Drupal, Joomla!, TYPO3, and WordPress are the most popular FOSS content management systems on the web today. While all are based on the PHP programming language and distributed under the GPL open source license, each platform takes a different approach to website publishing. With strength in diversity, they form the Inter-CMS Working Group, promoting the values and benefits of free and open source software. $\"↩\"$ ︎

Gutenberg 16.5 was released this week with the biggest changes landing in the Command Palette. Users now have access to more block-related commands for block transforms and block actions, including the following:

“Together, these new commands not only enrich the command palette’s functionality but also improve the distraction-free mode by offering immediate access to basic functions,” Automattic-sponsored Gutenberg contributor Siobhan Bamber said in the release post.

Improving the discovery of these new commands may prove challenging. Contributors are exploring displaying the contextual actions as suggestions immediately after opening the command palette, to scale with the increasing index of available commands.

“Since the aim of this PR is to add so many commands, let’s not surface any suggestions yet,” Automattic-sponsored designer James Koster said. “We can explore that in a follow-up with a thought-out design which considers how to scale the display of so many commands, if necessary.”

The Command Palette design was also updated in this latest round of version 16.5. Users with a keen eye may notice a new search icon aligned to the right, a reduced width, darker icon color, and more subtle changes.

Gutenberg 16.5 adds more block supports to the Details block, Post Content block, and File block to make them more customizable with controls for colors, block spacing, and padding.

This update includes many more small enhancements and bug fixes, including improvements to the writing flow, build tooling, fluid typography, existing Command Palette commands, Snackbar component, and Global Styles. Check out the 16.5 release post for the full changelog.

WordCamp US 2023 kicked off Wednesday with the Community Summit and the Contributor Day on Thursday. The main conference days begin this morning and will be broadcast via high-definition livestreams throughout the event.

In-person attendees will have live captions on the screen in the Woodrow Wilson and Cherry Blossom tracks. The captions are also available on personal devices with livestreaming captions. Organizers have set up Woodrow Wilson StreamText and Cherry Blossom StreamText, which are also available to those watching remotely.

Livestream viewers can watch for free with no tickets required. Check the schedule for specific times. Presentations you are interested in can be starred and emailed to yourself or printed for easy access.

This year Post Status is celebrating a decade of serving WordPress professionals with its member-supported community. The site was founded by Brian Krogsgard in 2013, and now runs an active Slack community with 2,083 members, a weekly newsletter with 4,300 subscribers, and a job board.

As a testament to the community’s continued growth, Post Status announced it has added WordPress veterans Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt as equity partners who have invested cash in the business. They will also be taking on active roles in leading the Post Status community – de Valk as CTO and van de Rakt as an advisor and editorial contributor.

“Post Status has created the most important networking possibilities for us in the past and helped us grow our WordPress businesses,” van de Rakt said. “It seems only fit to contribute and to take on an active role in the Post Status community at this point.”

Post Status CEO Cory Miller said the organization will be moving forward with “the same vision and values – supporting the business of WordPress, with an emphasis on agency owners.” Co-owner Lindsey Miller will be taking on a new role as CMO.

Although maintaining the professional community remains their first priority, Post Status will be expanding with two new initiatives this year that will benefit both partners and members. The team has soft launched the new poststatus.com, featuring a new Partner Directory that showcases WordPress businesses.

“I believe a healthy growing business ecosystem inside of WordPress is absolutely key to WP continued growth and success,” Cory Miller said.

“We want to get a little more organized, professional as an industry, and that means cooperating, communicating, working together, with Post Status being that collective brand, showcasing the agencies, software and professionals of WordPress better.

“The next step is our directory. We want to say, here’s our professional industry for those looking at WordPress for their web projects.”

In addition to ramping up editorial commentary and analysis on industry trends, with the depth of expertise of new partners de Valk and van de Rakt, Post Status is in the early stages of planning an annual summit. It will be similar to WordPress’ contributor summit but for businesses and individuals who are making their way in the marketplace.

“The second step is to gather together, talk business and what are we seeing, what are the issues, challenges, and opportunities as an industry,” Miller said. “That naturally gives us focus and initiatives to cooperate on together.

“Doctors, lawyers, big businesses have these kinds of venues and platforms for conversations about the state of their industry. We need that for WordPress and Post Status is taking next steps to do so.”

These two initiatives are next on the organization’s roadmap, and with the new partnership they now have the resources to execute on them.

“Showcase the collective, that’s our directory,” Miller said. “And gather us together to have the key conversations we need about where we’re going as an industry and community. That’s our summit.”

Sponsors are what keeps the lights on at Post Status. The organization has historically been focused on driving individual membership for WordPress professionals but is shifting its focus on businesses as members now.

“We want every WP pro in Post Status, this is their home, their trade association,” Miller said. “Those who work at WP companies or with WP as part of their gig, we always want to welcome them in to PS.”

Post Status is one of the few WordPress organizations that has been operating for longer than a decade. Now that the Pressnomics event has been retired for four years, the WordPress community is sorely in need of an event where the business-focused community can connect and help each other grow WordPress’ success in the wider industry. Post Status is the organization best-suited to step into this role. To stay on top of the their efforts and plans and to support the business community, join as a member and/or subscribe to the weekly newsletter.

BuddyPress 11.3.1 is now available. This is a security and maintenance release. All BuddyPress installations should be updated as soon as possible.

This vulnerability was reported privately to the BuddyPress team, in accordance with WordPress’s security policies. Our thanks to the reporter for practicing coordinated disclosure.

BuddyPress 11.3.1 also fixes 3 bugs. For complete details, visit the 11.3.1 changelog.

If for a specific reason you can’t upgrade to 11.3.1, we have also ported the security fix to BuddyPress versions going all the way back to 5.0. Here’s the list of the available downloads for the corresponding tags, you can also find these links on our WordPress.org Plugin Directory “Advanced” page:

WordPress 6.4 will be shipping with a new default theme, expected in early November. The theme’s project leaders unveiled the designs and concept for Twenty Twenty-Four in an announcement on WordPress.org today.

For those who have complained that past default themes have been too niche or too narrowly focused in design, this theme will take the reverse approach. Contributors are attempting to build the ultimate multi-purpose theme that can be used for nearly any kind of website, highlighting the unmatched flexibility of building with blocks.

“The idea behind Twenty Twenty-Four is to make a default theme that can be used on any type of site, with any topic,” core contributorJessica Lyschik said. “Because of that, and contrary to past years, it has no single topic. Instead, three use cases were explored: one more tailored for entrepreneurs and small businesses, one tailored for photographers and artists and one specifically tailored for writers and bloggers.”

Last year’s default theme, Twenty Twenty-Three, was a stripped-back and minimal version of Twenty Twenty-Two, with a strong focus on community-submitted style variations. Like its predecessor, Twenty Twenty-Four will put the spotlight on some of the latest WordPress design features.

“Twenty Twenty-Four will be a block theme fully compatible with all the site editor tooling and it will surface new design tools like the details block or vertical text,” Lyschik said. “Another key intent for the theme is to properly present whole page patterns and template variations so that users don’t need to assemble whole pages themselves, thus easing up their site building process.”

Whole page patterns are a critical feature that all of the best block themes provide, as most people feel daunted when starting from a blank slate. If a whole page pattern is already pre-inserted on a new website install, users are light years ahead in their site building efforts.

Twenty Twenty-Four features the Cardo font for headings and a sans-serif system font for paragraph text. Cardo is an Old Style serif typeface designed by David J. Perry in 2002 for “classicists, biblical scholars, medievalists, and linguists.” It grounds the design with a bit of sophistication but should be easy to swap out with the typography management features coming in 6.4.

The initial previews of the theme don’t stray far from many of the traditional website designs you might see browsing businesses or portfolios. It leans more towards providing an invisible framework for the user’s own creations, instead of pushing a single, opinionated design. This design lets the Site Editor and design controls shine as tools that can unlock human creativity on the screen. So far it has received positive feedback on the WordPress.org announcement. Check out the post for more images/video, and information on how contribute to Twenty Twenty-Four’s development.

Organic Themes, one of the oldest WordPress theme shops, was founded in 2009 in the town of Lahaina on the island of Maui, which was ground zero for the recent devastating wildfires. Until recently, Lahaina was home to Organic Themes co-founder David Morgan, who hosted the Maui WordPress meetups for years, and co-organized WordCamp Maui in 2015.

Morgan and his co-founder Jeff Milone have been best friends since high school. In 2007, Morgan sold everything and moved to Oahu, working as a freelance designer while living out of his car after arriving.

“While living on Oahu, Jeff and I began working long-distance on freelance WordPress projects,” Morgan said. “This led to the idea of starting a theme business together, and I invited Jeff to Hawaii in 2009. While he was visiting me on Oahu, we flew to Maui and fell in love with the island. We decided to start our business there.”

Organic Themes operated out of Lahaina for ten years before Morgan eventually returned to the mainland to start his family in Sarasota, Florida. Milone still resides in Maui part-time.

“We have friends that have lost their homes,” Morgan said. “We’ve been in touch with old neighbors and friends, and it’s been beyond shocking for us to see what has happened.”

The company recently created the Kokua Lahaina website and apparel products as a way to give back to their community. The site is built on WordPress and WooCommerce and uses the STAX block theme. Organic Themes is donating all profits to the Maui Strong Fund, which provides shelter, food, financial assistance, and other services to those impacted by the wildfires.

Work on WordPress 6.4 is kicking off with a post from Editor Triage Co-Lead Anne McCarthy that highlights everything the team has planned for the release. This will be the third major release of 2023, and is unique in that it’s being led by an underrepresented gender release squad.

Although WordPress is moving into Phase 3 of the Gutenberg project, which focuses on collaboration, 6.4 will primarily extend existing features in the block and site editors.

“Initial explorations for phase 3 will continue in the Gutenberg plugin, and any early wins will be added alongside the foundational work already planned in this major release,” McCarthy said.

WordPress 6.4 is anticipated to introduce typography management features, including a Font Library and server-side @font-face CSS generation and printing. This means users will be able to browse a library of fonts in the admin, similar to how they manage media. It will not be dependent on the theme that is activated but will be a library that is extensible for plugin developers.

WordPress 6.4 will also ship with a new Twenty Twenty-Four default theme that will showcase the latest capabilities of block themes.

McCarthy emphasized that the features published in the roadmap are “being actively pursued” but may not represent what actually lands in the final release.

WordPress 6.4 is anticipated to be released on November 7, 2023, with Beta 1 expected on September 26.

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the state of the WordPress community in Australia.

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If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you, and hopefully get you all your idea featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox and use the form there.

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So on the podcast today, we have Jo Minney.

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Jo is the founder of a small business that specialises in building websites for organisations, mainly nonprofits and the tech industry. With a background in engineering, Jo decided to shift her focus to website development using WordPress. She was excited about the WordPress community and joined her local meetup, eventually becoming an organizer.

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Jo is keen for the WordPress community in Australia to grow, and has been making significant contributions to that growth.

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In this episode, Jo shares her insights on the challenges of organizing WordCamps and meetups in Australia, where the large size of the country, and small population presents some unique obstacles. If you’re used to a European or north American setting, it’s really interesting how the geography of the country presents challenges not seen elsewhere.

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We discussed the importance of paying speakers and covering their travel expenses to create equal opportunities for freelancers and small businesses, as well as to give the Australian community a stronger voice.

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We talk about her journey with WordPress, starting from her early days as a coder in a different field, and navigating the community online. Jo highlights the need for in-person opportunities to learn and connect with others. Especially in a global community where the time zone differences and online platforms can be limiting.

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We chat about the challenges faced by the Australian WordPress community from limited resources and burnout, to the struggle of attracting new organizers and attendees. Jo share some exciting success stories, such as organizing WordPress events and hosting a successful do_action event.

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We briefly get into the need for more diverse voices and the importance of fostering, a supportive and inclusive environment. If you’re interested in hearing about how the WordPress community is doing in Australia, this episode is for you.

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You can find all of the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast. Where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

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And so without further delay, I bring you Jo Minney.

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I am joined on the podcast today by Jo Minney. Hello Jo.

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[00:03:40] Jo Minney: Nice to be here.

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[00:03:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah thank you for joining me. Jo is in Western Australia which means that the collision of the time zones is pretty severe on this one. It’s the middle of the afternoon for me which means it’s very, very late in the evening for Jo. So first up Jo, thank you very much for staying the course and being with us.

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I guess my first question, as always, it’s a pretty banal one but it’s worth asking anyway. Given that we’re on a WordPress podcast, we’re going to be talking about the WordPress community in Australia in particular. Would you mind just spending a moment just telling us who you are? What your relationship is with WordPress? Perhaps a little bit about the kind of job that you have, and the role that you have and all of that good stuff.

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[00:04:22] Jo Minney: Sure I can absolutely do that. So I am a small business founder like a lot of people that work with WordPress. I run I guess what you’d call a micro business. I have a grand total of three people in my team, and we build websites for mainly organizations. We work a lot with nonprofits and also a bit with the tech industry. So my background is actually engineering, and I threw in the towel and decided I didn’t want to do engineering anymore and started building websites instead.

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So in a nutshell what I do now, and how I use WordPress. And when I first started using it I got really excited when I found out about the community that was behind it and things like meetups and WordCamps. And that was yes, this is so exciting and went and joined our local meetup and none had been running for the last year and a half. So that was a bit sad. And then I reached out to the organizer who had previously run them and was like, hey, what’s going on? And she’s like here you go. And so I became lead organizer and the rest, I guess, is as they say history.

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[00:05:27] Nathan Wrigley: Did you find the community more or less as soon as you found WordPress? Did you have a nice bit of serendipity there? Because when I discovered WordPress it was many years before I realized that there was any kind of community. I purely viewed it as a piece of freely available software. And whilst I understood that the freely available nature of it meant that there was community involvement in building the software, I had no conception there was a community of people who would be meeting up in the real world or getting into the kind of discourse that they do, in all sorts of different directions. So yeah, to paraphrase that question, did you find the community right away?

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[00:06:07] Jo Minney: I wouldn’t say right away, but fairly soon after I started using WordPress. So I had done a little bit of coding before I started using WordPress but in a very different environment, working as I said in engineering. I was really lucky that my husband, who’s also my business partner now, also works in development.

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And when I first said I want to learn how to use WordPress and I’m going to use it to create my website for my consulting business, which back then was still in engineering, he was like no you can’t use WordPress. WordPress is the devil. He’s come around since then. He’s actually speaking at WordCamp US. We do a lot of collaboration projects now. So he builds custom web applications and my team do WordPress websites. And we do a lot of merging the two together and integrating them.

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When I first started using it I felt like a lot of the time the people that I was asking were a lot more superior at using it to me, and had a lot more experience. So reaching out online was a little bit intimidating. So I actually started looking quite early on in my journey for something that was in person, because it would enable me to kind of go and learn from other people without having to actively start asking questions on online forums, where often I was the only woman there, or I didn’t know if I was the only woman there, but I kind of had assumed in that space.

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[00:07:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah thank you. So in terms of the timeline of all of this, you may have mentioned it but forgive me I didn’t pick up on it. How far back are we going in history? What year? 2015, 2016, or later than that? Did you reach out and find these events?

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[00:07:48] Jo Minney: Yeah, so I think I started using WordPress in 2017, quite recently compared to a lot of people that are in the WordPress community. And I took over the meetup as lead organizer I think in 2019. I could be wrong it could have been 2018, but it was either 2018 or 2019. So it was only a year or so into the first time that I had actually touched the platform.

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[00:08:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay so pre pandemic you discovered the real world community. So paint a picture of what it’s like in Australia. Now clearly you’re going to be able to paint that picture better describing where you live. But if you’re able to give us more information about Australia more broadly that would be excellent as well. And maybe during the course of the next few minutes we can map out how things may have changed since 2017, 2018, 2019, to where they are now.

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[00:08:42] Jo Minney: Yeah, that’s a great question. So I have a question for you in return, cause I know that you’ve been to Australia before. We talked about that earlier. Australia is pretty big. So do you want to have a stab at how big Australia is?

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[00:08:57] Nathan Wrigley: In terms of square miles, or just multiples of the UK.

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[00:09:01] Jo Minney: Either’s fine.

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[00:09:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay so I would imagine that you could fit the UK into Australia, I’m going to pluck a number out of thin air, 35 times.

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[00:09:09] Jo Minney: I actually have no idea how many times you can fit the UK into Australia but I do know that it is about the same size as the lower 48 in the US. So it’s like 7. 6 million square kilometers, versus 8 million square kilometers for the US. So they’re pretty comparable size wise.

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Do you want to have a stab at what the population of Australia is compared to the population of the US?

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[00:09:34] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so I’m going to guess Australia has 22 or 23 million people in it.

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[00:09:40] Jo Minney: It’s a little bit higher than that. It’s 26 and a half, thereabouts, million. Which is less than Texas. So think it’s really important to understand that one of the biggest challenges that we face here, and you would know this from having driven across the Nullarbor, is there’s nothing in the middle of Australia.

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We only live around the outside. So if you imagine the entire US but only having people live around the coastal cities and having the entire population of that whole continent being less than Texas.

