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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm your host, Eric Karkovack. Today's guest is Steve Burge, the founder of Ramble Ventures, the company behind popular plugins like PublishPress, TaxoPress, Metaslider, and Logtivity. He's also the host of the PublishPress podcast. Steve, welcome to the WP Minute.
Steve Burge (00:20)
Hey, thanks, Eric!
Eric Karkovack (00:23)
So I know you've been around ⁓ the open source movement for a long time. I read in your bio that it was with 2003. So that's the first year WordPress had a release as well. So tell me a little bit about your background in open source. How did you come to it?
Steve Burge (00:38)
Well, I wanted to be a My family are all teachers. ⁓ My mother was a principal. My sister is now a principal. I loved ⁓ being a teacher, and I thought I'd be a teacher for my whole career until I moved to the United States and saw what they pay teachers here. And that kind of... ⁓
Eric Karkovack (01:04)
Not great, yeah.
Steve Burge (01:07)
Ended that career path real quick as I taught for a couple of years here and then had kids and a mortgage and suddenly I needed to do something else that wasn't teaching.
Eric Karkovack (01:19)
So why open source? What attracted you to it? As opposed to maybe other kinds of development, maybe becoming a Windows or a Mac developer.
Steve Burge (01:31)
Well, back then 2003 2004 there was the kind of buzz that you probably have about AI now it was Open source was a revolutionary idea and a lot of the open source CMS's were bursting onto the scene it was it was a good time to jump on that train and and the values struck me then
and still strike me now of building on a shared platform that people can contribute to of sharing your code. I wouldn't have stuck around, I think, if I'd have got into developing on a Windows platform or a Mac platform. I think I would have been out of the business. ⁓
The business opportunity got me into it at first, but the values that we share as a community have kept me around for all those years now.
Eric Karkovack (02:39)
So, you know, I think one of the reasons I've stuck around with WordPress for so long is because it has a community, right? And it's not a faceless ⁓ enterprise, kind of like, you know, developing for Windows or Mac or whatever other platform out there. ⁓ It seems to be like a common thread between us, right? We stick around because we love the community and we love to contribute to something bigger.
Steve Burge (03:05)
Yeah, you wouldn't get that feeling working inside a big corporation. I know I know some friends who have done that and they they certainly don't ⁓ and The ecosystem has been has been good to me over the years I have been looking back 20 plus years later. I have no complaints over the people i've got to work with the the places i've been able to go to the
the people that I've met along the way.
It's been something I look back on with pleasure and hopefully there's a good few more years left in the ecosystem now.
Eric Karkovack (03:43)
Yeah, I I
don't think for a piece of open source software to make it 20 plus years, it doesn't happen without community. It doesn't happen without people wanting to be here, right? Even with disagreements with leadership and things like that, I mean, it's great that I think people continue to stick around and continue to ⁓ come together for it.
Steve Burge (04:08)
And there's a I think there's ecosystem on the web of Not 100 % exactly the the same approach but an ecosystem with similar values you look at things like like Wikipedia of Building things together in common and having them last
beyond your work. You see the values now of open source are a play in the AI world in interesting ways.
Eric Karkovack (04:47)
So, I've seen you've written several books, co-authored several books about... ⁓
web development and open source CMS. ⁓ And your company's plugins tend to focus on the publishing aspect of things. How did those two subjects kind of collide for you and what made you decide to focus in that area?
Steve Burge (05:10)
Well, when I got into open source, I had a teaching background. I always thought I would be a teacher for my life. And so when it came to ⁓ getting a foothold in the open source world, we started with training. We did a lot of live training. ⁓ There was a time 2007, eight, nine, ten, when the the US government was getting into open source in a big way.
This was around the time that Barack Obama moved the White House website over to Drupal, which was a huge win for open source. And a lot of the ⁓ big government departments were following along. So we spent a lot of time up in Washington helping to move Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Energy.
all of those departments over to open source by training their staff. And the books were kind of a natural ⁓ kind of side effect of that work that we we'd ended up developing all these training materials that were often 6070 pages long, because we would do week long trainings. And we're looking at it like, hey, I've just written a book. And we had these training guides that I mean, if you look to the books now,
You'd say, that's basically a training guide that he's turned into a book. Very step by step, do this, do that.
