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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. Today's show is all about the recently released MyWordPress.net, an application that stores an entire WordPress install in your web browser. My guests are WordPress contributors, Alex Kirk and Brandon Payton. They're here to fill us in on the project and its role in the ecosystem. Alex and Brandon, welcome to the WP Minute. Thanks for being here.
Brandon Payton (00:24)
Thanks for having us.
Alex Kirk (00:26)
Thanks for having us.
Eric Karkovack (00:28)
So Alex, as far as I know, this is kind of your pet project, your passion.
Alex Kirk (00:34)
Yeah, I think that's appropriate. I've been kind of pushing this forward, coming from an angle where our team at Automatic was working on Playground or is working on Playground. So we know the technology pretty well. And we've been working the whole past year on basically making sure that Playground works with all these different setups that plugin developers have.
all the different PHP modules they need, work and performance, things like that. And at that point, we figured that we are getting pretty stable and it would be a good opportunity to take it to the next level. Meaning that we've been catering the developer audience pretty well, but it has been a bit tricky to explain to some...
like non-developers, people who expect WordPress to operate in a certain way. And that brought the my-WordPress.net idea on the plan. That is basically a refocus of the audience for how playground, how people could interact with playground.
Eric Karkovack (01:26)
sure.
Yeah, so how do you guys think about, you know, the differences between Playground and my WordPress? Why the name change?
Alex Kirk (01:54)
It's not a name change. Both will continue to exist in parallel. They're catered to different audiences. So, ⁓ in theory, like even though we mentioned it in the announcement that my wordpress.net was powered by playground, I believe that in practice people don't need to care too much about it. it's basically an evolution from, you know, if you think about WordPress over the course of the years, initially it was server side software only.
Eric Karkovack (02:00)
I got you.
Alex Kirk (02:23)
So you put it on a server, you had to decide on a domain name, you had to get hosting somewhere. You maybe had to decide on a plan and then you could share it with people. And later on we built Playground, which is this interesting tool that runs in your browser. And every time you come back, it resets and you have a fresh WordPress, which is perfect for developers. But for a long time on Playground and WordPress.net, we even had like a blank WordPress screen. So you would go there.
And would have like, welcome to WordPress. This is your new WordPress, the hello world post and all of that. And that was confusing to people. So at some point we introduced this welcome screen where it explains what it is a bit better, but still like every time you would reload it or every time you would use a blueprint, it will start fresh. And now I see this as the third step where you've got a website that is private, that is hosted for free on your own browser, but
Eric Karkovack (03:09)
Sure.
Alex Kirk (03:20)
that behaves like a normal WordPress and as in you go there, you change something, you come back, it's still there. So that's the big difference. the big thing that, you know, Matt had this brief monologue on like how it's hard to understand why my WordPress and that you can have all of that with Playground.
And that's true because it's based on Playground and it has all these technologies. In Playground WordPress net, you can have multiple saved Playgrounds. At some point we added the save button pretty prominently so that you can know you can save them. But already that can be overwhelming to people who just want the WordPress. They come there, they expect the WordPress to behave like they know that a normal SAS works. You go there, you change something, you come back and it's the same.
Eric Karkovack (04:07)
Brandon, do you have anything to add to that?
Brandon Payton (04:11)
think the way I've been thinking about it is that Playground is more like a toolkit, whereas my WordPress.net is more like a WordPress just to have for yourself and love, and it's more of a personal experience versus an excellent toolbox. That's kind of how I had been thinking about them together.
Eric Karkovack (04:35)
Yeah. So it's, really from my, my sense is that, that this is really more for the end user, not necessarily the, developer. mean, a developer can certainly use it to experiment, but in this sense, it's like, okay, I can just create my own little WordPress blog. And I was saying, ⁓ before we started recording as a freelancer, I work with a lot of clients. do a lot of training.
I could see this being something very useful for training even because I know sometimes when I'm working with a client on a live site, they're afraid of breaking things, which, you know, it's kind of hard to do, but it is possible. So I could see them, you know, maybe having like a training through my WordPress where they play around with things in private. They don't have to worry about the public seeing it.
