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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.
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Speaker 2:Hey, Gravity Formers. It's Monday, August 21. If I sound a little different, it's because I'm traveling, maybe just like you this week. It's WordCamp US week, and I've put together two great interviews for you to travel with. It's Breakdown, a Gravity Forms podcast.
Speaker 2:If you're headed to WordCamp US, don't forget to stop by the Gravity Forms booth and say hello. I'll be there with the team and many other fans of WordPress to celebrate one of the most popular word camps on the planet. Actually, both of the podcast guests today will be in attendance, which brings me to our first interview today with Jamie Ostler. Jamie works on the Gravity Flow product here at Gravity Forms. Gravity Flow streamlines your workflows.
Speaker 2:It's a powerful yet easy to use WordPress plugin that automates your repetitive processes and complex approval chains so you can work more efficiently. So what does that mean? What does it have inside the plugin? It has a visual drag and drop workflow builder. You can easily create automated workflows without coding using our Visual Editor right inside the plugin.
Speaker 2:Rules based conditional logic. You can build smarter workflows, things that happen after you process a Gravity Forms or the user submits data, and you can adapt that based on statuses, user input, timing, and other triggers. It also has robust integration capabilities, connect to popular tools like email services, Slack, Zapier, and a whole heck of a lot more. In fact, Jamie and I will be chatting about that today to share more of those opportunities around Gravity Flow, but he'll also be here in the Gravity Forms booth, so don't forget to stop by when you're at WordCamp US. Check out the automation plugin in person.
Speaker 2:Say hi to the rest of the team. Alright. Here's Jamie chatting about Gravity Flow. Hey, Jamie. Welcome to Breakdown.
Speaker 1:Hey, Matt. Nice to meet you.
Speaker 2:Gravity Flow. Let's chat about that today and let the Breakdown audience into a little bit more behind the scenes of Gravity Flow, maybe like what we're doing with it and some of the cool features we have. Sound good?
Speaker 1:Very good. Yeah. It's a it's a really interesting product that takes off from Gravity Forms and the idea of what happens after the person submits the entry. So whether they're right now might be doing something where they're submitting an email notification, they're downloading those to Excel, they're going in and editing the entries through the admin dashboard, it's really largely your admin staff have to do something with that entry. And there was a recognition that there was a need for a more structured way to approach that from a a business process or a workflow approach.
Speaker 1:So Steve had started to build this product a couple years ago, and it's now scaled up to be a really wonderful product. The core of what it offers breaks down in two ways. You have non interactive steps. So just coordinating feeds that you might have in your Gravity Forms, but really deciding what order those should go in. So if there's data that's coming back from one step and it needs to notify something else, you can kinda schedule those.
Speaker 1:Email notifications are another example of that. Webhooks are another. And then where most people tend to start seeing the value in it are the user interactive steps. So you can define either an approval step or a user input step, and it at its core, it has the idea of who's assigned and what field should they see or what fields should they be able to edit. And whether that's through the dashboard, through a separate block on the front end of your website, you can really take a large complex workflow and break it down to just show the person the information they need to see to make a decision to move the entry along in that process.
Speaker 2:So a lot of folks might look at Gravity Flow and say, boy, this kind of looks like this Zapier type functionality. It's not quite that. This is a lot of that automation or things that happen after Gravity Forms takes place has its functions within WordPress. Safe to say that this lives within WordPress, and you shouldn't really think of it as, like, the cloud connector tool that is Zapier. Do you have a good comparison for the two tools?
Speaker 1:I I do, and it Gravity Flow supports Zapier. So if a resource already has Zapier set up, you can have those triggered in your workflow. It really serves two different audiences depending on where they're at in terms of scale. If they don't have something like a a Salesforce or Zapier or a whole back end environment, then, yes, WordPress and Gravity Flow can be your entire automation environment. And so those are stored within the database, and you see the the history of what an entry does as it moves through its workflow.
