WordPress Planet

March 18, 2024

Do The Woo Community: What March is Looking Like Here at Do the Woo

But if you are listening to this on the day it came out, I am at WordCamp Asia along with a few of our hosts. In fact, today is Contributor Day which I am at enjoying my time with the Community team.

Now the real reason I am giving a quick update here is that between now and the end of March our show releases may be a bit off and there may be some gaps. But rest assured, things are being recorded both at WordCamp Asia followed by CloudFest as well as some of my hosts kicking shows around while I’m gone. And when I have some moments I hope to get some quick post production done here at Do the Woo.

If you don’t hear from us in awhile, watch us on X/Twitter or LinkedIn, to see updates throughout both of these events. And the fun part, you never know what shows will come out of March.

So, tomorrow starts two days of the main event at WordCamp Asia, and if you happen to listen to this, stop by our booth.

That’s it for now and hope to see you around.

by opurockey at March 18, 2024 09:15 PM under Uncategorized

Do The Woo Community: What You Can Expect from the CloudFest Hackathon 2024 Projects

If you are attending CloudFest later this month in Germany, you may also be part of the CloudFest Hackathon. You can learn more about what the hackathon is in episode, but today you are going to hear from some of the leads of the projects, letting you know what they are going to be doing and what you can expect.

These include the Enable Mastodon Apps Project, which aims to make WordPress more social and interactive, and the Inclusive Language Checker for open source contributors, which seeks to make content creation more inclusive and accessible. Other projects include integrating Marie DB catalogs with PHP platforms, improving user interfaces of WordPress using J Schema, and creating a centralized resource for frameworks and accessibility. The transcript also mentions a project to make WordPress multi-site easier to use for multilingual websites, a project to make CMSs that run public sector sites transparent, and a project to improve tools for WordPress hosting providers. Lastly, the Hack the Hackathon project aims to create a platform for hosting hackathons with one click.

Learn more about the hackathon

Read about all of the projects

Get a free standard pass to CloudFest using the code: DotheWoo

by opurockey at March 18, 2024 09:15 PM under Uncategorized

Do The Woo Community: Bringing DEIB to the WordPress Way Show with Birgit Olzem and Angela Jin

In her debut show co-hosted with BobWP, they have a chat with Angela Jin, head of programs and contributor experience at Automattic. And what a conversation it is.

It starts by discussing the importance of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) in the WordPress community.

Angela highlights the need for a learning mindset and shared language around DEIB, especially given the global nature of the community.

The conversation also touches on the challenges of burnout among contributors and the importance of creating a welcoming space for new contributors.

Rounding out the episode, Angela and Birgit both express their excitement for the future of WordPress and its potential to be a role model for DEIB in tech.

Links and resources


Show Transcript


BobWP:
Well, here we are with a new host joining our team and bringing a new monthly DEIB featured episode on the WordPress Way show. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart and I’m honored to have Birgit Olzem as our new host. Welcome Birgit. And how are you doing today?
Birgit:
Thank you, Bob. Doing fine, even if I’m kind of feeling nervous because hosting a WordPress podcast show isn’t feeling natural to me in this certain point, so please bear with me when we are starting to kick off. But as Bob already mentioned, it’s about a topic close to our dear hearts and my aim is to help everyone to understand more about how we can contribute to the WordPress community and feel also comfortable to do so.
BobWP:
Well, I’m going to have you introduce your very first official guest and I, I’m going to let you do it, but she is of course one of my favorite people in the world, but I would rather you introduce who you’re going to be chatting with today.
Birgit:
Yeah, thank you Bob. I’m very pleased to introduce you to Angela Jin. Angela is the head of programs and contributor experience at Automattic where she also oversees the work of multiple teams dedicated to WordPress open source project, and these are community events, engagement, education and marketing teams. And her passion lies in building strong and inclusive communities. And please, Angela, tell the audience a bit more about you.
Angela:
Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on your show. I am very honored to be the first guest here. And yeah, I think you captured my bio very accurately. I am originally from the United States, but I currently live in Madrid and I have family from Taiwan, so yeah.
Birgit:
That’s very awesome. And we met each other for longer time on WordCamps, but we are also working closely together in the recently founded DIB working group. For all the listeners who don’t understand the term DEIB, it stands for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging. And the WordPress community aims to be more inclusive as possible, but as we all know, we are all humans and there’s always room for improvement. And Angela, I would like to hear more about your thoughts about the DEIB working group. How did you perceive this going on after I published a proposal to establish a DEIB, formal Make WordPress team? And so maybe you can explain a bit more about this initiative from your perspective.
Angela:
Yeah, happy to. So DEIB work is something that is near and dear to my heart. I’ve been active in the WordPress community since 2018 but have worked on DEIB initiatives long before that in other communities and I think it is essential for any community to focus on the work that has been done in the community so far has largely been through Jill Binder’s, WP Diversity Speaker initiatives, which have had really wonderful impact and she earlier this year made the decision to move on to some other passion projects of hers, which is totally understandable. She has been doing this for a long time and so it was really exciting to me to see a working group come together to focus on DEIB more broadly across the project. It is a really hard topic because our project covers so many different spaces that, and we are a global community that DEIB looks so different from place to place. And so I think I’m really excited that there are people who are passionate about this topic and want to come together to see how can we be, how can we champion DEIB for WordPress? How can we be a shared resource for everybody and help everybody better understand what it looks like when we remove barriers for people to participate and when we really help people feel like they belong in this space. So yeah, I’m really excited about it.
Birgit:
Yeah, this really interesting because the term DEIB didn’t came to me naturally before I started more researching about it. I only know the word term diversity, but learning more about what it entails to have the whole picture, I’m a person who is really more into the bigger picture and in the whole that wholesomeness of a project or the community itself. And when you say about belonging, how can someone who is interested into contributing to WordPress join the community and feel included and belonging? As you mentioned, there are certain parts which is very complex in the whole WordPress project, even as long-term contributors like myself contributing to WordPress over a decade now, and I think I know a lot, but sometimes I feel I just know a little tiny bit of the whole project and you are one of the program managers of the whole project and you need to oversee a lot, but how do you perceive this for new contributors? Can you put yourself in a shoe of a new contributor?
Angela:
Yeah, I think there’s a number of things in there. I often remind myself that our project is so big, it is impossible for anyone to know everything, and that’s challenging because I also find that WordPress contributors are people who like to know a lot of things and so there’s some self-reflection there that I always like to do when I feel like I am struggling to figure out where to go with this project. I also get lost in it and there’s a lot that I don’t know about this project and a lot more that I want to know about this project. So my reminder to everybody is that you don’t need to know everything and we have so many people who have different perspectives, different pieces of the information that getting all of us together really creates something really holistic and really beautiful. And so that’s regularly my approach when I come into my work.
And for new contributors, it is really challenging to step into such a big space and see that it is very well established. There are practices and processes and very strong open source philosophy and there’s just so much to learn and so belonging and helping people really quickly find belonging is a big challenge. The first thing that we all can do is just create a really welcoming space, which I think is why DEIB is such an integral part of our work. We also find that connecting people to other people, other like-minded people and quickly to resources and where they can make an impact is also really helpful for bringing in new contributors. And so that’s one of the reasons I’m also really excited about the mentorship program and I see a lot of excitement around that right now because I think we can all remember when we first started contributing. I don’t know that we all remember the exact first thing that we might’ve worked on, but we do remember the people who helped us get there and how they were super friendly helped us find our way, made us feel comfortable, made us laugh, made us feel friendship, and that is a huge, huge step towards belonging in there. I got so excited about the mentorship program. I forgot other parts of your question there.
Birgit:
No, it’s absolutely fine because I had in mind the mentorship program leading to this question because I was one of the contributing members of the first initial cohort and also mentor and currently you and I, we are mentoring the mentors within the mentorship program who are assisting new contributors or already established contributors to find a new space to contribute to because for anyone who’s listening and isn’t familiar with the structure, WordPress a around WordPress.org, the software piece a community has built up and there are certain teams who are working on parts within the WordPress project.
It’s called Make Teams and someone who contributed by answering support questions on the support forums, which is also a part of contributing to WordPress would like to start contributing with code on work on the core software or wants to provide their value, time and knowledge into content to educate other contributors or users how to use WordPress like on learn WordPress dot org. So this mentorship program support the shift from one make team into another or open the space and as you mentioned, it is really exciting to see how new contributors found their way into the project by a guidance one by one. It’s not that overwhelming as we already talked about. It is really because it’s an established project and really big and feeling lost becomes very depressed and that is also why I love the mentorship program by myself. So I’m really glad that this is getting more traction currently.

I wonder what would be helpful to nurture our contributors who are already contributing to WordPress. We saw a lot of contributors are more burning out or leaving the project because they were overwhelmed with too much work and less support can we do to nurture those. Maybe you can introduce a bit about the Five for the Future initiative alongside us.
Angela:
Yeah, I do see a lot of burnout. A lot of it’s a hard time right now. I think with so much economic strife and also geopolitical situations, it’s a really tough time in the world right now. And so I’m a part of some other communities outside of WordPress and I see similar things both in the WordPress community and in other communities as well. We have people who are very well-meaning with very big hearts and they are impacted by all of that. On top of that, many of us are very ambitious and hardworking and so we have so much that we want to do not just our daily jobs, but also hobbies and family. It’s a lot for any one person to juggle.
Whenever I see people are struggling, one thing that I know I can do as a fellow community member is just to check in on them and see how they’re doing. I never want to underestimate the power of just reaching out saying, Hey, how are you doing? I care about you and you mean something to me. I think that’s a really powerful way for humans to connect with each other and I really appreciate that. The vast majority of contributors that I meet, they feel a strong sense of responsibility. And so if they are on the community team responsible for mentoring a WordPress event, they really want to make sure that they do the best job possible and stick with it. And I am also a firm believer that if you are struggling so much that you’re having a hard time keeping up with all of your personal things, that’s really, I don’t want to ask you to help more than that.

That’s a really difficult position to put somebody in. And so one thing that I really love to see in our community is more of a culture of sharing the work and allowing people to more readily come in and out and pick up things that can be done like ad hoc and as people have time, I think it’s a difficult thing in the WordPress community, but we do have a number of really impactful things that people can just pick up as they have time knowing that they’ll always be welcome back and that we have a culture that allows people to prioritize their own family things and their own personal things as need be. And so that’s one thing that I would personally love to see that I think would really both benefit WordPress contribution and benefit people who want to contribute, but also in a way that is respectful of their time as well.

You mentioned Five for the Future in there and I think that’s a really excellent thing to touch on as well. So the Five for the Future program is very much about WordPress is open source software, and so it is available for anybody to take and use and build a livelihood on top of. And so the companies that have built their products, their companies, their enterprise on top of WordPress, we want them to contribute back to open source because that is how we sustain it and that is how they can also continue their business in the best way possible as well as enabling other businesses to be created with five for the future as well. Part of five for the future is sponsorship, and I think sponsorship is a really wonderful way to bring people who otherwise may not be able to contribute into this space. And so I think that’s another way that we can support people to contribute to this space.
BobWP:
I was just going to interject something there because it resonated with me is I’ve been probably involved in this space for at least 14 years. Then there was a bit before that I got into WordPress. And during all those years I’ve never per se contributed to a team. I was always, I’m a lurker, so I watch conversations, I love learning about things going on, I’ve contributed in my other ways that I’ve done and I’m not even going to go into all of that. But when you talk about the things you’ve just been saying, Angela, that and nobody should wait 14 years either. So I’m going to put that as a disclaimer too, but for me, it wasn’t necessarily even the time I had available, but when I saw the DEIB group and I started getting a little bit more into it and hanging around more and then I started participating a bit more, it was like finally, I don’t want to say after all this time, but something just hit a nerve and it was all these other things that were going on in my life and the things I was doing with the podcast and the business and a lot of stuff just came together and it was like I thought that’s it.
That’s the one I want to give my time to. And it took me a while. Again, I don’t want to tell anybody to wait that long, but if you keep your fingers in enough and so I guess I’d just say to everybody, hang in there, watch, listen to people, get to know people, and you’re going to find that little sweet spot and it’s going to fit into everything and all the other aspects of your life, both probably personal and professional.
Birgit:
I’m really glad that you found a spot for yourself. And as you mentioned, it doesn’t matter how much someone is contributing, every contribution counts and especially for someone who maybe feels afraid in contributing to a software project, you don’t have to know any knowledge of coding or development. In any case, you can contribute, like Bob mentioned in participating into text chat meeting or conversation, bring in your own perspective into the project. And that is what I personally love about the WordPress community diversity and diversity is also allowing different perspectives, perspectives from life and culture backgrounds and even life experience and the generations which is spanning over the time. And when we think WordPress, a project itself turned 20 last year, turning 21 this year.
I’m kind of getting old, but I’m wondering, as you mentioned participating into the project, it reminds me of some discussion around we are getting older as a WordPress community and WordPress might be not that famous or interesting for the younger generations, but how can we say, okay, WordPress is open source and you can contribute to WordPress even if, but you can also use and create your own apps.

For instance with WordPress, there are so plenty ideas what you can achieve with WordPress and Angela, you mentioned the sponsorship part. How do you think will be when you are looking forward for the goals WordPress project published and was working on when you keep in mind younger generations but also the established contributors, what do you see in the future of WordPress looking for the next five year, for instance? Is it possible?
Angela:
Yeah, that’s a question I’ve been thinking a lot about, so I’m glad you asked it and I’m going to try my best to have a succinct answer because it’s a hard question. Yeah, I think today we are so large and we are all getting older and it’s a really interesting time in tech right now where you have a lot of new innovations that are very attractive and I think Josepha had flagged two things that she is keeping an eye on for WordPress’s future. First is that our growth has become stagnant, and so how can we increase that? It’s a huge thing for a project this big, but also a really important thing for us to keep an eye on. The second thing is are our events, which are a fundamental way that we bring people in, are they meeting the needs of what people want today?
And I absolutely love our events. I think they are wonderful and we have a lot of really good times at them, but undoubtedly we’re not seeing that younger generation come as much. And so when we put those two together, I do really think we need to think about how are we adapting WordPress and what we offer to meet people where they are. And so I’m a big fan of diversifying our events for one, to help people see exactly what they’re going to get out of our events so that they are more spread out. And therefore for people to get to the more events we have, the more varied opportunities that we have for people to participate. It is really, really difficult for somebody who is a brand new speaker to say, I am going to go to the WordCamp Europe stage and speak in front of 3000 people.

That is a scary, scary thing to do. I get nervous speaking in front of that many people and I’ve spoken on quite a few stages. And so the more we can provide different opportunities around topics that people are interested in, I think that is a really great way that we can reach a broader audience, not just the younger generation, but also people who we previously haven’t reached before. And because this is a vat, DEIB, I do think that we need to move into this next era of WordPress with DEIB at the forefront of our minds because this next generation really does care about that. And if we are not considering that as part of our practice, I think we will quickly outdated ourselves.
Birgit:
I am really glad that you mentioned that this was in my mind as well because the younger generation is really caring about diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. And this also for companies who are interested into sponsoring to the WordPress project. It’s also beneficial for them to get more talents and qualified talents, especially when you are hiring someone who is contributing to an open source project, even if it’s not only WordPress, but for any open source project. And someone who is contributing to a project like WordPress is also self-driven in most places and they’re interested and invested into something building for a bigger project. And this mindset is also nurturing and benefiting other companies. From my perspective, I’m a mom of five children. I built my expertise while watching my kids and I was growing into from pure curiosity. And when I started contributing to WordPress, I was visiting a WordCamp beforehand, I was participating in the forums and I got aware about WordCamps in this forum, and then later on I was facing the opportunity to translate WordPress into my native language German. And this was my kickstart to really look behind the curtain and a person, I’m always curious and I always want to look behind the curtain, how things are going, how things are working. And with this mindset, I am always moving forward. Sometimes I feel I’m kind of like a bulldozer.
And that leads me to my other question for you. In your role currently as a project manager, program manager, we had so many great initiatives beforehand. We had so many great contributors who are having talks about DEIB and WordPress several years ago before even this was kind of a buzzword. I don’t want to limit it on this terms, but why does this now work? Is this the right time or how do you feel the, it was a shift maybe in the project? I don’t know because I just put out a proposal idea because I felt the injustice in some places within a community. And I’m a doer person. I do and I cry out and I work on constructive feedback and moving things forward. But why now? I would love you to hear your thought on that.
Angela:
Yeah. Well, you’re not the first curious person to come into the space and I sure hope that you are not the last one. Curiosity is one of my favorite characteristics. I’m also a very curious person and tend to ask people a lot of questions. And so I generally encourage that. I think diversity is, if I had a magic wand and I could just wave it really quickly, I would make people understand diversity and the benefits of it and why it’s so integral to everything that we do and its importance and make a more equitable world immediately. But the reality of the situation is that we have had so many struggles, and I use we in this context as in the world. There are systems outside of much bigger than WordPress that we operate in, and those systems have been longstanding and inequitable. And so when we are faced with such a societal structure, the path to changing that is long and arduous.
And so I don’t think that it’s, for me, it’s not why now. I think this has always been an issue whether people realized it or not or whether it was in front of them or not. But I do think we have passed the point of enough is enough. And so there are a lot of people who want to see positive change and positive change is going to be really difficult. If it were easy, we would’ve fixed it Yesterday. We’re good at solving easy problems. And I realized that that is not an answer that many people like because they have been subject to injustice oppressed for a long time, and asking people to wait longer for justice is terribly unfair, which is all the more reason that we should be doing something today. And so yeah, I want us to keep going for it. I want us to create a more equitable world. And I guess we’ll start with a more equitable world for us for starters. But yeah, I think it’s a hard thing. I also don’t want to ignore all of the excellent work that has been done to date. There have been many people who have come and gone in WordPress who have championed various diversity issues, who have been excellent allies, and all of that is impactful towards where we are today.
Birgit:
Thank you very much for your insight in that as well because I feel even if I rallied and whas an ally for as long as I can think of, I wasn’t aware about, as I mentioned already about the terms itself and what it mean to someone, but also from my perspective, I am feeling I’m in a kind of a privileged situation because of my heritage, because I’m living in Germany. I was born and raised in Germany. I never experienced some tremendous issues someone else experienced, but I’m a great listener and I, I’m really thriving to learn more about what is someone facing, which issue is someone facing on daily basis working with WordPress as a software, but also being part of a broad and global community. As we already know, global means different languages, different culture backgrounds, and it is also part of being inclusive, translating WordPress for instance. It’s one of my core, but accessibility is also really, really important topic and I would love to see WordPress as a torch moving forward and being a role model for others to follow. What do you think about this as a global project? Can we achieve this?
Angela:
I agree. So one thing you asked earlier about my five-year plan for WordPress or what I would like to see in five years for WordPress, and we also talked earlier about how anybody can contribute to WordPress. One thing I would love for all WordPress to do to take on an all new incoming contributors is for them to have a learning mindset. None of us are going to come in here knowing it all, and especially when it comes to a global community and DEIB, we have to all be in a growth mindset. There is so much to learn about what DEIB looks like from even city to city in the same country and nobody is going to have the same experience as somebody else. And so it really behooves us to listen to each other, see how we’re being impacted and help each other, help each other grow in that I think that everybody is at a different point in their DEIB journey and I would rather bring people in and help them learn along the way, especially if they’re receptive to it.
What I fear sometimes is that we are so quick to call people out that it prevents a learning opportunity and that learning opportunity can over time build stronger allies. And right now we need every ally that we can get. And so that’s my hope for WordPress, that we also create an environment where we can learn from each other and better understand what issues we’re facing and how we can overcome that together because we are stronger together at the end of the day. And it’s a hard thing when we are faced with so much struggle every day. But the people who it’s also not fair to ask everybody to do this, I do want to acknowledge that there are a ton of resources out there that people can educate themselves with. And so for WordPress, that’s what I want to see, that we have strong allies who can help people out of tough situations and that we really build a shared language around DEIB. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges with DEIB work in a global community.

Even the word diversity, it’s going to be different from place to place. I come back to there was was a study on colors and how the color blue was perceived from country to country, even something like a color, which I think the color blue we can all more or less understand, but that it’s perceived so differently across different cultures like a color. And compared to complex diversity terminology, that’s hard. And so wherever we can build shared understanding around the terminology that we’re using around DEIB, that’s one really concrete step that I think would be immensely helpful.
Birgit:
I couldn’t agree more. Thank you very much and thank you very much also for your time and your well insight into this. And I’m really looking forward to work more closely with you on reaching those goals and tangible outcomes for a better and more inclusive work WordPress community. So I can only say thank you very much. I really appreciate that You will find your time, find your time to be our guest on this show.
Angela:
Thank you so much for your get it truly my honor. And I am really excited to keep working with you on this as well, so we could do it.
BobWP:
And obviously there is a lot to be talked about and I’m looking forward to having Birgit come on once a month here to at least do this show, do something now. I know we got to get going, but some people are hopefully maybe listening to this as they’re flying to WordCamp Asia, they’re driving, they’re on their bike, maybe they’re even jogging. I don’t know what they’re doing. They’re getting there somehow or other once they’re, I just want to have Angela share just a little teaser about her panel she’s going to be on because that might be something you want to attend.
Angela:
Yeah, so WordCamp Asia overlaps with International Women’s Day on March 8th, and so I am very excited to be hosting a panel about women in WordPress. So we have three rock stars who are going to be joining me to share their stories about their experience as women in tech and to hopefully inspire the crowd who’s listening and help us get more diversity into technology.
BobWP:
Great. And Birgit you’re going to be having a panel yourself, at CloudFest which follows WordCamp Asia. Why don’t you just give a quick little spiel about that before we go. In case any of our listeners are attending CloudFest.
Birgit:
We will have a panel with two other tremendous guests and we are talking about inclusivity and also sustainability in WordPress and how we can be more sustainable with our human resources. For instance, as we mentioned, the burnout churn is really high currently and we are looking for we discussing ideas, how we can prevent those churn and be more inclusive, but also sustainable.
BobWP:
Alright, cool. Well, I can’t wait to have you back on every month. I’m sure we’ll have Angela come on again sometime. And I just want to thank everyone for tuning in and I’m just going to do one quick little teaser. If you’re on your way to WordCamp Asia, make sure and stop by the Do the Woo booth. I have these really cool DEIB stickers to give out and I’m not going to even tell you what they look like because you have to stop by the booth. So yeah, thank you both. Looking forward to having you on the hosting team Birgit and thank you Angela.
Birgit:
Thank you Bob.
Angela:
Thank you.

by opurockey at March 18, 2024 09:15 PM under Uncategorized

Do The Woo Community: All Things CloudFest 2024 Hackathon with Christian, Carole and Alain

Guests Carole Olinger, Alain Schlesser, and Christian Jäger talk about the upcoming events.

The Hackathon, now in its seventh year, is expected to be the biggest yet, with around 140 attendees working on 11 different projects. The projects are all designed to serve the open source community, with a focus on collaboration between different CMS ecosystems. The Hackathon also includes a friendly competition, with awards sponsored by partner companies.

The money raised from these awards goes to the Groundbreaker Talents initiative, which supports female developers in Uganda. The podcast also touched on the first-ever diversity and LGBTQ+ event at CloudFest, Rainbow in the Cloud, which will support three different charities.

Christian also touches on WP Day and how that evolved to be part of CloudFest
CloudFest
CloudFest Hackathon
Get your free ticket using code: dothewoo


Show Transcript

Robert:
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Woo DevChat at Do the Woo. And we are having a great time today talking with the folks who are running CloudFest and the CloudFest Hackathon. I’m very excited to have my guests here, Carole Olinger. Alain Schlesser and Christian Jäger. Welcome everyone.
Carole:
Hi there.
Alain:
Hello. Hi.
Robert:
Thank you for having us. It’s certainly our pleasure. I don’t know exactly when this will go up, but we’ll be close less than a month away before CloudFest and the Clou Fest Hackathon. And I guess in order of the activities, let’s kick it off with CloudFest and lead organizer, Carol Olinger.
Carole:
Yeah, my name is Carole and I am the head of CloudFest Hackathon, which is going to be our main topic today. And yeah, I’m doing that for several years in a row and it is really one of my favorite projects during the year. And yeah, this year we are going to be celebrating also the 20th anniversary of CloudFest, so we are even more excited about what …
Christian:
Makes us old.
Carole:
What is expecting us during CloudFest and the days leading to the main event, CloudFest are all about the CloudFest Hackathon and the WP Day. So I am passing over the mic to Alarm who is one of the project mentors during the CloudFest Hackathon. So what are your thoughts on this year’s event?
Alain:
Yes, thanks. I am really looking forward to this year’s event. The CloudFest Hackathon has always been a fantastic event that highlights some of the creative problem solving of the open source community. It allows open source contributors to come together via the funds of the general sponsors, of course, to tackle some of the projects that can bring the open source CMSs and larger open source hosting ecosystems forward. And in the past we had some very influential projects that have gone on to really have an impact that came out of this hackathon. And so I’m looking forward to this year’s setup of projects that we have to see what will come out of it.
Robert:
That’s excellent. Really. It’s interesting because as Carole mentioned, this is going to be the 20th CloudFest but Hackathon is relatively new. Christian, can you tell us a little bit about what got that CloudFest Hackathon going in the first place? Yeah, thank you very
Christian:
Much. The hackathon, the first edition I actually came to join was 2022. The first edition we did at CloudFest was 2019, Carole, is that right?
Carole:
Actually, I think there was a few previously, but that was even before I was involved. I think it started around 2016.
Christian:
See it says seventh edition. I should just look at our website. So 20 years of CloudFest, it’s going to be the seventh hackathon, the biggest one ever. And the reason why we do it is there’s actually two reasons. One of it, it opens for us as a conference organizer. It opens up or it builds a bridge to a totally different audience, namely the CMS contributors and also how to activate our typical attendees, which are cloud service provider to take a more active role in our ecosystem, namely by helping or supporting the hackathon, which is a project by the way, which is not run for profit obviously, but it’s to really enable the community to hack or contribute and really design new products. And if I may say, so the first edition 2022, I had little idea besides what Carol, of course told me what’s going to happen. So I thought it’s going to be a room full of tech and geeky people eating pizza. And actually it was, but we didn’t have pizza, but we had that the German French equivalent, which is called Flammkuchen. But actually only after the event, I realized the enormous work and the value the hackers contribute. And not because I understood what everyone was doing, but I understood the impact it had for our core attendee group, which is called service providers. So I’m super happy I became a super fan ever since I attended, and I’m really looking forward to the biggest one yet. Carole did an excellent job and along with the selection of projects, so really looking forward to it.
Robert:
It’s hard keeping track of everything Christian with being the CEO of CloudFest.
Christian:
We are trying hard, we’re a good team here.
Robert:
So Carol, last year was easily the biggest hackathon in my memory. How many folks did we have and how many projects?
Carole:
So we basically had around 120 attendees last year and we worked on 11 projects and that was also what we determined the good size for the event. So this year our attention was not to actually make it bigger, so we wanted to stay with the 120 attendees. But what is really interesting is of course we invite a little bit more people because plans may change and it’s always a few people that are not being able to make it. Then sadly Visa arrangements cannot be realized. But this year we invited more people to end up with 120 and it’s unbelievable. Every single person confirmed. So that is really a testimonial to the people that are applying to attend this event, do it because they know they will be there. So that being said, here’s the teaser. We are going to be 140 people for this edition.
Robert:
Oh boy.
Carole:
Still working on 11, obviously different projects. So this is for real going to be the biggest CloudFest Hackathon ever.
Robert:
Brilliant. Congratulations. Before we dive into this year’s projects and put Alight on the spot, who are the, well, let’s forward a little bit of the format because there are some winners and second place and third place, and how does that work and who were our champions last year? So we only have champions at CloudFest. Yeah, just want to say well said Chris.
Carole:
Yeah, so let me pick up this question. So basically we introduced last year based on the feedback that we got from attendees from previous years. So-called Friendly competition. We did that already in the addition of 2022, but in 2023 we brought it to a next level where we wanted to support a charity organization with the awards that we are basically select winners for. So what we did is we reached out to our partner companies and attendee companies and ask them to sponsor the different award categories that we defined for this year. So for example, we are going to have a future of the web award. We are going to have a social media master award, which is a really good one because it’s done at the award in the team that creates the most boss during the hackathon on social media. And there are three more categories and an overall hackathon winner.
And all these awards are tied to a sponsorship from one of our dear partners for the event. And everything that we are going to be raising in terms of money is going to go integrally to the Groundbreaker talents initiative, which is really amazing and dear to my heart because it empowers and supports female developers in Uganda. So last year we managed to fund a whole year of scholarship for a CO developer. And with the help of CloudFirst, we invited that person to this year’s hackathon. So we will be able to all meet in person, our dear Vanessa, who already got certified with the Groundbreaker Talents program.
Robert:
It’s amazing. I saw the email from CloudFest earlier this week or was it last week? And that really is one of the great things about what happens at the hackathon, what happens at CloudFest in general, and Groundbreakers is really a fantastic organization. It is just so cool. I want to touch on a little slightly technical before we dive into the projects. This is primarily open source. I don’t know if it’s exclusively, but it’s close to it. Would that be fair?
Alain:
It is all meant to serve the open source community either directly or indirectly. So there might be projects where there’s no actual code being produced, for example. So saying everything is 100% open source is difficult if there’s different ways that value can be produced. But in the end, all the value that is being produced will serve the open source communities and we specifically pick projects in that regard as well so that they serve a greater purpose and are not just a marketing vehicle or a product offering of a single company or so. So while not everything, as I said, will technically be open source, everything lives under the open source spirit.
Robert:
And I remember specifically that I think it was in 22, that the Joomla team that was there put together more of an open source specification rather than actual code to paper code to computer pet to paper code to computer. So yeah, there are some interesting opportunities. So yeah, let’s dive into the 11 projects that’ll be going on at the CloudFest Hackathon, I’ll let you run through whatever order you want.
Carole:
Yeah. Then let’s start maybe. So I don’t want to go into the profoundest details here because as far as I know, and I’m going to tease, I’m going to be teasing once more. There’s going to be an episode where the actual project leads will deep dive, dive deep, dive deep into their project themselves. So we don’t want to do that twice. But I’m just going to pick a project that is particularly dear to my heart, which is the inclusive language checker for open source contributors, which is going to be led by Birgit Olsen. So where the primary goal of the project is to standardize accessible and inclusive documentation guidelines across different WordPress teams. So this is also a project that is very much tied to the values that we as organizers want to share with and for this event. So accessibility and diversity and inclusivity are really important to us. And in order to have the attendees for this event really representing the industry and having them more diverse, it was also important for us to be on the lookout for projects that represent these core values for what they are aiming for as goal setting. So this is one example and I am also super proud to say that we have a female lead for this project and teaser again, it’s not the only one. So that is one which I’m particularly excited about.
Alain:
Every project has a very special place in this hackathon, I guess. So yeah, let me preface this by saying that we had an overarching goal this year because last year we noticed that there was a bit of a separation between the different ecosystems, between the different CMSs. And so this time we added some active involvement to make sure that the projects are more collaborations between CMS and between ecosystems. So where last year for example, as you mentioned, Joomla did a project where they worked as a team on one feature for their open source offering. This time around we want the Joomla folks to spread over the spread along the projects. We want to have the CMS garden being involved area and so on and so forth. So there was an active effort that we did to make sure that we don’t have islands of ecosystems that all work on their own separate projects, but there’s a lot of cooperation going on between the individual ecosystems.
Carole:
For example, we do have a project that is targeting different CMS at the same time, which is called CMS Health checks, which is led by Neil Lanner, where you do already have commitment from Joomla, Drupal and type of three communities together with WordPress one. So that’s a really exciting one. We do have an accessibility project, which is also targeting all the CMSs and the industry at large because accessibility is important to all of them equally, right? This is called can Everyone Use, which is going to be led by Anika Bob. And then we do have a MariaDB project, which is also going to be equally important to different CMS project. It’s going to be led by Andrew Hutchings directly from the MariaDB Foundation. And the goal is to integrate MariaDB catalogs with PhD platforms. So that’s definitely projects like Alan said, that are targeting multiple CMSs and not only WordPress, while of course knowing that WordPress has the biggest market share and is according to its market share, also a little bit more represented amongst attendees of the CloudFest Hackathon.
Robert:
Yeah, it does look like there are two more specific WordPress projects for the hackathon, but it feels like it’ll be less than last year, which is great, but it does, and I don’t want to leave Chris out of the conversation being bombarded with technical information. Last year was also the first year for sort of the WordPress day. How did that come about
Christian:
WordPress or when I started in the business in 2011, and I keep repeating that sentence even though it doesn’t have to do something with WordPress is in 2011 everybody told me VPS is dead and shared hosting is dead. And now we are 2024 and it’s still probably the two most compelling products for pretty much all mass market providers. Now there is of course a second incumbent and a new layer which is added to this equation, which is WordPress.
Robert:
So you’re saying WordPress that just like VPS and shared hosting,
Christian:
It’s like Exactly. WordPress, is that this is what I’m saying? No, it’s actually as that as the other two. And the reason is that it became one of the anchors for many of our visitors. So they all either already have WordPress offerings or they are even now not concentrating on getting new customers in, taking over other hosting companies. More consolidation. No, they’re even looking into WordPress. They can integrate into their own offerings in order to say, well, I have this add-on which is exclusively available at my service. And that undermines a little bit the importance of WordPress in that particular case. And this is also the main motivation where we said, okay, there’s so much in here. There’s so many requests at the hackathon initially dealing with WordPress that we have to do something more. And this is when we were approached last year, Hey, wouldn’t you be able to do this start firsts earlier?
We don’t need a specific content and we would rather like to share ideas. And it was a big success. The room was packed. We also had a few learnings from organizational point of view, and this is why we did it this year, even more professional. We made it part of the official agenda. So it starts basically a day earlier. People don’t have during CloudFest, they’re super busy with meetings and attending other sessions, but the Monday seems to be a good day where in the afternoon everybody’s already on site and has time to be invested into sharing the recent knowledge about WordPress. And this is why we said, okay, this is the perfect topic, the perfect place, let’s make something out of it. And this is how WP Day was designed.
Robert:
And since we’re on do the Woo, of course there’ll be WooCommerce conversations as well. So it’s actually a very nice kind of lead in throughout almost 10 days of Europa Park Madness, I can’t think of another word except madness because it’s so intense, so productive and so valuable.
Christian:
You would see me on Saturdays super tired, but super happy hopefully. So the Saturday after the entire, I was going to say,
Robert:
So the Saturday after the event, I was going to say which Saturday, definitely not.
Christian:
If it’s the first Saturday, then I made something wrong or the heck has really wanted me to party.
Robert:
A quick question. I don’t think anyone’s ever thought of this. Can folks who arrive early actually take a look at what’s going on in the hackathon peek in, see the winners and sort of the closing ceremonies I guess, of the hackathon?
Carole:
Yeah, actually if they come find me, we can always arrange something, especially if I remember correctly, we did that with pleasure in the evenings so that there wouldn’t be too much of a distraction during the day. But yeah, everyone’s basically welcome to confine me and see if we can do a sneak peek. And it is also very, very good for us in terms of finding new potential partners for the additions to come. So yes, but what we cannot do is accept attendees on spot. So like I said, we are already at 140, so it wouldn’t be possible to just join on a Saturday and say, okay, I’m specifically interested in this project and can I now start hacking here for the next two and a half days? So that’s unfortunately possible because of the success of the event, but if anyone wants to come by and say hi, we can certainly arrange that. And yeah, I’m looking forward to meeting all of you in that case.
Robert:
Yes, I know a lot of travelers from us and maybe Asia we’ll also be coming a day or two early so that it might, first of all, just for time zones, trust me, I know that experience. So I get there a little bit earlier, you mentioned partners and the sponsors. I think it would be a shame if we don’t actually mention the hackathon sponsors since they are the folks that are facilitating, getting the spaces, getting the time, getting the hotel rooms for the hackers, I guess we can call them.
Carole:
Yes, let’s do that. So yeah, this year we do have 12 confirmed partners, and before naming them, we still do have one open slot for a partnership package two and one open slot for partnership package one. So in case anyone out there listening in is interested in getting a board to CloudFest hackathon, please reach out directly to me and you can do that via email carole@CloudFest.com. And like I said, very, very limited spaces. So hurry up.
Robert:
And that’s Carole with an English E at the end, just so people
Carole:
Oh, good one, very good one, very good one. Yeah. C-A-R-O-L_E@CloudFest.com. Yeah, it’s amazing how I know how my name is spelled, but should be amazing.
Robert:
Before we get into that list, I just want to make a very funny aside. Literally everyone on this call has English as a second language. I may be the most native of the speakers, but it actually is a second language as well. So that’s where we’re having a lot of fun with Carole and Alain.
Carole:
But most importantly, let’s name our dear sponsors for the CloudFest Hackathon. So this year we have Intel, Ionos, Inpsyde, HostPress, Group One, Greyd, Codeable , Cloudron, BotGuard, Automattic, and the Alma Linux Open Source Foundation. Thank you.
Robert:
I mean it’s an amazing, amazing group of folks. Definitely some of these are hosting companies, WordPress focus, but even seeing some like Intel supporting the hackathon, that’s a very, I think prestigious for the hackathon as a whole, that such a large organization is putting the money where the mouth is about open source development and all of that.
Carole:
And they’re supporting the hackathon for many years already. And because they’re doing that, I also want to mention that they’re organizing an AI Summit during the first day of CloudFest. So that’s also something I’m looking forward to because that’s the new thing. Everyone wants to be up to date about what’s going on with ai. Even I, and I’m not technical.
Robert:
If I hear AI one more time, I’m going to start doing a Jäegermeister with Carole.
Carole:
Yeah, it’s got to be the most important. If you’re going to do some Bingo competition with the buzzword that has to be in the middle somewhere,
Robert:
It’s like the center square because someone’s going to say it no matter what. So just block it out.
Carole:
Or the drinking game each time.
Christian:
It’s either that or quantum computing. It’s like these two I hear every day.
Robert:
Oh, okay. So I’m going to test you on that because Quantum has actually, at least from an anecdotal perspective, taken a huge back side to ai. Is there anything, I know we’re talking about a hackathon, but it’s fun to get some little snippets about the CloudFest agenda as well in here. Is there going to be anything quantum related?
Christian:
No, actually we had Quantum last year and the year before, so this year we are really focusing a little bit more on ai. And the reason why is it why that’s the case is not to get on your nerves, Robert, even though of course that could be an argument. But the main driver is we ask the audience what specifically they would like to learn. We do a survey called State of the Cloud, and there we collect the feedback of over a thousand cloud service providers, which have already replied. And there were two main replies, which we identified the first one being AI and how does it actually impact my business? Is there a business case for me being maybe not intercompany of the world? So what does it mean? How can I profit from it? Can I actually profit from it? And the second one was the takeover of Broadcom and VMware and whether there’s going to be a partner program anymore.
So another strange topic which is emerging right now. And then the last one is always about, and that’s interesting because it was the same last year, is about international collaboration. How can I learn from other market participants which are maybe doing business next to me or doing with me or maybe even competing? And that’s actually how we derive this year’s theme, which is uniting the nations of cloud because I mean obviously we could talk about nations in the sense where you’re from different countries, we have over 80 different countries attending, but nations could also mean the technological background an attendee has. So there could be a product manager, software developer could be a hardware producing. So these kind of nations. So the fields of interest or whatever you’re going to call it. And this international collaboration of these nations is what clouds is known for.

