everyone&#8217;s life is going to be easier.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We have a home cleaning service, a residential home cleaning service. Tim has done a great video, you&#8217;ll find it on our YouTube channel about how to build a service business application, and in 30 minutes, and this is a live video that Tim did, and you&#8217;ll go through it. Tim is not going quickly at all.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>But in 30 minutes he built an application that tracks this home cleaning services clients. The jobs they do. Their team members and their teams. They go into people&#8217;s homes, they bring up Engine Awesome on their phone. They view their jobs. They mark their job cleaning when they&#8217;re starting to clean, and then they go through this whole process.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And when they&#8217;re done, they mark it done. Eventually they&#8217;re going to be taking credit cards using Engine Awesome. So, we have a Zapier integration where when the job is done, the client will get an email automatically with a payment link. And this is changing her business, right? Right now, she deals with cash or check or Zelle. Sometimes people forget. And it&#8217;s just making her life much easier.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even something crazy like a marketing company that has displays in Home Depot stores. They are going to be doing a test in a couple of hundred Home Depot stores. And they built a UI in Engine Awesome that tracks stores and products and promotions and using our web hooks and API, they&#8217;re going to be pushing data to those stores, to those displays, and managing it all in Engine Awesome.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So ideas that we never even thought of, people are starting to use Engine Awesome for some really, really creative ideas. You know, at the core of it, Tim and I really are passionate about helping businesses be more productive every day. And I think these use cases give a good, broad example of that.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:32:06] Nathan Wrigley: I don&#8217;t know if either of you have ever used a piece of software called Airtable? But Airtable came around, I don&#8217;t know, maybe five or six years ago and it felt like a really, quite an interesting piece of technology at the time, in that you could put data in, it was basically a spreadsheet, but then it could show you that data, back at you in a variety of different ways.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So that leads me to the question, is that possible here? It sounds like the answer&#8217;s yes. So, as an example, let&#8217;s say that I&#8217;m a real estate agent and I&#8217;m updating data about houses on my roster. And I&#8217;ve input all the fields. I&#8217;ve got images. I&#8217;ve got prices and descriptions and maps of floor plans, all of that kind of thing.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Is it possible for me to create bespoke layouts of that data? So rather than it just being an Airtable, which looks like, well, a spreadsheet, you&#8217;ve got other options in there, but basically a spreadsheet. Is it possible for me to, I don&#8217;t know, float images right? Or highlight this particular aspect of the text? Make this a heading and you know, add iconography.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>In other words can I make the data engaging to look at? And further to that, can I bind those presentation layers to members of my team? So for example, could the sales director see a different layout of different data and somebody who&#8217;s in marketing, front of shop, might be able to show data to a customer that walks in the store? That kind of thing.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:33:23] Steve Bruner: Yeah, so it&#8217;s interesting you brought up Airtable, right? Because Airtable is a no-code solution that, like you said, is mostly a spreadsheet. And I want to get back to that because I think Tim and I, we feel a little differently than the way Airtable and some other no-code solutions do their business.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>But to answer your question, yes. You can build really compelling, beautiful layouts using Engine Awesome. Because you&#8217;re using the Gutenberg design tools, right ? So you&#8217;re essentially designing a webpage, but it&#8217;s a, you know, maybe it&#8217;s a form or tables or some type of layout. But yes, you can float things, right? You can float through things left. You can bold, change colors. We have themes. We brought in themes as well. So with one click you can change the color and style of your application.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>In terms of different team members using Engine Awesome and seeing different things and seeing different items. This is a really important point, right. Tim and I are actually going through this right now. How we want the user roles and capability system to work i Engine Awesome. Because our goal, and this is the goal we&#8217;ve had since day one. I think this is also what makes us different from a lot of no-code solutions out there, is that we want your entire team using Engine Awesome.