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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.
It's the WP Minute Plus, your home for long form discussions around the WordPress ecosystem, deeper insights, conversations that you won't find on our short form WordPress news podcast. We'd love your support. Head on over to the wpminute.com/support to donate a $5 virtual coffee. Join the membership for $79 a year. Purchase a classified listing in our newsletter or get a video review of your product.
Speaker 1:The wpminute.com/support. Support independent WordPress media. The wpminute.com/support.
Speaker 2:Just opened my eyes. Coffee's kicked in. Thank you all for coming. This is yet another episode of David Tries to Do Something for the WordPress twenty twentieth anniversary without getting out of his chair or traveling or doing anything remotely that resembles work. If you are the listener, if you listened to the past episodes and you're listening to this one, I owe you one.
Speaker 2:So thank you. If this is your first time listening, then you are in for a fabulous treat. I'm going to explain the concept briefly, then our guests can introduce themselves. So we have a panel here of four WordPress professionals and me that are going to share some moments from the WordPress history that they have experienced. WordPress spans twenty years.
Speaker 2:Now we're not saying everybody here has twenty years experience, but there is a lot to share and pick from. I'm gonna ask them a couple of questions. They're gonna share their experiences. These questions are a little bit different than anything else I've done in the past episodes. So these are unique questions.
Speaker 2:If you listen to this and maybe you have a little bit of nostalgia that takes you back, just pull over to the side of the road and finish the podcast, and then you'll be absolutely fine. So to start this all off, I will introduce this in the order presented by random.org. Jason
Speaker 3:Yeah. Hey, everybody. It's your boy, Jason Kasper, aka Postformats Malone. Just here to, to chop it up and chat a little chat a little WordPress history today. I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna try to pull from deep in the catalog because I've been doing WordPress for I it makes me feel old to say it.
Speaker 3:Eighteen years now.
Speaker 2:Oh, you're gonna have to bend over really to get all of that stuff. Yes. And by the way, if everyone else wants to share along they've been with WordPress, that's a good that's a good thing too. Keep forgetting to ask people that. Eighteen years.
Speaker 2:Wow. That's That's going back far. I can't wait to hear what some of the things that you have to remember or for me to remember after you've shared them. Let's see. Who's next?
Speaker 2:Joshua? I think you're next on the list here. Introduce yourself where you're from. You know?
Speaker 4:I'm Joshua from Idaho, and I've been doing WordPress in some capacity for seventeen years. I want to find the exact date because it was in 2005, 2006 that I started making some little websites. And I've been involved in lots of different ways. Currently, I'm doing freelance work for different clients and enjoying that. I'm enjoying what I call, my freedom because I like not being in meetings and that facilitates that at the moment.
Speaker 2:Right
Speaker 4:now I'm doing a yes.
Speaker 2:Go ahead. This isn't technically a meeting, so we're good. Right?
Speaker 4:This is not a meeting. No. Because I'm actually, involved and I care. That's another topic. Okay.
Speaker 4:I'm working on a project right now called OnboardWP where I'm doing teardowns of WordPress projects and having fun with that. Thanks.
Speaker 2:Oh, can't wait to hear the post mortem on this one. Alright, Joshua. Thank you very much. Francesca, you are you're up.
Speaker 5:Yes. You're next. Hello, everyone. I am Francesca from Italy. Right now, I'm in The UK, but normally I'm in Italy.
Speaker 5:As you can tell from my accent, I'm very Italian. I am the director of engineering, learning and growth at XWP, an enterprise WordPress agency. I take care of all our developers and their professional growth, which allows me to be what ultimately I feel I am, a mama bear. Beside that, I have been I have to admit it has a lot to do with the upcoming empty nest syndrome, which I'm going to experience in one or two years. Oh, no.
Speaker 5:I'm hoarding developers to kind of replace my kid. Beside this-
Speaker 2:You got an extra one, let me know. I'll trade you.
Speaker 5:Well, I'm always happy to mama bear one of your girls, but I don't think they need my mama bearing. Been working with WordPress for fifteen years now. Started out as a mommy blogger and I love the tool, I love the people, I love the project. I've been actively contributing to WordPress since 2015. Yeah, I can't believe 20 years old.
Speaker 5:My god.
Speaker 2:Wow. So Jason was 18. Joshua was 17. And Francesca, you said you were?
Speaker 5:15. I've been using it for years. I've passed as a bloggertinkerer, then as a WordPress developer, and then as a facilitator of WordPress development.
Speaker 2:So we are we are this close to calling this geriatric press. But Yes. We have we have Maytree here. And Maytree, how long have you been with WordPress? This is this is the last in the selected by random.org.
Speaker 2:Maytree's bringing up number four spot spot here. Maytree, how long were you in WordPress? Are you in WordPress?
Speaker 6:I am in WordPress. I was introduced to WordPress in, 2016, And I was introduced to it because of of Adi Camp. I've been with them since then. And I started off as an end user, you know, just trying to use WordPress and, you know, posting a few blog posts and, you know, well, it was definitely a love at first sight because I didn't know that using, you know, people who could use something to share with the web could have been so easy. And I think by that time, WordPress had progressed quite a bit.
Speaker 6:I've not seen the olden days, but I have seen the modern WordPress. And I think I joined WordPress at a very good time because of which it for me, it was like, Oh my god, this is amazing. There's so much that can be done. So yes, and I'm from Pune, India. I'm working at Adi Camp as director of Client Delivery.
Speaker 6:And I'm working on various projects and working with many clients who are using WordPress in many different ways. And it's amazing to see how WordPress has been growing and how everyone else is using it in so many beautiful ways. So yes, I'm happy to be sharing my experience here.
Speaker 2:I can hear that young enthusiasm, even though 2016 was when you started. So that's not too bad. That's what, So around seven years?
Speaker 6:Around seven years. Yes.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. I'm not good with the math. Alright. Well, then let's get started.
Speaker 2:Thank you all for being here. And you know what? I just want to say I love the fact that we are from like, first of all, it was so easy to to to get a group of people that that are so that has a diversity built in. Right? We have people from Italy.
Speaker 2:We have people from India. I forget you you two are in The States. Alright? Jason and Idaho. Idaho.
Speaker 2:And Jason, I forget where you're California. California. Okay. So yeah. And, you know, I'm in the trash bin called Florida.
Speaker 2:So we have a great variety of different things going on here. Let's move on to our questions. So, I'm going to read the question off. Jason, you are up first. These are the most wordiest questions I've ever asked because as we continued on, interviewing people, they kept giving the same responses like favorite favorite word camps.
Speaker 2:You everybody seemed to pick one of the same one or two things of favorite WordPress releases. So I have to almost, like, write a legal document that says, I'm not looking for anything in particular, but the biggest thing is you can't half the questions were like, you can't pick Gutenberg. Alright. So let's let's start off with the first one. Alright.
Speaker 2:So, Jason, throughout your time with WordPress, what's the most memorable or noteworthy impact WordPress has made for the open source community or just the any general community, you think?
Speaker 3:Oh, wow. You know, one of the things that is a a big thing for me and kind of, set the table, for probably, like, the the past fifteen years of development in WordPress is the release the well, it started around WordPress 02/2005 and then on to to WordPress 02/2007, there was a project run by, Liz Danzaco and a few others called, Crazy Horse. And what Crazy Horse was was, effectively, usability testing. So before WordPress 2.7, everything in the WordPress dashboard were, little history lesson for you, just tabs at the top where you could select things. Crazy Horse and and that project where they actually hired users or, like and and paid them to to run through and do testing, do eye tracking, do all of these things.
Speaker 3:They actually I think Liz Dansico is working on behalf of HappyCog, which was at the time run by Jeffrey Zeldman. Zeldman now works, I believe, still, at So, you know, they've had a a long standing relationship there, and and it seems kinda like where it first began was was with this crazy horse project. And and so Liz actually presented this at a WordCamp. It's a 2008, WordCamp San Francisco. I I remember being in the audience as they shared all this, and it was just wild to me that, looking back on it, I was kinda going through posts and everything else.
