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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Coming up on the WP Minute, the first monthly news roundtable is out. This will be a continuing series only on the WP Minute Plus podcast feed. Search for WP Minute in your favorite podcast app. Make sure you're following both this podcast, WP Minute, and WP Minute Plus so you don't miss out on future episodes. You don't normally get forty five minute episodes on this feed.
Speaker 1:So enjoy today's news roundtable conversation, especially those of you in The US who are taking time off for Thanksgiving. Got a lot of content headed your way so that you can enjoy the holidays with some WordPress goodness. The WordPress professional, someone who's running a small agency, freelance business, maybe even selling themes and plugins for WordPress. Now is your time to join a fantastic Slack group of folks just like you, the wpminute.com/support. Get in for as little as $5.
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Speaker 2:Hi. My name is Adam Weeks, and it's honored to be on here with, with you today for the WP Minute roundtable. I work at Cirrus Influence where we raise your influence.
Speaker 3:Hi. I'm Mark, and, I represent, two companies. I represent MainWP, and I represent, Site District, a small managed web host company. And happy to be here. Thank you for having me, Matt.
Speaker 4:I am Jonathan Wold, the CEO and cofounder of Gildenburg, and I'm growing my hair up.
Speaker 1:Welcome, everybody, to the first WP Minute news roundtable. Hopefully, a little bit different than a lot of the other roundtables that are out there. Most roundtables are round, but, you know, hopefully, this one has a slightly different contour, in terms of content and coverage around the WordPress ecosystem. We're gonna kick off with segment one. A lot of the big news happening this week is, a major figurehead in web technology leaving the post.
Speaker 1:No. Not OpenAI and Sam Altman. Someone even more important, Sarah Gooding, calls it at the WP Tavern. She wrote a post called last call, literally, her last call at the WP Tavern. Matt posted on the Tavern, what's next, looking for new writers, new contributors.
Speaker 1:I've got a lot of thoughts on this. I think Sarah is a what was and is a massive contributor to the WordPress community. There's a big gap there to be filled, in coverage, in, you know, all things WordPress community. Adam, I'll kick it to you first. What are your thoughts on the body of work that Sara leaves behind, and maybe what is important to you in WordPress journalism, especially somebody who's, you know, doing the PR thing, and you're helping folks get in front of the limelight for WordPress coverage.
Speaker 2:Say it ain't so. That Sarah was well, she is an incredible person. That has not changed. I'll be curious to see what she does next. Has anybody heard where she's going?
Speaker 1:She's getting I I DM'd her, she's getting another job in the tech field.
Speaker 3:But Okay. Well
Speaker 1:Not related to WordPress.
Speaker 2:Congratulations to to her. It's the tavern is that one spot that, you know, that you can go to for just consistent quality content. I really appreciated what the take that she took not too long ago when all this kerfuffle went on with, with Matt and what was happening on Twitter. And she very rightly so had it as unbiased. I was very impressed with with that coverage.
Speaker 2:That's something that happened recently. And for her to come out of this, any idea? These aren't connected, are they? By no. But, yeah, I I've
Speaker 4:been very
Speaker 2:I'm very impressed with her level of integrity and the competency that she had with talking about the entire ecosystem. It was really well done.
Speaker 1:Mark, your thoughts.
Speaker 3:I I'm pretty actually disappointed, like most people are. I think that, boy, Sarah was one of those people that, like, Adam says, she was able to stay objective, which is really difficult to do if you consider just the politics involved with working for a production or anything that is kind of under the thumb of, you know, of Automatic or the WordPress world. And what I've always appreciated about Sarah was, first of all, she gave us some very good coverage when we shut down Server Press, and anytime we did anything with Server Press, she gave us really I always felt she handled, the coverage of what she did with us. I really appreciated that. But what I really liked about her and what I think was unique with her was that she was able to understand kind of from a bird's eye view of the impact that things were having on things.
Speaker 3:So whether it was a technical thing or whether it was a marketing thing or no matter what angle it was, she was always able to approach it in a very professional and well thought out and well presented way, I don't know that we're it's gonna be hard to find somebody to replace that, I really believe that. So, know, obviously disappointment.
Speaker 1:I mean, especially when you look at the tavern just being her Mhmm. For the last
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, what, four three or four years when Justin. I'm gonna Justin left, well, went to automatic, and, that's just a tremendous weight, a tremendous amount of stress in order to to manage that. Sure. You have Nathan who runs, you know, the podcast side, and maybe there's discussions to sort of transition to, you know, maybe him writing, some more pieces and covering the the community closer. I haven't talked to him about it, but that's just that's tough.
Speaker 1:And you look at it and, you know, obviously, I have many many opinions about running a media site as a part part timer, trying to monetize it, trying to grow it, scale it, bring people in to write, contribute. All of that needs the foundation of cold hard cash. And you look at for forever now, it's been one person with no investment from AudreyMatt back into the tavern. And here we are, you know, like, you didn't do your homework and you're about to present it to the teacher. You're scrambling at your desk trying to finish that homework.
Speaker 1:I need to hire two people to fill this spot. Please, who's gonna do it? And, you know, that was Matt's sort of post, like, man, why haven't you been doing this for the why haven't you focused on this at least for the last year? Because I personally know she's been pushing for more, she's been pushing for more investment's not the right word, but there's more attention, on on the site, and sadly, wasn't getting it. Jonathan, your on the situation.