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[00:10:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah that’s fascinating. So I guess if you’re listening to this and you’re a North American, the distance that you would have to go from east to west is comparable from say going, I don’t know, from Virginia to California. They’re on the same kind of scale but the population is significantly smaller. I guess what you’re trying to say is we’re spread out.

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[00:10:35] Jo Minney: Yeah, we really are. And I think if you’re in Europe, again, to travel the length of Australia or the width of Australia you’re traveling through multiple countries. Each of which probably has a higher population than what we do. So the challenge that we’ve got there is that our communities to start with, and I don’t just mean our WordPress communities, I mean our cities, the people that we have living here, are very small in comparison to a lot of other places in the world. So because our population is so spread out, it makes it really hard for us to hold in person events in the first place.

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So that’s a challenge that we’ve always faced here in Australia in building our community. And it’s something we were slowly starting to overcome. And we did before the pandemic have meetups happening in, I think, five different cities around Australia. And then obviously the pandemic happened and all of that stopped.

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But even before the pandemic started, in the city where I live, I mean it’s only 2 million odd people here, but we had never had a WordCamp in the whole time that WordCamps had started running.

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So if you think about someone who’s just coming into the WordPress community for the first time, and they learn about all of this stuff and then they find out actually we’ve got no meetups running. We’ve got no WordCamps running. We don’t actually have a community here. It can be really sad, and really soul crushing I guess.

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That’s kind of where I was at. So I got it in my head, I was like that’s it, I’m going to be the person that organizes the first WordCamp here in Perth. And to do that I reached out to a lot of the other organizers from around Australia, who are fantastic people. And some of them have been doing that for a really long time.

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And that’s probably the second challenge that we have which is burnout. And I know that this is not something unique to Australia. I know this happens everywhere. When you’ve got meetup organizers that are volunteers it’s not just rocking up for the time of the meetup and ordering some pizza. It’s organising speakers, it’s growing the community and actually making sure that people come along to it. There’s a lot that’s involved with it.

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And often it falls on one, maybe two, people to do that. And we really struggled to get more organizers, to get attendees, to get speakers. And when you look at that compounded with the fact that we have such a small population compared to the space we have, you can see how very quickly it becomes a challenge.

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[00:13:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I guess in Europe, as an example, the population density is extremely high. I’m guessing per square kilometre it probably is even higher than in the US. I don’t actually know if that’s true or not, but I’m imagining it is.

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The point being there’s lots of people. So the reservoir of people who may stumble into the community within a hundred miles of where I live there are likely to be a dozen, two dozen, a hundred, whatever that number may be. Whereas where you are, that number is going to be significantly lower. And so if somebody steps into the community but then gets that burnt out, or just gets fed up, or moves on, or just doesn’t wish to contribute to those events, there really isn’t that pool of people that you can dip into which would be present in North America or other parts of the world, Europe and so on.

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So if somebody moves on there’s often somebody that will take that role on again. And I know that in the recent past there have been discussions about whether or not, even in Europe and other places, the burnout and the replacement of people is more and more challenging. But I guess where you are it’s really acute.

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[00:14:13] Jo Minney: Yeah absolutely. And I think another thing that became a challenge for us is, you mentioned earlier a mutual acquaintance of ours, Cameron. And he moved to the UK. He wasn’t the only one. We actually had two of our other organising committee who we had spent the last couple of years trying to build up that community, and they also moved either interstate or international.

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So I am back to being the only organizer now for our local meetup. And we’ve now got three meetups around Australia running. So Sydney is definitely the most recovered. And a big part of that is because it’s got Will spearheading it who is phenomenal. Who mentors WordCamps and stuff like that, and has a lot of contacts. And also just because Sydney has the biggest population of any of our cities in Australia.

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Brisbane started up again. For anyone who doesn’t know Australia which is most people in the world, they’re in the the top right. So in the northeast of Australia. And our biggest WordCamp that we’ve ever had before the pandemic so it was November 2019 I think or maybe a bit earlier than that, it was in 2019 anyway. That was our biggest WordCamp we’ve ever had in Australia and that was 450 people.

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[00:15:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah that’s really interesting as a contrast, the last WordCamp London that I attended, which I think was in 2019. So that’s a subset of the events which go on in the UK. I think that event was about 600, something like that. WordCamp Europe is usually touching about 3,000. WordCamp US, although the numbers have been much smaller recently due to pandemic restrictions, you know eclipses 2,000 as well. So the magnitude, given everything that you’ve said, I guess we’re expecting the numbers to be lower.

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Were you saying 400 as the big flagship event in Australia, the Sydney one? Were you saying 400 because you thought that was a small number, or were you just saying it because that is the number?

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[00:16:11] Jo Minney: A little of both. 450 was actually in Brisbane. So I think actually a lot of the speakers at that had come from interstate, and that’s something that definitely we’ve noticed. Every WordCamp that we have in Australia people travel to it, because they’re so rare here. Even though it costs us an absolute fortune, we still have people flying to Brisbane, flying to Sydney, flying to Port Macquarie.

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And an interesting thing that I noticed was that a lot of the speakers were the same across multiple WordCamps in Australia because again, it comes down to that not having a huge population and we struggle to find speakers for our meetups. So you can imagine it’s equally hard to find speakers for WordCamps.

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So that’s a challenge there. Since post pandemic it’s become even harder. I know I’ve had the same conversation with the Brisbane organisers and the Sydney organisers. And I don’t know if this is something that other communities have experienced, but all three of us have found that our communities are essentially started from scratch again.

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So the number of people that have come back from pre pandemic communities is basically zero. So we had one person at our first meetup when we restarted that had attended a meetup before, ever. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s still a thing. And it’s something that I think has also become a challenge because it means that there aren’t people who are experienced with running events and that sort of thing. And how to put the word out, and what’s involved in organising them, and speaking with who is around to help out with that load.

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[00:17:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It’s interesting. In the UK there’s several factors which are making it more difficult to get that community engagement back up to the levels that it was pre pandemic. The first one is obviously just related to people’s desire to go out. They may have dropped out of the community. So there’s the process of, as you’ve just described, starting from scratch. So that’s one thing.

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But also the cost of ever so many aspects of life has gone much, much higher than it was prior to the pandemic. Particularly the cost of venue hire. Venue hire over here has become significantly more expensive, orders of magnitude more expensive. And so something that may have cost X 5 years ago, or 3 years ago is now possibly 3 or 4 or 5 X for the exact same building, for the exact same duration. So there’s all sorts of circumstances contriving to make it as hard as possible I think. And if you’re starting from scratch, that is even more of an obstacle.

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[00:18:48] Jo Minney: Yeah absolutely. And I am sure that London is probably about as expensive, maybe even more expensive, than Australia. So one of the things that I think is very different here, so those WordCamps that I talked about, even our biggest ones have always historically been at educational venues. So we’ve always used universities.

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And the one that we were planning locally here was at a TAFE, which is a technical institute. I don’t know what you would call that in places that are not Australia. That’s sort of always the kind of places that we’re looking at and we’re not talking about flashy hotels and things with 2000 people or conference centers. We’re talking about a university during their down times. So even trying to keep those costs really low, it was actually a real struggle for us to be able to fund. And I say us, I wasn’t actually involved in the organising committee for the last one, because I was still fairly new to the community at the time.

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But speaking to Will and some of the other previous organizers about it, A they have to wait until the end of the year to find out the availability for those venues. So it makes planning kind of a challenge. And B, one of the things that WordCamp limited us to, or really pushed for, was for us to keep the ticket prices down at 50 Australian. Which is like 30 Euro or 30 US. So trying to do that and then cover the rest of it, even using a really comparatively cheap venue like a university, was really a struggle still to meet the budget.

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And on top of that, in 2019 that was the first year that we’d had three WordCamps in Australia in the same year. So before that the most that we’d ever had was two. And I think that had only happened once. And what we found is that the organizers for those WordCamps were actually competing for funding. So the sponsors were like, oh I don’t want to fund WordCamp Sydney because we just funded WordCamp Brisbane, and it’s all the same people that are attending.

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So that’s something that has really been something that we’ve noticed, and it’s something that we’re keeping in mind when we go into the future planning WordCamps. While we know that they are historically encouraged to be very local events, that’s something that we’ve got to keep in mind. We are potentially competing against other cities for that attention where we don’t want to be. We want to be helping each other grow because there’s not enough of us to be in competition. We’ve got to be helping each other out.

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[00:21:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It speaks to coordinating at a higher level doesn’t it? The idea that, let’s say there’s three or five, that they were A spread out geographically, B spread out over time so that you weren’t trying to compete in the same month for a WordPress event. And that obviously, you’ve got to go a little bit higher up the pecking order to figure out all of that stuff.

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But from everything that you’ve said you sound fairly, I’m going to use an English colloquialism, you sound fairly chipper. Which means you sound fairly upbeat.

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[00:21:47] Jo Minney: Optimistic. Hopeful.

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[00:21:49] Nathan Wrigley: Exactly. But I want to probe into this, if you’re willing. How do you really feel about this? Because I can imagine that with all these setbacks and no shows, people coming in smaller numbers, the feeling that the community is dwindling. Do you get moments where you just think, oh this is really hardly worth my time anymore? Do you ever get those moments where you just want to throw in the towel?

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And if that is the case, I wonder if that is another problem which has to be dealt with, you know, people just getting fed up and moving on.

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[00:22:17] Jo Minney: Yeah. I won’t lie. There’s definitely been times where I’ve been like, is it really worth it? I am the only volunteer contributor that I’m aware of, other than my husband who is fairly new to it, in my entire state.

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We have one other contributor who’s full time at Automattic. So when it comes to the WordPress community everyone that I know is online. And that in itself can be really depressing. But it can also be really challenging for me to have a conversation with someone. And I do think that in person conversations are important, and you don’t communicate the same way online and over text and via Slack and things like that. Commenting on blog posts is what you do when you’re having a face to face conversation.

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And while decisions in the WordPress community aren’t made at WordCamps and meetups and things like that, conversations are started there. And those conversations help to drive future decisions. And that is really important. And it’s sad to me that Australia isn’t part of that conversation, and hasn’t been since definitely since pre Covid, but even before then we were struggling.

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So I think for me that’s one of the most disappointing things. For example, WordCamp Asia was earlier this year which was super exciting for us. There were some Australian people that attended that. There were no Australian speakers as far as I’m aware, which I don’t think is a bad thing because I think it was important for WordCamp Asia to really push for representation from Asian speakers, because that was the purpose of it. And I know if we were to ever have a WordCamp Australia in the future that we would be pushing to try and have as many local speakers as possible as well.

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But then if we look at some of the bigger flagship camps there were two speakers at WordCamp Europe that were from Australia, that I’m aware of. So I did stalk and go through every single speaker to check, because what else am I going to do with my spare time that I don’t have?

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So both of the speakers from Australia that were at WordCamp Europe were executives from companies that are very big. And I’m not going to name names. You can go find them yourself if you’re really interested, but they work for the Googles and the eBays and the News Corps.

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And, my concern is that globally the voices that are coming out of Australia are not the ones that are doing the work of rebuilding the community. They represent big interests, not most interests. And to me that’s the most concerning thing about the lack of community here in Australia.

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[00:24:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There is this phrase which sometimes gets brought out that the people that can contribute to the project, there’s sometimes a feeling that it’s those that can afford to contribute to the project. So in the scenario that you just described, if your very successful company are willing to send you, then you are now sitting at the table where potentially some of those decisions are being made.

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I realize that it’s far more complicated than that, but you have a voice because you’re able to go and prior success for the company that you work for, you know, it’s no reflection on that company. We want the companies to be successful but that’s just how it works. And it’s difficult for people, well such as yourself, to sort of feel like your voice is rising to the top and being heard, I guess.

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[00:25:34] Jo Minney: A hundred percent. And you look at the cost of flights, for example. So it’s easy enough to say we’ll just go to some of these. Get more people and fund them to go over. But flights are like 65% more expensive now than they were pre pandemic, for international flights from Australia. That’s bonkers.

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I certainly can’t afford to pay out of my own money to go over there. And even getting sponsorship, there’s nothing really in it. There is things in it for people, but it is a challenge to communicate them.

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I like stats, you might’ve noticed that already Nathan. One of my favorite stats about why I think it’s important for people to start paying attention to the WordPress community in Australia? So we have the 14th largest market for eCommerce in the world. Which is cool sure. Do you know how much of the web or how much eCommerce on the web is powered by WooCommerce overall globally?

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[00:26:30] Nathan Wrigley: Oh no. I know it’s a significant amount, but don’t know exact number. Yeah I realize it’s very high.

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[00:26:37] Jo Minney: Yeah like everyone knows the WordPress number, right? But nobody knows the WooCommerce number. I like this because I feel like it’s a better, accurate representation of websites that are being used. Whereas the WordPress number still takes into account a lot of sort of dormant sites and that sort of thing. So with WooCommerce it powers about 24% of eCommerce sites on the web globally.

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In Australia however, it’s less than 15%, and Shopify leads with over 20%. So what that tells me, and this is obviously just my interpretation of that data, but it tells me that in Australia we don’t have the same recognition and understanding of WordPress and WordPress tools as what there is globally.

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And that’s an opportunity for people who are earning lots of money from WordPress. For the Automattic’s and the Yoasts and these other big companies that have combined collectively an economy that’s like bigger than Tesla. It tells me that there is value in them paying more attention to Australia and helping us to rebuild the community because I don’t think that we can continue to do it the way that we’re trying at the moment.

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[00:27:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah that’s really interesting. That was a really interestingly presented fact because makes it, well it lays bare the opportunity that is maybe being left. The old adage of money being left on the table it kind of fits under that umbrella, doesn’t it?

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It sounds like you are A, you’re very committed to the community. I guess you wouldn’t be on a podcast like this if you weren’t. But B, you’ve identified that there’s a problem. So C, I guess, is what do we do about the problem? Do you have any endeavors? Do you have any thoughts? Do you have any intuitions as to how these challenges might be overcome? How you might reinvigorate the community?

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[00:28:24] Jo Minney: Yeah look I think a lot of people who are much smarter and more engaged and well versed in the WordPress community than me have already suggested a lot of the things that I look at and go that would really help us. Even though we’re not specifically the target audience for those things that are being championed.

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And one of those big ones is, and I know it’s probably a drum that’s been beaten to death, but paying speakers or at least covering their travel. Because as I said, I think a lot of those conversations happen at WordCamps. And even if you’re not paying people to attend them or that sort of thing, by paying speakers you’re giving the same opportunities to the freelancers and those small businesses as you are to those companies that are working for Google and eBay.

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So I think that’s one thing that would go a long way towards evening the playing field, and allowing the Australian community to have a little bit more of a voice. And I know that there’s a huge amount of work that’s being done to push for that in the WordPress community by loads of different, amazing people.

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And there are sponsorship options and stuff out there for people who are underrepresented in tech. But you know they have their challenges. I think that would go a long way towards helping.

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[00:29:39] Nathan Wrigley: I just want to just interject there again and inject the geographical piece again. Because it’s so easy to forget that for where I live, really I can hop into a car and I can be at a local event within an hour, less. You know and typically more or less everybody in the UK could probably drive in one of the directions of the compass and find an event fairly quickly. May not be all that frequent, but at some point during the calendar year, it really is different isn’t it where you are? You know you may just drive off in the same compass direction as I do but you end up in the middle of the desert.

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[00:30:13] Jo Minney: Or the ocean depending on which way you go.

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[00:30:15] Nathan Wrigley: So there really aren’t those opportunities and the fact that you have to travel further, as you’ve described, the cost of airline transportation has gone through the roof. So it may be that you simply are nowhere near something. And so just having a little bit of an offset for the cost, the remuneration as you’ve said for speaking. Simply that may be enough to propel some people to have a different opinion of it, and to make the effort to go.

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[00:30:40] Jo Minney: And I think the same thing goes, and it’s a similar argument, but for the volunteers who are organising. Maybe not all WordCamps but certainly flagship ones. When I was talking to Will about his experience with organising WordCamp Sydney back in 2019, he actually logged his hours for it and he logged 1,200 hours of volunteer work.

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[00:31:03] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.

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[00:31:03] Jo Minney: And I spoke to one of the organizers, not even the lead organizer, just one of the organizers for WordCamp Europe, on a call for the training team last week. We have like a coffee hour every Friday. Only for me it’s wine hour because I have a 12 hour difference from everyone else. And he was saying that doesn’t surprise him at all. And he definitely feels like he logged at least that much as a volunteer for WordCamp Europe.

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So I think there’s something to be said at least for flagship WordCamps and for that sort of core organising committee who are essentially taking on a second full time job to give them some kind of reason to keep doing that. Otherwise we are just going to keep losing volunteers to people that want to pay them.

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[00:31:47] Nathan Wrigley: It’s interesting as well because, suddenly into my head I’m thinking, I wonder if there just needs to be a different approach based upon different parts of the world. This is probably going to sound controversial. If anybody’s listening to this I’m just throwing it out there. Given what you’ve described in Australia, I do wonder if the Australian WordPress community needs a different set of parameters applied for a period of time.

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Because there are different constraints, there are different problems, than say you might have in Europe. And it might be that one size doesn’t fit all, and those considerations could be different for Australia. They could be different for, well pick any part of the world, any country. They might to be judged differently. I don’t know if that would ever happen, but it’s certainly an interesting idea.