Speaker 3:Our little, left hand navigation bar that, you know, for for everything in the the WordPress dashboard has been built off of that. The widgets in the dashboard, you know, like, the actual, pull down tab settings where you can kind of configure how things are laid out, I was all informed by this crazy horse project. And I know that, you know, in the next few years, we're very likely to see an update. I think that was one of the things that's discussed for this next phase of Gutenberg was having, an improved admin interface. I really hope that now that all of the the work has been done, you know, fifteen years ago that they take some time and go through this user process again because the last batch, like I said, it's lasted us fifteen years at this point.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, hey. You know? But but that I mean, I I can't think of a project out there in open source that has you know, at least in open source CMSs that have done this, probably because I I don't really follow Drupal or any any other things like that, but it just really feels like an incredibly impactful thing to to take some funding and and some money from, you know, and and throw it at this and and kind of, shape the direction of the project for for so long.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I other people have mentioned the WordPress admin change before, but nothing specific about that project, which I'm now glad we're we're talking about because that is it's not just a redesign. We we we worked with a professional company to develop that. And according to what I'm reading, that's they started in WordPress 02/2005 to begin that work. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And eventually, it came out in WordPress 2.7. And, of course, 2.7 had that built in plug in integration, one click updates, short codes. So having that new admin interface, and I've seen, you know, everybody's we've all seen the same generic, Bootstrap admin interfaces, on the web. But I've seen a lot too that have mimicked WordPress so closely, almost had to do a double take in terms of, hey, is that a WordPress? Oh, no.
Speaker 2:They stole that. But I I I think it's massively affected the WordPress project, and I think it has affected the open source community. So I think I like that pick. So Jason's, very impactful project, crazy horse, one word. Good.
Speaker 2:We'll we'll both go with that. And, alright. So this this means if I can do my math correctly, I think Josh, I think you're up next.
Speaker 4:I was thinking about this from the perspective of me as a young person trying to get into building a business and making stuff for people.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And the five minute install was life changing for me as someone using open source. And I was a designer, not a developer. And so my brother basically got tired of helping me. He's like, hey. Here's a little document.
Speaker 4:Just look at this. Figure it out. So I got an
Speaker 2:FTP brother to me. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yes. Fantastic older brother. We still work together. I got an FTP client. I started reading through that.
Speaker 4:I got lost a bunch of times, but I was able to get a little website up and charged my first project. I charged $400 for a client that I traveled from Chicago to Georgia to visit with them. It's ridiculous. That means like hours of round trip.
Speaker 2:These days, they just dollars 400 is the airline ticket.
Speaker 4:Yes. We met in the coffee shop. Got the anyway, it was fantastic. So the ability to use this software, use this five minute install to kind of just make something initially to start being able to charge clients and figure this out and then start editing the templates and just get up and running. That was a massive deal for me, and I'm guessing that affected a lot of other people too where maybe you're not so technical, but you can kind of figure it out and build a business off of it.
Speaker 4:And that that was a big deal.
Speaker 2:It is the GEICO insurance, claim. You now I'm drawing a point.
Speaker 4:Say, fifteen minutes on your car and fifteen minutes for 15%, something like that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Those when you throw numbers in, right? And back then when WordPress started, nothing was a five minute install.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And I did get close to five minutes after a little while once I actually understood what I was doing, and that was massive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Should I turn on search engine? Well, yeah, I can't imagine. It's not as common these days. Auto installers and onboarding and that sort of thing.
Speaker 4:InstaWP is blowing my mind still. I've been using it for a couple weeks now. Like, in five seconds, you're in WordPress. It's fantastic. But, yeah, five minutes was a big deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, that was probably the first slogan or tagline of WordPress that I can think of because it was treated as such. Matt said it on the stage a number of times. It quoted how many times early in the beginning. And like I said, was kind of attracted me.
Speaker 2:I mean, it was a little bit still techie and developer, right? Because you had to get the database set up and they had to enter the database password and all of that. But believe me, as somebody who is playing around with Drupal and PHP Nuke and movable type, and my apologies if I'm insulting anybody here, I don't want to get any emails. I'm sure they had their own processes that didn't take very long, but WordPress branded it. So it was the first brandable WordPress slogan in my mind.
Speaker 2:Jason, you look like you're about to explode.
Speaker 3:No. Well, I I picked WordPress specifically because of, the five minute install, specifically because I had tried. And I I've I've been blogging since 2001 and originally actually, 2000. Originally using Blogger, and then when I decided to to stop, and and, like, sort of start treating my site less like a hobby and more like a a serious thing, I started looking at CMSs. And I tried to install type.
Speaker 3:I I I mean, I'm 45. I've had a Linux box under my desk since I was 18 years old in 1996. Like, I, you know, I I can figure this stuff out, but, like, movable type, there was something just slightly obtuse enough about it that I I I couldn't like, I I couldn't get it up and running. But, you know, on the flip side, the five minute install, like, yeah. I could figure that out.
Speaker 3:And then just just a year into the project, I was looking this up a little bit earlier. One click installers from Fantastico and from DreamHost where I currently work, like, were and and became a a thing that turned that five minute install into click a button and wait five minutes while someone else does it for you. Yeah. Like and and, you know, they didn't have that for movable type. They didn't have that for Matt, when DreamHost did their one click installer, like, sites of of blog posts that the DreamHost ran at the time that said that they couldn't do that with movable type given the licensing of movable type.
Speaker 3:So the the fact that there was, like, a a GPL license there actually kind of helped the the growth of that and and helped. So, yeah, the five minute install and and just that little tiny step further of that one click installer where you get it in cPanel. You get it at all of the the different hosts that were proliferating around the time. It's massive. I but I I've I've talked enough, David.
Speaker 3:Would you like to tee up to someone else?
Speaker 2:Oh, Fran Fran it's random.org is is determined. Fran is next. So I'm Yes. I can't wait to hear what Fran has to say. I the power has been taken out and given to random ability.
Speaker 2:So, Fran, So what do you got for do
Speaker 5:have a few memorable moments, but while we were having this conversation about the five minutes install, and Jeffrey Zelman was a really big
Speaker 2:Well, share your biggest one now, and we'll get to the others hopefully later.
Speaker 5:Yes, so the biggest one for me is seeing Helen Who's Sandy getting on stage for the release of WordPress 4.7 in her high heels, beautiful floaty dress and knowing that this beautiful young woman was in charge and at 4.7 was already very big, WordPress was already very big. And at the time the release was managed by one person. And it was just for me, it was an historical moment because it was the first time I saw such representation on stage at any tech conference, and especially during a general relief moment. So that for me was memorable. And then there were other moments that were important, but that one is memorable.
Speaker 5:Like, I can still see her on stage, going on stage during State of the Word, presenting 4.7 with her heels, her dress, explaining all the technical features, looking fabulous doing that.
Speaker 2:And that because we are talking about the impact of the open source community or the general WordPress community, presence on stage would lead up. You remember when the, the old the what release was that?
Speaker 5:05/2006.
Speaker 2:05/2006. So it took a while, but I remember having I remember the conversations for that happening around this time. Like, people were talking about and I you know, Helen is is is obviously a great person. There are other great people that were around her that worked on that too of of all different types and sizes and shapes and everything. But I think once people saw started saw she added to that bucket of I'm seeing representation on stage.
Speaker 2:Yes. That was a lead representation and, like, taking it to the next logical step because things take time between 4.7 and the five releases, still wild, but then people start saying, Why can't we have an entire team or a entire division? Or why can't we have this? So yes, I agree. I'm First great with that
Speaker 5:of all, why can't we have more women represented to start with? I mean, like an all women and non binary false releases also it is historical for open source. Was an historical release 5.6. I am really baffled by the fact that tech media didn't pick up on that so much. Actually, I was discussing that at the time with Josef for the fact that, you know, we there was no media coverage and that was an historical release because, you know, I did a bit of research and nothing popped up when I looked for open source releases that were led completely by women.
Speaker 5:So I'm really baffled by why that release hasn't been picked up by the media. There's going to be another one six point four, which is going to be the last release of 2024. So moment of advertisement. There is a post.
Speaker 2:Okay. We'll come back here in a year and a half. And assuming I'm not hooked up to tubes here, we'll talk about it.
