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Discover new WordPress opportunities through stories told using Gravity Forms. WordPress developers and agency owners rely on Gravity Forms to solve complex problems for their clients. Breakdown explores their stories to extract the most useful lessons for our listeners.
Join podcast host Matt Medeiros with special guest appearances from the team behind Gravity Forms to stay up to date on the next opportunity for Gravity Forms + WordPress. Whether it's a new Gravity Forms add-on or a new way to use our e-commerce features, Breakdown is the WordPress podcast you want to be subscribed to.
Travis Tots, welcome to Breakdown.
Travis:Matt Medeiros, how you doing, man?
Matt:Thanks for having me. I've been employed for three years. We've been publishing this podcast for three years. This is the first time you've been on?
Travis:I think it is actually, isn't it?
Matt:It it must be my annual review coming up.
Travis:So, Matt, we need to talk about yeah. No. It's it's funny you mentioned that. We have been at this podcast now for three years, and I haven't been on yet.
Matt:You and I just co hosted a webinar. We talked about the labs project, the upcoming AI stuff we have coming into Gravity Forms. We are gonna talk about that stuff today. But you and I are as old as the trees in the WordPress community. We've been here for a while.
Matt:What what what don't folks know about you and your journey in in WordPress? Where did you start and how did you end up here at Gravity Forms?
Travis:Yeah. I feel like I tell the story a lot, but it's probably just on calls and, and, you know, meet and greet calls with other, with other WordPress folks. But I started with WordPress at a small agency when I was still in college, believe it or not. And I think we started using WordPress at version three. So it's been a long time.
Travis:And we were really just looking for a CMS alternative to static built websites at that point. You know, we were building, you know, HTML websites and and Dreamweaver, and customers wanted updates. And, you know, the agency, the mom and pop agency I was working at was like, well, let's try to find a way that they can do this themselves. You know? And, obviously, the rest is history, I guess, as it relates to WordPress and how they kind of became for a lot of agencies, especially small agencies, a de facto solution for just that.
Travis:From there, I really delve deeper into WordPress after after doing forum support for different WordPress theme shops, which gave me, I think, just the experience of, like, digging into customer issues and what people were running into when using WordPress themes and WordPress in general and just deepened that knowledge and passion, I think, for the platform and for continuing to do it, as you said, as old as the trees now, from then until now, which has been, you know, obviously a fun ride. And then in the agency work, and it was all WordPress for the most part. And then and then, of course, to Rockechini's, you know, on the product side. So it's been fun. It's been a it's been a wild ride.
Matt:Not to add more pressure to you, but we are accidentally live on the Gravity Forms YouTube page. I forgot to uncheck that when I hit record from the webinar that we just talked about. You've seen a lot in the WordPress space, you and I have both seen a lot. I'm sure folks listening to this have seen a lot, but where where do you think things changed for for WordPress? What was the big change?
Matt:Was it at some point, you know, from your perspective anyway, like, did you see something shift in the customer of WordPress? Like, back in the day, people were just, what's this WordPress thing? I don't know what it is. Just give it to me. Sell it to me.
Matt:Did you find over time people got more warm to WordPress, mature to WordPress, they wanted WordPress? Did themes and plugins change the landscape? Like, where was the shift in your career where you said, you know what, WordPress isn't like what it used to be, which was I gotta unpack this thing and figure it out. Like, when did that shift for you?
Travis:Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's funny because you think about even, you know, what year would would that have been? 2003 maybe roughly, 2002. Somewhere around that timeline when when WordPress really kind of became a blogging platform and obviously, like, you know, mom blogs, so to say, as they were once called, really kind of led people down the path of choosing it as a as a great way to put out content. Right?
Travis:A great way to blog about whatever they were doing in their lives. And at that point, you know, there may have been plug ins entering the ecosystem and and being in the repo at an earlier stage. But I I do think that a big part of where it graduated to the next level and evolved was when you started to see real plug in companies, I mean Rocket Genius and Gravity Forms included, start entering in that space, right, where plugins became a thing that really helped people run a business on WordPress, not just be a, you know, a blogging platform, as it once was. I think that at that point you started to see, okay, I can use this to build a website for a garage door company. I can build this website and run an e commerce site off of WordPress.
Travis:And I think that that really opened the doors for a lot of people when they were looking for a solution, you know, that wasn't a closed platform, that was open source, that was, you know, much easier and more affordable to to build on. And I think that continued from that trajectory, to be honest. I mean, as as an agency owner, it not only became our de facto solution because of our familiarity with building and designing for WordPress, but also because it had so much flexibility. And we could build, you know, exactly what somebody wanted in a platform that didn't cost them a lot per year to run. Right?