Speaker 1:But if they are a large organization or they have that other environment, whether it's Zapier using outgoing webhooks to some other SaaS tools, Gravity Flow can still be the I'd like to position it as a thin pane of glass so that you're still giving the amazing presentation layer that Gravity Forms and Gravity Flow provides for your WordPress theme. But the back end, there might be things going off and doing more complex business processes and those can send APIs back into Gravity Flow to give the customer just the the information update they need or if it's an example where an HR manager or a finance manager needs to make an approval based off of data that that back end system provides, you can give them just the slice that they need. So you might have less seat licenses or zap costs because you're doing less transactions because you're moving what makes sense to be in WordPress into there and showing it to the customers in that environment.
Speaker 2:I wanna paint a very loose picture of of opportunity. Right? So part of the show is, hopefully, the freelancers and and small boutique agencies listening to this are hearing some of the stories and some of the features of Gravity Forms and Gravity Flow and from our guests, like, hey. I wanna leverage that in my in my business. Right?
Speaker 2:I wanna be able to take the feature functions of Gravity Flow and offer it to my customers, but I I need to package this up and present it. Would you say that Gravity Flow almost allows one to build, like, an app out of WordPress, not a traditional app, but, like, a web app. If a customer comes to them and says, we need to do things with these Gravity Forms submissions that come in, like, things out, assign tasks to other people, Do you think Gravity Flow is a start to something like that? Years and just years and years ago when I was running my agency, we built a whole wedding planner out of Gravity Forms. The person was, like, toggling things and saving things for a wedding magazine that was a client of ours, and we basically made, like, an app like experience out of Gravity Forms, and we were able to present that to the customer and say, hey.
Speaker 2:Look how cool this is. I mean, it's partly because WordPress is got it's a lot of the infrastructure there, but Gravity Forms allows us to save and manipulate data. Again, this is years ago. But what's your thoughts on opportunity for agencies or freelancers to leverage Gravity Flow with Gravity Forms?
Speaker 1:That that's absolutely a great use case example. I would imagine you had to write a fair bit of code to make that happen Yeah. With Yeah. Controls around fields and such. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So that idea of either agencies or businesses that are trying to build out like an MVP for a a product, it we position it a lot in the same way as of WordPress as a low code option. 80 to 90% of what you likely are coming in to look for requirements in that context, you can do with just setting up settings like you would fields in the form. You create the steps in the workflow, choose who's assigned and what fields they should see, kinda get into some of the instructions on the page or the support materials, and build a a branded experience. And then as there are things that you need to do that are slightly beyond that, Gravity Forms hooks and filters, Gravity Flow has equally strong ones, you can customize with just a little bit of PHP in there. So I would think wedding planners is a great example, nonprofits, lawyers, publishers.
Speaker 1:I mean, I could go alphabetically through and probably pick something for everything except for the letter k. That's mostly because I can't think of what an industry that starts with k is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that we have coming I'm gonna try to fuse two worlds, and you don't have to stare too far into your your crystal ball or let out any top secret stuff. But, you know, this is the podcast. We're trying to get some great content here.
Speaker 2:We have Gravity SMTP coming. I know one of the use cases for Gravity Flow is, like, creating drip campaigns or or reminder emails. I mean, you take the marketing. I know marketers ruin everything, so take the marketing thing out of it. But if you wanted to send multiple emails to staff, to an event coordinator, to an organization, my gut tells me that Gravity SMTP and Gravity Flow are gonna pair up pretty well, because now we'll help you deliver the email, and you don't have to worry about sending from your your WordPress self hosted or shared hosting site.
Speaker 2:Any cool things that you can think of that this might unlock when Gravity SMTP is in full production?
Speaker 1:The the biggest value proposition that I know for Gravity SMTP is not just that the email gets delivered, but you might have a little bit more of that traceability. For Gravity Flow customers where I think it will really show its strength is in the testing and setup phase. One of the challenges that comes with building these workflows is if I I take an example of a job applicant. They're gonna have an HR needs to do some vetting and approval. There might be the hiring manager and then a finance department.