Speaker 5:Care for that. 6.3 is ongoing. So if anyone wants to see what the release is about, they can ride along and see if it works for them. But, you know, to bring it back to that moment, I remember I I was not at Work Camp US that year. Was watching from home.
Speaker 5:She got on stage. Was like, Oh, my goodness. Well, good
Speaker 2:for her. If she hears this, I'm sure it'll give her a smile. Great. All right. So Maytree, you're the youngest person here after all us old timers.
Speaker 2:Do you have anything that fit any particular memorable moment for you?
Speaker 6:I wanted to add a little bit to what Francesca said and the mention of the all women and nonbinary folk release of 5.6, because that was one of the most memorable releases for me. And I remember reading about it, and I remember the call for it. And that was the first release where I stayed up almost my entire night at India time, and I saw that release happen. And ever since then, I have been up and like awake the whole night for all the major releases because just seeing how beautifully that was done. And that particular release was very impactful on me because that is when I actually started looking into how I could start giving back, although I was using WordPress.
Speaker 6:But that particular release and just seeing all of them work together, that has always been like a core memory for me. And that encouraged me a lot more than I expected to, you know, where I was immediately looking at, okay, how else could I contribute? And then I was able to start participating in some of the contribution activities that we were doing, even at office. And there were a few other folks who were looking at doing the first contribution, and I was able to help out with it because I was reading a lot of the handbook information myself. That was something that was very, very memorable for me.
Speaker 6:And another moment that I was very happy about because we were working on something similar at Aticam a few months before was the launch of learn.wordpress..org. I think that was so important for all technical and nontechnical users. We have had a couple of years where it was very tough for us to maybe have engineers who were very well versed with WordPress development, and some people found it a little difficult. You know, there's so much that we can do in terms of career opportunities just using WordPress, be it technical and nontechnical ways. And some of us have had good mentors who have, you know, got us into the ecosystem, but maybe some who have just stumbled upon it have not had an easy way to get into it.
Speaker 6:And I think learn.wordpress.org was a great step towards it. And I know I know the impact that it could have created for a lot of other folks was because of we were working on something similar, learn.aticam.com, where we did want the engineers to feel encouraged enough to understand how they could, you know, do the WordPress development, get an early introduction to it. And if they are still willing to go for it, maybe they could apply to us or to somebody else. And that is how we had initially started that. And to see how, you know, the tutorials came up and how there were more defined courses for every single topic where usually you're just finding random Google things and, know, people are trying to piece things together.
Speaker 2:It's was pre chat GBT children.
Speaker 6:And now I find myself also helping clients, you know, with references to some of these tutorials and courses where it's it's so easy for them now, you know, to go through, especially the video tutorials have been very impactful. Feel reading a document can become very difficult. But watching a video actually seeing it happen is it especially for a visual learner, so much better, you know, and now we are working towards just combining our efforts in terms of whatever we learned into managing the course, improving it. Now we're working towards adding that information to the learned WordPress. It's been very helpful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a lot of outdated information. WordPress has been going on so long, people finding things that don't apply anymore or bad code and that sort of thing. So yeah, so I'm putting you down for learn.wordpress.org as the contribution. And I think moving forward, that's going to be a really, really big impact and set the example maybe for other open source projects who hopefully have enough manpower to it or people power to, to get that something like that going. But yes, I can't imagine how much impact that has on the next generation of people.
Speaker 2:Great perspective, by the way, because all us all us old timers have like, you know, five minute install? Oh, fine. I got a pH group right here. I'm gonna run it raw right on the server. You know?
Speaker 2:Alright. My wife said I can only do one of those per hour. So real quick real quick, Jason, before I have to use the restroom. Just kidding. Go ahead.
Speaker 3:Yeah. No. I I was, gonna kind of, tack on to that. The the folks who run, learn.wordpress.org, the the WordPress training team specifically well, I mean, everybody in that team like, I I spend a little time that is part of the the contribution that I I do when I have time is work with that team. It is a massive effort.
Speaker 3:Every time, there is a new version of WordPress, they go through all of those videos and, figure out, like, okay. What do we need to update? And, they work so hard to try to, get everything updated, like, day and date when a new release comes out. They're not fully there yet, but I know, that that Courtney and Haua and and all of the folks over there just are working. So, I mean, I don't wanna take away and single anyone out, but, like, Courtney Robertson is, like, a force of nature.
Speaker 3:I I think over on WP Water Cooler, we've nicknamed her the the Leslie Knope of WordPress. Like, she always has the the resource ready to go. She, you know, has, you know, things all planned out. So, really, I I mean, it's it's not a singular person effort, but a lot of the work that has been done around training and a lot a lot of the work moving forward, has has been, Courtney, and I just feel like she needs props for for how much has been done there.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, get to ask get her I know she wanted to to come on, so hopefully, can do, like, one more round of this with her included. Underappreciated for for sure. But speaking of underappreciated, Jason, now that I we we have you here, our second question was, what proposal or feature WordPress over the years you think hasn't gotten the attention or the appreciation it deserved? Now I know there's probably a ton, but I do eventually have to see my kids later. So let's if we wanna narrow it down to one, what's something that has been underappreciated, undervalued, or hasn't gotten the attention?
Speaker 2:WordPress features.
Speaker 3:Post formats. Yeah. Post formats. Kids It
Speaker 2:there was post formats.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Back in 2011, post formats was something that was included in WordPress 3.1. And what the idea behind post formats, if you've ever used Tumblr aka the house site, will know what post formats are. That basically, you could set something up where it would be, you know, a a a quote post. So you could post a a favorite quote for your from, like, an author, from whoever.
Speaker 3:You could post chat logs. People used to use stuff other than iMessage back in the day. I know that the kids love Discord and the old folks love Slack, but, you know, you could, like, kind of copy and paste, like, a chat between two people, and it would be appropriately formatted. One of the things that I really loved it for was link blogging. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So, yeah. So you could actually have a you didn't have to make a a custom post type for any of this stuff. It was effectively you could as long as you had a theme that supported it, you could, you know, link blog. You could whatever. And this was all based off of, it was, I feel like and this is a little bit of, you know, speculation, but Matt saw what Tumblr was doing and said, oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:We should be able to do that. And then a bunch of developers went, oh, yeah. I'd like to do that. And they all focused on it. They, you know, did a bunch of work.
Speaker 3:They announced it in WordPress 3.1 that we had post format support, and then it just sort of withered.
Speaker 2:Well, I yeah. Not to deal on this too much because we only have twenty four hours in a day to talk about this, but I Right. Think that the themes themes never really caught on with it. And I think that's where yeah. So I think now in the future, I think we, we get we've learned from that lesson and try to do a little bit more, proactive polling surveys, that sort of thing, and see how the fire was.
Speaker 2:I think maybe it was maybe it was a little bit more of a personal project during it to scratch, but definitely the the output didn't seem to match up with the, the input in the
Speaker 3:Mhmm. I I I don't wanna dominate too much,
Speaker 2:but I I No. Feel free. Dominate away. Well, wait, that doesn't sound good. No.
Speaker 2:Go ahead.
Speaker 3:There is a a a little bit of a theory that I also have, which is, at the time, even though, you know, post formats, like, yes, absolutely, this is a a thing we wanna be able to support. Yeah. The theme support wasn't there, but also the I feel like the theme support wasn't there because WordPress was already eight years into its life, making that push to becoming less of, like, a blogging platform and more of a general purpose CMS. And, a lot of the the blogging stuff, while it was still there, while it was the bedrock where all of this stuff was laid, was was beginning to, like, lose a little bit of that focus, a little bit of that shine. And, getting things that were a little more concentrated on being a a general purpose CMS sort of, like, took the wind out of the sails there.
Speaker 5:Alright.
Speaker 2:So post formats, RIP to a real one. So thanks a bunch. Alright, Josh. What what what you get what you got for me? Underappreciated.
Speaker 4:Depends on how you word the question to which answer I'll give, but I just had to pick one. So
Speaker 2:It's up it's up for your interpretation.
