Matt: Kevin Geary, welcome to the WP Minute.
Matt, thanks for having me.
Glad to be here.
Geary.
co, automaticcss.
com, x.
com, slash, thekevingeary, and forgot to put it up, youtube.
com, slash, at kevingeary, I believe is your YouTube channel as well?
YouTube is at gearyco, I believe.
all things, bricks, all things scaling WordPress businesses,
very opinion opinionated fellow on Gutenberg and WordPress at large.
A lot of folks really wanted me to have this interview with you.
You reached out right around the same time I was chatting with folks to
talk about, having you on the show.
And I was telling you before we hit record, just in all fairness to you,
there's a big debate on whether Kevin Geary likes WordPress or, or really
supports the WordPress side of things.
You, you come off on a very opinionated side.
And I think you and I both have strong opinions and we would
probably agree on a lot of things.
The only thing I've ever taken, Taking a back from, and the only thing I was really
like, man, this one really stung a little bit from just like the leader perspective,
like being a leader in the space, somebody who has a lot of followers, somebody
who has a lot of, community, folks that follow him was the, the recent live
stream you did where, you know, you singled out one individual and sort of
took apart his, sort of website build.
That was the only thing.
That I was really like, man, didn't really, that one didn't
really fit good with me.
Just like when Mullenweg called out and it made personal tax and you
didn't even go that far, by the way.
But when I saw Mullenweg do something in his vein of like having an outburst
and I'm not even calling your thing an outburst, but his outburst, I was
like, man, from a leader's perspective, left the bad taste in my mouth.
I understand your passion for it.
This is a long lead up and I want to give a long lead up because I've
thought about this meeting for a while.
And a month or so ago, somebody was like, you don't really know Kevin and you've
never taken his page builder one on one course and understood all the stuff.
And I did, I took your page builder one on one course.
Fantastic.
You are an advanced and intelligent individual on CSS.
And it was great.
I will admit I skipped some of the tech parts cause I'm not building
websites anymore, you know, from the ground up, but a fantastic course.
and I think that, you know, my perspective is maybe you're, and,
and I'm not even saying this label, and we'll have this, this discussion.
Maybe you're misunderstood in, from the, the, the folks on the
Gutenberg side of the fence.
Like, maybe they're just like, hey, they don't see the same passion.
Maybe they all should take the PageBuilder 101 course, and I think they should.
Because at first blush, I was like, oh, he's just an internet
marketing guy who's got a course.
And this is an advantage to his business.
And then I took the course and I was like, Oh, he's no, he really knows his stuff.
And he's, he, it is from the heart.
One commenter said it's like being in the trenches and dodging bullets,
which was funny, but it certainly sets the stage and the tone.
And I wanted to give this opportunity to just chat about maybe why you think
people Might you might rub people the wrong way because I think you even
fully admit it to and in in that course like hey This might not be for you.
I'm fast paced.
I'm in your face.
This might not be the thing for you.
Anyway, this is a long preamble I am happy to have you here, but I did want
to just frame it with let's let's unpack the Kevin Geary that maybe some folks
Don't see on Twitter and chat about that
Kevin: Well, I'm very passionate about our industry.
I'm very passionate about WordPress.
I'm very passionate about the people that I serve, which is WordPress
developers, web designers, whatever they want to call themselves.
but people working within the WordPress ecosystem and those people
have families and those people have real lives and our tools.
And the work that we do has a dramatic impact on the lives of those people.
Those people have employees.
there's a lot of people that rely on WordPress.
There's a lot of people that rely on the work that we do in this ecosystem.
There's a lot of clients that rely on the work that we do as
well, who have real businesses and real families and real employees.
And so I've spent the last few years teaching.
What I consider to be best practices as I know them, paying a lot of
attention to details and to workmanship and to quality and accessibility.
And I put this education out there for free.
And in doing this, I've also realized some of the areas where
we can improve workflows and I've built software and tools to fulfill.
Those purposes, contrary to popular belief, the educate, the free education
came first, the tools came second, the tools were built for the, gaping holes
in people's workflow based on what we teach as far as best practices goes.
Okay.
So that's where I'm coming from.
if anybody doubts.
Whether I support WordPress or love WordPress or whatever, as an
ecosystem, as a project, as a whatever.
if I didn't like WordPress, I would actually not say anything.
I would let WordPress continue down the path that it's currently going,
because I don't think that that is a winning path, because I deeply.
Love WordPress.
And by the way, I've been using WordPress since 2005.
so I've been around for a while, not new to WordPress.
and you know, I want WordPress to survive.
Most of my journey with WordPress has been.
With this default understanding that WordPress is the dominating
thing in, on the internet, right?
So we, we all know the stat 43 percent of websites are powered by WordPress.
That's been the understanding the, the entire, until now, until now, I know
that that status still kind of sticking around, but the underlying stat of
new projects started with WordPress is dramatically lower dramatically.
And it's, and it's continuing to decline.
And I think that there are very.
clear reasons as to why this is.
And it's become very clear to me that if something doesn't change, I don't
think WordPress is going to continue to dominate, and that is a problem for me.
It's a problem for all the people that I do work for.
It's a problem for all of my clients.
It's a problem for that entire ecosystem that I just talked about.
And so I feel like if people don't start standing up and saying
something, and saying something.
A little bit loud because I've also recognized that WordPress does have a
little bit of an echo chamber problem.
and so I, I think if there isn't some counter leadership, let's call
it, the, the changes that need to be made are not going to be made.
So.
but no, I 100 percent love WordPress and I'm 100 percent committed to WordPress.
All of my products, all of my work is done on WordPress and for WordPress and
for people in the WordPress ecosystem.
So there should be no doubt there.
Yeah.
Matt: You, I mean, I've made a career, a podcasting, audio career on being
opinionated about WordPress largely from.
the leadership perspective, right?
Mullenweg, critical, been a critic of WordPress, both critical and positive.
And, you know, I love WordPress, probably as much as, as you do.
it's funny, I was talking to, probably a, a friend of, a shared friend of
ours, Mark, Zemanski about this stuff.
And I was, I was like, Mark, you know, you know, I, I've been criticized from,
from my own content that I put out because let's face it, you and I are in probably
the smaller, well certainly me cause I usually cover like business and, and
community opinion and stuff like this.
You're in the more of the broader category because you're doing front end development
and, and, and coding and stuff like that.
But largely the people who consume content for WordPress.
Are like the pure developers.
Hey man, just talk to me about JavaScript, PHP, HTML, CSS, my SQL
database optimization and hosting.
That's like the broad audience.
And then, you know, when I come along and talk about business,
they're like, get out of here.
I don't want to, I don't care about how, how you build your
million dollar plug in business.
That's whatever.
so I, I feel like we, we share that sort of same struggle of, you know,
the, the community being like, ah, this content isn't for me.
but I can certainly respect your, you know, your passion
and, and your angle on it.
Do you ever look at it as like from a content creators perspective, like
I need to be different to stand out or this is just that passion just
bleeding out all over the place when you're, when you're creating this stuff.
Kevin: Yeah, I mean, nothing that I do.
I mean, you can watch, I think people, well, I don't know.
I mean, some people are good actors, but like, I don't have all
the content I produce is just me.
I can't, I'm not a good actor.
Like I just, I turn on a camera and I, and I, and I record,
99 percent of my videos are.
mostly unedited, right?
there, there'll be a little snippet here or there or
whatever, but, mostly unedited.
I do hours of live streaming every single, it's just, it would
be too exhausting to, to act.
and so I say what I say on my live streams.
I say what I say in my videos and I say what I say on social media
and it's all extremely consistent.
and that's, that's just it.
And I decided a long time ago, I was like, you know, you know, Cause
when I first started making videos, I was actually a little worried.
Like I, I held back a little bit.
and I was like, let's, let's button it up.
Let's make it a little bit more corporate.
Let's package it nicely.
And, and I was just like, man, this is, it's too mentally
and emotionally exhausting.
It's way easier to turn on a camera and just be yourself and just do what you do.
And publish it and that's it.
And that's what I've lived by.
you know, a few weeks in, I was like, no, not doing that anymore.
And, it was just me from that point forward.
Matt: When people, ask, let's talk about, the criticisms of Gutenberg.
And, and again, I, I'm not saying you're wrong.
I think what people are missing is there needs to be healthy debate.
There needs to be healthy criticism on both sides of the fence.
If it's just one person agreeing with everybody, the echo chamber,
like you mentioned, then.
It's just the same thing over and over again.
And there is no progress.
Like there needs to be a little bit of what I'll call,
you know, chaos that happens.
And then out of that chaos, something new happens, whether you agree with
it or not in this open source world, whether it's like, Hey, I don't
like these features in Gutenberg.
Well, This is the chaos that got us to this point and maybe there'll
be more chaos that happens again that gets us to the next point.