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We don&#8217;t charge per user, and I think that&#8217;s a really important point, right? We really are charging per organization or per team. We want everybody, we want your part-timers to use Engine Awesome. You want the CEO to use Engine Awesome. Everybody in between. You shouldn&#8217;t have to pick and choose who needs to use an application. We really believe at our core that when your entire team is on the same page and uses the same application, and can see the same data, your life&#8217;s going to be better. Your business will be better. Everybody will be more productive.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So we&#8217;re working really hard to make sure we have this roles and capabilities system that allows to do exactly what you&#8217;re talking about, and really fine tune it. So that everyone is on the same page.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:35:28] Nathan Wrigley: Timothy, anything to add to that?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:35:30] Timothy Jacobs: Yeah, I would mention one thing, which is that right now we have things set up so that you can have different levels of permission. So you can have and invite users onto your team that can just read data, for instance, or who can just edit data, but they can&#8217;t make changes to your application. But yeah, the next big thing is figuring out what it looks like and how do you make it intuitive for users to set up an application where they consider different things like permissions and capabilities?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are some tools that, the kind of permission system is really just visibility. And if you&#8217;re a developer, you can sneak under the hood and they throw warnings all over the documentation that, hey, you know, even though you&#8217;re, you think you&#8217;re hiding this data, you&#8217;re not actually hiding this data. Because it still gets sent to every user&#8217;s browser or something like that.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So thinking through ways to make it very intuitive for users to say, hey, how do we actually set up our permission model, is the thing we&#8217;re exploring.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:36:28] Nathan Wrigley: Will it be possible to change the data on, for want of a better word, the front end? In other words, if you&#8217;ve input the data in one UI, but then you&#8217;re looking at the way it&#8217;s presented, the theme, if you like. Is it possible for, and again, user permissions, we&#8217;ll assume that that&#8217;s coming down the pike, but is it possible to have people change the data in the different displays? Or do you have to always return to the, if you like, WordPress post to amend that data?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:36:55] Timothy Jacobs: Yeah, so you can edit the data everywhere. This is a trend that we&#8217;ve been seeing with a lot of these different tools. Is that they give you different layouts that can present your data, but at the core of it, they all have a data mode where you&#8217;re basically looking at a spreadsheet or a very, I&#8217;ll say charitably, a plainly designed form that doesn&#8217;t have a sense of hierarchy or related bits of information. And then you can present it in any way that you would want.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>For us though, the first thing that we wanted to tackle was to make sure that when you presented and created a beautiful layout, that your users could also edit the data in that layout. So right now we don&#8217;t have, for instance, a separate kind of raw spreadsheet like view into your data. That&#8217;s something that is on our roadmap. But our main actual priority is for users to be entering in data through the rich UIs that you create.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:37:48] Nathan Wrigley: I feel that&#8217;s one of the, one of the great advances recently. The ability to change it wherever you are. I think that would be really good. Because it is frustrating if, well, you&#8217;re looking at the data that you want to amend and then you have to, in WordPress parlance, click edit post and then go and find that field and amend that field and then click save and then go back and make sure it looks how it ought to look. That&#8217;s just one of the best things about this whole approach, isn&#8217;t it? Is that you can do it right there on the front end.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Just moving slightly. Obviously you&#8217;re a SaaS app. You&#8217;re consuming all sorts of data. Probably you can imagine where this question&#8217;s going. If you are consuming, I don&#8217;t know, email addresses, images, all sorts of financial information, whatever it may be. How are you storing that? Where is that data being kept? If I&#8217;m in the EU, do you have it in a certain jurisdiction? Is it encrypted? Let&#8217;s just leave it at that.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:38:41] Timothy Jacobs: Yeah, that&#8217;s a great question. So right now we don&#8217;t have a separate EU instance for instance. Unintentional rhyming there. But the way that we&#8217;ve set this up is, we are using MongoDB as our database system. And each team that gets created gets their own, essentially database inside of MongoDB to themselves.