Alex Kirk (05:25)
I think, to be honest, I think I would suggest to for those use cases to continue to use playground of WordPress.net. The point being that part of the vision for my WordPress and also for this use case that is kind of unorthodox for what you kind of know WordPress for. It's a publishing platform. Its mission is to democratize publishing. And here we are in this environment which...
inherently doesn't allow publishing because everybody has it on the same URL and it's really private. And the vision goes in that direction that this actually creates a very unique space that WordPress hasn't entered yet, which is, I've been thinking about it a bit like there is this self-hosting community around the web and there's websites that list like all these services that you can replace with self-hosted versions.
But it's been really a power user thing and pretty tricky because it's really hard to like, every tool has different stack. Like every developer is passionate about creating this clone or like this self-hosted version of something. But that also means that everyone has their own solution. And there are services that make it easier to host that. There's like often Docker setups to make that more easy, but it's still pretty tricky and pretty, you need to be pretty determined to do it. So an idea here is that.
WordPress with its plugin system is pretty uniquely positioned that it can really easy install more plugins. Just the problem is we don't have plugins that cater for this personal use case. Like all the plugins are set to work on increase your reach, do publishing better, style your website better. But there is this whole part of the internet that's pretty big elsewhere that is about creating an experience for one or more multiple people.
Brandon Payton (06:57)
you
Alex Kirk (07:11)
that is more like their own community or there's like their own app. And that's also why we introduced this app name or let's say we're trying it. It's not something completely different, but it's the language that we think that people speak. They know I install something in this service and then I can use it. And while technically it's a blueprint and it's based on plugins and all of that, it's a bit easier for people to understand this is how this is like a thing that does something.
Brandon Payton (07:37)
you
Alex Kirk (07:39)
maybe just one thing, maybe a few things, but whatever. It's like an app on a phone and you can install it in your WordPress and then it does this thing for you in your WordPress.
Eric Karkovack (07:52)
Yeah, so what sort of use cases do you envision for this? I know that the announcement post talked about a CRM, for example, or even just going old school and blogging for yourself, you know, like a private journal. What other sorts of use cases do you see for it?
Alex Kirk (08:11)
I think that's open for exploration. And that's exactly the chicken and egg thing that I think we're trying to encourage to kind of break through. So I have many more ideas and I've got some ideas baking that I might also share here because they will be coming. But ⁓ I did start off with this personal CRM thing being this idea of like, you know, if you just want to increase your, either your, you know,
Brandon Payton (08:23)
Okay.
Alex Kirk (08:35)
single person network as in like solo developer and you want to increase your reach and want to kind of keep track of these people that you don't know, maybe don't know well enough to put in your phone address book, but you still want to have around. That's where such a CRM could be useful. Or another use case when you've got like friends that, you know, you like them, but you don't get in touch often enough and they don't do either. Maybe you can kind of get a little automation there, you know.
and check in with them more regularly and get reminded of that. And especially with, with beeper, it's really interesting ⁓ to have an integration there because it can actually check for you. Did you, did you talk recently? So that's a, the CRM aspect, but there's other things. Yeah. For example, the, the chat to blog is a, is an app that is
I have to admit it comes from my own use case, but I think it's really useful. So for private blogging, when you want to share something from a personal event, it can be really tricky to kind of gather the photos together or the videos from that event. Different people send it to you and you can save them to your own computer and then upload them again. And with the beeper integration, you can just collect them from different conversations and upload them to your blog and save them there. So we've been kind of going into this.
Brandon Payton (09:43)
you
Alex Kirk (09:54)
field of where is it useful to use it just for yourself.
Eric Karkovack (09:59)
This is kind of an all encompassing thing when you can integrate with services like beeper. I guess the question I have then is we have this AI integration in it too and we're getting more AI in WordPress. The 7.0 is about to come out as we record this. What sort of things should people be on the lookout for as far as AI with this app?