Travis:And that was, you know, where I think it's continued to evolve into, you know, at this point, maybe even the de facto enterprise solution because of that. But yeah, mean, now you look at, you know, you look at the theme market and you look at how, you know, everything in the theme space has drastically changed. And I I think that fracture happened probably with the block editor in around 2018. And now it's, you know, now it's a great platform to to use. But at first, it really was very difficult.
Travis:I think all of us can agree on that. Right? So Yeah.
Matt:Yeah. You know, it's in a post COVID world, I talk to folks all the time, and they're like, so have you been working at home since COVID and all this stuff? And and how are you doing with it? No. I've been working at home in coffee shops for the last twenty years.
Matt:More more than twenty five years. You know, well just about twenty years. I started my agency in 2007. I wanted to shift gears a little bit, talk about what it's like to work with work in the environment that we work in, that is technology at Gravity Forms for WordPress remotely, because I remember distinctly going to your office, forget if it was a WordCamp or Prestige Conf, and I had started, just started my agency, was like, this place is awesome. Like, you know, I have a small, you know, where I was from, like, I had a small agency.
Matt:No one had agency, like, office agency, and none of my friends and colleagues and competitors had one. Where where I lived, I thought I was, you know, upmarket, but you guys had a killer office. Talk about the difference between, like, what that was like with people in a room discovering technology to where you find where we find ourselves today, especially at Gravity Forms as a, you know, remote based team. We do have an office in Virginia. Yep.
Matt:But just your experiences of, like, shifting from we're unpacking this cool technology stuff all in person to now we're all dispersed throughout the world.
Travis:Yeah. It's such a it's been such a wild ride. I mean, yeah. It it to to think that you're coming from, you know, even even, you know, the early two thousands, like that was the goal. Right?
Travis:I wanna be a designer at a cool agency and that's the path. Right? That's the that's the career trajectory. That's where I wanna be. That's what I wanna do.
Travis:To to, of course, now being in a remote environment is, you know, sit sit in my home office all day and hear my kids trample around upstairs. And that's just that's just the difference.
Matt:Which is literally happening to me right now. I can hear Which is
Travis:literally happening right now. Yeah. And it never ends, especially during the summer. But, yeah, I it it it was different then. It was different, you know, even when what you're talking about when you came to to Minneapolis to our to our office space.
Travis:And and we built that space because we wanted to build a space that not only we wanted to be in, but we wanted our team to be excited to go to every day. Right? And we wanted to, like, give them, you know, the fun things that go along with having a physical office, environment. And then obviously the collaborative spaces, right? Different meeting rooms in different spaces and a mezzanine with with a library and just different areas for people to collaborate.
Travis:And it felt, know, at that point it felt like the only way to run an agency. Right? It was before the Zooms of the world kind of took over meetings. And obviously we had, you know, remote meetings because we had clients all over the world even at that point. But, you know, it was it was just different.
Travis:The collaboration was different. I think it looks different than it does now. Right? I think a lot of those interactions in person were very special. And even, like, the the things like playing foosball or playing a game of pool during the day, had an effect.
Travis:Right? It has an effect on the culture, of the agency and the collaborative nature and and in meeting and and working with other people, throughout the day because you're like, oh, yeah. I just I just played this. You know? I played my coworker in a game of pool, and that was like a a dynamic that you just can't capture anymore in a remote environment.
Travis:Right? You try to in different ways. But, yeah, now I feel like I've been remote for so long. It's it's hard to remember what, what those days were like, and why they were special. But I do think now, you know, we we find different ways to break down the barriers, meet with each other on a regular basis, communicate with each other in different ways and in new ways.
Travis:And, you know, and the flexibility makes it the way that we work now. Right? It's what everybody wants is, you know, I want to be flexible. I want to be able to go to a doctor appointment or take my kid to a baseball game or whatever it is and still be able to work and do my stuff. And that just makes it wonderful and lovely and and amazing as as, you know, as a parent, especially.
Travis:But even without kids, just the flexibility and and the ability to do those things. But, yeah, different different times and different eras of agents from agency work all the way to now Gravity Forms.