It's not a beautiful way to, to envision it, but sort of how I see open source or
local politics, you know, to a degree.
when people say, Hey man, like you've got some great ideas.
Why not bring it to the leadership?
Why not sit down with a meeting with Mullenweg or Rich Tabor or Anne McCarthy
and say, Hey, I've got these notes.
I've got these strong opinions on the software.
Let me just go and have these one on one meetings or, you know, interview them
on your channel or something like that.
And sit down and have those more, what I'll say, relaxed debates versus The
live streams or the Twitter threads?
Kevin: I think it's a very simple answer to that.
I've never been invited to any of those things, so it's not that I
would reject them or decline them.
I invited Matt to come on my live stream, which they had initially agreed to.
We just, I think it was right before he went on his sabbatical,
so it probably got lost.
to reconnect and things like that.
So, you know, Matt is open and, and that's one thing that I've actually
praised Matt for a lot is his willingness to go on people's podcasts and live
streams and do this stuff and answer questions and take criticism and take
heat and, and have the conversations.
so on that point, you know, I, I would give him maximum praise.
you know, anybody that works on the project, if they invited me
to conversations more than happy to, to have those conversations,
a few people said that they would, I said, DM me, we'll set it up.
It's very simple.
Like I live stream every week.
I mean, this is very open.
It's very easy to get to me.
I'm on podcasts all the time.
They don't end up DMing me.
and so, you know, that that's why it doesn't happen.
It's not that I'm avoiding it or not wanting it to happen.
I'm welcome it.
I a hundred percent welcome it.
every time that I've brought things up, mainly the reaction is why don't
you become an official contributor?
It's essentially like, why don't you come?
Do free work for us.
Why don't you come, put ideas in the voting pool and then wait on
them to happen and yada, yada, yada.
And it's like, okay, that, that part of it, I'm not super interested in.
Like I I'm building my own products.
I have a full plate as it is.
but I do.
you know, I do love WordPress and I do love the direction that
it, the potential that it has.
Right?
and my main concern right now is, is more than a feature request missing
here or there or a slight adjustment.
It's not something I can go into the contributors area, or get and
just write up something real quick.
It's more about.
The block editor being a fundamental departure from longstanding web
design practices and principles.
And you can't fix that with a feature request and you can't
fix that with a contribution.
the only way you can really get an understanding and a potential fix
for that is through these kinds of conversations and public examples of.
Asking what exactly is going on here?
What?
And what is the vision for this?
And so that's the only way I've seen to do it.
And, you know, anybody that wants to have discussions about it
further, I'm more than open to.
Matt: Yeah, it's certainly one of the same things that I struggled with.
You know, years ago, it was the same challenge, right?
Because I was critical of leadership.
It was very difficult to, you know, get Matt on as a podcast guest.
Little less.
Challenging now, because I think he's seen that I'm a little bit more level
headed than some, not you, but others in the space who, who come up with really
wild, allegations on, on the way he runs his business and decides things.
and it's, it's a tough space.
This is, I don't know if this is just the WordPress community or.
Open source in general.
I spend most of my professional career in two different open source
worlds, WordPress being the biggest.
And then the other side is podcasting.
There's a whole podcast thing called podcasting 2.
0.
It's an open source.
Yeah.
it's a lot smaller obviously than, than WordPress, but it's the same like
challenges of, there are people sort of at the top have been doing it for decades
or started a project and then you kind of have to, you A little tug of war, a
little back and forth to get attention and to get people to, whatever, validate
your thoughts and your ideas to get there.
but, you know, one of the practices, again, thanks to, to Mark, I, I complained
about something with, getting to templates in, no, excuse me, getting to template
parts in, the site editor, right?
Because it's tucked away in, like, the patterns library or something like that.
And I was like, why can't I just use Command K to get there?
I mean, there's a whole point of this Command K thing.
what is to get there?
And, you know, whatever.
Ranted on Twitter or something like that.
And he was like, put your money where your mouth is and , you know, and go to GitHub.
So I was like, okay, fine.
So I, I went to GitHub and I said, here's the issue.
I want to get to template parts inside of, the command palette, command K.
And, you know, sure enough, somebody picked up on it.
I think actually somebody else, you know, Brian Cord, which, mm-Hmm.
. Part of the, part of the discussion today, Brian Cords picked up on it, wrote.
Actually some code to pull it up in the, in the command palette.
And I think it's coming to six, six, maybe six, seven in the future.
But the idea is, is like, yeah, I can understand like these huge, massive.
shifts in the way the software is, is being developed
might be too much for that.
but I think there could be some inroads there if, if spent with the right people.
And maybe it's them inviting you, or you inviting them.
I think there can be some movements there.
Cause I, I do think that is one of the greatest strengths
that we have in WordPress.
Is that you can leave a mark.
It's gonna be tough.
At first, but I think you have the audience and the respect
enough to, to have those meetings.
So it's unfortunate that they haven't cycled, cycled back to you to book those.
But, I think it can go both ways where a little bit of maybe spend a
little time in GitHub and leave some comments and then they go, okay, fine.
This guy gets it.
And now there's some connection there.
I think it'd be better for, for everyone.
Kevin: Yeah, I think, building bridges is always good, right?
So if it has to start small, then it has to start small.
you know, shout out to Brian.
Brian's been probably one of the most responsive on that side of the
aisle to various pieces of feedback, discussions, vocal, vocalization.
it's been, it's been great.
And I really appreciate that.
So I do think, I do think we need more of that.
but it goes back to, and a lot of what I've been talking about lately is, is this
concept of the vision of the block editor and the ideal user of the block editor.
And I just have a feeling and you know, it's kind of written in
their mission statement that this is for everybody and democratizing
publishing and yada, yada, yada.
But if you, if you build software with a faulty premise, it can't
really ever become good software.
And I just feel like the.
The premise of who the block editor is for is faulty.
And so they, they, they're designing it for a beginner.
They are designing it for, it's kind of the same like as the Wix audience.
It's like anybody off the street should be able to open up WordPress
and feel comfortable assembling pages or doing whatever they're doing.
And it's just never going to happen.
It's, it's not, it's not, that's a faulty premise that you, the idea that.
I always use my mom as an example, the idea that my mom can spin up
WordPress and open the block editor and start assembling pages is lunacy.
It's not even close to reality.
it doesn't matter how simplified you make it, how much you dumb it down.
It just doesn't matter.
She's never going to be able to do that.
And so if you build software for her.
The people who are going to suffer is everybody.
Everybody's going to suffer.
I think my mom can't do it.
And then everybody else is frustrated with it because of what you've done to
try to make it so that she can do it.
And that's kind of what I feel the block editor has been doing.
and, it's even, even over simplification beyond what Wix does
in terms of simplifying web design.
And it's insanely frustrating for people who know the language of web design.
So if you know the language of web design and you open the block editor,
This is a fundamental departure.
You have no idea what to do, where to start or what's going on.
and that's a, that to me is a big problem.
I'm not opposed to evolution.
I'm not opposed to innovation.
if there is a, if there's a fundamental departure from standard
practices and somebody can say, look, I get it, this is brand new.
looks way different.
but we did it for very good reasons.
It actually, when you learn it, it is, it's going to insanely improve how you
build websites and maintainability, scalability, et cetera, whatever
else that we actually care about.
It's going to do wonders for all of these things.
So just be patient, give it a second and let me walk you through it.
If that is the pitch, I have no problem with that.
In fact, automatic CSS has done many things to innovate workflows.
And I tell people that all the time.
I'm like, look, just be patient with this.
It's going to be brand new.
It's a new concept.
Nobody's doing this, but here are the advantages to doing it this way.
I feel like the block editor has made a fundamental departure from
the best practices of web design.
And has not been able to list a single advantage other than, well, your mom
can use it a little bit easier than a normal, you know, environment.
And that's not gonna, that doesn't cut it.
That doesn't cut it.
So that's been my main objection.
Now, if anybody wants to come in and say, no, no, no, here are the.
Here are the dramatic advantages that you get, but they're, they're
really, I've, I've looked at it.
I mean, I've tried to look at it objectively and I haven't identified
any, you take an environment where if you want to compare it to something
like bricks, where everything can be done in bricks that needs to be done.
And then you compare to the block editor where it's like, well, now, I mean,
we've got to introduce new languages.
We've got to introduce Jason files.
We've got to introduce VS code.
We've got to custom blocks.
We've got, I mean, man, we're taking something that could be unified.
And we're spreading it out across multiple different tools and languages.
That doesn't seem easier or better or faster for anybody.
and so it's fundamental problems like that, that I've continued to bring up.
Where the vision just doesn't seem to, it's not capable of
leading to a great conclusion.
And that's where I start to get very worried and I'm like, I don't know.
Are we going in the right direction with this?
And then you see the decline in new projects being started with WordPress, and
you start to wonder, is it because of this direction that, that WordPress has gone?
That's why we need to have the conversation.
Matt: Yeah.