Alex Kirk (10:21)
So I think we can say it's a pretty good playground for AI because it's a safe environment. It's a sandbox. But it's more of a more fundamental question is like, where do you put AI? So either you've got your WordPress site, like in reference to WordPress, either you've got your WordPress site somewhere and you've got the AI outside talking to it, modifying it and all of that. And this is our...
trying to put it actually into WordPress and basically from inside out have the AI use it. So this AI assistant works in a way that similar as cloud code, for example, works. The AI is provided with certain tools that allows it to modify your WordPress and interact with your WordPress. And especially with 6.9 and the abilities API that opens up so many interesting
opportunities. So for example, coming back to the personal CRM example, what I, I was just recently on a trip and I met five people and it was quite interesting to be able to basically open up the AI assistant and just tell it, you know, I've met these list names people, please add a note for each of them and create them if they don't exist in the personal CRM right now. And it would interact with the other plugin because of the abilities API knew how to do it and would create the context and add a note.
And that's pretty powerful, a pretty powerful way of putting it inside WordPress and making it aware of what's available in this small environment.
Eric Karkovack (11:52)
Yeah, I can see that being a way, even as a developer, playing around with that in this kind of environment, before you start adding AI to your plugins or whatever, you can actually kind of see the different use cases for yourself in a very private area and just experiment, as you said, just let it kind of inspire you to do something creative with it.
Alex Kirk (12:14)
Totally. I could also see it as a place where, know, ⁓ AI conversations, where they can draw the context from that you want to give it to them. You know, like as soon as you add your notes, that's the place where your notes are. And you can tell it like, make use of these documents inside my WordPress. It's kind of this environment that you have more control over. Whereas with, you know, the clouds and open AI's and so on, you have kind of...
are in their ecosystem, the conversations you had there, they can use it for their context and for their memory functions. But here you can have more control. can like maybe upload more documents first and then talk to the AI and it's already there. So I think that opens up some opportunities that are currently even hard to grasp.
Eric Karkovack (13:03)
Now, ⁓ Brandon, I'll ask you about this one. What about portability? I know it lives in the browser and it can be reset. What's going to happen eventually? Are we going to be able to push this to other devices if I want to use this on my phone and then I want to use the same install on my desktop?
Brandon Payton (13:03)
So, go ahead.
It's funny you ask about that because I was just going to try to just talk about that. We're working on sort of WordPress to WordPress sync right now. So the idea would be that we could.
actually be able to sync entities or content between WordPresses. That's not just for my WordPress, that's just for WordPress. So that impacts WordPress Core, Playground, mywordpress.net. And then it just starts to get really cool because if your content is portable, maybe you want to pull some content from a more public facing website into my WordPress to work on or play with, could. And then you could maybe even explore pushing it back. All of a sudden Playground even becomes
This ability we've talked about this is like WordPress anywhere, WordPress everywhere, but you really then can start to do that because your content can be more portable. And so that's a space that I think we won't even fully realize the power of until those tools are really in place. I know we want and are interested in doing sort of even like peer to peer syncing with mywordpress.net and that sort of thing.
So that's something that we're working on and looking forward to as well.
Eric Karkovack (14:36)
I think that's exciting just for WordPress in general to be able to do that. ⁓ We ⁓ have hosts have staging environments and they're all kind of bespoke, right? We're pushing certain things from staging to production, an ability to sync something that's built into WordPress core that could be like massively useful for so many people in this case and for agencies, professionals as well.
Brandon Payton (15:02)
It really opens up, I really like the, even the playfulness that you can have with something like mywordpress.net, but it really being able to have content and data portability really opens it up to, I don't know, you can even have fun with things that are serious on another site, but you can pull, pull them down. can explore, experiment, whatever you want and push it or don't, you know, I think that's, ⁓ that is really exciting.
Eric Karkovack (15:26)
Yeah, mean WordPress, we always talk about data portability with WordPress, whereas other systems don't necessarily give you that. So I think that's kind of the ultimate example of it. I can have a WordPress site here in my browser. I can push that content to my live site if I want to and, you know, sync back and forth, which I think is incredibly cool. So I can't wait to see what that looks like. I know Alex, you had some videos that you had recorded.
Brandon Payton (15:43)
you
Eric Karkovack (15:52)
with my WordPress, would you like to share anything?
Alex Kirk (15:57)
Yeah, I've got one video that I could share. That's the tricky thing about it is that because it's kind of inherently private in that what is what you're working with. So I've got a video that shows the personal CRM and how the importing from my beeper would work. yeah, I can show it
Eric Karkovack (16:17)
Okay, great.
Alex Kirk (16:19)
So here we go.