And the hackathon is a perfect example because without knowing it by heart, there’s already people from all over the world. As Carole already said, we even have our talent from Uganda, which is flying in last year. We were able to finance five talents in total, one coming only out of the hackathon participants, which is freaking awesome this year of course I’m hoping for six. So we will do our part to make that a reality, but it shows that this collaboration part is so important to our audience and to our community and it’s even ever increasing important. So it’s really cool we have the hackathon helping us to achieve that goal.
Robert:
Yeah, I think that’s a great point because I think we have folks from every continent except Antarctica. So I know yet, so I was going to say Christian and Carole next year we need to at least someone who’s maybe spend some time there.
Christian:
Yeah, sure. Let’s do a local meetup. Antarctica.
Robert:
Challenge accepted now. There we go. The challenge for CloudFest 2025 Hackathon, someone who’s been not just a vacation but actually spent time in Antarctica. Okay, okay, that’s good. Folks listening to the podcast, can’t see the weird look Christians giving me like, okay.
Christian:
Was thinking about is the Linux Penguin actually from Antarctica? But I dunno,
Robert:
Nice, but I don’t want to, in fact, I want to even go deeper into this. It’s great how almost like 10 days of a program really works out here because the hackathon gets I think new people who would not traditionally go to CloudFest to see what this global experience is like.
Carole:
We definitely see a huge increase of people. So basically when they sign up we ask them, are you also applying to attend CloudFest? Or maybe do you have already made arrangements? And I can see a huge increase of people transferring their interest from maybe having attended the hackathon a few years back and not so much interested in CloudFest to shifting that. And I would say at least 50 to 60% of the people that are attending the CloudFest hackathon are now attending day one and beyond of the main event. So that certainly is a result of having this complimentary program elements like the WP Day and an AI summit. And so everything we built throughout the last editions, but it’s also a result of the hackathon projects and initiative itself because we built this connection between the deciders and the big companies of the industry and the open source world, the contributors to the open source project. So with that connection being built over the years, it is clear that that shift into the main event cloud first and that is really, really amazing to see. So that’s something I’m actually really proud of.
Robert:
Yeah, I kind of see it in three parts. We have the hackathon, then we have WP Day and the Intel AI Summit and then really sort of that official get ready to meet, what are we looking at? 8,000 people at CloudFest now, plus or minus. Yeah. Even if we’re rock by 10 or 20%, it’s still going to be a huge, huge event. It’s going
Christian:
To be a full house. Please arrive early, bring some patients, especially on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, be ready for queuing. Very British but it’s going to be full house and be ready for getting in line.
Robert:
On sort of a little fun note. How does one survive 10 days?
Carole:
You find out, tell me.
Christian:
Yeah, eating a lot of flammkuchen and some Jäegermeisters.
Carole:
And then there’s crazy people like Robert and me who are going to go to WordCamp Asia the weekend before, which isn’t Taipei, Taiwan for anybody who doesn’t know. So that is definitely going to be an interesting month of March for all of us.
Robert:
Yeah, I’m looking at about three weeks, not at home.
Carole:
I just also wanted to mention there’s something that we didn’t talk about yet about when we were mentioning the projects. What is really important for me to say is also something that we started doing a few additions back when we were trying to have more targeted goal-oriented, diverse and inclusive projects as already done. We were coming up with concept of having project mentors and offering guidance throughout the process of having an idea for a project and then having it set up for the hackathon goal oriented, having the right ed audience defined and making it a success. And in that context, I wanted to mention, so we have Alan here who is one of the project mentors that we have for the lost edition and for this one, but we also have Lucas Radke and both of them are doing such a brilliant work in guiding our project leads through the process and finding and determining the derived projects for our events. So I wanted to give a shout out to both of them and maybe Alan can say a few words more about how the process looks like on their end.
Alain:
Oh yeah, sure. So yeah, I have been doing this already last year together with Lucas. So we are already a properly trained team on dealing with that. And this year we wanted to go through what we’ve learned last year. So last year we were very specific about what types of values we wanted to have represented in the projects and from the ideas that were submitted, we tried to actively shape those so that we could have some of those values represented. So we wanted to have sustainability, accessibility, things, big topics like that, that were represented through the projects. And then we made sure that the projects represented those values and that we had the right people to lead those projects to get a successful outcome. And this year we are still continuing down this trend, but also we learned from last year where everything as I mentioned was a bit too isolated.
So this year it’s also we want to tie everything a bit closer together across the ecosystems. But what I wanted to mention is that from how I perceived this hackathon, it has started as just an annex to the cloud first. But we slowly, we actively worked on making this a more integral part so that we get a proper bridge between the open source communities and the businesses where the value is created and ultimately where the money is being generated. Because oftentimes those topics, it’s a bit of a taboo to mention them in the same sentence, open source and money, they tend to not go well together. And as project mentors we really try to get the general ideas of these open source communities but then produce the version of the project that makes the best use of this specific circumstance where businesses are funding this, where businesses are present at the main event so that the open source community gets proper access to these resources and then can bleed over into this business segment.

And also more importantly, and I think that is often the harder part to do, have the business topic bleed over more into the open source communities, they tend to isolate themselves from that business, but ultimately without required funding, all of these open source projects will ultimately have trouble succeeding. So this amalgamation between the open source spirit and resources that a business focused event and the participants at that event can provide that is just such a powerful happening that happens once per year as far as I know, I don’t know of any similar event happening like this. And as project mentors we try to properly guide the project leads to make sure that they can properly tap into the resources of this specific circumstance.
Robert:
Yeah, I think that is a great point Alain. And if we look at the sponsors for Hackathon, those folks are all sponsoring open source developers day in and day out, either as true sponsorships or as employees within their own companies. So and maybe some kind of strange perfect utopian open source world, everyone could just do what they want and it is critical to have small, medium, large organizations keep open source projects going. And that’s great to see. We are kind of running out of our podcast time before the mysterious man behind the curtain. Bob cuts us off. One little thing I’d like to mention on one of the days, I’m going to let Carole talk to this because she’s done so much of the work we are having Rainbow in the Cloud. If you can just give a little, when is it, where is it and what’s it about?
Carole:
Oh yeah, I’m so excited about that. So this year CloudFest is going to host the very first diversity and LGBTQ plus event, which is called Rainbow in the cloud. You’ve got to love that name. Do you? Right? So Rainbow in the Cloud is going to happen on the second day of CloudFest, which is Tuesday, March 19th after the main concert concert in the hotel in the bar called Commedia dell’Arte, which is also known as the karaoke bar.
Robert:
Yes, the karaoke bar.
Carole:
And not surprisingly there is going to the karaoke, but more than that we are going to have a few very colorful and glittery surprises for you during that event. And the main goal besides obviously raising awareness for having a more diverse and pride friendly industry and including that like showcasing this during CloudFest because that’s the values that we all care for in the organizing team and as an industry, we also thought it would be really, really great supporting a few charities in that matter with the event we are organizing. So long story short, again, we reached out to our partners, so the partner companies of CloudFest, but also attending companies for CloudFest to sponsor this site event. And a minimum of 50% of all the money we connect toward this site event is going to go to three different charities that we chose. And one is a female empowerment company, which is called Anita B, the other one is out in tech and the third one is called Rainbow Railroad. So again, if anyone hears the call and feels like, hey this is so amazing and I want to support this, please reach out to me on Carol with an e@CloudFest.com and we can certainly make it happen that you are going to be one of the amazing sponsors for CloudFest very first diversity and pride event.
Robert:
Perfect. I’m very excited about it. Yes, I am helping Carol with that as well. So I do have a vested interest in seeing Rainbow in the cloud be quite successful. I’m thrilled that the CloudFest team has really put their full support and weight behind putting this together. Again, one of the many reasons folks should be attending Cloud Fest in Germany at Europa Park for Americans, Europa Park for everyone else. So we already know how to get ahold of you Carol, so Carol with an e@CloudFest.com. Also the hackathon at hackhackathon.CloudFest.com.
Carole:
Yeah. So yeah, you can always reach us there and get more information and yeah, really, really looking forward to seeing you all there. I can’t wait and I cannot believe that one year has already passed since we were in Europa Park for the last time.
Christian:
I tell you.
Robert:
And I guess Do the Woo has a nice little coupon code for free standard Pass, which is dothewoo with two o’s of course. So we know how to get ahold of Carole at CloudFest. Alain how we get ahold of you, how can we make your life more difficult?
Alain:
I’m probably best reachable on Twitter X @schlessera is my nickname and per email if you want to reach me regarding the CloudFest, it’s Alain.Schlesser@gmail.com.
Robert:
And Christian.
Christian:
Happy for everyone of the folks listening in to join our cloud festival and you can reach me cj@CloudFest.com and really I will be waiting with open arms at the gate Monday latest or for the hackathon on Friday and Saturday. Of course, really looking forward and appreciate the work Carole is doing and Alain are doing. And of course you are doing robot in making all these great community projects are reality. And that’s not only the hackathon, which I told you earlier, I became a super fan without knowing what I’m a fan of the first year. Now I know, of course. And then now we started this rainbow in the cloud initiative, which it shows that the community contributes actively. It’s like an open source B2B festival we are doing in a way. So I really, really, really much looking forward to it. I
Robert:
I love that Christian. I think that is a great way of putting it open source B2B festival. We now know the tagline for 2025
Carole:
And that’s exactly what should happen. That is exactly what should happen. I think there’s so much potential in uniting those both worlds of mine and those both worlds of us and many of the people out there. And yeah, I am an advocate for doing that in the WordPress ecosphere and beyond. Let’s unite the open source and business world. Please.
Robert:
Thank you all so, so much. I am so excited for another edition, seventh edition of CloudFest Hackathon, 25th edition of CloudFest. Everything starts really getting going March 16th and goes a solid week afterwards. So very excited. So you can check out hackathon.CloudFest.com or go directly to CloudFest.com to get more information. And I’m sure there’s some tickets left, but it is going fast and crazy people book this a year in advance. Thank you so much all. Can’t wait to see you in March.
Carole:
See you. Bye.
Christian:
Thank you very much for having us.
Alain:
Thanks everyone.

by opurockey at March 18, 2024 09:15 PM under Uncategorized

Do The Woo Community: WordPress Translation, Internationalization, and Documentation with Estela Rueda & Pascal Birchler

Thanks to Our Sponsor

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They highlight the work of the Polyglots team in translating the software into different languages, making it more accessible to users worldwide. And also share about the upcoming improvements in WordPress 6.5, including a new translation system that uses PHP files for faster performance.

All three of them encourage more people to get involved in the WordPress community, emphasizing that it’s not just about knowing the software, but also about understanding the culture and the people.

And they end with a common love for a food dish that Estela and Pascal not only enjoy eating, but making as well.

Find them on WordPress.org

More links


Show Transcript

Abha:
Hello, and we’re here for another WordPress Way on Do the Woo. I’m Abha Thakor and we’re continuing our journey around the world, finding fascinating people who are doing the WordPress way, but also can tell us a little bit about the Woo too. So stick with us and stay on our journey. So today we have Estela Rueda with us, and Pascal Birchler, and we’re going to have a very interesting conversation about translation, internationalization, documentation. In fact, we might find a few other things that ending in Asian and talk about those two. So stay with us and let’s see where we go. So welcome both of you. It’s so nice to have you here. Now, Estela, I never know where you are currently in which country. So tell us today, which country are you coming live from?
Estela:
Hi, Ava, how are you? Thanks for the invite. First of all, where am I located now? Today I am in Italy. I recently moved, last two months ago I moved to Italy. That’s where I am living.
Abha:
But that’s not where you’ve from, is it before? Where did you grow up?
Estela:
That’s a different answer from where I am from. I really don’t like it when people ask me where I am from because it depends on what you want to know. It’s always a different, always a different answer.
Abha:
I tell you what, tell us some other countries that you’ve hopped over to so that we can get a flavor of the international Estela.
Estela:
Well, let’s see, Mexico, that’s where I was born. I grew up in the US in Mexico somewhere up and down. I went to college in Costa Rica. I got married and moved and lived in the Netherlands for a long time. Then I went back to the us. Then after that I moved back to the Netherlands and then Slovakia, and now I’m here in Italy.
Abha:
Love that. This is why you are one of the perfect people to be on here talking about internationalization, and I know that international background of yours also means that inclusion is a really important part of your work in the WordPress and the do the We community too. So thanks for telling us all that. Pascal, where are you coming in from today?
Pascal:
Hey everyone, thanks for having as well. It’s a bit more boring here. Born and raised in Switzerland and I’m still in Switzerland today.
Abha:
There is nothing boring about Switzerland. It’s one of my favorite places in the world. So whereabouts in Switzerland are you coming from
Pascal:
In Zurich?
Abha:
That is got to be one of my favorite cities. So I think it was last there for WordCamp Zurich seems a lifetime ago, but it was only just before Covid. So I had the pleasure of coming to speak at that. So it’s an amazing place to be right now. We all know it’s a really busy time because when we’re recording this at the moment, we’ve just had beta one for the WordPress 6.5 release and all three of us in fact have been quite busy who had this release. So I wondered if we could just give people a little bit of an insight into why is it that both of you do give time to the release and you do give it in such an amazing number of teams from design, documentation, polyglots, performance and core. So why do you do that and why should people think about that?
Estela:
I think it’s important that you get involved with many of the teams, not just one and just focus on one thing because nothing that we do within WordPress, within Woo, is just focus on one thing. If you want to change the design, you need to talk to the developers, you need to talk to Core. And if you change something, you need to document it. You need to let people know what you did, whether it is documentation for developers, what is documentation on the features that is just for end users. So always, always have to talk among teams. So belonging just to one team sometimes makes most of the time I’m going to have to say that makes no sense.
Abha:
I love that answer. And in fact the blog I’m writing in my head now is just that’s going to start with that answer. And it is true. I work and volunteer in probably about seven different teams actively, but they all have touch points and my work tends to focus on actually where they touch and it really does make a difference. I don’t think I would’ve been a good docs if I hadn’t understood core and I certainly wouldn’t have been as good if I hadn’t understood training. And this time I was doing a lot of work in training too.
But performance is the one that really I’ve learned more most about being docs co-lead for the last release because it affects everything. I thought it just affected this little bit over here and this is like an add-on thing, but we look at before or maybe we look at after, but I did not realize until I worked with Pascal and Joe and all the wonderful people in performance that actually it affects every single thing that we do and probably should be more in our focus as people learn to use WordPress and it be something that when you start as a developer or you start making sites as a site builder, performance is right up there in the first things that you learn. And of course who better to ask that question to than Pascal?
Pascal:
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I mean performance affects everyone and it’s not just you as a user of WordPress when you’re writing new continent WordPress or you use your site, but it also affects your visitors and that’s why it’s so important to improve performance across the board, both on the backend and front end. And yeah, I think in the recent years we’ve done a pretty good job already, but there’s of course always lots more to do.
Abha:
Pascal, do you remember offhand how many performance improvements they were in? 6.4? I should know I did the field guide, but I can’t remember at this very moment. I know I was absolutely stunned by how many,
Pascal:
Oh, I don’t have a number in my head because there’s so many, sometimes there’s bigger changes, but there’s so many smaller improvements as well if it’s some caching or some code optimization. So yeah, I don’t have a number, but it’s definitely a lot of improvements.
Abha:
I tell you what, we’ll put it in the link in the show notes just so that people can read how many there were. I was looking at the piece right now and it was quite phenomenal and I think if you are thinking of that performance is an issue for your WordPress site or even that you’re debating working with Wu and WordPress because of performance, you need to check out this post on WordPress 6.4 performance improvements and look at the work that’s happening now because it really shows you that performance does not have to be a problem. In fact, the ability you have with speed with WordPress and Woo is phenomenal. Say Pascal, if you were suggesting WordPress and Woo to other people, what would you say to them if they were hesitant about performance with the software?
Pascal:
Don’t be because WordPress is known for powering some of the biggest WordPress, some of the biggest websites in the world and also WooCommerce. It can scale to super large sites and it’s definitely proven to be a robust and performant choice and there’s performance plugins that you can use. There’s always something that you can do on your hosting side of things as well. So yeah, it’s definitely, performance is definitely, you don’t have to worry about performance when you’re going with the WordPress and Woo.
Abha:
And I think sometimes it’s a misnomer and people have this idea what it is and it limits and actually it’s not. But that also brings me back to the value of documentation because especially in the work for the last few and in our shows here, we’ve been explaining how important documentation is because if you understand what you need to do on your WordPress site to make it perform better, then you’ve got more chance of it actually doing that because it’s not often the software that’s limiting, it’s how much you can read in terms of documentation, how much you can learn about how much you can learn from your peers. And to that, I have to go to Estella who’s nodding at me going, yes, yes, yes, this is exactly what we’ve been telling people. So Estela, you tell them.
Estela:
Well yes, documentation is very important, but documentation in all levels right now, WordPress dot org, we have many levels of documentation. We have the support forums which will give you the one off questions very specific. They also have articles and stuff that they’ve been recollecting from answering many things. Then we have documentation for end users, which are people that are non-developers that they want to know how to do the basic stuff on their side, make it look nice, look pretty working, that’s all they need to do. We have documentation for developers and they go all on the deep stuff, all the code, everything in the backend that not everybody understands, but that’s good for them. And then we have Learn which are longer tutorials, video or just reading that people can learn at their own pace. And these are good when they want to learn about one specific feature or how to create a specific feature, how to create a theme for instance, or how to create a plugin or how to run performance. It’s like very specific topics. That’s what it is.
Abha:
And it’s all available for free.
Estela:
Yes, it’s all available for free and many of these things for the longest time, you have to go and look around the web, Google as much as you can to find it. And what we are trying to do nowadays is to have them inside WordPress dot org so that people know that this is, we we’re the ones that build it and we’re telling you how to do it, how to fix it, how to work in it, how to learn about it.
Abha:
And the beauty of course is that right now we’re going to be working on documentation for end users. That starts pretty much in the field guide as well as beta 1 comes in and if you are passionate about these things and you want to help other people or you wish something was documented but you can’t find it, this is the time to come and volunteer. The same for performance because the core performance team have regular meetings, they’re a fairly new team and they’re pretty awesome. And I’ve had Nini who’s been helping me research for this show and she’s just sent me a message to say that they were 64 tickets with a focus on performance in 6.4, which is pretty good. And that’s just main tickets. There was lots of other things as well in addition to that. So this is a happening team as of course this documentation and you get virtual cookies too. These are important things to get. They make you smile and being able to smile in a day is quite important.
Estela:
But if you’re at attend work camps and you go to contribute this, you get real cookies for the documentation.
Abha:
Now I’ve missed out on these. I’ve been at WordCamps and I haven’t had the cookie, so I’ll need to have a word with the development people and see if I can get some wonderful one sent across. So it 6.5 obviously has a lot of things in the release. And for our regular followers, we have got a show that’s coming to you in mid-March with a 6.5 and we’ll be looking at all the wonderful things in that as well. So if you’ve got questions that you’d like to be included in that or that we can research for you, do send them in and we’ll try and make sure we can follow those up too.
So for 6.5 and beyond, what would both of you like to see as different in a release in terms of how can we get more of the translation understood, more of the need for internationalization understood. And also just a bit more, I dunno if understanding is a quite word, but there is a lot of work that our polyglots do, our polyglots or our volunteer translators for anyone who’s not heard that term before because they have quite a short time to translate the release into their local language so that WordPress can be used in that latest software more easily in that locale. So Pascal, I’m going to go to you first of all, I know something that you feel very passionate about. What would you like to see if you had a wishlist that would make translations and their importance and all the perfect translations and all the internationalization work that you are involved with, what would make it easier and what would be your dream?
Pascal:
So one dream that actually already came true, which is that on translate WordPress dot org, you can now translate plugins or core itself directly inside WordPress. That is very important because sometimes you have a text that you need to translate but you don’t know where it’s used. But so you can just basically open WordPress and then you see the string in the necessary context and you can translate it right in there and then upload those translations. I think that’s an amazing change that happened. And the other thing, I think it’s just in general maybe for developers to translate their use WordPress in another language during development because just so often strings are not actually translatable and we have to fix that. That’s always a bit annoying. It would help to use some plugins or just change the language to just use WordPress in another language to get that experience.
Abha:
So where do you think that would be the most effective during the beta testing the RC time? Or do you think that would be when we’ve got a live release
Pascal:
Even before beta, I think especially when developing a big new feature, it can happen that things get forgotten, but beta is of course the ideal time because that’s where we start focusing on bug fixing. So especially during the beta period, it’s a good time to fix those translation issues.
Abha:
I’m just thinking about how we could make that workflow easier. Do you think something on Learn possibly might help with that if we showed people how to do that?
Pascal:
Possibly? Yeah, I think the worker’s playground is already very helpful because it makes it easier for you to test WordPress with a different setup. You don’t have to change your main website to do that. So maybe making it easier to do this via playground would be helpful. But I don’t have concrete ideas right now.
Abha:
The beauty of this show is that we have a lot of people who come back after listening and go, actually, we could do it this way. And it also people we’ve had guests before who’ve gone away to their teams and go, could we do this? And it’s great because we like that at Do the Woo, we like not only being about empowering and sharing the community, but also coming up with good ways of people working together. So I think we’ll take that definitely to the next learn meeting as well.
So it is really important just so we’re aware that when we’ve got new things like WebPress playground, we will put that it’s in the show notes. If you listen to our show from last month, we had a whole section on WordPress playground as well. But if you not sure what it is, there are tutorials, there is help documentation on how to use it. And as Pascal said, it doesn’t have to change your current setup to be able to use it. And you can test WordPress too and be part of the releases in the making. We’ll share some of those in the cross link in the show notes too. Estela, okay, I need to know your dream now. What would be your dream to make it better for Polyglots internationalization and translation?
Estela:
My dream is almost coming true, almost coming true.
Abha:
I love this.
Estela:
So the GlotPress team has been working on improving the plugin to be able to take long tests, long text, and it may be they are planning on launching this new plugin in WordCamp Asia, which unfortunately I’m not going to be able to be there. But the people that are going to be there, they’re going to see it and I am really, really looking forward to it. That is one. The other one is one that I’m still working on is improving the style guides for every language. This style guides have been written up while long time ago, I don’t know. Some of them haven’t been updated in forever. In recent years, we have had many issues and changes in the language in all languages.
And how do we address, we had the problem of gender, we have problems of how to address people. Yeah, sometimes it’s formal too informal or gender, the feminine and masculine like English is easy because it’s a neutral language, but Spanish, no, everything is feminine or masculine and there is nothing in between. So we need to learn how to address these things not only in the way we name objects because that grammar, we’re not going to change it. We cannot change the grammar, but we can learn and give tips on how to address things like the users. We always call them masculine, so maybe we need to find a different way of naming them this kind of thing. And Spanish is not the only issue with this, right? A lot of other languages have these problems. Also the integration of English terms that are non translatable.

A lot of languages just decided to keep the English term and not translated. So I think that improving the style guide that we have that will make it easier. And then using AI to translate with always, always finishing with a human review doesn’t go from chatGBT straight to blood press ever. You need to check, you need to read it and you need to make sure it doesn’t read like a robot. It needs to read like a human is telling you what to do and how do you do things right?
Abha:
Absolutely. So yeah,
Estela:
That’s it.
Abha:
It’s almost coming true. I love it. So of course that means that next time we will have to find you a new dream so that we can work towards that as well. So for anyone who doesn’t know, can you just share what GlotPress is?
Estela:
GlotPress is the tool that is used by the polyglots team to review the strings, make sure that they are the same, that is the same terms, the functions. I don’t know if probably Pascal knows more about this because it’s used more in development or core than it is in documentation. So I dunno if Pascal knows more about how it’s or what it is, how to use it.
Pascal:
Sure, I mean GlotPress is basically a WordPress plugin and it’s what powers translate WordPress dot org. It’s used to translate not only WordPress itself but also all the plugins and themes in the directory and I think even the mobile apps and some other parts.
Abha:
And we’ll find a way of linking that in transcription as well. So for anyone who’s not come across it before, but those are really cool. There’s a really good things that are coming up. Pascal, you’re also got a hit GitHub work that you’re doing on various things relating to translation, but particularly performance translations. Do you want to share a bit about how that makes a difference to WordPress and therefore also to what people want to do with Woo?
Pascal:
Oh yes, absolutely. So it’s always been known that the translation system in WordPress, how WordPress loads translations, et cetera, is a bit slow, but it never got attention it deserved. So last year we did a very thorough analysis on the performance of the translation system and as a result we built a completely new translation system that is more performant, uses less memory, but it’s backward compatible. So everything still works the same. And we put that into a plugin called Performance Translations. So everyone could just install this plugin and if you are using WordPress in another language, your site should be instantly faster. And the good news is we are now merging this plugin into WordPress 6.5.
So technically you don’t need to plugin anymore. So just update WordPress and it gets faster. And the main thing that this new system does, it uses a new file format for translations. So if you have ever translated WordPress or dealt with translations in a way you might be familiar with those .po and mo files that are used by WordPress. And we are replacing that with PHP files. So PHP files that hold all the translations because loading a PHP file in PHP, which is the language that WordPress has written in, is much faster than having to load those binary mo files.
Abha:
And that of course not only improves performance, especially once it’s in core, but also makes that more available to more people who don’t have to do plugins because not everyone has that ability if they are having a site that’s been built for them, they can’t always add plugins. But having that feature facility within WordPress core means that more people could use it. And of course that has a direct benefit for if you’re adding WooCommerce on top because you can already have something where you can translate it much more easily. With WordPress playground, as we’ve talked about, you can test how your service that you’re having may appear in different translations as well. And I dunno about you two, but I definitely think that the understanding of why translation is important really has taken much firmer hold globally in the last two or three years compared to what it was like a decade ago. And I’m going to go to you first Estela on that.
Estela:
I think even five years ago, I think five years ago we were not still so sure about translating. It was one part, the core was being translated, that’s what poly gloves were doing mostly. And people locally were writing their own content, but nowadays we are translating even more. And I have insisted a lot on this and whenever I can I talk part of inclusion is giving WordPress to people in their own language, in their own culture, within their own culture. Why? Because there is this saying, there is this saying that says give a man a fish, feed him for one night, teach ’em how to fish and you’ll feed him forever. It’s the same thing if we teach somebody how to use WordPress, that somebody may have a work for a lifetime, they have a job, they have skills that they can move on and there you go.
So I think that that’s what we need to be doing now and we need to take away that part that says if you want to learn WordPress, you must learn English or speak English. I don’t think that that is true and that should never be true. We need to stop that, we need to avoid that and we need to go around that and say, okay, we want to include as many people as possible and we’re going to teach as many people as possible how to use WordPress, how to work with WordPress, how to create a life with WordPress, a business, anything that you want to do. And that’s why I insist on translating documentation from developers for end users. Because also is that thing, you do not need to be a developer to create a blog and with a simple blog you can create a business,
Abha:
Right? Definitely. And it is about empowering and it’s about having that empowering globally. And I know one of the questions that we did, part of the research for this podcast today was about well, but we was different. But actually there is for everybody out there who thinks that there isn’t a localization aspect of WooCommerce, I can tell you there is and there’s lots of people actually involved with it and you can contribute to your localization to core and they maintain translations of the WooCommerce project on GL press. So you can translate it, you can take part in the teams who are working@webpress.org, the whole thing works together and that’s the beauty of it. It isn’t that, oh, I have to start again. The more we can translate to WordPress, the better that is for people using it for WordPress and all its different ways it can be used, but also for those using it for WooCommerce products, it really is about the future.
And we’re not going to go back to a place where everything just has to be in English. The world has moved on considerably from that and that is a good thing. So if you haven’t thought of these things before or you thought a plugin was what was standing in your way, have a look at 6.5 and we will include in the show notes after it becomes into core, we’ll get Pascal to write as little paragraph to go in it as well and a link so that people who think, okay, what do I do now? Where do I go? We can direct you because a lot of it is about education and education in a positive way because as we share, we learn. And that’s why we have so many hundreds of locales. We have so many people and in the shows on Undo the way we do try and get across different countries as well and to see what people are doing.

So if you’re listening to this from a country we haven’t featured yet, please let me know on NonstopNewsUK or Do the Woo on Twitter, or actually you’ll find us, look us up and we’re there and better still subscribe to our do the Woo feed and you’ll have lots of ways to be in touch. I’m going to move us slightly sideways and Estela, apart from living in lots of different countries and having just a huge amount of international experience and also probably a lot of dishes and foods that you’ve tried, which I’ll come back to. How did you first start using WordPress and feeling that actually it was the software that you wanted to invest your time, not only as a professional but also your volunteering time because that’s quite a commitment. When did you have that moment where you felt, this is what I want to do?
Estela:
Yes. Let’s see, I started long, long time ago. I think it was with 1.4, 1.7 something around there. I started building my websites, my first site just with S-D-M-L-C-S-S because that’s what we had back in the days because, and I had my first business as a virtual assistant. I needed to find something that would allow me to make money while staying home because I had a little child, I had a little boy and I wanted to make sure that I was there for him. Somebody recommended WordPress, I went to WordPress and then I made my enemy number one, the Codex. Okay, I hate the codex with everything that I can. I don’t think I hate anything else more. I just couldn’t understand that I’m not technical, I’m not a developer. So the codex always, always stop me. So I went back to CSS and TML, I took a class on WordPress and I learned how to use it and that was like three point something when I learned how to use WordPress and I loved it and I’m like, oh my God, you can do so many things with this.
And I started going here, going there and learning how to do things. And then mobile fast to nowadays, I went to work in Europe in Berlin, which was two 19 at a contributor day. I was sitting at the design table and I’m just going, we were beginning with Gutenberg, it was the beginning of the development of Gutenberg and everything was magical and nobody knew what we were doing, but everybody was there. And I told someone like, I don’t like this. Just reviewing tickets, giving, making comments on tickets and stuff. I think I need something more. I need a project. I don’t feel like I’m giving much. And they said, okay, that’s easy. And they sat me at the documentation table and then these people started talking about things. I had no clue that existed. It took me probably about three or four months to understand that they were talking about moving the codex into documentation, separating from the end user documentation and the development documentation.

And I’m like, oh my God, I love that. I’m all for it. Get rid of the codex. I don’t like the codex. Now I know that the codes has been useful, it had a lifetime, but I think that we have surpassed it, right? And yes, there are a lot of documents in there that are not being updated and we are little by little retiring it until it will go away eventually. The documentation that we have nowadays been it’s different. And I work in a special project with the documentation team for the end user documentation to everything. The articles give them an order, giving them a reason to be somewhere and they have a life or more a path. It’s like what is WordPress? Is this something the CMS good for my project? And then it teaches you requirements, maintenance, all the stuff that you will need before that teaches you what is WordPress, the parts of WordPress, the features.

And then you have all the information you need, all the tutorials you need to make it look great in a way that a non-developer can understand it. And yeah, that’s it. That’s where I’m stuck. I just love it. And I’ve learned how to write technical documentation and I’ve learned a lot. And that’s why you see me sitting at meetings at different meetings where sometimes I just say hello and I’m just sitting looking at Slack, just going like this, reading, reading, reading, reading. So that I learn what other teams are doing. Sometimes I understand the conversation, sometimes I don’t. But it’s okay because I have things in my head that tells me, oh, okay, so somebody was talking about this, so the topic is this, or they are working on this feature, they’re working on that feature. And I can talk about it or at least I know about it. That’s what I do.
Abha:
Well, if that’s not a reason to be inspired to join in and learn not only more about the projects and how to do the different things, but also improve your own abilities and knowledge so that you can use it in your own workspaces too. It really is. Thanks Estela. And it’s been an absolute pleasure to work with you now over, oh, I’ve lost count how many years? But it’s been wonderful. We’ve worked at WordCamp Europe’s and documentation Polyglots. I think core releases it goes on. But as Estela said, even if you don’t understand something straight away, observing is a great way to actually learn and there isn’t really a stupid question. So it is about working together because at the end of the day, we also want to encourage the next generation of people contributing to the project. And that doesn’t have to mean a younger generation. It can be just people who, at whatever time of their life may now want to contribute and not know how to start or need to see someone that they can relate to and who has skills that are similar to them or an area that they’ve always wanted to work in. So come along, get involved. And Pascal, I know you are just amazing. I’m going you to tell a little bit about what your day job is as well and just to show that you can mix the two.
Pascal:
Yeah, sure. So my day job right now is actually contributing, or for the most part it’s contributing to WordPress, especially WordPress performance. It wasn’t always that way. I used to work for a WordPress agency building websites for clients, but now I’m part of a team that is focusing on improving performance in CMSs like WordPress. So not just WordPress, but mostly because WordPress is powering 40% of the web or something. It’s pretty big. So yeah, main focus is performance. The performance team that you mentioned earlier. Right now I’m a co tech lead, co core tech lead for Repress 6.5. So I also have to make sure all the tickets are done and closed and fixed for the release and make sure all the deadlines are kept and things like that. It’s maybe a bit more project management in coding I would say on that part. But I also have fun fixing box. The performance translation thing was very dear to my heart because I started using WordPress also not in English, it wasn’t German. So performance translations has always been very important for me. We have so many contributors to performance team, but also 6.5 in general. So I try to make sure people feel welcome, guide them wherever possible, point them in the right directions.
Abha:
And Pascal, you’re a developer relations engineer in your day job working with Google. And do you feel that your work there is enhanced by the fact that you have been a contributor for so long and you have worked with people across the globe?
Pascal:
Oh absolutely. I think having contributed to WordPress before is why I was able to join Google to work on WordPress. It’s not about only about knowing the software, it’s about knowing the people, knowing the culture, knowing the community, how things work. When I’ve seen people just arrive at WordPress and I dunno, proposing some change without knowing how things work, they usually get upset or frustrated and leave again because it doesn’t match their expectations. So yeah, being in the community for so long, it’s definitely made it easier to how to see how things work and go with the flow and go basically I changed from spare time contributor on my weekends to it full time, so it made the transition much, much easier.
Abha:
Thanks, Pascal. I know both of you are very valued in the team and by many contributors valued to dear friends too because that is one of the things about the community is that you get to know people really well and you may not get along with everybody, but that’s okay. It’s such a big community that you can find people that you can work with and learn from and also learn different ways of thinking. And I think anybody who does join, I think particularly we’re focusing on translation today. If you get a reply and you think, oh, I don’t quite understand that, or it seems like maybe they don’t want me there, it’s probably not the case. It’s probably just remembering that the person you’re writing to or write or is writing to you, English may not be their first language and sometimes it can come across differently than it’s intended.
And I think that’s one of the big learning things. And I think the more you get involved in translation, the more you actually understand that. That is super important to know. And when we we’re writing and talking to think about, will somebody else who is not used to doing this day in, day out or to translate everything in their head as they’re speaking or reading, is it easy for them to follow that? And if not, how can I make that a little bit easier? Because that all comes down to us as well. And of course more things join us together, then they do that separate us. So as people know who know me from for a while now, know that I have a thing about WordPress and food and recipes and as we’re particularly after Covid and during Covid, getting people to think about eating health relief for their wellbeing, but also as a cultural way of coming together, keeping in touch and for sharing cultures.

It’s a great leveler and a way of people to discover other people that they may not have contact with. So I was really surprised when interviewing people from one from Italy and one from Germany, and they came up with the same food that they love to cook when they’re working. So I am intrigued. Did you two speak to each other before this broadcast? Because you both came up independently with the fact that you liked one particular food. And I did a quick look in. The trusted researcher in the background here has had a look at how popular this food was. Now I’ve got a slight pause before I tell you what this food is and see if you can decide yourselves. So Estela, can you describe it without mentioning its name?
Estela:
Lemme think, it’s a sauce. Some sort of sauce. Not really a sauce, but some sort of it you can eat it with. I actually eat it with Italian bread, which is amazingly delicious. Oh, I moved two blocks away from the best bakery that you have in Italy. So you see me, you find me there every morning at seven o’clock in the morning so I can get good breath. Recently coming out of the oven. There’s also, it’s a Mediterranean dish, we like. Ingredients? I dunno, you can also add flavors to it. I like to eat it sometimes with extra olive oil, sometimes I put a little bit of chili on it. If I’m feeling adventurous I add extra garlic and yeah, I tried even one time with avocado now it’s not good. Trust me. Do not mix it with avocado. It turns very weird. Green color.
Abha:
No. I’m going to jump quickly to Pascal. Pascal, you have 10 seconds to describe this dish without telling people what it is.
Pascal:
Alright, creamy, great for dipping goes well with pizza bread as well. Or I dunno, maybe cucumber for example. You can do it at home as well, or just buy it in store.
Abha:
And I think we’ve given them enough time and thank you Nini, who’s just popped into the chat for me that the global market for this product is worth 2.62 billion in 2020 and it was projected to grow to 6 billion by 2028. Now I should tell them really why it is, shouldn’t I? Because they’re going to want to be able to cook it. So the favorite item for these wonderful people, a developer relations engineer, in your case a UX strategist, is hummus. And I am going to want your hummus recipes so that we can pick some of the best ones to make live on our cooking show that we are going to have while we talk about Woo and WordPress. Because why wouldn’t you? And hopefully we’ll see two of these people with us as well, sharing their recipes. And I told you we’re going to have to cover food at some point.
All that leaves for me to say is thank you very much to Estela and to Pascal for joining. Do the Woo and talking about WordPress and WooCommerce. We’ve loved being in Italy and in Switzerland today. If we can come to be your country, then let us know. I really want to cover as many continents as I can this year. Thank you for joining us. We’ll put everything in the show notes. If you’ve discover something that you’d like to know a bit more about, do let us know on our different, do the Woo channels and we’ll make sure that we come and talk about those too. So thank you to both of you and we’ll see you soon.
Pascal:
Thank you.

by opurockey at March 18, 2024 09:15 PM under Uncategorized

Do The Woo Community: WooCommerce Plugins for Portugal with Marco Almeida

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Marco shared with us his journey into web development, his focus on creating plugins for the Portuguese market, and his involvement in the WordPress community.

He also touched on his recent decision to offer lifetime licenses for his plugins, explaining that while it may not be sustainable in the long run, it gives customers more options and allows him to test new ways to sell his products.

Marco emphasizes the importance of giving back to the WordPress community and staying connected with others in the industry.

Connect on X aka Twitter


Show Transcript

BobWP:
This is special because this is from my new home country. I mean, you’ve all heard me talk about how much I regret moving away from the us, which well, now I never said that, but I’m dope. But Marco, my friend, welcome to the show.
Marco:
Hi. Thank you for having me and welcome to Portugal. I think I told you this several times now, but now it’s official.
BobWP:
Marco’s been a big help in a lot of adaptations for both Judy and I here and stuff, and he even helped me get my cell phone. I have to say this, I couldn’t even get my cell phone working right, the right plan. So he actually took me to the mall and he talked to them, got it all figured out. It’s like, yeah, I was a mess. Let me say that.
Marco:
Just helping a fellow WordPress person.
BobWP:
Yeah. So you do development, you do all sorts of cool things, plugins. We kind of focus a little bit on the product end of things, but why don’t you tell everyone who you are, what you do, all that good stuff.
Marco:
Okay, so my name is Marco Almeida, as you said. I’m from Portugal. I live across the river from Lisbon since forever. And yeah, I got into the web development really soon. I’m 44 now. I got into it around 20 and yeah, that’s what I do.
BobWP:
Yeah. All right. Okay. So you have your plugin site and then you have a development business.
Marco:
Exactly.
BobWP:
Can you tell us a little bit about both of those?
Marco:
So in 2005, so almost 20 years now, I’ve opened the typical IT company. I had a partner, we did IT support. We sold hardware, consumables, typical corner shop stuff, but we worked mostly with companies. And at the time, I already did some web on my previous jobs before I opened my own company, and I was working on my free time on a CMS, A content management system that we started using on this company web to build websites for several companies. I think most of the people my age in the WordPress world probably have a similar story of having built their own CMS at the early ages. And then time I took over the company myself alone, I didn’t wanted to do that. IT support selling hardware, consumables, all that stuff, and I focused more on web development. Well, WordPress was natural. It was a natural transition from the CMS that I developed and something that would be more flexible. And so it really went really natural. Funny enough, that CMS that I had, it was based on rows and columns, something that we now call blocks 20 years ago, which is really fun to see right now. But yeah, so I started using WordPress, I think around 2010. I published my first plugin on the repo in 2011. I think it was a plugin for open graph text to share your posts on Facebook and Twitter with the correct thumbnails. Funny enough, it was my first plugin and it’s the only one I’ve sold so far. I’ve sold to WP experts around the time of WordCamp Asia last year.
BobWP:
So what got you into the plugin? I mean, it’s like some of the stories we get from different folks we have on here is that the plugin often came from a need with a client. Yeah, same way.
Marco:
Exactly. Yeah, I think that that’s a common for everyone. So yeah, this plugin I was talking about, it was a need that I had myself and I just published on the repo, and so I start publishing plugins on the repo really soon. In my WordPress journey, most of the plugins, as you said, were stuff that I had a need for myself or for customers of mine I was developing websites for. And I also, in the early ages, I got into e-commerce. So there were a lot of needs, specific needs mainly for the Portuguese market. And that’s why nowadays there’s several plugins, several free plugins and premium plugins that I own that I developed that are mostly focused on the Portuguese market. And yeah, that’s how I got on.
BobWP:
Yeah, I find that interesting because when we first met, and I remember looking at your plugins and stuff that, yeah, it’s on the Portuguese market and I don’t see a lot of, well, I’ve seen some developers do that, but there was, what made you mean obviously there was a need that needed to be filled and nothing was available. And so how many of your plugins are you specific to Portugal?
Marco:
Well, probably on the commercial plugins, I have 10 commercial plugins, and I think six or seven are focused 100% on the Portuguese market. On the free plugins, I currently have 20 free plugins and probably also six or seven focused on the Portuguese market. And you were saying about the specific needs, I can give you some examples. For instance, the VAT number, which is something that in most countries is something that it’s only for companies in Portugal, what we call a fiscal number, which is the same as a VAT number, but for a person, and that’s something that WooCommerce doesn’t have the fields too, so I created a plugin for that. Also, we have a payment method in Portugal that it’s exclusive of Portugal, and it’s the most, so it’s the one people trust the most. And at the time there was no WooCommerce plugin for it. So I’ve implemented it and it’s now the most used payment gateway in Portugal. So there were really specific needs that someone had to do specifically for Portugal.
BobWP:
Yeah, that is really interesting. And the one you were just talking about, that’s the payment gateway, right?
Marco:
Yeah, it’s a payment method that exists in Portugal, I think for more than 35 years now. So when you get your, for instance, your utilities bill, like the electricity bill or the water bill, if you get it on traditional mail, in paper, you normally get a reference, an entity and the value, an entity, a reference, and the value. And you can go to any ATM machine or your own banking service. You just put on the reference the value and it’s paid for and it’s all automatic. So people trust this for a long time way before online shopping was a thing. And so at some time I had a customer that needed that wanted to implement that on his website, and there were already some companies providing that service with an API, but they weren’t building plugins for shops. They were just providing the API and expecting for each and every shop owner to implement it. So I saw an opportunity there. It was funny because I called them and told them, so I’m doing this for a customer and I will probably publish on the public WordPress repo. And they told me, so the company is called If then Pay, and they told me at the time, yeah, you can do whatever you want, just do not. We have nothing to do with that. You are the one who has to give support. We just provide the API. And I was like, okay.
Funny story, like six or seven months after they were the ones calling me saying, yeah, we got to talk. Because there’s a lot of customers going in because they first go to the repo, they install the plugin, and then they see, oh, I need a contract with this company. And so of course we now have an agreement. Well, this was launched in 2013, so we are 11 years now, and we have an agreement for the last 10 years. And of course now they’re paying me to keep the plugin and support the customers. And so we have a commission based agreement. So each payment that goes to, yeah.
BobWP:
Wow.
Marco:
And it’s more than 7,000 stores, right?
BobWP:
Oh, I bet. Because I remember when I first, somebody explained to me about being able to pay this at the ATM I was somewhere and they said, well, you could just go and pay this at the ATM, I think it was at the hospital. And I had paused and I thought, because I’d seen it, but I didn’t really didn’t connect and stuff. So that’s amazing. How do you Now I don’t get to talk. Most of the times it’s my host and I don’t get to talk with a lot of the product makers. What makes you decide when you do a plugin, you’ll have some that are free and then some that are premium. What makes you decide to go to the premium route?
Marco:
So at first, as I was saying, so I started publishing plugins on the repo, so free plugins very early. Although that payment gateway, although it’s a free plugin, I’m still being paid to have it online. So it’s almost a commercial plugin, not for the customer side of it, but for me as a developer. And at first it was giving back to the community and also put on my name and my company name on in public, getting to be known as a developer, a WordPress, and specifically a WooCommerce developer in Portugal. And there’s probably not a lot of Portuguese online shops that don’t have at least one plugin. One of my plugins installed because I made them so specific for the Portuguese needs, and it was really natural. At some time, I got contacted from someone from Angola, the African country, they used to be a Portuguese colony, and they were also trying to implement, they have basically a copy of our banking system there.
The payment methods are really similar, and so they wanted to implement that same payment method there. And so there was not a lot of potential for users, but they agreed on paying upfront to develop that plugin. And at the same time, I made a pro version, and that was my first commercial plugin. Actually, it was a payment gateway, not for Portugal, but for Angola. No, interesting. But it was really a test and I was not expecting for it to sell so much and didn’t, it’s not a commercial success for sure, but then the real first one that made me start with a premium. So for instance, another thing in Portugal, most countries of the world, if you have a PDF file or a piece of paper, you can call it an invoice that doesn’t exist. In Portugal, we, for several years now, every invoice must be issued by an IRS certified software.