Speaker 4:Yes. I, I I hate and love notifications in WordPress, and I know there's been some fantastic folks who have been trying to bring that forward. There's been a lot of talk about it. So it's not that we're not aware of it as a community, but it's a really hard problem to solve.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'll have to add a trigger warning to the beginning of this episode, but go ahead.
Speaker 4:Just the last couple weeks, I've been looking again at really famous popular WordPress plugins doing some teardowns and seeing that we just don't know how what to do with this in a way that doesn't cause confusion and chaos, but there's an absolute need for notifications. And you look at other operating systems, it's better. You look at e even iOS. It's not great. It's not perfect, but it works in a way that is useful.
Speaker 4:And just plug in creators for one, they need a way to be able to say, hey. Here's what's going on without abusing it, and that's really hard. That's important. So that that's that's one that I think if we can figure it out that actually will really help the project as a whole, it's just not an easy one. So, yeah, I could go on.
Speaker 2:Maytree, you you nodded your head the hardest during that last minute. Do you have a problem with notifications?
Speaker 6:Actually, that was, that was the same thing that I was going to raise when the baton was going to be passed over to me.
Speaker 2:Uh-oh. Now you're gonna have to find something new. We'll give you a few minutes for that. But it's but so, yeah, you did. What were you gonna say real quick about it?
Speaker 6:So what happens is what I do envision is having a very seamless way to get notifications for everything that I'm using on my site in a much more elegant way, which is not confusing, where every time I'm going to a different part of WordPress, I'm getting buzzed by different plugins or maybe, you know, somebody asking me for a feedback. I would like, like, maybe a dedicated space where I could go for it when I'm ready to maybe share that instead of, you know, interrupting my user journey when maybe I'm focusing on, you know, publishing something that is very urgent, or, you know, I have something on my mind, I'm like, hey, okay, that's where I'm gonna go. This is what I'm gonna do. And sometimes I've had a few interesting experiences where I'm giving a demo, and then suddenly there's a notification that has come out of nowhere. I'm like, Oh, sorry, you know, like, I'll let you all know about it a little bit later.
Speaker 6:But that that could be some for sometimes when I'm introducing WordPress to very new users who are coming on, from a different CMS onto a new CMS. You know? So I would love for that experience to also become nicer for the users in general.
Speaker 2:But to be clear, we were talking about underappreciated and under recognized. So I think notifications, I think in themselves, I think what I think and I'm putting words in Joshua's mouth here.
Speaker 4:Please.
Speaker 2:But, you know, as much as we rag on them, they're an integral part of what we have to deal with in WordPress. So as you know, it's kind of like the person that always gets into trouble, in the end, if they weren't around, then life would be harder. So at least that's how I'm going to interpret this and to what We
Speaker 4:have to have them. How we have them is the massive question.
Speaker 2:Yeah. At least that's how I'm going to repeat this back to when I talk to my therapist later about all this. But anyway, Fran, what is something underappreciated in WordPress?
Speaker 5:Multisite.
Speaker 2:Ah, yes. And multisite. Remember when it was two installs? WordPress multisite was an install if you needed it. It was integrated into WordPress later.
Speaker 2:But what makes multisite your deal? So
Speaker 5:a few years back, I can't pinpoint the time, but I would say either the year that Gutenberg was nourished or the year before, Matt said that this is not a priority. So basically, for the past four, five, six years, it has been on life support and no new features have been really implemented and it's mostly, you know, maintenance and making sure it doesn't break. And it's important that it won't break because actually multi site is used by a lot of
Speaker 2:A lot of like news organizations, other News organizations, universities. Wordpress.org uses it, doesn't it?
Speaker 5:On a limit that well, wordpress.org for sure. At some point, wordpress.com was also kind of based on
Speaker 2:I'm sorry. That's my message.
Speaker 5:Wordpress.org for sure. But wordpress.com, I think at some point, I think they moved past that sort of architecture. So it feels that it was the great feature that could have been. And there was a lot put into the early days of development of multi site And then now it's on live support. But there are so many use cases for it and it's not just the end.
Speaker 5:Like the all the enterprise word relies heavily on multi site. But you know, the enterprise agencies also have the resources to tweak it and make it what they want. Although I know for a fact that we still every time I talked multisite with anyone from hosting companies or enterprise agencies, everyone's like, I found a bug. Found this. That could improve and things like that.
Speaker 5:But I think there are so many use cases also not for the enterprise wide and it makes it very hard to use. For example, my humble website that was unused and unloved is actually a multi site installation. Yeah. It's very sad because I have the Italian version and the English version. So, know, it makes sense for me to have that.
Speaker 5:Well, the other option was to talk about multilingual, but multi site for me is kind of the base for a lot of these things. I wish because it's not that it lacks people that want to work on it. There's actually a small but very passionate group of people that want to work on that. But it's very hard to prioritize it in the scope of a release at the level it should be because then you have to touch a lot of things if that's multi site. That for me is the great feature that could have been.
Speaker 5:And it doesn't get much appreciation. And I think because it's been a bit left on life support. So it cannot really keep up with the development of WordPress and the development of tech and solution tech solutions in general. So that's my one.
Speaker 2:No argument here. Fran, MultiSite, great pick. I used it a lot in the early days. So for Maytree, bring on this depression chain into the station here. Is there any underappreciated thing of WordPress that you can think of real quick?
Speaker 6:I I don't think so. Not at the moment, David. I think I'm going to circle back to it a little bit later on, if that's okay, so that we keep
Speaker 2:Nothing underappreciated?
Speaker 4:Mean, I did steal her pick already, so.
Speaker 2:That's right. Both of you are sharing notifications. Yes. And just like notifications, there's at least two sticking out right now.
Speaker 4:They come together in big bunches and pop up everywhere.
Speaker 2:Honey, bunches of notifications. Yeah. I'm I'm just gonna quick say auto updates in WordPress. It was a big deal. People made a big deal of it at the time.
Speaker 2:I remember Nathan standing on stage, and I've mentioned this before, so this is gonna be very, very quick. I I remember seeing Nasen and other prominent WordPress people on stage for years, I think, saying that this is not gonna you know, we're doing this in this way. That's not gonna break anything. People even not associated with WordPress were flipping out about it because you these are WordPress core updates, and there are people who are afraid. And and going along those lines, the features later where the rollback is is coming, the rollback feature, the site tools that would help you, the emails that are sent now saying that, hey, you have a you have a fatal error in your WordPress site for some reason, maybe because of an auto update or maybe because a developer was messing with your site.
Speaker 2:That to me, especially, are all the things I think of when I think of underappreciated features. Nowadays, you get an email from WordPress saying, hey. Your site is down. You can click on this link to go into a protected mode. That is a big deal.
Speaker 2:That had to come very quickly after auto updates for WordPress.
Speaker 5:Oh, so
Speaker 2:Oh, so what?
Speaker 5:So we closed this part with actually optimistic looking to the future of auto updates. Just today, the temporary backup of plugins and themes before updating has been merged that feature. And I'm very excited about that. It was the step two of a multi step plan that actually I wrote the post for that. Don't ask me why because I'm not a developer.
Speaker 5:So I have no idea how I ended up writing that post. But basically we laid down with my colleagues at the time from YAOS, a multi step plan to make auto updates as safe as possible. One of them was creating this temporary backup of plugins and themes. And there's a small, very small group of people that worked on that. It's actually four people basically that dedicated a lot of time to that.
Speaker 5:But they persisted and today it was merged. I
Speaker 2:feel like I need to get a helium balloon with something written on it. All right.
Speaker 4:I had a client from four years ago who's like, hey, my site's broken. So I went in and I'm like, I can't update stuff yet. So I then did a backup manually. Took me about ten, fifteen minutes. I'm like, all right, now I'll update and is it broken?
Speaker 4:And this yeah, I'm excited to hear about that merge.
Speaker 2:Great. Yeah. So my so I I've thrown in auto updates and that WP email you get when your site experiences a fatal I don't know what and then because that's what exists now and the future looks even brighter. So anyway. Alright.
Speaker 2:We're on to our third round here. We're gonna go a little bit quicker on this round so we have the time at the end to bring up the anything else that we may not have, covered up to this point. So the third, topic are oh, man. I'm gonna edit this out. I just had a brain fart.
