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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. Today's episode features a segment from Matt's talk with WP Signal Creator Jared Rethman. Jared shared the potential of real-time infrastructure for WordPress and how it may be a defining feature moving forward. Now you can catch the entire interview over on our WP Minute Plus channel. Visit the WPMinute.com for all the details.
Matt Medeiros (00:28)
But here's my last working theory, and then I want to get back to talking about WP Signal. I think that what we'll see is probably, we will see the percentage of WordPress shrink, right, in terms of like that 45, 44, 43 % that's been around for quite some time. And I actually think it's a good thing, even though it might be a detriment to the WordPress economy.
But I think it's a good thing because I think what will land on is the use case for WordPress, which has been the struggle for like 20 years. Like, what is this thing? Who should be using it? Who's the best use case for this? It's been a general tool for a lot of people, right? From bloggers to folks like you and I who are building solutions for customers, to e-commerce stores, to the portfolio site. WordPress has always struggled with that identity.
Jared Rethman (01:00)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros (01:23)
And I think that this is an opportunity where WordPress can land on an identity and like be an open source tool for a thing. I don't know what the thing is yet, but I think it will be a thing soon. And that's just my own thoughts. I don't know if you, because you have a breadth of knowledge. Like you've seen large media scale, large scale media sites at TenUp and your other jobs.
Jared Rethman (01:47)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros (01:48)
And I just think that maybe there's an identity that WordPress needs to find and this might be the cause of that. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
Jared Rethman (01:58)
I mean, as you were talking, was like, it's such an interesting question, like whether it has its identity. I mean, it kind of did. It was the blogging platform and then custom post types came around and then the REST API happened and then that became like an application framework. I've got several clients that hit the REST API through their mobile apps. So it's, I don't know if it would ever find it's...
and like a granular identity. I think it's gonna be this general purpose kind of CMS solution for a while. I mean, what are the alternatives like Drupal, M-Dash, Payload, or one of those types of like headless solutions? I don't know. think there's too much experience, too big of a community to...
for it to go anywhere anytime soon. I do see that, as you said, that market share, I do see it shrinking, but I don't see specifically people jumping ship, leaving WordPress to go to another solution. I just see an influx, a plethora of new sites hitting the market, like these Astro sites and whatever it may be, whatever Claude decides is the best solution.
Matt Medeiros (03:19)
Yeah,
yeah, whatever cloud makes you build and then we're all following that. Along the same lines again, I wanna go back to WP Signal for a moment. Some ideas just popped into my head. When real-time collaboration started to get developed, in core WordPress that is, did you see that as an opportunity?
for WP Signal, like when you maybe first had the idea before you even started building this product, and when it got pulled from 7.0, did you jump for joy? Or did you say like, no, this is not good for me? Like, how do you see competing or augmenting the real-time collaboration with WP Signal, if at all?
Jared Rethman (03:47)
Mm-hmm
So the birth and the idea, the concept of WP signal was birthed from the real time collaboration initiative. So in the early buildup towards version seven, was a lot, mean, I was working at breakneck speed trying to get this plugin launched in time for version seven. But as I was following along, I started to notice that this wasn't really gonna happen just because of.
the performance issues that come with real-time collaboration and just hammering the DB to keep both browsers in sync and add, that's on two people, add three people, add four, five, six people. Then you've got one issue with the plugin inside and the block editor which can crash the entire editor. it's, I kind of had the feeling that it wasn't gonna make it.
But then I started to, like I mentioned, explore the possibilities of what that real-time behavior can kind of give a WordPress owner, a WordPress site owner. And then I started to look into the bi-directional chat. even created, I recently created a poker game that you can play between two WordPress logged-in users. And now I'm starting to explore and...
create examples of what you can do with e-commerce. So I'm augmenting it in that way. But I'm still closely following the real-time collaboration initiative. I don't believe it's going to make it in 7.1. I think it's going to still be, I don't know if we'll make it in this year, but we'll see.
Matt Medeiros (05:44)
From your product perspective though, when real-time collaboration does hit, if at all, is WP Signal set to augment that experience? Like in terms of like your own marketing messaging, are you able to say, okay, now that WordPress Core has this, I can bring this experience 10 times for you, like with all this other stuff that I can add to it. Is that the positioning for a product like yours?
Jared Rethman (06:07)
Absolutely, yeah. the lovely folks who've been working on real-time collaboration built it in and using a provider architecture where you can as a provider, as a WebSocket real-time collaboration, I mean a real-time WebSocket relay, I can just plug into that provider architecture and instead of using the polling mechanism that's implemented. essentially there's this HTTP polling
mechanism that exists within real-time collaboration and it's literally just sitting there hammering the DB every, I think it's currently set to three seconds. So 90 % of those messages are empty because it's saying has anything changed, has anything changed. What the WebSocket Relay allows is that you've got this open connection and only when things change, only when things need to be sent, are messages sent across that wire.
Yeah, I kind of lost my thought there, my train of But basically that's how it's automating it.
Matt Medeiros (07:09)
Yeah, yeah.