One of the things that I've said, and whether you're, you know, Bricks user
or Elementor or whatever, like other page builder you have, I think one
of the great things, and, and want your thoughts on this, obviously, is
I feel like the, the page builders have won, right?
You know, you, you have Bricks and you have WordPress that'll
integrate into, into, you have Bricks that'll integrate into WordPress.
You have Elementor, Beaver Builder, whatever.
Like, you can put these tools on top.
And WordPress continues to flourish, right?
Or, or we need WordPress to continue to thrive.
So haven't we already won?
We being, let's say the page builder community, haven't we already won just
for the sheer fact that we're able to build a bricks tool and then your tool on
top of all these other tools, like, isn't that already a winning scenario or does.
WordPress need to fundamentally shift along with all of these tools continuing
to, to flourish at the same time.
Kevin: It's a really good question.
no, we, we have one by, by the, this is open source.
This is the wild west.
We can do whatever we want with WordPress.
That's, that's the best part about it.
WordPress is number one advantage is being open source, not just in its
flexibility, but in the ownership of data.
Right?
Like that actually matters most to me is the ownership of data.
so I control my data.
I own my data that I can't go to Webflow and say that I can't go to Shopify and
say that I can't go to Wix and say that.
Okay?
so that is the number one advantage.
And I actually firmly believe that if that advantage didn't exist, WordPress
was beat and defeated a long time ago.
but it does have that going for it, which is awesome.
amazing.
That's why, that's why I've been in WordPress for so long and
continue to stay in WordPress.
So, that's fantastic.
The problem is, the wild west of WordPress does not align
with the vision of for everyone.
it, it, it, except, so there's a caveat to the for everyone thing.
PageBuilding 101.
It's actually the joke is that it's not a one on one course.
It's actually, it's like two Oh one three Oh one four.
It's all baked in the, but it's called,
Matt: yeah, it's, it's a pretty intense,
Kevin: it's a pretty intense course.
Make it appealing to people.
But I tell them at the beginning, I'm like, I'm not going to
treat you like an idiot.
I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna like, You know, baby, you through this
thing, I'm going to tell you and teach you what you need to know.
And we're going to cover advanced topics.
And I'm going to do my absolute best to make you able to
absorb it and understand it.
but you are going to learn everything you need to know, to be more
advanced than most of the people building websites on WordPress.
Okay.
So that's what I told people at the beginning of page building one on one.
So the question is, is page building one on one for everyone?
And the answer is yes, but it's for everyone who wants to do the work.
It's not for people who want to click an easy button and magic appears.
It's for people who want to learn web design and practice web design and
care about quality and workmanship.
That's who it's for now.
So does that describe everybody?
I don't know, but anybody can come in.
All right.
But not everybody's going to make it through probably.
So WordPress.
You can't say, well, Kevin's mom is going to be able to come in here.
If it's the wild west, it's already a wrap.
She's already done.
You already lost because if you think about onboarding somebody into
software, you onboard somebody into Wix.
Very streamlined experience.
Welcome to Wix.
Here's our editor.
Here's our templates.
Here's our, this, here's our, that here's education on how to
do this and how to get going.
My mom can probably do some of that, right?
Choose a template, change some content, whatever.
But you come into WordPress and what is the onboarding flow for WordPress?
First of all, you have to install it on a server that you
have already set up and own.
Thankfully they have one click install, but we're already
at like, what's the server?
What's this?
What's that?
Okay.
So then we get into WordPress, into the dashboard and now it's okay.
Your first step is you need to choose a theme.
Well, it's actually not just the design and layout.
It's the actual architecture built into the theme.
So different themes are going to give you different options and
different ways of approaching how this website is built in and designed.
Okay.
Well, that just, you just sent that person down a rabbit hole of,
well, what are the pros and cons of this theme versus that theme?
And, oh, we got block themes and we got non block themes.
We've got, oh my gosh, this is insane to a beginner.
And then it's like, well, what do I do next?
Well, you actually have to extend WordPress because a lot of functionality
comes through these things called plugins.
And so there's a gazillion plugins to choose.
Well, which plugins do I need?
Well, we have to have some conversations about that, don't we?
And so now they're down another rabbit.
I mean, this is days of just investigating and weighing options.
And you know, this is assumed you even understand the pros and cons of the
ramifications of what is going on here.
This is not.
A for everybody platform.
It never it's for anybody who wants to come in and go through
the learning curve for sure.
Right.
But this idea that we should then craft the main editor, the block
editor as if somebody day one fresh off the street should be able to use
it without without learning anything.
The entire platform has to be learned.
The entire ecosystem has to be understood before you can do anything in WordPress.
So the idea that we should have a completely dumbed down editor
that departs completely from the fundamentals of web design and
frustrates most advanced web design users, that it seems like a, a mismatch.
And it also seems like, you know, the vision doesn't compute.
And for some reason it's like, why haven't they.
Realize that that vision doesn't compute in an ecosystem like WordPress.
Matt: Yeah, you know, I, I seen the recent numbers about like the decline of
new installs and I don't know, I think it's, I mean, listen, I have no idea,
opinion just like everybody else, but, I think it's a, is it a lagging indicator?
Like we're, we're catching up.
To the tail end of everyone of evacuating WordPress when Gutenberg came out.
And then a couple of years after that, we had COVID where everybody spiked to going
to WordPress and other web platforms.
Cause everyone was at home building stuff.
Everybody, Oh shit, I need a website now.
Right.
You did like when I was in business, I was at ran an agency for a decade.
It's been, I've been out of, out of it now for.
I don't know, like seven years, but when COVID hit people, people, I was trying to
sell websites through back in 2010 were calling me up going, I need that website.
Now I'm like, where the hell were you when I was trying to get you that website?
but I think this is like the lab, maybe anyway, lagging indicator of
like the, the real techies who were in WordPress who left when Gutenberg hit.
And then we had like this weird fluctuation of, of data from, from COVID.
And I think it like, maybe it'll plateau.
I think, well, let me ask you this.
Do you think it's as easy?
Do you think it's an easy fix for WordPress to just say advanced
mode, easy mode, easy mode enables the site editor advanced mode.
You can just shut it off.
And it's now just a framework like it was.
10 years ago, pages, posts, custom post types.
Let me go nuts and let me bring in my own page builder.
Do you think it's easy enough for them to just go easy mode, advanced
mode and advanced mode, you can just shut all this stuff off.
And we're back to like this blank canvas framework.
Like we used to,
Kevin: yeah, I, I, I mean, I don't know how easy it is from like
an architectural perspective.
I don't think anything's easy now because they've got, you know, FSC
and the, the UIs are a complete departure from one another.
We have to bring a lot of cohesiveness in.
and then yes, we do need to talk about.
Advanced users versus beginners and making the experience because it's,
you don't really have to pick one.
You can, you can build a tool that has all of the necessary
controls for advanced users.
But then we have to get into this idea of there is two big camps, right?
There's the camp of I love to live in VS code.
I want to create, I want to write my own custom blocks.
I want to use tailwinds.
I want to do, I want to do all this stuff in VS code.
And then it just appears in Versus The other side of the aisle, which is Nope.
I want to do everything in a UI.
I want to do everything in a page builder.
We have this concept of page building now, and that's where I choose
and prefer to do all of my work.
so those, that situation has to be handled.
Now WordPress can support both of those for sure.
But on the UI side, I think the developers can continue to do what developers do.
I mean, they're, they're able to do that in VS code.
They can do all the work they want is same old workflow, whatever.
It's really the UI side of things that we're talking about here.
And so people that use page builders want a specific experience.
Elementor was the, one of the first page builders.
Divi was obviously one of the first page builders.
they kind of introduced this whole concept and proved that, Hey, you can actually do
work like this and you can build entire sites and it's a good experience and,
and we've come a long way since then.
Right.
but if WordPress is, you know, WordPress had the option of, okay, well, we're
going to do something page building like.
That's native.
Should it be along those lines?
And should we give advanced users, people who know the language of web design, all
the controls and power that they need at their fingertips and WordPress flat
out said, no, we should not do that.
We should, we should only serve absolute beginners with this UI.
And anybody that wants to do anything beyond this is going to
have to extend the block editor.
And by the way, in order to do that, they just isolated all these page
builder people, because if you don't.
Do work in VS code and you don't understand multiple languages.
You are excluded from participating in that custom block building, extending the
block editor side of things that at least it's, that's a big jump to get there.
Right.
and so now what we have is a product where a lot of people.
There's a, I mean, look at the size of Elementor, look at the size of Divi, look
at the size of the page building world.
They feel like the block editor was not built for them.
Like they were excluded from being considered in the
development of the block editor.
That is an isolation of a, of a large part of the WordPress ecosystem.
And I don't think that that was a great decision.
Not involving people who use page builders in the vision for the
block editor, I think was a huge.
step backwards for WordPress and has created a lot of this tension.
Matt: Yeah.