All right, so this is the infamous welcome screen that can use a little design touch-up. And this is the app screen. And ⁓ I think it has been talked about the apps that are there. ⁓ In this case, we'll talk about the personal CRM one, which as I said, from a developer standpoint, it's just a blueprint and it will actually install multiple plugins. As you can see, as it's booting it, it actually has
This is comprised of multiple plugins that have been activated in sequence. And as I said, it's pretty interesting for people to get started, like get quick started if they have Beeper. Because Beeper connects to all these different services and it provides a local API that basically the communication is over localhost.
the data never leaves your system. So it talks HTTP to your beeper and you need to get an API token from beeper. And ⁓ with that token, ⁓ it communicate to your locally running beeper. So in this case, ⁓ here are my previous conversations. I've haphazardly blurted them out, but we're going to move to my brother. He's Christopher and...
It will unblur in a second. ⁓ I create this group, the family group. And ⁓ yeah, then this is the profile that's created just from beeper. And as you can see, there's ⁓ two services connected and you can see when the last contact was, as you see, it has been in January. And I just copy and paste at his birthdate. So with some small nuggets like that, like paste detection.
it can ⁓ show the next event just based on the birthday. Then the thing that I spoke about before, it could be interesting to ⁓ keep in touch every now and then, and you can set a schedule on which you want to keep in touch. So this will remind you that in five days you should get talking again.
And one interesting small kind of just for fun thing is that it can do this relationship analysis based on your previous messages that you exchanged. And for any of your contacts, you could then see like, how's, how's the balance who's initiating the conversation more. Not that it really needs to mean anything, but it can be an interesting way to see like, is this a one-sided relationship or not? Which is kind of fun and hard to get otherwise.
Eric Karkovack (19:12)
I can see that, yes.
Alex Kirk (19:15)
But here we have it just through this API integration.
So if everything works well, think the next thing that I show was the chat to blog thing where I'm going to ⁓ actually go into a conversation. My daughter had a ski day ⁓ some days before. So let's skip ahead a little.
Brandon Payton (19:37)
Yeah.
Alex Kirk (19:41)
show it. So this installs the chat to blog. I paste the beeper key and now when creating a post it will actually ⁓ list all the conversations and then if I go into a previous conversation it will pull the photos from that conversation and then I can go ahead and select those photos that should be created put into a new post. So this is a from a different conversation now.
and it will actually take the date from the pictures to make it easier to backdate something to the event when it happened. And yeah, then you create publish and it actually creates the post from that.
Eric Karkovack (20:25)
Very cool.
Alex Kirk (20:28)
And now these posts, they are in your media library. So ⁓ they're really uploaded and stored there. So I think I'll keep it this for now from the video, but ⁓ this gives you kind of an impression of what the people integration can do as in like making it super interesting to get content into your My WordPress with very little to type, so to speak.
Eric Karkovack (20:54)
And beeper, just for those that don't know, is an Automattic product. And what exactly does that do? It's really a messaging app, right?
Alex Kirk (21:03)
It's a multi-messenger kind of in the old style that many older folks might know from ICQ days and so on, there were different protocols and different apps that could kind of collect them all in one hood. And in today's world, we've got the WhatsApp and Signal and iMessage and Telegram and so on. And it can talk to those protocols also.
Eric Karkovack (21:13)
yes.
Alex Kirk (21:26)
like with a privacy angle over your local connection. So it doesn't go to a server. I think for most of them, there has been some transition, but like most of those services right now work like that. And the interesting part for the My WordPress is that it can then expose one unified API that you can talk to. And it doesn't really matter which protocol was there in the, when the message was received.
Eric Karkovack (21:51)
Okay, so it's really just pulling that data. doesn't care whether it came from Facebook or WhatsApp or any of that. Okay.
Alex Kirk (21:58)
Exactly that. So
from this use case, it can be really interesting to receive event pictures or videos from all those different sources where typically would have to care like who messaged me on that platform or how can they send me something from there? And that's kind of a nice way to collect that. And my personal use case is that we have a blog for our children to keep memories and everything. And it's a really nice way to keep up to date and
reduces a lot of hassle to download them and collect them after the fact. And my recommendation is if you've got a family, it's really a nice idea to do some family blogging. And you can do it privately, even with WordPress.