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So right now that&#8217;s all centrally part of Digital Ocean&#8217;s managed database service and their encryption at rest and so on and so forth. And there are a lot of great security practices. In the future though, what that means is that we&#8217;ll be able to support teams having data that is in a different data center, depending on what their needs are.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And even for potentially more enterprise customers, the need to be able to self-host their own database. Engine Awesome is set up to be able to connect to different database applications. But right now all of that data is stored in Engine Awesome, in Digital Ocean.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:39:37] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. You mentioned enterprise there, but also Steve earlier was talking about examples of local charities and things like that. So is this software basically open to everybody? And on the website, forgive me, it may be that I&#8217;m just not looking all that carefully, but I can&#8217;t see a price. So I don&#8217;t know if that&#8217;s a function of you haven&#8217;t worked out your pricing yet. Or if it&#8217;s a contact us, and we&#8217;ll talk through what it is that we think you&#8217;re going to need, and we&#8217;ll work out the pricing accordingly. But are you aiming at all the people all the time. Enterprise, just small mom and pop stores. How are you launching and what is the pricing model?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:40:14] Steve Bruner: So right now most of our clients are small to medium size businesses. We&#8217;re not writing off enterprise, we just realize that enterprise may need other features that we don&#8217;t have yet. Like single sign-on or maybe a, you know, a dedicated SLA or something of that nature.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So we&#8217;re not there yet. Obviously we&#8217;re happy to talk to enterprise. There is one larger company that expressed an interest in Engine Awesome, and we&#8217;ve been talking to them. But right now, all of our clients have been small to medium sized businesses.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The pricing model we&#8217;re still playing with. Again, we don&#8217;t want to charge per user. So we&#8217;ve been playing with all sorts of ideas. The number of records you use. Or the resources you use. Our goal is to get you and your entire team on Engine Awesome, and we&#8217;re willing to do whatever it takes to get you there.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, right now we have a manual onboarding process. If you sign up for Engine Awesome, you&#8217;re scheduling a Zoom call with me. So we have a talk. I find out what your needs are, how you plan on using Engine Awesome, your pain points. And we talk it through.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And at that point we start working out where Engine Awesome fits into your plan. For smaller teams, we&#8217;re in the $10 range a month, $15 range a month, $20 a month. But we&#8217;re not really going much higher than that right now.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:41:42] Nathan Wrigley: Are you going to be making use? So we&#8217;re in phase three of Gutenberg, which is for want of a better word, concurrent editing. Think Google Docs. Are you going to be making use of that? I mean, I can see that being incredibly useful if it&#8217;s pulled off. But is that something that you are thinking about implementing?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:42:00] Timothy Jacobs: I would love to. It&#8217;s something that I&#8217;m seeing, and I&#8217;m really, really excited to see how that evolves. I&#8217;m really curious how the core Gutenberg team is going to approach designing that. I think there&#8217;s a lot of UX patterns that are going to be challenging. And seeing them pull that off is going to be really interest.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then seeing how that connects to WordPress. Is it going to be like peer to peer? Is it going to go through WordPress, as the PHP backend? What is all that going to look like from a technical perspective I think will also be fascinating. For us, I think one of the benefits of being a SaaS application is that it makes it a little bit easier for us to do that kind of orchestration, because we control what the backend is.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>But of course with WordPress, when we&#8217;re building for WordPress, we&#8217;re building for like 45% of the web. So the technical requirements are a lot more of a challenge. Yeah, I&#8217;m keeping a keen eye on that and I&#8217;m really excited to see how that progresses. Because, yeah, I think that&#8217;ll take Gutenberg to high Peaks, and will be something that a lot of different people building on top of the block editor, on top of the Gutenberg project will be able to utilize.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:43:07] Nathan Wrigley: That was kind of like a roadmap question, but in disguise. Let&#8217;s just ask it outright. Just outline for us in the near future, we&#8217;re recording this towards the middle of February, so depending on how long it takes this podcast episode to actually make it out into the public, some of these things may have come a along already. But just outline roughly, maybe let&#8217;s go for six months, eight months, something like that. What&#8217;s the plan? What are you hoping to implement?