Matt:I mentioned at the top of the show, we had just recorded a webinar about our new project here at Gravity Forms, excuse me, and it's called labs, labs.gravity.com, and speaking of bringing the team together and camaraderie and doing all this stuff in a remote way, Labs is a bit of an exercise of team culture, right? I mean, we're gonna talk about AI in a little bit, but of course AI has put WordPress and our tech industry, many industries under a microscope about like what's gonna happen with AI and how does that affect our jobs, our product, our customers, everything. And labs allows us to leverage a little bit of that stuff, AI, and allows the team, folks like you and me on the marketing side who don't normally introduce things into product, let alone build experiments or scaffold MVPs to show off the product team, now we can do that, and it's sort of being birthed through the labs website, labs.gravity.com. Talk about that, it was one of your ideas that you brought up to the team, well I guess not just your idea, but a group of you had the idea and introduced it to the team, I think, probably like six months ago, eight months ago, something like that.
Matt:Can't remember. Time is fleeting, but talk walk us through that when that started and and how we got to where we are today.
Travis:Yeah. I I think you're probably pretty close to accurate. I wanna say it was maybe six to nine months ago. Right? We had talked about just ways that, you know, a mature product can move faster.
Travis:Just different ways that a mature product can move faster. Right? And I think, you know, Gravity Forms just turned 17. And, you know, the honest truth is, I think and I think a lot of people probably think it in general with software that's been around as as long as Gravity Forms that, you know, 17 year old, 20 year old software companies don't usually ship experimental sandboxes. I think it's it's we see it here and now here and there.
Travis:Obviously, we got the idea because of looking at some, you know, people like Google and and Atlassian and things like that doing some of those things, but it's it doesn't happen that often. And I hadn't really seen it much in the WordPress space. Right? But but I think it says something about where we're going. I I think it says something about where we're going, in the tech space, and I think it says something about where we're going as a company here at Rocket Genius with Gravity Forms and the rest of, of what we're building with a future product suite in general.
Travis:Right? It says that we aren't just sitting idly by while a lot of things ship and happen. Right? We want to move a little bit like a startup again. We want to be able to not only have those things that are that are shipped in core on a regular basis and a regular cadence and those integrations that everybody looks for and needs when they're using Gravity Forms, but we also want to be able to ship things at a faster clip in an experimental mode so that we can see what resonates with our customers.
Travis:We can get active feedback and that they can really see that we're trying different things. We're here to understand what resonates with them, why, and how we can do more of it. Right? And and labs was really burst out of those ideas. Right?
Travis:How do we, you know, with the evolution of of, of course, the text based and, course, of WordPress and, of course, AI, take those ideas and figure out how to do more with them. Right? We don't want those ideas to die in someone's head or die in Slack for lack of a better way to say it. Right? We want those ideas to become real.
Travis:And I think now more than ever, an idea can become real, especially in WordPress and especially the way that we've architected the solutions around labs. Right? It's not just, you know, someone one shotting, as they say, a plug in. Right? Yes.
Travis:Some of it is AI driven or or assisted, but we start with frameworks for people. Right? We start with code bases. We start with an add on framework. We start with things that make sense in our world and can be tested and QA ed by the individual that's working on it and then properly, tested and security scanned at the end, right, before we put anything out into the world.
Travis:So, it's faster access to real ideas and tools that we think our customers need. And I think when the idea was talked about, that was the goal, and we executed on it in a pretty quick fashion to just open up contribution at the company and with the team.
Matt:Yeah. I think, obviously, it's opening up new ideas, and and and it's quite an experiment, like, label these as experimental add ons, right? And and this whole thing is an experiment for us as well, right? How we how we communicate this to customers, how customers give us feedback, hopefully, if at all on the add ons and the snippets that we put out, and we're trying to build that sort of feedback loop to see and talk to people like, what do you think about this idea? Remember, it's just an idea or an experiment.
Matt:Try it out. If you think that there's something here, tell us what you're looking for, and maybe this matures into the the core product. Like, we we haven't figured that part out yet because we we are just in the early days of the lab, so we're constantly experimenting with the experiments going out, which is really cool. It's also fun to see the different ideas that can come to the table now. So, for instance, my more utilitymarketing brain goes, Wouldn't it be great to have migrators from Contact Form seven, which has been frozen in terms of development life cycle, and some of our competitors like WP Forms to bring those forms into your Gravity Forms site.