Speaker 4:That is a couple of different streams of thought. It it first reminds me a little bit of, Andrew Middleton's, like, tenure. Ten years is a long time in WordPress, And, I mean, there's a I think the good from my perspective, there's a a gone but not forgotten to this because Sarah's work will continue to live on for a really long time. There's that's a tremendous body of work. There's been a ton of things that she's covered.
Speaker 4:I I guess I'm I'm bittersweet. I was I'm happy to see Matt's response and the the like, it wasn't just a I mean, it will be interesting to see how it actually pans out, but at least wasn't a, oh, we'll get around to this. Because from my perspective, the tavern has been a mainstay in our space for a long time. I don't know what Luke and I would do on Crossword if if tavern wasn't continuing to be a thing. Right?
Speaker 4:Like, it's like, hey. What's going on? And it was good objective coverage. I I don't know. I'm I'm really curious to see what happens next, and I'm grateful to all that Sarah has put in over this past decade.
Speaker 1:You know, it's gonna be tough for I'm a Patriots fan. Okay? The New England Patriots. We had Tom Brady for twenty years, winning game after game, Super Bowl after Super Bowl. If you're an NFL fan, you probably hate him or you love him.
Speaker 1:One of the two, and it's a now we have Mac Jones, and it's just like a fish out of water flapping on the ground, like, what is this? This isn't this isn't the same, and it's not, you know, partly, you know, you how do you compare and and and match up against a legacy like Tom Brady? And a person that comes in next, man, I'm already getting stressed for that person, you know, to publish their first blog post because it's gonna be tough to just align with somebody with a decade of experience like like Sarah.
Speaker 2:And how do you how do you train that person? Like, how does what's the onboarding look like for that position?
Speaker 1:This is the biggest challenge, and I'm sure you I think all of us on this panel have run into it. You're hiring for a marketing position. Right? You you want somebody to write or create content about WordPress, but then also about your and and meeting the needs of, like, the end user. Right?
Speaker 1:How does my WordPress thing align with the end users, and do you know how to write about this stuff? It's very difficult to get somebody in, like, a content creation seat that knows the lineage of the WordPress community, and how WordPress has evolved, and put that pen to paper, and then and then make the connection to you, like, your business. It's not it's it's not easy. You know, it's gonna be tough to see somebody, you know, come into that role and and really, you know, fill that knowledge gap.
Speaker 2:So so, Matt, you're throwing your hat in the ring? That's what you're saying?
Speaker 1:I'm not. I almost did for shits and giggles just to see what Matt would say. I did email him immediately, when I when I saw her leave, like, and I just asked simply, who's next? Literally, that's what I said, who's next? And, did not I did not get a response.
Speaker 1:But, you know, hey, I I can't wait to see who it is because I do wanna wholly support that person.
Speaker 3:And the thing two is
Speaker 4:people, hopefully.
Speaker 3:Two people. Thing is that right now, you know, just because of where kind of the the community's kind of sentiment within WordPress is kind of mixed right now, it's gonna timing is not exactly ideal. It's it's, you know there there's there's probably some people that five years ago have said, I'd love that job that are now looking to go, I wouldn't wanna step in it now, you know? So Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I don't know.
Speaker 1:So, and this would be, like, sort of the last thought, thread of thought on this on this segment, but, again, back to, Adam and Jonathan, because I think you are both looking like, your businesses are better when you can find publications, maybe like the Tavern, like WP Minute, like the Repository Ray, like WP Mayor, like Post Status, the people who are committed to covering and fostering news and information and community about WordPress, like, we're all better. Right? Rising tide lifts all boats, etcetera, etcetera. I'm I'm curious, your feedback. When you go to the greater Internet, the greater media outlets of of WordPress, what do they say?
Speaker 1:Like, what do they say? If it weren't for and this is okay. Let me get on the soapbox. If it weren't for us, who who else is covering, you know, the small plug in owner, the theme creator? Right?
Speaker 1:The self self funded WordPress host. If it's if it weren't for all of us, who else is gonna do it?
Speaker 2:I was on the old, the old TikTok the other day, and someone I had never met I tried to look through, like, oh, what's happening in it was WordPress, anybody talking about it there because TikTok's kind of a big deal. And someone was talking about Automattic's one hundred year, plan, but the person totally missed that what Automatic was selling. They thought it was a domain name, and all the the comment was like, well, yeah, domain names are like, yeah, like $20 a year or something. This is really outrageously priced, and, like, your opinion aside on if it is priced correctly or not and all that. The person when I typed in WordPress news into you know, on there, that's what I got.
Speaker 2:It was someone who didn't know what they were talking about miscategorizing something that was a big deal in in WordPress. So Yeah. Yeah. What do we do?
Speaker 1:I don't wanna put words into your mouth, Jonathan, but you strike me as a fellow who might be like, hey. Business is business. Doesn't matter if, you know, Matt's talking about Matt me, Matt Medeiros is talking about me, or Sarah's talking about the business. Look, we just wanna get sell the product, get people interested in the product, and we're gonna do it through regular marketing means. Do we need folks like like the Tavern and the WP Minute?