So you cannot just make a PDF file and call it an invoice. So for instance, on WooCommerce, on the right side, on the other actions, when you have that option sending invoice to customer, that’s not legal in Portugal. So for instance, in the Portuguese translation of WooCommerce that I work on, we remove the word invoice from that string. And so I was doing some integrations with an API to one of those certified softwares for some customers. And from the early stages, I thought that this could be a really good commercial plugin because the shops needed, but there were already two solutions on the market. One of them was from Marcel Schmidt that very well. And so at one time, Marcel decided to do something else and he reached out to me and he told me, Hey Mark, well I know you are working with the same API.

I know we would like to have a product. I’m going to do other stuff. Do we want to take this plugin? We can reach a financial agreement on this. And so I took it. There was a lot of stuff to do. We were around the time WooCommerce 3.0 was launched and there were significant changes that we needed to do to the plugin. And so I released a version 2.0 of that plugin after some months of, and that become the first profitable plugin that I had. Funny enough, the competitor was also a friend of mine that called me the day I launched my plugin say, oh, I have a great success. We are now competitors on this. And I ended up buying his plugin also.
BobWP:
And I wonder how many other plugin developers, various parts of the world ever think of these more specific needs within their country? I mean, the couple of things there, for example, I didn’t realize with the multi bank that it’s Portugal specific, that nobody else does that at all. And yeah, that is really interesting
Marco:
And I think it’s a good way to get into the plugin development because you have a laboratory, very small user bases that you can test your stuff with, your commercial practices and everything. And that’s what I’m doing right now. I’m starting to do some plugins that are for the global market of course, but creating them for Portugal.
BobWP:
I want to also touch a little bit on community and stuff with you because I know you’re really involved. But sticking with the product thing, I know that you recently went to lifetime licenses. I mean really recently. Don, your plug is like,
Marco:
I announced it today
BobWP:
And I saw it on X. It’s always hard to say x, I still want to say Twitter, but I saw that and I’ve seen these discussions go on and on about that. What made you decide to do it? I mean, what convinced you to go that route?
Marco:
So first of all, as I was telling you for instance, when I bought that invoice express plugin from Marcel and from the other guy afterwards, they were both on lifetime licensing, but it wasn’t sustainable because they were charging the same value that I charged today for an yearly license and they were charging lifetime license. And I think that’s why we saw a lot of lifetime deals completely disappear. Some of them, even in some strange situations where they don’t honor the previous license. So I bought a lot of lifetime licenses that I use still today, like a CF, like WPML. So I have a ton of lifetime licenses that I still use. And so when I started doing my plugin business, I always said no lifetime licensing. So it’s got to be yearly. You got to pay by year yearly because it needs to be sustainable of course, but you got to try stuff.
You got to try new ways to sell your products and you shouldn’t be afraid of doing it. Even if you have to just take it down sometime. It’s not a problem as long as you honor the customers that bought it on that licensing. And so what I’m seeing now that I’m selling plugins for some years now is that most of the customers that keep the licensing for a long time, they really just ask support for the first months. They really don’t need a lot of support afterwards. So even if I’m losing money on the long run with these customers that decide to buy the lifetime licensee, I think it’s just a way to give them both options and let them decide if they want to pay each year or if they want to pay a lifetime license. So I’m charging something between three and four times the price of yearly license for a lifetime. And so I decided to give them that option and let’s see how it goes. If it doesn’t go well, I can just turn off that licensing and just honor the ones that matters. It’s just a test. Yeah, I’m testing.
BobWP:
Interesting. Yeah, I don’t know if I’ve ever bought a lifetime license. I’ve been given a few over the years, which has been really nice and I’ve been given them and I’ve used them for maybe as long as a decade. I can probably count on one hand or two hands how many times I maybe ask for some little help with support or whatever because yeah, and I imagine there’s some that are a lot more high maintenance or whatever depending on things. With the one with bank, is there a lot of, I mean, not on the side of the actual woo, which yeah, it updates, you got update or whatever, but is there a lot of updates on the other side when you’re using kind of a payment gateway like that? Is there a lot of things you have to keep on top of? But is there stuff pretty much set? Like you said, they’ve been doing this what for 30 some years and it’s just done it .
Marco:
Exactly. No, it’s really stable what they have. So if then pay the company that the plugin works for, they are what is called by the Bank of Port a payment provider. They’re not a bank, they’re a proxy between the business owners and the banks. They’re certified by the Bank of Portugal authorized to provide payment services. And so multi-bank was not invented by them MB way. So the other methods, the other really use methods in Portugal is something that when you check out, you just enter your phone number, your mobile number, you get a push notification on your phone, you have that app installed and you say Yes, and it’s paid for done. And so they are not the owners of these payment matters. They are just payment providers. And so what we’ve been doing during the last years is they normally get another payment methods into their portfolio and we just need to add it to the plugin. So right now it’s multi-Bank, MB Way, there’s another one which is called Pay Shop, which is actually a way to pay with real money. So you just get the reference from the website and then you can go to a local shop, like a newspaper stand or something like that. And they have a computer there just given the reference and the money and it’s paid for.
BobWP:
Interesting. So is that, are they paying for it after they received something online or are they actually getting it there? There no,
Marco:
No. So just imagine you chose bank transfer on checkout, but instead of doing a real bank transfer and the shop owner has to go to check the balance on the bank to see if the payment is there or not, you just go to a shop or if it’s multi-bank or you just use the reference on the ATM or your own banking services, if it’s MB Way, you just say yes on the push notification on the phone. And if it’s the pay shop, the one with money, you just go to the shop next door, make the payment, and automatically in one second the website gets a web service call like an API call. And you are the changes to processing after that.
BobWP:
Interesting. Wow, that’s kind of cool. Alrighty. Well, okay, so products, we’ve talked about products, but knowing you, I’ve got to touch on community a bit, and you’ve been involved with meetups toward camps. Just tell us a little history of your community involvement then. I think a couple of things I might poke out there.
Marco:
So my first WordCamp in Porto in 2013, so maybe around two years after I start using WordPress, I found out about this community that some of us already start calling like a cult or more cult than a community. So I went to Porto in 2013. It was my first world camp and then I went to Seville for WordCamp Europe in 2015. That was my first WordCamp Europe. I start co-organizing in 2019 in Lisbon. And then I was part of the organization team of Europe 2020, the one that didn’t happen in portal because of the pandemic last year. I was crazy enough to become lead organizer of WordCamp Lisboa in 2023. It was hard. But yeah, I do it with pleasure and to give back to the community and the meetups in Lisbon, they were not happening for some time now, and the pandemic didn’t help also. But now we are in about almost a year and a half of nonstop meetups in Lisbon and it’s not only me right now, I have two other people helping me with organizing. So we meet every month in Lisbon, Brisbane, and then there’s the people of photo also. And I’m going there next month to speak
BobWP:
And I’ll be there about WooCommerce, I’ll be there heckling you and I will let out a secret about meetups in Portugal, meetups are only done for, they can have these long, long dinners right after the meetups. I think you said that once jokingly. Of course. But I did experience that. So you go to your hour meetup and then you have a two to three hour dinner.
Marco:
So come for the meetup, stay for the dinner.
BobWP:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
So last August here in Lisbon, António Carreira, a friend of mine which is also on the organizing team of the meetup, we are trying to get someone to speak on the August meetup. And it’s not easy because everybody’s on holiday that month. And so we told yeah, we just do the dinner.
BobWP:
Hey, why not?
Marco:
The meetup will be the dinner. It’s okay. You only need two people and a glass of beer to do it.
BobWP:
Yeah, exactly. So what is it that keeps driving you to do, I mean I know you with the community, you’re always out talking to people, you’re doing meetups, you’re doing the WordCamp, and I know it’s probably a question everybody’s been asked and a lot of us have the same answer, but what really drives you to stay involved with the community? I mean, you got the business understand that part, but actively giving your time. And I’ve seen you’ve done a lot of contributions through the different teams on WordPress. What drives you to do that?
Marco:
Yeah, it’s really the sense of community. I don’t think most of the people that work in it and in development understands how special this community is. Of course with all these it’s problems and dramas that we have some time, it really is something that I’ve never seen in other areas of it. And so yeah, it’s the people, it’s the community, it’s giving back to a software. So 100% of the revenue at my place in my house, it’s word for us. Me and my wife, we work 100% of the day with word for us, so why not give back?
BobWP:
Yeah, really as simple as that, right?
Marco:
Yeah, it is really simple. Also, being with the people, everybody works from home now since the pandemic. I work from home for 15 years now. I need to see people. So I need to go to meetups and work camps and stuff like that. And that’s a way to be connected with the world. So for instance, as I was saying, I was part of the organizing team for WordCamp Europe 2020 in Porto. That only happened in 2022 that year a crazy American come to Porto and decided to stay. And then I was invited to be on the organizing team for the online version. That did happen. I was really glad to help, but it’s just not the same.
BobWP:
Yeah, I attended a couple online ones during that time and I just thought, yeah, there’s no comparison.
Marco:
Exactly.
BobWP:
Absolutely. Well my friend, this was wonderful. I don’t get a chance to chat with a lot of people. I let my host do all that good stuff, but I’m glad I was able to sit down with you and catch up and I’ll be seeing you in a short amount of time here in Porto at the meetup and looking forward to that. And that nice little bite to eat we’ll have afterwards.
Marco:
Yes, we always have that really cool dinner with all the people. As we were saying, it’s about the community, it’s about the people.
BobWP:
Yeah, exactly. So where can people find you? Give me your website addresses, all your social, where you hang out in social and stuff where people can connect with you.
Marco:
Okay, so myself, you can find me on Twitter, that X thing, I’m still wearing a Twitter shirt. People are not seeing this because it’s only audio. But yeah, my handle is Wonderm00n, but the last two ohs are zeros. And then you can find my company webdadospt and you can find my plugins brand. So I started selling the plugins and they’re the same brand as the company and then I decided to separate them. And you can find me at our plugins @ptwooplugins.
BobWP:
Alright, well absolutely a pleasure my friend, and looking forward to seeing you soon. It
Marco:
Was an honor. Thank you.
BobWP:
You bet. Thank you.
Marco:
Okay Bob. See you.
BobWP:
Bye.

by opurockey at March 18, 2024 09:15 PM under Uncategorized

Do The Woo Community: The Collaboration of the Interactivity API with WordPress and WooCommerce

In this episode of Inside Woo, BobWP chats with WordPress and WooCommerce developers Carlos Bravo and Lucio Giannotta about the collaboration between WordPress core and Woo working with the Interactivity API, a new framework for WordPress developers.

The API allows developers to create interactive blocks, providing consistency across the platform. It also solves the issue of front-end development in WordPress, which previously depended on individual developers or teams. The Interactivity API allows all developers to use the same tools, enabling plugins to be interconnected and share the same code base. The experts also highlighted the API’s benefits for WooCommerce, including improved user experience, server-side rendering of content, and more consistent, cleaner code.

  • Take a deep dive into what the Interactivity API
  • Learn the problems it solves for the WordPress community and WooCommerce ecosytem
  • Discover what types of blocks are powered by it in Woo
  • Find out the hardest part was in developing the API
  • Hear what the WordPress core team learned from collaboration with Woo
  • Understand the implementation of the Interactivity API and it’s effect performance, accessibility, security and other aspects of Woo
  • Learn about the ways that it facilitates custom block development and creativity for developers building unique WooCommerce experiences.

Lucio on LinkedIn

Carlos on LinkedIn


Show Transcript

BobWP:
As you know, you’ve been hearing a lot about the Interactivity API probably heard it on other podcasts. You’ve heard it on different posts around the space. And we’re going to throw in some woo with this one because everybody’s been talking about WordPress, but we’re going to talk about WordPress and Woo and I have two experts on the topic. Way more experts on it than me by 100% Lucio and Carlos joining me, how are you two today?

Lucio:
Doing great. Thanks for having me.

Carlos:
Hi, I am really happy to be here.

BobWP:
Alrighty, well let’s get right into this. You’re just going to have a conversation, so we need to start with the basics. What is the Interactivity API?

Carlos:
The Interactivity API is a new framework for WordPress developers that allows them to write interactive blocks. Those are blocks that the user can click and something will happen on the site. And it does in a way that is the same way for every developer. We are trying to give consistency by writing some data attributes in the HTML that will be together with some JavaScript and will allow developers to create interactive blocks. That’s the main goal of the API to give consistency.

BobWP:
Yeah. So from both of you, what is the solving for the community? What is this solving for the developer community or even the community as a whole?

Carlos:
Regarding WordPress right now, the main problem in the community, it’s not a problem in the community, it’s problem in the software is that there is no guides about how to do the front end part in your WordPress site. I mean each project will depend on each developer or team working on it. Until now, you could use React, you could use plain javascript, any framework, but now you can also do that. But we are providing a way to do all, so all developers can use the same tools. And that’s great because that way we allow plugins to be interconnected. Like blocks can talk to other playing blocks, and also they are all using the same JavaScript library. So imagine you have to plugins one for bookings and one for the dealing with the payment process. For example, with this new API, they can both share the same code base instead of using one React and the other plain JavaScript or whatever library can use. That’s the main problem we wanted to solve here.

Lucio:
Right. So as per what concerns, Woo, I think a lot of what Carlos has just said applies. So if you think about traditionally how W has handled this kind of interactive well content in the shops, if you’re a developer, you know that, well, two things. I think first of all that Woo has somewhat fallen behind the curve of the modern e-commerce experience in a way. And the other you will know that sometimes the developer experience of adding such Interactivity to a shop was a bit inconsistent. So had traditionally we had things like just normal jQuery Ajax requests all sprinkled around various functionality like the add to cart functionality for example. So we had very kind of the first inkling of an Interactivity was that back, I dunno, more than when Woo started really that was there as well. But then when we started to get integrated a little bit more with Gutenberg blocks and start transitioning into a more block based paradigm, well frankly because of Gutenberg also was very young and Wu was an early adopter like we are of data Interactivity API.

Now there was no clear direction. So everybody was developing blocks was kind of on their own. And the same applies to Woo. So we started developing blocks using React. Well that resulted in well us trying to move as fast as possible to implement this kind of experiences, but it resulted in a little bit of an inconsistent experience. So now we want to transition all our bets away from the classic themes as you are aware and more into block-based development. And there are a few downsides of the way we were developing blocks because again, we were in the early stages and we were experimenting. First of all, I would say I think the clearest downside was that our new blocks, for instance, if you have used the old products block, they were climb side rendered. That means that when the user will go to the page, JavaScript will need to load and then it would show a loading skeleton and then it’ll show the products.

That would mean that well search engines nowadays can deal a little bit better with client side engine stuff, but it was not the best SEO and it was definitely not the best UX As you are going to the store and you know how precious those milliseconds are. You want to see your products as soon as possible. You don’t want to see another loading indicator. So I think first of all, the Interactivity API allows us to do the server side rendering of all this content, which means that the server already renders the content that we have. And so the user sees it immediately and then on top of it add with, what’s it called? Hydration systems that Interactivity API is providing add the Interactivity in short. So before we had the situation in which classic teams would be service-side rendered, but then let’s say you want to switch pages in your catalog and then you get a full page reload, that’s not great experience.

Then we wanted to do something a little bit more. So we had this client side navigations that was more snappy. But the problem is a CO and the problem is just user experience on first load for example. And now we have the best of both words thanks to Interactivity API, right? We service edge render. So that’s means the crawlers can find the contents very easily. You get it immediately without any flashing of content and also you get the Interactivity. So I would say there is a clear improvement for the user experience of WordPress users and merchants to get aligned more into what modern e-commerce platform, what you would expect from a modern e-commerce platform. So that’s I think the best contribution of the Interactivity API and the WooCommerce ecosystem. But to the ecosystem at large, you can also say there is a few more developer oriented improvements that have been made thanks to the work that the in interactive API guys have done, which is, well first of all, by using their framework, we remove a lot of low level plumbing kind of coding.

In this way it means that the responsibility is handled by the framework. We don’t have to worry and it means that WooCommerce code base is more consistent, it’s cleaner, frankly, and we can rely on the expertise of the entire WordPress ecosystem to support us because we are using their framework. And so we also are able to things just much faster and they are more maintainable and they are more secure and reliable. And also wherever is building on WooCommerce, you’re not going to have this fragmentation of the whole ecosystem that everybody’s doing something a little bit differently. So we have all the same framework now and yeah, like Carbo said, you can still implement things like you wanted, right? But now we have a common ground where we all built and that means greater versatility. For example, developers can jump from one place of the code base or another or maybe build the extra blocks that are going to be shared among and across the community and the ecosystem and so on. So I would say these are just a few of the good things coming from the Interactivity API to WooCommerce. It’s truly something magical.

BobWP:
I actually took this a little different approach because listeners are probably thinking, wow, these two really know what they’re talking about. So I’m going to step back and have you introduce yourself, who you are, what you’re doing with this project, what your experience and what has been your involvement with this so far. I’ll start with Carlos.

Carlos:
Cool. Well my name is Carlos. I’ve been working as a full-time sponsor contributor of WordPress score for about two years and a half. Before that, I was working doing projects for another companies as a freelance and also as an agency developer. These last two years and a half, I’ve been full-time working in Interactivity, API, planning it, talking with another developers, starting working on the foundations of the API, doing lots of testings, lots of proof of concepts, lots of investigation, comparing with another frameworks, a lot of stuff working on that. And I will keep working on the Interactivity as long as the community needs it. I mean, I’m quite happy to be there. I remember one sentence that was when I joined them, it was like, do you want to help to do the frontend developers of 40% of the web? And it was like, yes, for sure.

BobWP:
And Lucio, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Lucio:
Sure, my name is LuLucio and where to start? Well, I’ve, let’s start with my involvement with WordPress. I’ve been involved with the WordPress community since the early days of my development career. So it’s been more than 15 years. I think at this point. I think many of us developers have started somehow with juggling around things and playing with WordPress. It provided a really good platform and still does for starting out as a developer. Then I went on a long WordPress hiatus for several years. I didn’t touch any WordPress code. I started working on more AI automation related stuff actually.

And then about same as Carlos, I think two years a half ago I got more involved into this and I’m now working for Automattic. I work for WooCommerce division and I lead a small team there who is responsible for everything which we call full store editing, which is our version of the full site editing that WordPress says. So we are really trying to spearhead very hard the transition, like I said before from the classic paradigm to the blocks paradigm. So we want to empower users and merchants specifically to customize their stores, to have their vision come to life. And we really think that the work which has been done in core and Gutenberg is the best way to go. And I think over the past two years and a half, I’ve seen so much progress in WooCommerce that I hardly can believe it actually, I’m trying to be objective here, not to be too biased, but I think it’s been incredible the amount of maturity that we have seen in the past and a half years. And we are basically not only willing, but we are committed to try to make this transition as seamless as possible for the users and just to get everybody excited about what blocks mean in the WooCommerce and leave our legacy classic paradigms behind. So that’s a little bit about my mission, let’s say.

BobWP:
So what has been, you’ve both been involved with this for a while. What do you consider really the hardest part? What’s been the biggest challenge of actually the development of the Interactivity A p? I mean, is there anything specifically you can think of or something even more general?

Carlos:
When we started investigating the best approach to deal with the problems we had before, I mean the first thing you do is to compare with another React frameworks providing the same Interactivity and the single page applications period. And most of them next swell kits, they are using the same language both in the server and the client. But WordPress is not like that. WordPress is built on PHP. That was the most difficult part to work with because as Lucio commented before, you need to be server side compatible. That was the most important part. And in WordPress there are hooks and those hooks are really powerful, but also allows third party plugins and developers to modify the HTML as they want. And that is a thing that is quite hard for new Java screen modern frameworks because most of them are working to only change the data that the user interacts to.

If you have a counter and you increase it, you only want to update the number for a product. If you want to add two pair of CT’s, I mean the number is the only part of that HTML that should be updated. The problem here is that when you compare what it comes from the server to what you have in the client, if those are different at the beginning you’ll see a flash on the side as a user or you need a loading bar as Lucia mentioned. So dealing with those hooks was the hardest part and to be fully compatible with all plugins backward compatible.

Also with block and classic themes and with anyone editing that HTML, the way to go we found was this directives thing. I dunno if we talked about directives before, but for people who are new to the Interactivity API, these directives are the core foundation of the Interactivity API. These are like HTML attributes. If you take alpine js that is quite common similar or for example HTMX that is also quite new and it’s approaching a similar way to do these things. We are adding attributes to that HTML to allow both the server and the client to know what to do with those user interactions. Imagine on click for example or text update or changing CSS classes or styles. That was for my point of view, the hardest part to deal with.

Lucio:
Yeah, well I just want to echo what you said. Basically for us it’s also mostly the difference between the server side language and the front end language, which is I think a problem that still we have to kind of figure out a final solution if there will ever be a final solution, like a paradigm or sorts. Because obviously the advantage of having the single page applications of paradigm that we had before with the React components was that we only needed to care about the React code base, but now we have to maintain the same component in PHP and in JavaScript or TypeScript in our case.

So that creates additional complexity for sure. It’s totally worth it, don’t get me wrong. But still I think that on my wishlist is a way to better handle this component reusability, try to eliminate this duplication of code and try to make sure that the component is in sync to make it more maintainable. And I think we don’t have a solution yet. And I don’t know, I also don’t know what the solution could be. I also know that we are not exactly the only one who faced this. If you think about Laravel has had similar problems because also they are PHP framework and they use view in the front end. But Laravel has different set of constraints or rather we have much more stricter constraints than Laravel. I know that something that, if I recall correctly, maybe you can correct me if I’m wrong here. I recall when I was checking on Laravel did it, is that they actually have a node emulator running on PHP to do the rendering or something of that sort, which I think we can’t do.

I was speaking with Lucio I think a couple of some months ago. I think we can’t do because we need to support all their versions of PHP and this is only a PHP eight thing or something like that. So obviously this is a problem that’s really hard for us because WordPress is deeply committed to backwards compatibility. So moving towards these kind of things is much harder. But the upside is that people can rely on us for future years, right? So yes, I would definitely say that for us as implementer of blocks on top of the Interactivity API rather than implementing the API itself, this was the hardest challenge. Trying to figure out how to optimize for removing as much as possible code duplication and using the components and making sense on how to architecture our code.

Carlos:
Yeah, it’s also on my wishlist. I would love in the future to see the Interactivity P in the editor in order not to do the react block for the editor and then the front end or the PHP plus the Interactivity API block for the front end. That would be cool. Yeah, we have been thinking in that. But as you mentioned, backward compatibility is a thing. If WordPress, we have to deal, I mean it’s a good thing to have this backward compatibility as you mentioned, if you have a WordPress site, it will work for years, but still you need to update it please and this cover for security. But we have been thinking about it. We have several options there like working on a templating system or we are still thinking about it. We are also on the front end we use, which is a lightweight kind of version of React.

There have been some people asking us to move react to the editor part in order to be lightweight. But still there’s a lot of work to do there. There’s a lot of things to stay there. We have some options. We are just making tests, but still it’s going to take some time because I mean WordPress is evolving quite a lot. We are also phase three with this collaborative workflow, the internationalization. I mean that part is, I mean we will receive more feedback of that kind of, I don’t want to repeat lots. We are working on that. We know we suffer from the same.

Lucio:
I actually wanted to, you made me think about something I wanted to add to my previous answer, although I made it clear that it was just a limited set of advantages that I was talking about. But now you mentioned shipping React instead of react is also another thing that I think it’s particularly important for e-commerce experiences. To make it clear, we haven’t moved away from React yet, but it would be beneficial for performance reasons, obviously to ship the lightweight, the most lightweight code that we can. And also connecting to what you said about the directives and what I was talking about with removing a lot of the plumbing, for instance, state management, which is something very usually very complex and that everybody even in the same team sometimes tends to do in a little bit different way. Let’s not talk about different plugins in the ecosystem. I think that by abstracting the state management, the Interactivity API, this also is a huge advantage. These are my personal feelings of working with that. So take that with grain of salt.

BobWP:
So you talked about performance, which is obviously talked about quite a bit here. Anything else as far as impact on performance you’d like to point out or are there other impacts, say accessibility that you want us to be aware of?

Lucio:
Well, just what I mentioned is a tiny part of the performance impact that this has. Mostly, it ties in with what I was saying before, that the most important positive performance impact is the fact that everything is service side rendered. So users will see content mature, maybe have been exposed to those metrics as first paint and such metrics. These are just much faster. So not only performance is going to be faster because their browser doesn’t need to ship a bunch of JavaScript, then it needs to evaluate, then it needs to render the JavaScript and so on. But it’s also just including all the content needs to be rendered and it’s also perceived performance that matters a lot in these kind of scenarios. So instead of seeing a loading indicator, you see the content coming up immediately or like Carlos was saying, you don’t see the flesh of stale content and then everything is, it should be.

That’s I think as I was saying before, the best of both worlds between basic service-side rendered stuff, which is the classic, the real classic legacy kind of approach and the single page application that enables this more snappier interactions. So we get the best of both of those. As for all impacts like maybe accessibility, I mean you render HTML, so I guess it’s compatible much out of the box with most screen readers and things like that. We have big commitment on accessibility In any case, I know core even is even more diligent than we are most of the time. So I dunno, do you have stuff to add, Carlos?

Carlos:
Yeah, regarding accessibility, we already did accessibility improvements to some core blocks with Interactive DPA like search and navigation. Cause it is much easier to work with keyboard Evan, for example. So now the navigation keyboard experience is much better than it was before. And also as we are editing the HTML, both in client with Interactivity API runtime and in the server with also using the attack processor, the new H TML processor, we are adding some area labels or indicators for screen readers and keyboard navigating for the sites. So it will be still a matter that the playing developer needs to work with. I mean we can provide the tools but we cannot help you with your plugin or make your plugin to be accessible. But we are providing a tool that will allow you to add those markup, those thermal attributes that you need to have a better experience for those people. But it’s that the main point is that we already improved some accessibility. For example, also with the new image Lightbox feature accessibility was quite important for us and we spend a lot of time working on that and this API allow us to be able to handle that expand experience for example with the keyboard. And I think that’s all the rest of you mentioned is great.

BobWP:
Very cool. So did the team at WordPress core learn anything through this collaboration working with Woo?

Carlos:
Yes, for sure. We learn a lot of Woo. I mean when you start thinking about how to make a framework for developers, I mean the first thing we thought was, okay, let’s talk to them. Let’s talk to real developers. Because a problem for core developers may be that if you are all your time working only in core, you are only working with WordPress with nothing like a default WordPress installation with just one post, just one page gut number install and just that. And the problems usually appear when you need more difficult things. I mean, for example, our blocks to test was navigation search file and the most difficult was the query loop. But now you can change the pagination, you can paginate your posts without reloading the site. But the first time we talked with Woo, it was like, okay, how do you use it for the product collection, for product filter or for an add car button, which is more interactive than an e-commerce.

I mean WooCommerce was the best fit we could find at the beginning of the project. For example, there’s one directive that at the beginning where we were not planning on including it because we were not sure about if it would be necessary at the beginning of the Interactivity API life that was WP it that is used to render loops of things. And when we presented to Woo, the first thing they said was we need an each directive. And it was like, okay, we thought about that but we were not sure. And if you are telling us to do it like now the first or the second one, yes, go for it. And also they were the first giving us the real feedback and also giving us the main pain points that Lucio told before we are dealing with this issue. We have this problem using React on the front end. We are have this loading bar that we don’t really like and that’s it. We have had a lot of conversations with them. Their help has been great and also where they were, I think the biggest guinea pig we’ve ever had in a project because I mean Woo is in a lot of sites, woo is a really huge project and they even found the time to help us with the foundation of the API. I think without wool this project would’ve not been the same. Would’ve been different for sure, would’ve been worse.

Lucio:
That’s great to hear. And I want to make it clear that we were extremely happy and honored to be the Guinea pig project and we have also maybe people are wondering how we’re talking about how did we use this since it’s not out for official use yet. So actually we did something quite really experimental and crazy in our WooCommerce code base. We have included our own forked version of the Interactivity API runtime while it was still in flux and in development. And we still do that actually right now. So the way we have done this collaboration and provided the feedback that Carlos has mentioned it because we literally copied their homework with their permission and just pasted the Interactivity API runtime into the WOO code base. And that has allowed us to kind of really be there while the development of the API was going on with hands-on, of course everybody in the community could participate obviously, but to have such a big buy-in from us, it was very important from us that this would work. So we had a lot of involvement with ecosystem as Carlos has mentioned, providing feedback but also providing contributions and so on. So that was a really amazing collaboration, which makes me think really, I’m really optimistic about the future with the blocks and the Golden instantiation of Gutenberg in WooCommerce. Basically

BobWP:
With what you’ve said there and kind of moving forward, what ways does this facilitate custom block development helping woo developers get more creative in building the future woo experiences? I mean is there other things you haven’t mentioned or things that you would like to talk to those developers specifically and say this is now the opportunities you have or will have?

Lucio:
Well I think most of the things I have mentioned in passing at least I would say the biggest deal is basically removing the responsibility of this plumbing that I was talking about from the hands of the single developers and enabling them to build experiences instead of thinking about how to deal with state management hydration now what’s the best paradigm to use for templating and ding and all these sort of things that Interactivity API does for us. So removing the heavy lifting from the developers and also creating a base, like I was mentioning before, a shared understanding across the entire ecosystem. Not only WooCommerce but WordPress Gutenberg. So we know that our blocks are going to interactive blocks, this is the way they’re going to work moving forward. This creates also a lot of future proof to your custom blocks for example.

So you can be faster, just more rapid development of this kind of dynamic components. You can be more future proof, you can get inspired by what’s going on in Gutenberg. You can see, actually one thing that we did again copying course homework is our product collection block that is soon hopefully coming out of beta is based on the query loop block that was done on Gutenberg. So at first actually we’re using a variation of the block and then we realized we couldn’t really use a variation, but we took a lot of inspiration from the work that very smart people have done on the query loop block on the navigation, on the gotchas of what kind of blocks you can put inside. There is a lot of stuff that we have taken inspiration from the work that’s going on in Gutenberg. So I would say these points maybe are a good answer to your question.

BobWP:
Well I know that listeners probably as they get through this show, they come up with questions and I actually did have a listener when they found out that I would be talking to you too, did ask a question around security. So I thought I would at least throw it out to you and I’m going to read it here. Verbatim said the proposal blog post mentioned security and their graphic as partially handled. He says he doesn’t have a lot of react knowledge, so he’d like to know more information on that. For example, is this the end of nonsense?

Carlos:
We are not ending nonsense. I mean nonces are still there. We’ll be still there because it’s a great way to deal with intercommunication between the user and the site or saving data in the system. From there, I mean the most easily in the site, the most dangerous part is forms is allowing user input from outside that can be injected to your site or server site to your database. But what we mentioned there is we are providing a framework to create interactive blocks. So they will be secure, our directives are secure, the run time is also secure. The PHP server processing of all of that, because we are in PP is also processing those directives in the server. If you want to show a taps panel for example, and also the first step for product descriptions or productization data, all that part, if it is handled by the PHP with our Interactivity API will be secure.

But also we are allowing the user to use their own JavaScript. I mean you will have a VJS file in order to write that interactions you want the blog to have and that java script will be written by the developer. So that’s the partial handle. I mean we deal with one part that is the API and the directive processing and the runtime that make that interaction. But the other part is handled by the own developer. So we cannot control that. I mean WordPress is secure. Yes, we try to be secure as always, but you as supply developer, you cannot, you need also to your clients to be secure.

BobWP:
Alrighty, cool. Well I’m sure that was the answer he was hoping for. So getting towards the end here, is there something that we haven’t touched on? I’m sure there’s a lot of things we haven’t touched on, but anything specifically from either of you or both of you that you’d like to add?

Lucio:
Yeah, actually, I mean as you said, there is probably a treasure trove of things to touch upon. I’m very proud of saying that we have been experimenting with a lot of new things. And so people who have been following WooCommerce quite closely, they might have seen also a little bit of a mess maybe sometimes as we have included the new products beta and then it became the new products beta block was supposed to replace the old products block and now we have a new block which is the product collection block, which is supposed to replace the product’s beta. And maybe some people have questions about why we did this and I would say sorry, but not sorry. Also we have been experimenting and being a little bit more liberal. That’s why we for the first time introduced beta label on our blocks because we felt like we wanted to be a little bit more out there and experiment with this new API and make sure that we could move a bit faster than our usual commitment to backwards compatibility and so on. So I think one of the most exciting parts that we are implementing is this new way of displaying your shops catalog, which I guess is the core, the heart of the e-commerce.

So now you can display your products using this new product collection beta, which is hopefully coming out of beta in the next, I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t say anything but soon tm. And so you will have all the advantages like I was mentioning before of service side rendering. So it’s very snappy, instant rendering and also incredible interaction and Interactivity like pagination and so on. And we are also in parallel developing the new filters block. So previously we were in this limbo zone. Well, in a classic experience, you select a filter in the whole page, reloads in a react experience, you select a filter and the block reloads. But there was a bunch of limitations about doing that that I’m not going to get into because it’s going to get a little bit too tedious. But now we are implementing this new filters block which will seamlessly integrate with the product collection and everywhere you can have multiple product collection blocks in your site and have different filters assigned to them and everything is going to be very fast in reloading and now people expect from the modern e-commerce experiences.

So this is I think one of the core things that we are working on, but there is much more, like for example, developers might be happy to know that we are moving away from our jQuery ways. So actually the first Guinea pig of the Interactivity API was the add to cart button, which still used jQuery in factories. I dunno how many people know this. There’s a little setting in WooCommerce in the WooCommerce preferences that you can toggle if you don’t want Ajax to happen on the clicking of the add to cart button. That’s probably a setting that came out, I don’t know, maybe 12 years ago. I don’t even know why that’s setting why anybody would toggle that setting. But we still keep that setting by the way, we didn’t remove it, but we have transitioned the jQuery way into Interactivity API. So the add to cart works with Interactivity API and then we are doing things like the product gallery that eventually maybe, we’ll thinking as I was saying before, to take inspiration from Gutenberg, we are thinking of perhaps trying to transition into the more light box behavior that Carlos was mentioning that Gutenberg is implementing right now.

It’s not the API is not quite there for us yet, so we are doing other things, but eventually maybe the idea would be to once again try to leverage as much Gutenberg as we can. So we want to be to set out the example for the community that Gutenberg is really a solid framework that you can build the most complex use cases upon, which I think e-commerce is probably one of the most complexes and we have many other things down the line. You can imagine tabbed experiences in your single product template, a collapsible maybe your so many things on the roadmap. Imagination is the limit, let’s say. So I just wanted to give a little bit of sneak peek for people who haven’t used this new blocks you should get into them, try using the product collection. The new filters beta give us feedback. We are really keen, especially in this phase, to get as much feedback as possible. I know actually data that product collection is being used and it’s on the rise and that makes me extremely happy. I can’t wait for basically every e-commerce WooCommerce experience to be a block expert. So that’s my mission as I mentioned earlier.

BobWP:
Do you have anything we’ve left out, Carlos, that you’d like to add, that you like to highlight?

Carlos:
I would like to highlight that the Interactivity API is stable. Okay. You can use it without hesitation. It was included in a private way also in 6.4 in the previous version of WordPress. And the navigation block, as I mentioned before, navigation, search file and query, and this light box feature that was included on the last version of 6.4 in WordPress were all powered by this Interactivity API that will now in 6.5 will be public.

BobWP:
Alright, great. Now for those developers out there that want to follow all the things that are going on with it and possibly propose suggestions to the roadmap or offer use cases or whatever, how can they do that?

Carlos:
I think Gutenberg repository is the best place to go. If you have any issue or a problem, then create an issue and let us know. You can ping Luis, David or me in Gutenberg and we will be happy to answer. And also there’s a panel there in GitHub called GitHub Discussions and there’s a bar just for the Interactivity. PI like attack for discussions where you can talk about it suggest improvements, you can also showcase your blocks or your projects and those are the main points. We also are in Slack, so feel free to reach out in coordinator Slack channel, and I dunno, maybe Twitter, well now colleagues, but some of us are there looking for Interactivity word, but the best place to discuss apart from make core posts. Also in the comments of core posts that are talking about the Interactivity PI think GitHub is the best place to go. GitHub and GitHub discussions

Lucio:
For our developments. You can always follow developers to know what we’re thinking about our roadmaps. We post design snaps very frequently. Kudos to the people involved in that. Our community Slack is also available and we are also on GitHub as well. But I think for Woo, you should keep an eye on developers woo.com and give us feedback on the repo and also on Slack. Ping us and give us feedback on the way you’re using the blogs on the limitations that you’re seeing. It’s similar to what Carlos was saying about Gutenberg working in a vacuum. Sometimes when we develop for e-commerce, we don’t know all the ins and outs of people’s businesses and what their needs are. So maybe we think we have covered all of them, but there are some niche, or even maybe not so niche, but things that just fly under our radar that people can just ping about. So ping to us about. So ping us the limitations that you find with the new blocks we are experimenting with. We are really, really hungry for feedback.

BobWP:
Very cool. So I just want to thank you both for taking the time. I know this is a hot topic right now. A lot of people are interested in it and hopefully we’ll get people in there asking all sorts of questions and also contributing and helping along the way. So again, thank you both for being on

Lucio:
Anytime. Thanks for having us

Carlos:
Anytime. Happy to be here.

by BobWP at March 18, 2024 09:15 PM under Uncategorized

Do The Woo Community: Hear From 13 WordCamp Asia 2024 Speakers

  • Adam Silverstein discusses the importance of user experience over the entire page life, not just the loading part.
  • Alex Kirk talks about a tool that allows translators to run a plugin or theme in the WordPress playground.
  • Benjamin Intal shares tips on using the site editor to transform the default 2024 theme.
  • Hannah Swain Løvik discusses the concept of “Joy of Missing Out” and focusing on meaningful tasks.
  • Joe Simpson Jr. will present on making all WordPress events accessible.
  • Miriam Schwab shares her experience of building her WordPress career while raising seven children.
  • Paolo Belcastro will present on using AI to improve content creation.
  • Ricky Blacker talks about the importance of website accessibility.
  • Jeanne Tan will discuss on-page SEO techniques, highlighting how the order of words in a sentence can affect Google rankings.
  • Robert Li will give an overview of generative AI and a demo of a chatbot.
  • Wes Theron discusses the creation of learning pathways on WordPress.
  • Perth Woratana Ngarmtrakulchol will share how he monetized his WordPress development skills to create multiple income streams.
  • Nada ElSharkawy will share her experience of starting a WordPress Meetup.