So it was kind of a natural, ⁓ the books were a natural follow on of the work that we were doing and we added videos later. It was all from the same source though.
Eric Karkovack (06:44)
So.
So then you've published print materials, is great. And then, of course, you have these CMS applications that are for publishing online. So what got you into, for say, Publish Press to try and improve that experience for WordPress?
Steve Burge (07:20)
Well, there's probably two parts to it. One is that training is not an easy business. We were doing great. thought we had on our website, we had a list of all these clients, some of the names I mentioned, all the departments, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Transportation, you name it. I looked at all our list of clients and said, hey, we've got, say 30.
really high profile prestigious clients and then ⁓ the guy out of Texas the US Senator Ted Cruz ⁓ decided to shut down the government this was like 2013 and suddenly I came to the realization that I was an idiot and we didn't have 30 high profile clients we had one which was the US government
Eric Karkovack (07:53)
Yeah.
Steve Burge (08:17)
and all of them had gone away overnight. ⁓
Eric Karkovack (08:20)
Yeah, when the government
shuts down, everybody shuts down.
Steve Burge (08:22)
And what happened was they basically kicked all their training contracts a year down the line. They said, hey, we're not allowed to spend any money. Come back and see us next year. And then by the time a year had gone by, like a lot of the, we worked with a lot of training labs who would rent out computers and training space. They'd gone out of business. So our partners had gone. It was time to move on from that model.
So we were still doing some training and I spoke with a few people who had gone with Drupal and they were getting quite frustrated with it. I like Drupal, it's been a very solid player in the open source space for a couple of decades now. But some of our customers were getting frustrated with it and I'd ask them, why did you go to Drupal route rather than WordPress? And
Most of them would say things like they needed the permissions systems. They needed the lockdown, the control over what was happening on the site. And so we kind of took that as a an indicator of what was missing in WordPress and what the gap we could fill. It was a bit more complicated than that. We we tried several shots of the WordPress market, which failed as we were kind of learning our way in that space. But that was the primary insight that
A lot of these universities, ⁓ government agencies, ⁓ big corporations really wanted a strong permissions and publishing control set of tools in WordPress.
Eric Karkovack (10:05)
Yeah, that's something I mean, I have had clients go with Publish Press and there are like certain, you know, we have user roles and permissions already, but there are certain scenarios where, know, you may want somebody to come in and just publish and work on one page. Maybe that's their department or maybe you just want them to be able to add press releases. And in WordPress, you know, core, there's really no easy way to do that so that I could see that that definitely takes. ⁓
a useful space, I guess I'd say, in the ecosystem because we don't have anything like that in Core right now.
Steve Burge (10:42)
And Drupal does, quite often some of these people make, make comparisons with what is out of the box. I mean, we've had some agency people on our podcast and they say that a lot of these decisions are often made between platforms by simply what's in core. And so they will say like Drupal has a permission system in core. We'll go with Drupal. The example someone gave us on our podcast.
a couple of weeks ago was multilingual. They'd say we just need even the most basic multilingual features in the WordPress core. So we can check that box and we're probably going to win a lot more deals.
So quite a few of these government agencies had gone to Drupal simply because you could control who was editing which post type or who could edit an individual post or page, for example.
Eric Karkovack (11:36)
Yeah. and it just, just from, mean, you've written books on, several of these, these systems, including Joomla, Drupal. How does WordPress compare in your mind? and was there like, you have experience with these different open source platforms. What is it about WordPress that made you want to
Steve Burge (11:36)
Nothing more complex than that.
Eric Karkovack (12:04)
know, dedicate your business to these products, to that ecosystem.
Steve Burge (12:09)
They speaking they being Matt, maybe WordPress got the business, the product business side of things right. Drupal really didn't allow you to sell modules in their case, their version of plugins. And Joomla just didn't really have the
the business behind it to drive the growth, drive the just all the different structures you need to support a big project you need. ⁓ Think of all the hours the Automattic staff have dedicated to WordPress over the years. Joomla just didn't have that. So Joomla didn't have the business behind it. Drupal didn't have the business structure allowing
companies to sell modules, sell plugins. WordPress got it right in terms of allowing a ecosystem of small businesses to grow up around it.