Speaker 4:So the reason why I, yes. And I think it's because there's in our ecosystem, there's a lot more than business just being business. And there are some like, one of the big challenges that we have, there's all these hidden gems. These products, these these individuals, people doing incredible work because of our decentralized nature that are pretty hard to find. Like, this is an experience I consistent consistently have after coming up on nineteen years, coming across stuff that I've never seen before.
Speaker 4:And it's places like the tavern, WP Minute, post status, WP Mayor, and the rest that, the repository, especially that just brings these things to our attention that we wouldn't have otherwise. So I've been feeling for a while, I'd love to see a lot more investment in these areas and tackle some of the misalignants or, it's like, why is there a funding problem? It's been curious to me for a while. I can understand at the surface level, but to me, the it not getting the resources and attention, which is part of why I was happy with Matt's initial response. We'll see what the outcome would be a a great loss for our space where it's already difficult because of our nature and how spread out we are.
Speaker 1:But if you're looking for news covers, the wpminute.com. I'm gonna transition over to segment two. So segment two of the show, we're gonna talk about this sort of, crossroads, this this area of where WordPress is at. I'll give you my feelings, then I'm gonna kick it over to the panel. So I have three links here.
Speaker 1:I have Elementor's raising pricing. I have WordPress 6.4 improvements, which also includes the 2024 theme. I think the general sentiment is that everyone's happy with 6.4 and see anybody complain except for the big patch that came out like days after, a couple days after. Hey, I feel like, hey, things are moving forward. 2024, I feel it's a it's a solid theme.
Speaker 1:It's great for builders, for end users, for freelancers, etcetera. And then, like I said, you have Elementor raising prices, maybe cutting out some of those features from the low end and and kicking people up a notch till you have to get at least the middle plan to get these features. It almost feels like, boys, are these page builders, are they gonna survive this? This being the economy, this being WordPress as it improves, and that's all sort of underscored by, Matt Mullenweg's tweet that touched upon this, and I'm gonna quote his first tweet here. Says, as Gutenberg gets more capable, non Gutenberg site builders will likely need to continue raising their prices.
Speaker 1:As one as one is in the news today. He's talking about Elementor when they announced the price hike. To maintain revenue churn in the face of higher churn and fewer new users, this trend I don't see this trend happening for Gutenberg based ones. They'll also need to spend more to keep up as they have to duplicate all the engineering going on into core. It's almost like, hey, look, we've been building this thing.
Speaker 1:But I I look at that and say, yeah, man, that's easy for you to say, like, eight years later. Like, it's taken you this Right. You it's taken us a long time to get here. Like, I don't think our pitchforks are that sharp where you're be going after an Elementor. Even a Beaver builder, even, you know, some of these other builders that are more full featured, Cadence, for example.
Speaker 1:There's a lot lot here. I feel like my projection is over the next one to two years, feature themes are really gonna grab hold of the of the builders out there, and and as WordPress gets easier, sure. The mom and pop shop, much easier for them to jump into WordPress, and hopefully, we hopefully, that's a win for everyone. The easier it is to onboard into WordPress, the better we'll all do. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? The better Elementor will do, the better Beaver Builder will do because there'll be these jumping off points, these graduation points. The worst thing to happen is when people touch WordPress today and they go, this thing sucks. Why do I want this? And then they just leave, and they never get exposed to a WordPress product again.
Speaker 1:That's my sort of one minute drill of of that. Mark Mark, how are you feeling? I'll give it to you first. I
Speaker 3:I actually, surprisingly don't have a huge opinion on this. It's really hard to see where things are going. I do think that if they don't jump on the Gutenberg bandwagon, they're gonna end up in a bad way. I had an interesting experience in Phoenix, WordCamp Phoenix, where this we were I was with Matt Kapala, and we were on the elevator, and this woman who had nothing to do with the conference was on the elevator with us, and she saw that we were at the WordPress conference and she said, oh, you're with WordPress? She says, I hate WordPress.
Speaker 3:And we're like, well, we're at a conference for WordPress. And she's like, you work for WordPress? And then she, I mean, she proceeded. It was funny, her boyfriend actually ended up grabbing her by the arm and dragging her off the elevator because she was so mad at us about WordPress and she says, I ended up going to Wick, you know, and I think it's, you know, you were talking about the ease of use as it gets easier and easier, we're gonna get more mom and pops, but I think the issue that we're still gonna be running into overall is really performance and speed and and being able to build on the back end, and and I I think that that's one of the things that things like Wix and Squares will always have over WordPress because WordPress is built as a a system first with all the drag and drop and builders as a secondary thing, whereas Wix and Squarespace are built as we're builder first and everything else second. And so, I as far as raising the prices go, I I kind of agree with Matt that the only way they're gonna be able to deal with churn is, and and and loss of customers is by raising the prices, but they need to add more value there.
Speaker 3:And and, you know, I I don't know how to do that. I'm glad I'm not in that business.
Speaker 4:So I've been following Elementor pretty closely for the past couple of years, and I'm I'm fairly up to date on what's going on in the builder space generally. And I don't think these things are connected. I don't think I can understand where Matt would draw that conclusion, but I don't see a connection between, Gutenberg's advancements and Elementor raising its prices as, a defense. Because if you look at by market share right now, Elementor, I'm pretty sure yes. So two years ago with Google, we worked on a, there's the, the web almanac project that does data and I was the, the author of that year's chapter.