Show Transcript

Adam Silverstein:
Hi, this is Adam and my talk for WordCamp. Asia is INPA new metric for interactivity. One tip for my talk. When you’re building a product or site and aiming for good user experience metrics, you need to consider user experience over the entire page life, not just the loading part, because user spend over 90% of their time on web pages after they load. So I invite you to attend my session to learn all about the new core web vital metric that helps you do just that. Interaction to next Paint or INP.
Alex Kirk:
Hi, my name is Alex Kirk and my lightning talk is called Translate Live in Context Translation using WordPress Playground. I’m going to talk about this tool on translate WordPress dot org that allows translators to run a plugin or theme in the WordPress playground alongside with a special version of Glotpress called Local Glotpress that adds inline translation capabilities. It’ll highlight text that can be or is already translated with a color shadow and translators can more easily find a good and fitting translation. Having the visual context of where the text appears allows them to easily make the right call of whether that text is a headline or a button. The tool is also useful for plugin creators as they can quickly switch between different language versions of their plugin to see how well it is translated. And here’s my tip for plugin creators. Make use of the new blueprint plugin preview functionality of the plugin directory. The blueprint that you provide there will also be used by translate live so that your translators don’t need to spend time configuring your plugin but can start translating right away. Thanks and see you at my talk.
Benjamin Intal:
Hi, I’m Benjamin Intal. I’m the founder and lead developer of Stackable Pagebuilder Blocks for WordPress. Here’s my tip that I’d like to share with you. The default 2024 theme is a chameleon and you can mostly transform it to anything you’d like. Using the site editor is key here. It’s your headed editor, photo editor, and template editor. You can use it to build completely bespoke templates, blog or archive pages to showcase portfolios or your bestsellers. Even the static pages like your 404 page you can fully build. Unlike before in the old days. There are a lot of innovations taking place in the block space, especially in the site editor, so if you haven’t checked it out for a long time now, try it out again. It may simplify a lot of your current block-based workflows. Join me in going more in depth on this topic. I’ll be sharing more workflow and efficiency tips on my session in WordCamp Asia titled How to Achieve an Efficient Workflow with a Block Editor Insight Editor. It’ll be on March 9, track three at 3:00 PM. See you there.
Hannah Swain Løvik:
Hi there. My name is Hannah Swain Løvik and I’ll be at WordCamp Asia giving a lightning talk on From FOMO to JOMO. Discovering the joy of missing out our lives are relatively short. One popular book says that we have about 4,000 weeks if you live to be 80 years old. The emphasis is then often on using our time as efficiently as we possibly can. That generally involves productivity methods. After all, the more productive you can be, the more efficient you can be, right? The problem is that no matter how efficient you are, that time will just fill up with more work. No matter how many times you empty your inbox, it’s just going to fill up again. Instead, think about what you really want to achieve, what is truly meaningful for you in these 4,000 weeks. Then do that, not the busy work of emptying your unending inbox. I know that’s easier said than done, recognizing that you’re operating from a checkbox mentality of just getting things done rather than thinking about what you truly want to achieve. That’s a first step. I’ll be happy to tell you more about this at my session at WordCamp Asia. I’m looking forward to meeting you there.
Joe Simpson Jr.:
Hello, my name is Joe A. Simpson Jr. And I’ll be presenting Make All WordPress events accessible at WordCamp Asia 2024 in Taipei, Taiwan. I am so incredibly excited and honored to be presenting. I’ll be joining you from cast California just north of Los Angeles in the beautiful Santa Clarita Valley. Often when we think of WordPress and accessibility, we think of websites, not the physical or virtual spaces where we gather. In this presentation, I’m going to show you the community, how we can make all of our events as open and inclusive and accessible as possible. We’ll take a look at the history of accessibility in terms of the built world and how a group of teenagers who met at a summer camp made a movement that changed the world forever. I’ll share tips on how to plan accessible events. For example, what do you look for when you’re touring a venue?
Are you touring that venue with someone that’s disabled? I’ll also share a checklist on what to look for. We’ll also look at how to build organizing teams with an eye out for accessibility. We’ll talk about how to create welcome and meaning spaces, how to make wayfinding maps and other information to help people get around the venue and come and pass as easily as possible. I’ll show you tips on how to make your website and all of your communications as accessible as possible. I’ll give you tips also on how to make your live stream accessible. My presentations are always interactive. I love the give take between me and the audience. I’d love to hear what accessibility wins you have to offer and so we can have a great dialogue on how to move accessibility forward in our community. Join me, Joe Simpson, March 8th, 2:00 PM CST at WordCamp Asia. I’m so excited to see you and can’t wait to meet you.
Miriam Schwab:
Hi, my name is Miriam Schwab and I’m head of WordPress relations at elementary. I’m going to be speaking at WordCamp Asia in Taipei on the topic of How I Built my WordPress Career while Raising Seven Children. This is going to be quite a personal talk for me. I have mentioned here and there that I’m a mother of seven, but I haven’t really ever delved into it, at least not in a public setting, what it means and how I managed to more or less juggle a very intense and demanding personal life with a very intense and demanding career. Actually, because I founded two WordPress companies, first my agency and then Strati and sold both of them and building and developing a company and products is incredibly demanding, and of course raising seven children is also incredibly demanding. So in my talk, I’m going to be addressing certain techniques and processes that I developed over the years that helped me be more efficient and manage these two aspects of my life.
And also I am going to touch on why WordPress is a really great option for people who have demanding person lives and or just want to be able to give attention to their friends and family in the way that they need and deserve. That’s more or less what the talk is going to cover. It’s a very unique perspective, and I’m not going to be speaking from the angle of this is what anyone should do. Not at all, but we all have our professional side to our lives and we all have our personal side, and it can look many different ways, but I think it’s a challenge for most of us to figure that out. And so hopefully some of the things that I learned doing what I did under very intense circumstances can be helpful to whoever attends my talk. So I hope you’ll come and listen and of course, I love it when people ask me questions. I’m not always going to have an answer to everything because some things just are hard to explain, but I love having a conversation about a lot of things and I’d love to talk to you about this topic. So I hope I’ll see you there and I can’t wait to see you in Taipei at WordCamp Asia.
Paolo Belcastro:
Hey everyone. Paolo Belcastro here, hailing from Vienna, Austria. I’m incredibly excited to join you all in Taipei in March for Work, campe. I will be presenting their recession with the title You’ll Never Be Alone Anymore, Building and Maintaining Work Sites With AI. I will go over all the different ways that AI can be used to improve your craft as a content creator and a site creator, and particularly underline the benefit of using it as a tool to increase the diversity of opinions you consider when writing content. The idea is to use AI to become better at what we do and increase the quality of our content as opposed to the quantity of it. I am truly, truly looking forward to seeing you all there and invite you to come and meet me at 3:00 PM on March eight, for you’ll Never Be Alone Anymore, Building and Maintaining WordPress Sites with AI.
Ricky Blacker:
Hi, my name’s Ricky Blacker and I am going to be doing a talk at WordCamp Asia 2024 this year, and I’m talking about accessibility and the why, the when and how. So in my talk, I’m going to be sharing a lot of things from my perspective on why this is important and how to go about it. One of the interesting things with it is a time in my life where I really found out about this when I was designing WooCommerce sites and I found accessibility is one of the big things. It’s more than just allowing people to see with disabilities, allowing them to interact with websites. It goes way beyond that. It’s all about everyone being able to access the information on the website and little things like adding the alt tags on your pictures. This is not just for screen readers and or if the image can’t be seen.
This is something that can be picked up by SEO and can really boost your SEO, making sure that those alt tags are properly inserted. Even beyond that. When I was doing the commerce sites, one of the things I found was that even the simple thing is renaming the file name to something descriptive about the picture was massively helpful. And this is accessibility on an even deeper level because I was finding, I was going back and looking for images that I’d maybe uploaded a year or two before and I had a hell of a time finding it because they were labeled things like Image 2000149, and if you’re going back and looking for that image, it’s very hard not knowing what it’s called. So I started labeling even my file names before I uploaded anything into the WordPress media file. I would rename them with something meaningful so it was easy to go back and find them in a year or two years time when I was doing a search because as we know, the media files can grow to quite a number on some of our sites and going back and trying to find it can be a very manual and time consuming task.

So that’s a little hint for you. Hope to see you in Taipei at my talk. Come and see me talk about accessibility, the why, how, and when. And also if you see me around at WordPress, come and say, good day. Thank you very much.
Jeanne Tan:
Hi there. WordCamp Asia attendees. I’m Jeanne and I’m excited to share a powerful strategy that actually works from my lightning talk on how to outrank your competitors with easy on page SEO techniques. Did you know that something as simple as the order of words in a sentence can totally change how your content ranks on Google? For example, search engines interpret the statement, tourists flock to the beach during summer to be different from the beach is flocked by tourists during summer. The first sentence tourists flock to the beach means search engines focus on queries that involve tourists. On the other hand, the beach is flocked by tourists prioritizes content that respond to queries on popular destinations. Tiny tweaks like this make a huge difference, especially if you’re aiming for those featured snippets. I’ll reveal more secrets like this on March 9th to help your content climb the results page. Join me for my session. I’ll be in room 101C for trap four at WordCamp Asia. It’s about time to get technical.
Robert Li:
My is Robert Li, but most people don’t call me Bob. My talk at work campaign of 2024 is called ChatWP Talking to WordPress Generative AI. I’ll be giving an overview of the current and future state of generative AI and probably most interestingly for listeners, we’ll be showing a demo of the chat bot that will rely on the content in your WordPress site with a CoLab notebook and all the resources that attendees can access and trap and sell. This will allow them to build an end-to-end production ready custom open source chat bot with their own WordPress site. I hope to see you all in Taiwan at the talk.
Wes Theron:
Hi, my name is Wes Theron and I’m part of the training team, and I will be joining WordCamp Asia from New Zealand. The name of my session is called Learning Pathways on learn dot WordPress dot org. This is an informational talk about the work we are currently doing to create learning pathways that cater to learners of different roles and skill levels. If you are keen to learn more about this initiative and our plan to redesign the Learn website, join me on the last day to explore learning pathways. We all have WordPress origin and stories and are constantly acquiring knowledge and skills in diverse spheres of life. Our goal is to provide free learning material to empower folks while just starting out with WordPress or who are aiming to achieve a more advanced proficiency. As part of the training team, we are passionate about education. I will leave you with some food for thought. Lifelong education will allow you to banish boredom. And Henry Ford said, anyone who stops learning is old at 20 or 80. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. I can’t wait to see all of you in Taiwan. Cheers.
Perth Woratana Ngarmtrakulchol:
Hi everyone, first of all, thanks to Do the Woo podcast for having me. My name is Perth. A quick one about me. I have been using WordPress for 15 years, and I’m currently working as analytics engineer at Canva, the online design software company. In my lightening talk the title is Multiply Your Income Streams With WordPress Development Skills. I will be sharing about how I have monetized my WordPress development skills throughout my career and how I was able to create multiple income streams with these skills to support in my life circumstances. I’ll also give you multiple ideas on how you can also make a living or how you can grow your career from workplace development skills. You’ll be able to take away a list, a thing or two from this talk. For example, did you know that workplace development skills can lead to teaching job in WordPress or web development, which is highly rewarded too. Teaching job will also give you multiple options. You can do one-on-one training. You can do one too many offline training, or you can do the online course, which is basically one to infinity. So if you are a developer or keen to become one, come join me in the session. See you.
Nada ElSharkawy:
Hello. Hello, this is Nada ElSharkawy. I’m a senior marketing manager at GoDaddy and I’m part of the commercial strategy theme. So excited to be speaking at WordCamp Asia 2024. I have a lightning talk under the title, starting a WordPress Meetup, the Highs and Lows.

by opurockey at March 18, 2024 09:15 PM under Uncategorized

Do The Woo Community: WordCamp Asia 2024 with Andy Saw & Huanyi Chuang

In today’s WordPress Event Talk, it’s all about WordCamp Asia that is just around the corner.

Hosts Devin and BobWP have a fun conversation with guests Andy Saw and Huanyi (Eric) Chuang, who are part of the organizing team.

They share the event’s highlights, including the speaker lineup, workshops, and a family-friendly room. And of course, we cannot go by without mentioning the after-party, which will feature different areas for various themes and activities.

And we cannot talk about a WordCamp without touching on the  importance of networking and engaging with the community during the event, providing tips for first-time attendees

Plus, most importantly, they all discuss the local food and transportation options in Taipei.

The organizing team for the event consists of 47 members from various countries, including India, Malaysia, Australia, Philippines, Nepal, Japan, and Singapore.


Show Transcript

BobWP:
Well, we are here to talk about a very exciting event. It’s exciting because I’m going to be there. No, not really. That’s not why it’s exciting. It’s exciting because actually I attended WordCamp Asia last year for the first one, and as many word camps as I’ve ever attended over 14 years. I’m going to say this and don’t anybody frown upon me. It was probably one of the best word camps I’d ever been to.

Devin:
Woohoo,

BobWP:
And it just had a different flavor. I just absolutely enjoyed it and so looking forward to it. So I’m going to quit blabbing though and have my wonderful co-host Devin, say hello and also introduce our guests, which are very special.

Devin:
Thanks, Bob. Hi everyone. As Bob mentioned, the wonderful host co-host is here. Devin’s live from Jakarta. Well, not really life, but I kind of want to feel it’s life because so excited to be with Bob again and there’s my lovely, I want to say ex-teammates, but I guess with the community team, we are always a team and we are always community leaders who support each other. So yeah, I have Andy and Eric here with us, so I guess I’ll let you all introduce yourself, please, perhaps starting with Andy.

Andy:
Hey everyone. Andy here, one of the global leads for the WordCamp Asia 2024. It’s good to be here and having a chat with everyone about the exciting events that we are coming up.

Devin:
Yay. Thanks Andy. And next Eric.

Eric:
Okay. Hello everyone. I’m Eric from one of the local leads of WordCamp Asia 2024, and as a local leads, we’re so excited to welcome all of you coming here and we can’t wait to see you in person.

Devin:
Yes, these lovely folks, I can tell you they’re really excited since we started working Asia back in 2020 and then we had the first one in 2023 when Bob attended and had a fantastic time, and we are going to recreate that fantastic time in Taipei. So yeah, it’s been a while. Andy and Eric, how’s everything, how’s the planning going? What are we expecting in the last couple of months? Is there anything that we need to be prepared? Let us know.

Andy:
Yeah, so events happens on 7th of March. Have everyone get the tickets already?

Devin:
Yes of course.

Andy:
If not, there’s still tickets available. Just go to the website to get the tickets so we can see you there.

Devin:
All right. So yeah, I’ve got my tickets. I’ve got my accommodation book. I’ve got my Visa secured. So what else you want to share with us? What can we expect from WordCamp, Asia in Taipei? Would there be any differences? Like main differences from the one we had in Bangkok?

Andy:
Yeah, so year’s we have a special kind of arrangements, for instance of sessions. So it came up with the idea that we invited speakers. So among those that we already announced, Matt is coming. Joseph Jacks the founder from the OSS Capital. They’re also becoming so the other tools, they’ll also be joining us on the stage. Noel Tock from the Human Made. Then everyone knows that the executive director Josepha will also be joining us. And many more.

Devin:
Something that I really wanted to be because in Bangkok I was busy at the back end. I couldn’t go to any of the session. And then this time and Taipei, I really want to check out one of the invited speaker session and also other sessions. Is there anything else different? Is there any workshop or any panel discussion that we are expecting in Taipei?

Eric:
Yes, there will be a couple of workshops so that people can join and we’re also having a family friendly room this time so that if parents bring their children, they will be able to be in a family friendly room and during the conference stage.

Devin:
So this is different from childcare.

Eric:
Yeah, we are not going to hire childcare. We are just having that place. We are just going to have that room be children friendly, dedicated space. Yeah. And we are still going to have a volunteer there to watch everything, but it’s not a professional childcare center.

BobWP:
So if somebody thought Bob needed a timeout and they wanted to put him somewhere, they could bring him over there too and put him in a corner with some toys and just kind of leave them alone.

Eric:
Yeah, because it’s not a professional childcare center. So we still recommend the parents being with their children, but we are going to prepare some toys so that they can play with.

Devin:
Nice. All right. Well that’s good to know. That’s something different from Bangkok because we didn’t provide childcare in Bangkok, but now we learn, we improve, we do things better. Great job everyone. Nice to hear. Not that I have kids that I will bring, but I’m considering taking my cats all. Probably not. Bob and I here are parents, and of course we’d like to have our fur babies everywhere with us, right, Bob?

BobWP:
Right.

Devin:
All right, what else? Okay,

BobWP:
I have a question. Okay. Everybody that goes to any WordCamp, all they talk about, not everybody, but it’s always about food. So I have to personally ask both of you, what is your recommended dish? I mean, this is personal. This is what you really would recommend for someone to try while they’re there.

Andy:
Okay, because I’m not local, I’m considered as a tourist with to the country. So the night markets, you typically have all the delicious food. So the two things that every time I went there I will have the fried chickens and the mobile tea. So these tools are very famous that it’s a mass that we have to have it,

Devin:
But what’s the difference between the fried chicken in Taipei and the other fried chicken we have?

Andy:
It’s local made then I mean, what do you call the ingredients? They have it. The taste is very different. Although that in Malaysia, where I see though the advertising is originally from Taiwan, but you eat it, the taste is very different. It’s just like when you have the, what do you call the na bar in Malaysia and the ones that have it locally, it’s different.

Devin:
It just tastes better when it’s sourced locally, made locally and eaten locally. Right? So you have to be Taipei to try this Boba tea and the fried chicken Andy’s recommendation. What about you Eric?

Eric:
So as a local, I personally, I’m a soup noodle person, so I would recommend beef noodles. Yeah, we have a lot of good beef noodles and I think we also have a lot of local restaurants which offers different kind of stuff, and it’s called, I’m not sure whether I should just use Mandarin. It’s called Real Top, which means stir frying places. Yeah, it’s the place we brought you before. That’s fried stir fry stuff. Yeah, yeah. The atmosphere there is super good and it’s a best place to have good time with your friends.

Devin:
Yeah, no, I wanted to add if I’m not also local, but I hang out with these folks in Taipei and I enjoyed the sweet potato ball, so it’s fried. Remember we were waiting for the vendor to come back because I really wanted to have that sweet potato bowl. So it’s the purple sweet potato and then also the orange sweet potato, and they’re so yummy and they’re so chewy. It’s hot, it’s just, but it’s really nice when you have it in your mouth. So yeah, I always go for it. I can’t go wrong. It’s something fried. It’s hot and it’s chewy, so I can’t wait to have that.

Eric:
Yeah. So speaking of that chewy, speaking of that chewy texture, there’s a dedicated phrase in Taiwan, it’s called Q. Yeah, it’s Q, the alphabet Q, that texture, we call it Q. Yeah. So if you say, I want something Q, Q, we want something Q and they will give you something chewy.

Devin:
Yeah, today I learned. All right. Okay, so for those of you who like something chewy, then just ask for anything Q, is that correct? Yeah. Okay, let’s do that.

Andy:
Yeah, all the other things that we can brought up is this year, because the events happens in the TICC areas, the convention also, we also managed to secure place media rooms that is dedicated, that we can have partners like media partners like Bob here to the rules. Two, if there’s any interview sessions we want to carry out, we can do it over there. Yeah, I think back in Bangkok, we don’t have the luxury of, they have professional green screens there and yeah, a lot of equipment we can use.

Devin:
All right. Do we have to secure media partners have to secure for the slot for using that room?

Eric:
Yeah, if you want to secure the time slot, you can contact our communication team. Yeah, we will reserve. We reserve the place for you.

Devin:
All right. Nice, nice, nice. All right, let’s talk about the contributor day, because I’ve received several emails about securing the attendance or registering. What can we expect? Is there anything new? How many teams are going to be there? Do you have any information about this?

Andy:
14.

Devin:
Yeah. Great.

Andy:
And this year I think we’ll also be doing the other one, especially the human library projects. So we’ll have a separate tables just for that. So it’s like 15 minutes of sessions, but we still, I mean the contributor team still trying to engage the books to come over so that we can confirm the slots for everyone to make reservations.

Devin:
We didn’t have that right in Bangkok human library. That’s interesting. Yeah, right. Is that something like happiness bar where people can go and ask questions?

Andy:
So happiness bar, we also have a delicate place within the sponsor areas that we try to gather together with the communities sessions. So that’s a place over there. So the human library is more towards, it happens on the contributor day itself, four to five tables separate, just dedicated for that sessions.

Devin:
Excited. Anything else? I think I remember in Bangkok we have this battery pack charger. Do we have anything like that? Something like the attendees can use for free?

Eric:
Yeah, we are still managing the charging stations for our attendees to use, and I think these will be sponsored by our sponsors. Yeah, charging stations.

Devin:
Yeah, that’s a good approach. That’s one way to engage sponsors in a different way that they can contribute in a different form as well. I like that.

BobWP:
Yeah. Yes. But the sponsor, speaking of sponsors, I’m kind of curious because I’m actually a sponsor this year for the first time

Andy:
Your best sponsor.

BobWP:
Yeah, I’m a little sponsor. But anything about the sponsor area that you want to bring up? Anything special this year? The setup of it. I noticed that whether it stays this way, I’m strategically placed across from Woo, which is very nice for me because for obvious reasons. But yeah. Is there anything you want to add about that? I know that as a sponsor, just what you were mentioning, it was very cool because you had several add-ons and some of them were very creative instead of just the typical, you sponsor the coffee or something like that. So yeah, just tell us anything around that particular part that you might want to share.

Andy:
Yeah, so the sponsors, I think back in Bangkok we have because of also the place in the C icon, so all the sponsors are get joined together in one place. So this year, because of the TSCC area, we also learned from the 2023 Bangkok, we kind of separate the sponsors to two areas, first floor and the second floor. So that the idea mainly is to trigger the traffic for the attendees to move around instead of just fixing that on one places. Then having say that also that is a call online with the schedules or sessions, we try to change the topics of the categories on their rooms instead of one categories fixed on the second floor. So we move around it also in a way just to also drive the traffic for people to walk around the SCC so that they can engage the sponsors to meet up with other attendees to just communicate and just be social.

Eric:
So this time we’re going to have a room dedicated for some activities. So we’re still discussing some of the activities now, and one thing where we might have are the networking sessions so that people can go into the room and exchange their business cards and so on. Yeah, we’re trying to make to come up with some small activities in those dedicated rooms.

BobWP:
I really like that idea of especially the networking part of it, having different places where you can do the different things and I don’t know if you actually ever get a chance to listen to the speakers, have the time. I’m guessing you probably are pretty busy, but can you give us a little insights on what we can expect from the speakers and what’s happening there?

Andy:
Having opportunities to sit inside, to listen, to catch up with those speakers coming from their own, from the other part of the world coming to share with us, I think that’s a very, very good opportunity because not many peoples will be able to join the flagship in Taiwan. That’s why also I think we brought the WordCamp flagship to the Asia and we have the first one last year in Bangkok. So I mean personally I would recommend that the attendees that came join us for this sales just sit in and then listens to the favorite speakers. And although I mean some of us may not be able to join, then we also be live streaming the entire sessions to the place so everyone can feel it and enjoy the sessions together.

Eric:
And speaking of the speakers, I think from this to encourage local speakers to join. So we also choose some local speakers who we think the topics might be interesting. So please come and share our local speakers up.

BobWP:
What about the first time attendee, especially to a large WordCamp? Any words of wisdom you can share with them? I mean, some people are a little bit overwhelmed. I found that from attending last year, everyone was so gracious and opened arm that it’s like you could talk to anybody anywhere, no matter if they were supposedly the big WordPress person or not. Anything a tip or a little bit of advice for that first time attendee to make them a little bit more comfortable as a join this community?

Andy:
I think the first thing is come early and get your badge. So to avoid the traffic because during the first day, most of the attendees will just come in. And then the queue, well, we have new vendors also coming in this year, so hopefully we’ll have a better sign in check in this year versus 2023. Because I mean, as you mentioned, we keep on improving for each friendship, learning from the past experience. So the tips is I think try to check because it’s an in-person events is very different from all the virtual events that we have. So engage with the communities, the friends that previously you have, maybe have a chat in the workplace, the off slack, then visit the sponsors because those are the sponsors or plugins or teams or solutions that you use. Probably you have in a chat with them in the live chat or emails. So they are here presently, physically here, visit their booth exchange feedbacks or your thoughts of how you use your products. Then for the speakers also as you bump into them, have a photo with them and yeah, and anything else.

Eric:
I would say yeah, try to chat with people, try to chat with people because like you mentioned, it’s a chance that you can meet all your plugins or things developing companies in the manual. And also if you feel the atmosphere in the venue is kind of tense or if you feel nervous, well look forward to the after party because it’s a place you can have casual talks with everybody. And this time personally, I would say our after party venue is going to be often and personally, I’m looking forward to that.

BobWP:
Okay, so after party, you brought it up and you’re not getting away with telling us more about that. I know that de and she’s probably, if I hadn’t asked she be, I can see her smiling. You got to tell us more. Okay. After party, tell us about the after party.

Eric:
So for after party this time we’re going to have different areas for different themes. Yeah, so because just like back to Bangkok, people gather for different types of gathering. Some people like Sudan in the center of the menu and some people just enjoy their drinks in the other side. So this time we are trying to differentiate different kinds of people for different purposes. And also this venue is, it’s heavily open, so our attendees can also build connections with other people in Taiwan, like other local people outside the venue because it’s happily open. So yeah, if you think, okay, I want to change some atmosphere, you can just hop into local vendor, how do you call that? Get some local food outside, local food shop outside the venue. Yeah, it’s pretty close.

BobWP:
Yeah, it sounds like the best of all worlds because I know as many after parties I’ve been to and I did love it last year because I could enjoy the music, then I could go down the other end and actually visit with people and hear the conversation and stuff. So being able to have that different areas that you can go to for whatever mood, and I like how you’re integrating the local culture with it too. So if you just, you’re like, okay, I just need a break, I want to go over into this little shop or this little whatever vendor is nearby, you can experience that and then you can go back in and do your thing. So that’s fantastic. I love hearing that. So now on another side of this, I know on the site you’ve talked a lot about getting there, traveling, things that people should be prepared for. Is there anything you want to revisit and highlight as far as people traveling to Taipei?

Eric:
I think the most important part will be the documents. So if you are from the visa exempted countries, it’s fine, but for people who need visa, please be aware of the visa. And also there’s another law in Taiwan that pork products is prohibited in Taiwan for importing. So please, please be aware that do not bring anything pork, any pork things like sausage, edge or ham. I mean you’re coming to Taiwan, so just try to enjoy our food. Yeah, you don’t have to bring your own,

BobWP:
Thats the whole point of it.

Andy:
Yeah, you don’t have to bring your own. And yeah, the food is pretty affordable in Taiwan.

Eric:
Taiwan sausage jersey is very famous

Andy:
And we have some of the important regulations, but I think the most important thing to highlight is the pork because it’s strictly prohibited.

BobWP:
So that’s really good to know. And next thing you said, there’s a lot of great food to eat there. We don’t need to bring our own food. So how do we get around to try out all this great food? What’s the transportation options option for everyone?

Eric:
So for Metro, I think Travelers can buy a one day card for the metro. You can just hop in and hop out for most of the metro stations. And I think the metro system in Taipei is pretty convenient. So you can go to any places you want to visit in Taipei City with Metro system. And as for the bus, you can also look up on Google Map because it’s pretty well connected. And if you want to call a cap in Taiwan, we use Uber rather than grab in Taiwan, we use Uber. So yeah, be prepared with your Uber app. And if you are a bicycle lover, we have a service called Ubi, you can register in advance and you can rent a bike in Taipei City and it’s really affordable. I think the first 30 minute would cost you five Taiwan dollars, which is like, I think, well, it’s like 0.16 US dollar kind of. Yeah, it’s pretty affordable.

BobWP:
That’s great. It sounds like there’s plenty of options. I don’t know if anybody wants to deal with me riding around on a bike, but hey, it’s good that there’s the different ways to get around. Let’s talk a little bit about the organizers, the organizing team. How many of you are there? Just give us a little bit more around the organizing team.

Andy:
So we have total about 47 of us co-organizing events. So in between, there are some people because of the commitment, so they left, but we are also on board. There are some folks that join us as well. So today we are about 47 of them joining us, the teams from fries. This year, the changes we have done is that we kind of changed the names of the speakers team to the program teams because we thought about speaker team is kind of like the names can be better with the program because of the schedules and et cetera. So that’s why actually the change is there. The other new changes actually we brought in is we form operation teams. So the operation team actually they took over the items like the tickets, registrations, then others also we talked about the, and on the actual event by itself, we need folks that actually know most of the staff in the TCCS conference. So when something goes wrong, main stage or the food goes wrong, registrations go wrong, sponsors need some informations, where do we find all those pieces? So the operation teams, they are the big folks that actually helps to gather all these and answer questions because the local teams, if we are just relying on just one or two persons, it may not be sufficient example, like Eric will be running here and there, he cannot be on the stage. At the same time, he also sponsor taking care of some of those logistic issues. Yeah,

BobWP:
Cool. And what countries are actually represented by the organizing team?

Andy:
Yeah, we have folks from India, Maylasia, Australia, Philippines, Nepal, Bangladesh, Japan, Singapore, what else? Let me think. India.

Eric:
Yeah, Taiwan. I think there’s one more difference between this work camp Asia and Bangkok is that we try to separate our local team members into each global team. There are four team members and they are including the other local lead uni. There are four dedicated local team members and the rest of them support each team.

Andy:
Yeah, I think one thing to add is the entire events is just not, the organizing team members is also being supported by the volunteers that join us. So without them actually the organizing committee members, it’s just not sufficient resources on the ground, on the event itself to make all these event happens. So it’s very important because it comes from what everybody mentioned is a strong communities. So we love to see everyone.
So organizing, I mean all the organizers, we have shirts. So easy to recognize and then just came and say hi.

Eric:
So I think I want to share an important concept this time because this is from the whole local leads. So an important concept of this work, Asia is experiment. So try to make new friends, it’s also kind of experiments and try to explore the venue, try to explore our sponsors and other, try to build friendship with different people. I think this is also important in the community. We keep improving, we keep trying new experiments, we explore new things and I think I hope we can bring this kind of atmosphere to all our attendees.

BobWP:
Alrighty. Well this has been fantastic. It makes me even more excited now talking to the two of you about everything that’s going on. And yes, everybody out there, if you’re going to be at WordCamp Asia, find one of us, say hi, hang out a bit, go to the party. Just yeah, overall, just have a fantastic time and want to thank Devin for pulling this together and for both of you joining us, it’s been an absolute pleasure. So thank you. Thank you so much.

Andy:
Thank you.

Eric:
Thank you Bob. Thank you Devin. See you in Taipei.

Devin:
Thank you so much.

Eric:
See you.

by BobWP at March 18, 2024 09:15 PM under Uncategorized

Do The Woo Community: WordPress and WooCommerce at CloudFest 2024

In today’s episode, hosts Jonathan and Tammie move over from Woo BizChat to discuss WP Day at this year’s CloudFest in Germany.

Throughout the chat, they highlight the growing presence of WordPress and WooCommerce in the hosting industry, and the opportunities this presents for product developers and hosts.

They also touch on the importance of diversity and inclusion in the WordPress community, and the potential for open source projects to address these issues.

With both of them involved in WPDay, they give us a preview for the agenda, which includes panels on product development, AI, and sustainability and inclusivity.

And lastly, Jonathan introduces a new event called Pitch Fest which is part of his business, Guildenberg. At this event they are aiming to facilitate partnerships and collaborations in the WordPress space.


Show Transcript

Jonathan:
Welcome to another episode of Do the Woo. I am your co-host, Jonathan Wold. And with me today is your other co-host, Tammie Lister. How are you, Tammie?

Tammie:
I’m good, thank you. How are you?

Jonathan:
Well, today we are talking about CloudFest and the WP Day, and I’m excited that we have the Do the Woo, a Strong Do the Woo presence this year at CloudFest, there are multiple hosts who are going to be there, and this, if I’m recalling correctly, Tammie will be your first time out to CloudFest, not the first time you’ve been invited though. What was your first impression when you first heard of CloudFest? It’s been a couple of years, right? Yeah.

Tammie:
Yeah. I think my first impression was not really understanding how I would fit there, and I think that’s something in the conversations with you and with working through this has been, and you can kind of address that a little bit more, is seeing how it’s not just for the business conversations or hosting, and that has been really interesting. So I’d love you to talk more on that because just the way that you explained it to me has been really interesting as well.

Jonathan:
So for those who don’t know, let’s give some context. So CloudFest is an event that takes place every year in Europe. It’s in Europa Park, which is a little town in Germany, which you, you’ve been to the park before. You know the venue?

Tammie:
Yes, when I was younger.

Jonathan:
And for those who don’t know, my impression as an American going to the park for the first time is like, this has a curiously, it reminds me of a Disney World.

Tammie:
Let’s go with that.

Jonathan:
Yeah. It’s quite interesting. I actually quite enjoyed my experience. It might be different as a child. I’m sure a lot’s changed as well since you were there.

Tammie:
Yes.

Jonathan:
So this will be my third year attending. The first year I was a backup speaker and I spoke on WordPress as an ecosystem. And then last year we put together a WP Day at the beginning of kick it off, and this year it’s expanding further. My first impression, CloudFest has been going for a long time. The hosting industry is a big industry. There’s a lot of moving parts and pieces to it, and CloudFest has its own storied history For a while it was owned by GoDaddy and then ultimately the group of folks who have been at the heart of it for a long time, Soeren and Christian, and have a great team around them, took CloudFest several years back and have been growing it since. It’s a fantastic event. The team really knows how to put together an event experience. And the thing that I’ve personally loved about it over the past couple of years is just the growing WordPress influence in the programming and the attendees and the thinking and the reason is quite obvious.

WordPress is a massive part of the hosting industry, and from my first time attending to each time since just the interest and the openness on the part of the hosting community and those who serve them to understand WordPress better, it’s been fantastic and it’s been great for me to see the growing number of WordPress community folks who’ve been making it out. So just before CloudFest, we have WordCamp, Asia, and Taipei. For some, it’s an opportunity to combine two trips into one for others it’s like, okay, that’s way too much. So it’s like an either or.

Tammie:
Yeah. And I think it’s like you have to make decisions depending on your families, depending on what you’re doing, depending on whether you can drop your bag back home, get your change of clothing, and because it’s very different environments as well, right? March in Germany versus Taipei. But I think that that’s kind of the good thing. It’ll be different energies and different people.

Jonathan:
And lemme just expand on that idea of difference for a moment. So one of the things that I love about CloudFest, especially if you’ve just been attending WordCamps, is the difference. Now if you go to a cloud fest, and for those who are just doing WordCamps, it may be a bit of a shock to go to an event that’s not volunteer driven. So there’s still volunteers, there’s folks like myself, Carole Olinger and others who are just helping out on the WordPress side of things, but there’s a professional team that runs this. It’s like a large scale event and it shows up in a lot of ways. When I’m describing this to folks who haven’t been to a WordCamp or to an event like this, it’s like there is a big difference with a WordCamp. What you get is very driven by the organizing team and what they bring to the table.

There is a passion and a heart to it, and your experience will vary. Some parts may be really good, other parts may be sort of underdone, and that can be daunting for folks coming to WordCamps for the first time who are used to professional events and with professional events, you have a much higher expectation. You see that in CloudFest. The other part of it though is that the team loves the WordPress space, so there’s also a lot of heart that they bring into it, and that shows up in the openness that they’ve had to inviting folks like myself and others to contribute and shape and influence the WordPress side of things.

So last year, WP Day was on the Monday before CloudFest kicks off proper, and that was great. We had a couple hundred people there. We tried a mix of different things. This year we’re doing the same, but making it even more of just the proper launch to CloudFest. They’ve got some great meetup stuff, more community stuff happening in the morning and then WP Day kicks off in the afternoon. And yeah, I’m pretty excited. Now you and I are both going to get a chance to attend the hackathon this time around, but yeah, that’s something that I’m looking forward to. I’ve heard really good things about it. I know that Carole and the team do some fantastic work, but this will be my first time getting to see it actually in practice. And one of the projects you were connected with.

Tammie:
Yeah, so I heard about it and I’m really, really excited about Birgit’s project, the inclusive language checker for open source contributors, and she’s actually going to be on the panel for a WP day. So there’s a lovely cohesion going through and I’m really, really excited about just, and that’s the kind of thing, having those kind of projects in the hackathon, I’ve always seen some of these projects come from CloudFest and then kind of come through into the project. I think it’s really important to, we have a lot of interesting perspectives inside, but we get really interesting perspectives when we start collaborating with people who are outside as well. And that is what I feel that you get from situations like this. A curious point, my last time I was in Taipei, I was actually at a cross open source conference, so those kind of cross conferences to me are incredibly delightful.

So that is something that I am really hoping to get from this. And just those different voices that you are all trying to do a similar thing at different levels and just the idea that hacking on different things, the inclusive language, I’m really excited because it covers so many things. I mean, I’m going to read the project description because I think it’s worth reading, but the primary goal of the project is to standardize accessible and inclusive documentation guidelines of across different WordPress teams on the make WordPress dot org, the project aims to consolidate existing internal guidelines into a unified handbook and encourage adherence to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.

I always love that we have belonging in there as well. Principles in documentation and posts. So the whole idea is we have all this information in different places and it’s about bringing it all together. That’s kind of the too long don’t read of it. We often think of hackathons as one type of thing, but hackathons are really just like contribution days. They should be multiple different types of things. And this is exactly, so a lot of open source projects that aren’t WordPress do have incredibly good inclusion and diversity documentation. So been able to learn how they’ve done it, how they’ve done inclusion, and how they have language checkers. So yeah, I’m really excited to see what comes from this.

Jonathan:
Look forward to that. And I think I’m glad you made the reference to contributor today. Again, there’s some important similarities between what’s worked well at WordCamps and what we’ve been doing over here and also what CloudFest does, and it’s doing it differently. It’s not the same yet. There’s influence between them. Let’s talk about the WooCommerce angle for a moment. So it was interesting for me for the past three years, so as WordPress has been a clear sort of backdrop and influence, WooCommerce comes up a lot and one of the big changes this year, so Automattic is an official sponsor and WooCommerce is going to have representation. We have Rosalyn from the marketplace team who’s going to be on one of the panels, which I’m excited about. So yeah, that’s one of the things that stood out to me in my conversations with hosts attending has just been the strong interest in Woo.

And so I was really happy to see, so obviously we have great community representation, do the Woo will be there and Woo, as a sponsoring organization through Automattic will also be there. And I think that’s great. That’s a great connection of interest because for a lot of the hosts, they’re looking at the proprietary platforms and seeing what they’re doing. And WooCommerce today is one of the strongest allies and there’s been some confusion in the past where, okay, is WooCommerce focusing on hosting and what’s the deal? And I was happy to see Matt right before he went on sabbatical, make that move to try and clarify that firewall of interest, if you will, where it’s like, there’s the hosting team who’s going to do this, but WooCommerce is free to do whatever. And I think that’s a great backdrop for Woo coming into CloudFest to say, Hey, we’re here to work with the hosts. We’re here to connect these ecosystems better. And so that’s something, another reason why I think for folks who are in the Woo space thinking about CloudFest, there’s a high openness and a desire on the part of hosts to bolster their WooCommerce offerings. And I think working with product folks is one of the best ways to do so.

Tammie:
And I think people need it. If you look at the example I always do is Etsy people just because it’s a real ground level example that people used to be able to start their small shop, knitting, crafting, whatever, put it on Etsy, and they can’t generally do it now because of the high fees. There’s very few opportunities because of high fees and scaling to do that. So you are more and more looking for how can you do it yourself and the scale of being able to do that. So the market for out of the box easy through hosting, being able to do it, just simplification of that process and just set it and go for these people because they want to be able to crochet hats or they don’t want to have to, or little animal goy creatures.

They don’t want to have to worry about are their plugins going to be compatible when WordPress updates and all these kind of things. That’s not going to work right. And that’s why they were with, again, another opportunity for shipping and all these kind of things. They can’t work out masses of shipping. That’s why they were with things like Etsy. Yeah, it’s really, I feel it’s like the artists, the crafters, the small businesses, they’re just getting squeezed out with that. So I’m hopeful that there’s a regeneration. I have a place in my heart for that. So I’m hopeful that we can do something for that because it’s a really important part of,

Jonathan:
So one of the themes for CloudFest over the past couple of years has been this focus on sovereignty and the importance and just better representing the global interests of the internet this year’s theme. And is this idea of, how would they describe it? The uniting the nations of cloud and this idea that the world is, there’s a lot of different interests. Internet’s this thing that brings so much of us together and at the same time to do it well, you have to recognize the differences. And I think the WordPress project, there’s such a good alignment with that because WordPress by its nature is incredibly diverse and there’s a resilience to that and a lot of complexity when it comes to recognizing the differences in cultures and the ways of working and thinking about things. And CloudFest to me, does a good job bringing together a lot of the best of that.

And you have an entire week in a place where this is how I set the stage for those who are thinking of going, attend, get there for the hackathon. If you can make sure that you’re there by WP Day, and that’s a great start to the week. And then you’re going to have the entire week. They have good programming throughout the week and you’re in this large shared space where you have opportunity to connect. You can also go off on your own if you want peace and quiet. There’s a lot of space and a lot of flexibility. And I really enjoyed it and I think I’m quite excited about this year.