I mean, I, it goes back to, you know, some of the stuff we will, we'll talk about and
stuff you already mentioned, stuff we'll, we'll talk about in a minute, but like
Wix and Squarespace, no code tools again, you know, I, I think a lot of this, again,
I have no answers, just pontificate, just like everybody else, but I remember
years ago thinking about, like remember the Avada theme and visual composer,
my God, those things were terrible.
Kevin: Yeah.
Matt: They were terrible.
And as an agency owner.
You know, you get somebody knocks on the door and they're like, yeah, this, you
know, this person, down the street, my cousin's neighbor's boyfriend built me
this site and, I don't want to pay any money, but he built me this site and
here it is, it's, and you boot it up and it's Avada and you're just like, what
the hell, like, I have to tear this thing apart and I think we had a real issue with
WordPress being fragmented and it's, it's a big debate to also like sit back and
say, okay, What are the motives of, say, Automatic and open source WordPress, and
is this really a, cohesive way to, to get, whatever, free labor and free research
and development for the betterment of Automatic, which I don't believe, like,
I believe that Matt Mullenweg really is, A huge advocate for, for open source and
I think he'll do anything he can to, to also keep WordPress open source, even from
investors in automatic, yada, yada, yada.
But I think what he realized was we have a frag, fragmentation issue and I can't
make this nice, cohesive iOS and Apple ecosystem like experience with WordPress.
If I don't, if there isn't a major shift like this, in order to get people to, to
stay on just what's the most base level of WordPress I can, I can give them that'll
allow them not, or give them the ability to do all this stuff without having to go
and get Elementor and then Gravity Forms and then all this other stuff, you're
building all those things, and that's where, that's where his real monetization
comes in, which is Jetpack, right?
Like if I can give somebody the basic framework to build a
website easily, that's a win.
It's just taken like 10 damn years to get there and we're still not
even like crossing that bridge yet.
It's not, it's not easy to solve that, but I, I certainly, I certainly understand
it and I certainly, I certainly feel it, you know, coming from, you know,
the Bricks and the Elementors and, and the Beaver Builders of the world.
Kevin: Well, the way I, the way I look at it is, there, there's actually,
WordPress is poised to serve both of these markets very easily, and very well.
so, and I mentioned this when I was on Jamie's, podcast as
well, which is there's wordpress.
org and wordpress.
com.
Wordpress.
org is a self hosted ecosystem, the wild, wild West.
Anybody who wants to learn and be a developer and be a real web
designer and all of that should use.
org and.
org should be structured to serve those people.
And then anybody who wants a Wix like approach.
Can, could go to.com if, if they, if they structured this correctly,
could go to.com, wordpress.com, spin it up and it's as user friendly
and dumb down as they want to make it and do whatever you guys want.
With the.com side of things, that's not for us, okay?
For us, right?
People understand the language of web design and development.org
needs to be protect.
org needs to facilitate the work that we do and the way that we do it.
And that's where the vision went wrong.
That's where, yes, he, you're right.
He saw a problem and he aimed and he shot at it and he missed.
and that's just the facts.
it can still be fixed though.
It can still be fixed easily.
Webflow, by the way, for anybody who is, you know, there's, I see
the counter argument a lot that.
If we made, if they built an editor that was too advanced, right?
it, it would, it would turn people away.
It wouldn't work.
There wouldn't be enough adoption.
And I think Webflow has completely proved that philosophy incorrect.
I mean, 4 billion plus valuation in a very small, relatively small amount
of time, compared to WordPress.
they, they built essentially a tool for advanced web design and development and
then spent millions of dollars educating people on how to use it and how to do it.
And they get adoption rates through the roof on a platform that's not open
source, that doesn't have data ownership.
So they don't even have that going for them.
And they were able to wildly.
Be successful.
so I think they've proved the model of if you give people a functional tool and
teach them how to use it, if they don't already know the language of web design
one, they will do it, they will adopt it.
They will go through the learning.
And what I've always argued is two on the other side of it.
And I don't want to dodge your question that you initially asked
in the very beginning, which is the controversy over calling somebody out.
Right.
but if you get to.
A level where your skills have dramatically elevated because you're
using a functional tool, because you do something like page building
one on one or whatever education is out there that actually elevates
your understanding and skill level and abilities, your confidence.
dramatically improves the work that you do for clients dramatically improves.
And the other thing that we haven't talked about yet is we have an epidemic
because there's very low barrier to entry.
We have an epidemic of people in this industry doing work who actually
don't know what they're doing.
And that harms clients.
It harms the ecosystem.
It harms the industry.
and they're doing it in many cases for bottom of the barrel prices.
I, I do see that as a, as a big problem that also needs to be addressed.
And when we go back, we tie this in with the block editor.
When you dumb the tools down, guess what you attract more of people who
don't actually know what they're doing.
so there's two big problems there that are tied together.
Matt: Yeah.
Let's, let's move in that direction.
That's something that's near and dear to my heart.
one of the questions I always used to ask when I started my podcast, the decade
ago when I was running my agency was what do we do about the 500 website?
Right?
Like, cause back then, even back then I was seeing people, I famously tell
this story, this kid that, you know, I would see out at all when I was doing
my agency and I was doing all the, like chamber of commerce meetings.
Cause that's what you did back in like, 2010 to like find
business, to sell websites.
I would see him everywhere and he'd be like selling 500 websites.
And then he finally sold to some like big e commerce.
I don't even know what the hell they did, but they had just had thousands,
tens of thousands of skews and he knocked on my door and he was just like,
I don't know what I can do with this.
And he was running on like some shared hosting service trying to import over 10,
000 products into a WooCommerce store.
And I'm like, Oh, What, how much did you sell this for?
It was my biggest project ever.
I sold it for like five grand.
I'm like five grand.
I'm like, we were, we're at like 50 K minimum for a project like this, just
for the, just for the project management and, and architecture stuff alone.
We're not even building the website yet.
Right.
Trying to like figure this stuff out.
What does he do now?
He's a real estate agent.
So like I, I totally am.
I am there.
I'm there with you.
and.
Speaking about like your 101 course, when I got done with it, I was like, man.
This guy, you should just be teaching CSS.
Forget like bricks.
Because I think like what I learned from that and like hearing you go through
that, that course, I was like, this guy doesn't even need bricks or WordPress.
You, you could just step up 50, 000 feet and look at CSS as a whole.
instead of having to, to teach the bricks, the pocket, a well called a pocket
of, of bricks in the WordPress world.
What are your thoughts on that?
Like when you're thinking about elevating people, do you ever just think like, yeah,
maybe I should just extract the CSS part of it or, or as bricks that critical.
to your, to
Kevin: your workflow that you need.
I mean, Bricks is critical in the, in the, in the web design, right?
CSS is only one part of the web design.
So something has to write the HTML.
Something has to, be dabbling in PHP.
Something has to be helping with JavaScript, right?
So Bricks has interactions and conditions, and it's got a lot of things built into
the UI that make all that stuff easier.
And so people, if they're getting into web design and they're learning
web design, what I tell them is.
If you have a capable, a quality capable page builder, and for anybody that
doesn't know why we're talking about Bricks or the advantages of Bricks.
Bricks is a builder that proved that you can have a page builder write code
for you that's not an absolute mess.
The code output of Bricks is almost as if you wrote it by hand.
they have a lot of respect for accessibility, for performance.
For clean code output, logic, class first workflow, all of
the fundamentals of web design.
This is respected by Bricks.
It's one of the only page builders in existence that does this.
certainly the most popular page builder that does it.
And so when I'm trying to like, I, I want more people to get into web design.
I want beginners to come into our space.
You can't have an ecosystem and an industry that Thrives if it's not bringing
in new talent and new beginners, right?
So I do want more beginners to come in.
I don't want more beginners to be lied to about how easy it is
to get into web design or how easy it is to build websites.
I think Wix lies.
I think Squarespace lies.
I think the WordPress block editor lies, about what is required to actually
come in and learn and do good work.
Right.
so, and that's why I told people on page one in one on one, I'm not gonna
lie to you and I'm not gonna baby you.
I'm like, I'm going to tell you what you need to know and we're going to do it.
and, and this is the only path forward.
So in facilitating that, if I, yes, I tell them in page building 101, there is one.
Thing you really do need to know and understand.
And that is CSS.
the page builder is going to write the HTML for you.
The page voter is going to write the PHP for you.
The page voter is going to write the JavaScript for you, but when it comes to
styling on a website and when it comes to best practices of maintaining and scaling
styling, you have to understand CSS.
And that's why CSS was a big part of.
Of page building 101.
Of course, it's why, I, I advocate so strongly for a framework and why I
built the framework that I built and it works the way that it works because of
that philosophy and those principles.
but without bricks, it would be okay.
I'm going to teach you the, the.
Fundamentals of scalable, maintainable CSS.
But then I also have to teach you HTML.
And I also have to teach you PHP.