Speaker 4:And we added the section for page builders. So we have the data. It'll be interesting to look at this again next year. Elementor was dominant, followed by Visual Composer, WPBakery, and then Divi, and then kind of down the list. I don't expect that's been a big change.
Speaker 4:For Elementor, it came down to just controlling the means of distribution. They did a bunch of stuff to that got the distribution. I think most people who use Elementor have never even heard of Gutenberg. So it's not it's so I would suggest first that those things aren't connected. I think Elementor's problem is twofold.
Speaker 4:One, they are, I don't think intentionally because I know some great people at Elementor who are very sort of in it and connected to what's going on in WordPress. But one, they are, increasingly disconnected from the heart of what's going on in WordPress, and not necessarily for a bad it's it's not necessarily a bad thing because they're doing a lot to bring value to their end users, but there is a disconnect there. It's not crazy that people think, oh, are they just gonna fork WordPress at some point? Even if they have never the intention or never did that, there's this feeling of it being too isolated. But the second problem that they have, within the past year or so, they introduced their own hosting.
Speaker 4:And from my perspective and vantage point, as I kinda look at the space broadly, that is creating an increasing deincentive for the hosting companies out there to continue to want to do anything with them. So they're in this spot where the dominant builder on their platform is offering hosting services despite what Elementor says about it not competing. For end users, it's hosting. They don't really know the distinction. So I'm I'm curious to see how this plays out, but I don't think it's about Gutenberg.
Speaker 4:I think Elementor is kinda looking at their economics, looking at what they can do, and it doesn't surprise me. I'll be curious to see how it plays out, but I think it's different than the technology alignment with what's going on in core. Least Least right now.
Speaker 2:I'll add to what Jonathan was saying. Think there's also a marketing element, and as someone who is technically on the marketing team for, you know, a volunteer, arguably not a very active, Elementor is is good at marketing. And if you control the messaging and I think to Mark's point, and so many people, they get confused by what WordPress is. And they say, oh, you work for WordPress, and what's automatic and and .com and .org. It's a confusing landscape.
Speaker 2:So for those people who are just hopping into WordPress for the first first time, if Elementor is the search term that they found and it pops up when they're looking, they might not even know about core and all of that, and Gutenberg Elementor has the opportunity to grab that that new user.
Speaker 1:I'm curious. Do do we think it's when you look at the edit the site editor and page building with blocks, you look at those two components, is it a good thing that the the whole of WordPress experience is going to be that? In other words, I almost look at it as Matt seeing this and saying, hey, man. If you're not on board with the way Core builds WordPress websites, there's there's no other way. I don't care how much money you have Elementor, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1:Like, it has to be this I said in my post, as much as I complained about a fragmented experience for the last ten years of WordPress, it also led to a lot of innovation, like Elementor, builders, themes. I mean, yeah, some of them weren't that great, but it did spark a lot of innovation. Out of that chaos came some really great products. If we're just rooting for one way to build WordPress websites, is that a good thing?
Speaker 4:So the heart of the problem from my perspective, I I look back at the history of WordPress, and you you had the famous five minute install. Right? You could go from installation to success within five minutes if having a blog was your objective. And WordPress crushed that. That's a big reason, like, it wasn't trivial at the time.
Speaker 4:Getting a blog up and running was a lot of steps. WordPress, five minutes, you're out of blog. The default theme, it was fine, and you could sort of do what you wanted. I know we're well, I think we're gonna talk about Woo a bit later, but I think Woo is right at the heart of one of challenges that we have. If you go to Woo Express, they have this positioning there that says, like, customize in days.
Speaker 4:It has this it calls out that it's gonna take days to get up and running, right? Which is honest. I actually appreciate the honesty, but it it it calls out the problem. Can you imagine Shopify or Wix or anyone else saying, get your site up and running in days? That's kind of the reality of WordPress right now.
Speaker 4:And so when I look at Gutenberg and when I look at the site editor and what's going on there, there is a lack of end user focus somewhat by nature because you're designing for a 100,000,000 plus WordPress sites, and it was the builders up till now that have done the best work to reduce that time to live. And now we're in this kind of fragmented case place where it's like if the builders disappeared right now, we'd be in trouble in terms of an end user experience. So we're I think we're at a fairly fragile place right now, and WordPress core technically has a lot of great stuff, but it's still a hot mess from an end user. From the from getting closer to that five minutes to live, we're a long ways off. And I think that's problematic for the next generation of people coming into WordPress.
Speaker 4:Builders have been bridging the gap. I acknowledge that it's imperfect and that there's some there's some problem sets there, but we're at a place right now where you can't to your point, Matt, like, you just if we just all said, oh, we're all in on the site editor in Gutenberg right now, I don't think but we're not closer to just we're not closer to getting back to that five minutes. And I think that should be the direction that we're going for end users. They shouldn't have to care about all this stuff, until they want to, and we're still quite a ways off.
Speaker 2:Find a need and fill it. Elementor is filling a need, and that's it is what it is, good or bad.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that's that's actually a great point because a lot of people, you know, you hear it. WordPress is this amazing echo chamber for many topics. Right? Like, the community of Yeah.
Speaker 1:And products, and here's how you build a website. No. You need you don't tab space your document. You press the space bar like a developer does. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, whatever it is. The the thing with Elementor is you can you can hate on it all you want, speed optimization. I get it. Bloated, feature packed, but that's what an end user wants. It's literally what the end why is the the hottest car in America the family sized SUV and not a wagon, like, in Europe?