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:43:32] Steve Bruner: Well, our customers are always giving us ideas, right? So things do change like you mentioned. Our priority of right now is user roles and capabilities. Once that&#8217;s integrated, and that&#8217;s going to take a little bit because not only do we need to plan it out and how it&#8217;s going to work technically. We also need to make it super simple to implement, so clients can do this and feel comfortable that the right people are seeing the right data. So that is going to take a little bit of time.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>E-commerce would probably be our next big focus. Our clients want to start taking payments from their clients, right? The cleaning service is a great example. Right now the plan for her is to email a Stripe payment link to her clients, but we want to make things a little bit easier.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Also that feature would, currently being done through Zapier. Which is an additional charge. So we want to bring that into Engine Awesome, where we can make it seamless and where our clients won&#8217;t have to pay any more for that.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Those are probably the two major features that we want to roll out in the next six months. There are other things we want to do. We want to do, you know, we want to add scheduling. Again, a lot of our clients are service businesses. So scheduling is a big part of that, and they&#8217;re using services like Calendly, and if we can do something better or bring it into Engine Awesome , make it easier for them to use, then we want to be able to do that as well.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:44:55] Nathan Wrigley: The introductions at the top of the show made it pretty obvious that you&#8217;ve got a history of giving back to WordPress. So, forgive me if this question sounds ill placed. But given that you are leveraging quite a lot of the Gutenberg project to build out your SaaS app, I&#8217;m just wondering what your posture is in terms of giving back from Engine Awesome. Back to Gutenberg. Again caveat emptor. Sorry, I know that you both do more than enough already, but I just wondered if that was part of the ethics of the business.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:45:28] Timothy Jacobs: Yeah, I&#8217;m a big believer in that I think the Gutenberg project gets better the more different use cases that we have. Historically, my contributions to WordPress have been mainly focused on the REST API, and how Gutenberg interacts with the REST API. But I hope to be able to dive in more and more into the core Gutenberg project.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I think being good stewards of the open source community is a key aspect to building on top of an open source project. Both from, this is the best thing to do from a kind of community standpoint. But I think also everyone should really be thinking about how they contribute back to Gutenberg. So that we have a say in shaping how Gutenberg moves forward.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>There&#8217;s a lot of work to do, and we all have different pet features or things that we might want to have changed or improved in Gutenberg. And, really the long and short of it is that there&#8217;s more work to do than there are contributors to do the work. So the more of us that can contribute back to the Gutenberg project and the WordPress Core project, the faster we&#8217;re all able to go.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:46:39] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you, Steve. Anything there?</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:46:42] Steve Bruner: No, Tim said it all. Tim said it best. He&#8217;s been a core contributor for a long time. Our goal from day one, like you mentioned, we&#8217;ve been contributing to the WordPress community in both code and education for a very long time and we want to continue to do that.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:46:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that&#8217;s a nice answer to hear actually. That&#8217;s very heartening. Thank you. Should anybody have been listening to this podcast, had their interest peaked. They&#8217;re either interested in talking about what you did with Gutenberg from a technological point of view, because maybe they&#8217;re thinking of adopting Gutenberg in their own platform. Or they just want to actually find out what they can do with Engine Awesome themselves.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don&#8217;t know if you want to answer this question separately or combined, but where is the best place to get in touch? Is it a contact form? An email address? Is it, dare I say it, Twitter.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:47:30] Steve Bruner: Right now our website is really the best place to contact us. So engineawesome.com. On the homepage if you are interested in signing up, or just getting on a Zoom call with me to learn more, there&#8217;s a input right there where you can put in your email address and sign up for that.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>And we also have a contact form where if you have questions about Gutenberg and how we did this and you want a more heavy developer talk, you want to chat with Tim, then that&#8217;s the place to let us know.