And I also have to teach you basic JavaScript.
That barrier to entry is huge, right?
And so I look at a page builder and, and trust me, like I'm, I'm all for, clean
code and scalable, maintainable projects.
If the page builders were doing what Elementor is doing still.
Right.
Which is outputting really, really, really bad code and ignoring the
fundamentals like a class first workflow and, all the things that I talk about.
I, I would object to using a page builder as well.
I look at a tool as.
Does this tool have tremendous upside and does it have a very small list of cons?
And Elementor has a lot of upside for beginners, okay?
And people entering the space.
It also has a laundry list of cons, like deal breaking cons.
Bricks does not have That laundry list of cons, it doesn't have any deal breakers.
And so when I'm introducing new people to web design, bricks is a,
it's a critical piece in that puzzle.
and I'm not saying it's, it's always going to be the only one.
And I'm not saying, I'm not saying it is the only one.
Okay.
There's a couple others.
They're just not as known.
but bricks facilitates this.
So much for people and they, they get confidence, I would say three to five
times faster than they would if we were just saying, Oh, I'm just going to
teach you how to hand code everything.
that, that wouldn't work nearly as well.
I think you've,
Matt: well, I don't want to put, I don't want to put this all in your shoulders,
but I think you've, you've really tipped the scales of, page builders, in the
page builder, what I'll say, page builder community, you've tipped the scales to,
to, to have an advantage to even have the, have this discussion in the space.
Cause you probably remember as long as you've been in the space when Elementor
and Beaver Builder and we had page lines, site origins, we had all like these little
page builders trying to break through.
I don't know what year it was, 2014, 2015 ish.
And my God, if you brought up page builders, You were just, you just
cast out of the conversation, right?
Because you had the hardcore developers who were like, get out of
here with this page builder thing.
Right.
And I, and I think of course these tools have evolved, but then so have
folks like you come out with education around this stuff and it's really built
up, you know, the confidence, like you said, in, in that sort of page builder
community, but also it allows people that to have a little bit more of a,
of a respected conversation around it.
Like it doesn't, everything doesn't have to be.
Hand coded and, and, and done, NDS code or whatever.
Having said that my, my, one of my, challenges to using something like bricks,
because like you said, like the front end development and the CSS and the styling,
this is just one aspect of the complete delivery of a, of a website project.
So one of the things that.
I'm not pushing back, but the challenging question is in my
agency, when I was running it there for bigger projects, there was no
way we're using a page builder.
And again, you got to remember this is many years ago.
So beaver builder was like the only one I really felt comfortable with.
I would use that on the ones that needed lower budget and faster deployment time.
So we were using beaver builder, but any bigger project, we were
not slotting in beaver builder.
And I probably still wouldn't today.
For one of the largest issues was, continuity in the business.
There's always a front end developer and a back end developer on every project.
And when they're coding, they're deploying to GitHub repo, where testing
or QA and all this stuff, on staging servers, like we weren't deploying
code until the customer tested it.
Now, maybe these are just bigger, more complex projects that these
page builders are just not aware of.
A perfect fit for, but I'm curious, like in scaling the agency side of
things, when you look at something like bricks, the continuity of the business.
Hey, I got to find somebody who, who knows bricks.
I know bricks, but now I have to teach somebody else.
What if that person's on vacation?
How do I go back and check the code and the changes that they were deploying?
It can't certainly just be in scanning the UI of Bricks and seeing
what their changes was and copying and pasting something back in.
We certainly want something that has, You know that, like get hub repository.
Like I can see all the code committed.
I can see comments.
I can roll it back if I need to do a different version.
So what, what are your thoughts on like scaling the business?
I get how you scale code and, and building your sites through a tool
like bricks, but how do you think about it as scaling the business?
Somebody leaves, you hire somebody new, you're growing a team.
Et cetera, et cetera.
Kevin: You know, I think it's a challenge regardless of the route that you go.
It's the same challenge of our thing is built in react.
And this other thing is built in view or built in Svelte.
And it's like, okay, the develop the main developers that built this left.
And the company is like, we've got to go hire people.
let's say, you know, it was built in view.
Well, you got to go find view people.
Right.
So to, to bring in, and in WordPress, it could be built in a page builder,
or it could be built in a code editor.
If it's built in a code editor, let's say it's built with a, they
created a custom block theme.
Okay.
So now you're immediately limited and you've got to go find people
who understand block themes versus traditional themes.
this, this problem is just constant in our space.
and, and there's many, many different angles to it.
Now, do I, do I wish that there was more, compatibility with.
Bricks and get, yeah, for sure.
I think that's a big conversation that should be had and should be talked about.
Now, my ideal client and the ideal client of most of the agencies that, you
know, are in my ecosystem and that I've spoken with, you know, if you're doing
websites for a small business, go for it.
Clients, the average small business client, especially
service based businesses.
I do want to say, I don't do anything with e commerce e commerce
is a completely different beast.
and there's a lot of complications when it comes to e commerce and protecting
the versioning of a website, right?
Because you can't, you can't just pull it off to a staging server
and then try to push it back.
Like you're, you're, you know, you're losing, all the transit, the transactions
that came in during that time, right?
There's a, there's a lot to consider there.
The average small business website, like, you know, Joe Plummer, the
gym down the street, or even SaaS companies, or that are just using
WordPress as a front end marketing site.
It's not even, it's not powering their app or anything else, right?
They are just fine using a page builder like Bricks.
They don't need Git.
They don't need all this hyper version control.
We do daily backups.
We do have in place, bricks has native versioning of, what you've done in
the builder on every single page.
it has now the protection of multi users working and not overriding
each other's work, not messing up the classes that they might be using
and adding to different elements.
So there is a lot of that at play now.
and I, and I think, you know, there's a lot of stuff that page builders do that.
Of course they didn't used to do.
And so a lot of the assumptions about how page builders work are based on the old
model of page builders and not really what page builders are capable of doing today.
But I'm also not saying that bricks is, is a great tool for every
single situation and every single scenario and every single website.
If you need version control and you need get, and it's an enterprise
level thing, don't use bricks.
Don't use bricks, you know, do a, WordPress route for sure.
Matt: Yeah.
Yeah, I just remember like just for folks who are listening
and maybe never experienced it.
Remember, I'm not, I just dabbled in development.
I was a system admin way, way, way back.
And that's how I started my agency and WordPress, yada, yada, yada.
But from like the owner's perspective, I learned really quick that when we were
You know, we didn't turn over a lot of, freelance, developers and designers,
but I learned real quick when they were deploying code to a client who was
paying us thousands of dollars a month that there was no way I could just go
into this blindly and, and, And not know what these people developed on the site.
and that's how I just learned my lessons stumbling and failing when
the customer called up and say, Hey, this, this website's running slow.
And we had hired some, you know, somebody who said they knew WordPress and suddenly
we're trying to debug all this code.
And I was like, Oh yeah, we need, we need version control.
I need continuity in this stuff from the business perspective.
It's an insurance policy.
but like you said, if there are, there may, and I did it too.
Like I use Beaver Builder on, on a certain class of our customers and then a certain
class of customers got it the other way.
So, yeah, that's the
Kevin: one.
The one good thing about bricks is, it is a page builder that
respects the language of web design.
So it is not a proprietary builder.
Elementor is a proprietary builder.
Divi is a proprietary builder.
Beaver is a proprietary builder.
Bricks is not proprietary.
Bricks uses the language of web design.
It respects the fundamentals of web design, which means that anybody,
there's a giant ecosystem of page builder developers in WordPress who
are very, yeah, like good at that.
Their job and what they do.
And if you understand the language of web design, you can open Bricks and
have zero problems understanding how the site was built, the concepts that
were used, classes, CSS, et cetera.
You gotta, you gotta, if you don't have any experience with Bricks, figure out
where the inputs are and things like that, and how the templating system works and
yada, yada, yada, but it's a very fast, like you're talking about a couple of
days, you take somebody who understands web design, you can onboard them.
In a couple of days.
And now they're managing and scaling the website that was built in bricks.
People who build websites and Webflow have the same exact issue, right?
So if I have a client that their website is built in
Webflow, they have two options.
They can go find a Webflow developer, or they can hire any developer that
understands the language of web design, who is willing to work in Webflow.
And that person can take over their project.
Why?
Because Webflow respects the language of web design.
Elementor, Divi, Beaver, these are proprietary systems where if you
understand the language of web design, it doesn't actually matter because
when you open the builder, you are completely lost and you will stay
completely lost until you understand, oh, this is how Elementor works.
Does things and names things.
This is how beaver does things and names things.
This is how Divi does things and names things because they
all do it their own special way.
And by the way, the block editor is exactly the same.
It departs from the language of web design and it has its own language
and its own workflow and its own ideas for how things should be done, which
means that it doesn't matter how much experience you have in web design.
You're not going to be able to do anything in the block editor unless you
learn the language of the block editor.
and that is a barrier to entry.