Speaker 1:Right? And people just want big, large, soft trucks, know. They feel like they're in control. They can shove everything in it. That's why it sells.
Speaker 1:And same thing with Elementor. You can hate it. It's not a Porsche of page builders, but it's economical. It's got every feature an end user wants, and they say, I wanna do that with my website. And WordPress doesn't give it to you yet.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Just before we move on, I think the thing to watch in this space, because WP Bakery, a visual composer, was what wrote on the back of Envato. Right? That's what kinda led it to its market share, at least from my oversimplified perspective. Elementor is the main player right now.
Speaker 4:Divi is third place. Divi is interesting. They they have a long history. It's gonna be interesting to see what they do with their next couple of releases. But I think the challenge that Elementor has is a strategy one right now.
Speaker 4:By choosing to go into hosting Mhmm. And base which makes sense if you're just from a pure SaaS perspective, but to me, it's an indicator of that disconnect in strategy from how this ecosystem works holistically, and it's the symbiosis between what happens in core, what happens with the products, what happens with the hosts. Like, you have to keep those things in balance. By saying we're going after it all, I think that they're hurting themselves both short term, less short term, but more in the long run. It'll be interesting to see what happens.
Speaker 4:I expect their market share to drop as time goes on. And what's gonna be interesting is what does it get replaced with? Are we churning out of WordPress entirely? Or do other builders, Discord, sort of pick that up? That's which is what I'm hoping to see happen.
Speaker 4:And I think that's gonna be interesting to watch over this next year. I don't expect it to stay static.
Speaker 1:I I think and we're gonna get into the the WooCommerce, topic here, and this sort of plays into that. So WooX WooXpress, sort of like their hosted version of of WooCommerce, you know, trying, to almost compete against Shopify, although probably not use the headline days to build it out. Jetpack Jetpack is and I said this to Matt when we had our last interview is they look at Jetpack as the best way to experience WordPress. So while I feel like Elementor is yeah, man. It's a grandiose idea.
Speaker 1:Right? Let's just try to let's do a page builder, and let's do the next best thing for profitability and and scale is do hosting. Also very difficult. But, like, if you can nail it, you're you're you're off to the races. And I think that's what WordPress is is gonna lean to.
Speaker 1:Like, in a year's time, it's gonna be come to wordpress.com, host your site. We got Jetpack. It's the best experience for WordPress. If you go somewhere else, too bad. But if you come here, you're gonna get this.
Speaker 1:I think that's what maybe Elementor and other hosts have tried to do. Probably the only other one that comes to my head is is go, GoDaddy and Bluehost, sponsor of the show. They have, an AI builder that, you know, onboarding experience.
Speaker 4:It's Wonder Suite.
Speaker 1:Wonder Suite. So you have these components of trying to build experiences out, and, I think Elementor just tried to do that, maybe trying to swing for the fences a little too early, but a lot of other hosts are gonna try to to go down this path. Did you have something you wanna throw in there at the end, Jonathan? No?
Speaker 4:I you know, so I don't think it's good Yeah. Long term for the ecosystem. That that's that's the heart of it. I think it's a natural progression. Wordpress.com added on its, you know, it's it's been making some moves in the you you can now join the marketplace there and get you get on wordpress.com and WooCommerce, which is interesting.
Speaker 4:I think it's natural. I just don't think it's the best thing that we could do in this space. And it's like, I think ultimately what happens is if you get it to a future state where you've got a bunch of bifurcated sub ecosystems, you have the experience for WordPress over here with Bluehost. You have the one over here with GoDaddy. You have the one over at .com.
Speaker 4:And it makes sense that you'll have folks like .com say, hey, we're just gonna we we just can't figure this out. We're just gonna kinda do our own thing. I just think it's it's unfortunate, and it's more short term thinking than long term.
Speaker 1:Will .will.comcom
Speaker 2:get more aggressive? And, like, is but I guess my question is, if .com and Automatic really pushed hard, could they really upset the ecosystem more? Are they how much are they trying to protect it?
Speaker 4:So here's the thing. As a former automatician, I worked at WooCommerce for eighteen months, and, right when COVID started, so I got a lot of, like, front row experience. I have a lot of really good things to say about my time. One of the challenges at Automatic is that it's quite siloed. Like, different organizations can do different things.
Speaker 4:There's a lot of autonomy, which has a lot of upside. But one of the downsides is that what WooCommerce is doing over here is quite different from what .com is doing over here, which is what what the Versus what Jetpack is doing over here and so on and so forth. And and it's not uncommon to see strat like, from an automatic perspective, it's like you're going in different directions. So we're not sure what we're doing. So it's hard to say.
Speaker 4:Dotcom generally though has been pretty aggressive in its positioning. They see themselves as we're just competing against the other hosts. But what it's hard to take into account is that that hurts Jetpack's ability to get buy in with all the other hosts. It also hurt WooCommerce's ability to get that buy in as well. It's like, how is this not just youpushing.com?
Speaker 4:And so it it creates some challenges, and I expect them to be more frustrated and more aggressive as time goes on, and we'll see how that pans out.
Speaker 1:And and we kinda see this, right, happening with, you know, WooCommerce now. Woo. Right? Woo.com. You can go and you can get the you can get the hosting and, know, a 100%.