Eric Karkovack (22:38)
You know, I see
that and it just hit me like the pain it is to use social media for those types of things, especially if you have multiple accounts. And, you know, we all get into this habit of doom scrolling and seeing all the awful things online. And if you just want to connect with family, if you just want to keep track of those fun things, even at your child's school or things like that.
you can create a little integration like this locally and you can avoid all the doom scrolling and just have the fun stuff that you can smile at instead of despairing out on your phone. I think that's a really cool use case.
Alex Kirk (23:12)
Yeah,
that's one of my main motivations in kind of making it more attractive to blog again. And one really important aspect I think that we've been also kind of omitting so far is that my WordPress is kind of, it could be a stepping stone towards a hosted WordPress. So I've been working in the space of personal WordPress for
Brandon Payton (23:25)
you
Alex Kirk (23:36)
quite a while now. I have this plugin that's called Friends that integrates with Activity Pub and it's a really, it makes your own blog, like the backend or your friends' pages in that matter, interesting to visit because before, or like for everybody else who's not using WordPress for private reasons, you only go there to do action and you hardly go there to read.
because it doesn't connect things. And I think it could be really interesting to foster this use case more of like making WordPress more useful to yourself. And honestly, I had some trouble kind of convincing people to try it out because the problem is that most people don't have a WordPress ready to be used for private reasons. You have to find a new, I have to create a new account or add it to an existing account, find a new domain or subdomain or whatever. And that was an...
for just a private use case, it's a pretty high burden to take. It's an uphill battle to kind of convince people, you know, for trying this, just create this new blog and just do those four steps. And then you can try it. And with my WordPress, it's kind of one click away and we kind of make it more easy or easier for people to try those use cases that might not have publishing or self-promotion in mind, but just your space for yourself. And that's...
That's one big thing for my WordPress. Plus there might be people who... Yeah, it can, of course. I think we've got many more ⁓ applications that we could build and that I'm hoping to inspire people to implement in WordPress because I'm hoping that we now have a really easy way for people to try it out and to use it for themselves. And I think there's many audiences around the world...
Eric Karkovack (24:59)
That's like your personal timeline, really.
Alex Kirk (25:22)
who can really benefit from a kind of free WordPress that's easy to use because you don't have to, yeah, find the place where to host it or burden the costs for hosting it.
Eric Karkovack (25:33)
Yeah, I could definitely see that vision. ⁓ It's interesting. mean, we always talk about it as hosting. And I know Matt Mullenweg had mentioned in his blog post about this that he wanted to see WordPress, you know, this might take it into the billions of installs instead of millions. I could see that down the road when you have, you know, everybody is tired of necessarily going to those 20 social network accounts that we have and all these other
third-party apps that we're using, if you want to bring all that into your own personal space and own it, my WordPress could be a way to do that.
Brandon Payton (26:12)
In the future, we could even have certain kinds of links where, you know, friends could invite their other friends to my WordPress to experience some of these things. if it's the social networking, we're talking about private social networking. could, it's so cool to be able to share these possibilities with friends in a way that doesn't even require them to install software at all. Like they have a browser. They already had a browser.
And so it's such a great way to get started. And yeah, and then one thing I wanted to mention also is that I think that's one thing I would have liked to have added to the post that I posted on the WordPress.org news is kind of an invitation to imagine what kinds of apps you would like, you know, built from WordPress and please, please make them, you know, make them.
have fun playing with what you might like and maybe if you find something worth sharing share it and yeah that's the idea.
Eric Karkovack (27:06)
we've seen this so many times over the years. There's a call for the WordPress community to go out there and be creative. And they've done some amazing things. So maybe this is that next step where they can go and do something that none of us sitting here right now have even thought of for that personal use case. And then, as you said, the syncing is coming, you know, at some point.
which again I think is just a really cool feature to be able to go back and forth between a live site and a local site. Just as a developer, I love that. Have it built right into WordPress. Is there anything else that we should know about this project? Anything else that's coming down the pipeline here?