Speaker 2:Third topic. What word camp comma, summit, comma, event, comma, conference over the past two decades or, you know, fill in the appropriate period of time here, has been noteworthy to you? And we'll qualify this by saying, there's no wrong answers. You guys can repeat something. It's that you didn't have to physically attend the event.
Speaker 2:You didn't even have to be in WordPress when this event took place. If you're looking at something that was affecting a WordPress history, you feel free to bring that up too in terms of things. But we're looking in it. And like I said, it doesn't have to be a WordCamp. So, we're gonna move a little bit more quickly here.
Speaker 2:So pick your best shot and let us know why you feel that way or what impact it had on you. Jason, what WordPress what WordPress related, event is sticks out in your mind?
Speaker 3:WordCamp two thousand six. The original, the one that started it all, the one that basically gave us the the framework for for all word camps. I I was there. It was a Monday event. Matt checked me in and handed me the sticker I put on my chest because there were no badges.
Speaker 3:It was a hello. My name is sticker.
Speaker 2:You don't need those stinking badges at a first word camp. Yes.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It was at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco. There were about there were, like, 500 something people registered. Probably about three to 400 were there. They had two tracks already.
Speaker 3:They had multiple tracks.
Speaker 2:Wow. No.
Speaker 3:The way yeah. Yeah. I I when Matt checked me in, Matt and I think Glenda, for the old heads in the crowd who remember when Glenda was was, hanging around the project, Matt and Glenda checked me in, and I was wearing a a Blogger T shirt in reference to Matt a year before at an event, Webzine two thousand five, got up and told the crowd, hey. You know, this is why you should use WordPress. And there was a shootout between, like, them, movable type, and blogger, I think.
Speaker 3:And Matt got up wearing a blogger T shirt, just like, hey. And it it was funny. And then I showed up wearing my blogger t shirt, and Matt's like, oh, that's hilarious. So
Speaker 2:That's amazing. I there are so many good thing. I didn't wanna catch you off, but I dropped a link into our chat here, and I'll share it with the share show notes as well. This is a sf.wordcamp.org/2000six. It is not it is not like any other WordCamp site you've seen.
Speaker 2:It is basically just a very plain text page saying these are the folks that signed up. The number goes to 500 about 513, 514. Who's to say who showed up? But there's it's it's quite a it's quite a piece of WordPress history. And there's also links to the pictures on Flickr, posts on Tech Neurotti, and something I've never, which I don't think exists anymore because the link is dead, and something called Sphere, which I don't know what that is.
Speaker 2:Actually, but anyway, you get to see a piece of internet history, the pictures on Flickr still work. So, yeah, I I am so jealous of you, Jason, because I would have loved to have been there. And the pictures and Matt looks so young.
Speaker 3:So young.
Speaker 2:So okay. Well, the first WordCamp passed probably the first event period that I can I that I know of, back in 2006? So it's a great first pick.
Speaker 5:I love Jason that your your your role is Slacker WordPress user.
Speaker 3:Yep. I I was I what am I? Like, eight or so registered? Yeah. Number nine.
Speaker 3:Nine. I I I heard that there was gonna be an event and just signed up, like, immediately. I was like, no question. I love WordPress. I'm gonna be there.
Speaker 2:You should scroll down this list when we have a chance and see who who we recognize and who is still around. Some of these names Yeah. Pop out, some of these names I have never heard of. I mean, some of them were probably also in San Francisco at the time and, you know, moved on to more open source or other tech related things and was San Francisco after all. All right, well, great.
Speaker 2:I can look at this all day. Thank you, Jason, for making me jealous. This was around the time actually I probably started I was using WordPress for a little bit, but I didn't even know these WordPress camps existed. WordCamp Miami started in twenty o eight, so it took me two years to learn about this. Joshua, what event, hootenanny, whatever you want to call it in WordPress, Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sticks out to
Speaker 4:for me, it was the first one I attended, which was WordCamp Toronto twenty seventeen. And I got a bug in my ear from a friend. Hey, why don't you go speak at
Speaker 2:a word camp? Figuratively. Got it.
Speaker 4:Figuratively. And I applied to as many word camps as I could, and I got accepted into Toronto. And I went there to give a little talk, and I was physically ill for the day or two leading up to it. I was so nervous, but I gave my talk. Everyone gave me really positive feedback.
Speaker 4:I got to spend the day with hundreds of other people and just kind of see this community in person. And it did something that it made it a little bit more real versus just being on the Internet and just talking to people remotely. It was that coming together to talk about something that was important to us. Just sitting and hearing different people saying why they got into WordPress, why it mattered to them, that was fantastic for me. And so I I think I've been to maybe eight or nine since then and, really enjoyed that.
Speaker 4:So I think that's the the big thing for me. It's just getting to go to one and seeing, oh, I can be part of this.
Speaker 2:Hey. Did they do a contributor day?
Speaker 4:I believe so. A couple years back now, so I can't remember.
Speaker 2:Well, they had a WAPU drawing contest. I think if they didn't have a contributor day, that probably fits in right there. I'm sharing the link now. September 30 and 10/01/2017. Yep.
Speaker 2:Okay. Just making sure you just just confirming you were there and you're not lying to me.
Speaker 4:I actually had to Google to figure it out. I'm like, I'm checking the years. Which one did I because I went to five within, like, an eight month period. So that was the first one.
Speaker 2:Yep. And there's your picture right there. Good for you. Yep.
Speaker 3:You you go to one word camp and you sort of start following them around like the Grateful Dead or FISH or something like that. You just start going to more and more.
Speaker 2:Sketches, universal language was your talk.
Speaker 4:Yep. Talking about sketching.
Speaker 2:Oh, good then. You nailed the title. I can never forget our first work camp. Alright. No one no one forgets their first work camp.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Alright, Fran. You've been to an you've been to a lot of events. It's gonna be hard for you to pick just one.
Speaker 5:Well, actually, it's easier than you might think.
Speaker 2:Uh-oh. Dun dun dun.
Speaker 5:It's the first WordPress event no. It's not the first WordPress event I've attended because the first one was the wordpress.commeetup. But with a a standalone contributor day that we organized in November 2017. 2017? No.
Speaker 5:2015. Sorry. I spoke about it in 2017. November 2035, the Italian community has been dormant for a few years for a number of reasons, and a bunch of people decided to get together and organize something. And we didn't want to go for a WordCamp straight away.
Speaker 5:It seemed like too big for us. And also, were really passionate about contributing to WordPress even more than listening and giving talks about WordCamps. So about WordPress, So we organized this standalone contributor day in Milano. I have very fond memories of the day. I met friends and I also met my partner.
Speaker 5:So, you know, I was like, love boat work for the edition and without a boat. So yeah, I gave a talk about it at work in POS a couple of years later. There are some funny pics of us. A bunch of people helped us. It really kicked things into a higher gear because the Italian community went from having two word, two meetups that met every once in a while to be the second or the third largest community in the world at some point.
Speaker 5:So, you know?
Speaker 2:Oh, my. What year did you say that contributor thing was in?
Speaker 5:The contributor day happened in 2015. And in 2017, I spoke about it at WorkMPUS.
Speaker 2:Yeah, share that link for our guests for that.
Speaker 5:That's Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it was just one day set aside for contributions. It was not Yes. No no talks really. It was just purely
Speaker 5:No. The thing is also we didn't really know what contributed to WordPress was because apart for a few people that were already contributing to WordPress, no one had contributed to WordPress before. We had like a very to the global project. So we invited a few friends from abroad that really kindly donated their time and also money, to be honest, to make that possible. So shout out to automatic crowd favorite and human made that actually helped us make that with money, people, food, everything.
Speaker 5:So we met in Milano. We had people from these companies come along and tell us what it means to contribute to core, what it means to contribute to community, what it means to contribute polyglots. You know, we got together and the Italian community is a really big one. And that was the catalyst for all of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, without that, who knows? Like, you wouldn't the contributor community in that area wouldn't have been as big as it is today. And that now feeds into so many much other things today.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think in terms of word camps, probably because there was already that desire and it was already a bit of that network existing. Probably would have expanded anyway, but the amount of Italians that contribute also to the global project is really big compared to the size of the country. The fact that we don't necessarily all speak English, actually, we don't really, but that didn't stop people from, you know, also saying like, okay, my English is not perfect, but it doesn't matter. I can give something back to the Italian community for sure, but also to the global community.