Speaker 1:It's it's you got WooCommerce, you've got .com, you've got Jetpack. Where like, where is this experience going? My thought is is all this is gonna do is just push the whole of automatic to having a more centralized WordPress experience when you get to wordpress.org. It's gonna be like, hey. By the way, we get these other things over here, and then we get this open source WordPress thing.
Speaker 1:You know? Here's WordPress. The best way to do it, you want your own website? Use Jetpack. You want to sell something?
Speaker 1:Use WooCommerce, and then below that, in fine, like, nine point text will be download WordPress. Right? It'll be Oh. Just download WordPress right here if you want it. You know?
Speaker 1:And I can't fault them for that. Like, if you went to No. Red Hat I I'm not gonna pull it up right now. But if you went to Red Hat, a Linux operating system, I'm sure it's all enterprise Red Hat when you get to their website, and then somewhere in the pages will be and here's the ISO you can download on your CD. That's how old I am because I used to put red ISO on my CDs.
Speaker 1:Like, here's the ISO download. Go, give it to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think that's the direction they're gonna go. Mark, thoughts on the Woo?
Speaker 3:Well, first of all, I I just wanna say that's kind of the way Microsoft went with their Office March, and, I mean, it it's just the the way things go. My my first thought with the Wu, and and probably because it happened while I am busy updating our Black Friday roundup list for main WP, which is a daily chore, is all these people that that have to market towards Woo now instead of WooCommerce because they've built their plugins and says WooCommerce, WooCommerce, WooCommerce, and now all these people I'm sure are like, oh, well, there's, you know, a wrench that's been thrown in our works here that we have to, we have to deal with. I don't know, what was, I guess my question is, what's the overall point?
Speaker 1:For me, it'd be probably just, like, branding. Right? Trying to make this thing Sure. Feel better. But I agree.
Speaker 1:Like, do we need it? Yeah. Like like, do do you just take Woo and go and then just take WooCommerce and just say, oh, by the way, WooCommerce exists. It's in here. But you have to unwrap Woo first.
Speaker 1:Is it just like
Speaker 3:I don't know. I I I always worry about, I guess I, you know, I always get worried or concerned when I look from the outside. I'm going, why did they feel the need to rebrand at all right now? Why are they putting their money and resources and and, you know, is it the marketing guys woke up one day and like, we don't have anything to do today. Let's do this.
Speaker 3:I I I don't know. I mean, I I I honestly don't know, but Jonathan does.
Speaker 4:So I do know the answer to this one, or at least I have I'm informed from experience. So this has been in the works for years. This isn't a a recent thing, and it's not trivial to get something like this done. But one of the clues is there in the posts. In in the post, who was it that did the announcement?
Speaker 4:David Callaway from the marketing team did the post. And, you know, so first, WooCommerce, the product, doesn't change its name. Woo is the name that that refers to the brand and company. But some of the names that do change, it'll now be WooPayments. And Woo Payments is, like, is the the baby.
Speaker 4:That's the one that's the the most important to WooCommerce the business, or Woo the business now. So that's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out. But, yeah, it's been years in the making. The you know, it's not trivial to do something like this. I'm also curious about the long term, but the short of it is, like, if you look, WooCommerce payments, formerly now Woo Payments is the most important part of the business, I'd argue.
Speaker 4:And so I would be looking at that and looking at what happens there going forward as the clue. And from my perspective, when you look at Woo the business, they're still a bit torn. They don't technically offer hosting directly. They have partners that do. Have one of their partners wordpress.com, and they have this clear open overture towards other hosts to say, hey.
Speaker 4:We wanna partner with you. And I know that's genuine. They've been doing that work, But I think there's a little bit of like, ah, let's bet on both both horses and see what happens. If wordpress.com wins, we're a good place to benefit from that. But we also know we don't wanna ignore the rest of the ecosystem, so let's try that.
Speaker 4:And I think we're seeing that unclarity of strategy, because I'd argue those are two very different strategies. We're seeing that, not be clearly played out yet.
Speaker 1:Oftentimes, I'll see people criticize automatic for, you know, where's your Super Bowl ad? You know, where where are the ads con like, if you look at you know, when I go onto the YouTube channel to upload, stuff, like, it's just I'm constantly getting hit with Wix and Squarespace ads. Right? And none of that stuff is showing by the way, if you're a marketer in WordPress and you're wondering, like, why your stuff isn't selling, look at a Squarespace and a Wix ad, has nothing to do with the software, the drag and drop build. It is nothing.
Speaker 1:It's always somebody painting on a canvas, cooking a dish, taking a photo, and then at the end, it's like, you can do this with Wix. It's like, oh, like, I didn't see any blocks, drag and drop, plugins, themes, nothing. So it's a huge story there for the or or lesson there for marketers. Obviously, lost my train of thought with that. So looking at Woo, I'm looking at their website.
Speaker 1:What I what a lot of folks were were angry about was, hey, what where's the community? Still, again, like, where's the community side of this? I feel like Shopify a few years ago used to be really good with the community, and I think that's how they catapult into a lot of their success was, you could go to shopify.com and hire an agency, get a freelancer, they had the directory and they had all that stuff. I don't know if that still exists these days. They took a lot of bad, PR with a lot of the stuff that they they did to their partners and stuff, but, a lot of people were questioning, like, where's the partnership portal here?