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[00:32:35] Jo Minney: Yeah a hundred percent. And if you’ve got Matt’s ear, when we do manage to have our first WordCamp again after the pandemic, we’d love for him to come visit. Maybe that will help get some more people there. So we do want to make it a primarily Australian event with as many Australian speakers as we can get. But I think having the support and the ear of the global WordPress community would be important.

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[00:32:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay so you’ve given us one possible way of reinvigorating things. The idea of financial help for, for example, speakers. If there’s any other ideas you want to just float, go for it.

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[00:33:09] Jo Minney: Yeah. So I think something that for me is really hopeful and something that I think is amazing, and I’m really excited about seeing it happen in the near future. And I’m not sure how much of this I am meant to be talking about but I’m going to anyway. And that is the idea that we’re going to have sort of a contributor tab in the latest WordPress release. Sort of about page.

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And a little bit more information about that because something that has really been a challenge is that, because again, as you said, you don’t just bump into other contributors here, you have to actually seek that out. And a lot of people don’t realize that that is something that they can do. That you don’t need to be able to code to be a contributor.

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And I think that the two things go hand in hand. So by contributing to something you’re feeling like you’re part of the community and you feel like you’re not just giving back to it, but also receiving from it, because you get to be a part of that conversation and the direction of where everything is going.

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And if we can broaden the people who know about that and make sure that they’re informed. So your average WordPress user or developer has that information sort of plonked in front of them with, hey, did you know that these are a whole bunch of things that you can do that don’t require you to be an absolute guru at PHP?

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Then I think that that’s something that’s going to be really exciting, and hopefully attract more people who historically haven’t been involved in that community.

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[00:34:36] Nathan Wrigley: Great. Any other suggestions or we can move on?

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[00:34:39] Jo Minney: I think they’re the main ones for me. Just trying to increase the representation in any way that we can. I like the idea of the new WordCamps but I’m not sure that anything has really come up that is the new format for WordCamps. I’m not sure that anything has really come up that has sounded like it’s going to be a super fit for us. So if anyone’s got ideas we’d love to hear them.

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[00:34:59] Nathan Wrigley: Can we just dwell on that for a minute? So I spoke to Angela Jin who is the Automattician who, broadly speaking, she steers in many ways the different bits and pieces. And one of the things that we talked about on a recent podcast episode was about this new idea of WordCamp’s having a different flavor. Perhaps more localized, perhaps localized around a specific theme.

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So it may be that there would be an SEO one. Or there might be something about blocks. The idea being though that rather than having an event in which everything goes, you would lock it down a little bit and encourage people to attend if they are into that particular niche, if you like. So having looked at those proposals, none of that’s jumped out. That’s curious.

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[00:35:46] Jo Minney: I think one of the reasons on that for me is that there still seems like there’s going to be, maybe not 1,200 hours worth of volunteer work, but a significant amount of volunteer work to make it happen. And we’re struggling to get 20 people at a meetup. So I personally don’t have the time to put in even 400 hours of volunteer work, or even 50 hours of volunteer work to have eight people show up to an event, and be the only person who is organising and running it.

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[00:36:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah that does make sense. Obviously you are operating in a completely different system. I think the endeavor of these new WordCamps is to try and shake it up, because I think although the Australian example that you’ve just described seems to be more severe, I think the feeling has been that over the whole of the international community the numbers have perhaps dwindled a little bit and there are challenges in getting people to come back.

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And so trying new things out, the hope would be that some of it sticks and some good ideas would rise to the surface. But I do like the fact that you’re open to new ideas. And it may be that somebody in the next year puts on an event which isn’t an absolute runaway success. And it’s just quirky in some way that people like, and you may be able to borrow that example.

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[00:37:06] Jo Minney: Yeah absolutely. I think two things that I would love to see happen more of in the community in general is local contributor days. So that’s something that we’ve tossed around and we’re fortunate we do have one full time Automattician that lives in my state.

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So he works on Gutenberg, and while he doesn’t super love public speaking he does get up and do it anyway because he knows that there’s not really anyone else with the same level of experience and expertise as what he’s got. So super grateful for that. Tell Dan thank you. But I think having a contributor day locally would be a great way of driving more sort of enthusiasm around the community.

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But to do that we need to have enough people that can help run it. And I’ve never even been to a contributor day myself, so that’s not something that I really feel comfortable running. And hopefully that will change after WordCamp US. So I will be going to my first contributor day. I’m super excited about that. So that’s something that we’re hoping to do.

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And another thing that we actually did in 2020 right before the pandemic hit, that I would encourage any other struggling communities to consider as a way to, I guess reinvigorate, but also bring the community closer together. And again, it’s a huge amount of work, but it is so rewarding. And that’s the do_action events. So I’m not sure if you’ve heard of these before Nathan.

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So we ran a do_action event back in January of 2020, and it was so fun. So much chaos. We built eight charities websites, theoretically in a day. I ended up finishing off most of them over the following six months. But just for the rewarding experience of bringing that community together and seeing a hundred volunteers in a room, trying to use WordPress to help these charities was phenomenal. And I think it’s probably, when I look at what’s happening and I’m like, oh, is it really worth it? I think back to that. And that’s the thing that keeps me going.

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[00:39:08] Nathan Wrigley: During the last few years, has the community, I know that the real world events have been on hold, but have you got a thriving online event set up? Are there things that are going on in these cities which are online and regular and what have you? Or is it really just that even the online stuff has gone away as well?

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[00:39:30] Jo Minney: Will did run some online stuff. There’s a two and a half hour difference between Sydney and Perth, so our community didn’t attend a lot of that stuff, but I know that he did have some good attendance for a while. I think post pandemic, a lot of people got burned out with Zoom. They just didn’t want to Zoom all the time. And I get that, a hundred percent get that. I’m on video calls pretty much all day, every day with my clients. And I think it’s great that this technology opens up so many doors, but I can also understand that it can be exhausting.

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In terms of things like Slack, we have really struggled to get our local community to use Slack. We actually have a WP Australia workspace, so that has started to bounce back. But it was essentially dead for a couple of years. And there was basically no conversations happening on there.

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Locally, what I’ve found, we tried a bunch of different platforms. People don’t go to Meetup. We struggle even to get people that come to our meetups to use Meetup. So, the one that we’ve had the most success with, which is, sucks for me because I don’t use it, is Facebook. So we’ve actually got a local community group on Facebook, and I log in like once or twice a week to check for comments on there, and that’s the only time I use Facebook, so if that’s where people are, then that’s where I’ll go to try and get them along. But yeah, online not great either, so.

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[00:40:58] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I think probably we’re just approaching the amount of time that we’ve got. So I will just ask that if anybody is listening to this who feels that they could help, obviously if you’re in Australia, that would be, I guess, an added bonus. But you know, even if not, if there’s some way that you feel that you could help. Jo, where would we contact you? Is there an email address or a social handle that you use?

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[00:41:24] Jo Minney: I’m Jo Minney on most socials. I am recently on Mastodon, because I got mad at it being rebranded on the bird, that’s no longer a bird. And if people want to email me all of my stuff, all of my contact details are on my website. So jominney.com is my personal blog, and always happy to have a chat.

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[00:41:45] Nathan Wrigley: Jo Minney, I really appreciate you chatting to me today about the state of the WordPress community in Australia. Thank you so much.

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[00:41:52] Jo Minney: Thanks Nathan. It’s been very fun.

Jo is the founder of a small business that specialises in building websites for organisations, mainly nonprofits and the tech industry. With a background in engineering, Jo decided to shift her focus to website development using WordPress. She was excited about the WordPress community, and joined her local meetup, eventually becoming an organiser. Jo is keen for the WordPress community in Australia to grow, and has been making significant contributions to that growth.

In this episode, Jo shares her insights on the challenges of organising WordCamps and meetups in Australia, where the large size of the country and small population present some unique obstacles. If you’re used to a European or North American setting, it’s really interesting how the geography of the country presents challenges not seen elsewhere.

We discuss the importance of paying speakers and covering their travel expenses to create equal opportunities for freelancers and small businesses, as well as to give the Australian community a stronger voice.

We talk about her journey with WordPress, starting from her early days as a coder in a different field, and navigating the community online. Jo highlights the need for in-person opportunities to learn and connect with others, especially in a global community where time zone differences and online platforms can be limiting.

We chat about the challenges faced by the Australian WordPress community, from limited resources and burnout, to the struggle of attracting new organisers and attendees. Jo shares some exciting success stories, such as organising WordPress events and hosting a successful do_action event.

We briefly get into the need for more diverse voices, and the importance of fostering a supportive and inclusive environment

If you’re interested in hearing about how the WordPress community is doing in Australia, this episode is for you.

Useful links.

Pre Emma

My parents are both into tech. My dad – a Computer Engineer, and my mum – a Semiconductor Engineer, met in the ’80s in Silicon Valley. The romance that started between them eventually led to me, a techy kid who loved doodling on the walls just as much as building computers with her dad.

Kid Emma

I can remember Y2K, the Covid of its time in the tech world. My dad and his colleagues were at all the server rooms “just in case”, and we celebrated at a Korean Baptist Church “just in case.”

I remember the first AOL trial CD – with 30 whole minutes of “FREE” internet, my first IM (instant messenger) username (snugglebunny – I know, I know), free calls after 9 pm, and putting the phone to your ear only to hear a blasting of eeee-oahhh–eeee–uuuuu that told you the internet was on.

I also remember when our one family computer turned into three personal ones—no more having to wait your turn. Technology was changing.

By the time I was in university, we all had the internet in our pockets. I had a laptop that was way too heavy for its size, BUT my dad’s work computer screen still looked like the matrix.

Uni Emma

My first WordPress interaction happened when I was in university studying Marketing and Strategic Communications. I started a blog about working as a barista for Starbucks. I was learning HTML5/CSS (yeah, way back then), practicing the basics of the technical side but also enjoying the creativity of designing what my “readers” would see, such as fonts, colors, and layout. I was really putting my newfound knowledge to the test.

The days were filled with tweaking code, and the nights were filled with stories. Stories of customers, fellow baristas, and observations watched from afar. The regulars, the missed connections, the extraordinary amount of times someone missed the toilet when they were trying to poo. But that didn’t last long; I got my degree, and life went forward, but my blog stayed behind.

Twenties Emma

The next time WP made an appearance in my journey was when I started a blog about being a teacher in South Korea. Stories of coffee as the common denominator turned into the tall tales of a not-so-Korean Korean living in a world that she didn’t know much about. The students and teaching were one thing; the community of expats was quite another. Spending time with such a varied group of weirdos was how I realized there is more to life than a 9 to 5. We shared our stories about how we each got there.

With each closed door, another opens, and sometimes more doors than you can imagine. My blog didn’t last long. But the way of life (traveling and meeting interesting strangers) has lasted till now.

Present Emma

I decided to return to school for Computer Engineering and Cyber Security, so I moved to Lithuania. The goal was to get another degree and a visa to the EU, but instead, I found Hostinger, the perfect sweet spot for tech + marketing. Fast forward through COVID, through my graduation, and re-enter WordPress. I didn’t actually think “work” could get much better until the WP Community was introduced into my life.

I’m talking about waking up excited to see what work throws at you, what fires you can put out, what changes you can implement. What can you do today that can make it better than yesterday? That’s when work doesn’t feel like work. That’s when you know you’ve got it good.

I joined the WP Slack community, where I was amazed by the number of people, the friendliness, and the amount of information. I had major FOMO for not having had this as a constant in my life until now.

Enter a new team: Documentation. Now they had their priorities straight. Documentation, words, content, and CONSISTENCY– who knew there was a world of Emma’s out there? Not to mention, it was a collective group of people who were there because they wanted to be there, not because they were told. We all had a common goal. Content may be King, but Consistency is Queen.

Then came WordCamp Asia 2023. Hellooo, Korean baby Jesus! It was like being thrown into a sea of open doors. Everyone was kind, welcoming, intelligent, silly, happy, joyful… insert 1000 more adjectives here. AND the best part is, everyone is a WordPress nerd and loves to just talk about WP. Was I in WP heaven?

Since then, even more doors have opened. I volunteered as an MC. I wanted to see if I could make these stage fright butterflies into something more. I’ve spoken at events and presented at work, but WordCamp was a whole other level. The acceptance, the kudos, and the ease of knowing that everyone was rooting for me to succeed was a breath of fresh air. I took these teachings, experiences, and skils back to Hostinger and it changed the way I led my team and looked at projects, issues, etc.

So here we are. Volunteering for my 3rd flagship, looking back at my life full of twists and turns with WordPress as my mile markers. I didn’t always realize that it has been a constant in my life. It taught me to write, it taught me to code, it taught me to express myself. It taught me that everyone has a place in WP and all are welcome.

Bonus:

While revisiting my WordPress journey, I stumbled upon an old post; even though I had to make a few updates to it, it’s a nice TL;DR.

Poet Emma

There once was a girl
Who had more than a skip-and-hop in her step
Dancing along a string of lights

One day she noticed – in the sea of her peers
To the left were wide eyes and skin as pure as snow
To the right was darker skin and hair long, silky, with flow

Her eyes were not as blue as the 7 seas and crystal waters
Her eyes were not brown tree rings filled with stories passed down and reincarnated
Her eyes told a different story
From her white ancestors– a victory ring protecting what was to come
With a starburst of wildflowers shining through the heart
With speckles of green, and blue, and brown
She had a little bit of everyone
But it didn’t turn her frown upside down

Some of her friends turned red like a tomato
Under the hot desert sun
While others began to glow a beautiful brown
But hid in the shadows till it was gone
Her skin did a combo
Not red nor brown,
Olivey yellow
And added a milky way of stars dusted across her nose

Her friends packed brown paper bags and Superman lunch boxes
Filled with tortillas or crustless sandwiches
Hers had rice, kim, and a yogortut
No one wanted to trade

Straight A’s were a must!
If not, you were grounded
She thought this was the same for all the kids
But she was wrong

Fast forward 20 years
Her eyes have seen the world
Dipped her toes in the 5000 islands
Scaled waterfalls after riding her bike up a mountain
Jumped from a plane over sand, water, and snow
Tickled her taste buds from bugs to Van Gogh

Her eyes have not changed
But other have
She no longer is the girl who gets the question, why are her eyes like that?
But she is now the girl who gets the question, how do I get eyes like that?

She no longer longs for her freckles to be gone
But now appreciates them as they come, and miss them when they’re gone
She no longer wonders why studying was an important loop
But now she is always ahead and has a stronger work ethic

She still wonders
She still looks with her eyes
The same eyes that were once filled with confusion and doubt
But now her eyes embrace it
And are ready for the next route

One of the cooler things the WordPress community started doing in 2006 was putting on these events we called WordCamps. A big one is about to kick off in National Harbor, Maryland (which is basically Washington DC, but we’re calling it National Harbor for some reason).

You might be wondering where the name came from: Tim O’Reilly, of the O’Reilly books that so many of us learned from, hosted a hacker event called Foo Camp but it had limited capacity, and was therefore something of an exclusive invite (one time I eventually went I slept in a sleeping bag in an office). Tantek Çelik had been invited the year before, but not in 2005, and I had never been invited, so a group of us put together a more “open source” event in response called BarCamp. (The name was an allusion to the foo/bar concept in teaching programming, and the picture on that Wikipedia page was in the living room of my first apartment in San Francisco, as you can tell by the stand-up piano and Thelonious Monk poster.)

Foo had the idea of a conference created on-the-fly by its organizers, and also had a radical event where there wasn’t even lodging but all that mattered was getting people together. Bar took that format and opened up the invite list, and did it quickly with just a few weeks of planning. They also open sourced the format so BarCamps could be hosted anywhere in the world, and many were. The following year I riffed on that and made the first WordCamp in San Francisco, at the Swedish American Music Hall, the same place Stewart Brand hosted the first hackers conference in the 70s. (We didn’t know that at the time, it was just a coincidence.)

WordCamp took the everyone-is-welcome from Bar, mixed it with the attendees-create-the-conference from Foo, added a little more structure and planning so we ended up with these really groovy community-organized events all over the world where people come together to learn, contribute, get to know each other, and have fun. WordCamp San Francisco evolved into WordCamp US, our flagpole event for North America. (I like that US can mean “us” as well as United States.) There have been hundreds of WordCamps around the world, and when we were getting started I used to go to all of them; if someone put one together I’d cram into an economy seat and fly there. I can’t make it to all of them anymore, but I still go as many as I can, and they’re some of my favorite days of the entire year.

It’s so cool to see a group of people from the eclectic backgrounds come together because we love making the thing that allows people to make the thing. (WordPress.) You’ll see CEOs of multi-hundred million ARR companies brushing shoulders with techno-anarchists, all brought together by a common hope and belief in the four freedoms of open source and the mission of WordPress—to democratize publishing, put the best tools in the world in the hands of everyone, for free and for freedom.

This year’s WordCamp US is exciting to me for a bunch of reasons. One, I love spending time with other contributors to open source. Second, WordCamp organizers iterate and learn, and so every year I’m excited to see what’s being trialed and what’s improved, because they just keep getting better and better. Third, we’re doing a community summit beforehand for the first time in a while, which is why I’m already in Maryland. Finally, on the amazing schedule are two speakers I’ve invited to bring something new to our milieu.