Matt:Like, as somebody who talks to a lot of people in the WordPress space and customers and sees a lot of stuff on social, I go, I need to build these tools. I see people asking about these tools, I can go build these tools. Somebody like Melissa from our marketing team, who spends a lot of time in design and a lot of the graphics and visuals that you see from the Gravity Forms brand, she came up with what I think is a killer idea for, like, an overflow list when people are registering for whatever it is that you have on your Gravity Form, whether it's an event or registering for a space or ticket or something like that, and it builds an overflow list so you can see it in the back end. Talk to us about your add ons that that you built and why those ideas popped into your head. No pun intended.
Travis:It's odd it's even awesome to hear you talk about them. Right? Because I do think that, like, some of the best ideas don't necessarily have to come from a product manager even or or a developer or an engineer. Right? They not that those ideas don't happen, but I think they come from people that are everywhere at the company.
Travis:Right? And I think labs is giving us an eye a path to those ideas becoming real and making their way to real users, which is awesome to hear about. Yeah. I've I've built a a number of of things just because, you know, obviously, I have a development background. I have a lot of experience building in WordPress, but I don't it's not it's not my daily to to do anymore.
Travis:Right? It's it's other things. It's managing. It's it's working through design and branding. It's working through partners partnerships, and lots of other stuff that happens.
Travis:Right? But I wanted to be able to take some of the ideas that have been in my head for a while and just try building them. Right? Pop ups is something that I know, you know, we've had solutions in our ecosystem for a while. We've used pop ups ourselves on our own domains for quite some time.
Travis:And I wanted to take what we had used on gravityforms.com and and gravityflow.io and just actually build a solution that that is literally an add on instead of, instead of hard coded or custom coded, which is what those solutions were in the past because we had a need for, having our customers sign up to a list, in a pop up mode modal. And I was like, alright. Let's build this as an actual, add on for Gravity Forms. Just make it an add on versus something that was hard coded. So pop ups is something that I had had in my, head for a long time, and, honestly, we had used for such a long time.
Travis:I was like, alright. Let's take what we've used and and apply it elsewhere as an add on. Version control is another one. Versioning is what we named it. But I've always thought version control for Gravity Forms sounded like something I would want as someone that breaks stuff, right, regularly.
Travis:We test things. We change things. We add new fields. We delete fields. We we, you know, change of the entire form.
Travis:We're like, oh, you know what? Didn't work. Now I have to go through and manually do all of the deleting, revising, etcetera myself. But versioning was a way for us to say, okay. Well, instead of doing that, let's use a way, for those customers to roll back.
Travis:And I think it's great. I think, honestly, those types of things from a feature standpoint are cool to to test in the environment, put it out there, and see if people wanna use them. So those are two that I recently built that I'm pretty pretty excited about.
Matt:Let's just as we sort of wrap up, I wanna talk a little bit of the icing on the cake, which is your AI development stack, how you've been developing Gravity Forms add ons with AI. And I do wanna mention everything that we've just talked about, these experimental add ons, how you can contribute as a customer, as an agency, as a freelance developer. If you're using Gravity Forms, go to labs.gravity.com, labs.gravity.com. Available to well, can view it, but you can download the add ons and the snippets as a customer. Just log in to your account and you can access the download links to all of those experiments.
Matt:Give us your feedback, partake in the online form that we have as well, which is well suited for the stuff that we're doing with labs. We're moving to a position with Gravity Forms that is going to leverage the Abilities API and connecting up your WordPress site via MCP and a bunch of other tooling. We don't have Sam here, that's in the recording of the webinar, which will be posted online soon, and customers will able to start to experiment with this stuff later on, hopefully in the month, or into the fall to start experimenting with the MCP stuff. But, what's your flavor of AI? Like, you sit down and you're like, I want to build a Gravity Forms add on or markup a template page or something like that, you do that, what are you using on the AI side to assist you in those areas?
Travis:Yeah. What I found the best luck with myself just because I'm used to, you know, working in an IDE has been cursor. It still has the ability to set up a project, the ability to use the code, the ability to edit the code just like you would in a standard ID, and also the ability to interface with something like Claude or or ChatGPT depending on the model that you wanna use. I have found that that works really well for me. I like the the idea of it being familiar.
Travis:I like the idea of setting up a project and still being able to see the code and still being able to edit things myself when when I want to and when I need to. And usually, when I'm prompting in cursor, I'm I have found the best luck with Opus and using Claude under the hood. I know a lot of the models are feeling fairly similar. At least the higher end models are feeling fairly similar nowadays in performance, but I feel like that was when it clicked for me. It was like, okay, this, the power that I can harness via this model feels more closely aligned with what I want versus some of the other stuff.