Eric Karkovack (13:20)
Yeah, I mean, if we were just focusing on core and only ⁓ the ability to ⁓ provide free modules, free plugins, I I think the contributions to WordPress would be quite a bit smaller and we wouldn't have, I mean, even the freemium plugins that we have now, we take for granted, just like Yoast, for example, ⁓ anyone who can install a free SEO plugin that does a lot of good things for you and upgrade.
But that doesn't exist without the kind of ecosystem that we've built here.
Steve Burge (13:56)
You can see the same thing, I think, in the SaaS world that I'm not as familiar with it as I am with the open source world. But to my understanding, Shopify has one in that kind of space by allowing a huge ecosystem to grow up around it. Whereas Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, ⁓
I don't think Webflow does either. They're much more locked down. I don't think I've ever met anyone who has made a good living by selling add-ons to Wix. But some businesses, some projects get it right. And WordPress did and Shopify has done in recent years too.
Eric Karkovack (14:31)
Yeah.
So how do you think WordPress is doing right now in terms of publishing? know, you know, like obviously Publish Press is all about workflow. Taxo press does a lot of that as well. Where do you think its strengths lie right now and where do you think maybe it should be improved?
Steve Burge (15:05)
Ooh, are we talking publishing for ordinary people, publishing for enterprises? They're quite, quite different segments.
Eric Karkovack (15:11)
I guess the ability
to create your own workflow, publishing workflow.
So probably more on the higher end.
Steve Burge (15:16)
In the WordPress Well,
there is none Everything has to be all of that is in the realm of of plugins which is not a knock on WordPress, I guess because they have the 80 % philosophy and Those workflow tools are not for the 80 % of people
Um, even people with Several staff members all writing content can normally get away with just using draft pending review and published that's enough, the workflow tools are really for the The 10 the 20 to have much bigger teams. Um Let's say we work with we've done work with the pharmaceutical companies where
They're very much at the 1 % end of the spectrum where if they publish something incorrect on their website, like some incorrect medical information, they're in a world of hurt. They need to get it right. But that's 0.1 % use stuff. So is WordPress doing very well when it comes to publishing workflows? No, but I've...
I think it's fine to leave that for for plugin territory there's no there's no contact form in the WordPress core for example no e-commerce all of that's plugin territory
Eric Karkovack (16:55)
Yeah, I think we get a little greedy sometimes about what we want in core, right? I mean, you see, you see it online all over and over again. Why don't we do this? Why don't we have that? And in a lot of times it's really just a niche use, right? It's not something that is just said, everybody's going to want. mean, yeah, it would be nice to have a publishing workflow, but I could also just grab a copy of Publish Press and, know, and, and refine it and of who can do what and, know,
have different ⁓ statuses and review systems in place, that's kind of the beauty of WordPress. You're not stuck with one way to do things.
Steve Burge (17:33)
It's interesting to think about the fact that most of the publishing ecosystem is on WordPress. You look at newspapers, magazines. We work with a lot of really interesting nonprofit newspapers that have sprung up in recent years. Almost everyone is on WordPress. But even then, even if you take the entire news ecosystem,
That's still only a very small proportion of the people that actually use WordPress. You take hundreds, thousands of newspapers and magazines across the United States and other countries. That's still dwarfed by the number of WooCommerce sites or the number of people using WordPress for their recipes or anything else. Yeah, we do publishing, but we're very much in a niche inside the bigger WordPress ecosystem.
Eric Karkovack (18:16)
Sure.
Now, how do you feel about the collaboration tools that are starting to come? Is that something that you want to focus your products on as well?
Steve Burge (18:39)
⁓ that's interesting. Are we talking about the real time kind of Google Docs style?
Eric Karkovack (18:44)
Yeah,
yeah, there's a phase three Gutenberg, you we just got the notes feature in WordPress 6.9. That seems to be finally ⁓ getting some movement and some momentum.