Tammie:
I wanted to also say something where you were saying about the diverse, the other end from an end user perspective is being able to pay for your product. That is such a challenge depending on where you are, and that is a big part of access to these sites and the more closed platforms, access to them is really difficult depending on your location. So I think that is a big part. Diversity includes access to the content, includes access to the customers that are the right customers for you, includes access to be able to sell your thing that you make rather than having to go through a third party. So maybe you make something in a particular remote part, but you can actually sell it rather than having to go through someone that takes a cut of it. All of those kind of simple things that we can really empower, but just being able to pay using your currency that maybe isn’t accepted in certain payment gateways and all these kind of conversations I think is really interesting. When we’re talking about Woo and we’re talking about payment gateways and access, it’s not the part of diversity and inclusion that we always think about, but it really is the right to be able to sell and pay for your goods is really an inclusion and access

Jonathan:
And hosts are in a great position to execute on that for the locales and markets that they serve in a way that a large proprietary sort of homogenous organization can’t easily do.

Tammie:
Yeah, it’s the right to access and the right to access is that if you limit access to someone, you limit their potential. So being able to have access on both ends, like selling and purchasing is really, really important. And so yeah, it’s all big conversations to have. I’m kind of really curious how we solve those. There’s no good answers because we get into politics and legal, but it’s also really good answers for open source to start looking at. I think

Jonathan:
Let’s take a couple minutes to talk through the agenda. So it kicks off at 1:00 PM on Monday and once you get there it’ll be clear how to get there. It’s going to be at the Hotel Colosseo. It’s a great little spot I’ll be opening up and then introducing Kevin Ohashi who has the first keynote. His title is Can WordPress Save the Hosting Industry? Kevin, who I have the privilege of knowing for quite a few years, he runs ReviewSignal.com. One of the things that Kevin has done very well from the outset is be unbiased and objective. Obviously we all are. Kevin goes to great lengths to make sure that the things, the reviews that he’s doing, that it’s transparent, how it’s working, especially in a world where it’s really hard to, what can you trust? He did a bunch of work early on sentiment analysis in bulk to become a basis for, so anyway, he does great work.

He is not sponsored by any hosts, so he is going to be able to give his just candid perspective on the state of the industry and WordPress’ connection to it. Really excited about that. Yeah. Then we’ve got WordPress by the numbers with Jan Loffler from WebPros. He’s the CTO. And so WebPros is one of the big sponsors. What I’ve loved, I’ve got to work with them directly on this, is they see this as an opportunity to share their insights and perspective. So this isn’t like people already know who WebPros are, they’re the guys with cPanel and Pluss and regardless of feelings, the prevalence of them is unquestioned. So they’re in such a good spot to be able to give a perspective on things and WordPress is a growing interest for them. So that’s going to be great. The next one is not announced yet. I think I know what’s going to be, but it’s not on the agenda, so I won’t reference it. And then we have our first panel, which you’re going to be leading, creating Products in an Evolving WordPress. What was your inspiration for the panel?

Tammie:
So my inspiration was hearing stories of people like Beaver Builder who are working through how do you adapt and change in the space and letting product builders tell the story and people who are navigating that. We have a credible range from people who are supporting that to people who are doing that. So I am really excited. I caught out this specific story because it inspired me on that panel, but really just it’s not going to be like, here are the things that we are aiming for. It’s more just the stories and there’re going to be some challenges. There are, but what is it like? And also things like how do you take stacks? How do you take an existing product and adapt it? What decisions do you make? All of those kind of conversations I think are really important to start having and what ones do you not take is also really important to have. The panelists will have their own ideas, so I’m really curious how that shapes out in all these panels.

Jonathan:
That’s awesome. And next up we’ve got two sponsored talks. So WebPros is going to be talking about WP Squared and then Automatitc who’s a first year sponsor. We’ll be talking about what they’re doing with hosts and with both of those, I’m excited because they know the audience. They know this is their chance to put their best face forward and they’re going to do a good job. I’m excited about both those talks. Next we’ve got an AI focused panel that I’ll be leading. We’ve got Miriam Schwab from Elementor. She’s got a bunch of contexts. They’ve been doing some interesting things in the AI space. Sujay from Brainstorm Force. Jesse from Automattic will be representing some automatic interests and I’m excited to explore that. And panels is something I’ve always enjoyed and it’s just an opportunity to get a mix of perspectives and just bring different views together and have some interesting discussions. Panels can be, yeah, they can go either way, but I really enjoyed the process and we’ve had really good feedback from last year and I think folks are going to love this year. And last but not least, you’ve got this panel on sustainability, inclusivity in WordPress. What are your thoughts what we want to try and accomplish with that?

Tammie:
So we’ve got Birgit and Carole, and I’m really excited. I want to accomplish a space for them both to speak. I think that’s really what I’m hoping specifically. I think you can aim to want to achieve things, but sustainably do it. That’s what, hence the title is a different approach. So I think it’s going to be really interesting to hear their voices, particularly with Berg’s project in the hackathon and her recent initiatives. And Cowell is always doing that type of work. So it’s going to be really interesting to get those perspectives again with these panels. I think as part of it is we’re in that stage where we’re just finding out what the panelists want to say as well. You can have those intentions, but it’s also about what the panelists want to say, which is super exciting. So I am excited for both. I am learning how to do panels as well, so it is also super exciting.

I know, but it’s exercising that different part of your brain, so it is really good to learn different panels and you will be good too. So yeah, it is a good time to do it. I am very excited because I think these are maybe different panels too we’ve had before. We definitely are covering the product and then we’ve got the AI panel for doing some bingo check, but then having that, but having a sustainable inclusion panel I think is a good angle on it.

Jonathan:
Yeah, I think so too. We’ve also got something that we’re doing on the Guildenberg side, which is going to be interesting on Wednesday. We’re putting together this little event called Pitch Fest, and I think it well represents a primary, I think, value for folks in the Woo space. So CloudFest to me is really all about making and growing strengthening connections between folks in this highly diverse ecosystem of ours. And what we’re trying to do with Pitch Fest that I love is create this space where people can bring their product. Our current goal is to have 30 products and give them 90 seconds each.

We’re going to see how it goes, but give them 90 seconds each to share their product and what they’re looking for in partnerships. And what we’re trying to do here is create an experience that facilitates the partnership because folks will come in and some folks are really good at introducing themselves and others are more, and it’s like we want to create something that just makes that process easier. It’s a free event. All folks need to do is register in advance so we know who we’re working with and we can coach them through. And I think, yeah, I’m excited about that. To me, at its heart is about facilitating those connections, expanding people’s perspectives, giving insights into how other people are thinking. And I’m excited to see how it goes. We still have a lot of work to do leading up to it.

Tammie:
And it’s going to be pitching your product, but also pitching where you might need something for your product and not just investment,

Jonathan:
What you’re looking for.

Tammie:
Exactly. Yeah, and what I’m curious is would everyone just ask for investment? They could, but also maybe they won’t. And I kind of like that. If they don’t ask for investment, they might be asking for something very particular, like a particular partner in something or partnership, or maybe they want to partner in a particular area or they want to expand or have some mentoring. That is a really interesting angle, I think, to add to it, rather than just the investment which there will be there if they want to have that as well. So yeah, it’s kind of an interesting, and everybody should be able, sorry,

Jonathan:
I’m hoping that it goes, and this is such a good point because ultimately it’s about creating a space for people. Where I’m hoping it goes is to see products working more together where it’s like, oh hey, because we’ve had this conversation where two products will quite like each other but haven’t actually done anything yet. And say, okay, what can we do to help streamline that? And that’s for folks thinking about attending. I think what in particular about CloudFest is there is this expectation and looking for opportunities. So people are coming in with a, Hey, let’s work with each other. Let’s expand, let’s identify new opportunities, let’s try things. And then you have an entire week to explore and expand on these ideas. And it’s not about getting things done, it’s about the connections part. And that’s what we’re trying to do both with WP Day is facilitate more connections between the WordPress space and the hosting industry and then build on that throughout the week. So I’m excited to see how it goes

Tammie:
And you should be able to, in a very short time, pitch your product and what you do. And so it’s really good practice. It’s really difficult, but it’s also really good practice.

Jonathan:
I’m quite looking forward to it. And then on the WooCommerce front, yeah, we’re going to have folks from Wu there. I’m really excited about having Rosalyn from the marketplace team, Ronald Gijsel will also be there from the Woo team. So if y’all are coming out, please let us know. We’d love to connect with you in person. And it is not too late also for anyone wanting to register who hasn’t yet, you can get a free ticket using the code. So just put that in the registration and we’d love to see you guys there. Tammie, any final words? Anything that you’re looking forward to in particular?

Tammie:
I’ve got a lot. WordCamp Asia and then CloudFest. Looking forward to knowing the differences and enjoying the spaces over the next few weeks. I think that’s what I’m going to go with. So I’m really excited to gain some energy from that and then process it all. So what about you?

Jonathan:
I’m looking forward to seeing folks again. I’ve really just enjoyed the experience and just having a dedicated space to reconnect with folks, picking up conversations from the previous year. And I’m also excited to see WooCommerce’s presence expand and see what types of opportunities and conversations that opens up for folks there. So it’ll be fun. We’ll see how it goes. All right, Tammie, we’ll see you next time. Yeah,

Tammie:
Bye.

by Derek at March 18, 2024 09:15 PM under Uncategorized

WordPress.org blog: WP Briefing: Episode 75: WordCamp Asia 2024 Unwrapped

WordCamp Asia 2024 was a dynamic three-day celebration of collaboration, diversity, and innovation in the WordPress project. This week, Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy shares her insights and experiences from the event, which featured one of the largest Contributor Days in the region, a variety of speakers, engaging panel discussions, and workshops. Josepha offers her thoughts on the latest topics being discussed within the community and forming the future of WordPress.

Credits

Host: Josepha Haden Chomphosy
Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Brett McSherry
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

Show Notes

Transcript

[00:00:00] Josepha: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open 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. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go. 

[00:00:29] (Intro music) 

[00:00:40] Josepha: I have returned from WordCamp Asia and struggled my way through some truly aggressive jet lag, so that means it’s time for a little WordCamp wrap-up. I spoke with a couple hundred people at the event, and I came away with a few topics that seemed to be on everyone’s minds. Those topics are: making business in WordPress, the business of making WordPress, and how to communicate both sides a little better.

[00:01:04] Josepha: So first, let’s start with making business in WordPress. This comes up at every event, and that honestly just makes sense. WordPress is a tool that people use to power their businesses across our global economy, and sometimes the businesses are closely related to WordPress itself. They are creating custom themes or plugins, building WordPress powered commerce sites for clients, or offering any number of agency services. But there are also businesses that are a little less close: restaurants, museums, local governments, schools. But it was clear that they all rely on the software just as much as the other.

So, it was nice to see some sessions that focused specifically on business matters in WordPress. And I heard so many people tell me about a conversation they had had earlier in the day with someone who helped them figure out their pricing or advised them on early errors they made in their business journey and generally helped them feel a little less lost.

I always love seeing this. Hearing how people are accomplishing their goals because of connections they made at one of our events, it’s enough to keep me coming back for years.

[00:02:10] Josepha: The next thing that came up a lot was the business of making WordPress. I don’t know if that came up a lot because of the sorts of conversations that people are willing to bring to me these days or because there was overwhelming interest in knowing how we keep all these trains on their tracks. But either way, it was refreshing to be able to have so many conversations about the invisible work that goes into a project like this. There was a Contributor Day that hosted over 600 people, if I recall correctly, which makes it the largest Contributor Day in the area to date. 35 percent of those people had never attended a Contributor Day before, so there were a lot of people who were discovering the WordPress community for the first time.

And for folks who’ve been here for a long time, it’s so easy for us to forget how much there is to learn at first. Even if you happen to show up with a skill set that fits a contributor team’s needs exactly, you still have to learn where we collaborate, how distributed contribution works, and all these rules and guidelines about open source freedoms and copyleft.

[00:03:10] Josepha: And then also you have to come to terms with the fact that we define and design all of our spaces and programs with belonging in mind. I mean, for every one question that you get answered, there are going to be six new ones that you didn’t know you had yet. So I came away from a lot of these conversations with the reminder that it’s important in so many ways for us to talk about the work that we do, even when it’s boring, even when we think it doesn’t really matter, because a lot of people have questions about how this works, how it runs, and how they can be part of making sure that it’s around for the long-term.

And the final thing that came up all over the place last week was how to communicate these things better. It’s easy to forget that folks who listen to this podcast don’t actually make up like a hundred percent of the people using WordPress; that’s on me. So just cause I’ve said here that, you know, enterprise is our next big space for biz dev or that, our primary growth markets are APAC, or that events are our best tool for brand expression.

[00:04:08] Josepha: Like, just because I said it doesn’t mean that everyone heard it. And we absolutely have to get those messages to more people, more frequently, and with more certainty. You’ll hear often from WordPress pundits that rising tides lift all boats, and the bigger the pie, the more the slices. We believe fully in the spirit of coopetition here, that we are all better together.

But I can’t shake the feeling that we’re mostly just talking to ourselves about it. It’s hard to get outside our own little bubble, but I believe completely that doing so is the best thing for our project in the long term. Not only so that we can continue to grow and provide access to the opportunities we know we offer but also so that we can do more to dignify our profession.

WordPress developers are not taken seriously, and yet you all are some of the smartest and most compassionate people I’ve ever met in my career. And I’d like to see how we can fix that perception together. And so that’s it. Those are the big, big, giant, old topics that came up a lot in conversation last week.

[00:05:14] Josepha: Don’t forget that you can catch up on all the sessions via the live stream, or if you are feeling inspired to contribute, reach out to the community team and see what sorts of meetup events you can host. 

[00:05:24] (Music interlude) 

[00:05:32] Josepha: Which brings us now to our small list of big things. I have two big things and one slightly less big thing, but they’re all fairly big.

So, the first thing on the list is that the latest version of WordPress, WordPress 6.5, is on target for release on March 26th. That’s, I think, a couple weeks from now. So keep an eye out for that. In the event, I mean, we have auto-updates everywhere, and probably you are on a WordPress-specific host and, so you won’t necessarily need to do anything. But if you have any desire or concerns about seeing the software a little bit ahead of time, you can always go and download the beta, give it a quick test or the release candidate, give that a quick test. See if there’s anything that’s not functioning as you expected it to function, and let us know if it’s not. But yeah, there are auto-updates. You don’t have to go out and proactively do anything if you don’t want to, that’s just in case you do want to. That’s coming up March 26th. 

[00:06:27] Josepha: The next thing is that I want to give everybody a general call-in for event contribution. So, WordPress events is where I entered the community. It is one of the most affirming and life-changing types of contribution I’ve ever done because you get to see a bunch of people succeed in their own goals because of something that you were able to tell them. It’s like teaching, but with people who elected to be there. So we have a lot of opportunities, for contribution by volunteering at events, either as volunteering at the event itself or to volunteer to organize it. We have small-scale, easy-to-do meetups, but we also have slightly larger WordCamps that can be done. If you have any hope for doing that or are just kind of interested. I’ll leave a link for you in the show notes. 

[00:07:19] Josepha: And then the final thing on here is that we actually have a pretty substantial proposal out at the moment. It’s for non-editable footers on all event website pages. This might not sound interesting to you, but it actually is kind of interesting. So, it’s been proposed to add a non-editable footer to all of the event website pages moving forward. So that’s everything that would be displayed on a WordCamp or on any of the new formatted event sites that we have. This proposal intends to meet two goals. One, it fills any legal requirements a site or country might have about displaying the privacy policy and other items. And two, it brings visibility to the new events.WordPress.org website, where a community member can find more events in their area. The last day to respond to that proposal is March 20th, which I think is two days from now. I think it’s on Wednesday and this is airing on Monday. So, I’ll have a link to that in the show notes as well in case you have any thoughts about it.

[00:08:15] Josepha: And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app or subscribe directly on WordPress.org/news. You’ll get a friendly reminder whenever there’s a new episode. And if you like what you heard today, share it with a fellow WordPresser. Or, if you ended up with questions about what you heard, you can share those with me at WPBriefing@WordPress.org. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks. 

[00:08:43] (Music outro) 

by Brett McSherry at March 18, 2024 12:00 PM under wp-briefing

March 17, 2024

Gutenberg Times: Build modern layouts, WordPress 6.5 Dev Notes, Gutenberg in Drupal, Block Bindings and more — Weekend Edition 287

Howdy,

What a great experience WordCamp Asia and Taipei, Taiwan was! I went a few days early so I could do some sightseeing. The city combines the traditional, the unconventional with the 21st century high-tech vibe. I will share photos and details in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, you can browse the official photo album of the WordCamp.

The WordPress Community organizers of Asia did a fantastic job bringing all the cultures of the region together again. It was interestingly enough, marketed as the Premier Open-Source event for the Web. It’s a strong argument to be made that’s what attracted about 36% of local and first time attendees. It was again super well organized! It was heart-warming to see and hug so many friends and make new ones. I love the WordPress community.

So, now the downside of me traveling was that I didn’t publish during my trip. This weekend’s edition is again huge. Get your favorite beverage, and let’s see what happened in between.

Yours, 💕
Birgit

PS: I might have missed something awesome, please let me know and I add to next’s week’s edition.

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

During the break, Joen Asmussen published two Design shares: Design Share: Feb 26-Mar 8 and Design Share: Feb 12-Feb 23, where he highlights the work the WordPress Design team has accomplished lately.

There is a lot of work being done for the upcoming revamp of the Learn.WordPress.org site. You can see the exploration for Learn video thumbnails.

For the editor, designers are working on placeholders, for the group and columns blocks. “Threading the needle on setup states that provide convenient shortcuts when inserted empty, yet still scale to very narrow contexts when they are inserted, for example, in a 100px thin column, is a tall order. ” he wrote.

He also visualized the work on Social Icons, Inspector controls (dev speak for options in the editor’s sidebar), a refreshed Select Mode and a new icon for the Metabox modal.

The team continued work on the redesign of WordPress.org. Forums and pattern directory are next.


In the monthly roundup post on the Developer blog, What’s new for developers? (March 2024), Nick Diego collected 28 developer relevant changes in this round-up post. You might want to reserve some time going through it.

WordPress 6.5

WordPress 6.5 Release Candidate 2 was released March 12, 2024. It’s really time test and make sure your plugins and themes are compatible.

Final release is scheduled for March 26, 2024.

In her post Unblocking WP6.5 – Font Library and Synced Pattern Overrides Josepha Haden Chomphosy explained the decisions on two discussions about Font Library’s default upload directory and naming patterns for the Synced pattern overrides feature. TL;DR Font Library is still in the release, Synced pattern overrides was punted to WordPress 6.6


With the release candidate, the documentation release leads collected, published the Dev Notes about new features and updates and compiled WordPress 6.5 Field Guide.

Block-centric Dev Notes for WordPress 6.5


Leonardo Nurugha, documentation co-lead of the release, offers a preview: What’s Coming in WordPress 6.5.


Carlos Daniele took a deep dive into the most important features for the Kinsta Blog: What’s new in WordPress 6.5: Font Library, DataViews, Block Bindings, Interactivity API, and much more!


Courtney Robertson published a What’s new in WordPress 6.5 walk-through and separated the updates for site builders and users from those relevant for developers.


And if you want to drink from the fire hose about updates in WordPress 6.5, Anne McCarthy has the ultimate WordPress 6.5 Source of Truth for you. In this over 10,000-word opus, you’ll find the updates tagged for each group of WordPress users they would be relevant to end users, theme or plugin authors, developers, site admins, and enterprises. For selective reading you could use your browser’s “Find on page” feature and search for these tags. She lists 15 priority items, with an array of 26 sub-items, and then another 23 additional items, and closes with information about items that didn’t make it into the release for one reason or another.


You could also go the other direction and watch Jamie Marsland explain WordPress 6.5 in 250 seconds.

Gutenberg plugin releases

Gutenberg 17.8 and 17.9 together comprised of 360 merged Pull requests.

Joni Halabi, senior software developer at Georgetown University, and I chatted about the new features in Gutenberg as well as what’s coming in WordPress 6.5 in our 97th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog. As always, the latest episode will drop into your favorite Podcast app over the weekend.

If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to any of these services and apps:
Apple Podcasts | CastBox | Google | Podcasts | PocketCasts |  Podbean  
Podchaser | RSS | Spotify


Grant M. Kinney, core contributor, sponsored by Automattic, lead the release of Gutenberg 17.8 and highlighted in the release post What’s new in Gutenberg 17.8? (28 February)


Andrew Serong, lead the Gutenberg 17.9 release. In his release post What’s new in Gutenberg 17.9 (13 March) he highlighted:

My “About-time-feature” in this round: Using the tab key to indent list items. It has been so ingrained in my muscle memory from using Google Documents tripped my up every time, I wanted to indented list items. Anything you have been waiting for a long time?

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

Eric Karkovack did a deep dive into How to Create & Manage Block Patterns in WordPress. It’s a fantastic tutorial explaining what patterns are and how you can create your own with the WordPress Site editor.


Paul Halfpenny introduced a new plugin called PersonalizeWP, which allows you to use personalization features within WordPress. “The plugin can help you tailor your content for your website visitors using the Block Editor to define what appears for them based on the conditions you choose.” he wrote. Learn more about pro version and all the features on their website


Jamie Marsland and Brian Coords discussed in this video How to Fix WordPress Gutenberg! Specifically, they walk through some usability issues of Block themes and the Site editor.


A similar discussion followed Anne McCarthy’s post about overlapping problems from last month in a Hallway Hangout. McCarthy posted the Summary of Hallway Hangout on overlapping problems in the Site Editor


Did you know you can install and use the Gutenberg block editor, built for WordPress, in Drupal! This video on YouTube walks you through the steps: Getting Started with Gutenberg (Block Editor) in Drupal (2024)


Rich Tabor introduced his new block: Cards. “This block is technically two blocks: a “Cards” block and a singular “Card” block, which is repeated—reminiscent of the WordPress Buttons block. Even now, I find it incredibly helpful to look at the source code for official WordPress blocks, which has all the tried-and-true methods for just about any type of block you’re looking to build next. Don’t reinvent, iterate.” he wrote.


In his video You won’t believe WordPress can do this! Jamie Marsland shows off the Cover Block magic possible with the WordPress Core. He shows you five different effects: the magical Parallax, the Scroll Snap, the Font Reverse the animation, and the Rick Roll.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Claudio Rimann shared his latest article Git going with FSE and Block Theme Development “Working with Block Themes and versioning in Git didn’t play together as nicely as I was used to. Here’s how we adjusted our workflow to make it work for us.” he tweeted. It fits into a discussion that also happens in the Make WP Slack #outreach channel


The video of a workshop called “Developer Hours: How to build modern web layouts” available on YouTube. In this one-hour workshop, Justin Tadlock made it all about learning to make website layouts with WordPress blocks. It was really helpful for anyone who wants to figure out how to put together different blocks to make cool and useful website designs.

Tadlock also looked at some website layouts people had made without blocks and showed how to make those using blocks instead. In the later part of the workshop, he gave some helpful tips, like when to use your own extra styling, how to make blocks look special, and when to turn your design into a repeatable pattern. This is great for making your site look just right but also keeping it easy to use. The examples are available for download from GitHub

 “Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2024” 
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. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly. The previous years are also available: 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor

Keith Devon and Mark Wilkinson from Highrise Digital discuss WP Café #80 | New features coming in WordPress 6.5. They cover the discussion around McCarthy’s overlapping problems post. Then they move on to cover the Block Bindings API, Interactivity API, and some design tools coming in the new version.


Mark Howells-Mead shared his views on the WordPress Interactivity API, pointing out that while there are simpler methods to create interactive interfaces, such as using plain JavaScript or React, learning a framework like the WordPress Interactivity API entails understanding both the core concepts of JavaScript and the specifics of the framework itself.


In this episode of the Do the Woo – Inside Woo show, The Collaboration of the Interactivity API with WordPress and WooCommerce, BobWP (Bob Dunn) chats with WordPress and WooCommerce developers Carlos Bravo and Lucio Giannotta about the collaboration between WordPress core and Woo working with the Interactivity API, a new framework for WordPress developers.


Brian Coords reported for the WPTavern on The Block Bindings API Brings Dynamic Data to Blocks. “As the block editor continues to evolve its content management capabilities, the lack of support for custom fields has been one of the key roadblocks for users and developers. While custom fields in WordPress are still widely used, in the block editor they’ve been relegated to a drawer at the bottom of the screen, and haven’t been as deeply integrated as many would like. With the coming Block Bindings API, things are about to change in a very good way.” he wrote.


Eric Karkovack explored Why Keeping up with Gutenberg Is a Challenge for Developers. “Let’s say you have a #WordPress block plugin. What do you do when WP core offers overlapping features? I spoke to some developers about the challenge of keeping up (and adjusting) with Gutenberg.” Karkocack tweeted.


Nick Diego invites you to the next Developer Hours on March 26, 2024, at 14:00 UTC (9 am EDT). He tweeted: “While Block Hooks were introduced in WordPress 6.4, I’m very excited about the upcoming enhancements in 6.5. So many more tools for plugin developers. Join me and Bernie Reiter for Developer Hours: Exploring Block Hooks in WordPress 6.5.

Bernie Reiter also wrote the Dev Notes about the Updates to Block Hooks in 6.5

From the WordPress Developer Blog

In his latest post, How to register block variations with PHP, Justin Tadlock provides a step-by-step walk-through of how to register block variations using PHP in WordPress 6.5.


Nick Diego posted An introduction to block-based mega menus and explored how to build a Mega Menu block that integrates with the Core Navigation block using new features coming in WordPress 6.5.


Justin Tadlock posted Introducing Block Bindings, part 2: Working with custom binding sources. The second tutorial in a two-part series that introduces the Block Bindings API in WordPress 6.5. Part 2 focuses on registering and using custom binding sources.


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GitHub all releases

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.


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Featured Image: View of Taipei, Taiwan from the Elephant Mountain, Photo by Birgit Pauli-Haack


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by Birgit Pauli-Haack at March 17, 2024 12:15 PM under Weekend Edition

Gutenberg Times: Gutenberg Changelog #97 – WordPress 6.5, Gutenberg 17.8 and 17.9

In this episode, Joni Halabi and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss WordPress 6.5, Gutenberg 17.8 and 17.9

Show Notes / Transcript

Show Notes

Joni Halabi, senior developer at Georgetown University

What’s new for developers? (March 2024)

Developer Hours: Exploring Block Hooks in WordPress 6.5

WordPress 6.5

Gutenberg plugin

What’s new in Gutenberg 17.8? (28 February)

What’s new in Gutenberg 17.9 (13 March)

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our 97th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about WordPress 6.5 is about to release, and then we have Gutenberg plugin versions 17.8 and 17.9. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times, and a full-time core contributor for the WordPress Open Source Project sponsored by Automattic’s Five for the Future program.

I’m thrilled that Joni Halabi made the time to join me again on the show. Joni is a senior software developer at Georgetown University and a regular guest at the Gutenberg Times shows. It’s so wonderful to see you again, Joni. How are you today?

Joni Halabi: I’m doing great and I’m thrilled to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me back. I’m really excited about what’s to come in WordPress 6.5. It’s going to be a good one.

Announcements

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s coming out in 11 days. If we do it again, this is March 15th. We are recording this March 15th, 2024, and I’m fresh back from WordCamp Asia, and I brought back marvelous memories of the city because I did some sightseeing and memories of the Asian community where a lot of selfies were taken by WordCamp Asia. It was, again, a wonderful WordCamp and I enjoyed meeting all the friends again that I made last year, or that I have been communicating all these years in the WordPress community and met for the first time last year. It really felt more like a family reunion around the purpose of the open source project.

So from there I brought two announcements. I’m happy to report that this year’s State of the Word will be on December 16th, 2024, and it will be brought to you from Tokyo, Japan. It will be, again, an event in location, but of course, live-streamed and live translated from there. We will maybe have some time issues if we want to watch it live in the United States or also in Europe, because Japan has a different time zone. That’s probably half around the world.

Joni Halabi: Yeah. I think they’re possibly 12 hours off from the East Coast of the United States, which is where I am.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So if it’s at 3:00 in the afternoon, then you watch it at 3:00 AM in the morning. But it’s the second time that the State of the Word is outside the American audience, and as Matt Mullenweg in his AMA at the WordCamp explained, “It’s a tribute to the first community outside the US that sprung up early on. The WordPress community in Japan was the first one to translate the software into a different language, and back then they didn’t have all the tools available. They had to fork the full software and go in and translate every string in the code base. I also heard that 86% of all Japanese websites are built with WordPress. So the community is huge and strong and has been for almost two decades. So the first translation, I think it was in 2007 or something like that, I am sorry, I don’t have the exact year there, so it’s pretty cool.

And then the second announcement that came out of Taipei, Taiwan was that the next WordCamp Asia will take place in February, 2025 in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. So that’s the announcements that I have. There were great talks I saw, and many that I missed because I was chatting in the hallway and lost track of time. And apart from the workshops, you can catch them all on the so-called rerun on the live sessions, and I leave in the show notes, the link to the schedule of the sessions as well as to the YouTube live stream recordings, so you can catch up on the talks as well, dear listeners.

Joni Halabi: I love learning that. I had no idea that the Japanese community was the first to localize WordPress, and that is so exciting to me that they took that on themselves because I don’t know if you know this, in a past life I worked as a translation manager for a software company, and we translated into so many languages, and the hardest thing to do is translate something into that second language because it sets the stage for localization in all of these other languages. So they must have done so much heavy lifting. I’m so impressed by that. I love that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, I didn’t know that you were a translation manager. And you’re right, they were the pioneers of that, and out of that collaboration came the prodigal tool that now… So WordPress is translated into a hundred languages, and there are, I think, something between 3,000 and 5,000 translators now working on translating 6.5 into the languages. So when it came out that someone in Nepal or someone in India, or I think there are translators for seven or eight languages in India alone or in Arabic, can use their software with the new features within their own language. So that’s so cool.

Community Contributions

Joni Halabi: Very cool. Yeah, it sounds like a lot has happened in the last four weeks, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I imagine. Yeah.

Joni Halabi: So now we’re just going to catch up on all the details, including all the new features that are coming out. In WordPress 6.5, which comes out, we mentioned this before, on March 26th, so 11 days from when we’re recording this, and we’re just going to catch up on all these features in this latest monthly roundup. There’s a new post on the developer blog that was published this month. Nick Diego collected 28 developer relevant changes in this roundup post, and this post lists all of the new resources that are available for developers. I highly recommend checking it out. It’s a really great post,

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And he has all the links to dig deeper into whatever comes out of WordPress 6.5. They also cover some of the things that we are going to talk about in 17.8 and 17.9 of the Gutenberg plugin as well. 

What’s Released – WordPress 6.5 RCV2

So when we come now to the section of what’s released, we are already in the middle of it actually. We have three releases to cover. That’s the 6.5 cycle and two Gutenberg plugin versions. So the WordPress 6.5 release candidate two was published, and the testing team collected notes on how best to test this version. And you don’t need to use it if you don’t want to. You don’t need or go into the debug code stuff, developer stuff. You don’t need to use a hosted test site or local WP, you can just use WordPress playground and run WordPress in your browser. That’s the new cool feature that came out quite a bit, but we are now all the things that can be previewed or tested, we try to make this work with WordPress Playground. So the release candidate and the developer documentation were also published.

First one, sad news, my favorite feature, the sync pattern overrides was pulled just before the last release candidate as a few contributors felt it needed to simmer a few more months before it can be released to millions of users. So that has to wait to 6.6, which is scheduled when… The release schedule is not out, but I think about mid-July or so. So it’s only two, three months. No, four months. And in the show notes I will have for you the developer notes that are very heavy leaning to developers, hence the name about all the new cool features. It’s Block Bindings API. That is pretty much the coolest feature we’re waiting for, for the block editor extension to extend the block editor, and a lot of people have been waiting for and they’re really gearing up to it, using it and using the heck out of it, so to speak.

Block Bindings API allows you to connect a block with a data point. That could be post meta, that’s the usual custom fields, but you can also, and that is also explained in the def notes, register your own data sources, so it could be something from a different table from a different action or something like that. So that’s one thing that we’re all excited about. What do you think about it?

Joni Halabi: This is my favorite feature, hands down. I’m in love because it is not even borderline, it is turning. It gives the developers the ability to turn a static block, for example, a paragraph block into a dynamic block. So it’s mapping this content that somebody can update in a meta field or really anywhere else on the site, and it’s mapping that data to a static attribute in one of these blocks, and it is so cool. I see so many applications for it. There’s some examples in the new feature post that’s on the blog, and I’m really excited. I’m very excited to see how developers are going to use it. I really want to see how we can use it on our team at Georgetown. I’m just kidding.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, Justin Tadlock on the developer blog, was also quite excited about it and he wrote a, I think it’s about 5,000 words about it and has a great example. He has part one and part two introducing the feature, and that is really, really important for developers to look into, but I think you will find it fairly easy to figure it out. And on the Gutenberg Times, actually, there’s also a post that is an almost no code way to use this, and I walk you through with little videos on how you can use the old meta boxes on the bottom of your screen and also add it to a template or something like that, so you have additional ideas that you could have as a site builder who is using not so much code, but more is on the no-code side or low-code side, so I was quite excited when I saw it too.

Another feature where has a lot of people excited is the fund library, and we have been waiting for it quite a bit because it was actually slated to be in 6.4, but then was pulled also in the release cycle that it needed to simmer a bit or have more testing done, but it’s now coming in 6.5. Then there is another API that came into 6.4, but it now has some update. That’s the Block Hooks API, and then we also have now public, and we talked about it for a year and a half on this show, on the Gutenberg Changelog, is the interactivity API is finally made public and in WordPress core. So that’s another feature where developers can actually build some great websites with it. It’s almost like there’s no reload on pages if you have interactivity pieces in there, and it replaces the reliance on jQuery quite a bit. A lot of it happens in PHP if you want to and of course also JavaScript. Have you played with it or tested it? I say play, but I mean tested the interactive API?

Joni Halabi: I use play too. Unfortunately I have not. I’ve been reading a little bit about it, but I just haven’t found a good case for it on our team just yet. We tend to shy away from interactivity, but I wonder if this will help us get into some more interactive elements on our sites.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I had a hard time coming up with examples, but the developers who worked on it, they built a great movie demo application and of course made the code also available to that. So I can share that in the show notes. And then we have two people writing about. So Magdalena is writing an introduction into the interactivity API, and then Seth Rubenstein, who also has been on the show on the Gutenberg Live Q and A from the Pew Research Organization. He has done quite a bit of using the interactivity API for some of his voting and quizzes, and he’s writing a case study about some of his examples. So we’ll all get much more information about that in the following months, I would say. So the next two to three months or so might not be all ready for the release, but it’s here to stay, so there’s some great stuff going.

What else? Oh yeah, Steven Lin documentation co-lead for this release 6.5 has published the WordPress 6.5 field guide, and Carlos Daniele has published a great post on the Kinsta blog, who walks this through all, not only the user facing, but also the user facing changes that are coming down the pipeline. I can name it. We talked about them here on the podcast when they were all coming into the Gutenberg plugin, but it’s just to remind us all. It’s the robust revisions for style and template changes and the integration into the style book. Then of course the fund management system and then the background image support for the group block. I like them and you can have tiles or you can have them in a different aspect ratio. Speaking of aspect ratio, there will be support for the cover block and then shadow support for three more blocks. Button blocks had them already, but with 6.5, it also comes to the columns block, and the single column block and images.

The site editor gets plenty of quality of life updates where things get a little bit smoother and then the list view, but everybody’s friend is your list view. When you have longer posts, it’s a little bit more complicated and nested blocks that are even more powerful with a right click menu. And then also you can now change names in the block view, so when you have five group blocks together, you can name them and then manage them much better. Speaking of management, pattern management has also gotten some updates there and drag and drop support enlist you and editor canvas. I think those are the most important ones, but there are small little things that make life so much easier in all of these releases.

Joni Halabi: Yeah. I was just going to say I really love the list view changes because I think, especially changing the names of the blocks, it’s going to make it so much more intuitive for people who, perhaps they just have a page and list view before, it would just say paragraph, paragraph, paragraph, list view. You really don’t know where you are in that list view, so if you can change it to paragraph about puppies, paragraph about kittens, paragraph about whatever you’re writing about, I think that’ll help people a lot on those longer pages.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So as we said, release is March 26th, and I know that the design team is working on some featurettes. That’s what they’re called. Short videos to show off the biggest new features. So watch the space and I’ll probably have more in the weekend edition of the Gutenberg Times in the next two weeks leading up to the release and afterwards.

Joni Halabi: We could probably spend another two plus hours talking about WordPress 6.5 because it is such a robust release and I really recommend, because we are in release candidate too, definitely check it out. You can check it out via the beta tester plugin or the WordPress playground like we had talked about before. 

Gutenberg 17.8

But it is time to move on to the Gutenberg plugin release 17.8. 17.8 was released just a couple of weeks ago, on February 28, 2024, and it included 164 pull requests by 45 contributors, and there is a blog post up that was published the same day, February 28th that runs through everything that’s new in Gutenberg 17.8. So I think it’s time to run through some of the key features.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The first up is that you can now bulk export patterns because that’s now added to the data views on the pattern list view. So go to the site editor and you click on patterns and you see on the patterns, you can now check some of the check patterns and then have a bulk action for export, and you get them in the JSON format. That’s a JavaScript Object Notation. With that, you can then import it into another website through the same system where there is, I think by the patterns, there is an import JSON button on top of the list view.

Joni Halabi: Oh, nice. Another new feature is in the template editor or inspector where you can show and select related patterns. So if you show a template or a template part, it will now show similar or related templates in the sidebar, so you can very, very easily in that sidebar switch to a different template or a different template part if you want to just play around with your design and see how something similar might look. I think that’s a nice interactivity feature.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And somebody who builds websites definitely needs that to gauge how it is going to look and have switched faster through that and not have that, “Oh, change it, save it, see how it looks.” But the preview helps out to curate all that, the list about it. On the grid block variations, that’s another new feature. There’s a toggle for the various grid types, so auto-generated or manual or rows or columns and all that. So you can play around with those grid block variations some more. It’s good to have. You can also change the minimum column width so you know how those columns distribute on your canvas in the front end as well as on the backend and also in mobile view because it’s intrinsically responsive. And that also is a feature. So for the grid children, so inside the grid, you can also specify rows and columns and change the column span and the row span. So even more to play around for all the designers out there.

Joni Halabi: Yeah. That gives you so many options for different layouts, alternate layouts, and I’m very happy that accessibility and responsiveness is also taken into consideration here because I think that’s going to be really important, especially when you start playing with all of these spans. And there’s some great screenshots in the pull request that give a really clear idea about what’s going on in the grid block right now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And Justin Tadlock and Ryan Welcher, they had a Developer Hours on how to build more on web layouts with WordPress blocks, and they talked about some of the grid features, but also some can be done with CSS, and so you might want to check those out. And Justin shared all his code to use that in a repo, so I just wanted to make a shout-out for that. It does not cover these grid layout features yet because they weren’t out yet, but he’s preparing another show for that for sure, because he’s very much into grids.

Joni Halabi: Moving on to some enhancements, the script modules API got a new deregister option, so you can use that to override script modules if you want to de-register a module. There’s now an API hook into that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And that is actually part of the WordPress 6.5 script modules, API that comes as a new feature. And this was, although it was outside of that, was one of the last Gutenberg plugin releases, it was back boarded to the release candidate, so it will make it into 6.5 when it’s finally released. And the same with the next one is the block bindings to actually lock the edit of the blocks that have block bindings, so a user can override that if it has a block binding. It also comes with a visual indicator in the toolbar that this block actually has a block binding connection with a custom field, so it’s much more visible what kind of block this is. So I’m glad that they found this. This also has been back boarded to the release candidate, so it will come in 6.5 as well.

Joni Halabi: Nice. Another new feature that I’m particularly excited about is when an editor is editing a block in content only mode. So it means that the block inspector is usually unavailable, but now there’s a new feature that allows editing of an image blocks alt and title attributes when you’re in that content only mode. And I think this feature is so important because, at least in my experience, a lot of content editors, sometimes they’ll forget to add a title or alt text to an image, and this just makes it much easier to remind them and give them access to write that content because that’s content, it’s content for screen reader users and people who need that. So I’m very excited about this one.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, glad you pointed that out, yes. I’m looking through this. There is also an update to the theme JSON schema to actually include the background support that came in with previous versions of the Gutenberg. So you get now support if you use the VS Code or something like that, you get support for the code inspector for the background support. It’s for settings, and in the settings part, also, it’s used for the block JSON for custom blocks, so it’s in the support background setting in the JSON files. Very important.

Gutenberg 17.9

Joni Halabi: Moving on to Gutenberg 17.9. 17.9 was released on March 13th, and it included a total of 196 pull requests by 59 contributors. And this is what I’m excited about. Four of those contributors were first-time contributors, so that’s very awesome. March 13th, there was also a blog post about what is new in 17.9, so I definitely recommend checking that out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Go ahead.