Speaker 1:Because, yeah, it's gonna take an end user days to do this. You need somebody to set this up for you. Partnership thoughts on, like, should it should it be led with community, or we have have we not learned our lesson that automatic's gonna put automatic first? I'll I'll give it to whoever wants to jump on that grenade.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Because it's, fool me once. Is that is that a is that what's happening here? People being worried, like, well, I I could donate my free time to this, or maybe I will get, yeah, maybe I I won't get the benefit from that that investment. I think that maybe what we're seeing here is some people are worried about volunteering for something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yep. It's gonna be fun, to see this stuff play out. I'm looking at their I am looking at the website right now. There's a page called no code customization.
Speaker 1:Somebody should, file that with fraud department.
Speaker 4:So when I was at WooCommerce, I was responsible for the community side of things. It was pretty incredible to me as I worked with folks around the world to see how much people were willing to contribute to a quite explicitly commercial product, and they were still willing to volunteer, organize meetups. And so there there's something just it's still part of this broader WordPress ecosystem. One of the challenges that I saw at Woo, and I think it's better now, but while I was there, they were pulling more people from Shopify and other, like, proprietary ecosystems and trying to, trying to get the benefit, which makes sense, But the people coming in weren't taking into account the unique nature. And it's not unique to open source, but it's unique when you're coming from a proprietary world.
Speaker 4:Right? Of this this idea of shared ownership that someone in a meetup in some other part of the world feels that this is theirs, and it is in fact theirs. And so we're at a place right now where you're, like, you're not really we're not seeing like, you go to the hosting page right now, and it's like wordpress.com, Pressable, VIP. If you go down a little bit further, there's some of the SiteGround and Bluehost and other trusted partners, but they're clear second and third class citizens when the when the reality is that the majority of WooCommerce is hosted outside of automatic. And it's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out.
Speaker 4:Some of those Shopify folks are no longer there at WooCommerce, and there's people who are there who have been there, like, a really long time. So I'm optimistic. But, but, yeah, I think
Speaker 3:You know? I think it
Speaker 4:it's gonna be a hot mess for a while.
Speaker 3:It strikes me that a lot of the issues that I see with marketing within the word WordPress community is that we're marketing to the WordPress community. So we know what wordpress. We we know what wordpress.com means. We know what all these things mean, but if you're trying to market to people outside of WordPress, because what we're seeing right now is kind of this feeding frenzy, right, of like, oh, how can we get that customer from within the community that's already somebody else's customer within the community? We see that happening all the time, and yet we're talking about things like Shopify.
Speaker 3:What makes Shopify so popular? Well, to me, it's the fact that I can set up a Shopify store in five minutes and get engagement. Okay. How do you do that with WooCommerce? Well, if we're only marketing to WordPress people, you're going to have WordPress answers to that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that quote, you know?
Speaker 4:And this was the justification to doing WuXpress. This is like, okay. We need to control the experience. We need to create something that's better for end users. Not wrong, but I think shortsighted.
Speaker 4:Rather than doing the work of saying, okay. How do we be the leader in this but work with our partners to improve the experience for end users? Where they said, you know what? Just forget that. Let's just do our own thing.
Speaker 4:That's how it feels from the outside. I was like, okay. Good luck partners over there, but we're gonna create the best Woo experience here, which I'd argue somewhat by nature can't be. You need the ecosystem ecosystem brought brought along along with with you. You.
Speaker 4:Right. And Right. We're we're gonna that's gonna be a struggle.
Speaker 1:Makes you wonder why Automattic wouldn't even buy text.com for $50,000,000 when there's so many other things to fix. That that link is not on the news roundup, but my god. I used it. It's it's a it's an interesting product, but $50,000,000? I don't I don't know.
Speaker 1:Let's, let's let's finish off today's episode in segment four WordPress. Is WordPress thriving? This was a part of a conversation that or a presentation that Josef, Hayden Champosi did at, WordCamp US. And, you know, I'm just I put this out there as, like, this is just my gut feeling. End of the year, we start reflecting on, like, where '23 has gone, what's happening with WordPress, and going into 2024.
Speaker 1:And just seeing all of the, fever dreams that Mullenweg was in on Twitter, What happened in the community? Software's getting better. I think we're on an upswing with people being more positive with block building. And is WordPress thriving? Is the lens that I'm literally gonna be looking at all of this through, because I I'm hoping that upper management means it.
Speaker 1:Like, I hope it's a it's a it's a a a thing that everyone has bought into, and I I won't let that go at least for the next year. And that's how I'm going into 2024 is all of this stuff, you know, is WordPress thriving. Does anyone have any thoughts on the WordPress thriving? Who wants to to take that one first? No direct question, obviously, but what are your thoughts on how you're evaluating is WordPress thriving?
Speaker 2:It's a it's a yes and kind of a thing where there are people well, I guess when you not to get too philosophical, but what is WordPress? I mean, it's code, but it's a community. It's people. It's companies. It's people trying to make a living, and it's people like us talking about it.
Speaker 2:I am constantly encouraged when I am in the different Slacks in our community about people who are just willing to help out. Like, wow. You took time to write a really thoughtful answer to this person that you may maybe not know at all. That's an incredible thing. Go to these WordCamp events.