Steve Burge (18:57)
Yeah. So I've been following this for six or seven years now. And probably the fact I've been following it that long gives an indicator of how things are going. I'd say it's up there with
Maybe the toughest, most difficult technical challenge that's ever been added to the WordPress core or even hasn't been added yet has been considered for, for addition to the WordPress core, getting a WordPress site to act like Google docs is absolutely possible on high end hosting. And particularly if you have, ⁓ some kind of man in the middle server.
Eric Karkovack (19:36)
Yeah.
Steve Burge (19:43)
which handles the connections between the two people editing at the same time. But getting that to work on low-end hosting.
Eric Karkovack (19:53)
How do you make that happen?
Steve Burge (19:56)
We don't know. Honestly, honestly, I don't think anyone knows yet. They're in the process still of trying to figure that out.
Eric Karkovack (20:06)
I wonder if almost it becomes like a dumbed down version on lower resource servers. Maybe it doesn't look as fancy, maybe it's not quite as functional. on the enterprise hosting, based on the available memory or something, ⁓ it can scale up. But that's kind of an interesting... ⁓
spot for them I would imagine right now because how do you know WordPress is almost like Windows. ⁓ You know when you're talking about Windows anyone can create something for Windows it doesn't have to go through an app store it doesn't have to go through quite the vetting process that Apple is typically used especially like with iPhones and things like that. So you have to you know.
build something based on it could be any number of hardware combinations, any number of software combinations. How do you make something that complicated just work? Because if you're in your Google Docs, you're just on Google Server. It doesn't matter what your hardware is. It doesn't matter what you're connecting with because they're handling that for you. But on WordPress, you're kind of at the mercy of the web host and all the other plugins you're running and the theme you're running.
Steve Burge (21:30)
So there's a number of possible solutions to that. One is offer some kind of limited experience. Maybe it just is disabled on low end servers that don't meet the requirements. Or maybe there is some kind of extra plugin requirement. mean, some sector of the WordPress community might not like it.
But one solution could be to say require a jetpack or require a WordPress.com connector. And so that would be free to use, but the data would pass over WordPress.com servers
A few other people that have tried this have have hit on I think ck editor, which is a a kind of a popular alternative to tiny mce they They were trying to figure this same problem out. I mean, it's not a wordpress specific problem at all. It's just a This is a very technically difficult thing to do and ck editor Ended up saying the only way we can do this is by running all the data over
ckeditor.com as a middleman and so it could be that WordPress ends up with a middleman ⁓ but I don't envy the people working on this it's it's a tough challenge it's a heavy lift
Eric Karkovack (22:56)
Yeah, mean, Gutenberg in itself was a big change, ⁓ you know, just from the visual point. But now we're really talking about the back end and some of the things that the rest of us don't see. ⁓ So that's going to be interesting. It's taken a while to get just to this point where we have notes. know, what will WordPress 7.0 bring? What will 7.1 bring? Will we get this in the next two or three years? I'll be interested to see.
⁓ Meanwhile, how are your products kind of keeping up with the changes to Gutenberg and maybe the addition of things like notes? Does that at all factor into what you're doing?
Steve Burge (23:43)
Yes, it does definitely I mean we have at least one of our plugins that is a blocks focused plugin and It has we've had to adapt it as Gutenberg has changed for example, we have a a tabs block in there and The WordPress core has just added a tabs block. I mean ours is better has more features like as quite
as is quite often the case the core has a simpler version the plugins have a more advanced version but yeah absolutely we try and piggyback on the new features for example the notes that have just come out i think we're soon going to add a screen to our blocks plugin that will show all of the notes that are available on a site because right now in the first version of the notes feature in wordpress the notes are just
Eric Karkovack (24:12)
Sure.
Steve Burge (24:37)
of restricted inside each post i think it would be helpful if publishers had one single screen where they could see all the notes on their posts or maybe all the notes on everyone's posts so you could see all the conversation happening ⁓ yeah we we do try our best to ⁓ to build on top of what the wordpress core is doing and accentuate it ⁓
For example, there's not really a notification system for these notes yet. I'm pretty sure that we will look into building a system where people can get an email or Slack update when one of these notes is added.