Joni Halabi: Sorry, I was just going to run into the features, but if you wanted to say something before I did that, go for it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, go ahead.

Joni Halabi: Okay. So the first feature that I wanted to call out was that now color and typography presets have been added to global styles. So this was something that was really popular in classic themes where users were allowed to change the color palette and the families in the customizer. So now this is available in global styles.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. Yes. So it’s not only the privilege of the theme developer to offer presets for color and typography, so that’s really good. Another feature is a shuffler option for the pattern category. So if you have a category on your patterns that it’s maybe call to action, you can press that button, that shuffle button, and it shows you all the call to action at different order. So it makes it easier to select things and not always have to scroll past the same patterns that you saw before. So it makes it a little bit more surprising.

Joni Halabi: Yeah. Another new feature is in the inner blocks component, there is now support to insert before block and after block actions when you’re using a lot of blocks. So basically what this means is that if you are a content editor and you have selected a child block inside of some parent block, in the toolbar, there are now options that say add before and add after that will allow you to add child blocks before or after whichever child block you have selected. So it just makes it a little bit easier to add these child blocks as you’re editing. So I think it’s a really nice UI feature here.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, absolutely. And I think it makes it also in combination with the block hooks, API makes it much more versatile for extenders to use that feature as well. Another feature is something that I personally have been waiting for since I saw the list block in Gutenberg, which I think was right from the beginning, but is to allow the tab key to indent a selected part. So up until now, you needed to use the click on the block toolbar to indent a set of list items. So the child parent kind of thing. Now you can use Tab, and that is much more… For me, it’s much more intuitive because I spend a lot of time in Google Docs and that’s how it works there. So I’m really glad that it finally made it to the block editor.

Joni Halabi: Yeah, that’s a really nice one too, because I use my keyboard more often than I use anything else.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely.

Joni Halabi: The next feature that I want to talk about is connected to the block binding API, and this adds a visual indicator if you’re in the editor and you’re looking at a block, and that block is connected to a block binding source. So, for example, if you have a paragraph block and the content of that paragraph block is bound to some external source, a meta field, for example, in the editor in the toolbar, there’s a special icon that will just give the content editor a clue that, “Hey, this paragraph block, you can’t really edit this paragraph block because the content here is bound to some other external source. So this is not something that you can edit by yourself.”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And before that feature came in, there was no way to find which blocks are actually connected to something else. So it removes the wonder and mystery of things, and I like that it’s purple.

Joni Halabi: I love that. I love that it’s purple, but also a different icon design because that means even if you’re colorblind, you can’t see the color purple, you can still see, “Hey, this is not the paragraph icon. What’s going on here?”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. Correct. Yeah,

Joni Halabi: Very nicely done.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I just want to point out, if you are looking for documentation, there have been a ton of updates in the documentation sector, and they are all already live on the Block Editor Handbook, especially for the interactivity API docs and the other theme, JSON schema we talked about, and some of the core block references have been updated, so check them out. There are so many. We are not specifically calling them out, but just wanted to point that out for you. And I think we are done, are we?

Joni Halabi: I think so. I didn’t see any others in the list, but just a reminder, there are so many changes in WordPress 6.5, but also the latest two Gutenberg updates, 17.8 and 17.9. So I definitely recommend checking out those blog posts that are up on the blog, just especially if you’re interested in seeing what else is out there that they all link to the pull requests and it’s just a wealth of information.

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. But now that we are at the end of the show, I wanted to point out that on March 26, that’s the day of the release of 6.5, Nick Diego and Bernie Reiter will explore block hooks in WordPress 6.5 in a Developer Hour. So that is on March 26th, 14:00 UTC, that is 8:00 AM Eastern, and they will explore the changes what happened with the block API. Bernie was also the developer who wrote the developer notes, so come with your questions on it, and I of course, share the link in the show notes so you can register for that. There’s also an April workshop on April 9th that’s also on what’s new in WordPress 6.5 with Bud Kraus. And Bud Kraus is a long time WordPress educator and he shows you some of the features that you, as a user, can see with 6.5.

And on March 26, there’s actually also a workshop on untangling templates with Kathryn Presner demystifying the templates and how to put this piece together. So there are great things coming on the WordPress online learning workshop as well, and we have the links in the show notes later on. All right, so what are you working on right now or when we are done with the show, it’s the weekend, but next week, what are you going to first check out on the 6.5?

Joni Halabi: Well, since the field guide just got published today, I saw the email come in this morning in my inbox, my plan for today, and probably early next week, is to pore through that field guide and see what changes affects our team at Georgetown because we have a very heavily customized set of themes and plugins that we use for the university. So it’s always exciting to see what new features are coming up, how we can leverage those, and what features are being released that affect our existing code. So that’s my plan for the next few days.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, wonderful, wonderful. And as always, the show notes of this episode will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast and this is episode 97. And if you have questions or suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com or ping me on the Make WordPress Slack or on Twitter. And when people want to connect with you, Joni, how would they do this? Where do they find you online?

Joni Halabi: I am just about everywhere @jonihalabi. That’s my handle in most places. I’m also on the Make WordPress Slack, so just come find me there. Feel free to shoot me a DM or send me a tweet or a Mastodon message. I’m on Instagram.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, so this was it, dear listeners. Thank you for being with us and we’ll see you or hear you. Not see you, but hear you in two weeks again.

Joni Halabi: Thank you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Take care. Bye-bye.

by Birgit Pauli-Haack at March 17, 2024 11:19 AM

Matt: Paul Davids and Jacob Collier

I know I share a lot of Jacob Collier content, but this one is particularly interesting because you can see him learning things in real-time, exploring an instrument that is not his native tongue but he’s already world-class in. It’s so interesting to me the polymath musician friends I have who can play so many instruments how they bring the technique and language across their learning, and this video illustrates it well.

by Matt at March 17, 2024 04:36 AM under Asides

March 15, 2024

Matt: Hugo on Vision Pro

Many of my friends are ridiculous overachievers, and Hugo Barra is no exception. In response to my birthday blog post present request he has published a magnus opus of over 10,000+ words on his thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro from his perspective having been present for some foundational moments for Google, Meta, and Xiaomi. This is my dream, to get people writing more. We need more of this stuff on the internet! It’s fun to go down rabbit holes with experts. Cool that it’s on Hugo.blog, too. 🙂

by Matt at March 15, 2024 11:38 PM under Asides

March 14, 2024

WPTavern: Inside DE{CODE} 2024, WP Engine’s Upcoming Developer Conference

If you ask a WordPress builder or developer to list the most important tools in their toolkit, chances are that at least a few will be WP Engine products and possibly their managed hosting platform itself. Plugins like Advanced Custom Fields have a pretty passionate fanbase, so it shouldn’t be a surprise the WP Engine’s employees are just as passionate about their products too. 

All of that passion goes on full display every year when WP Engine hosts DE{CODE}, their popular developer conference, now in its fifth year. DE{CODE} 2024 will happen March 19th & 21st, with the one-day-long agenda repeated across three global regions. The online conference is free to attend, and registration is now open.

I connected with some of the team members behind the conference, and behind WP Engine’s products, to get a (quite candid) behind-the-scenes look at what many would consider a fairly unique approach to a conference in the WordPress space.

Giving Tech Conference Vibes 

In the tech industry more broadly, the idea of a company-centric conference is pretty standard fare. I’m sure your inbox is full of invitations from AWS re:Invent and Stripe Sessions, though I think a more apt comparison might be something like Craft + Commerce by Convert Kit. In the WordPress community, it’s not as common.

Lexi Mostek is the Lead Event Manager at WP Engine helping to bring this vision to life. I asked her about the background of the event and how they think about the balance between company and community.

“We started this virtual event before Covid even existed,” she told me, “because developers a lot of times don’t have the budget to travel and we don’t want to charge for this event. We want to make it free. We definitely started out heavily promoting a lot of our own products and having a lot of internal speakers, which I think you can expect from a company putting on a conference. What we have tried to do is grow our roster of other people in the community, other speakers and other topics that support that. So I think we just added on our 46th speaker. And roughly half of those are external.” 

This is WordPress after all, so I’ll be clear now that this is not a WordCamp. That said, alongside WP Engine product updates and tutorials, you’ll get to hear about WordPress 6.5 from the core Editor Triage Release Team and about AI from Zack Kass, the former Head of Go-to-market at Open AI. If it’s anything like years past, the sessions don’t feel like a sales pitch, they more often take the shape of hands-on tutorials and best practices. 

Rob Stinson is a Product Marketing Manager at WP Engine whose domain includes Local, Advanced Custom Fields, and many of the other developer tools they’ve added from deals like 2022’s acquisition of plugins from Delicious Brains

“One of the sessions I’m involved in is an ACF Blocks deep dive,” said Rob. “We’ve seen this feature really emerge as a hero of ACF over the last few years and we’re doing more and more in the product itself to improve that feature set. So myself and Liam Glady (Senior Engineer at ACF) will go through four different custom blocks, the first one being a very basic one to showcase the nuts and bolts of it for anyone who is not familiar with how to do custom blocks with ACF. But then we sort of progress and showcase some more interesting ideas that really leverage interesting features.” 

That sort of practical approach is key to many of the sessions. For WP Engine, the return on their investment into the conference comes by being seen as the hosting company who is most focused on providing value to developers. The goal is brand awareness more than immediate conversions.

“WP Engine obviously has a long history in the Managed WordPress space,” he said, “offering WordPress solutions at scale. Something that we have learned – and it does seem obvious when you’re in the midst of it – is providing value through developer and builder tooling is just immensely impactful. There’s value to our customers and there’s value for the broader WordPress ecosystem.” 

Clearly being the company behind WordPress’ most popular local development tool is helpful, otherwise Automattic wouldn’t be bringing their own competitor to market. Even outside of WordPress, you can see other open source platforms working to own the comprehensive developer experience, from coding to deployment.

A Most Unusual Format

One interesting feature of DE{CODE} is that the conference is streamed live, but sessions are all pre-recorded and presumably polished ahead of time. Then the conference happens “live” three times in three distinct time zones, making it more accessible to a global audience. One side effect of this approach is that the speakers and panelists are often in the live chat engaging with the audience and answering questions during their own talks. I’m not sure I’ve really seen this approach before.

Imran Pervez, the Global Head of Event Marketing at WP Engine, talked to me about the thinking behind this.

“When I go to a conference,” he said, “I personally don’t enjoy watching a thirty-minute session with only a 5 or 10-minute Q & A at the end. That’s hardly enough time for a meaningful discussion. So with the approach we take, if a session is 40-minutes long, you can be asking Q & A the whole time and make full use of the subject matter experts. If a speaker isn’t able to attend a session–given the range of timezones we’re serving–then we have a mix of subject matter experts per session on hand to interact and respond on chat.”

The first time I attended this conference, I was definitely confused that the person on the screen was also responding to me in the live chat, but I have to admit it really makes for a more collaborative experience as an attendee. It’s one of the more engaging live chats I’ve seen at a virtual conference, and conversations can continue on in virtual “hallways” between sessions. 

AI is Kind of a Big Deal

The keynotes of the event, as you’d expect in the Year of our Lord 2024, center around AI. Before you wind up that massive eye roll, it is worth thinking about AI in the context of WordPress and maybe looking at some of the names on those panels. 

Rob drew the connection between generative AI today and the WordPress landscape:

“If you think about the last 24 months, you know, AI has become a thing, right? The three areas where the best use cases have emerged are code, text, and images. Interestingly, the best technical representation of those three things in the world is actually WordPress.” 

I would add a fourth dimension to AI’s current skillset, which is finding answers from massive amounts of content. In other words: search. If you’ve been responsible for a large-scale WordPress site or WooCommerce store, then you might know how tricky it is to get search right. But “search” as an internet concept has been evolving this last year as AI tools are changing the game, both around data indexing as well as user interface expectations. 

“And so it’s just interesting and exciting,” he continued, “to see the broader WordPress ecosystem figure this out. Ask ourselves ‘What does this look like?’ Experiment with things. As these use cases are evolving and starting to mature, I think the implementation of AI through WordPress in the coming 12 months, 24 months is going to be really impactful.” 

If that does sound interesting, there are a number of AI sessions, including one on AI search, the Zack Kass keynote mentioned above, and another keynote panel featuring Jason Cohen, WP Engine’s founder with a group of notable community members.

“What we decided to do with our keynote,” Lexi explained, “is bring in some external people like Amber Hinds, David Dicamillo and Lucky Gobindram, who are doing things and actively working on WordPress projects in different areas of expertise. Because this conference isn’t only about us and our products, it’s about the community.”

There’s interesting agency teams and product owners throughout the agenda. The third keynote panel focuses on the business of WordPress and includes Sujay Pawar of Brainstorm Force, Miriam Schwab of Elementor, and Lesley Sim of Newsletter Glue. Beyond business and AI, there are sessions covering marketing, performance, SEO, and ecommerce. 

More than WordPress “Developers”

Looking at the topics listed, you might be wondering why it’s called a “developer conference.” In the WordPress ecosystem, we can often take a broad view on who we consider developers. More than just developers, WordPress is a community of builders and extenders.

“It is developers,” Imran said, “but actually it’s those that have a technical interest in what’s happening. We also welcome marketers, business leaders and those that wear multiple hats in their businesses. We make sure there is technical content, but a lot of it isn’t necessarily hardcore- it’s applicable for someone that could also be less technically advanced.” 

“Do you log into the WordPress admin at least once a month?” added Rob. “You’ll get something out of it.”

Even if you’re not a developer, I would encourage you to browse the agenda and see if anything looks interesting.

DE{CODE} 2024 is on March 19 (North America and APAC) and March 21 (EMEA). Registration is free.

by Brian Coords at March 14, 2024 03:13 PM under News

March 13, 2024

WPTavern: Reflections on My 2 Weeks Writing for The Tavern

As my 2 weeks as a guest writer at The Tavern wind down, I thought y’all might be curious to hear some of my reflections on the experience.

As James wrote, bringing 7 writers in for 2-week stints is kind of like The Hunger Games – many go in, two get the job.  

That “Hunger Games” analogy seems to have stuck – many of the people I conversed with for stories over the past two weeks asked me a variation of the, “How is The Hunger Games treating you?” question.

The truth is that every interaction I’ve had with one of my fellow writers has been a combination of productive, nice, charming, and helpful. 

When fellow writers finished their trials, I mostly felt sadness. Not only will I miss our conversations on The Tavern Slack channel, but I’ll also miss the energy and reporting they brought to The Tavern.  This version of The Hunger Games has been a ray of sunshine to my eyes.

  1. How did I decide what to write about?
  2. Emotions Emotions Emotions
  3. What did I learn in these 2 weeks of writing for The Tavern?
  4. I hadn’t applied to a job in decades.
  5. What is it like working with Matt?
  6. How would I improve The Tavern?
  7. What’s next for me?
  8. Would I do it again?
  9. Comments ↓

How did I decide what to write about?

I was surprised by the different types of content each of us writers produced for The Tavern.  One of us did long-form video content, some of us were curious about reporting on new and interesting things in the WP community, some of us shined a light on long-underreported people in our community, some focused on tech, others focused on humans, etc.

As you likely noticed, I am, personally, curious about how the WP community changes and rolls with the times. For example, you saw me writing about how small businesses are taking on the big dogs, an analysis of popular themes on wp.org, and how plugin shops have integrated accessibility best-practices into their day-to-day jobs

Emotions Emotions Emotions

While I felt very prepared to do the work that would be required, I was unprepared for the whirlwind of emotions that would flood my body during these two weeks.

Almost everyone I spoke with for my articles was exceedingly professional and helpful.  In fact, some people went out of their way to help me find sources and to cajole quotes out of people.

And yet, at times my discomfort with waiting for email/Slack responses to my inquiries left me an emotional wreck (“Are they ignoring me? Did I offend them? Were my questions stupid?” etc.).

Then there were times I accidentally manufactured discomfort – like when I pushed to get a straight answer about a difficult topic out of a PR person at a big WP plugin shop.  

There was the scary time when an online accessibility forum misunderstood my line of questioning and came after me with pitchforks (for the record, my articles highlight people who are making a positive difference on the accessibility front).  

I think the waves of emotion I experienced are part of starting something new and challenging.  I hadn’t written articles with this intensity for decades – it makes sense that I would be forced to deal with my internal emotional issues.

What did I learn in these 2 weeks of writing for The Tavern?

Over the past couple of weeks writing for The Tavern, I learned so so so much.  Here are some of the many lessons I learned since Feb. 29:  

  • I learned that people appreciate being part of a good yarn. My articles on plugin businesses and people doing great work on web accessibility seemed to be appreciated by both the commenters and the people featured in the articles.
  • I learned that hitting “Publish” can be scary. 
  • I learned off-the-record conversations are oftentimes more fun than on-the-record ones.  
  • Related, I learned that off-the-record conversations build trust that a reporter can leverage into more compelling on-the-record interviews and articles later. 
    For example, one of my off-the-record conversations led me to a curious string about a sensitive topic – I pulled that string, and before you know it, we agreed to put that part on-the-record and included it in an article.
  • I learned the hard way that you’ve got to be careful about how and where you tell people you are a journalist.  That lesson cost me a lot of heartburn and sleep.
  • I learned that I need to help people help me.  One person I interviewed early on asked, “What’s your angle?  I want to give you a quote that’s relevant.”  That question saved us from a lot wasted of back-and-forth time.
  • I learned that some people want The Tavern to be hard-hitting “gotcha” news source.
    (Fwiw, I see The Tavern’s role in the community a little differently – It needs to be a trusted source of information and a hub for conversation in the WP community.)
  • I learned (to no surprise) that the writers at The Tavern truly do have the editorial freedom to cover topics that are critical of WP power brokers, including the people paying our paychecks.   
  • Interacting with the other 6 writers led me to believe that any of us 7 would make great next-generation leaders of The Tavern.  Seriously – I’d trust any of them with leading my beloved Tavern moving forward.
  • I learned that reporting on WP stuff is not an easy job.  
  • I learned that the 2-week timeframe was both a positive driver and a limiter of output. Deadline pressure in journalism is real any way you slice it.  Deadlines force you to get creative – to say  “good enough”, hit the “Publish” button, and move on to the next challenge.  
  • I learned that not as many people read The Tavern as I thought.
    • When I told my mom and sisters that I was picked to write for The Tavern, they were like, “Uhh huuuh.  That’s nice, sweetie,” and more or less patted me on the head before returning to their respective days.
    • I was surprised to learn that even some of the WP pros I quoted in my articles did not check wptavern.com to read the articles.  When I spoke with them a week after one article posted, they said, “Oh! Is that article live?”
  • I learned that, based on The Tavern’s Jetpack stats, these articles do have an extremely wide reach by my standards.  For example, one article I posted has garnered over 2,000 views on the web, over 2,000 email opens, and 70 clicks from email. (I joked that I had 300 million impressions and 4,070 conversions – that’s a conversion rate of .0013%.  Not great if it was a paid ad campaign, but, personally, I was thrilled with the numbers!)
  • I learned that constructive criticism I received on my article drafts from my fellow writers made my writing better.

I hadn’t applied to a job in decades.

One thing I found personally fascinating was the application process – because I have no idea how to apply for a job.

The last job I applied for was a student life position at the University of Minnesota in 2004. I quit that job in 2006 to become a WordPress consultant, which has been my primary job since.  

Writing for The Tavern is a dream job for me.  In my application, I wanted to communicate my vision for the job, my unique life experiences that might make me a great fit, my view that the news is a critical component of our democracy, as well as my quirky personality (didn’t want to surprise anyone there). 

My application was a long email highlighting my experiences reporting the news, blogging, and contributing to the WP community.  It also mentioned my respect for The Tavern’s history (I’ve been reading The Tavern nearly every day for 10 years or so).

When I didn’t hear back after a short amount of time, I got antsy and sent this follow-up:

A piece of crumpled up notebook paper with When I didn’t hear back on my original application after a week, I sent this follow-up email.

What is it like working with Matt?

One of the more popular questions people asked me over the past two weeks was, “What is it like working with Matt Mullenweg?”  

Matt was true to his tongue-in-cheek word from his Nov. 2023 post: “You can ask previous writers how much I was in their hair.”  I had very few interactions with Matt or the Automattic/Audrey team.

I felt prepared to do the work of The Tavern, and I saw the lack of interactions with Matt as a sign that he trusted me to do that work.  

I felt like Matt was available via Slack if I needed him, however the only time I needed him was when I needed access to the X.com account.

Also, I had read The Year Without Pants, so I was expecting this trusting, hands-off approach to leadership.

So, with all that in mind, it was great working with Matt!

How would I improve The Tavern?

I have a great love in my heart for The Tavern.  Regardless of who takes over the reins, I hope they continue to pursue a deeper connection to the WP community.  

The Tavern is a hub of our community – a place where people go to learn and to be heard. The format and history of The Tavern communicate an openness that has proven tough to replicate elsewhere on the web.

At the end of the day, wptavern.com is the humans who write, run, and interact on the website.  I hope whoever takes over continues to push those traditions.

I see an opportunity to have the Tavern community provide more input into what gets reported on.

I can see the next leader reimagining the WP Tavern Forums, doing more outreach on other platforms, and looking for other ways to increase engagement on-site.

What’s next for me?

I don’t know what’s next.  I feel like I could add some very positive and subjective direction to The Tavern based on my unique experiences in the WP community.

To be honest, I would love to be involved with The Tavern in any capacity that it needs me.

Would I do it again?

It’s been a thrilling couple of weeks, and I’ve gone through a rainbow of emotions and learnings.

I would absolutely 100% do it again.  And who knows – maybe you’ll see this smiling face at The Tavern again someday!

Comments ↓

by Toby Cryns at March 13, 2024 11:29 PM under Opinion

WPTavern: #111 – Josepha Haden Chomphosy on Navigating WordPress’ Evolution, Growth and Change

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how WordPress is managed and directed.

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

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

So on the podcast today, we have Josepha Haden Chomphosy.

Josepha is the executive director of WordPress, a role she’s held since 2019. She’s been contributing since 2012, and has a special fondness for brand new to WordPress learners.

During the episode, Josepha shares her insights on overcoming the challenges posed by the pandemic. She talks about the positive strides made within the Gutenberg project, and the need for improved change management during its implementation.

We also explore the significant achievements of WordPress, reflecting on its growth to power 43% of the web. This gets us into the objectives for future WordPress expansion. Despite some current stagnation, Josepha explains her ambition to reach 51% market share. She talks about the potential in the enterprise sector, and the importance of reshaping walled gardens into community gardens. A metaphor for an inclusive and participatory ecosystem.

We also discussed the semi anarchic nature of participation in WordPress, acknowledging the diverse perspectives of for profit motives, and those who contribute for nonprofit motives.

We contemplate increased diversity and restructured WordPress events, with aspirations of up to 160 word camps a year. And we discuss recent experimentation in the event space.

Expressing her journey from hands-on community management, to her executive role, Josepha explains her optimism for WordPress, with passion and authenticity. She emphasizes the responsibility of aligning contributions with strategic roadmaps, ensuring that each initiative within WordPress delivers meaningful impact.

Towards the end, we discuss how the success of WordPress can be measured. This is focused upon metrics like attendance, engagement, and community contributions as a way to gauge the vitality, and sustainability of the WordPress ecosystem.

If you’re interested in the WordPress project as a whole, and how it’s run and directed this podcast is for you.

If you want to find out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

A quick note, before we begin. This was recorded live at WordCamp Asia. There was quite a lot of background noise to contend with, and I’ve done my best to make the audio as easy to listen to as possible.

And so without further delay, I bring you Josepha Haden Chomphosy.

I am joined on the podcast today by Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Hello.

[00:04:00] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Hello. How’s it going, Nathan?

[00:04:02] Nathan Wrigley: Very, very good. We’re in the, I actually don’t know the name of the venue, but we’re in the venue.

[00:04:06] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: I know it by its acronym, which is TICC.

[00:04:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That’s where we are. We’re in the media room. It’s Word Camp Asia. It begins today, we had the contributor day yesterday. As I said at the beginning, I’m joined by Josepha, but I think probably for the community who don’t know you, could you just tell us who you are? Give us your bio, what your role is in the WordPress project, because it’s quite a significant role.

[00:04:29] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yeah. I’ll give you the mini bio, so that we have a little bit of extra space for the what I do, because it is significant. So I’m Josepha Haden Chomphosy. I’m the executive director of the WordPress Project, and I came to this work kind of through marketing and other ways.

I learned about WordPress in 2000 and like 10, 2011. Made my way, over the course of my career, through marketing, and data analysis strategy, and then wound up here in the WordPress project. I did some community stuff first, and then took over some core work, and then did what I do now, which is as the executive director.

And so what I do as the executive director is I, for one, make sure that all of the bits and pieces, that are working across the project, are kind of aware of each other. It’s very hard to see how everything is interconnected. But I also make sure that we have some focus and effort around specific projects. Things like making sure we have volunteers coming in, and contributors that are trained, and some way for new attendees to figure out how to learn WordPress, or learn how to contribute, however that goes. And making sure that we have time and attention, funding in the project as a whole. So it’s a bit project management, it’s a bit funding and resource management, and quite a bit of strategy as well.

[00:05:42] Nathan Wrigley: It really sounds like rather a lot. Do you find yourself working a regular shift? You know, do you begin at nine in the morning, and finish at five at night? Or are you 24/7, having to wake up because people in, for example, Asia are doing things at certain times?

[00:05:54] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yeah, so when I first started doing the work, I would work anytime, and kind of just let my day fill up as it would, because it always does. As we ended up with more contributors, and for my teams at Automattic, as I ended up with more and more people there, it became really clear to me that, like a goldfish, it’s just going to grow to the size of the container you have for it.

And so I do really try now to fit it into set times. And, you know, I’ll get up early, work a bit late if we have synchronous talks that have to happen. And when I go to WordCamps, I just, you know, work 16 hour days, because that’s how you do at a WordCamp.

But yeah, for the most part, I really try to make sure that I guard my personal time pretty jealously, and that when I am working, try to make the best use of my time, and everyone’s time that’s working with me. Because we all have finite resources in that space. Like, we all have the same number of hours in our day, and my time isn’t more important than anyone else’s. And if I consider my time important, I should treat everyone else’s time as important too.

[00:06:54] Nathan Wrigley: You must have had a great sense of optimism when you began in 2012, to have risen in the way that you did. You must have enjoyed it, threw yourself into it I’m guessing. Do you still have that same sense of optimism about the project in 2024, that you did in the 2012, 2013, 2014, or is your role, the nature of the role that you have, mean that you view it from a different angle?

[00:07:14] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: So, to answer the question specifically, to answer that particular question, I do really still have a lot of optimism. Like, there’s so much that we can do for the project to get it moving faster in specific directions, and kind of get everyone in here and working on it in a way that is impactful for them, but also is valuable to our CMS and our community.

But I wouldn’t say that my career progression was because of optimism, right? Like, I try to be a realist. Pragmatic optimism is kind of how I like to really hone in on that. But I continued to see the need for someone to come and do the work that I am specifically skilled at doing, and also was really prepared to take on the responsibility.

It wasn’t necessarily like, I’m optimistic, and therefore I will do this forever. It was, I see the importance and the value of having this available, long after any of us want to stop working with it. And so I have the skillset, I have the attention, I have some of the connections, and I accept the responsibility to help move this forward, and keep it moving in a good direction, for as long as they’re willing to have me. So I guess it was less because of optimism I did, and more of a, because I can accept that kind of responsibility, I will.

[00:08:28] Nathan Wrigley: At WordCamp Asia you’re giving a talk, and the title of that talk is converting walled gardens into community gardens. And I’m just going to read a little bit of the blurb that goes with that. You mentioned the fact that WordPress is this giant CMS, and you say that it’s grounded, it’s got an ethic, it’s got maybe some morals in there. But there’s obviously some point of concern in your mind, because you say the following, how are we managing our distractions and feeding the opportunities around us? What are the distractions that you are thinking of when you put this talk together? What are the distractions that the community is experiencing?

[00:09:01] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yeah so, firstly, I have to acknowledge that sometimes when folks work closely with me, they see that I am highlighting potential risks in a plan. And I never do that because I think that it’s a bad plan, I do that because I believe, probably, it’s the right way to go. And if we don’t know what is in the landscape for us, we can stub our toe on rocks. Like, I’m just trying to find the rocks we are going to stub our toes on.

So I do have some questions around that. I think the last time that this came up, this question of what is going to distract us from doing the things that help us move faster, or move better, or be more relevant? It’s always the question of, are we contributing things that are specifically related to the roadmap?

There is, for open source, this basic philosophy of contributors are here to contribute without the expectation of reciprocity, and without an agenda. But I have always really felt like the without an agenda part, is not as nuanced as it should be. Because everybody does have a plan. They’re trying to do things. Like, people are contributing some functionality, because it fixes a problem they had.

And so that doesn’t fit with the idea of no agenda. And also, we don’t want aimless contributions. When you support 43% of the web, it’s so difficult to move that number of people in any sort of direction. That if people show up with kind of aimless contributions, you aren’t able to have a clear direction for where the software’s headed, or the community’s headed. And it’s not a good contribution experience either.

They don’t feel like they have a clear impact. It’s not clear how their project gets into the CMS over time, or gets rolled into our event series. And so I just, I don’t have any concrete examples at the moment, because they will all belong to someone, and I’m not going to have them experience this on a podcast.

But like, you’ve always got to watch out for those things where, this project that we were working on, it worked really well when TikTok wasn’t where everyone was. This worked really well when Reddit was in its heyday, or whatever. Like, it was stuff and communication processes, and methods that made sense for the context of the time. And I just want to make sure that everything that we’re doing makes sense for the context of now, where it’s reasonably possible.

[00:11:13] Nathan Wrigley: So, what’s your guiding principle? What’s your North Star? Because I’m guessing that maybe you speak to Matt, Matt Mullenweg. In the pyramid of WordPress and organisation, you are right near the top.

Where do you get your inspiration, for what the project should be doing? Where do you find that? Do you come up with ideas? Toss them around between the people that you work with? Or is it really a process of getting in the Slack every day, and just listening, and percolating, and filtering the ideas out?

Because it feels like, if WordPress were a blue chip company, and it was a for-profit organisation, you’d have this hierarchy, wouldn’t you? And right at the top would be the CEO, and they would make the decisions with the board, and those decisions would then trickle down, and everybody would have to obey.

But that’s not the way it works. So I’m genuinely curious. Where do you get your intuitions, as to what we should be doing? And how do you sort of shepherd that conversation, so it doesn’t feel like, well, we’re being told what to do, more we’re being guided, here’s some things we could do?

[00:12:06] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yeah. I’m going to try to answer them sequentially and do my best. And if I get lost, you’re going to have to bring me back. So the first question you had was, what is my lighthouse? What is it that I’m aiming for? So I do kind of have this dream of like WordPress being the thing that secures the future of the open web. And it is literally a dream, because we actually don’t have that much agency. Like we, even if we get to 51% of the web, will not actually have the ability to just say, and now the open web is here forever. Like, that’s not within our control. So it is a bit of a dream.

But there is, for me and my decision making, an overarching vision of what we can offer as a project. And a lot of my decisions are based on that. So I believe that the WordPress project and ecosystem should be able to offer an excellent open source alternative to every tool that is required to get a business started online, to get your project started online.

And that feels attainable, right? Like, the CMS, done. Open source CMSs, in place of proprietary CMSs, that’s good. But also things like Openverse, and the photo directory, and how that can compete if we figure out a couple of provenance issues, and maybe like micropayments. How that can compete with Getty images.

And I think that that’s a really compelling offer and opportunity, especially because, as people are coming into this community, so much of what they’re looking for is kind of a more equitable access to a network. To not only succeed at their learning and connection to their local community, but then also to succeed with their business goals, however they are.

And so that is my guiding principle from just like what we have to do here standpoint. And then there are the philosophical principles that we all kind of hold in the WordPress project, which is the four freedoms of open source, those are in there. The five good faith rules of community that we have.

And so we’ve got the ethical principles that are in there. We have the pragmatic things, like always decisions, not options. And I feel like they all ladder up into this concept of like, we could be the primary open source alternative to make a business happen. To make your dream happen. To make your story known online. So there’s that. And immediately, I forgot the 17 other questions.

[00:14:18] Nathan Wrigley: It was really about what is your North Star, and how do you decide what’s important?

[00:14:23] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Okay, so for one, there are a lot of like literal decision making tools that I use. But I know that’s not the question you’re actually asking. The question you’re asking is, how do I keep track of the information that comes in, and where do I find the best guesses about the future? So that we can choose the right product choices. We can make the right event and ecosystem decisions. And fortunately, I have the incredible good fortune of having my own leadership team inside Automattic.

I’ve got three people who work directly with me. Héctor Prieto, Chloé Bringmann and Angela Jin, and probably everyone will recognise all three of those names, work with me to help keep track of everything that’s happening across the ecosystem, and the programs, and the CMS.

But there are also about 10 people that I really rely on in the community, and they are from across different companies, and different disciplines, they have different roles. We have people who like specialise in product or project management, and people who are core developers.

And so like I have a lot of people who are helping to flag issues, and flag potential future opportunities that I otherwise wouldn’t have seen. And I rely heavily on them to talk through like, what is the essential pros and cons of this discussion that’s being had here? What is the relative impact to like performance in the CMS? What’s the relative impact for attendees, if we make this change versus that change?

And so I do a lot of discussion with a lot of people and, yeah, it’s based on like stuff that’s happening in Slack, and Post Status, and Twitter, and kind of all around. I am just one person, and it has been probably more than a decade since one person could know everything that was going on in WordPress. And so I’m very lucky to have probably a good collection of 12 to 15 people that are helping me do that.

[00:16:08] Nathan Wrigley: If you were the CEO of a blue chip company, I’m guessing that the metric for success would be profitability. Are we in the black? Are we in the red? What did we do to go into the red? What did we do to go into the black? What’s the guiding principle there? When you look back over the last, let’s say, couple of years, what do you see as the moments that were successful? You know, it doesn’t have to be specific, it could be more of a general question in terms of, what does success look like? What are you looking for there?

[00:16:33] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: It’s different in different places. So there are kind of four big focuses in the WordPress project. You’ve got the CMS and related software elements. You have our programs and event series, which are WordCamps, meetups, and then also all of the things that keep volunteers feeling like they are included in our project.

We also have the ecosystem, which is like the marketplaces that we have, with the plugin directory, and the theme directory, things like that. And then we kind of have a fourth that is our communications and operations side of things.

And so for each four of those, there is a different metric. We don’t have a lot of early indications. All of what we can look at is primarily just like a result, as we are working through things. And so we can’t make a lot of early course correction, just because we don’t. take data for anyone to have WordPress. We have instituted auto updates, and so like we can’t really follow downloads as a proxy for how many people are using WordPress, like things like that. And so the indications, the metrics, if you want to call them that, are different for different things.

But ultimately, I really believe that our best proxy for understanding how vital WordPress is to our own ecosystem, is seeing how many people are still trying to learn WordPress. How many people are attending our events? How many people are showing up to help build it? Although that is a very long tail kind of thing.

It can take anywhere from, you know, five months to five years for somebody to go from using WordPress to finally contributing to WordPress. And so that one has a really long latency period.

But also there are normal things like, how many new followers do we have on our social media channels? How many new users do we have in Slack that are participating actively? How many contributors do we have, as we are just kind of running through our annual milestones of flagship events, or WordCamps overall, or major releases?

It’s a bunch of things. I think that once a year at State of the Word, kind of point all those out. So we don’t like have dashboards or anything that keeps track of it. But I do have a general sense for where things are over the course of the year.

[00:18:33] Nathan Wrigley: If we were to go back to 2012, I don’t know what percentage of the internet was using WordPress, but it certainly wasn’t 43%. At the moment, 43 ish, thereabouts, 43%. It’s highly improbable, I would’ve thought, that looking back 10 years, you would’ve said approximating half of the internet would be using WordPress.

So it’s had this really unprecedented growth. Monumental growth. So if you were to look back at any one of those years, probably the numbers tick up each year, and let’s just use that one metric, the percentage of the internet. Do you have any intuitions as to whether that 43% is in a state of ascendancy still? Are we looking into 2024, 2025, are we looking for it to be 44, 45, 46? Has it plateaued? Is it maybe going down? Do you have any expectations of where the project will be in a year, two years?

[00:19:20] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: So, for one, one of my big success indicators would be for our percentage to get to 51%. Because that approximates out to like 75% usage, which is a ton. I realise 51% is a really big percent of the web. And it’s like, you know, eight percentage points away.

Now the question of, are we still growing? Do we expect more growth? Do we expect like incremental, or another big spike? We do. I think we all can see that we currently have a little bit of a plateau. But also, in my big picture goals post for 2024, I called out very specifically, like, I see that this is something that we all kind of started talking about in 2022.

That’s the first time that we all sort of had a question around like, is this plateauing? Is it an unlimited plateau? Do we think we can do something to change it? And I do think we can do something to change it. But I also think what has to happen will really take a lot of concerted effort, for two reasons.

For one, because in order to do any last mile work, like the last mile of a delivery is always the most expensive. That is going to be our hardest work, to get from 43% to 51%. Just because you have kind of sold to everyone who already knew they needed you, right?

And then the second part of the problem is that, everyone else that is available to, quote unquote, sell WordPress to, are companies and business deciders, who maybe don’t know that they need a CMS. Which is a different proposition than companies or business deciders, who know they need a CMS, they know they need a website, they’re just trying to figure out which one. We can certainly make a strong case for why WordPress is the best long-term solution for them.

But if they don’t agree that they need a website, or that if they do need a website, that it needs to have enough functionality for them to grow, or whatever reason they have, that’s a different sales proposition. And getting into that enterprise space, getting into that corporate area, as you mentioned, there’s a bit of a shift that you have to make in your mind.

There’s a feeling of open source means everything’s free, because it says it right there, free and open source software. But free in this context means, you know, about speech, and freedom, and copy left, right? And less about no money.

No one ever said that you should not be able to make money in an open source project, or using open source software. Like, it is seen all over the internet right now, that you can build a business on top of open source technologies.

And so that is a big shift in mindset. WordPress has always been very pro business. If you look at our plugins, it’s not a bunch of plugins that are like, here’s how you paint on WordPress or something. Like, that’s not the plugins we have. We have plugins that are like, we want you to be able to convert into your contact form better. We want your contact form to be easier, and more enticing, so that you can have those contacts, so you have the opportunity to pitch your product, or pitch your service.

If you look at what we have around, we do want people to accomplish business tasks, on top of any other sort of thing that they’re wanting to do here. And so I don’t think it’s as big a shift as we worry that it is. I think it’s always been there, and we just are a little scared of the idea of it. It feels like we kind of have to lose that original ethos, and I don’t necessarily know that that’s the case.

[00:22:43] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned in the blurb for your talk, you were talking about distractions, and we covered that off a little bit. But you talk about the sprawling nature of the future of our projects. And I’ll just quote, in your talk you are going to look at what the sprawling future of the project could be, as we continue to convert walled gardens into community gardens. What do you mean by that? What are the walled gardens that you’re talking about, and what are the community gardens that you wish to have?

[00:23:07] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: You’ll have to come to my talk. Nathan! But also, I will give you an elevator pitch of it. So there’s a concept of walled gardens in technology. It historically, or in recent history anyway, has referred to marketing platforms. And a good proxy for that, if that doesn’t make immediate sense is, you know, like Facebook, and Instagram, Twitter, things like that. Where the audience is contained in the platform.

And so if you enter the platform, you have an audience, and you just have to say compatible things to get the audience to you. That’s it. That’s what’s considered a walled garden right now.

And community garden is actually not something that people use when they’re talking about software, but I want us to. And so that is also a big part of my presentation.

But a community garden is, you know, in the US it’s a plot of land, generally in a city, that’s broken up into smaller pieces, where anyone who’s in that local community can come and garden in it.

[00:24:00] Nathan Wrigley: We call it the commons.

[00:24:01] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Right. People say that often. But I don’t think that’s a very accessible term for anyone anymore. I have found that when we talk about that and we’re like, people putting sheep in the fields. Like, it’s a very cute idea, but it’s not the visual thing, in my experience, hasn’t kept up with what people understand now.

A lot of us might understand a community garden, where you have small plots, you can do your gardening. If there’s anything left over, the entity, the community that is managing the larger group can redistribute that, and make it available to other people in the community. If that’s what they’re trying to do, they can donate it to community food banks, or sell it to other members of the community, and use the proceeds to make better beds in their community garden, or improve the ground that’s in there, or pay somebody to do administrative work, something like that, you know.

I think that’s much more modern, evocative. Like, it has a much more modern experience than taking sheep out to fields. I know that there are still people who take care of sheep, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that we probably don’t have, actually, a bunch of local common grasslands for people to all take their uncommon sheep to, in the one common place. Like, that’s what I’m saying. It’s just a more modern concept, and I think a more understandable concept as a result.

[00:25:12] Nathan Wrigley: If we just put to one side, that the walled garden of Facebook, and the walled garden of all those proprietary platforms, and we just think about our community. What are your feelings in 2024 about how it’s going? How the WordPress community is going? I mean, we’re gathered, there’s probably 2000 or so people at this event. We’re obviously, all of us, optimistic about WordPress. We probably think about it far more than is healthy for us. We are all really into it.