Ken Liu is one of my favorite sci-fi writers and will be giving an amazing talk weaving together the history of narrative craft and modern publishing and technology. I’ve read almost everything he’s written or translated, and seen him talk once before, and couldn’t be more curious to hear what he’s bringing to the WordPress community.

Simon Willison is an engineer and blogger I’ve followed since the earliest days of WordPress, and recently he’s been one of the most interesting explorers in the new world of AI and LLMs. He’ll be sharing with us how to tap into this new alien intelligence, how it can accelerate our coding, security, and mission to democratize publishing.

So if you ever have a chance to go to a WordCamp, take it! It may be too late for this one, but you can follow the livestream (visit the site once the conference starts), and plan for next year. We also make sure all the talks accessible on WordPress.tv later.

Foo Camps still happen, by the way, and have branched into science and such, and who gets invited is a whole deal. They’re still awesome.

I hope what people see here is that creativity and doing generates more creativity and doing.

WordPressCS 3.0.0 was released this week with what its maintainer, Juliette Reinders Folmer, says are significant changes to improve the accuracy, performance, stability, and maintainability of all sniffs, and its handling of modern PHP. The project is a collection of PHP_CodeSniffer rules (sniffs) that are used to validate code developed for WordPress, helping developers meet the requirements of the official WordPress Coding Standards.

This update adds many of the non-controversial rules proposed in March 2020 to the Coding standards guidelines but leaves those that generated more discussion or objections for a future release. Many of the new rules are now available as sniffs in WordPressCS.

Version 3.0.0 includes important architecture changes. Most notably, Composer is now the only supported way to install WordPressCS, as this update includes four run-time dependencies. The release contains breaking changes for those using ignore annotations and those who maintain custom rulesets or have created a custom PHPCS standard based on the project. A detailed upgrade guide is available for these various scenarios.

WordPressCS is largely maintained by Folmer and a small group of volunteers, but the future of the project is in jeopardy if they cannot get funding. Folmer said it is currently in a good place with this release but this will not last long with the pace at which PHP is moving.

“WordPressCS 3.0.0 has cost thousands of hours of work and the vast majority of work has been done by one, mostly unpaid, contributor, with code review support from two fellow maintainers,” she said.

“Unless funding is found to continue maintaining WordPressCS and its dependencies, the future is bleak and maintenance will be halted.”

Folmer is calling on corporation and agency users of WordPressCS to find a way to fund the project’s continued maintenance and development. She elaborated on the dire need to have more contributors involved:

WordPressCS has become one of the most highly used open source tools in the WordPress ecosystem that is now in a vulnerable place with so few contributors. Although many developers commented on the release, thanking Folmer for her efforts, no contributors or corporations have publicly stepped forward to support the project’s continued develpment.

“With over 15 million installations on Packagist and a 400% increase in monthly installation in the past three years alone, WPCS’s popularity is surging and shows no sign of stopping,” Lucas Bustamante, a backend developer specialized in automated tests, commented on the post. “The situation is alarming as WPCS is a foundational tool that flags not only code style issues but also critical security issues, making WordPress a more secure CMS. Letting WPCS fall into limbo poses a risk to the entire WordPress ecosystem.”

We chat about the Page Builder Summit, how it started, what it takes to run the summit and what you can expect in September.

WordPress Playground, an experimental project that uses WebAssembly (WASM) to run WordPress in the browser, makes it possible for users to quickly test plugins and themes without having to set up a local development environment.

Ordinarily, testing a plugin or theme with Playground requires visiting playground.wordpress.net, which will instantly create a real WordPress instance with admin access without having to install PHP, MySQL, or Apache. It runs inside the browser using a SQLite database. Adding a plugin or theme to the instance is as easy as appending the slug to the URL when creating the test site:

A new Chrome browser extension, created by LUBUS, a development agency, makes this even easier by adding a “Playground” button to theme and plugin pages on WordPress.org. Users can fire up a sandbox instance to test drive a theme or plugin in just one click.

I tested the extension and it works as advertised. It’s a neat little shortcut for launching a Playground instance without having to remember the URL or get the plugin/theme’s slug to append to it. The video below shows a site created with a selected plugin installed in under 20 seconds.

“We have been using Playground internally a lot for testing out plugins, and quick demos for internal or client meetings,” LUBUS founder Ajit Bohra said. “We often find a plugin or theme which we would like to test drive. It involves copying the slug of the theme or plugin and using them in the URL. To make this quick we thought of building and quick browser extension to add a button on wordpress.org to quickly launch a plugin or theme in the Playground.”

Bohra posted his process of creating the extension in a thread on X. He used the Plasmo framework, which offers a dedicated runtime for building browser extensions, taking the project from idea to built in approximately 30 minutes.

Bohra said the browser extension is currently a proof of concept that he would like to further extend with more settings based on feedback from users. He also hopes to collaborate with the Meta team in the future to see something like this added to the plugin and theme pages on WordPress.org so that users don’t have to rely on a browser extension.

Better late than never. Been thinking and talking about WordCamp US for the past few months, so yes, I will be there.

This Week at WordPress.org (August 7, 2023)

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In this podcast episode, Cory Miller introduces his professional coach, Kelly Gallagher, to discuss the role of coaching in personal and professional growth. They explore the difference between coaching and therapy and how they can complement each other. They highlight the value of coaching for high achievers and how it can help with career changes, improving performance, and enhancing communication skills. Cory shares his personal experience with coaching and expresses its positive impact on his life.

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Transcript

Cory Miller (00:00:00) – Hey everybody. Welcome back to Post Status Draft. I’ve got a special guest today and I’m excited because I’ve worked with this awesome person professional for I think it’s been five years now. Four years? No, probably four and a half years now, Kelly. And. So back when I had just sold items, I was working the, you know, my job at trying to transition team, get some things done in the year after we had sold and I was starting to percolate. Okay, I’ve got this huge career change coming up, this huge business, whatever change in my professional life. And I sought out a coach and found Kelly Gallagher. So she’s my professional coach for four and a half years. We’re going to have a great conversation talking about coaching times when it’s so helpful to have a coach. And I’ll share personal experiences, too, but you’re in for a treat today. So Kelly, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Kelly Gallagher (00:01:02) – Thank you for having me. I’ve been watching some of your podcasts, and I’m just honored to be the subject of one of them.

Cory Miller (00:01:09) – I often refer to Kelly as my secret weapon because a lot of the big things that have happened in the last five years, for sure in my life I’ve rehearsed, practiced, talked through all of these with Kelly. So, Kelly, tell us a little bit about your background.

Kelly Gallagher (00:01:25) – Um, Cory, I came from a business development specialty within corporate America, specifically pharmaceuticals and the medical industry, and also diagnostics and lab testing. So I was a road warrior. I was out closing deals and my responsibilities escalated and escalated to the point where. Um, the last ten years, I was with a diagnostic lab, and I was also training other salespeople. I was interviewing them, hiring them and then coaching them. But I didn’t know I was coaching because I wasn’t sure even what coaching was. I wanted to take over the training department. So I was told, Well, you have no experience, even though I was already doing it. So I challenged and said I would like to go back and get my masters.

Kelly Gallagher (00:02:16) – And I entered the coaching program, which is a just gold standard industry. I don’t know. It turned out to be one of the best. And so I entered that. And then while I was doing it, I thought, why not just get a master’s in business administration? Because I already know these things. So I went to school for five years and it was the best five years of my life. Um, I learned that I love to learn, and I think that may be what separates good coaches from great coaches. Is that. Constant wanting to move the bar up, that constant going to class mentality to be at another level. And that’s what’s really defined my career. There’s not really a time of the year when I’m not in continuing education and it’s my passion. I just want to be a master of my craft. So that was my journey. The interesting sidebar is I was told you can do all this, but if your sales performance drops, we’re done. We’re not paying. I said, okay.

Kelly Gallagher (00:03:29) – But the more I studied coaching and communications, the higher myself through. And there’s actually a correlation between the two. It doesn’t seem like there would be, but I learned how to really listen. I was a good listener to begin with, but I became just a great listener and observer of behavior. And I also learned how to challenge people. So if a buyer told me, yes, yes, I’m definitely going to get the contract signed. And I sensed a hesitancy, I would call them out and go, you know, you’re sending one thing, but I’m hearing something else. It sounds like you’re still uneasy. And a lot of times by doing that, I could tease out that they weren’t going to buy it and we can have further discussion. So the coaching actually when I finished up. My sales career. It was as far as I could take it, but I owe it all to the coaching training.

Cory Miller (00:04:32) – That’s awesome. Now, I know you have ICF credentials and all that and you can share a little bit about what ICF is, but so I know you are very involved there.

Cory Miller (00:04:45) – Have done there’s so many regular like you said, I do a lot of work with mental health practitioners and there’s such a very, I would say regulated, but no like very intense and purposeful way to do therapy. A lot of guidelines, a lot of regulations, a lot of licensure things, ethical consideration, continuing. Ed But coaching has so much of that too. And that’s where ICF comes into yes.

Kelly Gallagher (00:05:12) – And unfortunately, there’s not a specific license. I wish there was, but because there isn’t, the consumer has to really be discerning. And one way to start is that ICF because it’s the gold standard and for coach is not doing continuing education and involved with ICF. I don’t know. Chances are there will be less rigor to what they’re going to be able to do. It’s not that they wouldn’t be good coaches.

Cory Miller (00:05:40) – Yeah, I think the ICF stuff is strong. Sometimes I feel like it’s a little bit too limiting, but I go, Gosh, it’s so good because it’s trying to really professionalize the coaching industry where anybody can just say, Oh, I’m my coach, I’m a life coach, whatever it is.

Kelly Gallagher (00:05:57) – People just hang out a shingle and say, Boom, magic, I’m a coach. I two think it can be limiting, but I offer a bit of a hybrid because I have so much business experience. I’ll often tell my clients, Hey, I’m going to shift out of coaching if you want. Is it okay if I put on my business act and they almost never had anyone say no in interviews? And so then I’m able to interject a little, you know what this happened to blah, blah, blah. And I think that’s what differentiates me from other coaches. But the ICF standards are just critical. And the other thing about the ICF is you have to have 250 hours of continuing education to keep getting the licensure. That’s not a license to keep, you know, being indoors. And so that really raises the bar and enables the coach to really grow because you’re constantly taking a course. Yeah.

Cory Miller (00:07:02) – So super, super strong. By the way, if you’re listening, you want to look if the coach has ICF certifications and all that, that’s really important, rigorous, rigorous work that they do to keep that up means to me it goes through taking it very seriously their profession.

Cory Miller (00:07:19) – So Kelly, what is a coach? We’re going to spend some time talking about the times in which coach has been so, so valuable to your clients, to me, and we’re going to share experiences around that. But first, I kind of want to get a baseline of like, what is a coach?

Kelly Gallagher (00:07:38) – Great question. Mean a coach. I had this conversation this morning at the pool at 5 a.m. Someone said, Oh, you’re going to coach. They just want content. I said, No, that’s not really what coaching is. I’m not really delivering content. I think a coach is someone that walks on a journey with a professional who wants to raise the bar. Um, it can be a life coach too. So then you’re walking the journey with an individual who has an area of life where they want to improve or progress. And that’s still the same formula for going through the coaching process, whether it be an executive or whether it be. Someone who wants to increase communication with their husband or wife.

Cory Miller (00:08:25) – So, yeah. And part of how we were working together when we first started working together was I was going to the same school you went to, which is fantastic. University of Texas and Dallas and their coaching program is incredible. And being mentored by you. And because I was getting asked when when I left our teams and I was trying to do my own thing, I thought, okay, it’s going to be coaching People go, What is it, Coach? What do you do? And I was like, Oh gosh, I’m struggling with these. But it’s so much that it’s that walking alongside a person on a journey and I like what you added to it, is like they want to raise the bar, they want to do something more. And, you know, I have so much reflected about my business entrepreneurial career for the last 15 years ago. If I had a coach from the beginning, it would have been so much better in many ways. Not just success, success for sure, but also health clarity.

Kelly Gallagher (00:09:23) – It’s funny you say that, Cory, because even 20 years ago when I was in pharmaceuticals and I was doing very well, had I had a coach, I would have been a rock star because there were rough edges that I couldn’t see. You can’t see them in yourselves the way someone else can who’s actively listening to you.

Cory Miller (00:09:43) – Yeah. Well, and you know, the parallel we always give is sports. You know the best. Greatest of all time. Athletes have coaches and have people around them. Like you just assume they wake up and they’re just as good naturally. No, they work on their craft. And I think about that so much. Like, I know you work with a lot of high achievers and oftentimes so many of the entrepreneurs I’ve worked with very high achievers too. I’ve had the pleasure of having people on my team big time, high achievers. And you just go, like, if you really want to do well in what you’re doing, you need to have somebody that’s on your side.

Cory Miller (00:10:23) – Nobody does it alone. I think that’s the fast that we perpetuate in our culture and especially in business, like with entrepreneurs, is like, Oh, I’m the rockstar. I do this by myself, that you got these icons out there. You know, Steve Jobs is the one you hear over and over and over 100,000 times. You go, He didn’t do it alone. No, there’s no way you can do it alone. And having someone in your corner that’s helping you perform at the highest level is so critical.

Kelly Gallagher (00:10:54) – Yes, I agree. And, you know, oftentimes people will also say, well, isn’t it like therapy? I would call it therapy. Ten x. Because therapy’s great and I think everyone should go through that process at some time in their life. I really believe in it. But at some point it’s limited because it’s just keeps moving into the past and feelings and often sad feelings. Whereas coaches moving the person forward so high achievers get bored in therapy after a while, after a while, and they might go back and forth to therapy.

Kelly Gallagher (00:11:34) – But generally they find that coaching helps them because it’s goal oriented.

Cory Miller (00:11:39) – Yeah, well, and I know there’s a big distinction between therapy and coaching and really, you know, really try to their distinct things. And oftentimes probably you have taught this mentioned like therapy is looking back, coaching is looking forward. Is that how you kind of see that?

Kelly Gallagher (00:11:56) – Yes. And you know, as a coach and a credentialed coach, I’m ethically bound if I feel like someone continually goes into therapy. Waters and themes, um, I’m bound to refer them on to therapists till they are more stabilized. And then oftentimes a lot of my clients are in therapy and coaching together. They really work well hand in hand.

Cory Miller (00:12:22) – Yes. In fact, for the bulk of the time right now, I am not currently seeing a counselor, however, for the last see two months, but for the bulk of the time we’ve worked together have had a counselor and a coach. So I think their yin yang, their.

Kelly Gallagher (00:12:41) – Right. And the people that come to me and have had some therapy, even if it was limited, they have just a little bit more self awareness.

Kelly Gallagher (00:12:55) – Because other otherwise get clients. Sometimes we’ll say, Well, what does it matter how I’m feeling about this? Well, it matters a lot because, you know, your heart is just as involved in these decisions and actions and creative things you’re asking yourself to do as the frontal lobe of your brain. So they are connected.

Cory Miller (00:13:14) – Yeah. Okay. So we talked about what coaching is a little bit we talked about the distinctions, therapy versus coaching and how they’re additive and can exist together. And in fact, or even better sometimes, oftentimes, especially in my experience, I would say. Well, I’m curious, Kelly So I know my own personal experience is related to our coaching professional relationship. But I’m curious, what are the times you you see people getting into the meat of this kind of conversation between us is like, what are those times when people go, okay, they’re thrust out to go actively look for a coach and end up, you know, in a in a room or a meeting with you.

Kelly Gallagher (00:13:55) – I would say that generally there’s some type of struggle. It can be a conflict at work. That’s a huge one because that dips into, well, do I want a career change? And sometimes people come and they don’t know what they want. They’re just not happy. Um, people who want to progress with that and find meaning and integrate what they’re learning about themselves will come to coaching because that process. It really it’s like turbocharging the job search and turbocharging people to take interviews and move on and move up without really any kind of formal instruction to just that self-awareness that it builds. So that’s one of the big ones. Um.

Cory Miller (00:14:44) – Let’s talk about struggle for a second. So struggle back to that. So is that so you mentioned a couple of factors there. I want to hit both sides. One is maybe I need to make a change, like move out of what I’m doing. But there’s another one, which is maybe I want to get promoted or have been promoted or, you know, within an organization to and I’m curious your experiences around around that too.

Cory Miller (00:15:10) – So I like that it starts with like there’s some kind of struggle and they’re seeking outside perspective and help support with that. But it starts with some things they’re trying to change and wrestling against. Sounds like.

Kelly Gallagher (00:15:24) – Right? And many times, you know, when you’re in a new position or you’re in a position where you are striving to do something else within that company, you will conform to their expectations and almost wear a mask. The to the degree that you lose something in the translation because then you’re not really connecting with your creative side or your problem solving side or your heart. And so a lot of work can be done to find that balance for people. The other thing that touches on is fear of failure. Your fear of failure is. It’s just a sweet spot because so many. Points of wanting to change. If we whittle down and we go with the client, what’s beneath that? What’s beneath that or what’s beneath that? And we get down to the core or the middle of the onion. It’s fear of failure.