Speaker 1:So there's four users that have four different WordPress roles that they need to see and approve different things. So when you're testing that workflow, you need to be able to either use a Chrome incognito window to log in and out and see the experience that the user has to make sure you've set things up correctly, but you also have to receive all of those emails. If you've set up PDF attachments with them, the links that are in those emails, have to make sure they have the correct tokens to allow the person to see if because it Gravity Flow does support non user based access. So if you just have a a customer's email, you can then say we've done a thing in our internal step, go here and approve to say that you're happy with the final result. So Gravity SMTP having dashboard that you can see the email history, you don't have to be logging into eight or nine different email addresses.
Speaker 1:You can just see those there and then copy the appropriate links out to do your testing with that separate user role.
Speaker 2:Expand on. This is something I'm I'm learning something here as as we go, which is not not too uncommon for me when I have these conversations, but a user can access an action without having to log in. So I'm just thinking, like, end user. I'm just thinking, like, end user base. Could this be, like, fill out like, Gravity Flow triggers a survey to be sent out.
Speaker 2:Person can take the survey, and that once they complete the survey, it's just auto like, another action can then happen after that. Depending maybe on the survey results, they could get redirected to a different page, or somebody could be notified in the organization, like, hey. Airbnb housekeeping did not do a good job. Somebody left a survey, and then it triggered an email to to go out. These are the types of things that could happen without even somebody having to log in to the WordPress website and automate it because that's what Gravity Flow does.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Cool. It really as long as your form has an email address, that email field can then be assigned steps in the workflow. And if users are familiar with creating conditional logic for fields on the form to show and hide, you can have steps that are conditional. So you can get into the idea of workflow branching based off of did the cleaning lady do the good job on that, even if it's your rating sort of a one to five scale and on one to two, you want to take a follow-up action for your staff to look in a different way, you have that support.
Speaker 1:Really, the difference between having it as a WordPress user or role versus an email field is how much of the history do you need to maintain so that that customer can go back and say, yeah, I submitted these 15 entries as I've been staying at that Airbnb over the years and be able to maybe restart those workflows or provide follow-up comments. That's where you really want to then start to say it should be tied to the WordPress user, but there's I I view Gravity Flow really as a Swiss army knife because it is a very versatile plugin that can adapt to whatever your business process needs from it.
Speaker 2:This checklist extension seems amazing, and I I'm just looking at it going, boy, I could I could build some interesting things with a checklist. And and I guess, again, looking at, like, zooming out and looking at opportunity, you said, like, Gravity Flow is is really a great sort of Swiss army knife tool. I I'd urge anyone who's listening to this who's running an agency already using Gravity Forms to check out Gravity Flow because there are some cool things that you can build for your clients. Right? And these are things that are probably pretty sticky.
Speaker 2:Right? It's not just a website where they're going Very much so. And okay. Now now I can find somebody else to build me a website. This is a tool that you could build somebody, and and they're gonna stick with you.
Speaker 2:Right? Because, well, you're the one that built it. You know how to do it. But but also, like, these extensions make it pretty portable and and pretty modular. You showed me one time a screencast for a for a friend of mine on Twitter with the webhook functionality.
Speaker 2:This seems like a real unsung hero for Gravity Flow, and it's almost like you could almost replace I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but you could to me, anyway, it felt like, wow. This webhook functionality, you could almost replace a Zapier, like, if you know what to look for in another service's API. I mean, granted, of course, everything's gonna be an edge case. But is that something that you see, like, really maturing over the next year or so? Because that is that, to me, is a really powerful thing that could replace these other services.
Speaker 2:Right now, it just might lean heavier in the more developer centric functionality.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. The way I like to look at it is that if there is an add on for Gravity Forms that provides a feed to do something with a a back end system, a Mailchimp, PayPal, or others. Those, you get an out of the box step where you don't have to do that API knowledge. At most, you need to make sure that your authentication or your API keys are there. For ones that don't exist or perhaps as you're saying that the costing doesn't make sense for that business, the outgoing webhook allows you not only to send the data to that API, but also to map some of the response values back into the form.