Alex Kirk (27:48)
I think for the moment, it's more, you know, there's a certain amount of mind shifting that needs to happen or that this tool is trying to encourage. And I think that's something that maybe the WordPress.org news post didn't convey enough as in like, it is powered by Playground, but there's a mind shift there. There's how, like this way how we can open up WordPress to people.
you know, who might be outside of the WordPress community who just want to use a certain app. And right now the options are mostly some hosted version of some app somewhere. Or maybe you can download some app to your phone or whatever. But this could be something where we can leverage the power of WordPress. Even though I said like you have to choose hosting, that's also a benefit because you have such a wide choice of where to host your WordPress.
where you know like this might be hosted inside my country. They apply to the local rules that I want. I don't have to go with a foreign service because they provide that. And I think that's pretty powerful for people to just have options. Whereas today there's some sort of limits in the market as to who's providing which service. And I think we as the WordPress community can provide this place for people.
this place I called it the digital serenity where you have a bit more control over where you hosted and how you hosted. And with the AI tool, I think maybe it's actually worth if you still have time to, I can do share a bit more of the video where I can show how you can use the AI assistant to actually modify software inside WordPress, which is also pretty powerful. Maybe a bit too far for
Eric Karkovack (29:38)
absolutely, go ahead.
Alex Kirk (29:41)
today's audience of like somebody who just wants to do something, but I think it can be a preview of what we can do with AI and empower people to change things. So I've installed the AI assistant and in this case, ⁓ so it's bring your own API key.
Brandon Payton (29:59)
Amen.
Alex Kirk (30:01)
but you can actually also run it with a local LLM and in this demo I'm using that. And so I've got a local LLM running and it also will connect over localhost with that.
And ⁓ now I'm basically asking it, I've got this plugin, please modify it. It's the Hello Dolly plugin. So, you know, this AI agent doesn't know a whole lot except for these are the tools available and it basically evaluates them for what, ⁓ how to achieve the task. And that's inside the current WordPress.
So it looks for the file and uses the file editing tool and proceeds through this task of changing it to what the user wants. And I think this is something where if we can provide this environment where people can dream up their tools that they want and the I can build it for them inside this sandbox and they can use it right there. It's a really interesting... ⁓
It's a really interesting ⁓ way to see how the software that you use can be even more at your own service.
So here it tries to activate. I think there was bit of a problem. So there was a syntax error and it fixed the syntax error.
and activates the plugin again.
Eric Karkovack (31:35)
Yeah, we still get the syntax errors with AI sometimes. I've noticed that too.
Alex Kirk (31:38)
I think that
it's been also a local LLM, so it's not as powerful. You can also use it with the other ones. But yeah, so I think that's pretty powerful in that ⁓ you can modify the software. So I think it cut off the part where it can be visible, but like there was the WordPress tips on the top. So yeah, the goal is to empower people, I think, and to...
kind of try to think outside of the WordPress box and how WordPress can empower people who have been not in the WordPress community so far too.
Eric Karkovack (32:17)
Yeah, I think we also get, you know, those of us who have been in this community a long time, we kind of see things a certain way and it's hard to shift that thinking. But maybe this is one of those, like, could serve as a catalyst for that, to kind of get us to look at other ways to use WordPress other than the ways we've just been using them for, you know, 20 plus years. I think that, and I think that's important for the future.
Well guys, I really appreciate you coming on and talking to us. We'll certainly post ⁓ all the links in the show notes. Where can folks connect with you online?
if you want them to connect with you online.
Alex Kirk (32:54)
So I guess in the...
One easy way to reach us is in the WordPress.org Slack and the Playground channel.
Brandon Payton (33:02)
and in the WordPress Playground GitHub repo, as far as for issues and discussion there as well.
Eric Karkovack (33:02)
Okay.
Alex Kirk (33:10)
Yes, also make WordPress.org slash Playground where we post chat recaps. is a bi-weekly chat where you can also reach us.
Brandon Payton (33:13)
Yes.
Eric Karkovack (33:20)
Thank you guys. I appreciate I appreciate your time and for showing us around my WordPress For those of you watching and listening. Thank you for supporting the WP minute Go ahead and visit the WP minute comm slash subscribe grab our newsletter become a member and support the work that we do and For Alex and Brandon, we'll see you again next time. Thank you
Brandon Payton (33:42)
Thank you.