Kelly Gallagher (00:16:19) – And that’s that’s just a part of being human. No one wants to humiliate themselves or fall down. But I think, too, in our society, think about schools nowadays. Everyone’s given a trophy. Soccer, Everyone’s campaigning, trophy swimming. Everyone makes the team. No one’s not on the team. Great. So children are raised to not really fail or understand that they founded something and think in a way, I like the philosophy, but in a way I think I see a lot of young adults who come out into the world and they are terrified of not getting a trophy of not. And the reality is, in real life, you don’t get that many trophies.

Cory Miller (00:17:06) – Yep. Well, we that was that fear of failure thing. We, we talked our last coaching session about that specifically and totally like, you know, when you’ve especially if you’ve been accustomed to winning, doing succeeding and then you hit some failures and or trying to do anything big and new, take that next job, start that new endeavor, whatever that is, and that, you know, oh, this is not a guaranteed success.

Kelly Gallagher (00:17:37) – Right? And if I fail, that also relates to a further theme of then the fear of being actually seen for who you are. Um, yeah, it’s a heavy topic and it can take a while to work through, but it’s, I think most of my clients will say that’s valuable work. And it’s not that they become fearless, but I think they’re able to notice the emotion name and then kind of negotiated.

Cory Miller (00:18:08) – Yeah, you mentioned the word emotions. And I think when I first started working with you, I didn’t I didn’t go to that realm. I was, you know, okay, more intellectual thinking process and stuff. And you’re extremely helpful with that. And probably because of some of the, you know, understandings between therapy and coaching or misunderstanding to say, I didn’t really get into that. But I think our best work has come with the emotions. Like my my definitely I’ve benefited every time we’ve talked. I’ve been better for it. However, I think the most profound times is when we get into, okay, I’m doing this thing.

Cory Miller (00:18:48) – It’s an event, like you said, a struggle or something new or a change or something I’m preparing for. But then okay, the emotion around that and understanding that and leveraging, you know, really deep dive into that where I’m trying to improve. I can’t remember how many times you’ve said to me, okay, well they are not in this call. What is the what about you? And I was like, Oh man, doing that hard work, which is made I know it’s made me better as a professional and a leader for sure, because oftentimes you kind of redirect back to me and go, okay, well, they’re not here. Let’s talk about what this means to you, for you. And I’m always like, Well, let me take a deep breath on that one.

Kelly Gallagher (00:19:31) – That’s a hard one. I learned that actually didn’t learn that at Utd or anywhere. I learned that as a young rep out in the field and I complain about these idiot customers. Right? And the manager told me once, he said, Turn your rearview mirror to your face.

Kelly Gallagher (00:19:48) – And I didn’t. He goes, Now look at that. That’s the person that would have to change. The client’s not going to change. And it was the most profound thing. It kind of hurt my feelings, but it was so true.

Cory Miller (00:20:01) – Well, I’ve talked through everything with you from partner team issues, all that. And it’s been so helpful because I think oftentimes kind of thinking, okay, yeah, they’ve got to change. There’s something with them. And the real work, profound and deep, that continues to get deeper is what does that mean for me about me? What do do I need to change something and what is that? And those are the times really in reflective work that I go, okay. And more and more I think I’m getting it. Or I go, okay, So something I’m not aware about myself potentially pointing outwards and then going, I kind of need to turn the rearview mirror back to myself.

Cory Miller (00:20:48) – It’s not the easiest thing to do, but I’m glad you do it.

Kelly Gallagher (00:20:50) – It’s not the easiest thing to do. And in periods of conflict or intense conversations with bosses or calling people, you’re supervising, it’s extremely hard to stop yourself and say, wait a minute, who am I? And yeah, it’s it’s really, really hard. But I think as people progress in coaching, they become almost a coach within themselves.

Kelly Gallagher (00:21:21) – Yeah. Oh yeah. So that would be my goal is that when I’m not there because I’m not there all the time and I don’t know of it, even though I know so much, I don’t know all of it. But my goal would be when that person’s gone for a week or they’re in a high stress situation, they’re able to somewhat coach themselves through it.

Cory Miller (00:21:44) – Absolutely. Well, okay. So we talked about like the struggle conflict. Something’s going on there. Want to do reach something new? Maybe they’re evaluating a big change. I mean, that resonates with me. I was that’s how we kicked off our thing.

Cory Miller (00:21:59) – It was like I was changing my profession career very substantially, knew I was going to be leaving the company I started. And, you know, okay, here’s a totally new avenue and having somebody to talk that through the fear of failure, the emotions of being an achiever, especially a high achiever, trying to do something in the world like an entrepreneur, what are some other things that you you see often in your coaching?

Kelly Gallagher (00:22:27) – Well, I would say the other thing, the theme is some type of organizational change, because your organization, of course, they’re always changing. And there are new standards that people don’t. We talked about that before we went on tape that sometimes people don’t like change. So being able to go in and help a person challenge their assumptions about the change really recognize within themselves the any negative thinking loops or or extra baggage they’re bringing in the situation and then thrive throughout the change would be a big thing. Um, and as they go along to they learn about themselves and then to integrate that learning.

Kelly Gallagher (00:23:12) – Back into the organization. That’s changing because change is constant. Yep. I don’t think I’ve ever been in an organization in 30 years that wasn’t doing some type of change. It’s almost never stay.

Cory Miller (00:23:31) – It’s yeah, absolutely. Well, there’s two things I think about when we’ve worked together and what I know of coaching too. It’s it’s the word change that you said. Some change. Big change oftentimes big change. The other side of the coin for me is performance.

Cory Miller (00:23:49) – Continual performance. So like and I think about those listening in why you won’t get you want to get coaching for yourself and your team is that performance factor like it’s an investment back into yourself or your team if you’re providing coaching. I think some great organizations, particularly in WordPress I’ve heard of because I’ve referred people to you that happen to be in WordPress. I go, Oh, I love the forward thinking of that. You’re going, it’s an investment in their people, but the performance side. So we’ve talked a lot of some about this change side.

Cory Miller (00:24:24) – There’s something going on and how we wrestle and adapt to that change where we talk about motions and different things and then but the other side to me is like, I can’t remember how many times I call it performance, but what I think it is, is like preparation. I mean, some of the biggest deals I’ve done in five years have been rehearsed, practiced, polished, perhaps even with you. And gosh, I didn’t have that my previous ten years. And I thought, wow, I went into so many situations. I thought I had done my preparation. But doing it with you with a coach was made things so much better, I think, through that process. Kelly It also eliminated like things I wasn’t aware of, things I hadn’t thought about, and just an approach to get some, like, clarity.

Kelly Gallagher (00:25:12) – Flirty, some big one. And I think that goes into the third bucket of communication skills. Just people sometimes come to me and in her struggle or there’s conflict or they’re going into a big sales promotion and they’re not quite sure how to go about it.

Kelly Gallagher (00:25:29) – So that would all fall into the bucket of communication skills. And that that’s a big one. I don’t think oftentimes people think they’re coming across one way, but it’s quite different if you’re observing them. The other thing is. They, you know, like you said, you’ll rehearse. And rehearse. But when you get in that situation sometimes. Hopefully you’re primed with enough rehearsal to lean back. If you forget what you’re going to say, you can lean back into the gist of it. So I think for performance, though, it comes down to communication skills and confidence, because in selling some time it’s not what you said anyway, it’s how you said it. And you can walk in if you say it with conviction and you have that internal clarity, as you mentioned, and conviction. The little wordsmithing and nuances of it aren’t going to matter. They’re going to matter. But the big the capital A to achievement or performance is how you set it.

Cory Miller (00:26:36) – Well, I didn’t say this in the beginning, but we we now meet twice a week and we’ve I think we’ve met twice a week for the last year or two.

Cory Miller (00:26:44) – And that was out of, oh, I need these times. We’re kind of booking them at the front of the week and the end of the week. But oftentimes I realize so many times it’s just seeking clarity for myself and those of us who are leaders out there trying to give a clear vision to somebody else, I’ll just say it. Maybe other leaders just wake up with clairvoyant vision. I don’t. I need rehearsal. I need work. I need to bounce it off people. I need a coach to help me kind of ask questions, think, think it through. And every single time I’m better. I remember some of the biggest ones that I’ve, like, talked to you. And it’s not even one session, maybe 2 or 3. They end up talking about it. But I go, Gosh, if I hadn’t had that, I would have made so many mistakes going into that big decision or time of presentation, whatever that was. And I’m so better for like I just need to practice and realize I couldn’t just do that.

Cory Miller (00:27:40) – I needed someone else to help me. And that’s where you’ve come in and done that. And so clarity for me is like when you say, what? When people would ask me, What’s the biggest takeaway for coaching? I go clarity and what is clarity? Build what you said confidence. And those two alone have made me a better leader. That’s why I can say, let’s just go back to the start of my career. If I’d had a coach, it started my career. Everything would have been better because I’ve been more clear, more confident.

Kelly Gallagher (00:28:03) – Being a millionaire ten times over just had a coach because I did so many stupid things along with the good things. That you don’t know, but you do learn from failure. You do learn. Oh, and so, you know, maybe not, but I sure would have liked to have a coach. It is a perk for high performers. If if if you if it’s a if there’s an employer listening in and they’re thinking of who does that need coaching? Yes, it can be remedial, but sometimes then it’s not the employees idea.

Kelly Gallagher (00:28:34) – The high performance will progress the fastest because it generally will be their idea. They want that perk and they want to grow a career.

Cory Miller (00:28:44) – This is my personal opinion, not Kelly. So I want to be clear about that. But I’ve been around organizations that use coaching as remedial, and I go, Then what happens is coaching gets stigmatized within that organization of if you’re not performing and you’re doing a crappy job, you’re going to get sent. And it has a negative tint to coaching, which is not what it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be progressing positive, helping improving, navigating situations. And this one organization in particular, it’s like that’s how they use coaching. I go, Oh man, Like, then they then all these high performers have this worry about it and don’t want to potentially go into coaching and miss this incredible benefit to what coaching is.

Kelly Gallagher (00:29:31) – That’s so true. There’s someone at my door. Can I. Can we pause?

Kelly Gallagher (00:29:45) – Yeah, we’re talking about, like, high performers and performance coaching. And I do want to make the point that that’s kind of what I think is my differentiator is that I have all that coaching training, but also I’ve been in the business world for 30 years selling. So if someone asked me about that, it’s easy for me to switch out. Yeah, most coaches have like a background, so they’ve never really had to go out into the world and perform, right?

Cory Miller (00:30:17) – Yeah. You bring both sides to that coin I think is incredibly helpful. Like I’ve talked so much with you about cells because it’s a weak area. I feel like it’s a weak area for me, but something I’ve had to do but forced to do and now trying to begrudgingly trying to do it. But I know you’ve got such an extensive sales background, business development background that totally leveraged that. In fact I think that’s how our two times a week started was a sales academy where it wasn’t necessarily coaching, it was more like sales coaching.

Kelly Gallagher (00:30:47) – Right. And it’s very hard for someone to coach you if they haven’t walked down the street, guide you down the path. If I’ve never been on it, I can coach and I can move you in many ways, but can’t exactly help you to perform because I don’t know how to perform. So I think that is the differentiator in my coaching style as I’ve been there. I’ve been in sales meetings where I got humiliated. I’ve had clients slam doors in my face. You know, I’ve executed $1 million contract. So. I just think it helps me to bring more to the party.

Cory Miller (00:31:25) – Yeah. And you understand the complete picture. That’s why, you know, our community is a lot of founders and a lot of high achiever leaders. You know, I’m curious your thoughts about entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs and coaching. You know, I don’t know your risk, your client base, but I am one. I know I’ve benefited from incredibly navigating change, big decisions and the performance side. But what do you say to entrepreneurs about coaching?

Kelly Gallagher (00:31:58) – I’d say it’s essential because of everything we’ve talked about in the end.

Kelly Gallagher (00:32:04) – As an entrepreneur, you’re alone, right? That’s what it is. That’s the gig. You might have a few people on your team, but generally you’re alone. It’s very hard to win deals in isolation. So I would say having a business coach is key to moving forward. Not only in all the things we mentioned, the clarity, the communication, the conflict, the struggle, but then sometimes you just have to go execute. And so for me, it’s very helpful because I’ve been in that sales situation so many times and understand features, benefits. I understand how to extrapolate from a client what’s going to really matter and what’s not. And I can help people with their slide deck or, you know, whatever it is they want to. So I will generally I can come in in that regard like we do and be a consultant on Friday, but a coach on Mondays. And then and most of my clients who are entrepreneurs use me in that way. Like they will sometimes just bring us like back or we’ll practice a presentation or they’ll practice what they’re going to say to their team before they say it.

Kelly Gallagher (00:33:18) – Get some clarity around it to understand. How they’re feeling in that moment of saying these wonderful things they think are are going to move the team. And sometimes they come out of the meeting and they’re going to say something completely different. Once we do the coaching, it’s not that I ever told them to say anything different, but we, you know, polished it. Let’s say, you know, they come out with this big chunk of coal and they leave and they’ve got a little diamond and it’s polished. And like you said earlier, they feel confident.

Cory Miller (00:33:50) – Maybe there’s some entrepreneurs that that come fully birthed into the whole process, but most of us have to learn it and grow through it. What I’m hearing, though, you know, big decisions, big challenges, big changes, and then the performance side preparation, Polish getting ready for those big things, too. And then the simply put, just trying to make the most of the opportunity. That’s what I think about. Like so many high achievers that go with an entrepreneur’s, like we have an opportunity.

Cory Miller (00:34:24) – We often like my my story is I stumbled into it, stumbled into it and go, wow, I have this amazing opportunity. So much with business. You go like, it’s right timing, it’s right place, right people, right, partners, all the things that have to go together for something to go really well. And then you go, I want to make the most of that. And that’s my reflection, is that I had an opportunity. I wanted to seize that opportunity to make the most of it. Now, seeing, Oh, wow. Now I did have a coach during about half of my business time, invaluable to help us with the organization. But I go like having someone that this is why we keep working together as I go. I just need it. It’s just a part of making the most of who I am and my opportunities that come my way to to do even more. And it’s not necessarily just about money, but it’s about making the most of the opportunity.

Kelly Gallagher (00:35:19) – And Joy, while you’re doing you we haven’t even touched about that. But there’s that personal happiness factor and a lot of my clients either are working out or I have them. I try to persuade them to start a fitness program while they’re with me. But that joy, that love of what you’re doing, you know, if it’s not there, it’s very hard to perform on your.

Cory Miller (00:35:43) – Yeah. And you’ve been such a good coach and you walk that talk. Kelly was telling me before we started the recording that she just ran a mile and swam, and I was like, Gosh, you overachiever. But it’s such a good inspiration for me for sure, because that other aspect of just life and business and everything is just being physically healthy. And you are a great encourager and you walk your talk.

Kelly Gallagher (00:36:07) – I try. I try. I try. I mean, no one’s perfect. But yeah, I definitely try. And I also find because I work out a lot and I’m more effective for people because, you know, it brings all that blood flow to the brain.

Kelly Gallagher (00:36:20) – So I shared with Cory that sometimes in between clients I’ll just run up the hill outside my house 4 or 5 times just to sharpen myself for the next person because I can feel it within myself. Then I come in their house and I’m all happy again and I’m feeling creative and supercharged and ready to go.

Cory Miller (00:36:41) – Oh yeah. You can tell what the energy you have for sure. Well, Kelly, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us about what you’re doing. Share a little bit of the experience. I mean, they resonate with me. Everything you’ve talked about are things that we’ve worked on in our coaching sessions, and I’ve been better for it as a person on Earth, as a human, on earth, as a business entrepreneur, leader, all those. But anything else that you want to share that we didn’t get to talk about?

Kelly Gallagher (00:37:09) – No, I mean, what you just said, that’s what I live for. That’s my passion is did I, you know, did I help someone? Did they feel better after we, you know, did we move the bar? And I just live for success stories.

Kelly Gallagher (00:37:23) – And I find it so much more rewarding than just pure sales. Although I would have argued back then that I was making people’s lives better because I had a terrific product or whatever, but somehow that what you just said, just seeing personal growth in other people, I just kind of live for that. So thank you.

Cory Miller (00:37:43) – Bet. Well, thanks, Keller, for being on. And thanks, everybody, for listening. We’ll share in the show notes how you can get a hold of Kelly if you’re interested in talking more with her. She’s fantastic. Coach, you can’t. I’ve referred you numerous times to people that now I believe are our regular clients with you. And we they’re defensive minded and we always talk like, yep, I just had my Kelly session, just had my Kelly Sessions, so.

Kelly Gallagher (00:38:08) – Well, thank you for doing that. Yes. I don’t really advertise. I haven’t ever. I only did maybe in the first year. But I think that’s the other thing. Good coaches just kind of get referrals and.

Cory Miller (00:38:23) – You do. All right. Thanks, everybody, for listening to Post Status Draft. It’s been another episode kind of went out of our league but love to introduce people that have made an indelible difference in my life and to share their wisdom. So we’ll see everybody next time. Thank you.