Speaker 1:So if you have fields that are administrative, so they're never shown on the initial form submission, you have a webhook that goes out to your custom API or a a SaaS product, you can then get data back from that response and then make subsequent decision based off it. It's a I definitely would position you as a unsung hero because when a user understands how to work with APIs themselves, this is, again, very little code or no code, and they can build a what to the front end user seems like a fully immersive app experience that everything is happening in WordPress. But behind the scenes, you might be connecting out to five or six different APIs to set up the event registrations in your booking calendar and other things like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's fantastic stuff. Jamie, Gravity Flow is pretty powerful. You're going to be at the time of this recording goes out this podcast episode goes out, you'll be at WordCamp US with us so long as maybe the electric vehicle you're driving in makes it there. Is there any demonstration that any demonstrations you'll be bringing along with you?
Speaker 2:Maybe we haven't had those internal meetings yet, but do you have any demos that you'll be bringing along to show off in the Gravity Forms booth?
Speaker 1:Yeah. There there are a couple ideas that we have both on the Gravity Forms and Gravity Flow side of things. We're hoping those are kind of a five to ten minute for people to get their feet wet and see what's possible with it. By all means, if people are listening to this and they have more in-depth questions of not only, hey. How can I do this?
Speaker 1:But kind of what are the steps that would go into making that workflow and that integrated approach? By all means, come and see me at the booth and happy to answer your questions about those.
Speaker 2:Jamie, thanks for hanging out today.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Good to chat with you, Matt.
Speaker 2:Like I said, don't forget to stop in and say hi to Jamie. Check out Gravity Flow, check out Gravity Forms, and check out the rest of the team. I think we're gonna be giving away t shirts and other prizes. Come to the Gravity Forms booth. You might also catch our next guest roaming the hallway track of WordCamp.
Speaker 2:He's the author of Professional WordPress Plugin Development and Professional WordPress Design and Development. He also co founded one of the most prominent agencies in the WordPress space, Web Dev Studios. Enjoy this conversation with me and Brad Williams as we dive into how agencies can use Gravity Forms and WordPress in the enterprise client services space. Hey, Brad. Welcome to Breakdown.
Speaker 3:Hey, Matt. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Web Dev Studios, you've written a couple books, you've done some things in WordPress, you're an agency owner, an entrepreneur, a father, a husband, a podcaster. God, this list is just forever.
Speaker 3:Wear a lot of hats, WebbyJets Studios. We are enterprise WordPress, it's what we specialize in. Big WordPress for big brands.
Speaker 2:WordPress has evolved a lot since you wrote the books, since you wrote your first few lines of code, since you serviced your first website customer. Is there one massive change, lesson, or story that you could share about the evolution of WordPress that has excited you over the last twenty years that you've seen it?
Speaker 3:Big question to start off. I mean, there's a I feel like there's a few big moments in in the history of WordPress that have big moments with releases and feature sets that have allowed it to elevate beyond just the blogging platform that it was originally and certainly allow it to elevate into the into the enterprise space. Certainly and you're right. I go I've been working with WordPress for a long time. I mean, we started founded WebDev Studios in 2008.
Speaker 3:We're in our fifteenth year now. So I think it's easy to think about WordPress as still kind of being newer, but it's it's not. Right? It just had its twentieth twentieth birthday anniversary. So it's been around the block a bit, but I remember the the WordPress three point o release was a biggie that really, I think, helped elevate it into the to be a true contender for a platform for building pretty much any type of website, and that really introduced the ability to register custom post types and allow to allow you to really set up your site to manage the content in the ways that you need to manage it more than just posts and pages.
Speaker 3:Right? Most sites have more than just that. So it allowed you to really take it if you're if you have a car dealership, you could have cars inventory, custom post type. Or if you're ecommerce, you could have your products, custom post type, things like that. So it really just kicked the door wide open in terms of flexibility and and just kind of the the direction you could take WordPress.