In my opinion, that is not something that facilitates the
work that we're all trying to do.
Do
Matt: you have time to continue?
Yeah.
Or, so let's, let me, can you unpack, an S an example of that?
Cause, cause I don't know, I don't have the answer, but I assume it,
I assume it might be like sort of like the container in, in rows.
Theory or module, methodology.
cause I've seen you talk about that in the page builder one on one course and,
and your other live streams on how bricks sort of handles that versus the others.
Is that the most simplistic approach that a lot of these other page builders
are failing at Gutenberg included?
Kevin: so yes, there is.
So when you're writing HTML, you write, you write HTML.
And if you're selecting elements that are writing the HTML for you, it's
very helpful if that is predictable.
So when you ask it to do something and it does something completely different than
what you expect, that's a disconnect.
And then it's like, why is that happening?
Okay.
Now we've got to investigate.
We've got to learn, right.
But I think actually a better example would be classes, CSS classes, the
use of classes, since the very, very early days of web design.
If you want to style something, you add a class to it and you assign
styles to those classes, okay?
This is a very, very fun, this is like what you would learn
on day one, of web design.
And Elementor and Divi and Beaver and the block editor, All say we
are rejecting the notion of you doing web design with classes.
We're doing away with that and we're doing our own thing.
Divi uses presets, what they call preset.
These are not, these are very similar to classes, but they're not the same.
They have, wild disadvantages over using classes that I've detailed in an article.
Beaver Elementor is very, very heavy in styling, just styling everything at the
ID level, which is a fundamental mistake.
That would be what you would learn not to do on day one.
So element or beaver asking you to do the opposite of what you
should be doing in web design.
the block editor is essentially the same.
And in order to try to overcome the lack of classes, they have to come
up with things like block styles and they have to, and now you're
in Jason and doing all this others.
Like it's all workarounds.
And, and, So all I've been doing is asking, okay, well, if we're going
to have this tremendous deviation from the fundamentals, what are
the advantages of deviating so strongly from the fundamentals?
And that's where nobody's ever been able to give me an answer.
What I've come to the conclusion is these tools believe.
That people are either not smart enough to understand classes
or they just don't care enough.
Okay.
And so with Elementor, for example, if you come to that conclusion and you
say, our product is not going to have classes, we're going to have everybody
style everything at the ID level.
What is the result of that?
The result of that is that you have thousands, millions of
websites that are Poorly built and literally objectively built wrong.
They're not scalable.
They're not maintainable.
The accessibility, if you care about accessibility is also non existent.
because you're facilitating workflows, for people that don't know what they're doing.
And not only are, do they not know what they're doing?
You're encouraging them.
You're actively encouraging them to do it wrong.
the tool, the official approved workflow of the tool is to do it wrong.
and so I've always.
Fundamentally objected to that.
And, and I think the block editor does the exact same thing.
Matt: And this is just from, I think I, I, one of your recent tweets, I
saw you talk about maybe just like the max width that, of the group, well
called group block that Gutenberg sets.
And you're just like, why, how did we even get to this number?
Right.
I was like seven.
I don't know what it was.
Seven, six years ago.
Kevin: Yeah.
It starts with a magic number.
Well, yeah, that, that, so the block editor, if we're going to talk about
deviation from fundamentals, like the block editor goes even a step further
Elementor, Divi, and Beaver are all outside in, environments, which is,
that's the fundamental of, if you go, if you go into CodePen and start just
coding a website with HTML and CSS, you're working outside in, things are block
level elements, they reach the edge of the screen, and then you work in from there.
in the block editor, they decided that it's going to be an inside out
workflow, that everything actually starts contained on the inside and you
have to work your way out from there.
And so again, anybody who has spent any time in web design is going
to be completely confused by that.
And so.
Again, I don't have a problem with it, if it has some sort
of magic, tremendous advantage.
But I ask, what are the advantages of deviating from
the, like, standard practice?
And I haven't been given any advantages.
But I do see disadvantages in doing it this way.
They also don't use containment, like actual containers to contain content.
they use, they use magic, assignments of max width to all children in a group.
so when you say like, I want this group to contain the, it's children,
it doesn't use a container to do that.
Like you would see in traditional web design, it uses virtual
containers with, with max width.
So yeah, it's a technical discussion that we could go deeper into, but again, it's
like, that's not the standard practice.
So why are we deviating from the standard practice?
What is the advantage?
And.
Same thing with naming things, right?
Like, what are we going to call these things?
Where a group is not a thing.
You can't add a group in HTML.
not in any, you know, general layout capacity.
You wouldn't see that happening.
You would use a section or you would use a div or something like this.
You wouldn't use a group.
so we have to understand what that's called and why is it called that?
And why can it actually be many things?
You can turn a group into a section if you want to.
but a section is fundamentally different from a normal div.
I've outlined this in, in detail as well.
And, but, but they are, they are opposed.
Like I've, I've actually proposed, Hey, why don't we have a section elements,
extremely important element in web design.
and I visualized that I've shown it on video.
Look at bricks.
That's a section element.
Look how it behaves.
Look what we're able to do with it.
Can we have this in the block editor?
No.
They've said, no, we're not adding that to the block editor.
So, again, it's, where are the advantages to, to this fundamental
departure, I'm not given any.
And so what I end up saying is, well, this is a frustrating environment to use.
If you, if you know the language of web design, this is not the language of web.
Does this a new language?
It's an experimental language, by the way.
and so if you can't give me strong advantages, I just have to reject it.
Matt: Yeah.
Advantages are probably.
Just so they can, they being Gutenberg and all the other page builders,
except for Bricks, the advantage of them building their product, right?
And hopefully, hopefully, air quotes, making it easier for their
users to, to build these sites with.
Yeah.
they make it easier
Kevin: for their users to build bad sites is the conclusion of that.
If you follow it to the end, here's what I will say too.
I don't know if this is the motivation for Elementor.
I don't know if this is the motivation for the block editor.
We talk all the time about lock in and the problems with lock in.
We don't want to be locked in.
We want to democratize content.
We want you, right?
We want this to be able to flow from one platform to another if need be.
Okay.
Proprietary workflows create lock in.
And so if somebody learns, let's say you're getting into web
design and you learn on Elementor.
Okay.
I've been very clear about this.
You don't really know anything about web design.
You know, about building websites in a tool called Elementor.
If I put you in bricks, you will have no idea what you're doing.
Cause you don't understand the language of web design.
You only understand the language of Elementor.
If you learn in the block editor.
You do not know web design.
You do not understand web design.
You know, the proprietary language of the block editor, which by the
way, makes switching platforms, switching builders, whatever, way
harder, way harder for people.
So if we're trying to avoid lock in, what we actually need is a standardization
of namings and practices and workflows.
Which web design has, has done, right?
We've, we've done this with classes and BIM and things like that.
what we have is a bunch of different developers creating their own cute little
package for how they want web design to work that completely deviates from all
the fundamentals and best practices.
And anybody who goes into that actually gets trapped inside of that.
You can't, your projects can't leave it.
Your mind can't leave it.
Very, very difficult to switch to change.
And that is a huge advantage for them.
I don't know if that's the main motivation for making it proprietary, but it
is a fact of making it proprietary.
And so,
Matt: but on the brick, on the brick side, like I can understand it
being, like, web development first.
Kind of methodology.
But if you were, because again, watching one on one video series
and some of your other live streams, like I've seen you input CSS into
the input fields inside bricks.
Surely if you disable bricks, that data saved in the database is gone and
you're kind of that, wouldn't that be lock in or are you saying, well, it's,
you still know how to develop a website more purely through the bricks model.
Kevin: Correct.
so yeah, for example, other people who know web design can take over
your projects and manage your product.
You're still locked into the builder for sure.
Got it.
And I, and I think that builders should, I'm not saying that
that's a great thing about bricks.
I think that builders should construct it in a way where you could potentially
disable the builder and, all of your, your whole website still exists, or
really my main argument is like web flow.
The platform should have a native capable builder.
And that's what we're all using and it respects the language of web design.
That's the advantage of Webflow.
Webflow, and that's why Webflow onboarding is so easy.
You open Webflow, there's one editor, there's one environment,
you know the language of web design, you can use it like magic.
there's not a big learning curve if you already know what
you're doing in web design.
So, that, that is, would be the direction, WordPress could go with, with org.
You're with the wild, wild west situation with plugins and all this, you are
going to have dependencies, right?
Yeah.
Bricks is a dependency, but it's a dependency that respects
the language of web design.
So if you do need it, like I was on oxygen, I was a big
oxygen guy for a while until it.
You know, shot itself in the head.
so I, when I switched from oxygen to bricks, people were like,
how, how hard was that switch?
I was like, not hard at all.
Both the builders respect the language of web design.
So if you know what you're doing, it's that it's a
weekend and you're done, right?