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

This Week at WordPress.org (July 25, 2023)

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This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

In this episode, Cory Miller interviews J.J. Toothman, owner of Lone Rock Point, a WordPress agency based in Sudbury, Massachusetts. J.J. shares his agency journey, discussing the growth of his agency and its remote-first approach.

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Transcript

Cory Miller (00:00:02) – Hey everybody. Welcome back to Post Status Draft. Got another great interview in our agency Journey series and I’m talking with JJ Toothman, a member of Post Status and JJ, Hey, thanks for coming on post this draft and talking about your agency journey story.

J.J. Toothman (00:00:18) – Hey, thanks for having me. Cory. It’s great to be here. Um, really appreciate everything you do for post status and for the community. So I’m happy to be, um, you know, a member of both. So.

Cory Miller (00:00:32) – Awesome. Well, we’ve gotten to get to know each other over the last, like, I’d say, what, eight months and hear about some of the work that your agency does. It’s super, super exciting. But can you tell me about the agency where it is now? Team clients kind of work. You kind of do.

J.J. Toothman (00:00:55) – Yeah. Um, so the. So my company is Lone Rock Point and I am located outside of Boston, Massachusetts, in a town called Sudbury.

J.J. Toothman (00:01:09) – Um, if you know the Revolutionary War history, you remember the Battle of Lexington and Concord and Sudbury borders. Concord. I live about five miles from where Paul Revere was captured at the end of his famous ride to tell everybody the British were coming. Oh, wow. Lone Rock Point. We have grown it to 16 people. You know, 12 of those people are full time. And there’s a handful of of, of part timers. Um, the were distributed all over the place. Uh, I’ve got, you know, some of us are in California, Texas. Uh, Michigan. There’s a few people in around Grand Rapids. There’s people in Florida, a few people around Asheville, North Carolina. And we definitely, you know, adopted a remote first, you know, virtual kind of organization, organizational structure from the very beginning. You know, when when the pandemic happened in 2020, we didn’t miss a beat. You know, our the people that we were working with, you know, just it just continued.

J.J. Toothman (00:02:29) – It’s weird to look back on that time and think about the, you know, ways that we were able to grow during that time in a period where so many small businesses were were, you know, struggling. But, you know, look back on that time and think about like we, you know, we were, you know, going remote, being virtual. That wasn’t a problem for us. We were ready to do that for the very beginning. And the people we were worked with, like just we just kept working on it, kept asking for more from us. It was actually a period of growth for us. We probably went from, you know, at the beginning of. You know, spring 2020, we were around four people and 4 or 5, and now we’re 16. We became a WordPress agency approximately 15, 16 months ago. Um, and we joined WordPress is kind of a continuation of our work with the public sector when I started my company in 2016. Um, you know that we can talk about the genesis of that, but it was, you know, I was had come from a federal government contracting world and I’ve been working for big companies like Raytheon, um, Perot Systems, Dell and, you know, decided that, you know, I wanted to start my own company, you know, had this, you know, the proverbial entrepreneurial itch that most entrepreneurs feel and just kind of wanted to try that out.

J.J. Toothman (00:04:02) – So I started to serve this company and wanted to start working. There were two customers that I wanted to work with from the very beginning, and one of those was NASA, which is it’s hard for me to talk about my own journey and the work that we’re doing without connecting to the long history I have working with with NASA. So I use that relationship and that relationship capital that I’ve built, you know, from starting working with them back in as early as 2001. Well, one of my first clients and then one of my second clients, big clients was Automattic. Some people over there that had built relationships over the years came to me and said, Hey, you know a lot about, you know, this public sector world, you know, federal government contracting. Can you help us, you know, with kind of get into that vertical and so help them with some some business strategy around that? I helped them with some security compliance, things they needed to be aware of. And then that relation, you know, that work kind of matured a little bit and kind of ran its course a little bit.

J.J. Toothman (00:05:15) – And then, you know, as they as WordPress VIP, you know, kind of solidified its it’s standing and it’s got themselves into what’s called the Fedramp marketplace. You know, they came to me and said, Hey, you should, you know, your company, you should we should continue working together. You should join the WordPress Agency partnership program. And that’s something I did, you know, specifically because of our shared interest in working together on public sector opportunities. And, um, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s really what my company is doing right now is, you know, Lone Rock Point. We are, we’re definitely exploring that intersection of WordPress and public SpaC, public sector, predominantly the federal level of that. You know, there’s a lot of state and municipal stuff opportunities there as well. Um, but we’re, you know, the, the kind of the, when you think of like WordPress and public sector, what I want people to come out of that connection with is is Lone Rock point and so that’s you know that’s work we’re doing with and and work we’re doing with NASA and it’s going we’ve been working on some projects from NASA for the past few years.

J.J. Toothman (00:06:31) – And it’s it’s really rewarding work. It’s good to feel like you’re contributing to. You know, we’re not civil servants, but we’re definitely kind of contributing to. You know, putting the taxpayer dollars to work, being good stewards of taxpayer money. And we think WordPress has a a role in that.

Cory Miller (00:06:54) – Excellent. Well, there’s a lot here I want to unpack, but it’s so compelling. Congratulations on your success. Congratulations on what you’ve done in the public sector to take WordPress there. I love hearing stories like yours and our other members doing good work in our world. And I get to I think I’ve told you, I get to brag, Hey, I know the people working on these projects, you know, which is pretty fantastic, and taking WordPress to the Enterprise, but Public sector Spaces is really fantastic as WordPress grows. So okay, I want to I want to thank you for telling us kind of what Lone Lone Rock Point does today. So I heard in there 2016. So I, I had assumed, as we had talked for because of the kind of work you’re doing, you had been doing this particular agency type work for a long time.

Cory Miller (00:07:49) – But wow, that’s why I say congrats one, Congratulations on your success. But like it’s pretty fast timeline to be able to get to doing an agency to doing this kind of work, I think. But can you take me back like before 2016, you said you were doing enterprise or. Yeah, public sector government, government contracting work. What were you doing before the agency?

J.J. Toothman (00:08:10) – Before. Before I founded my agency. Yeah. Yeah. So I was, I was a software developer, web application developer. I got hired by Raytheon to work on a contract they had with NASA Ames Research Center. And back in 2001, actually, the thing that the opportunity that kind of brought me into that world was that’s when they first started thinking about like, what do they have to do about website accessibility? So they brought me in there to kind of help, you know, help, you know, mature what they were doing around all that kind of stuff. And it’s been interesting to see what the what where was thinking about this over the last couple of weeks.

J.J. Toothman (00:08:57) – You know, when I first started working at NASA Ames and started talking about website accessibility and looking at all the various websites and web applications that was that were running at Ames Research Center, which is one of the, you know, field centers that’s part of the the NASA enterprise. Um, there was people were really just they were really resistant to it. They were trying to. They were trying to check the box on it quite a bit. You know, they were just like, What’s the minimum I have to do to, like, just check the box on this and so I can move on. Like it really the the optics of how important that was and just it just being the generally the right thing to do, forget the whole legal requirements of it all that really just wasn’t cemented. And here we are, you know, 20 plus years later where, you know, that’s that’s kind of like at the core of what is happening definitely in the public sector, but in the web in general, just like this, this strong emphasis on making it accessible and available to everybody.

J.J. Toothman (00:10:00) – You know, I saw how that started, you know, 20 years ago. And it’s it was not the same temperature, both from various from developers, designers, project managers, you know, that whole thing is shifted in very positive ways over the last couple of decades. So I was a software developer there working on various, um, you know, web applications, internal business process type applications, looking at accessibility improvements. Um, and then just kind of grew things over the years, you know, you know, started, you know, started rising the ranks a little bit, like getting opportunities to understand how government projects actually work, how it works, which is a pretty thing. I started participating in proposals that big companies like Dell were doing and responding to government RFPs, which are massive undertakings unto themselves, um, understanding compliance and security regulations that exist in government, in government, and really just kind of understanding how these governments, these government agencies and, you know, as individual as they kind of have their own ecosystems unto themselves, that’s probably not, you know, unique to all various massive, you know, corporate enterprises.

J.J. Toothman (00:11:29) – You know, we talk a little bit about the WordPress ecosystem now, but these these federal government agencies, they all have their own ecosystems around it. And then they’re also operating in this big federal thing where there’s kind of like this. Um, Jennifer Palka just wrote this great book called Recoding America, and she calls this term friendly fire. So where there’s like things where like the Office of Management, the OMB and General Services Administrations and other offices and agencies within the executive branch and other parts of government are putting together governance and policy around it and how the web should work. Um, and it creates all this types of, you know, these, this guidance and guardrails that you have to adhere to. So that becomes like kind of a larger ecosystem unto itself. So, you know, starting to understand how to work within that type of, um, you know, those types of scenarios and guardrails and boundaries and knowing how to interoperate it all just became, you know, something that started gaining more experience with and more exposure to with and, you know, think it’s been a big, you know, that knowledge is a big part of like why, you know, my company’s positioned and why we’ve achieved some success.

J.J. Toothman (00:12:44) – You know, working and and gaining some credibility in parts of the public sector and procuring our relationship with with WordPress VIP and, you know, expanding our own opportunities within itself. Yeah, it’s exciting. It’s challenging. Exhausting at times, but it’s also exciting and rewarding.

Cory Miller (00:13:04) – Yeah. Yeah. I can’t imagine. So just just for clarity. So you’re working full time at Raytheon or were you contract as a software?

J.J. Toothman (00:13:12) – So a contract means you’re you’re you’re like you’re kind of embedded, so you’re a full time employee and you’re your government contractor working on a contract that, you know, a company like Raytheon or Dell or Booz Allen or Lockheed Martin has with the federal government to deliver services abilities that are part of their requirements.

Cory Miller (00:13:39) – Okay. Okay. That totally makes sense. So what was that catalytic moment when you’re like, Hey, I’m gonna do this for myself, I’m gonna start my agency?

J.J. Toothman (00:13:50) – A couple of things. So I left NASA for a while and I went and worked for a company, a music ticketing startup called Ticket Fly.

J.J. Toothman (00:13:58) – I helped them, like, basically create a network of websites for small independent music venues, um, and help those music venues talk about, you know, what shows were coming, how to buy tickets, you know, when the on sale dates were and all the other, you know, all that content that is basically all about converting into ticket sales. And so I was with was, you know, with them when they were really small. And, you know, it was definitely the startup world and that was really exciting. It was also a bad time for my life. I just had like my my second child and like my work life balance was it was it was pretty bad. Um, you know, working at a small startup like that. So ended up going back to NASA. Um, you know, and just trying to, like, find my footing a little bit. I also wanted to leave California and move relocate back to the East Coast. And I knew that was, you know, being in a place, a large organization like that would offer some flexibility like that.

J.J. Toothman (00:15:05) – Um, but then, you know, I would say around a decade, you know, ten years ago. I started having this, you know, I started having that entrepreneurial itch again. I started thinking about, like, how fun it was to, you know, move fast at ticket fly and wanted that that feeling again. And so I started, you know, I explored a couple of like side hustles, you know, some small little independent web projects. One of them was like a newsletter to help families spend more time outdoors. And they didn’t really take off. They didn’t really get get some traction. And what I mean by that, it wasn’t necessarily traction from a, you know, where we’re making revenue or gaining customers. We were just like just the balance of of, you know, trying to do do that type of initiative while, you know, having a full time job and also like, you know, having a growing family and all that kind of stuff. And then in but was it was clear that.

J.J. Toothman (00:16:06) – You know, I was exploring something. And, you know, again, that desire to to like be in more, you know, control of of of my destiny, so to speak, and be entrepreneurial is something I just couldn’t I couldn’t get rid of completely. And it wasn’t happening within big companies like Dell in the way that I wanted to know. I really wanted to be, you know, in control of a lot of decisions that wasn’t in control of, um, and, you know, that’s why people start their own things and, you know, be founders of companies. And, you know, I had dinner with a friend of mine who was also in the government contracting space. He’s like, you know, you’ve been thinking about. And he told me he’s like, You’ve been thinking about all these little product ideas, these digital product ideas, like, you know, just just start a services business, you know, like and that will satisfy your need or the desire. You have to be entrepreneurial and, you know, like, you know, look at balance sheets and think about marketing and, you know, attracting talent and retaining talent and stuff like that.

J.J. Toothman (00:17:12) – And he was right. He was like, You know what? That’s a really good idea. And within 120 days, I’d like set the wheels in motion to, you know, start Lone Rock Point. Um, and, you know, we, we went from there. So it started in the fall of I started the company in the fall of 2016. It was just me for, you know, a year. And then it was like me and a virtual assistant for like another year. And I, you know, I started under this like this umbrella of like, digital transformation consulting. At the time, I was doing a lot of work with the public sector around cloud transformations. So people were were operating applications and on premise data centers and starting to make that migration into things like Amazon Web Services. And so working out a lot of change management type type projects associated with that. And it all kind of just fit under this like big umbrella of digital and cloud transformation, which, to be totally honest with you, is, is is too vague and too broad and borderline meaningless.

J.J. Toothman (00:18:25) – You know, if you ask ten different people what digital transformation is, you’re probably going to get ten different definitions of it. Yeah. And so it’s really hard to like, you know, grow a services business out that way is really just like me being a consultant at that point. Um, and it wasn’t until like started niching down into, you know what, like let’s just do this WordPress thing, you know, was I was delivering, um, you know, whitepapers and providing analysis of like how what people should do with like their, their inventory of web applications and advising them on what is and what platforms they should be using. And a lot of times ended up started like you know, making recommendations around WordPress oriented applications, sometimes just building WordPress sites, sometimes using WordPress as an application framework. Um, in over the, in the time I’ve been with NASA. I’ve used WordPress with them and a lot of different ways. We’ve done it in a WordPress network multi-site kind of way for allowing smaller NASA missions and programs and projects to, you know, have their own websites where they all communicate what they’re up to and what their findings are and share what they learned with, you know, with, with interested stakeholders and visitors to their sites.

J.J. Toothman (00:19:55) – Um, there, there’s been some internal things where needed to like communicate various services as it had to various corners of the agency. So we did like a WooCommerce thing where people can go to a web application, a website and just pick what, what services they want. Like I need, I need some Amazon cloud storage or processing or, you know, EC2 units. And they could apply, they could add all those things to a cart and then say, check out and, you know, check, you know, do a checkout with that and just start getting services provided to them that way. So um, and then, you know, over time it just became clear that like, this is, I keep recommending this, like there’s growth opportunity for me here and then, you know, niching down to being like, we’re going to be a WordPress, a more traditional WordPress agency is really when, you know, the growth started happening and the opportunity started becoming a little bit. And it isn’t just like strategic consulting, it became the execution part of it as well.

J.J. Toothman (00:21:00) – And the tactics part of it too, and the tactics and execution. We’re all oriented for the most of the time.

Cory Miller (00:21:06) – Yeah, I’d love to hear these stories because you got, you know, a big career in enterprise and public sector, you know, with your Raytheon and NASA days and then entrepreneurial hit. Okay, want to do this and then seeing you know when you say NASA and WordPress, it just seems like those things should always go together, you know, and that’s what really compelling to me is seeing WordPress more on the public sector enterprise. And now there’s really big institutions in in the US federal government anyway, probably around the world too, but that are starting to use WordPress more and more and leverage it and see that opportunity. Um, so I love kind of how those intersection of things happen. So that lone rock point would kind of exist and grow and then you hit your I was going to ask the question when the WordPress come into play, but you pretty much answered it. So like your 2 or 3 or so, it seems like, hey, we’re going to drill down.

Cory Miller (00:22:04) – And then when you mention WooCommerce that like that use case for an internal tool within a big organization like that to procure and get resources and things, that’s so compelling. You know, most of my.

J.J. Toothman (00:22:17) – Career that like, people just wanted that checkout expert, They wanted that. They wanted that experience of like, I want X, Y and Z, I want to add it to the cart and I want to tell you that I want it. And we just, you know, WooCommerce has that option to, you know, just do check payments, right? Which removes the credit card processing out of it. And so we kind of adapted that to, all right, we’re going to send this order to somebody who can fulfill that order via this WooCommerce WordPress system. Um, and, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s using the WordPress ecosystem at its best, like using it almost kind of as Legos and want this part of it. I want that part of it. I want to, I want to glue them together in this way.

J.J. Toothman (00:22:58) – And it’s, you know, kind of a no code kind of way around WordPress to solve some, you know, some very simple, narrow use cases. But, you know, my, my journey with WordPress, you know, starts way back in 2007 at my first stint with at Ames Research Center. Um, you know, I was working with all these various scientists and researchers and they just like need a place to like publish my, my research findings and publish my data and, and they, they all one, they all had the same, um. You know, requirements and needs. At the highest level, it’s like I just need a place to put it. And I want to I want to be able to manage it myself in a way. And I don’t know. I don’t know how to don’t know how to code. I don’t know. I don’t have anybody on my team who knows HTML. And so that, you know, that basically introduced the concept of like content management systems into all this back in 2007.