Speaker 3:So that was a biggie. And that again was that was probably 2010, maybe '11. So it's again, that was a long time ago. More recently, the block editor, Gutenberg is we'll probably call it forever. While initially, was a bit of a a bumpy rollout, more kinda beta, if you will, and took many, many iterations to get to where it's at today.
Speaker 3:But it's it's a really solid feature, and it really helps, especially what we see with our clients. It really helps elevate their their content game. Right? So now using the block editor in a lot of interesting ways, but allows you to make really beautiful content pages, landing pages, whatever it might be in a in a no code drag and drop method, which is really the way the web's headed and what people want, especially for their editorial teams. They shouldn't have to know HTML code.
Speaker 3:Right? They shouldn't have to switch from WYSIWYG to HTML to fix some formatting or to mess with the bullet point list or something. Right? They should just focus on the content. So I feel like the block editors really brought that into the highlight and it's gotten it's evolved a lot and turned into a really solid product.
Speaker 3:So those are two biggies I think that have really elevated WordPress in the last fifteen years.
Speaker 2:Burying the lead there, but the I think for those who are listening to this, agencies, freelancers, service folks in the web industry like looking for new opportunities. In my opinion, this WordPress 6.3, and I promise listener will get to some Gravity Forms stuff, but this WordPress 6.3 release, to me anyway, might be the most important release for WordPress in quite a while. And I'll just frame that with I I think it just it's setting the groundwork for the rest of what WordPress calls phase three of its development, of its, I guess, its current cycle of development that we're in. It's setting the groundwork for a lot of changes to how somebody uses WordPress. Quite literally, the admin interface, full site editing, and the page editor sort of fusing together in a more refined experience, fingers crossed.
Speaker 2:And then cross site collaboration or just collaboration, I I forget what they call it. But we're really setting up for WordPress to be a whole different animal in one to two years even, which is gonna happen in, like, a a little blink of an eye. How do you see WordPress evolving for, let's say, the the freelancer out there? Like, do you think it's gonna get easier or will that still be dependent on third party plugins like a Gravity Forms, like an Elementor to, like, go that last mile to make a a useful tool for freelancers and and agencies?
Speaker 3:I think the barrier to entry in terms of WordPress development has definitely gone up, but that is specific to Which is counter. Right?
Speaker 2:Which is counter to, I think, what a lot of people think where it's getting easier because of the drag and drop tools.
Speaker 3:It's weird because like the editorial side of it, the content building side of it is definitely getting easier and way more powerful. And the trade off is the code side of it is more complex, right? And takes definitely a certain level of skill. Now it's not just when I started WordPress, it was like just pure PHP, JavaScript. I mean, little bit of some jQuery stuff was just starting to get introduced.
Speaker 3:You could just dive in and start hacking away and make things happen, right? It's a little it's a different world now. But I think from a freelancer perspective, but in a kind of outside of the enterprise space, right, when you talk about what the type of projects freelancers are generally gonna gear towards, probably more small business marketing, maybe a medium medium sized business type of websites. I think ultimately it is going to get easier, but it's a it's a trade off between are you gonna be dev ing more or you're be really leaning into the full site editing block enabled themes. So as a builder, as a website creator, less code, maybe no code in some instances.
Speaker 3:And that is ultimately gonna it's going towards that point to your point of this release and and further of where that they'll be able to build more powerful sites without code than they probably currently can now today with code. So it's an interesting space we're in because it it is definitely headed that direction. And each release, it gets further along. The full site editing and block patterns or block enhanced themes are are really changing the game. And I think on the surface, I was a little bit apprehensive because when you hear full site editing, it's like, woah, woah, woah, woah, woah.
Speaker 3:Like, I don't want clients being able to change literally anything. But it doesn't mean just that. Right? Like, it's also the fact that it's making the theme block enabled. Right?