Travis:So that's my current stack. And then, you know, most of what I'm setting up is is local, dev environments via local. And I actually just have, cursor, SIM link, my project files directly into whatever I'm doing. So I can make live changes and have those live changes just on the local host environment right away. And it just makes it really quick to go through that QA and and dev process.
Matt:I'm curious for somebody who focuses much more on, like, the UI and UX of things, the front end design and stuff, not to take away from your developer back end skills, but as somebody who has more of a design focused mindset, are you using anything successfully in the AI stack for front end design? Because, I mean, I'm certainly not a designer, and I don't I don't like I'm very hard on myself and like the stuff that I put out, even like the add ons, like I'm very particular on how I lay out my options pages, so I'm very keen to focus on stuff like that, but man, I'm using, Claude design, and I'm like, this this doesn't look good still. Like, where are you finding success if at all in design?
Travis:Yeah. A little hit or miss, to be honest. It it has been a struggle depending on what I'm trying to accomplish. I have found that there there are ways to, at least in my workflow, mock something up in Figma, and actually take a Figma export or even a static image export of a mock up and be able to, to drop that into cursor and have the output do a pretty good job of matching. I've still done a decent amount of of manual updates with CSS and things like that, even fine tuning things.
Travis:So that workflow has worked decently well. Outside of building things for WordPress, I've had luck also providing full, even outside of quad or, quad design, full design system files. Right? Like, if it's a brand system or a design system, giving it the entire package. Right?
Travis:Here's here's a logo SVG. Here's the color palette, and here's the design UI sample that I wanna accomplish. That has worked pretty well. But not to hint too far in advance, but we actually are building, a gravity design system, for both our internal, team, but also, the greater ecosystem and and public in general to eventually use and consume, via some MPM packages and skill files that'll be hopefully released in the next few months. So stay tuned for that.
Travis:Obviously, like, subscribe to our newsletter if you're not. Stay in the loop. You know, ask us about it. We're super excited about it. It's basically taking our our components, and we've built these components for years, and we're gonna be able to allow both our internal team as well as, like I said, the wider public to be able to consume and use those components in things that they're building.
Travis:Whether it's WordPress, whether it's not, you can still use our components. So many years of work has been going into those design into those design components, so it'll be fun to be able to share that too. So stay tuned on that.
Matt:Yeah. It's a fantastic effort. It's something that I would definitely wanna use not only because I have to, but because if I'm developing stuff, it just makes life a whole heck of a lot easier, and having that design language sort of baked into the process is gonna be a huge advantage. And I think, you know, one of the things that I'm really excited about too, the labs project, and we talked about this on the webinar, is being able to open up the labs eventually to one of the greatest advantages of Gravity Forms is the ecosystem that we have, certified developers, third party developers, community developers, people that are just posting stuff on like the WordPress repo or random GitHub accounts, like getting folks that develop on top of Gravity Forms because they trust the platform that we've built, number one, and they get to sort of get access to the Gravity Pool, the biggest form public pool there is. It's gross, but come on in people, the water
Travis:That went is public pool.
Matt:You know, they can all take advantage of that stuff, so I'm excited to see that start to develop over the months, because that'll allow me as a content creator and somebody who's in the WordPress community connect with others and say, build your experimental stuff here or bring your add ons here, we can help promote them for you, so that's gonna be an exciting thing. Labs.gravity.com, that's what we talked about today. Of course, we talked about Travis and his journey through WordPress into Rocket Genius, and then MCP stuff coming to Gravity Forms, keep your eyes, ears, and fingertips peeled? No. Just your eyes and your ears peeled to the stuff that's coming for all of this stuff.
Matt:Gravity.com, gravityforums.com, Breakdown Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts, wherever you're listening to this, there'll be a subscribe link or a follow link. Go ahead and hit follow. If you've got somebody in your life who uses Gravity Forms or WordPress, this is a great podcast to introduce them to. Share it with them. Let them know.
Matt:Listen, Travis, I usually ask folks where to go to say thanks, but I think we've mentioned all the URLs unless you've got some other place you want people to go.
Travis:That's where you gotta go. And, definitely subscribe if you're not subscribed. Keep keep an eye on what we're what we're doing. You know? Labs is is a great idea, and it's just the beginning of shipping a lot more stuff.
Travis:So we're gonna ship more. We're gonna ship faster. You're gonna see more from the Gravity Forms team over the next few months. We're excited about it. Thanks for having