Eric Karkovack (25:22)
That would definitely be important. I could even see like an admin column when you're looking through posts and you know, maybe that has the number of notes attached to a particular item. There's so much, like, because right now, yeah, you're pretty much just opening a post and oh, there's a note there. You're not really aware of it. You're not, I'm sure that's coming in core at some point to some degree, but.
That's kind how the things have gone with WordPress, right? That the core doesn't have something, so everybody goes out and builds their own version. And then when core brings that feature in, we're all kind of left wondering, well, what do we do with the thing that we just built? Like you said, with your tabs block, it's one of those things that, you know, there's so many different blocks like that, that didn't exist and things that you couldn't do with the block editor and now that you can do. And so it's kind of funny to think about, well,
Steve Burge (26:01)
Yeah.
Eric Karkovack (26:14)
How does what we build still fit into that picture?
Steve Burge (26:19)
Yeah, it's a difficult game. It's only playing that game is only a small portion of our business. It's difficult to build a business directly on the block editor and trying to trying to play the dance of what is the core going to build. So we've got about a dozen plugins, and we only play that game with one of them. But it is fun and it is useful to it is fun and it is useful to fill the gaps.
Eric Karkovack (26:43)
That's probably smart.
Steve Burge (26:49)
⁓ basically based on customer demand most of the time most of our ideas around improving the block editor come from our customers it say it would be nice if x y z happened
Eric Karkovack (27:02)
Now have you guys used AI to help with development or customer service or anything like that? Because we've got to talk about AI. It's constantly in our minds.
Steve Burge (27:15)
Yeah, we had a discussion with our team last week about AI and almost all the AI that we use is outside of WordPress. We do use it for customer support increasingly. We do use it for translating our plugins. We've started to work on making
OpenAI generated translation files for our plugins so we can translate it into Vietnamese or Yoruba or ⁓ many more languages than we have translators for. ⁓ We do use it increasingly for ⁓ some security testing although the results have been iffy so far. It's hallucinated quite a few.
Eric Karkovack (28:09)
sure.
Steve Burge (28:11)
⁓ quite a few security errors. We're working on that. We have not yet got to the point where we've really started to deal with AI inside of WordPress. We haven't really come up with any killer use cases of AI inside the platform yet.
Eric Karkovack (28:31)
Yeah, that's one where everybody seems to want to jump on that bandwagon, right? But there's only a few different real use cases right now. It's generating text, maybe generating an image. ⁓ There's only so much you can do of that.
Steve Burge (28:46)
Yes, the best one we've come up with so far is in our taxo press plugin, we have the ability to scan your content and add the right tags or categories. But really, we were doing that with machine learning before. so using AI is not a huge jump in that case. ⁓ There are
Some people building AI tools to allow you to automatically generate websites, know, typing a prompt ⁓ and it'll, you type in, want a bakery website or spin up a bakery website for you. I've not tested or seen the customer feedback enough to know how good they are. But I think, yeah, next year we may start to see breakthroughs and useful.
Eric Karkovack (29:19)
Okay.
Steve Burge (29:40)
AI tools inside of WordPress. But so far, absolutely most of my use of AI is in the development phase.
Eric Karkovack (29:50)
Yeah, think personally, I think the future is in onboarding people because I have tested out GoDaddy's ⁓ tool for WordPress and it gives you a very nice basic block theme to work with after a prompt. it's kind of useful for that. then once you get that part of it done, you can go in and edit colors and you could tell it to edit colors or fonts and things like that. ⁓ But I also think just for the
Every day user. I like the idea of going into WordPress at for the first time and having like an actual tour of what you can do and maybe AI is the way to drive that. ⁓ I spoke with Devin Walker, who's the head of Jetpack now a few episodes back and he was talking about the idea that you could, you know, make Jetpack simpler for people by using AI to kind of guide them ⁓ to different.
know, endpoints of what they want to accomplish. It seems like that's maybe the part we haven't tapped yet.