Speaker 2:Wow. Like, people are showing up for this stuff. And I'm seeing new content being created. There is a general it just keeps going. There is a, an enthusiasm for the project.
Speaker 2:At the same time, there are significant reasons why we can all be concerned about the future of it. So it's a it's a yes and we need to make sure that the the guardrails for some of these different things happen. What's gonna happen with AI? Because we need to make sure we at least say that a couple of times in here for the algorithm. How will WordPress integrate integrate with AI, and what's what's that gonna do?
Speaker 2:Nobody knows.
Speaker 1:Mark, any thoughts?
Speaker 3:I'm I actually agree with Adam. It's it's the it's definitely a yes and, and you know, how do we define WordPress is a huge question that I have concerns because I think that the reason, one of the major, major reasons, if not the major reason for the growth of WordPress was and is the community. And, the concern that I have is that, know, blame it on COVID for sure, but it seems like we haven't gotten back to this idea that what drove the community was these live events, these face to face events. I, know, word camps are taking a whole different shape than they used to, and, it it's becoming more and more, difficult for sponsors to come in. So for the new people to come in and get their names known, it's becoming more expensive.
Speaker 3:And, you know, this is one of those things that I actually spoke with Andrea Middleton, speaking of of whom, you know, back in 2014 or something, said, you know, the way WordPress is going, we're gonna end up in a situation where it's evolved too much and it makes it hard for people to get into the community, and that's just natural evolution. Are we thriving? What does that mean? I mean, have we peaked? Is that really more the question, you know, that needs to be asked asked?
Speaker 3:Because, you know, 43% of the internet with the next in line is at what, nine or 10% or something like that? That's huge. So do we just look at it and go, okay, let's just maintain? Or, you know, what does thriving mean? Does it mean we keep adding percentage points?
Speaker 3:Well, those percentage points are gonna be like fractions of a percent at this So, I think community is where it's at. I think that building a good solid piece of software that just works is important, but if the community doesn't exist to back it up because it is community driven, it is open source, all those things, I we're just gonna run into more and more experiences with we where we run into people on the elevator who have no clue what WordPress is.
Speaker 1:Damn you, Mark, for making this software.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So I've got a couple of thoughts on this. The first, as I as I look at it, I think the key is to look at the the health of the ecosystem itself as a whole. It's not just the software, as Mark referenced, it's the community. There's there's some different parts and pieces to it. So it's interesting.
Speaker 4:How do you measure that, especially in a decentralized space? And when what I personally pay attention to so I was just double checking. So if I if I'm recalling this correctly, I think Giuseppe has been on the job for seven years. So I'm hoping we can have at least another good three years before she hits the ten year mark in context of kind of where we started this out. I have a lot of confidence in Giuseppe's leadership and the team that she's building around her.
Speaker 4:So that's and and that's, for deep seated reasons. I've seen what she and her team have done through some pretty big challenges. So that's an important indicator to me is like, how's that team doing? What I'm paying attention to the most right now though, are how are the product companies within our ecosystem actually doing? To me, like, if you think about the framing of WordPress as an app store, or WordPress rather as an operating system, the products are like the apps for it.
Speaker 4:Right? And how how are they doing? And there's a lot of struggle. There's products that are doing quite well, but they you know, they're they're fractions of what they could be in terms of the market share. So how is that gonna work?
Speaker 4:And that to me, that succeeding really comes down to how effectively we can do partnership within the space, how systematically, and that's not trivial. I think it's quite doable. But if that's not if that is done, then I think we have a lot more resources and momentum that can be harnessed back into the project. And if it's not, then I think, at some point, the trade offs of decentralization just carry their natural course. And we just bifurcate, and it's a bunch of it's gonna be very hard to ever kill off this ecosystem.
Speaker 4:But I would say, like, thriving is not to be taken for granted. It doesn't just happen.
Speaker 1:100%.
Speaker 4:It'll be interesting to see how the next couple of years go.
Speaker 1:Alright, gentlemen. Thanks for hanging out today in our first roundtable here at the WP Minute. Adam, take us out. Where can folks go to say thanks to you for hanging out today?
Speaker 2:Well, there's a really cool Slack community, that the WP Minute has, and you can always find me there, of course, on on post status, but, cirrusinfluence.com, if you're interested in some of those product companies Jonathan was talking about, PR exposure. And then, yeah, LinkedIn is is also a a healthy, place for me to hang out as well. Mark.
Speaker 3:I'm also on the WP Minute. In fact, that's how, Adam and I actually, connected. And and, actually, it's it's a great community. I'm also on Twitter at mark benzac. I won't call it that other thing.
Speaker 4:Is it still called
Speaker 3:Twitter? I won't call it that other thing yet.
Speaker 4:I respect that.
Speaker 3:I respect I'm a protester. Anyway, then LinkedIn. And You can find me on LinkedIn, and I'm on the Facebook groups and, just word camps. If they happen, I try to be there.
Speaker 1:You're gonna have a hard time when WordPress switches to Jetpack, Mark. All brand all branding will be called Jetpack. Yeah. Jonathan.
Speaker 4:I am also on the WP Man at Slack. Got a good little thing going on there. And, yeah, I'm, on jonathanwool.com. I have a WordPress blog that I update periodically. My contact information is there.
Speaker 4:And then my efforts these days are focused on Gildenburg, which you can find at Gildenburg Dot Com and, and on Twitter.