Speaker 5:And so we all did it. So that's that's really cool.
Speaker 2:Certainly an example of how something in a localized area can grow to be so much and have so much influence in in open source and WordPress.
Speaker 4:So,
Speaker 2:Maitri. Any events, any event that stands out to you? You've probably been to a few or at least know of a few.
Speaker 6:I have to say it would be the WordCamp Asia twenty twenty three for me for a lot of reasons. Over the past couple of years, I've definitely attended a few WordCamps in India. And over the seven years that I've been working with WordPress and known of WordPress, there are many other folks who I have got to know, well, let's say over Slack at this moment, it was WorldCamp Asia. That was a beautiful setting to have met all those people under one roof. Sometimes just because of logistics, a lot of times we are not able to go to like maybe some other countries because of visa issues.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:And it was great to have everyone come this side and still be able to meet. And there was that sense of community, which is always felt at meetups and word camps. But for me, it grew multiple folds at WordCamp Asia to have actually put real faces to people that I have been interacting with. I have been seeing them, you know, do releases and see them like be a part of different groups and do some amazing work and to have had a conversation in person with them has been absolutely wonderful for me. And one of the fond memories that I had was on Contributors Day, where there were a there were a couple of attendees who had no clue what they had walked into, and I bumped into them.
Speaker 6:They seemed a little lost, and, you know, I was explaining to them about what happens and all. And then they asked me, okay, what can I do if I want to be a part of, this day that you all are having? And the only thing I could think about is, okay, have you all traveled somewhere? Would you have some photos to share? And they are like, yeah, sure.
Speaker 6:And in matter of a few minutes, all I got them to do was contribute one of their favorite photos to the WordPress photo directory, and they were smiling, you know, and I don't know who Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like a drug. It's a drug. The first one is free.
Speaker 6:And the best part was that it it got approved in few minutes. So thank god for whoever was helping with the approval because it was so instant. So it was so instant
Speaker 2:Cha ching.
Speaker 6:That I was actually able to see them smile and feel like they were part of something so large. And then they saw that photo and you know, they were able to see that oh, and then I showed them you know, how it is going to come up on the open first. And I was like, hey, if somebody types it, they could use your photo and you know, it could be on somebody's website. You never know. And they're like, wow, this is so amazing.
Speaker 6:And was a moment for me. And I'm so glad to have been at World Camp Asia this year. I'm hoping to make it to many others, but it was a special one for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We could talk all day about how big and how much they went through before COVID and then now to have that. And you're right, I've had, in my years experience with putting WordPress speakers together, we would get some fantastic entries from people in in from from that side of the earth, and they couldn't physically make it over here. You know, financial items aside, they just couldn't get the right papers or the permission for everything. So to have that big of a work camp in that part of the area probably changed and encouraged so many people that all they were seeing with these big bigger word camps and seeing these people were just if they were fortunate, like video, you know, video livestreams.
Speaker 2:That could have an impact that unmeasurable in terms of maybe some statistics, from an impact standpoint, has to can't wait to see how that plays out and have was that going every
Speaker 5:a fantastic work camp. May 3. I can't wait to come to go to Taipei next year.
Speaker 2:All right. Woah, woah, woah, hold your horses. We got other work camps to get out of this year. So I'll bring up the rear on this one. Really, just real quick.
Speaker 2:I mentioned some of these in some of the other interviews I've done. When it comes to WordPress, I use the term, I didn't just stick with conferences in my terminology for a reason because I said events, conferences, summits, kids camps. I've talked about those, but I think those are pretty neat to try to usher in and expose people toward writing and blogging in the next generation of WordPress or even teaching them how to build WordPress sites and preparing them for some, you know, experience, especially for high schoolers to college, you know, college students. There is a word camp for publishers that ran a number of years, prior to prior to, COVID. I'm not sure where that is at the moment, but that had a bit of impact.
Speaker 2:There was also smaller independent conferences as well. There was also buddy camps very early on the beginning for buddy press. I hosted a couple as well, and that was those were pretty fun. And last but not least, the community summits that have happened. There's gonna be one at WordCamp US this year.
Speaker 2:Community summits, I believe the first the first one was, probably invite only and probably didn't get a lot of, you know, back in those days, they they the word kinda sped organically. And if you weren't part of a certain group, socially speaking, maybe you didn't hear much about it until after it happened. But then the next community summit, I believe, was at a work camp US. I just don't remember which one. It was '20 I'd like to say it was, like, early days.
Speaker 2:'1. 2015. Right? So I was at that one. I was at that one, and I think they should do one every year, to be honest with you.
Speaker 2:Where where were you gonna say, Jason?
Speaker 3:There was one there was one before Philly that, happened in conjunction with WordCamp San Francisco. Maybe it was a couple years prior, 2013, 2014. I I I remember because I was fortunate enough to be able to attend. And they held it at the automatic offices in San Francisco before they unloaded, that, you know, piece of property and went fully distributed. I mean, they've always been fully distributed, but they they actually, got rid of any sort of, offices that they had.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, community summits are are are huge and great to to kind of talk to the people, you know, boots on the ground, actually working on the projects, implementing things, you know, project managing things, etcetera. It's all just a really great way to, like, come together and be able to to participate in a way that we don't really get a lot of opportunities for otherwise.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I hope they do more of them. I wish I was gonna be there in person this year. You know, I realize that it's tough for people to attend those anyway and maybe, like, at least every year or every other year or at least, you know, more frequently than it has been because a lot of good conversations come out of those. It really helps to shape the WordPress, some aspects of the WordPress community.
Speaker 2:So anyway.
Speaker 5:I'll dig out a post. So this has been a really big, there have been very big discussions around community summits because they originally were intended to be a moment where you discuss in person tough topics. They have a bit of a negative connotation initially, but there is a post and I'll try to dig it up about, you know, reframing our vision of community summit and actually turned them into something positive and proactive and not something reactive that we do because we've been fighting online about something.
Speaker 2:Then of course
Speaker 5:COVID happened, you know, happened. So that threw a big wrench in the plans. But yeah, I think those should be more frequent. Yeah, that could be like a topic for a whole episode of any of the odd casts around the WordPress space.
Speaker 2:All right. I think we did a pretty good job. I think we covered like, first work camp experience, first work camp I attended experience, community summits, big work camps that finally got their due, and even one day contributor days. So I like how we all picked something different. So I thought that was fantastic.
Speaker 2:Really, really good job, everybody. Give yourself a open source pat on the back. Alright. So now we've come to our, lightning round, bring out your dead, so to speak, kind of a format here. We're gonna do this pretty quick, and, we we will you you can throw out one or two.
Speaker 2:We can always come back to you if something else pops up. But I wanted to get, you know, things that were not selected by me. I wanted to see if there's anything else in particular that you've that you felt over the past, your experience with WordPress has been really, really like, give me your top tier, top one or two things that really that really kind of stood out for you. So, Jason, you know, lightning round here. What what do you got for us?
Speaker 3:Managed WordPress hosting. It is, really, the point where the WordPress community started to mature, started to move up market. All of these blogs, other sites, you know, like I kind of hinted at earlier, 2011 is is where people really started to see WordPress as more of a CMS. They were trying to shake off, like, just a piece of blogging software. And the managed hosting, really helped, do that, really kind of, helped legitimize, like, you know, when people are willing to spend more than, $7 a month on hosting their WordPress site.
Speaker 3:It's like, okay. Now I'm actually, starting to take this serious as as a business. This is where, we also started to see, like, business tracks at word camps and things like that. So
Speaker 2:Would would you think that was the would can you think of anything bigger from an economic standpoint that that was bigger? I I it's hard to think of a single thing outside of WordPress managed hosting, and I don't wanna get into who invented it. But, I mean, it's the the whole the whole process and the whole onboarding experience. And maybe not just for businesses, but for the individual who just needed to click that few buttons, you know, and this is kinda like where the five minute install story starts to fade a little bit. But yeah, I can't think of one, can you?
