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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack:
Hello again everyone and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm your host, Eric Karkovack. On today's episode, we're going to share a taste of my interview with Devin Walker. Devin was recently named the head, aka artistic director, of the Jetpack plugin. Now to access the entire interview, check out our WP Minute Plus podcast. Visit thewpminute.com for all the details and to become a member. Thanks and we'll see you again soon.
Eric Karkovack:
Yeah, you've got a vision and you want to carry that out, right?
Devin Walker:
Yeah, gotta be set up for success, you know what I mean?
Eric Karkovack:
But looking at the big picture, like if we're going like a year from now, we're approaching Halloween here. If we're looking at Halloween 2026, where would you like to see Jetpack compared to where it is today?
Devin Walker:
Yeah, well, I think, A, it's going to be a much better connections experience. When I have worked with the happiness engineers, the almost every other ticket more than that. I'd say 75 to 80% of the tickets had to do with a connection issue. There was some sort of issue communicating between our cloud and their site. And it can't be that way. And whether it's their host is blocking XML RPC, we've created like this other version. There's just so much complexity in it that the baseline of the whole thing to work on self-hosted is for that connection to be stable. And there needs to be transparency when that connection isn't. The customer needs to know when it's not or what's happening. That's going to make our happiness engineers a lot more efficient. It's going to make the customers a lot more satisfied with the quality and uptime of the product.
Devin Walker:
And so that's just baseline right there, right? Whether that means getting rid of XML RPC and writing the whole thing in REST, which already has a lot of RESTful methods and functions within it. I need to understand that more but that's one and that's probably a bigger task than I'm giving it. Two, the form building experience. We don't have conditional fields yet. We need conditional fields. That is something there's no excuse in 2025 not to have that. So conditional fields having that in there. A much better building experience where you have a form builder interface right now you when you build a form you have to do it in a page or post that you see and build it right there. That's not like any traditional form builder out there like gravity forms our biggest competitors, right? Customers or users are used to using it in an actual form builder isolated interface where you don't have all these blocks and it's not confusing and so changing that experience so it's a much more traditional yet cutting-edge way to do it and then finally improving our already existing AI integration which if you've written with it does an okay job but it's getting old and it hasn't been touched as much as it should that can be a lot more improved and then finally thinking about what the big big next things are right or not even just thinking about it getting started on that and already have been started like whether that's called version 2016 or whether it's a whole more aggressive approach having that in the wheels going on that while also turning out and marketing the hell out of it and having a really nice website. That's constantly updated and not just posting bullshit articles. That's all what I want to get going.
Eric Karkovack:
So you're coming in to ruffle some feathers, right? You're not just gonna let this thing sit there and rot like...
Devin Walker:
That's my job like that's what Matt brought me in for is bringing that outside perspective being in the community having done it before not like getting like I want to make some moves here and build the 10x this product essentially and you can't do that by Ho-hum. I'll just do this little like let's add this little field here and change the color here.