You just, Oh, bricks puts this thing here and oxygen, put it over there,
but they're the same fundamental things and it's the same fundamental workflow.
So it was so easy for me to jump ship from oxygen to bricks.
To bricks.
That's what I kind of am talking about with like portability and not lock in.
If I was on Elementor for five years and Elementor blew up and then
they were like, well, how was the switch from Elementor to bricks?
Not good.
Cause all I, all I know is Elementor and I don't know a
thing about actual web design.
Matt: Does that, When you're talking to other, do you still do agency work?
This is something I should ask at the top of the show, but
do you still do agency work?
Kevin: we have existing agency clients that we maintain their websites and help
scale their websites and things like that.
But over the past year, year and a half, I've been actively phasing out.
and we've put a block on all new work.
I actually just launched our new website, digital gravy.
co.
It's the same company.
but we are focused completely just because the size and scope
of our software products now.
And.
Half of the team that was working on the agency side, I've
actually moved into software now.
so it just doesn't make sense economically for us to pursue agency work anymore.
We are a hundred percent committed to our software products.
and, and that's it.
Matt: Good.
I guess what I'm getting at is like, I guess the risk and the reason why I never
used, I was always looking at how can I.
De risk the situation.
How, how few plugins and areas of risk can I, pull out of a project for a client?
And just like we saw with, I'm gonna forget the name of it.
The one that shut down the page builder that shut down quickly, quickly.
Yeah.
I mean, it's still probably something that, that you would preface any
of the, anybody comes to you for education purposes or learning to
be like, Hey, this is still a risk.
Like bricks could either go out of business or all of a sudden
it could be a thousand dollars a month per license that you have.
Like that is a risk.
That's a point of, of failure or a point of contention for the business.
So it's something that everyone should be aware of.
Cause I just feel like in this page builder world, I love it.
I love your opinion on it as I just see page builder So many
people going for, you know, faster, cheaper, cheaper, more add ons.
And I'm just like, man, people, don't you ever just, all right, so your tool
doesn't have six of those, like, you know, whatever they're called, Jotty files, the
animation ones, or what a lot of files.
Like, so, all right, fine.
You don't have those.
Okay.
Don't switch your whole business over to a new page builder just because
you don't have those six free add ons.
Like stay, stay focused here.
So surely you, you must let folks know that, Hey, this is a risk and,
and, you know, stay, stay the course.
Kevin: Absolutely.
Yeah.
you know, any, any page voters are risk.
What I've actually said though, is, and people really need to understand this.
The block editor itself is a risk.
Okay.
There is no guarantee that the block editor survives and thrives.
It is an experiment.
Let's be very clear about that.
And it's eight years into development and still not nearly where it needs to be.
and it could absolutely still fail now with regard to bricks.
When you follow best practices, especially best practices in a content management
system like WordPress, thankfully, a lot of your data, if you're using custom post
types, if you're using custom fields, if you're using loops and templates, a
lot of your data, a lot of your data.
Is not in bricks.
A lot of your data.
It's all of your blog posts and most of your page and custom post type
data is actually in the database.
completely separate from bricks.
So if bricks died tomorrow, I could put in the next page builder that is closest
to a professional workflow and all of my data is, The, the, what I have to rebuild
is a couple of templates and I got to, and I got to hook up the dynamic data
again and the loops and logic, right?
that is a, a much smaller, like that's not a disaster scenario.
now if you build an element or a Divi or Beaver and, and you're not
using loops, you're not using custom post types, you're not using custom
fields and dynamic data and literally everything exists in the builder.
I've even had clients come to me.
It's heartbreaking to have to tell them this kind of stuff, but like, They have
576 blog posts and every single one of them were like assembled in Divi,
like in the, not in, not in WordPress.
and so, you know, you're getting rid of Divi and you're, and you're, you're,
and it's like, man, this is all of that content is going to be absolutely littered
with short codes and other nonsense.
and it's just not a good situation, right?
Bricks, you can avoid 90 percent of all of that hassle.
But, but by the way, if you ever have to leave WordPress, block editor
content is not really portable.
I don't know if anybody's looked at what that the block editor
does to your underlying data.
but it's not, it's not pretty.
so you're going to have massive issues.
If you do have to leave WordPress for whatever reason, your data is not
really safe in, in leaving WordPress.
So even natively, there are problems.
Matt: I would hope that the data liberation project is going to make that
part of the scenario a little bit easier.
One would hope
Kevin: maybe, I mean, what is the data liberation project from what I've
seen so far WordPress is WordPress is committed to liberating data from other
platform and bringing it to WordPress.
Matt: Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I, I just wrote about this, on the last episode of the, of the
five minute, podcast, you know, Here's the thing with, with all open source
stuff that, that Matt talks about and, you know, encourages others to do.
I always say like, man, call the bluff.
Like when he put GoDaddy on blast, I was like, why, why doesn't GoDaddy just
take 50 million a year, in engineers and commit them to WordPress core?
Because then if all of a sudden 50 GoDaddy people showed up and were like,
okay, we're ready to contribute to core.
That would be like.
I think that's when he'd be like, Oh my God, you called the bluff.
Now, now I actually have to deal with, with folks that,
because I see these things.
I see like the, automatic, they have a name for it.
They have like their own internal conference, automatic design, something.
It might just be like their design teams meet up, but they all like coalesce get
in their own meetings About like the design of like Gutenberg and all this
stuff, but their core They're the ones that were contributed to court now.
I don't think there's any super conspiracy here I think that it's just they they
commit the most amount of payroll to committing to to WordPress core.
It just happens to be Matt's company and I think that GoDaddy could do
like the same call the same bluff and say, okay, here's our team of 50 to
a hundred that will commit to this.
Bluehost does this and you know, they're a sponsor of the WP minute.
Thanks Bluehost.
and a lot of people give Bluehost flack because hey, they have
a 5 a month hosting plan.
I get it.
It's a volume play.
They know the challenges.
Everyone knows the challenges, but they also commit to WordPress core
and they have for over a decade funding word camps and paying
people to commit to WordPress core.
So yeah, they're good stewards of the community.
But even the Wix thing I wrote about, which was I was getting at this data
liberation, these other platforms could also call the bluff and build
their own plug in solution for data liberation to sink websites over time.
Across from each other to and from WordPress to Wix and guess what we
would all win But neither party it's like it's you know It's a standoff like
neither party really wants to do it because they're like no we're trying
to keep our users You're trying to keep your users But if the everyone
did it then we would all win at the end of the day wouldn't be pretty But
we would all win at the end of the day
Kevin: No, you're right.
You're right.
And the reason why is because I mean, if we, if we really, look at the underlying
motivations, if you are going to truly liberate content, which means you can
move, you can put content anywhere and use any platform very easily.
It does actually become a true competition at that point.
Who has Who has the best builder environment that actually
resonates with the market.
And I think right now, WordPress has to look at its position and say, we're in
probably the weakest possible position.
Okay.
If we compare our editor to what Wix offers users, and then Wix of course
has an advanced editor as well.
if we compare our position to Webflow.
Very weak, right?
the Gus goes back to the only, the only advantage they currently have, and
I want them to have every advantage.
Okay.
Let's go back to that.
I want WordPress to win.
I want WordPress to dominate.
The only advantage we have right now is being open source.
That is the only advantage we have right now.
Technologically from a CMS standpoint, from a native editor standpoint, We are
at a weak position and those are the things that we need to fix and shore
up from an onboarding perspective, from an, from an ecosystem, the
ecosystem is the plus and the minus.
Okay.
It's a plus in that everything is available to you.
It's a minus in that it's the wild, wild West.
And you have to do a lot of, research and understanding and weighing of
pros and cons to figure out how you're going to piece your stack together.
and then what direction you're going to go with your workflow.
It's just decision after decision, after decision.
That is a plus, but it's also a dramatic weak point.
So I think if data was truly liberated, and if let's say Wix and Webflow and
WordPress were all open source options.
WordPress dies tomorrow.
It can't compete with those.
The only reason it's still competing is because it's open source.
and I don't think, you know, you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket
in anything that you do really in life.
We don't want to put all our eggs in that one basket.
We want to also have the best native experience.
We want to also have the best onboarding flow.
We want WordPress to make cohesive sense in terms of how it functions in the UI.
We want the C the CMS is the best part of WordPress and it's been all but abandoned.
and, and that's, that's a really bad thing.
we need to get back to making it the best CMS that anybody's ever used.
So much work to be done.
and we just, we just need, I think.
A little counter leadership is what we need.
Matt: Yeah, I don't disagree with that.
you know, I, I think we've gotten to this point because, certainly Matt
is the decision maker and there's, I just wrote about this as well, either
last week or the week before that, look, there, there's no changing.
Right.
There's no changing that, you know, there's no changing it.
Hands down.
We have to just accept it and move on.
But what we can do is maybe try to influence those around him because I
really think he's going to get to a point because he suffers from probably
just like, just like you, except he has maybe a few zeros more on the end of his
payroll that goes out every single month.
but he struggles with the same thing.