J.J. Toothman (00:24:03) – And, you know, we were looking at things like wikis at the time and, and then discovered WordPress and around that and just the user experience of someone just, you know, managing their content with that type of, you know, WordPress, CMS, this is like version 2.0 of WordPress, you know, back when they added pages in addition to posts was the real thing. That’s like, oh, this is what this satisfies what everyone’s looking for. They want an easy place just to log into. And you know, they all some of them wanted to start blogging. Some of them wanted to start blogging without knowing that they wanted to start blogging. They just want to share what they know and tell their stories. Um, and then back in 2007, I created this is also the Web 2.0 era where, you know, your blogging was, was kind of heavy in the lexicon back then. And I was I did one of NASA’s first official public blogs on WordPress and, and kind of grew with WordPress, you know, from there that led to the ticket fly work.

J.J. Toothman (00:25:13) – And so WordPress was kind of always in my DNA, even when wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t like a defined part of what I was, you know, of my, my role description. But my role was in some cases to be strategic and provide advice and provide some roadmaps. And, you know, how do we do things? Give us some give us some guidance here. And a lot of times just said like, well, you don’t have to create a custom bespoke application for this. Just use a content management system like WordPress, you know, teach your users how to how to how to manage using WordPress themselves. And and you go from there. So and the WordPress ecosystem is what makes all that happen mean there’s all these different, you know, there’s all these different plugins and themes and you just kind of integrate it all together, um, you know, in a unique way. And you have a great solution architecture, depending on how you put it together.

Cory Miller (00:26:11) – But you know, remember a lot of the solutions that we have now didn’t exist. So, you know, big organizations were having to do like the the internal resourcing that you’re talking about. They’d have to custom code those things or build them because they didn’t exist off the shelf. Then you fast forward and you go, you could take WooCommerce save. I can’t even imagine how much time to kind of do git to feature like, you know, par with that and then take that open source solution and then utilize it and just customize with a with a great agency like you all to figure out what their exact needs are. So it’s it’s great to see how everything has fast forward to. Well, we touched on this. I know we’re going to have more conversations down the road. And and I want to talk more about the public sector and enterprise. And I know we’re talking and we’re going to have some great conversations in the next couple of months about this, because I know you’re passionate about it, about the public sector and bringing WordPress to the public sector, but we’ll save that for another time.

Cory Miller (00:27:07) – I don’t want to spoil too much of that, but I appreciate so much the journey and what you’re doing. So thank you for telling us that. That’s, that’s that’s incredible. Um, okay. What are you excited about today? What are you excited about today and the future going forward and what you’re doing with the agency and your team and the work you’re doing?

J.J. Toothman (00:27:27) – Yeah. So a few years ago, the government, Pervez passed a Congress passed an act called the Integrated Digital Experience Act. And within that act is basically it tells all these federal agencies how to modernize their website. So, you know. Obvious things like improve accessibility. They have to be accessible. They have to work on mobile. They. They. You have to have like good search. They should. People should be able to find content there. They also need to be based on user research and user needs. So they’re all logical things within. You know, public sector and it’s all so I’m really excited about that. Be something that initiates or triggers a lot of the work that I’ve been doing for the last couple of years.

J.J. Toothman (00:28:26) – And so for the last few years I’ve been working on a web modernization project with NASA. It exists for a couple of reasons. It exists. One, because of that idea act. It also exists because NASA has a couple of thousand websites and they don’t want there to be a couple of thousand websites. They want all that information in one website. So we’ve been doing a lot of work with them. You know, that started back in kind of mid 2000, late 2000, and it started with, hey, what should be using for its main, you know, web source, major web properties. And so I spent a year taking a look at the landscape of you know, of all the available CMS’s that are out there, you know, Drupal source site, Adobe Experience manager and then some new newer ones like Wagtail. And then there’s even we even took a look at, you know, some of the software as a service type solutions like Contentful and just trying to understand the pros and cons of Elda.

J.J. Toothman (00:29:38) – And so we spent a year taking a look at the CMS landscape and acquiring data for it, acquiring evidence of it. And while in my heart, you know, being a WordPress guy, I knew like, you know, WordPress makes a lot of sense here. You know, we it’s still there was a lot of benefit for me to kind of like take a look at like what, you know, all the driving factors for making a decision like that were, um, and you know at the end of it WordPress like was the, the solution, the CMS that NASA wanted to invest in for the future. And that’s what we’ve been working on for the last couple of years. So for the last couple of years we’ve been working on a couple of big. Uh, NASA WordPress projects. And a lot of, you know, I talked a lot about how I’ve been using WordPress and a no code kind of way. This is not a no code kind of way. There was a lot of Gutenberg custom development here.

J.J. Toothman (00:30:34) – It’s the, it’s, it’s the project that has everything like, you know, an emphasis on SEO, an emphasis on accessibility. There’s a new atomic design system that was created for this. And so the seeing the marriage of an atomic design system and Gutenberg, you know, come to bring all that stuff to life has been really, really exciting. And I’m excited to like for, for, you know, people, you know, interested in what NASA is up to and people interested in WordPress to see the fruits of all this labor that we’ve been working on for the last couple of years and it’s all coming in the next few months. And yeah, so I’m really excited to share that with you and share that with other people in the community.

Cory Miller (00:31:19) – Yeah, that’s excellent. So I want to take just a minute in sidebar because you did this whole year, you know, one of seeing what’s out there, seeing what the options are. And I love that you’ve done some deep, deep research for big organizations trying to make a big, important decision on it.

Cory Miller (00:31:36) – Um, I’m just curious what we’re couple takeaways. As you just surveyed the landscape. You know, we love WordPress. We understand, you know, we, we support WordPress, but, but we know that there’s a lot of stuff out there. Um, but I’m curious, what, what did the landscape look like? Where were some of the things you saw when you looked at the other platforms you mentioned like Wagtail? I hadn’t heard that one before. I’ve heard of Contentful for instance, and of course Drupal. But what, what were a couple of the takeaways on that year of investigation out there?

J.J. Toothman (00:32:08) – So the I, I would say that there are two major, maybe three major differentiators that separated WordPress from the rest from the rest of the pack. If you will. Um, you know, there’s a lot of great content management systems out there. You know, they all do the same thing or try to do people the same. They try to make it easy for people to publish information onto the web and make it easy for others to consume it.

J.J. Toothman (00:32:35) – But the differentiators from WordPress versus the other CMS that we were looking at were number one. A lot of again, it had a lot of it had to do with the ecosystem. WordPress was the only CMS that had real time analysis tools around SEO. So and accessibility to kind of try to improve those situations before the point of publishing. So Yoast is the obvious example. So Yoast, you know, we’ve all been exposed to Yoast. Yoast allows you to allows the content creator user to be authoring and editing content and getting some real time analysis about how friendly or compatible, whatever the term you want to use it is before the point of publish. There’s accessibility tools out there that do the same things that are kind of integrated within the WordPress Admin WordPress dashboard that allow that content creator user to like, you know, when it’s in draft format to analyze. Do I have accessibly accessible content that I’m about to publish in here and make live other CMS didn’t have that baked in. You know, there’s WordPress plugins that do these things.

J.J. Toothman (00:33:51) – Um, we could even, we even have the ability to prevent publishing until certain excessively thresholds and SEO optimization thresholds are met. That was really, really attractive. All the most of the majority of the other solutions are you publish it first it’s live and then you can go back and check it and then you kind of have to retrofit it. I’ve been working in enterprises enough to know that that doesn’t happen once it’s published, Once it’s out there, people are generally going to move on. They’re not going to do the analysis of like, All right, how do I go back and improve this thing? So you really got to you really got to catch those things early and often. Um, you know, up front in the, in the content publishing lifecycle. So that was one of the big differentiators was that and that again, that’s all a product of the WordPress ecosystem and the innovation that comes out of that ecosystem. The other one was just kind of like the resources around this. So we all, you know, you can take for a grain of salt like, you know, the the whole thing about, you know, WordPress powers, 40% of the web, you know, that kind of stuff.

J.J. Toothman (00:34:57) – But there is some byproduct of that. And that is there’s a lot of people using it. There’s a lot of people building it. There’s a lot of people developing on it. There’s a lot of people extending on. There’s a lot of knowledge being shared around that. One of the things I did was I went in the stack overflow and compared WordPress with other CMS’s and just being like, How many conversations are happening around this thing, you know, that we’re looking at? And it was, you know, what you expected, the ability for, you know, to be able to. Try to solve a problem by getting by by, you know, interfacing or sponging up knowledge that was already contributed back in some way, you know, via via StackOverflow or, you know, other places on the Web, other groups, Slack channels, etcetera, that exists in WordPress in a way that it doesn’t exist in these other, you know, CMS products. You know, the if you want to if you want to get developer knowledge around Adobe Experience Manager, you for for the most part there are some Adobe experience manager specialists out there, but for the most part you got to go to Adobe for it.

J.J. Toothman (00:36:02) – Um. Uh, you know, same thing with sorts. There’s not there’s not a huge community of sort site developers out there. So for a place like NASA, you know, resource acquisition becomes a problem. Like, where are they going to find talent for that? Yeah. And you know, again, WordPress, you know, kind of is head and shoulders above the rest in that area. Um, and then, you know, this whole concept of WordPress is for everyone to like that. That rang true in all this research too. Like it’s more than just developer community. There’s user communities out there that are also sharing their knowledge here. Um, you know, there’s all these kinds of like, there’s, there’s solutions for learning WordPress that are provided by the communities and multiple companies with the community that add a lot of value within the equals. So it’s not just like the software ecosystem, but it’s like, you know, the kind of service ecosystem to that exist within WordPress. Um, and then honestly, like, you know, portability matters to, um, you know, there’s, for the most part, like I really just wanted public sector to adopt open source.

J.J. Toothman (00:37:11) – You know, that’s the first decision I want, I want them to do is just, just, you know, make an open source decision. And then you’ve done that. You know, you’re in a good you’re in a better place than picking a commercial, you know, bespoke solution. You know, And then, you know, once you get past that hurdle now, you know, the obvious open source can cannot exist. And you know, the user experience of WordPress and that whole concept of WordPress being for everyone and being considering everyone, depending on who you are, really rings true and is a differentiator as well.

Cory Miller (00:37:50) – Well, that’s excellent. And that rings true. You know, I’m curious because as I talked to more enterprise agencies, all of you out there in the world interfacing with clients, with their needs, what they actually are trying to get done. That’s really, really great to hear and it’s reflective of the community. I think sometimes they’ve been in the community like you as long as we have.

Cory Miller (00:38:10) – I take some of those things for granted. So I think that’s that’s excellent. Well, JJ, thanks so much for the time today. I know you just got back from a big trip and you’ve got work to pile out, but I appreciate you coming on the podcast and sharing your agency journey, and I look forward to our next conversation, sharing the good work you’re doing with WordPress in our world. That too.

Cory Miller (00:38:34) – All right. Thanks, everybody, for being here today. And we’ll talk to you. We’ll see. We’ll talk to you. We’ll hear from you. They’ll listen to us soon.

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

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In this episode, Cory Miller, CEO of Post Status, and Rob Cairns, Founder, CEO, and Chief Creator of Amazing Ideas at Stunning Digital Marketing, discuss the importance of website security, client communication, and managing client expectations. They also talk about the need for businesses to treat their websites as valuable assets and allocate budgets for their maintenance and security. Websites have become an integral part of modern business operations, especially with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Transcript

Cory Miller (00:00:00) – All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Post Edits Draft. We’ve got another interview in our series on agency journeys. And I’m talking to a long time friend of mine, Rob Carnes, who has been very active in post. It’s been to a bunch of our meetups and I’m really excited to share his story today. So Rob, thanks for being on The Post podcast.

Cory Miller (00:00:24) – Well, Rob, let’s dive in. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your agency today. Name and what you do. What kind of work primarily you do for your clients.

Rob Cairns (00:00:34) – Okay, So my name is Rob Cairns. I’m in the greater Toronto area of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I should tell you, before I got into running an agency, I have a very tech heavy background which a lot of agency owners don’t have. So I come out of an enterprise healthcare environment, doing servers, doing all kinds of cool stuff to support one of Toronto’s biggest hospitals.

Rob Cairns (00:00:58) – Before that I was actually an old time COBOL programmer. There’s probably a word that you haven’t heard in a long, long time, and I spent some time in the financial industry, so I’ve got a bit of a business background. And then I jumped into agency life because, you know, I always tell the story. I never planned to be in marketing because I had a marketing professor in school back in the 80s who came in the class, and her whole thing was, Oh, I’m good. I’m here because I want my summers off. And I said, I swore then in there I’d never be a marketer if you paid me money to. Well, I lied. So, yeah. And I run I run an agency that’s WordPress focused. A lot of it is WordPress security stuff right now and some builds and then a lot of email marketing and consulting these days. That’s kind of where I’m at.

Rob Cairns (00:01:58) – Digital marketing is the agency site and digital marketing.info is like my Linktree site. It’s got links to everything I do on the web and where you can find me.

Cory Miller (00:02:09) – Excellent. Excellent. Well, I know as I’ve gotten to know you through some of the meetups, too, I hear more and more about the work you do, and it always impresses me. You’re like, Hey, is anybody worried about this particular update? And and I know you managed quite a few sites and it always I always like lean in when you talk about that because it’s at the heart of what a lot of agency work, particularly at post is that our agencies do is that beast of maintaining WordPress across multiple WordPress client sites. Well, great. Thank you for that. So tell me a little bit about how you got there. I heard a little preface of that, but I wanted to start out with where you are today. Um, and then talk about how you got there. That’s always the compelling part of these Journey series to me is what happened before.

Cory Miller (00:02:59) – So this is today and then what? What’s a little snippet of how what led up to where you are today?

Rob Cairns (00:03:06) – So where I am today was kind of how I got there was us working in healthcare. I wasn’t happy, I’ll tell you that now. I was working probably 60 to 70 hours a week at the time. So this is going back 14 years ago was when we started and I was extremely unhappy and somebody said to me, So why don’t you just go? And I said, Well, I’ve been here 21 years, so if they want to get rid of me, it’s going to cost some lots of money to get rid of me. So let’s force the hand and see where it goes. Well, 14 years ago, my dad was sick with pancreatic cancer at the time he actually passed away July 8th, the anniversary that’s coming up. And they decided, knowing I was going to be taking some time off, they decided we need to we’re going to make some changes and you can go away.

Rob Cairns (00:03:56) – And at that point, I was already building WordPress websites on the side. So I just kind of transitioned to what I was doing on the side full time. Now here’s where it got interesting. I decided really quickly only building the website, it’s only part of getting it out there. You still got a market that site and you got to do it properly. So I made a decision then and there. I was going to build a full stack marketing agency. I’ve taken some courses, a lot of courses. One of my mentors in this space is a gentleman by the name of Paul Tobey, who I’m founder of. Paul. Toby’s actually the father of Adrian Toby, the founder of Groundhog, who you know. So that’s.

Rob Cairns (00:04:40) – Adrian Yeah, love Adrian, Love. His dad saw his dad in January, actually, and we sat in his house and listened to him play some jazz tunes for us where we were visiting and and then transitioned in and at one time was offering all kinds of services and then just realized some of these are just don’t want to do so I just kind of niche down and got out of what I didn’t want to do so.

Cory Miller (00:05:10) – Got you. So how long ago did you go? Full time with the business?

Cory Miller (00:05:18) – 14 years ago. Okay. That’s awesome. We were going strong about the same time.

Rob Cairns (00:05:22) – Yeah, about same time. And you. And you and I connected, I think the first time about 14 years ago when I was in the headway community. And you were running the items community. And you’d be proud to know two of the products in my security stack back up by the in 19 security are still there to this day so.

Cory Miller (00:05:40) – Oh that’s fantastic to hear. Well, okay, So I’m really curious. Was there a point when you were like, doing this on the side? What was that juncture when you’re like, okay, I’m going to do this full time? A lot of the stories we hear, I hear in It’s My Own is some event. Something helped kind of catalyze the process to become a full time entrepreneur. And so I’m curious. So not happy, of course. And then, hey, I think you might have mentioned this just a second ago, but I want to make sure I’m clear on it.

Cory Miller (00:06:13) – So was there event that kind of like, okay, I’m doing this full time, this is the only thing I’m doing.

Rob Cairns (00:06:18) – So my as I say, my dad was battling pancreatic cancer at the time. Oh, right. Yeah. I went on three weeks vacation after I was on the corporate project, number one, and amassing overtime like nothing. And I walked back in on a Monday morning. I got a call from the director’s secretary at 10 a.m. and say, Director won’t see you in a boardroom at 3:00. And the boardroom was not the normal boardroom for meetings. So I just kind of put my feet up and said, okay, I know how this day’s going to play out. Welcome back from vacation for me. And believe it or not, I actually shipped everything personal home from work at lunchtime in a cab because I saw the writing on the wall. I’d seen it on the wall for a while. Yeah. Then I get, um, I get called in and the director says, Do you know why you’re here? I said, So you’re going to let me go, so let’s just get it over with.

Rob Cairns (00:07:16) – And the h.r. Manager turned to me and said, how do you how do you feel about all this? And my response at the time was, my lawyer will tell you at 9:00 tomorrow morning. Now you’re like no other comment.

Cory Miller (00:07:27) – Now at this time, you were already doing things on the side, though, right? Yeah, I think that’s important to note in the story because, you know, some of these events that happen, but you were already kind of testing the waters, building some kind of side hustle side gig on the side. So you didn’t just, you know, jump out into the ether. You had something kind of built up. Were you doing work for like client? I mean, friends? How did the the side gig kind of start parallel to that side gig?