Speaker 3:So there's still some rules you can put in place, some parameters or guardrails you could put in place to kinda limit. Hey. I don't want them messing with the menu layout. Right? It's exactly the way it needs to be.
Speaker 3:But maybe they should be allowed to mess with, say, the sidebar or the footer or things like that. So the game's changing. I think it's just a matter of freelancers or whoever's actually the builders, the website builders, figuring out the tools that are gonna work best for them. And ultimately, WordPress is getting so good. You don't need a lot of third party tools to to do this.
Speaker 3:So I think I'm hoping the tech stack is is ultimately gonna get a little bit easier. Right? So you don't need a page builder sitting on top of WordPress to do some of these things.
Speaker 2:Let's downshift a little bit. Have you used Gravity Forms in the enterprise space versus, I don't know, this brochure site I built for a mom and pop shop down the street from where I work? Something like And what's the difference in that enterprise space?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, we've been fans of Gravity Forms since it was first released way back when in WordCamp Chicago, I think 2009. And I remember at the time thinking, why do we need another form plugin? Like, c form seven is great. And looking back, I'm like, man, I was so naive because like as soon as I tried Gravity Forms, was so above and beyond anything else that was out there.
Speaker 3:And really the first kind of premium plugin that I feel like really took off at least from from what I saw in the in the market. It really was the first. So we've been using Gravity Forms since day one and still to this day. I think on every I'm I'm sure on every website we built, Gravity Forms is involved because every website needs, at the very least, a contact form. Right?
Speaker 3:At the very basic, you need a a way people can contact you. But on the enterprise, it's usually taken it quite a bit further than that. Right? So you're taking not only obviously, forms, but they're you're getting more into like more sales funnels, marketing funnels, and making sure that you're tracking users through that process. And when they get to those forms, that data has got to go into a lot of different systems.
Speaker 3:Right? CRMs and maybe other databases are pushed through APIs and all the GDPR compliancy that goes along with submitting data and allowing them to submit it or get it removed. So one, I love Gravity Forms because just out of the box, you're already ahead of the game. Right? You have a very powerful form builder.
Speaker 3:But then very quickly and easily through code and even through add ons, you can you can really enhance it to do anything. I mean, I remember we worked with a nonprofit that had a kind of a weird custom system and their website was WordPress and they needed to get the data from their contact forms into this custom SQL Server database. And they were really struggling with it and they had talked to some developers and just could not figure out a solution. And we came to them and said, we have a perfect solution. It's Gravity Forms.
Speaker 3:So very easily, you can filter right into the all the data that's being submitted, grab that information, and do whatever you need to do with it. So really, with just a a few lines of code and a a custom database connection to SQL Server, We got it working for them, and they were blown away. And it's it's something that if we had a custom code, could have taken hundred, two hundred, three hundred hours. We're able to accomplish in less than a week, easy, between testing and deployment. So I think it just it gives you that such a head start that you can focus on the real uniqueness of what you're trying to do versus the core functionality of what Gravity Forms brings, is quite a bit.
Speaker 2:I wanna put myself in the shoes of an amateur business agency owner. Right? Someone who's just starting out, they struggle with the fact that, oh, I'm going to solve a solution for bigger client than I'm used to working with, and I'm gonna use this Gravity Forms thing. Can I charge them money? Like, can I charge them substantial money to do something like that?
Speaker 2:When the tool or the solution, 90% might be Gravity Forms, 10% might be some lines of code, but you and I both know that a 100% of it is the knowledge and the support of this whole thing How of getting do you wrap your head around servicing a different client when maybe you feel like, oh, boy, can I charge somebody money when I'm using a plugin to solve this? Do you have any words of advice for that that that novice image that novice agency owner out there?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, yet when people hire you for a job, right, to build a website, to do anything, they're they're hiring you because they are assuming that you have the knowledge, and hopefully, you've provided that context, but you have the knowledge to do what they're looking to get done. Right? And generally speaking, they're hiring a professional in an area that they don't specialize in. So we work with a lot of different companies.