Not enough people, not enough time to get all the stuff done.
Automatic does they have like Twenty five products, you know, along with wordpress.
com and VIP and then all the people that that that he pays to commit to
WordPress core that he can't even he cannot corral the this enterprise that
he's built in order to focus on one thing.
Right?
From Pocket Cast to Tumblr to Simple Note to Videopress, to Newspack.
I mean, we're, you know, so many products and things that he has his hands in.
How could you even stay focused on this stuff?
and I think what we're gonna see is maybe some people put in charge
of the direction of WordPress.
Over the next maybe six months to a year like I, I think what I'm about to,
to, to see happen is we'll see like the rich Tabor's, the Anne McCarthy's, the
Matias's really step in as leaders and then Matt will just show up for state
of the word, which is kind of loosely what's been happening, I feel, but
he'll show up more for the dramatics of the presentation and more of these
folks will be directly in charge.
And that is kind of what's happening today.
Certainly not making, he's not making.
Every single decision, but he is the north star for this stuff.
And sometimes, you know, all of a sudden you get like a hundred year hosting plan.
And you're like, where the hell did this come from?
Like, why, why are we wasting time with this?
Like, can we just move on?
yeah,
Kevin: no, I, I think you're absolutely right.
I think, you know, any, anytime you have an organization this size, that's
still kind of mostly going through one person, it's a really big problem.
Like to have.
Something like this be successful.
You have to find talented people, put them in positions of leadership and
influence and let them do their thing.
Right.
and, and you have to be willing to have conversations with people
that, You know, exactly on the same page as you with regard.
And, and you also have to know that's coming when you deviate so
strongly from traditional practices.
but the other thing that I think is what would shore a lot of this stuff up.
I did a poll, I did a poll like maybe two years ago where I said,
is the block editor, a page builder.
Okay.
I, I, I thought this was a very easy question to answer.
It was 50, 50.
Okay.
About 50 50.
Okay.
I can't remember the exact percentages, but it was pretty close to 50 50, which
tells me that the WordPress ecosystem doesn't even know how to classify the
native editor in WordPress, which.
Tells me there is a communication and vision issue that if we're going to do
this thing, you have to come out with very clear communication and paint a
picture and say, guys, and again, if it's going to take eight to 10 years,
even more so is the communication and vision casting important.
You've got to come out and say, this is where we are going.
Okay.
And this is how we're going to get there in stages and it's
going to look very different.
And here's why it's going to look very different.
And here are the advantages of it being very different.
I haven't seen really any of that.
It's kind of all just done and it appears when it appears and it appears in pieces
and we're all just left to figure it out.
and it just, yeah, it's not a great situation to be in.
It's a little bit frustrating.
Matt: Yeah.
The, I.
The Gutenberg project, like if you look at Gutenberg's standalone, you know, I
think that, again, you go back to Matt's grand vision, crazy grand vision for
some things, like his idea of Gutenberg, it could still happen, but, you know,
it being a standalone project, So that it could be an editor for anything like
literally, you know, he thinks that it can be forked and used on you like
your Samsung refrigerator as an input like, okay, I need five eggs, right?
Like, I think he thinks of it that way, because he's even said that
he envisioned the Gutenberg project being bigger than WordPress someday.
And I think that's his crazy thinking, like, Not only am I going to not only am I
going to forge a page building experience in WordPress It's going to continue to
permeate through the internet in other areas and other people can build other
things like wouldn't that be amazing as he sits in like some mushroom high
and With Tim Ferriss somewhere micro dosing on the top of a mountain, right?
I'm just you know, sorry Matt, but you know, you did the podcast You know and
and I think those are those crazy visions I think that we need like crazy vision
leadership sometimes, but man, we got to get off this roller coaster at some point.
Kevin: Yes.
Yes.
And, and, and that, I, like, I think big ideas, create awesome things.
Right.
but yeah, you can't let them wander and you can't let them linger.
Like eight to 10 years in, and it's still not a cohesive thing.
and still doesn't have a lot of the fundamental stuff that we needed to have.
And a lot of people are frustrated with it.
I mean, there, you know, the classic editor plugin is what's still like
probably the most installed plugin.
People just kind of opting out.
Of the Gutenberg experiment.
that's a huge problem.
That's a huge problem.
So, we, again, we find ourselves right now in a very weak position.
I wish we were not in this weak position.
I don't care about blaming people.
I do care about how we're going to get to where we need to be.
And, I think spending another five years on the block editor experiment, going
down the same road and neglecting the CMS.
And I don't see that as a one, it's not a winning proposition and two, it
could actually be the end of WordPress.
Like it could, like, I just, I described on Twitter, we are a wounded elephant,
like no doubt WordPress is an elephant, gigantic, monstrous, powerful, right?
It is wounded.
And it is surrounded by a hungry pack of wolves.
And that is not a, and we don't have five years to figure it out.
We need to kind of figure it out like now, because things
rapidly change in this industry.
We've got AI coming in.
We've got all this stuff, right?
We don't know what could happen.
We can't stay in this wounded state any longer.
We cannot afford it.
So to me, that's like an emergency.
And so emergencies require like flashing lights and like, Hey,
Hey, everybody stop for a second.
We got to figure this thing out.
And that's kind of what I've been doing a little bit on Twitter.
Matt: you have 10 more minutes.
How, what, what, what is your stance on, on AI?
Do you think it's going to.
How far out do you think it's actually going to impact web design?
Because I look at it and it can't do anything for me ever.
I mean, the closest thing I've ever come to is like a decent summary with using
a Claude AI, but I, I really can't get.
Chat GPT or any of these AI website building platforms to do anything
of substance for me, whereas I could just go into, you know, let's say
use cadence as an example because they have a bunch of premade
templates, but I could just go themes.
I could just go.
Oh, restaurant website, click.
Oh, lawyer website, click.
And then I'll just do the rest of the 5 percent 10 percent later on.
Like, I don't see AI doing anything crazy yet.
Do you see it really progressing as a threat?
Kevin: not as a threat.
No.
let's be honest.
Like.
So let's say AI could, let's say a business owner, the, the,
the Wix person, the person Wix is trying to sell websites to.
Okay.
So that person, your average Joe Schmo business guy comes in.
He's like, you know, I don't want to pay a developer.
I want to use this AI thing to build my website.
So he gets on whatever, and he says, this is what I want my website to do
and how many pages I want it to have.
And you have to, and let's just say.
It can make him what looks to be a traditional business
website in his industry.
And it says kind of all the right things.
And then he pushes the button to deploy it.
There's not much difference from him going into Wix right now, choosing a
design pack that somebody already designed professionally and has starter copy.
and you know, putting that up and there's not going to be much difference.
Neither website is going to work.
Okay.
This idea that if you build it, they come, we all know that that's not a thing.
There's a gazillion websites on the internet.
So, and, and I just had this conversation on the live stream
the other day where I told people stop being just a web designer.
Like it's not design, build, good luck.
That's like, if you're doing that with your clients, That's
a, that's a huge problem.
It's design, build, and then there's got to be a pathway to success.
What is the pathway to success that you're going to offer?
Is it going to be PPC?
Is it going to be SEO?
Is it going to be email marketing?
Is it going to be social media?
Like, what is it going to be?
There's got to be a pathway to success because for the average
business owner, it's If you design it, build it and launch it, it will
sit there and do absolutely nothing.
They will get zero leads, zero ROI, zero anything.
Okay.
Yeah.
They think that handing out business cards with their website on the
bottom is actually doing something.
It's not doing anything.
It's not moving the needle.
And you could say, well, they didn't have a website before, but they have one now.
But what is it doing?
So the other side of the puzzle is what's called lost opportunity cost.
If you hired a professional that knew how to design, Develop right, really
well, and then had a pathway to success.
You would have a website that's actually generating traffic,
actually generating leads and an ROI and growing your business.
Okay.
Doing Wix, doing AI and having a website.
Ooh, look, look what it built for me sitting there doing nothing.
You are experiencing tremendous lost opportunity costs.
You think you had a success?
You've done nothing.
You've done nothing, right?
And so even if AI could do that, it's not building anything of, of merit
for people or success for people.
So I'm in that regard there, you still have to have consultants and you still
have to have experts who understand marketing, who understand actually
moving the needle for a business.
AI is, you know, Far off from being able to even create a template.
It's way far off from actually being the expert on how this business needs
to be represented on the internet.
Matt: Yeah, a hundred percent.
Kevin Geary, thanks for hanging out today.
Thanks for, sharing your thoughts and opinions on WordPress.
Where do you want folks to go to say thanks?
How do you want them to check you out on Twitter or on your
website or your products?
Give us everything you got.
Kevin: Yep, everything is available@geary.co, so GEAR y.co.
Matt: Awesome stuff.
Kevin: Thanks, Kevin.
Thank you.