Steve Burge (30:55)
Yeah, there was a guy, James LePage who was working on a an independent version of this that was acquired by Automattic and I think he's on the AI team now. And that was very much his idea was a chat bot in inside of WordPress, like type in how do I change my front page? And it will come back with a chat bot list of answers.
It will find your settings, will integrate with popular plugins like can you be able to type in something like can I restore the most recent backup? And as soon as that was at a workable stage I think Automatic jumped in and acquired in pretty quickly.
Eric Karkovack (31:40)
Yeah, I think there just seems to be a lot of potential for that part of it. know, wanted WordPress isn't the easiest thing to use if you've never used it before, if you don't have experience with it. So it's something like that to guide people and to kind of navigate you to where you want to go, I think makes a lot of sense. So what's next for you guys? What are you looking to any new products on the horizon? Any new features we should be aware of?
Steve Burge (32:10)
less products or less less brands at least we we've been we've got 12 we will soon have 12 plugins at Publish Press and we have you mentioned another couple of names taxo press logtivity i i think next year we'll end up collapsing ⁓ all of those onto the Publish Press brand we've
Eric Karkovack (32:11)
Less products.
Okay.
Steve Burge (32:40)
We've seen much faster growth there than we have in smaller brands and just becomes a headache to maintain so many different brands. You want to say sponsor a word camp. Do you have a banner with your main brand and then your sub brands underneath? Logistically, it's become quite a bit of a headache. So I think our main goal next year will be to
to double down on our strongest product line which is Publish Press and any smaller plugins will get moved and subsumed into that under that single brand
Eric Karkovack (33:23)
Yeah, I think that makes sense. I Publish Press has a reputation and is well known and it's kind of like you're building your own ecosystem within your product line, right? I mean, you're not, as you said, it's hard, know, people may not understand that Taxo Press is the same folks that make Publish Press and why not, you know, combine everything? I think that makes a lot of sense. I wish you luck with that.
Steve Burge (33:49)
thanks. We, ⁓ there were, was a time I think we were very influenced by, by Pippin, like, ⁓ from, ⁓ Pippin Williamson, the original developer of easy digital downloads and some other key products in the WordPress space. And he had, he'd set up his business lines and he had easy digital downloads and two or three others set up independently. And.
Eric Karkovack (34:00)
yes.
Steve Burge (34:17)
It made sense at some point, like he sold one of them. were independent and movable pieces. ⁓ and there's some value to that. ⁓ but the, the disadvantages have come to outweigh the advantages for us now. So, ⁓ we'll, we'll be moving most of our smaller stuff all under the Publish Press brand to make marketing easier, content creation easier.
⁓ and and try and build a an ecosystem. I think particularly We talked about ai a little bit already, ⁓ particularly in the in the days of vibe coding Where we do start to get people come in our support desk and say I don't know why you're charging for this. I could just vibe code it Yeah, but could you vibe code a successful comprehensive ecosystem of plugins that work together to make it good experience
Yeah, that's much more difficult. Yeah.
Eric Karkovack (35:20)
Good luck.
Yeah, it's something that you're going to to maintain as well,
Steve Burge (35:27)
I ⁓ did leave leave out an interesting use of AI that we have started to lean on, which is you have a strong, trustworthy plugin that you maintain. And you get people coming to support and they they want feature X feature Y feature Z. And it's niche. It's for the
The 10%, the 1 % most people aren't going to want it. We do use quite a bit of AI to divide code little short snippets to provide that feature to customers. So they get the benefit of a core plugin that is going to be maintained. Then going to get security updates. They're not responsible for any of that, but they also get a custom written feature for them.
Eric Karkovack (36:24)
Yeah, ⁓ that's a great idea.
Steve Burge (36:27)
Yeah, no one's complained so far. been a very nice use of AI for us.
Eric Karkovack (36:33)
Well, that's a wrap for this episode of the WP Minute. Many thanks to Steve Burge for being on today's show. Be sure to check out the WPminute.com slash subscribe to receive our newsletter and support the work we do at the WP Minute. Thanks, and we'll see you again next time.