Speaker 2:Not easily anyway.
Speaker 4:It made a massive difference for my clients when I was like, hey, let's just get a managed WordPress host and we will have a better, happier life from day one if we do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because remember before, it was like find your own hosting and just pray that it, was what you needed. Right?
Speaker 3:And the hosting wasn't specialized for, like, it was a a more generic bucket. So you could install Drupal. You could install movable type. You could install Joomla or or whatever else you needed to. But with managed hosting and disclaimer, I I I mean, we're or DreamHost has managed hosting.
Speaker 3:Before that, I was working with Liquid Web. I was employee number five over at WP Engine. I mean, managed hosting really, took a lot of, like, very focused optimizations, very focused, you know, server rules and things like that.
Speaker 4:Security.
Speaker 3:Security. Things that you would need a plug in for. Like, it was, most managed hosts don't allow you to, install a caching plug in because they've got caching handled already and, you know, all the different, permutations and cache exceptions and all this other stuff. It really was a monumental shift. I I can't think of a single, web host out there.
Speaker 3:Like, even the Bargain web hosts have a managed WordPress offering now. So that, shift, those, first three or four companies, with, Pagely, with WP Engine, with Zippy Kid, now Pressable Zippy. Yeah. And and, Vid Luthor. Right?
Speaker 3:So yeah. I mean, that that was really, the honorable mention for me and and the big, like, tectonic shift in WordPress.
Speaker 2:Big part of WordPress history. Yeah. Alright, Joshua. Any honorable mentions here?
Speaker 4:Two things, plug ins. I was building for small businesses, struggling with nonmanaged hosting, but the two plug ins that kinda changed things for me, Gravity Forms. So as a nondeveloper, I was able to create conditional forms for my clients, and it blew their minds. And if you don't know what that is, it's fantastic. If someone chooses option a, show them option b.
Speaker 4:It's just so great.
Speaker 2:Yes. It's like an ophthalmologist experience, except much better.
Speaker 4:Yes. And I was able to do that with a drag and drop interface. That was a massive deal. I got the reference. That was a massive deal for a nondeveloper.
Speaker 4:The other was Divvy. And I know people have very strong opinions on this, but I could use this this
Speaker 2:There goes another trigger warning I gotta add, but go ahead.
Speaker 4:As a non developer, I was able to build entire websites out for my clients. And with that and Gravity Forms, I could do almost anything that a small business needed, and it was a big deal. It was something that opened up the door for them. Maybe they didn't have 5 or 6 figures to pay an agency, but they could pay me and I could get them something live.
Speaker 2:How much impact, Josh, and real quick here, I'll throw an extra question at you. Page builders in general, what do you think how their impact was in WordPress history, especially before Gutenberg?
Speaker 4:Massive. You didn't have to touch a template. You didn't have to edit a file. You didn't have to figure out FTP. You could just drag and drop, and I could tell a client, I'll build this for you, and then I'll create a couple little videos so you can make changes yourself, and you don't have to worry about breaking code.
Speaker 4:That was a big deal for and I was working on dozens of small business websites that kind of opened the door for them to know that they were gonna be okay. And this was before Squarespace really took off. It was, hey. WordPress, I'll set it all up for you, then you're mostly gonna be okay after that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I mean, you could argue that page builders are the reason we have Gutenberg.
Speaker 2:Yep. I would say partly. Yeah. Competition also factors into it. But I I Sure.
Speaker 2:I I would stand to say though page builders are a large part of how WordPress got popular as quickly as it did in the time that it did.
Speaker 4:The pitch was, hey, here's WordPress. It's fantastic. We're gonna ignore everything, and we're just gonna drop a page builder on top, and then your life is gonna be better. Trust me. That's the pitch I made so many times.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then, you know, there's there's page builders that have been absorbed. I was never much of a page builder person because my sites were too niche, but I was always into beaver builder. So and Elementor today is now coming out with AI features. So it's still still there are still page builders out there that are controlling a a large enough size of the market even with Gutenberg.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So well, great. And Gravity Forms too. I was the one of the first that was my first paid plugin.
Speaker 4:Same here.
Speaker 2:And I got a pretty pretty sweet deal with that. So I'm really pretty Not gonna say how sweet because I don't want that deal to go away. Quickly, Fran, give us your give us your stuff before I'm gonna have to force to edit this out.
Speaker 5:I'm gonna shout out to all the
Speaker 2:Giving a shout.
Speaker 5:I'm giving a shout to all the women that popped up in the space in the last twenty years and made WordPress what it's You know, just gonna name a few, Josefa obviously, Josefa Hayden, Jean Voisey, the executive director for wordpress.org, Ellie Niemann and Michelle Forschette with the work they're doing with the under underrepresented in tech. Mentioned already Helen, shout out to myself because I was one of the first, probably the first non developer release lead of WordPress release and shout out to all the women that came on board during WordPress five point six, those that stayed and those that didn't come back, but maybe come back, will come back again. Early days, WordPress, Jen Milo, Andrew Middleton, Hany, Tammy, Tammy Lister, of course, Joshua. So honestly, it's like, I'm the daughter of two developers. So I've been I've been born in tech.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's a merge request.
Speaker 5:Alright. Yeah. So my parents are both programmers. Wow. So I was born in tech.
Speaker 2:Holy smokes.
Speaker 5:Nice when you said about the Linux, your first computer, mine was the XS Spectrum in '82. Know, like aging myself here. Yeah, never in my life I've seen such a diverse community. My mom was the first and probably the only programmer in their company. And it's great to see that in WordPress, we're not single digits anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's so many Lisa over at Web Dev Studios. There's Angie Miller.
Speaker 5:I mean, so many. I mean
Speaker 4:Andrea Middleton, Melchoice, Jason
Speaker 2:Mitchelton. I'm forgetting a few names that I don't even want.
Speaker 5:Amy, Tammy.
Speaker 2:Oh, sure. Put my first names. I can do that too.
Speaker 5:Amber, Rachel, Brittany, Bobby. Which team you you interact most with or which product you interact most with, you'll have a number of name. One group that is severely underrepresented is women founders and women CEOs. And this is definitely something that I hope to see increasing in the next ten years.
Speaker 4:And it makes a difference. Your projects are better for it. I've been in other tech outside of WordPress where it's just a bunch of dudes and you don't think the same way. You don't build the same You miss massive things that you should be including if you just have a homogenous group. It's such a big deal.
Speaker 2:The risk of being canceled. I have found in my experience that women are the best or better organizers. That's why I think you see a lot of them in positions at work camps, in conferences and organizations, maybe just because they have a certain can do attitude. I don't want to generalize too much here. Was an organizer for a number of years and some of the best toughest people that helped work Camp Miami were women.
Speaker 2:So I'm not even talking about my family, although I know I have to mention them or else they're gonna change the locks on my doors when I come back to the house. Anyway. So shout out to the women out there. Thank you very much.
Speaker 5:Yes.
Speaker 2:Greatly appreciate it. So, Maytree, what do you got? Anything left in your bucket? We appreciate you So just go, but yes, what's left in your bucket as we start to close things out here?
Speaker 6:So I wanted to mention a trend and I wanted to also mention key feature that came out as a part of the 04/2007 release. So talking about trend, something just to add to what Jason said, the onboarding experience, not just limited to hosting. I love the thought that people are now putting in to the onboarding experience of themes and plugins. I feel it makes a huge difference for everyone, especially if we have new users, and it's becoming much easier for them to know how they can set up a site icon, how they could where they should go to set up a simple header, and so on and so forth. And I love that we are also able to carry on that experience even when we are, you know, building websites for maybe some large publishing houses.
Speaker 6:That thought has been something that is very recent, and we have progressed a lot from what it was before where people were just you know, people were using WordPress, which is supposed to know what they had to do and where they had to go and all, you know. So there wasn't much thought going into it, but that's not the case right now. It's a lot more welcoming. And the other thing that I wanted to mention was something that I walked into because that was the year that I was introduced to WordPress 2016, the '4 point '7 release, also had the introduction of the WordPress REST API endpoints. And I feel that that exploded the WordPress ecosystem in all the good ways because it paved the way to build so many powerful integrations and applications.