But there’s been, over the last few years I’ve seen posts by various different thought leaders, for a want of a better word, in the WordPress space, about what’s happening in the community. You know, whether the for-profit motive in the community is kind of undermining the sort of more open source nature.

I don’t really have a question here, it’s just more, what are your thoughts about whether the WordPress community is bifurcating, whether we’ve got this, you know, for-profit, not-for-profit, if it’s getting shattered? How easy is it to steer that ship?

[00:26:06] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Sure, well, for just big picture context, it is worth remembering that open source, as a concept, is semi anarchical. And so like, a little bit, you will always have people who are here for the philosophy, and the ethos, that are like, all money is bad. And I get it. I get it. I understand that concept. But, in my experience, one, it has always been true of every WordPresser I’ve ever met, that they have, what I believe is a healthy skepticism about major corporations that move in.

And that’s not because the corporations are necessarily bad. It’s not because the folks who are here, doing these individual pieces of work, contributing personally of their time, are necessarily more right than anyone else. It’s just a thing that takes place, because of the values that we have as open source contributors and philosophers, for lack of a better term.

And so I don’t think that what we’re seeing, like I know some of the posts that you’ve mentioned, where people are like, everybody’s everywhere, no one’s in a single direction. I agree. We are lacking a little bit of direction. But I don’t actually think that it is an unsolvable problem. And I don’t think that it is a pernicious kind of existential issue. I think it’s been here for the whole time, and it goes in cycles.

As we have been working our way back out of the incredible lull that we had during Covid, where we had no in-person events, because the best way that we could pull together for each other was to stay apart. Which does not make sense to people in WordPress. We’re like, no, we’re together all the time. We’re shoulder to shoulder, looking at the problem. Don’t make me stay away from the people I love. Like, this is how we are. I get it.

Coming back out of that, the human nature part that your brain enacts to kind of work as a coping mechanism, to make sure that they understand what, from a flight or fight perspective, will hurt them or not, really goes into overdrive when you’ve spent a lot of time in isolation. It becomes harder and harder to see the people who are definitely like you, and the organisations that are definitely like you, versus those that are not.

And so you look for, because your brain has a negativity bias, because it’s what keeps you alive. You look for the things that definitely are not the same. Because that is the most important thing to look at, rather than what is definitely the same. And so that’s why it feels so exacerbated right now, I believe. And this does go in cycles.

We had a little bit of this in 2018, as we were working toward moving Gutenberg into core. And now we have it again here, coming out of Covid. I don’t think it’s unsolvable. It is a big problem. But also, like I know this community is able to see each other as more than that person whose plugin competes with my plugin, or that person who disagreed with me on Trac or GitHub. Like, I know that these people believe in each other more than that. And so, yeah, I see it. I agree. It’s a problem, we should fix it. But I don’t think it’s an intractable problem.

[00:29:03] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned that one of the four things that you have to do is community engagement events, that kind of thing. Has it returned? Obviously we had this lull, the pandemic Are we back to where we were in 2019?

[00:29:14] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: No.

[00:29:14] Nathan Wrigley: Is there any intuition that it will get back to that?

[00:29:17] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Obviously I hope it does. That is a goal. I think that 2019 had our highest number of WordCamps. I think that was 140 in the year. I definitely would like to get back to it. This WordCamp that we’re at, is the 1999th WordCamp. So the next one that happens, and I don’t know which one it is off the top of my head. Congratulations, you’re WordCamp 2000.

But it’s not back to where it was, just because it takes a long time. Like, we have a flywheel effect, that is broken. And we have a very clear concept of what a good WordPress event is about, and what it’s like, and how it needs to be organised. And it takes a lot of training to get that done.

And so like our just consistent pipeline of new organisers, it’s pretty shallow at the moment, but the team is working on it. Both by kind of diversifying the types of events that we offer to folks, to make them either hyper-local, or very specific to a niche. Or just being clear that like we can have just one track of content, or just one speaker, and then we do this other thing. Like, we’re trying to diversify those, and really reinvigorate the local communities, especially in our larger cities across the globe. And I think we’ll get back there.

We have continually, more attendees every month, than we had months prior. And then that goes into every year, more attendees as we go. I, at one point, felt like my goal for the community, as a whole, was to get to like 400 WordCamps in a year. I don’t think that is a reasonable goal now, because that’s a lot. It was a lot at the time, I just didn’t know how to set that goal I think.

[00:30:50] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a nice number with two zeros.

[00:30:52] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yeah, I was like, that’s a nice round number, I think I can do that. And, you know, we went from 60 a year to 140, during the time that I was helping to guide that program. So like it seemed plausible, but probably I think a bit too big ultimately. I would like to get us back to 140. I think up to 160 is probably good.

But I think maybe, along with this diversification of events that the community team is working on, we might also want to take a look at how we actually stack up our events. So like we have meetups, WordCamps, regional camps, flagships right now, you know, in a pyramid.

And I just wonder if, based on what attendees need from these events now, we might need to look at something a little bit different. Whether it’s meetups and then WordCamps that are specific and niche, and then regional WordCamps and a single flagship. Or if we want to have smaller numbers of meetups, and anything that has a clear shared topic. We make those into hybrid WordCamps, and then continue up in there. I have a lot of thoughts about the fact that we have attendees that still need us, and still need what we are offering, just not in the same proportions that we have been offering it up until this point.

[00:32:04] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like experimentation is the goal for the next period, with events in particular. Play with events, come up with different ideas. It’s a bit like throwing spaghetti at the wall, see what sticks, try something out. And at this event, we have this notion of invited speakers, which is of interesting and new.

[00:32:19] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Well that’s always been around.

[00:32:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:32:20] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: A lot of people don’t know.

[00:32:21] Nathan Wrigley: I think maybe it was the magnitude of some of the names that I saw, you know, people who have fame and familiarity outside of the WordPress space, such that it could almost attract people in, just because they’re on the roster. Thought that was quite an interesting idea.

But nevertheless, the idea is to experiment with different things inside of events, and see what works, and keep doing more of those. But it does sound like you’re optimistic. It does sound like it’s crept up. And whilst it might not be what it was in 2019, it’s going in the right direction.

[00:32:49] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Yeah. And had you asked me this a year ago, the answer would’ve been different. So I was still optimistic, because I believe in the strength of a good meaning group of people, like a good hearted group, which WordPressers generally are.

So it still would’ve been optimistic. But we had actually not, I feel, gotten to kind of a critical mass. We hadn’t gotten through the hardest part of the work, at this time last year.

It wasn’t until, I think it was probably a month a WordCamp Europe last year, where I felt like, okay, we have done enough of the foundational work that the flywheel effect can start to take place again. And so that obviously requires a bit of a shift in the way that folks who are working on building the community, and managing the community events.

It requires a little bit of a change in how you see those events functioning in the ecosystem. I’m absolutely optimistic. I think that we have gotten past the hardest part of rebuilding, which is making sure that your foundations are right.

[00:33:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. The next two questions are retrospective. I want you to look back in time.

[00:33:49] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Those are better than predicting the future.

[00:33:50] Nathan Wrigley: Then we get to that, I’m afraid. If we were to look back over, let’s just pick a number. Let’s go for five years. If we were to look back over the last five years, what’s made you happy about what’s happened in WordPress? So that could be the code, it could be the community, it could be anything you like. And also, what do you wish had been done differently? So let’s look back. What makes you happy? What do you wish had happened in a different way?

[00:34:10] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: So something that has made me happy in that timeframe, is that the bet that we placed on Gutenberg seems to have really paid off. Like, we went from 23% to 43%, in that time span. And I know that I was very anxious about the Gutenberg project. I didn’t talk, I fought full throatedly with Matías about the best ways forward on it, and if we were fully considering the user in the way that WordPress wants to, and should do.

And so he and I really got in the trenches on that, for all of 2017 and 2018, it feels like. And the bet of, for such a dramatic change, bringing in more people than we otherwise would have. I wanted it to be true, and I was experimenting with a full and confident heart, but also my brain was very concerned about it.

And so in the last five years, I am so glad that all of the work that we put into, not only making sure that the software that we were building was valuable for people who want to use WordPress, but also that the work that we did to communicate around it, and bring the community with us, worked. Because if we had not really committed to the change, you can sabotage anything by just not doing something.

And so my teams at Automattic, and then also the contributors in the WordPress project, just came with us on this with, I wouldn’t say gleeful abandon, that is not what they did. But certainly with the sort of critical feedback, that implies they believe that it could be possible. They saw that there was a possibility there. And so that’s my favorite thing that happened, in the last five years.

What I wish would’ve gone better is, I wish that we had done some of that change management work earlier. We ended up, for most of 2019, and I think this may be at the top of 2019, is when I first met you, at WordCamp London potentially. And I specifically went there, I spent the first six months of 2019 traveling to the communities that had told us that we had created the most chaos with merging Gutenberg. And just having y’all tell me what you hated the most about everything. And almost always the answer was, you might be right about the future of this software, and why Gutenberg needs to exist, and I just wish you had done it in a different way.

And so that’s what I wish we had done differently, is to do a bit better change management. Because all change, whether it’s a good change or not, represents a loss. And so if you cannot say at the start, this is great for where we are, but it’s not going to get us into the future. I think this is why we have to leave this point, and then I believe that this is probably the next point that we’re going to, help me find the way there. If you haven’t said very clearly, and with lots of confidence, why today won’t get us to tomorrow, you’re not going to get people to comfortably come with you into tomorrow.

We did do that work, and it was a lot of work. A number of contributors in Automattic, and in WordPress, and in other sponsoring companies, put in so much effort into training, and communications, and mediation, and just like listening. And I think that we could have done a little bit less of that, if we had done a little more proactive work, and just letting everybody know why we felt like WordPress needed to change.

[00:37:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. If everybody working in the WordPress community was an employee, then you could distribute the memo, couldn’t you? You could just say, this is the intention, off we go. But you’ve got this massive diaspora. And some of the people, you know, some of them are paying incredible attention to everything that is going on. Other people are just, oh look, it’s been updated, I wasn’t anticipating that.

But I think about it a bit like a jigsaw puzzle, the whole project, but Gutenberg in particular. And it feels like now that we’re in 2024, it felt like there were just one or two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. And we knew that there was going to be this complete puzzle. But now it’s got a little bit more fleshed out. The communication got better. Most people seem to be on board. Everybody can anticipate what power behind it is. And I feel very confident that that was the right decision. I think you’re right, it was hard to communicate all that.

Okay, we won’t stare five years into the future. Let’s go for a year, because that’s enough. What are you excited about over the next year in WordPress?

[00:38:29] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: So, this is going to be back office excitement. This feels like the year that WordPress, and its community, is going to like get really aligned on what we’re trying to do. Like, I feel as though we have enough people in the community, and enough really big voices in the community saying, we need to all just get pointed in the right direction, and everybody row in that direction. There’s a lighthouse, don’t hit the rocks. We’re going to do the thing. Like, we have enough people that are all saying that we really need to band together on this.

I think we’re going to be able to get that done this year. And I don’t really know what that looks like. But I do, especially like in this particular event, hearing the contributors, and how excited they are. And we had like 75% new contributors. I thought they said 35%, but everybody keeps telling me I misheard, and it’s 75.

Like, 75% new contributors. These are people who have never cared to come and do this, either because they didn’t know that the community existed, or because they were busy trying to get their own businesses set up, so that they had the luxury to contribute some time to WordPress. For whatever reason, regardless, 35% is also a giant number. 75 is enormous, but 35 is really big.

Hearing the excitement that people have around what they could do, if they understood what our goals need to be. People want to see the direction they’re supposed to be headed in, and that WordPress is supposed to be headed in, so that we can make sure that it goes a bit further, a bit faster. And I love seeing that because I agree. We would love to go a bit further, a bit faster, and see what is around the corner.

[00:39:54] Nathan Wrigley: You genuinely sound incredibly optimistic.

[00:39:58] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: And here I am saying I’m a pragmatic realist.

[00:40:00] Nathan Wrigley: It’s really not coming from a point of, you know, I don’t get the sense from you, that you are saying this because it’s a trope that you’ve got to give me. I feel that you passionately believe everything that you’ve just said. It’s an important piece of work that you’re doing. You are completely aligned with it. You sound like you’ve got real optimism for the future. That’s great.

[00:40:17] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: I’ll give you a secret. And it’s a thing that I wish I could tell everybody, and so hopefully you have all of the WordPress project listening to this podcast. So, you know, you’ve got a task. So I cannot pull together enough words to express how much I care about this community, and what they want to be able to do with a software like this.

10 years ago, I did not understand what a software like this means. I was just like, someone, quote unquote, someone out there is giving away a whole software for free, neat. I didn’t get it. And the more and more that I learned about it, the more and more that I just, it’s so much more than any one of us. Which is an amazing thing to be able to say about a piece of software.

And as I moved from, in 2015, to my role of managing meetups, which is what I was hired to do, all the way to 2019, when I became the executive director, and then also became the leader of the open source division at Automattic, my work changed so much in that one moment.

And the thing that I hate the most, is that I think that our community of contributors, and especially the ones that are not just replete with hours to contribute to WordPress. I hate so much that they will never know how much I care about their success. That was always my favorite thing when I was working with events.

To see people come back year after year, and not only be like, Josepha, I took the advice that I got at this event last year, and look, I have my business up, this thing is thriving. Not only be able to come back year after year, and like be able to celebrate what they enacted, with what they learned the year prior. But then also, to be able to say, at some point, I have all of this success, because of what this community does. And so now I’m going to be part of that community, so other people can have that success.

Those were my favourite, favourite, parts. And I miss working with events all the time, giving presentations to help people learn how to do this better. Whether this is like literally blogging, or running a business in WordPress, no matter what. I miss giving people that kind of information.

But also, I know that I can make a much bigger impact with this work that I have now. And the fact that the way that I have to do my work doesn’t let me be very clear with everyone that I love their journey. I desperately want them to succeed, and I desperately want them to succeed with WordPress especially, but like open source overall. Like, it really pains me all the time, that people will never know how much I care about that.

[00:42:47] Nathan Wrigley: Your enthusiasm is genuinely highly infectious. Amazing. So, we’ll just round it off. Firstly, for all of the hard work that you’ve done to get you where you are, thank you for that. In anticipation of all the hard work that you are going to do, over the next few years, again, appreciated.

I’m sure that your job, in many ways, is a thankless task. You know, you’ve described that you would like to be able to speak to everybody, and reassure them, that’s not going to be possible. But for what you’ve managed to tell us over the last half an hour or so, I really appreciate it.

[00:43:13] Josepha Haden Chomphosy: Well, thanks for making the time.

On the podcast today we have Josepha Haden Chomphosy.

Josepha is the Executive Director of WordPress, a role she’s held since 2019. She’s been contributing since 2012 and has a special fondness for brand-new-to-WordPress learners.

During the episode Josepha shares her insights on overcoming the challenges posed by the pandemic. She talks about the positive strides made with the Gutenberg project and the need for improved change management during its implementation.

We also explore the significant achievements of WordPress, reflecting on its growth to power 43% of the web. This gets us into the objectives for future WordPress expansion. Despite some current stagnation, Josepha explains her ambition to reach a 51% market share. She talks about the potential in the enterprise sector, and the importance of reshaping ‘walled gardens’ into ‘community gardens’, a metaphor for an inclusive and participatory ecosystem.

We also discuss the semi-anarchic nature of participation in WordPress, acknowledging the diverse perspectives of for-profit motives and those who contribute for non-profit motives.

We contemplate increased diversity and restructured WordPress events, with aspirations of up to 160 WordCamps a year, and we discuss recent experimentation in the event space.

Expressing her journey from hands-on community management to her executive role, Josepha explains her optimism for WordPress with passion and authenticity. She emphasises the responsibility of aligning contributions with strategic roadmaps, ensuring that each initiative within WordPress delivers meaningful impact.

Towards the end, we discuss how the success of WordPress can be measured. This is focussed upon metrics like attendance, engagement, and community contributions as a way to gauge the vitality and sustainability of the WordPress ecosystem.

If you’re interested in the WordPress project as a whole, and how it’s run and directed, this podcast is for you.

A quick note. This was recorded live at WordCamp Asia. There was quite a lot of background noise to contend with, and I’ve done my best to make the audio as easy to listen to as possible.

Useful links

Openverse

WordPress Photo Directory

Four freedoms of open source

Big Picture Goals 2024

by Nathan Wrigley at March 13, 2024 02:00 PM under podcast

Akismet: 26 Ways to Reduce Form Abandonment and Capture Lost Leads

Imagine if every single site visitor converted. Every time you led someone to your landing page, they signed up for the free trial. Every time someone clicked through from social media, they made a purchase. How soon could you buy that private island and retire if you decrease form abandonment to zero?

A 100% conversion rate is about as realistic as stumbling upon an extra billion dollars in your sofa cushions. But there are things you can do to maximize your results. 

People hate filling out CAPTCHAs, for example. They could be reducing your conversions by as much as 40%. For most marketing campaigns, that’s way more than the difference between winning and losing. 

But CAPTCHAs are just one of dozens of reasons why people look at forms and even begin to fill them out, only to end up quitting the process.

Why form abandonment matters so much

Form abandonment costs you big money. Depending on the purpose of the form, you’re either missing out on a sale now, or missing out on future purchases that person would have made. 

In other words, the more traffic or potential customers your company has, the more online form abandonment will cost you. 

And the two overarching reasons most people abandon forms are mistrust and frustration. Either they don’t trust something about your company or the form, or they get frustrated at trying to navigate the process. 

So whether you own a relatively new or small business, run a mid-sized company, or are working on a campaign for a large multinational company, reducing form abandonment by even a few percentage points can result in big revenue that you would have otherwise missed. 

Use the checklist below to reduce your form abandonment rate. Do the easy ones first if you need to tackle a lot of these ideas. Or, if you’ve been at this for a while, scan through the list and find the one or two ideas you haven’t yet implemented, and get your form abandonment rate to tick down just a little bit more.

Proven ways to reduce form abandonment

Yes, your company is unique. Nobody does it quite like you. But the principles of high-converting lead generation forms are fairly universal. Review the list below and choose a few to implement today for a better tomorrow. 

1. Keep forms simple and short

Only ask for information you need right now. You may want more information for future marketing purposes, but you can find other ways to collect some of that later. Focus on the most essential and critical information related to the purpose of each individual form. That might just be a first name and an email. It might include a location. It could also include something that allows you to segment your audience. 

2. Break longer forms into multiple steps

For longer forms, especially surveys and forms related to making a purchase or registering for an event, you’ll do better by turning one long form into several smaller forms with fewer steps on each screen. This makes the process seem faster, and it’s much easier to navigate on mobile devices.

progress bar on a contact form

This is probably the primary reason why HubSpot reports that multistep forms convert 87% better than single step forms. 

3. Place your forms above the fold

If the primary goal of a particular web page is to get people to fill out your form, then don’t bury it. Make sure the online form appears above the fold and is visible the moment people reach that page. 

If the page has a lot of content, include the same form again either at the end of the page, in the middle, in the sidebar, or in multiple places. 

4. Avoid CAPTCHAs (and reCAPTCHAs) at all costs

If form abandonment was a living, breathing monster, its favorite snack would be CAPTCHA. What is CAPTCHA? You’ve certainly encountered it yourself. It’s a little annoying puzzle you have to fill out before the website you’re on will let you complete the form.

example of a CAPTCHAPhoto from http://www.captcha.net/

A CAPTCHA might require you to decipher a word that’s very hard to read. reCAPTCHAs usually ask you to do something like pick out all the images with bicycles or stoplights. 

Of course, no one on Earth likes puzzling through CAPTCHAs. They’re a chore we loathe. And that’s why, as mentioned at the outset, CAPTCHAs lead to a high form abandonment rate. 

In a lot of cases, people don’t even try to complete the puzzles. They see a barrier and instantly surrender. 

Needless to say, CAPTCHA is a form completion destroyer. 

5. Prefer non‑intrusive spam protection

CAPTCHAs cause major issues for your users (and your bottom line). But they also stop spam, and you don’t want that, either. Otherwise, you’ll add hours of work for someone in your organization (possibly an entire full time team) who has to sort through that mess each week.

The solution? Akismet.

Akismet homepage with the text

This program stops spammers from filling out your forms but without the frustrating CAPTCHA. Using advanced AI and an enormous database of experience, Akismet works in the background of your site to identify and block spammers and bots from completing your forms.

Your users don’t even know it’s there. They just get to enjoy completing your forms without stress or frustration. That means more conversions, less form abandonment, and higher revenue. 

For large companies, there’s an enterprise solution for Akismet

6. Aim for fast load times

Slow websites drive people away. You have mere seconds to keep them from abandoning the page — especially on mobile devices. Forms are no different; They’re part of the page, and they need to work quickly. Don’t clutter up the page with oversized images or other features that slow things down. 

Use a free service like PageSpeed Insights to enter your URL and see if there are any ways to speed up the loading of your pages that include forms. 

core web vitals assessment for akismet.com

Using WordPress? A tool like Jetpack Boost could provide a major lift with almost no effort.

7. Optimize for mobile devices

When filling out a form, mobile devices aren’t as easy to use as a desktop or laptop computer. So you need to make accommodations. Other items on this list will help you optimize for mobile technology, such as single column forms and multistep forms. But don’t forget font size and readability, either. On the much smaller screen, it needs to be easy to read the field labels and button copy. 

8. Add security badges and trust signals

Trust is getting harder to presume in the online world. Security badges and other trust signals hold significant influence in reassuring people your forms (and your company’s technology) are safe and trustworthy. Do what it takes to obtain a few of these and place them in or around your forms.

9. Display social proof 

A great way to reduce form abandonment is to show testimonials and reviews that speak highly of your company. It’s even better if the reviews relate specifically to what the form is promising. Either way, collect some testimonials, star reviews, and screenshots of real customers rating your service or products, and place them around your form. 

Again, a primary cause of form abandonment is a lack of trust. 

10. Ensure forms are visually appealing

There are forms that look like they’re from the 1990s, and there are forms that look good. Even using pre-existing templates, it’s very easy to create simple forms that look sharp. If you haven’t updated your form’s appearance for a while, this is an easy item to check off your list. 

And while you want your form to fit in well with the rest of your site design, you don’t want it to blend in so well that people scroll right past it. Your forms need to stand out so they’re impossible to miss and tempting to complete. 

11. Provide a clear incentive to complete the form

“Join our newsletter!” Even in 2024, you still see this type of copy on so many email signup forms. The question is — why? Why should we join your list? Why do we want the free download? What value am I receiving? Should I give you my spam email address or the one I actually use? 

So you need to quickly, and clearly, explain why someone should register for your event. What’s in it for them? Why should they sign up for a webinar, or start a free trial, or fill out a survey? 

Your form is the closer. The visitor is looking at your website, your offer, and your form. They’re considering filling it out. But the form itself owns the task of convincing them to follow through and actually do it. So give them a good reason to do so. Make an appealing, irresistible offer or incentive that takes away whatever resistance may still be holding them back — and include it in the form copy itself.

That incentive is what will motivate them to follow through and complete the form, and not abandon it halfway. 

12. Use engaging microcopy around forms

Likewise, use engaging sales copy in and around the form. Restate the offer. State something about what they can expect after completing the form. Tell them what they get — something good that happens after they finish filling it out. 

13. Provide live chat support on form pages

If someone runs into a technical issue, a live chat option may be able to keep them from abandoning the form. This will capture people who really do want to fill out the online form but are having a little trouble. It will also capture anyone who has questions they need answered before completing the form.

14. Arrange fields in a single column layout

This has been tested numerous times for many years, and the verdict is in. In one study, users completed the single column form 15.4 seconds faster than the multi‑column form. That’s quite a difference. Many other tests have confirmed that single column forms convert better. And again, with the advent of mobile, the preference for single column forms is essentially a non‑issue. There is no other reasonable way to do it.

15. Ensure all fields are uniformly styled

This is a trust issue. Make sure you’re using the same font color, size, and type across your form fields. You can use different traits for the form title if you want to draw attention to it. But the fields need to have a consistent design. 

16. Clearly label each field

You can put field labels next to the field, above the field, within the field, or perhaps below it. Whichever approach you choose, make sure it is clear and easy to read and navigate. 

17 Indicate mandatory fields

This is another easy one. By now, most people are familiar with the idea of mandatory fields. This feature adds a little star next to the required fields. People appreciate this because then they know which ones they have to fill out, and which ones are optional. Plus, they won’t get upset about all the information you’re asking for if only some of it is required.

If you want to collect more information from people but don’t want to overburden them with a long form, using mandatory and optional fields strikes a good balance. For people willing to fill out every field, you’ll have more information about those customers. For people who just want to complete it and move on and don’t want to share certain information, they will do just the minimum — as long as you tell them which fields are mandatory.

18. Limit dropdown fields

Dropdown fields add steps to the process of filling out a form. With a dropdown, you have to click and interact differently than with text-based fields. Plus, you have to scan the choices. There’s more to do, and more to think about. 

If you have a dropdown menu you feel you really need, it’s okay to use it. But there shouldn’t be more than one of these in most forms. And even if you feel like you need one, can you collect the same information with radio buttons or checkboxes? This is a user experience issue.

WooCommerce form with checkboxes and short fields

19. Provide real‑time inline validation

One of the most frustrating experiences when it comes to filling out forms is getting to the end, clicking the button, and then learning you made a mistake, and all the information you entered vanishes. You have to start over. 

While you can (and certainly should) set up your forms to not cause entered data to disappear, an even better approach is to use real-time inline validation. 

This means the form itself tells the user they haven’t entered something correctly, or that they missed a mandatory field. For example, they might enter the date using an incorrect format, or an email address missing the ‘@’ symbol or that says ‘cm’ instead of ‘com’. 

With real-time validation, users will know they made a mistake and can easily fix it before clicking the button. This validation can also show up after they click so they can quickly find their mistakes. But users appreciate it most if it operates while they’re filling it out the first time. Making them go back up and find a mistake increases the risk of form abandonment. 

Real‑time inline validation is one of the best strategies for improving form abandonment rates.

20. Use autofill where possible

With some data, autofill can greatly accelerate the process of filling out a form. This can help with email addresses by filling in the ending such as “@yahoo.com”. It can also help with dates in some cases, as well as other fields. For people who have visited your site previously, even some of their personal information can autofill. 

Fast is good. And autofill makes the process of filling out forms much faster and less tedious. 

21. Pre‑select common options to reduce friction

Depending on the purpose and specifics of your form, you may be able to pre-select certain items or options that most people choose. That way, most people will have one less item to fill out to complete your form. 

You have to be careful with this one, though. You don’t want to pre-select things that relate to money. Some entities offering monthly subscriptions have been known to pre-select the monthly option over the one-time purchase option. Needless to say, customers don’t appreciate finding out on their credit card statement that they accidentally signed up for a recurring charge. 

So only use this strategy if there is something in your online form that is benign, and that most people tend to select or type. 

22. Show or hide fields based on user responses (conditional logic)

Some forms include fields that only apply depending on what a user selects earlier in the form. 

For example, suppose you have an event registration form, and one of the items lets the user choose between three different meal options. Then, it asks if they have any food allergies, and includes a list of allergies they can choose. If a user says they do not have any allergies, you can make the form hide the allergy selection field, and thus simplify the form. 

In other cases, you might expand the form to add fields based on user responses. Though this makes the form longer, the user won’t mind because they chose that option, which means they want to supply whatever information it’s asking about.

23. Show progress indicators for multistep forms

If you’re already using a multistep form or are planning to switch to that type after reading this checklist, look to also add a progress indicator. As the user completes each step in the form, the progress bar shows how much closer they are to finishing. 

progress bar on a multistep form

People like finishing things. The progress bar serves as a visual motivator and reminder that they are that much closer to finishing the form. It increases their desire to complete the task. 

24. Include a link to your privacy policy

For email opt-in forms, a privacy policy link is often a requirement due to anti-spam laws such as GDPR. So you have to have this for email forms. 

For other forms, while the privacy policy link may not be required, it’s still good practice because it expresses your commitment to respecting the privacy of the data your customers and leads are giving you in this form. You want customers to know they can trust you with their data, and are doing what you can to keep it safe and not share it. 

Does anyone actually read privacy policies? It’s probably rare. But having a policy assures people they can find out what you’ll do with their data. 

25. Use motivating button copy

Don’t use button copy that sounds like it was written by a computer. Submit. Enter. No — this is not the language of joy, excitement, interest, or desire. 

Your button is the final step in the process of filling out a form. Let the user finish on a high note. Make them feel good about sending their information to you. There are various ways to do this with button copy, such as:

  • Emotionally affirm them: “You’re in!”
  • Personalize it: “Sign me up!”
  • Inject personality or humor that fits your brand: “Fight spam!” 
  • Clearly describe what’s about to happen: “Register for webinar”
  • Remind them of the incentive: “Send my free book!”
  • Remind them of urgency: “Reserve my spot”

26. Regularly A/B test your forms and fields

You can A/B test many of the ways to reduce form abandonment that you see in this checklist. 

You can test font type, font color, number of fields, required fields, the effect of dropdown menus, security badges, button copy, multistep vs single‑step, and so many other things.

Set up one version of the page with one form, and another version with the altered form. Give the page enough time to collect a valid set of data, and then examine the results. If you see a notable difference in form conversions or abandonment rates, use the version that performs better.

Frequently asked questions

What is form abandonment?

Form abandonment happens when a visitor to a website begins to fill out a form, such as an email signup form or a webinar registration form, but then fails to complete it and leaves the page. 

Why is reducing form abandonment important?

If users who intended to complete an action on your website end up not doing so because of a preventable reason, you’ve lost whatever revenue that action represents. 

For example, if someone fills out your email signup form, you can begin sending them email marketing, which may lead to future purchases and revenue for your company. But if they abandon the form, all that potential revenue is lost. 

How can I identify which fields cause users to abandon my form?

You can use form abandonment tracking software to collect data that will reveal how people are engaging your forms, where they’re getting stuck, and when they’re quitting. 

What are the best practices for mobile form design?

Single column and multipage forms are much easier to engage on a mobile device than other form types. With a touchscreen, and a much smaller screen, these form designs fit better on the screen and deliver simpler functionality and a better user experience. 

Additional best practices include using large enough fonts to be able to read them on the smaller screen, including the form field labels and button copy. 

How does a multistep form improve conversion rates?

For longer forms, many fields can seem intimidating. multistep forms make the process feel simpler and easier by breaking it up into smaller chunks. Completing each step takes much less time, and the user experiences the positive feelings associated with making progress. 

What are some effective incentives for form completion?

This depends on the purpose of the form. Examples include discounts, free gifts, exclusive invites, access to special information or VIP services, free guides, reports or other information, and time‑limited offers.

How does A/B testing improve form performance?

It’s hard to know how well an online form is performing, or if it could perform better, unless you run an A/B test. Pick one characteristic on the form, such as the button copy, and create two forms with two different versions of the button. With enough data from people encountering these two versions, you’ll see if one version of button copy outperforms the other and improves the form’s conversion rate. You can test just about any feature in your form using this approach.

What are the best ways to build user trust in a form?

You can build trust in your forms by adding social proof, security badges, and links to your privacy policy, as well as giving the form a clean and consistent appearance and functional technology that works quickly and effortlessly. Having a live chat option also increases trust. 

What are some common mistakes in form design to avoid?

Don’t use more than one column for your form fields. Don’t make your buttons too small or hard to read. Don’t design the form such that it blends in too well with the rest of the page. And avoid asking for unnecessary information, especially if you make all the fields mandatory. 

Why should CAPTCHA be avoided?

CAPTCHA greatly depresses form conversion rates and increases form abandonment rates. The struggle and annoyance of trying to solve these puzzles leads a sizable percentage of users to give up and abandon the form. The good news is CAPTCHA alternatives exist.

What is Akismet, and how can it help reduce form abandonment?

Akismet prevents spammers and bots from filling out your forms, but without requiring the user to do anything or even know it’s happening. Akismet happens in the background, and uses AI to identify when bots and spammers are attempting to complete your forms so it can prevent them from succeeding.

How many websites trust Akismet?

More than 100 million websites are currently using Akismet, and as of this writing, it has prevented over 525,000,000,000 pieces of spam from being submitted through things like forms and comment sections. Global companies such as Microsoft, ConvertKit, and Bluehost trust Akismet to keep bots away without gumming up the user experience with their forms. 

by Jen Swisher at March 13, 2024 01:00 PM under Spam

March 12, 2024

WPTavern: The WordPress Training Team’s Big Changes: Learning Pathways and Website Redesign

Knowledge and training for WordPress has traditionally been very decentralized. There’s the official documentation, the developer documentation, the support forums, WordPress.tv, and then the wide array of community blogs, tutorials, and YouTube videos. Resources like documentation and support forums exist to answer questions and explain features, but their purpose is not to teach a person what it means to use WordPress. That’s the goal of Learn WordPress, managed by the WordPress Training team and living at the easy-to-remember URL learn.wordpress.org

Learn WordPress has existed in some form for the last decade, but the current iteration was launched by the training team in 2020, with free workshops and courses offering guided instruction through a number of topics, from basic site customization to block development. Now that three more years of educational content has been published, the team has been revisiting the structure of the website itself.

“Let’s be honest, if you hit the Learn WordPress home now, finding the right information for your specific needs isn’t the most intuitive process.”

That’s Jonathan Bossenger, a Developer Educator sponsored by Automattic. He’s actively involved in Learning Pathways, a new initiative launched last fall to address some of these architectural problems by July 2024. We spoke about his team’s goals with this new project.

What is a Learning Pathway?

“The Learning Pathways,” he explained, “are trying to solve [this problem]: allowing folks who come to Learn WordPress to find the specific content they need, whether they are brand new to WordPress, or have some experience and want to take that experience to whatever the next logical level is for them.”

Currently, content on the Learn site is organized more like a blog: it shows the newest content first, roughly categorized by concept. To help users find what they need, the new pathways will more effectively categorize courses based on three different types of learners: Users, Developers, and Designers. Then the content for each user type is organized by skill level, starting with Beginner, moving through Intermediate, and then Expert.

“Under the hood,” Jonathan explained, “the learning pathways are essentially courses, they use the same custom data types and quiz/activity functionality that courses currently do. But they are bigger, more encompassing courses, each with multiple modules that have a specific focus, containing one or more lessons to achieve the learning outcomes of that focus.”

So a developer or a designer coming into WordPress could look at their learning pathway and determine where they want to start: are they a Beginner or are they ready to level up their Advanced skills? Not all of the content has not been created yet, but existing courses are being repurposed and used as the foundation for pathways.

Curating Content for Modern WordPress

As a developer who has learned WordPress over the last decade, one concern I had was the sheer amount of knowledge you might need to grapple with. Just from the development side, there’s PHP, JavaScript, React, and dozens of APIs for everything from adding new settings to interacting with the database.

“Believe me, as the person spearheading the developer learning pathways, even I was surprised how much there is to dive into,” Jonathan added. “So for me personally, I’m a big fan of building a solid foundation, and then building on top of that. I’m pretty happy about how the beginner developer learning pathway has turned out, but I can see the future learning pathways we create on top of that being kind of fluid.”

This opens the question of just how the team is handling the transition of WordPress through its Gutenberg era, and whether they’re creating content for “Classic” features like shortcodes and widget areas.

“The factor that we are always keeping in mind is that we build those pathways to be about WordPress of today and the future,” he said, “not WordPress of the past. So while legacy APIs like the Shortcode API are useful to know about, it’s more important to teach someone about something like the REST API first, because that’s a big part of how WordPress works today, and probably for the future.”

When it comes to legacy WordPress educational content, there’s plenty of it around the internet. Hundreds of articles and demo plugins exist to teach you about shortcodes, whereas modern WordPress development is still uncharted territory. That said, Jonathan clarified that Learn WordPress “is focused more on what’s fully baked, not what’s still experimental.” If you’re interested in the bleeding edge, he recommends the WordPress Developer Blog.

A Well-Informed Redesign

The Learning Pathways project also includes a complete redesign of the Learn WordPress site. This new design will use the same visual language and underlying block-based parent theme that we’ve seen for other recent redesigns, like the Showcase.

A screenshot of the new Screenshot of the

Managing this entire project is Destiny Kanno, Head of Community Education at Automattic. She told me that her focus is “ensuring that the Training Team and Design Team are in constant collaborative communication [and that] the new Learn site follows modern learning website design principles and UI/UX.”

Destiny wasn’t just overseeing a redesign, but an entirely new approach to how educational content is being served, including a shift to making more content available on YouTube instead of WordPress.tv.

“I performed market research of both WordPress-specific and non-WordPress specific learning sites,” she explained. That included sites like WPBeginner, WPMU DEV blog, and WP101 as well as larger learning platforms like Codecademy, Khan Academy, Udemy, and LinkedIn Learning. Some of the things she looked at include the types of audiences and the user experience.

Some of those user experience updates require a lot of collaboration not just with design, but with the developer teams as well.

The Technical Challenges

Adding to the complexity of the project is the fact that much of the content is actually multilingual. As of right now, there’s no multilingual plugin on the site, so the structure of this content has been an issue as the site continues to grow.

“At the moment we host many content types,” Destiny told me, “Tutorials, Lesson Plans, and Courses– each with duplicative resources. When providing localized educational resources, being able to update content at scale is critical. With our move to only have Courses and Lessons going forward (courses are made up of grouped lessons), we are working to reduce duplicative content creation and localized content efforts.”

Another interesting update could be the inclusion of interactive code blocks inside of lessons, powered by the WordPress Playground, a WordPress instance that can run completely inside of your browser. The team behind WordPress Playground is helping address specific requirements around functionality and accessibility with the hopes that their WordPress Playground Block plugin can power more interactive lessons in the future.

What makes me most excited about the ongoing redesign of WordPress.org is that they’re fully committed to using block-based themes, at a scale of content and traffic that’s pretty overwhelming. If you want to learn more about how important this redesign project is, then check out this recent conversation with Nick Diego.

“I think you have to agree,” said Jonathan, “the new designs are rather exciting, if you compare them to what we currently have from 2020.”

Next Steps

While the current pathways only cover three different user types, Jonathan and I mused about other potential pathways they could define in the future, like a “contributor” pathway or a “marketer/SEO” pathway. WordPress is used by a variety of creators and across large organizations.

“As a writer myself,” said Jonathan, “I’d love to create a ‘WordPress writer learning pathway’. We could have a module on the basics of WordPress, and then dive into using drafts, scheduling posts, sharing to social, and adding newsletters…” 

For now, the team will remain focused on three specific Learners: Designer, Developer, and User. Follow along with their progress in the #training channel in Make WordPress Slack or on their project blog, Make WordPress Training.

by Brian Coords at March 12, 2024 05:46 PM under WordPress

WordPress.org blog: WordPress 6.5 Release Candidate 2

The second release candidate (RC2) for WordPress 6.5 is ready! 

This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it’s recommended that you evaluate RC2 on a test server and site.

While release candidates are considered ready for release, testing remains crucial to ensure that everything in WordPress 6.5 is the best it can be.

You can test WordPress 6.5 RC2 in four ways:

PluginInstall and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).
Direct DownloadDownload the RC2 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website.
Command LineUse the following WP-CLI command:
wp core update --version=6.5-RC2
WordPress PlaygroundUse the 6.5 RC2 WordPress Playground instance (available within 35 minutes after the release is ready) to test the software directly in your browser without the need for a separate site or setup.

The current target for the WordPress 6.5 release is March 26, 2024. That’s a mere two weeks away! Get an overview of the 6.5 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.5-related posts in the coming weeks for further details.

What to expect in WordPress 6.5 RC2

Thanks to the many contributors testing up to this point, this release includes approximately 20 bug fixes for the Editor and 30+ tickets for WordPress Core. For more technical information related to issues addressed since RC1, you can browse the following links: 

Update on content overrides for synced patterns

As synced patterns evolve and improve, every enhancement must continue to provide the best experience possible. With this in mind, WordPress 6.5 will not include the ability to override content in synced patterns. This allows more time for feedback and testing to ensure it can really shine. Expect this feature to debut in the next major release!

Contribute to this release

WordPress is open source software made possible by a passionate community of people collaborating on and contributing to its development. The resources below outline various ways you can help the world’s most popular open source web platform, regardless of your technical expertise.

Get involved in testing

Testing for issues is critical to ensuring WordPress is performant and stable. It’s also a meaningful way for anyone to contribute. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 6.5. For those new to testing, follow this general testing guide for more details on getting set up.

If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.

Curious about testing releases in general? Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack.

Search for vulnerabilities

From now until the final release candidate of WordPress 6.5 (scheduled for March 19), the monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities is doubled. Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.

Update your theme or plugin

For plugin and theme authors, your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for all users. 

Thanks for continuing to test your themes and plugins with the WordPress 6.5 beta releases. With RC1, you’ll want to conclude your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.5.

If you find compatibility issues, please post detailed information to the support forum.

Help translate WordPress

Do you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Русский? 日本? हिन्दी? বাংলা? You can help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages.