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:47:59] Timothy Jacobs: Yeah, you can also always find me on the make make dot WordPress Slack. That&#8217;s also a great place to reach out.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:48:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you Timothy Jacobs and Steve Bruner. Thanks for joining me on the podcast today to talk about Engine Awesome. I really appreciate it.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:48:13] Steve Bruner: Thank you, Nathan. I really, I really enjoyed this.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>[00:48:15] Timothy Jacobs: Thanks for having us.</p>\n</div>\n\n\n\n<p>On the podcast today we have <a href=\"https://wordpress.org/support/users/sbruner/\">Steve Bruner</a> and <a href=\"https://profiles.wordpress.org/timothyblynjacobs/\">Timothy Jacobs</a>.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Steve has been active in the WordPress community for the past 17 years. He&#8217;s a WordPress developer, co-organizer of the <a href=\"https://www.meetup.com/WordPressNYC/\">WordPressNYC Meetup</a>, and has organised many WordCamps in New York City.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Timothy is a WordPress Core Committer for the REST API, and has been a WordPress developer for over ten years. At <a href=\"https://stellarwp.com/\">StellarWP</a>, he leads development of the iThemes Security plugin.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>What brings them together is that they’re both founders of a SaaS app called <a href=\"https://engineawesome.com/\">Engine Awesome</a>, where Steve is the CEO and Timothy is the CTO.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>What has this got to do with WordPress, you might ask. Well, they’re here today to talk about Gutenberg, but not how you might expect. It’s Gutenberg outside of WordPress, but Gutenberg nonetheless.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like all of WordPress, Gutenberg is open source. You are free to download it, modify it, and use it in whatever way you like. When Steve and Timothy began working on their new project, and needed a way for their clients to interact with it, they found Gutenberg was the perfect tool for the job.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We talk about what benefits they’ve gained by using Gutenberg. How it’s saved them time, and how it’s fast becoming a stable and mature product, which is easy for non-technical users to understand.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We get into the details of which parts of Gutenberg they used, and which parts were not suitable for their app. They’ve been building their own blocks which work well in the UI, but which are more suited to the kinds of data that they’re gathering.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The discussion then moves onto what Engine Awesome actually does. It’s an app builder in which you can construct your own data containers and theme them so that it displays in any way you like. They tell us about the features which they have so far, as well as the items which are on their roadmap.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Towards the end, we talk about their commitment to continue contributing back to the Gutenberg project, and how they feel that it’s in everyone’s interest if the project gets better from any updates that they have made.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you’re looking to build your own SaaS app, or you’re just curious about how Gutenberg is being deployed outside of WordPress, this podcast is for you.</p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Useful links.</h2>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https://github.com/VanOns/laraberg/\">Laraberg</a></p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https://www.drupal.org/project/gutenberg\">Gutenberg for Drupal</a></p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https://engineawesome.com/2023/01/23/engine-awesome-has-a-new-look/\">Engine Awesome has a new look!</a> &#8211; blog post</p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https://airtable.com/\">Airtable</a></p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https://www.mongodb.com/\">MongoDB</a></p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https://www.digitalocean.com/products/managed-databases\">Digital Ocean&#8217;s managed database service</a></p>\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}s:7:\"pubDate\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:31:\"Wed, 19 Apr 2023 14:00:00 +0000\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}s:32:\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\";a:1:{s:7:\"creator\";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:\"data\";s:14:\"Nathan Wrigley\";s:7:\"attribs\";a:0:{}s:8:\"xml_base\";s:0:\"\";s:17:\"xml_base_explicit\";b:0;s:8:\"xml_lang\";s:0:\"\";}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}s:4:\"type\";i:128;s:7:\"headers\";O:48:\"WpOrg\\Requests\\Utility\\CaseInsensitiveDictionary\":1:{s:7:\"\0*\0data\";a:8:{s:6:\"server\";s:5:\"nginx\";s:4:\"date\";s:29:\"Mon, 08 May 2023 08:25:54 GMT\";s:12:\"content-type\";s:8:\"text/xml\";s:13:\"last-modified\";s:29:\"Mon, 08 May 2023 08:15:29 GMT\";s:4:\"vary\";s:15:\"Accept-Encoding\";s:15:\"x-frame-options\";s:10:\"SAMEORIGIN\";s:16:\"content-encoding\";s:4:\"gzip\";s:4:\"x-nc\";s:9:\"HIT ord 2\";}}s:5:\"build\";s:14:\"20220215125029\";}', 'no');