Speaker 6:And people's minds were just racing with, you know, what all they could do with it. And I walked into that world, you know, and when I used to have conversations with people, they were like, had this not to be here, we, you know, we wouldn't have if if it wasn't for the WordPress REST API endpoints, we wouldn't have been able to do this. We wouldn't have been able to do that. We wouldn't have, you know, been able to think about, like, let's say, decoupled WordPress and all. So I feel that that was a very that was a very key introduction, and it's here to stay definitely, but I feel it was a very pivotal moment.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. You you had people you had people getting excited that weren't in the WordPress world about WordPress. I remember being at the first loop conf, in Las Vegas. And
Speaker 2:Oh, another good mission.
Speaker 3:Was yeah. It was hand in hand with an Angular, conference that was going on at the same time, and they had, like, a shared vendors area. And I was working the table for WP Engine, and the REST API had not landed yet, but it was, like, getting close to. And, you know, you could still, like, kind of get it going with the plug in and everything else. And I remember telling folks, Angular developers, like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:We're adding a a REST API. And, immediately, like, light bulbs were going off. Like, oh, so I can use WordPress's posting interface
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And, use that for my back end. I don't have to worry, about forcing, like, some, you know, weird CMS that I have to develop in Angular on, my users and can just use something that's, like, tested and proven like WordPress and then pass everything off in the REST API. I mean, it it's it's powerful stuff. Yeah. They were so excited.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It opened up so many new possibilities, not just for WordPress, but even for other platforms platforms. And And just seeing how the world started merging with people's pet projects or like new products altogether, and it still continues to evolve. And there are so many other things that are happening on top of it. It's amazing.
Speaker 2:Wow. So much to cover in twenty years. I'm just going to share with my real quick here. First of all, we're talking about economics. Talked about a little bit in past episodes too, didn't need to mention here.
Speaker 2:But acquisitions, obviously, were a big deal. We're WordPress in the last ten years. I and speaking of which, Yoast and Automattic, their their force of contributions in the WordPress community along with a lot of other people, but they are the two biggest bubbles. And there's been controversy about how Automattic is making, you know, with Jetpack and various decisions with Jetpack and various you know, how much influence does automatic have over the years, that sort of thing that's gone back and forth in our history. But very, very net positive good in there in terms of how automatic and companies like Yoast have contributed and and and led some of the features that we appreciate today.
Speaker 2:On the same subject, again, talked about previously, so I'm not gonna touch on it here too much. WordPress accountability, questions about leadership, accountability, transparency. Some some foundations were start not foundations. Some groups and organizations started. Some of them exist today.
Speaker 2:Some of them fizzled out. But I think overall, that attention has led to better communication today from from the WordPress, community. Just Sam Josefa has been very has been a has been a has been a front person releasing blog posts. And and I don't remember what all of them are called, but she does the looking ahead in the next year, looking behind. More surveys are being taken.
Speaker 2:In fact, one was just I think they released the results today on a survey. I forget which one. It's on wpfront.page if you wanna take a look at that. But there is a lot more transparency in information and discussion going on because I think of WordPress going through that. It's still going through, but there was a particular part of, like, accountability, leadership, transparency, and I think things have improved so much.
Speaker 2:And then finally, I think this has not been talked about yet in any of my conversations. Does anybody remember the press this button? Jason does. Joshua Joshua looks like he just ate some bad fish. Some fish
Speaker 4:there, but I don't remember what it was.
Speaker 3:So I I think Good.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Josh, for clearing that up for us.
Speaker 5:Think I've ever used it. But, yeah, I remember it.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:It's I believe the the presses button or at least the the dashboard widget for that was added in WordPress 2.7. It may have existed in some form or another, but, just a a quick way to enter posts. Yeah. Yeah, David. You're right.
Speaker 2:It's And when when when blogging was still in, I would use I'm actually still using it today. So I actually modify the JavaScript a little bit to it. And, when I go around and I wanna share articles on WP front dot page, hint, hint, sponsored by, go I I click on an article and nine times out of 10, because it can't scan GitHub repos, but other than that, it will automatically grab the title, the description of that, and I can change it. I can edit it. I can refer to this.
Speaker 2:I can attach an image right in a pop up window in my browser. And all I did was click a browser extension. For a while, browser extensions were horrible. They weren't in fashion. They weren't in style.
Speaker 2:Now they're they're they're they're they're being used pretty heavily because, you know, with browsers extensions, you can change, you know, text on Twitter or the look of this website. But and I don't like you said, I don't think it's in WordPress anymore. I think you have to you I had to install a plugin to get it back. But I think Press This was just another one of those things like post formats and link log blog roles, if you remember those, and all of that stuff in WordPress that stayed on very early on in WordPress were fundamental to how people use WordPress primarily for blogging, then kinda just fade it away a little bit until you go, oh, yeah, that's right. But anyway, those were my lightning round items there.
Speaker 2:So I want to thank everybody here for their time. We had some great discussions. Most of this is so brand new. Can't wait to share it with the other people in this series that we've done. We talked about Crazy Horse.
Speaker 2:I think we were gonna start off with that. We talked about five minute installs, post formats, notifications, multisite, our first events, a variety of those. And we touched on some things like we never even considered about economic impact, shared hosting and, onboarding experiences and giving a lot of people the recognition they solely deserve. So I want to thank our panelists today. Let's go around real quick.
Speaker 2:Say, where people can find you at on the web. Let's start with Jason.
Speaker 3:Well, alright. Thanks for having me, folks. Again, Jason Kossberg. You can see me every week on the most influential WordPress podcast. I swear, I'm not just saying that.
Speaker 3:It actually is the most influential WordPress podcast. WP Water Cooler. That's at wpwatercooler.com. And you can follow me on the Fetaverse at, simian.rodeo@booga, b o o g a h.
Speaker 2:And a special shout out to the news organizations of WordPress over the years, the long those who've been with WordPress very long time, and WP Waterkiller is one of those. So, Jason, please please send our regards to the rest of the team when you go back there next time. Greatly appreciate it. I wish we had more time to talk about these these these particular news shows and all that stuff that kept up over the years. Joshua, where can people find you?
Speaker 4:Yep. You can find me at joshuawold dot com. I have a project What's that?
Speaker 2:Yes. I'm sorry.
Speaker 4:Onboardwp.io, where I'm doing onboarding and trying to figure out how we can make that better in WordPress.
Speaker 2:Yes. It's criticizing in a good way. I appreciate that. Yes. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Francesca, where can people find you?
Speaker 5:Almost nowhere nowadays because Alright.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for coming. That's it. Alright, Maytree.
Speaker 5:I almost stopped using social media. If you wanna see the cats that I retweet, I am Francesca Marano on Twitter, and that's more or less the content I'm sharing nowadays on social media.
Speaker 2:And, social media needs more felines, I assure you, and less of other things. Maytree, where can people find you?
Speaker 6:You can find me on Twitter at mytreec. Getting my spelling is gonna be a little bit difficult, but
Speaker 2:You'll put it in show notes.
Speaker 6:Type it in. Yes. But yes, you can find me on Twitter, and I'm also there on LinkedIn at justmytree.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you very much all. And in case you want to find me, I'm not tired of my voice yet, I'm at davidbissett.social. You most of my social links are up there, including, all of the tweets and posts and poops and toots or whatever. Whatever people are calling things these days, I my my WordPress website sucks all of those in because I don't trust social networks, and I've got 50 or 60,000 posts that I search through sometimes. But that is where so if you not only want to maybe you should check some of the latest ones out before you follow me.
Speaker 2:That's probably why have a website also exists. But you can find me @davidbissett.social,dimensionmedia on Twitter. And, again, appreciate everyone here. I can't wait to share this and all of you enjoy the next twenty years of WordPress.
Speaker 4:Thanks everyone. Thank you.
Speaker 5:Thank you
Speaker 6:so much for having me. Bye.
Speaker 5:Thank you so much. Bye. Thanks for
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