Release the haiku

RC2, a bridge,
From development to launch,
One more step forward.
submitted by @huzaifaalmesbah

Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @dansoschin, @get_dave, and @audrasjb.

by Lauren Stein at March 12, 2024 04:58 PM under releases

WPTavern: Bluehost Announced New Cloud Hosting Built on WP Cloud

Bluehost, one of the leading web hosting providers, has announced Bluehost Cloud, an innovative cloud-based hosting solution specifically designed for WordPress users. It is built on WP Cloud infrastructure, in collaboration with WordPress.com, to provide robust support for websites with high traffic and demanding performance requirements. Bluehost is one of the three WordPress.org recommended hosting providers

Bluehost Cloud promises managed WordPress hosting with 100% network uptime, faster page load time, and better performance. It targets professionals and agencies and can handle any traffic spikes without charging customers extra for such spikes. 

“In the realm of website creation, every pixel counts, every second matters, and every client’s satisfaction is paramount. With the launch of Bluehost Cloud, a collaborative effort between industry titans Bluehost and Automattic, we’re ushering in a new era of confidence for website professionals, agencies and freelancers. From a 100% uptime SLA to lightning-fast page load speeds, Bluehost Cloud is backed by our unparalleled WordPress expertise and expertly designed for high traffic and high-performance websites,” said Satish Hemachandran, SVP of Hosting at Newfold Digital, parent company of Bluehost. “Bluehost Cloud marks an exciting expansion into the agency market, complementing our long-time commitment to serving small businesses around the world, and it sets the new standard for WordPress speed, reliability, scalability and support,” he said.

Bluehost Cloud uses WP Cloud infrastructure, “the only cloud platform built from the ground up just for WordPress.” WP Cloud ensures robust security with real-time backups, anti-spam measures, and malware scanning. With features like a built-in CDN, 28 global data centers and automated WordPress edge caching, it guarantees incredible website speed.

We built WP Cloud so every hosting company can provide the safest and fastest WordPress experience available.

Matt Mullenweg

Bluehost Cloud offers four packages: special early access pricing starting from $29.99/mo for 1 website to $109.99/mo for 50 websites. The regular prices start from $79.99. Bluehost Cloud is also showcased on WordPress.com’s pricing page. All plans come with: 

  • 100% network uptime
  • 24/7 priority support voice chat
  • DDoS Protection
  • A web application firewall
  • Automated daily backups
  • Let’s Encrypt SSL
  • 2-Factor Authentication.

As of now, Bluehost Cloud does not support WordPress Multisite. However multiple websites can be created as independent WordPress installations under a single Bluehost Cloud account.

by Jyolsna at March 12, 2024 12:49 PM under managed hosting

WPTavern: Surprising Tech Trends in WordPress and Beyond

As you likely know, WordPress software powers 46% of all websites on the Internet.  I thought it would be fun to dive a bit deeper and note some trends that affect the WP community.

A pie chart showing WordPress has a 46% cms usage on the internet, Wix has 11%, Squarespace has 4%, and WordPress powers 46% of all websites on the Internet
  1. WordPress usage remains dominant and steady
  2. Antiquated software is still used quite a bit in the WP community
    1. Antiquated WordPress Core Installs
    2. Antiquated PHP
  3. jQuery is still riding high! 
  4. React usage is up for the top 1 million sites but way down overall
  5. WordPress’ competitors are rocking!
  6. What about e-commerce?
  7. Mailchimp is down; Zoho Mail and Google Business are up.
  8. How is our old friend, PHP, doing?
  9. About the Data
  10. Related Historical Links
  11. What do you think?
  12. Comments ↓

WordPress usage remains dominant and steady

Since its founding in 2003, WordPress usage has risen steadily and consistently

A line graph showing WordPress usage is up in a linear fashion from 0 to 30 million sites since 2003WordPress usage is consistently up over the years.

WP consultants who are old enough will recall that Drupal and Joomla commanded a large share of the market early on – not anymore.

Both are down considerably since their peaks around 2015:

A line graph showing Joomla's market share down considerably since 2015. It shows there are currently around 1.5 million Joomla websites.Joomla usage down considerably since 2015 A line graph showing Drupal's market share down considerably since 2015. It shows there are currently around 550,000 Drupal websites.Drupal usage down considerably since 2015

Antiquated software is still used quite a bit in the WP community

Getting people to update software and run security patches is difficult on any platform. WP and related tech seems to be no exception to that rule.

Antiquated WordPress Core Installs

Almost 20% of all WP sites are running a very old version of WP, the good news is that old versions of WP are still patched for security vulnerabilities.

Antiquated PHP

As we’ll see below, 3-out-of-every-4 WP installs are potentially insecure due to antiquated versions of PHP running on the server.

A chart showing that versions of PHP prior to 8.1 have reached PHP 8.1 and above is currently supported. Previous versions have reached “end of life” A pie chart showing that 43.3% of WP sites are using PHP 7.4PHP 7.4 powers 43% of WP sites even though it has reached “end of life” and might not receive security patches.

jQuery is still riding high! 

What’s not to love about jQuery?!  You can quickly write code that does all sorts of fancy animations and other things without knowing a whole lot about javascript.  

It’s not clear how much of this high jQuery usage is due to tech debt vs new code, but what is clear is that jQuery is one of the most-used languages in WordPress:

A line graph showing jQuery usage has levelled out at a high point since around 2014jQuery has consistently-high numbers

React usage is up for the top 1 million sites but way down overall

As you likely know, React is used to build most Gutenberg blocks, so it is now widely-used in the WP community. The story is more nuanced when looking at sites worldwide.

React seems to be gaining popularity in the top 1 million websites:

A line graph showing React usage has consistently gone up in the top million websites since 2013React usage has mostly been going up for the top 1 million sites since 2013

However, React usage is way down Internet-wide:

Line graph showing React usage skyrocketing to almost 4 million sites in 2019 before plummeting back to 250,000 sites in 2021 and remaining there through today.However, when looking at all sites, React was plummeting back to Earth in 2021.

WordPress’ competitors are rocking!

Perhaps you’ve heard of two of WP’s main competitors: Squarespace and Wix.  Well, they are both doing quite well:

A line graph showing Wix usage has gone up over the years and remains consistently-high since around 2021Wix is up and shows no sign of decline!

Squarespace is up (mostly):

A line graph showing Squarespace usage has gone mostly up over the yearsSquarespace is mostly up since 2004 with a little dip in the last year or so

I’ve noticed in my WP consulting practice that a lot of my clients are using Hubspot Landing Page Builder in addition to WordPress – usually to host and track downloads of 1-off lead generation pdfs and related form leads. So I was curious how Hubspot’s competing product is doing.

Hubspot Landing Page Builder usage has gone down a bit recently but still maintains a notable market share:

A line graph showing Hubspot usage has gone up over the years but experienced a decline in late 2021Hubspot is down over the last year or so

What about e-commerce?

WooCommerce and Shopify are in a head-to-head battle for the #1 e-commerce platform.  

According to BuiltWith.com, there are around 2.75 million websites using a WooCommerce checkout page (there are, apparently, also many Woo sites not using the standard checkout and/or any checkout at all).

Similarly, there are around 2.75 million Shopify sites.

Shopify usage remains high but has been decreasing since 2022:

A line graph showing Shopify usage has gone up over the years and experienced a dip since around 2022Shopify dipped around 2022

WooCommerce e-commerce is trending similar to Shopify:

A line graph showing WooCommerce usage has gone up over the years and remains consistently-high since around 2021, when it dipped slightlyWooCommerce usage went down a bit in 2021

Mailchimp is down; Zoho Mail and Google Business are up.

This section includes some stats I found notable due to the fact that these are products many of the small business owners and WP consultants I converse with use and recommend regularly.

Mailchimp’s usage downfall seems to coincide with its acquisition by Intuit in 2021:

A line graph showing Mailchimp usage has gone up over the years but dipped around 2021Mailchimp usage dipped in 2021 or so

Zoho Mail, meanwhile, seems to be mostly successful with its low-cost/high-feature business model.

For example, Zoho Mail usage is up quite a bit since 2020, though usage dipped a little in 2022:

A line graph showing Zoho usage has gone up over the years but dipped on 2022Zoho usage dipped in 2022

Meanwhile, the old guard isn’t sleeping.  Google Workspace (formerly Google Apps for Business) is up up up:

A line graph showing Google Apps for Business usage has gone up over the years and remains consistently-high since around 2020Google Workspace (formerly Google Apps for Business) usage keeps going up

How is our old friend, PHP, doing?

PHP usage has been down considerably for 6 years but still powers around 35 million websites, most of which are, presumably, WP sites:

A line graph showing PHP usage has dropped considerably since around 2017.PHP usage is down considerably since around 2017

About the Data

I pulled this data from reliable Internet sources and linked those sources above.  However, as with all data sets, it’s possible these sources are either incorrect or that the data doesn’t tell the whole story. 

If you notice anything in my data sets above that needs to be corrected, let me know in the comments. 

Similarly, if you find alternate data sources that tell additional stories, please let us know in the comments.

What do you think?

Similar to last week’s Tavern post about WP.org theme usage, data found on this page is likely best used as a fun conversation starter rather than a place to draw firm conclusions about anything. What is your reaction to this data? Did anything surprise you? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments ↓

by Toby Cryns at March 12, 2024 08:50 AM under wordpress

March 11, 2024

WPTavern: Matt Mullenweg to Deliver State Of The Word 2024 From Tokyo, Japan

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg announced at the Q&A session of WordCamp Asia 2024 that he would deliver the 2024 State Of The Word from Tokyo, Japan on December 16. This marks a significant moment for the WordPress community, as it’s only the second time the annual address is delivered outside of North America. Last year, the event took place in Madrid, Spain.

The State of the Word is a highly anticipated annual event at which Matt reflects on achievements, unveils his vision for WordPress’s future, and offers a peep into the upcoming features and developments. It’s an occasion for WordPress enthusiasts to come together to watch the event live streaming and celebrate their passion for the platform. 

Matt had this to say about choosing Japan for the event: “The very first translation of WordPress, before we even had a framework for translating, was Japanese. It was the moment that opened my eyes to the possibility of WordPress being more than just a blogging tool for a few hobbyists speaking English. Almost 20 years later it’s exciting for Japan to host a State of the Word and really showcase how vibrant their community is. I’m so impressed with all of the books about WordPress there, the market share we have in that country, and the warmth of the events they do throughout the year.”

Japan is home to an amazing WordPress community. The Japanese community was behind one of the first internationalized versions of WordPress – a Japanese WordPress site was set up in December 2003, just six months after WordPress was launched.  The version originally called “WordPress ME” (WordPress Multilingual Edition) was maintained by a user called Otsukare who made a multilingual edition hack. His post in the Support Forum led to Matt chiming in, “Well the localization code should be rolled into the main release sometime. (Soonish.)”

The first WordCamp Tokyo was held in 2008, and subsequent editions were serious crowd-pullers. The adorable WordPress mascot, Wapuu originated from the 2009 WordCamp Tokyo after-party. Kazuko Kaneuchi later designed Wapuu as a free gift to the WordPress community in 2011. 

Holding the event in Tokyo underscores WordPress’s massive and active user base in Japan and throughout Asia.

Update: Shusei Toda, a Communication Designer based in Tokyo and one of the organizers of WordCamp Asia 2024 is all excited and shared: “We are happy to have the State of the Word coming to our country, marking a monumental moment for the Japanese WordPress community—one of the oldest global communities dedicated to WordPress. It’s an honor to be the second global host city after Madrid, Spain, underscoring our significant position within the global WordPress community. 82.3% of Japanese websites are powered by WordPress, and this event holds immense importance to our local web developers, bloggers, and digital creatives. Hosting the State of the Word in Japan is not just a testament to our community and also in Asia but also a celebration of the pivotal role WordPress plays in our digital landscape.”

by Jyolsna at March 11, 2024 09:35 PM under state of the word

WPTavern: Automattic Doubles Down on the Developer Community

There’s something in the water at Automattic, and I don’t think it just started with Matt Mullenweg’s “samattical“. The last few months have seen a number of interesting changes across the company and its approach to the broader WordPress community.

When I pull the various threads, it looks to me like Automattic is making a larger strategic pivot towards “developers” and “builders” as a target audience, for itself and quite possibly for WordPress. Automattic’s products have traditionally focused on the DIY side of the WordPress market, making tools for bloggers or creators building their own websites. That’s still largely the case, but recently, things have been looking a little different.

I was able to talk to a handful of people across the company and explore some of these major changes. While I was never given an answer on Automattic’s larger strategy, if such an answer even could be given, I think there’s enough out there to frame some initial thoughts on changes that might affect WordPress (the software) going forward.

Woo Express causes Woo Distress

When Matt Mullenweg started his sabbatical, he did so with a tongue-in-cheek blog post titled “Automattic’s Big Re-Org“. While there was no big reorganization, the post did announce that each team inside of Automattic is revisiting its position within the broader ecosystem. Decisions will be made based on whether a team’s goal is to be competitive with the other hosting companies (i.e. WordPress.com, Pressable, WordPress VIP) or to be completely host-agnostic and “Help the Hosts” by growing the ecosystem (WooCommerce and Jetpack).

It’s an interesting distinction because you could certainly make the argument that more tightly coupling the WooCommerce brand to WordPress.com’s hosting infrastructure could be a tactical advantage. In fact, they did make that argument when they launched Woo Express a year ago and then rebranded the team behind WooCommerce to Woo a few months later. A new call-to-action that funneled visitors to WordPress.com hosting plans rather than just the open source software raised more than a few eyebrows in the community.

The team was fairly quick to address the criticism, with Woo CEO Paul Maiorana taking in feedback and responding openly to the community on Twitter/X. They’ve since rolled back that specific onboarding funnel. 

Matt Mullenweg directly referenced this experience and how it helped lead to these new changes:

“The big tension this surfaced was Woo Express, going forward that team is switching under WP.com, and Woo.com will recommend a variety of hosts (like W.org) to get started with Woo. Now people can meet with Paul Maiorana, who leads Woo, or James Grierson, who leads Jetpack, and know they have Help the Hosts cards as their teleological goal.”

So Woo Express is officially a WordPress.com product, competitive with the “managed WooCommerce” offerings from other hosting companies and treated (more or less) the same when you visit Woo.com. The end result is that Woo/WooCommerce will act more like WordPress.org and not completely favor Automattic’s hosting companies.

Conflict of Disinterest

I can see how important that separation is, but I can’t help but wonder if a one-click install of a new WooCommerce site wouldn’t have been a much better call-to-action for end users than what they get now: a link to a “Hosting Solutions” guide and an additional burden of choice. I’m sure a Shopify-like onboarding experience happening directly on the homepage of Woo.com was a tempting strategy.

It’s not unusual for the owners of an open source project, specifically developer frameworks, to actively promote their own paid solutions. The homepage of Next.js includes a callout to Vercel, Laravel includes links to products like Forge and Vapor. Those paid products (typically around hosting and deployments) can directly subsidize more contribution to the open source frameworks themselves.

WordPress has always held itself to a different standard in this regard, and part of that tension is because of the importance of all of the hosting companies to the broader ecosystem. The fact that I can go to any number of hosts and know that they’ll not only support, but also install WordPress for me is a major reason for the success and ubiquity of the software. As much as the community needs Automattic, it also needs the support, engagement, and contributions from the broader hosting ecosystem, a reminder that much of the WordPress you see in the world does not actually run on Automattic’s infrastructure (more on that later).

It’s Time to Build (on WordPress.com?)

As part of the non-re-org, Matt announced that the WordPress.com user experience was about to change. From his blog post: “WordPress.com is going to orient itself more towards developers, and have an experience that feels similar to WordPress hosted other places, less Calypso more wp-admin.” 

If WordPress.com is your only experience of WordPress, then this statement might not make that much sense. If you come from the world of self-hosted WordPress, however, you may know that the WordPress.com experience is wildly different from standard installations. WordPress.com still includes a number of premium upsells inside their version of the WordPress dashboard, including links to buy premium plugins on their parallel plugin directory. It’s been a somewhat controversial and convoluted approach, and you can still browse the WordPress subreddit and find the misconception that you can’t install your own plugins on their platform. 

At WordCamp Asia this past weekend, Matt was asked during a Q&A if he would ever retire the “WordPress.com” brand name entirely to clear up the confusion. Matt momentarily pondered whether this was “an original mistake in setting all of this up” and noted that he’d even considered “moving WordPress.com to wp.com or […] trying to get w.com.” He ended the thought experiment pointing back towards these user interface changes coming to his platform to bring it more inline with self-hosted WordPress.

I reached out to Daniel Bachhuber, the long-time WordPress contributor who was recently tapped by Matt to lead the entire WordPress.com side of the company. I asked Daniel to tell me about this new vision of WordPress.com and who it might be for.

“WordPress.com has always been a platform for a variety of users,” he explained. “Over the last year, we’ve added more developer-specific features (staging sites, WP-CLI access, etc.) […] Our hosting infrastructure, powered by WP Cloud, is best-in-class, but we need to communicate that better.” 

From what I’ve heard about some of the upcoming developer features, his team is not kidding around. One tool that’s been quietly pre-announced is Studio, a brand new tool to manage your local development environment. You can learn about it on the newly relaunched Developer Resources for WordPress.com (not to be confused with the newly relaunched Developer Resources for WordPress.org, led by a team of mostly Automattic-sponsored contributors, or the newly relaunched Developer Resources for WooCommerce that I’ll be getting to later. Do you see where I’m going with this?)

“The new developer.wordpress.com,” he explained, “is our place to connect with WordPress developers. We want to teach them how to use our developer tools, take advantage of our platform features, and help them achieve the best possible outcomes with their websites.”

The term “developer” is fairly broad, so I asked how they’re thinking about this new market segment internally. 

“This is a really tricky question, in fact! What ‘developer’ actually means is variable based on perspective,” Daniel explained. “Our working definition of ‘developer’ is ‘someone who builds or manages sites for someone else.’ This is inclusive of the freelancer building client sites, agency developer maintaining ecommerce sites, or internal developer working on the backend of a multi-platform publishing system or decoupled site.”

As someone who has actually held each of those jobs at one point, all I can say is that his team has their work cut out for them. Luckily, WordPress.com does have the infrastructure and the talent to achieve the technical implementation. The much harder part will be establishing this new relationship with the broader WordPress developer community, basically from scratch. That’s where the team at Woo comes in.

WooCommerce Would Like to See You Now

Because Developer Documentation redesigns are in the air this year, the team at WooCommerce also announced a brand new relaunch. More than that, the developer relations team has felt much more publicly engaged, recently resurrecting their old Twitter/X account.

Jacklyn Biggin is a Developer Advocate at Woo and has been one of the most visible forces for this change. I asked her if this was part of an internal strategy to increase their outreach efforts with the developer community.

“You’re not imagining things,” she told me. “Woo’s developer community is a huge part of what makes Woo successful, and we want to provide them with as much support as possible. We’re working to improve the feedback loop between the community and the Woo team, and relaunching @DevelopWoo is a small step in that process.”

She told me about some of the new things they’re trying, like hosting public GitHub Discussions for new features and having blog comments from developers piped directly into their internal Slack. I also asked her about the new documentation. 

“Historically, a lot of Woo’s developer documentation and resources were scattered across the monorepo, merchant documentation, the developer blog, and beyond,” she said. “Centralizing our documentation on our new Woo Developer Docs site aims to fix this. The current site you see isn’t a finished product – for example, we’re currently midway through migrating the WooCommerce Blocks docs to it – but we’re now in a position where we’re able to make these incremental improvements.”

WooCommerce Blocks was merged into WooCommerce core at the end of last year, making it possible to manage more of your store inside the block editor, and much of the work behind WooCommerce Blocks has directly influenced development of core WordPress features

Docs on Blocks 

If there’s one part of WordPress that’s been the most controversial, and given developers the most grief, it’s the block editor. Previously developers extending WordPress or Woo would achieve most advanced functionality with PHP. The block editor still requires that base knowledge of PHP, but adds the additional complexity of JavaScript and React now to make changes to the user interface.

As WooCommerce moves more of its functionality into the block editor, developers will need to keep up. And the team at Woo has to make sure those developers are motivated to keep up, if they want to continue to see the ecosystem thrive. Woo ultimately relies on the platform effect to remain relevant and attract new users. In general, developers will only build for the block editor if they think it’s being used, but users are waiting for developers to bring full compatibility to third-party plugins.

“The shift towards the block editor has been a pretty big change for developers,” she said, “and we’re working hard to provide useful resources. These include informational blog posts, tutorials and docs (note that these will move to the docs site soon). Over in our community Slack, we have a dedicated channel with direct access to the team working on Blocks at Woo, and we’re even hosting Office Hours focused on the new Product Editor next month.”

Daniel Bachhuber was quick to point out that emphasis on the block editor as well, telling me that, “it’s really matured in the last couple of years, and we’re excited to see the sites built with it this year. We want WordPress.com to offer the best possible user experience for block theme developers.” It’s an interesting turn of phrase. In theory, block themes shouldn’t need developers, instead offering a “no-code” experience building a WordPress site. If anything, the block editor has raised the expectations and need for developers in WordPress.

For now, it looks like most Woo stores are running on classic themes, though it makes sense that such a fundamental transformation will simply take a long time. 

When I asked Jacklyn if she saw this shift towards developers more broadly in Automattic, she pointed me towards the changes happening at WordPress.com as well as a completely different side of the company, WP Cloud.

Another Automattic Host 

WP Cloud is Automattic’s completely in-house alternative to AWS or Google Cloud. It’s built specifically for WordPress. It’s the underlying infrastructure of WordPress.com and Pressable, a managed WordPress host under the Automattic umbrella.

To learn more, I connected with Jess Frick, Director of Operations at Pressable. From the outside, Pressable looks like any other managed host, albeit with a particularly enthusiastic user base. Where WordPress.com traditionally marketed toward the individual user, Jess describes Pressable as “an incredible choice for developers, agencies, and freelancers who want to host multiple WordPress websites – our performance test results and customer reviews speak for themselves.”

As WordPress.com makes moves towards that same user base, it’s worth noting that there are key differences. One big tradeoff with WordPress.com’s hosting offer is its deep integration with Jetpack, which may or may not work with a particular developer’s workflow.

“The Jetpack integration is one area where I think we will continue to differ,” she explained. “While we’re obviously big fans of Jetpack – especially the security benefits – we understand that some of our customers may have other solutions they prefer instead, so Pressable makes it easy to use it or exclude it.”

What’s even more important about Pressable is their license for experimentation towards what the future of managed WordPress hosting might be.

“One aspect of our role that is possibly becoming more clear to the outside world,” she said, “is our position as Automattic’s hosting lab. We are empowered to build interesting things that other brands can benefit from, and we’re given the freedom to do experiments.” 

Results of those experiments can make their way to WP Cloud. For more context, I’d recommend reading Jess’s recent explainer on WP Cloud, outlining what it is and just how involved Pressable has been with its development. 

“We are both built on WP Cloud,” she explained, “and it is the platform that allows us to provide our hosting services. […] We have been using what’s now known as WP Cloud for years before it became a product itself and I don’t see a future where we use something else. It’s truly incredible.”

I’ll take one WP Cloud, please

But WP Cloud isn’t just for Automattic. It’s also slowly becoming available to other partners. Bluehost recently came out as a WP Cloud customer, offering a new cloud hosting tier to their customers. What’s more unusual about this deal is that WordPress.com is highlighting Bluehost on their pricing page

It’s a smart way for Automattic to grow revenue by leaning into what they’ve excelled at (infrastructure) while other brands (including their own) handle the marketing and user acquisition. Bluehost was one of the hosting options tied up in the initial launch of Woo Express, and it seems clear that Automattic learned something about how to better position these relationships from that messy process.

When I asked Jess if she felt a larger shift inside of Automattic, she told me that her “personal view is that this is a natural evolution, with Automattic responding to the needs of the market.” 

We’re all in this platform together

There’s so much more that I would’ve wanted to get into, from WordPress VIP to Jetpack’s “Manage” product for WordPress agencies. One year ago, the WordPress.com homepage opened with the tagline “the world’s most popular website builder”. Today it highlights their “lightning-fast hosting”. That’s two completely different visions.

Regardless of your opinion of Automattic as a company, the fact that they’re in the midst of redefining their place in the broader community is important, especially with their outsized role in contribution to WordPress and their alleged content partnerships with AI companies like Midjourney and OpenAI.

It’s always hard to say what’s going on in Matt Mullenweg’s head. The Gutenberg project is in its seventh year and still has two of four phases to go. I don’t know if anyone accurately predicted the scale and direction of the project’s current trajectory back then. In his initial manifesto on the topic, Matt said “We Called it Gutenberg for a Reason”:

“Ten years ago, agencies and developers worried that software like WordPress would ruin their business because clients wouldn’t need help updating their sites any more, and would maybe even just start building their own sites. But their worse fears didn’t come true — instead, it created new opportunities for everyone.”

As a developer, of course my theory is going to be that Automattic is starting to value the third-party developer and agency communities much more than it has in the past. That it sees itself less as a beginner’s version of WordPress, with its own Calypso-flavored interface, and more of the underlying infrastructure that agencies and builders can use to grow WordPress. That perhaps it’s turning to a vision of WordPress and WooCommerce as developer platforms for the internet, taking a role similar to other open source projects and focusing on providing infrastructure rather than competing with Squarespace.

It’s definitely a developer’s dream, an Automattic that fits in with the entire ecosystem, that values the builders, agencies, freelancers, and developers building WordPress websites, that offers its customers the same WordPress experience as the rest of us. Only time will tell where this dream leads.

by Brian Coords at March 11, 2024 09:20 PM under Opinion

Donncha: Gimme all your cache!

Today saw the release of updates to two plugins I work on. The first, unsurprisingly, is WP Super Cache, and it’s a bug fix release. It fixed a PHP8.2 warning, adjusted some labels on the settings page, solved a problem with “late init” and POST requests, and some other changes, but the major news I want to share is not about that plugin at all.

I’m on the Jetpack Boost team in Automattic, and for the last month or so, we’ve been working on adding a full-page cache to the plugin!

Jetpack Boost is already a pretty remarkable plugin, with what it does to CSS, JavaScript and images, so a page cache was an obvious next step.

Screenshot from the Jetpack Boost settings page.
It shows the

If you’re already using WP Super Cache, but you’re not using any of the advanced features, I think you should give Jetpack Boost a go. It works really well at serving cached pages fast. Jetpack Boost will be a drop-in replacement if you have these features enabled in WP Super Cache:

  1. Simple caching
  2. Caching Disabled for logged in visitors
  3. Garbage collection set to one hour.

You’ll have to disable WP Super Cache first before trying Boost Cache, as they both rely on the same mechanism to load. Disable Jetpack Boost to go back to WP Super Cache. You can enable Boost again, without using the Cache module, and the two plugins will happily co-exist.

I’ve been using it here for the last two weeks, and it has worked flawlessly. I post images daily on my photoblog, and they get shared to Mastodon, where the expected deluge of requests from hundreds of servers happens each time. Between Jetpack Boost and WP Rest Cache, my server barely noticed. Just like with WP Super Cache.

“If it performs just like WP Super Cache, why should I use Boost?” I hear you asking. For some, you’ll need the extra features of WP Super Cache, but otherwise, Boost may be just what you need. Apart from the cache, it also has remarkable features that will squash your CSS and JavaScript in various ways that load super quick. Give it a go, and let WP Super Cache handle the cache if you need to.

If you’re still here, read on, and I’ll give you a whirlwind tour.

The Cache module enabled with the expanded view showing the exceptions textarea and logging checkbox.

Boost supports an exception list like WP Super Cache does, and logging of activities in a similar, but easier to use way.

Output from the logging feature of the plugin shouwing date, pid, URL and description.

To simplify caching, only requests by logged out visitors are cached now, but that’s the recommended way of using WP Super Cache too.

Developers: like WP Super Cache, it also supports the “DONOTCACHEPAGE” constant. If you define that while a page is being created, then Jetpack Boost won’t cache it. If you can enable it before the page loads, then the plugin won’t serve a cached page either, but that will be difficult since the cache system loads so early.

To learn more, there’s a fine manual to read. It explains in detail how to enable the cache and how to use it. Yes, I’m biased, but I think you should give Jetpack Boost a go! Caching helps a lot, but the extra CSS and JavaScript features help render the page quickly once loaded.

by Donncha at March 11, 2024 04:51 PM under WP Super Cache

WPTavern: WordCamp Asia 2025 Scheduled For Next February in Manila, Philippines

WordCamp Asia has unveiled its host city for 2025 – Manila, Philippines. After Bangkok and Taiwan, it is Manila’s turn to take center stage as the venue for the flagship event, tentatively slated for February 2025.

The host city was announced at the Taipei International Convention Center in Taiwan as the WordCamp Asia 2024 came to a close. This year’s three-day event attracted over 1,300 attendees with an impressive lineup of 55 speakers including the WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg and the Executive Director of the WordPress project Josepha Haden Chomphosy. 

Asia has a very large WordPress community, and discussions about organizing a regional flagship event have been ongoing for years. However, due to the pandemic in 2020, it became the first international event to be canceled and finally became a reality only in 2023. 

Known as the Pearl of the Orient, Manila is the vibrant capital of the Philippines. Every corner promises to delight and charm the visitors, from the historic walled city of Intramuros to the bustling markets and majestic churches of Quiapo. 

WC Asia 2023 had a dedicated team of 53 organizers while the 2024 version saw 46 individuals in action. The upcoming 2025 event, too, needs passionate organizers to make it a success. Interested candidates can now fill out the application form.

by Jyolsna at March 11, 2024 12:48 PM under wordcamp

March 10, 2024

Matt: Amazing Brad Mehldau Interview

Great for everyone, but if you know a little music theory or Bach you’ll appreciate it even more. It’s never too late to learn music!

by Matt at March 10, 2024 03:16 AM under jazz

March 09, 2024

WordPress.org blog: Highlights from WordCamp Asia 2024

Over 1,300 attendees gathered at the Taipei International Convention Center in Taiwan for WordCamp Asia 2024. This three-day event emerged as a vibrant celebration showcasing the collaboration, diversity, and innovation that drive the world’s most popular web platform.

The Asian WordPress flagship event started with a dedicated Contributor Day, followed by two days of engaging talks, panels, hands-on workshops, and networking. Notable guests, including WordPress Cofounder Matt Mullenweg and Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy, joined the diverse lineup of speakers. Popular topics featured cutting-edge web technologies and trends, use cases, open source dynamics, and more. WordPress enthusiasts seized the opportunity to gain insights from international and local industry experts and to learn about the project’s future.

Converting walled gardens into community gardens

On March 8, Josepha Haden Chomphosy took the stage for an insightful journey comparing and contrasting the “walled” and “community” gardens in software ecosystems, drawing an analogy between closed and open source platforms. After exploring both concepts, she posed an important question to the audience.

What would it take for someone to move from a walled garden to a community garden?

Open source software, symbolized by community gardens, represents freedom from copyright restrictions and usage limitations. Unlike proprietary software (described as walled gardens), the core value lies in long-term empowerment, giving people control and ownership of their digital presence.

Acknowledging the longstanding values held by WordPress and its open source community for two decades, Josepha focused on the importance of caring for foundations that make us strong, managing what distracts us, and nurturing growth by embracing new opportunities. She celebrated the strengths of the WordPress community and how its shared ethos furthers a thriving ecosystem.

Slide from Josepha Haden Chomphosy's presentation showing colorful flowers on a blue background and the quote,

Quoting artist and activist Audrey Hepburn, Josepha expressed that, much like a community garden, the power of contributions—whether through time, knowledge, or product use— sustains and maintains shared spaces like WordPress.

In the Q&A portion of her presentation, Josepha addressed inquiries about community involvement and contributions. Highlighted resources included the WordPress job board for opportunities within the ecosystem and the Data Liberation project, emphasizing its role in fostering a more open web and helping the transition out of proprietary platforms.

Q&A with Matt Mullenweg

WordCamp Asia concluded with a live audience Q&A session featuring WordPress Cofounder Matt Mullenweg. Attendees gained insights into the future of WordPress, including ongoing projects like Data Liberation, community inclusion initiatives, artificial intelligence (AI), and more.

The atmosphere was filled with excitement when Matt revealed that this year’s State of the Word will take place in Tokyo, Japan, on December 16, 2024.

Additional questions from this session will be addressed in an upcoming post on the Make WordPress Project blog.

Stay connected

WordPress events enable technologists, open source enthusiasts, and community members around the globe to meet, share ideas, and collaborate to drive WordPress and the open web forward.

Don’t forget to mark your calendars for WordCamp Europe (Torino, Italy), WordCamp US (Portland, Oregon, United States), and next year’s WordCamp Asia in Manila, Philippines!

Thank you to the WordCamp Asia organizers, volunteers, and sponsors who made this event possible, and to @angelasjin, @dansoschin, @eidolonnight, @bjmcsherry for collaborating on this post.

by Reyes Martínez at March 09, 2024 01:39 PM under WordCamp

March 08, 2024

WPTavern: Which WP Theme is Best? Fun With Theme Download Stats

Today I embarked on a mission to figure out which WP.org themes are used the most and why. 

As you likely know, “Top 5” lists, as a rule, are generally very opinionated and based on fuzzy assumptions and non-standard use cases.  I want to assure you – this article is no exception to that rule.  

I had to make some very subjective leaps of logic with data to come to my conclusions.  I hope you’ll enjoy being part of this fun conversation.

  1. Astra Is the Most Downloaded Theme but Doesn’t Have the Highest Usage Rate
  2. OceanWP and GeneratePress Crush Hello Elementor in User Enthusiasm
  3. Let the “Best Theme” Arguments Commence!
    1. Random “Best Theme” Opinions from the Minneapolis-St. Paul WP User Group:
  4. About the Data
  5. What is your favorite WP theme?  
  6. Related Links
  7. Comments ↓

Astra Is the Most Downloaded Theme but Doesn’t Have the Highest Usage Rate

The top themes in wp.org with a minimum of 5 million downloads ordered by WP Data Dashboard’s “usage rate” are Hello Elementor, GeneratePress, Astra, Storefront, and OceanWP (a higher “usage rate” is better):

  • Hello Elementor: 6+ million downloads, 15% usage rate.
  • GeneratePress: 5+ million downloads, 11% usage rate.
  • Astra: 11+ million downloads, 9% usage rate.
  • Storefront: 7+ million downloads, 1% usage rate.
  • OceanWP: 7+ million downloads, 1% usage rate.

(How WP Data Dashboard’s “usage rate” metric is calculated.)

For additional context, “usage rate” is the holy grail for commercial theme developers.  In ad speak, “usage rate” is similar to “conversion rate.”  

A higher “usage rate” means the theme owner’s marketing team gets more mileage from each annoying banner ad they force to the top of your WP dashboard.  It means, potentially, more money in the theme owners’ bank accounts with less effort.  

And, more important to us in the greater WP community, a higher “usage rate” on the theme means more people might actually like it!  (Imagine that!) So, based on that “usage rate” number, Hello Elementor is the most-popular theme in the wp.org repo.

Oh wait…

Flowers arranged from short to tall so it looks like a chart.Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash

OceanWP and GeneratePress Crush Hello Elementor in User Enthusiasm

Below is an arbitrary metric I created called the “enthusiasm gap”.  This is the number of 1-star reviews divided by the number of 5-star reviews (lower “enthusiasm gap” is better):

  • GeneratePress: 1378 5-star reviews, <1% enthusiasm gap.
  • OceanWP: 5412 5-star reviews, <1% enthusiasm gap.
  • Astra: 5297 5-star reviews, 2% enthusiasm gap.
  • Storefront: 122 5-star reviews, 11% enthusiasm gap.
  • Hello Elementor: 90 5-star reviews, 14% enthusiasm gap.

GeneratePress and OceanWP seem to have rabid followings based on this enthusiasm gap metric.  Astra also has a great enthusiasm gap at 2%.  But Hello Elementor…14% – that’s…high compared to the competition.

Theme reviews are, of course, totally subjective and can be manipulated by marketing pushes.  

However, it’s also possible that a high volume of 5-star reviews is actually an indicator of enthusiasm for the theme. For example, OceanWP has 5,412 reviews, whereas Hello Elementor has only 90 reviews. 

What’s that say about those particular themes?  Who knows?!  It’s not clear why OceanWP has 60x the 5-star reviews of Hello Elementor, but surely something good is happening over at OceanWP, right?  

And maybe Hello Elementor is awesome despite its low enthusiasm gap numbers. It is, after all, dominating the “usage rate” metric, which is the metric WP Data Dashboard endorses.

Perhaps my “enthusiasm gap” metric is pointless dribble that I made up on the spot as I wrote this article and didn’t run it through a deeper analysis to learn if my assumptions were sound. If you believe this reality (and, admittedly, I won’t deny it), then speak to me as if I were a golden retriever and let me know what’s wrong with my amazingly mathy “enthusiasm gap” metric.*

10 people in a line holding hands on a beach.CC0 licensed photo by Sanyogg Shelar from the WordPress Photo Directory.

Let the “Best Theme” Arguments Commence!

To my great surprise, some members of my local Minneapolis-St. Paul WordPress User Group community disagree with my somewhat arbitrary and very mathy choice for the best theme available.  What gives?!

Arguing about why one theme is better than another is part of the fun of being a member of the WP community.  

Metrics like “usage rate” and “enthusiasm gap” add context in much the same way that “Free Throw %” does in basketball or “Shots Per Game” does in soccer.  That is, these numbers don’t tell the whole story, but they sure can lead to some fun conversations!

Random “Best Theme” Opinions from the Minneapolis-St. Paul WP User Group:

I asked my local WP user group members what their favorite themes are. Below are some of their opinions.

“Beaver Builder (specifically using the Beaver Themer plugin) because it is almost just as powerful as creating my own theme (what I used to do before Beaver Themer was released), but with the fast, easy and powerful features of Beaver Builder. I’m never going back!” – Barbara S.

“Impreza.” – Aaron H.S.

“I also use Beaver Builder/Themer, but not the theme. I’ve always used Genesis and still do. I use Mai Theme as my base, much to the horror of the dev who never intended it to be used with a builder. Sometimes I try to use the block editor on a basic page, but it still feels clumsy and unintuitive to me. I love Mai Theme because of the scalable fonts and spacing and the navigation is very well done.” – Jodi S.

“My favorite theme is either “Hello Elementor” (the barebones vanilla theme when building a site with Elementor), or just using Bricks.” – John V.

“+1 for Impreza! Have built 20-30 sites with it.

  • $59 one time purchase.
  • Comes with WP Bakery Page Builder, which is my go to. Love the backend editor.  Extremely intuitive.
  • Theme Options are very integrated with WP Bakery and include drag-n-drop Header/Footer builder, Reusable Blocks, Grid Builder, and Template Builder.
  • When used with ACF, I never have to touch code because WP Bakery has a Custom Field element that pulls in any ACF field I want.
  • Comes bundled with Slider Revolution, ACF Pro, to name a few.
  • Theme Support is incredible!

My 2.7 cents!” – Matt C.

“My favorite theme is Enfold. They have a really nice drag-and-drop system and the theme is super versatile. Good customer support and good performance improvements as browser changes are implemented.” – Beth B.

“I’ve been a Divi user since almost the beginning. It also has a drag-and-drop system and a visual builder that allows edits from the front end as well as the dashboard.”—Lisa D.

“I have been using Astra theme a lot. Got a lifetime license for Astra Premium & Astra Pro which has been so worth it for fast customization.” – Donna

“We have been using Astra a lot for the past three years or so. It has great benefits and a few unfortunate flaws, but on the whole it is a win for us. Astra is a more traditional theme than Genesis, easier to build child themes with, but it has a huge depth of hooks, making it just as flexible and customizable for our clients as we found with Genesis years ago.” – Eric C.

“GeneratePress is a powerful lightweight framework.” – David S. 

About the Data

I used WP Data Dashboard as my data source. 

WP Data Dashboard pulls raw data from the WP.org API and then give each theme a “usage rate”, to determine whether or not people actually like the theme enough to use it.  [See specific calculations.]

“While the data from the data has it’s limitations and should be taken with a grain of salt, the available numbers paint a pretty clear picture of what users actually want to use,” says WP Data Dashboard founder, Hendrik Luehrsen said.

For example, Twenty Fifteen theme has a very high download count but very low “active install” numbers – It therefore has a very low “usage rate” on WP Data Dashboard.  

Conversely, Twenty Twenty-Three theme, being a relatively new default theme, has both a high download count and high “active install” count, giving it a high “usage rate”.  

“A WP core update is a download of a ‘Twenty’ theme,” said a member of the WP Core team.  “Even though the theme might not be in use, it’ll get a lot of downloads.”

Therefore, for the purposes of this article, I ignore all the default “Twenty” themes since their download counts are inflated:

Two final caveats on the data:

  1. Download counts can be inflated by releasing more updates to the theme, marketing efforts, purchased reviews, etc.
  2. The download counts are correct, but the “active_installs” data point is capped at 1,000,000. So we have no idea if a theme has 1,000,000 or 5,000,000 installs. For example, Astra and Hello Elementor each have at least 1 million active installations.

Still, this is the best data we’ve got, so let’s have some fun with it.

What is your favorite WP theme?  

Keep it light and share what your favorite theme is and why in the comments below.

Comments ↓

by Toby Cryns at March 08, 2024 03:11 PM under Themes

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Last updated:

March 19, 2024 02:30 AM
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