Speaker 3:Many of them are not the teams we're working with are marketing teams or and they're not super technical from the aspect of writing code and integrations and all that. They just know the goals and what they're trying to get done. Right? So at the end the day, yeah, you're selling your expertise. Right?
Speaker 3:You're not necessarily selling the fact that I'm gonna build a custom form page for you from the ground up and charge you a hundred hours. What you sell them on is I know how to use industry proven tools that have been around for fifteen years that you can literally see on almost any WordPress website out there. So I'm bringing the the the best of the best to you as the recommendation. And then we're gonna customize it however you need it done for your project. So it's it's to that point you made of the the professional.
Speaker 3:Right? Like, you might walk in, it takes you five minutes to fix a problem, but it might have taken you ten years to get the knowledge to where you could walk in and fix that problem in five minutes. Right? So so it's really about valuing what you're selling, how you're selling it, and and the solutions that you're bringing. And then making it clear that you are gonna bring some solutions like Gravity Forms to the table because it is the industry standard, and it is a really great solution for almost any client out there.
Speaker 3:Right? Just like you would if it was ecommerce. Probably walk in the door with WooCommerce and say, is why we're going to recommend this. This is what we think we should do and then here's why. It doesn't mean you're charging them for every line of code that WooCommerce exists, but that way you can really focus on the customizations of exactly what they need versus the core functionality that's already out there and exists.
Speaker 2:Professional WordPress plugin development second edition was released in 2020, when the world was just, don't even know, upside down. I think it was upside down at that point. We have has your agent signed a new a new edition yet?
Speaker 3:Not yet. I I've been asked about that and and and also the professional WordPress design and development, which was the last the third version was even even a little bit older. One of the challenges, obviously, writing a book is in world of Gutenberg is that things are changing. And and my my business partner, Lisa Saban Wilson, writes all the WordPress for dummies. And she is currently rewriting the new edition, and she said it's almost a full blown rewrite because of how and it was and that happened a couple years ago with Gutenberg.
Speaker 3:It was also a big rewrite. But now it's like that was more about coding for Gutenberg and building custom blocks. And now it's getting further away from that where it's going or it's going back full circle back to no code. Right? So so it's like evolving, which makes it extra challenging, especially from a development standpoint because you wanna make sure, obviously, open source changes.
Speaker 3:So I don't expect the book you publish to be exactly correct ten years later. Right? But you wanna make sure at the time of publish, it's it's it's pretty damn accurate. Right? So so it is a challenge.
Speaker 3:I expect there probably will be another version down the road, but nothing in the works currently.
Speaker 2:Brad williams webdevstudios.com. If you are looking to learn more about Brad, follow him on follow him on x at williams.
Speaker 3:Is that what we say? X williams b
Speaker 2:a on Williams b a. Webdevstudios.com. Search for him on Amazon. Brad, I can't let you go without making a prediction of the Raiders this year. Are we going to the Super Bowl or?
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, because the Super Bowl's in Vegas. It doesn't mean the Raiders will be there.
Speaker 2:I think you win the Gardeners. Will be there.
Speaker 3:So that's a pretty solid prediction, I think. But, yeah, I mean, football's heck, I'm excited. I'm taking my son to his first preseason game, the Browns and Eagles, so should be fun. He's looking forward to us. It'll be
Speaker 2:exciting
Speaker 3:time. In Philly. So get those get those middle fingers ready. You gotta teach them young.
Speaker 2:Awesome stuff. Everybody follow Brad on Twitter or x. Go to webdevstudios.com. Thanks, Brad.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Matt.
Speaker 2:That's it for today's episode. If you could do one more thing for me today, share this episode on social media, your favorite Facebook group or Discord channel, spread the word about this podcast. It really helps. If you haven't added Breakdown to your favorite podcast app, point your browser to gravityforms.com/breakdown and click the icon of your app to add us and listen to us every two weeks. Okay.
Speaker 2:We'll see you in the next episode.