Rob Cairns (00:07:59) – Actually, it’s really interesting you ask that question. Being in tech, I’m like a resource in my family and you can appreciate that. So I did go to the let’s send an email to let’s ask the question.

Rob Cairns (00:08:13) – And I actually got fed up with family, believe it or not, and I wrote a website at that time was HTML and said, by the way, here’s all the family pictures from the event last week because I was also the manager of all that digital stuff. And by the way, here’s links to all the questions you guys asked me and nobody’s allowed to ask me a question until you go to these links and and actually do your own homework. So that was my start into domains and all of that and web stuff. And the other thing that started it was this is going back to the days of dial and dialing Internet providers, if we remember those days. Yep. And trauma, they were a dime a dozen. So I used to switch providers, i.e. email services more than most people because I get fed up with one dial in provider and I cancel. I go to another one, I cancel, I go to another one, I cancel. So I finally said, Forget this, I’m going to register a domain which I still have to this day.

Rob Cairns (00:09:15) – And then that was kind of my foray in. And then after doing static sites, I realized WordPress was the way to go and that’s what kind of opened the door.

Cory Miller (00:09:24) – So what was your introduction to WordPress? What kind of time period did you start using?

Rob Cairns (00:09:28) – WordPress would have been about 16, 15 years ago. 16 years ago?

Cory Miller (00:09:32) – Yeah, right. Right. In its first early heyday for sure. That’s about the same time I got started with WordPress, this cool platform that you didn’t have to manage with all these HTML top software and updated 100 pages you could do with one click. Essentially this concept of content management system was really, really crazy and awesome.

Rob Cairns (00:09:53) – We all remember the famous five minute WordPress install where our our hosting providers didn’t have a one click installer like stop flashes or any of them. We had to do it ourselves, right?

Cory Miller (00:10:05) – And yeah, we did it. I mean, I’m trying to remember when I did that, if it was FTP, you know, putting it on the server.

Cory Miller (00:10:14) – Yeah, I’m trying to think back about that. I use soft tactless quite a bit in the early days, but that was magical back then. If you think about it, it’s like I want the ability to do build a website and I don’t have to learn too many technical logistics. I remember googling. What does FTP mean? That was one of our first post that I themes because I was like, if I have this question, I bet you a bunch of other people have this question. But yeah, WordPress made it easy.

Rob Cairns (00:10:40) – Yeah. I have to tell you a funny story. You appreciate being over it. I think so. I had a client years ago. It was Australian, one of my first big clients, and he didn’t see the spending the money on something like backup buddy. So the silly client came back to me and said, So write me the documentation process of tobacco and restore a website menu and document it out. And the story goes that the cost to him paying for that documentation at the time would have cost him more than a yearly license for backup money.

Rob Cairns (00:11:12) – Well, even or not. So needless to say, he became a backup buddy. Pretty convert pretty quickly. Corey.

Cory Miller (00:11:20) – So. Well, okay, so you go full time with the agency starting to do on work. I know somewhere in there was like, Hey, there’s more to just the actual website build. There’s marketing different parts around the website. Um, as you look back, you know, 15 years now, what were some of the catalytic events that help you in your agency, personal professional, WordPress, all these things. If you look back where like 3 or 4 of the things that really made the difference in your agency to where you’re now, I know you’ve been doing this a long time. I know you’ve been able to have freedom of life to do different things in your life as part of the business part of WordPress, which is always the magic, I think, WordPress. But if you look back, what are those couple of things that kind of stand out?

Rob Cairns (00:12:07) – One is I come from a family of entrepreneurs, so my mother is 78 years old, still alive and still selling houses, believe it or not. As a real estate agent, my aunt who passed away at 92, was one of the top real estate brokers for Century 21 in the Farmington, Detroit area for many, many years. First successful. I come from a family who’s done business on their own, so that helps. My father was a CFO for an insurance broker, so that helps. That helped install some money sense into me and some business sense into me. I’m also a lifelong learner. So you and I have talked over the years about how much reading I do or how much listening to other podcasts. I do believe it or not, my own podcast is not on my podcast player backdrop. I’m busy listening to everybody else’s because think you got to get a variety of point. And then kind of just people along the way. People like yourself. People like Paul. Toby Paul was a big catalyst for giving me credit and saying, you know, more than like 75% of the world.

Rob Cairns (00:13:21) – Just go after it. So Paul was really good for me around mindset more than just technical stuff, so that was good. And then things like in my life recognizing and you and I have had this conversation about mental health challenges and the whole pearls around that. You’ve been through it. I’ve been through it. We’ve talked about it very candidly together over the years. That has helped. Am probably. 200% more mental health. Healthy today in my 50s and was in my 30s. I would say that, you know.

Rob Cairns (00:14:02) – And then surrounding yourself with the right people and people like yourself, people like post others group people like, you know, people outside of the post group, people you can go to and say, Hey, I just need an ear or, Hey, I’m stuck on something technical. I should know doing that. And then kind of. A big part of all this was deciding a number of years ago that I’m such a security junkie and I always was, even when I was in health care, and I need to dive into the security space and put my time and money there.

Rob Cairns (00:14:38) – And that was a big part of it, too. And that’s how that came to birth. You mentioned, I imagine, websites as of yesterday’s count 418, believe it or not, just from an update in security perspective and growing by the day. So.

Cory Miller (00:14:53) – It’s it’s for sure become a thing in a good part of our industry and community that there’s agencies like yours and I’ve talked to a lot that that are recognized WordPress is awesome. There’s a lot of things that go into it as far as keeping those things updated. So somebody goes, Oh, I built it, you know, I built the baseball field, Field of Dreams. It’s there. Cool. Everybody’s going to come to it. There’s two sides of the coin that’s really interesting with your story. One is that updates security. Part of it got to keep the field maintained. The other side is the marketing part. I found this fascinating because you’ve got this to blend of marketing and the really the maintenance said that includes this big topic called security.

Rob Cairns (00:15:37) – Yep, it’s true. And like one of the biggest things I think agency owners don’t do well is they don’t manage their own mailing lists, let alone their client mailing lists. And email marketing has become one of my strengths over the years and think that is a big deal because the only thing you really own is your website. In your mailing list. Everything is kind of what we call rented land or other people’s land in the rules change by the day and it gets to be awful.

Cory Miller (00:16:07) – So yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. I’ve talked to a lot of people. I think a lot of the WordPress community saw one thing from my work at things, but I go, you know, one want to know the key to what we built. There’s a lot of keys, right? But one of the big keys, especially marketing, was email marketing. And I love how you said website, what you really own, the website and email address. You don’t even own the rankings. You got to keep working on those things.

Cory Miller (00:16:32) – You got to you don’t even necessarily on the traffic. You got to keep working on those things. But when you have the what click for me with email marketing, was this old school, now old school concept of direct marketing when people used to go door to door and still do of course, to sell something to that person directly. And I think that was when it clicked for me is email is direct marketing where I don’t control the algorithms and whatever tech billionaire is going to buy another of the social media platforms. But if I consistently build I was actually talking to entrepreneur last week about this, just she’s just getting started with the physical product. And I said, Hey, you know, all the jazz and the sexiness is out on the social media platforms. However, it’s a great way to get started, push them, funnel them into an email where you can still to date in 2023, directly market. It still works, but so many are adverse to it or don’t do the work to keep up their keep up, grow, maintain their email lists and use them properly.

Rob Cairns (00:17:37) – And to segment them properly. Mean the big issue is. So I’ll give you an example. I have an email list that’s running about 7500 active right now. I’ve probably got, if you count people have an open stuff in like the last 60 days and probably closer to 1200. So the key is not to send emails to your host, send them to the 7500 that are active and then every six months touch base with the other people once in a while, like because honestly, that’s waste of time and money. Like don’t put your emphasis there, but you segment your list and figure out what people want from you and who’s going to open stuff. And as a result, on that 7500, I run an open rate of about listeners about 62% on a regular basis. Which is incredible.

Cory Miller (00:18:29) – Yeah, indeed. And it all takes work. Websites, take work, emails take a work to properly do it well. So. So you know, a couple of the things I’m interested in. The last 15 years or so you’ve been doing, this is what you’ve seen kind of transition the evolution of WordPress you know, from and websites within that.

Cory Miller (00:18:53) – So you know how WordPress has gone in the last 15 years. Where do you think it is now? Where do you think it’s going in the future, what your clients are seeing and value in as part of having a great web presence? And I’m curious your thoughts on those two things. So the underlying technology has grown 15 years. We just celebrated 20th anniversary of WordPress, which is just fascinating to me. Um, and then, you know, this, this changing perception, I think growing, valuing perception of websites, the value of having a WordPress type website.

Rob Cairns (00:19:29) – So there’s a couple of things. When we all started with WordPress, you and I, it was basically a blogging platform and now we’re building these whole robust membership sites, e-commerce sites, we’re building all this stuff and it’s incredible. And people say, Oh, why don’t you go to an e-commerce platform? Well, I have to tell you, I picked up the paper today, this morning before we jumped on this call. Corey and Shopify, who we all know is one of the big e-commerce products, is in trouble with the Canadian government because they refuse to hand over shopping records to the tax people so they can go after individuals.

Rob Cairns (00:20:10) – And the cool thing about WordPress is that’s all self contained. So as we get into this privacy era, everything’s within your dashboard and you can even buy marketing solutions like Groundhog Adrian, Toby or Fluent CRM, another one that resides right inside that dashboard which protects your privacy and puts you in control. And I think that’s the whole thing about WordPress. The other big thing I’ve seen is a big change in the hosting space. And you’ll agree with me, um, what’s old is good and what hosting companies have reinvented themselves in the last while. And two I like to point out to is one over at New fold and we both of us have a mutual friend there in the name of Dave Ryan at Neufeld. So Dave and his team, I’ve had many dealings with them. They were the old endurance and they came out of that. And they’re trying to reinvent themselves by running around and buying plug ins like they bought Yoast and they bought it and doing things like that. And then important for new fold, they’ve become more community aware than they’ve ever become before.

Rob Cairns (00:21:19) – So this was not the idea of eight years ago or nine years ago. I can guarantee that. And they’ve changed. And then you take somebody like her friends up at GoDaddy and, you know, I know that team pretty well for work I’ve done, and they’ve reinvented themselves. They’ve come out of the ashes of the Danica Patrick ads, as we call them. Remember those? Could you see a sexist ad like that flying in today’s society? I don’t think so.

Cory Miller (00:21:50) – No. We’ve evolved past that for sure for for better.

Rob Cairns (00:21:55) – But they’ve also reinvented themselves. And then even in a hosting space, you got companies like Liquid Web and WP Engine and Cloud, and then you’ve got companies that were leaders that have kind of dropped off. And a company I throw into a group like that is Siteground think, you know. Ten years. Five years ago, they were great. And then somethings kind of happened. So things go cyclical. Um, in terms of the technology more, it’s worth mentioning where we’ve gone.

Rob Cairns (00:22:25) – So we’ve gone from coding and WordPress with plugins to page builders and your team and I think this is one of the first with, with your builder product, right? And themes to, to build sites. And then we got into things like headway, which we all know the story of what happened there and they were part of their problems. They were miles ahead of their time and just not adapted. And then we got into the traditional page builders like the Beaver Builders, the Yeah, Elementor, the bricks, that kind of stuff, which is prominent now. And now we’re headed to this magical thing called blocks. And you know, there’s a couple block ecosystems. The one I use is cadence. I’ve been all in with Cadence for a couple of years now. So there’s evolution, that spot. And I think we’re we’re starting to see more is WordPress is becoming more than just a publishing platform. Automattic owns Tumblr, Automattic owns pocket casts, one of the biggest pocket podcast players out there. They own the day One journal, which is a journaling app, um, would encourage anybody out there who needs a journaling product to go get it.

Rob Cairns (00:23:45) – It’s worth every penny of it, like honestly. So they’re trying to democratize that whole, the whole solution. So, so a lot that’s gone on in 20. Um.

Cory Miller (00:23:59) – Yeah, there’s a whole history there and everything you talked about. I think what stands out was the hosting industry. It’s definitely evolved, grown and a lot of money has come into WordPress hosting space in particular. You talk about new Fold in Endurance, for instance, like it’s turned over, been sold and bought so many acquisitions in the space and for good reason, because WordPress is a great platform for millions of people to build their website on. So but you know, there’s a trend there too, which is you talked about the reinvention and kind of coming out of stuff. What I’ve seen in 15 years plus years or so is. Yeah, it starts out good. Trying to claim her to get new customers. New clients, show them, you know, help them with their stuff. And it seems a lot of cyclical ness of like, okay, they reached this point where now they’re trying to really all the hosting companies, I would say, should make a profit.

Cory Miller (00:25:02) – But then there’s a swath that like, okay, increasingly trying to make it more profitable to understand part of business. However, then you see customer service and support start to kind of fade with some of that and then you get this whole, okay, they’re going down and then going up. And I’ve I’m not going to name the names, but there’s a lot there where you see the cyclical up and down of that hosting side, which isn’t always healthy for WordPress either. I get it as a business part. What they need to do for their shareholders, partners, all that kind of stuff. But it’s definitely changed from like 2008 when I think this was on a shared hosting plan for like, I don’t know, $5 a month or $10 a month at like HostGator. And it’s I’ve kind of bemoaned it some because what the effect now is the experience for the WordPress user, those people that are your clients that are using their website and there’s that up and down. They’ve had to ride some of that and it’s always not good thing for the health of the ecosystem.

Rob Cairns (00:26:06) – It’s true. And the other thing I should add to to this discussion is I think the team up at Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, has been much more receptive to comments, suggestions than ever before. And I know some people don’t feel that way, but I think we’re in really good hands with Josepha being the executive director of the WordPress project, you know, and things like that. And I know on the Gutenberg side I’ve gotten to know Matthias Venture, The Gutenberg lead a little bit and, and people like our friends Polly Hack or people like Jessica Frick over at Percival, which is an automatic company. People like that have put us in pretty good hands, frankly.

Cory Miller (00:26:52) – Yeah, my personal opinion is automatic has long term commitment to the industry and I’m really proud to have them as sponsors a lot of automatic and post status and for good reason. But you know a long term commitment to like they have had the opportunity for many years to really really monetize what WordPress is and have held back. I think this is only my personal opinion.

Cory Miller (00:27:18) – No facts really share other’s leadership there. But get go have had a long term commitment because they believe in open source, they believe in the open web and the ecosystem is healthy. When you have a diverse set of people offering services and products to that, so you get great performance. Obviously they know WordPress inside and out and then the support and those are the things that have that kind of wane over time. In any hosting company that I’ve been, that I’ve been around, I’ve had I’ve been a customer at many of the ones you talked about had clients and friends at many of the ones that you talked about. And but the consistency, I think, is what matters overall. So I agree with you. Agree. Um, okay. So we’ve talked about a whole lot of stuff. Now I want to talk I want to ask this specific question related to your clients. What are you hearing from your clients about WordPress, how they’re using their websites? Because I love talking to our agency owners because tip of the spear for me is the people out there doing the work.

Cory Miller (00:28:20) – For those people using WordPress, they might not even know or care that there’s this open source platform underneath it all. But what are you hearing from your clients about what WordPress and working with the websites?

Rob Cairns (00:28:32) – Yeah, there’s a couple things. I don’t think my clients care what’s under the hood. So by that mean they don’t care if it’s a WordPress site, if it’s a custom site, if it’s something else, as long as it gives them the results they want. So one of the things I’ve been pushing in the community for the last ten years is don’t sell the solution. Sell what it brings you. I’m a big one. Outcome or something, not how you get there. And if anybody doesn’t believe that, I suggest you go look up a guy by the name of Simon Sinek. Start with why is his book and find his Ted talk and watch it and watch it again. So sell the the what you get out of it. So that’s the first one. I also think clients hate to say are dropping the security ball big time right now.

Rob Cairns (00:29:21) – I’m working on a site right now where the client couldn’t find their backup that they were sending to a cloud drive for six days and they took them six days to find out where they put that backup. So one of the things I find with my clients is you have to help them manage their digital assets or their digital stuff, and even more so in small businesses. What happens if the business owner gets run over by a truck tomorrow? What happens if he dies tomorrow? Do you have a succession plan for your business? Do you know how to handle that? Most people don’t. So that’s a problem. And then the other thing is, I think a lot of people flock to WordPress because frankly, what are we powering now? 45% in the Internet, 50% somewhere in there. And I think that alone is a selling thing. That’s attraction. Thing is WordPress is open source. It can’t be secure the security holes every month. Well, guess what? Microsoft Windows plugs security holes on the first Tuesday every month called Patch Tuesday.

Rob Cairns (00:30:27) – And the whole business world runs on Windows more than that. Right. And they’re still plugging holes. Security is a trust factor, not a it happened or it didn’t happen.

Cory Miller (00:30:37) – So I like that because security is a non-essential part of the digital our digital world, particularly our Internet, it’s a part of it. The real question is how are the people or companies behind that making sure it’s always secure. I remember talking to a security expert. I don’t know, it’s been eight years now and they said it’s not a matter this is one that just all they do is security and they go, it’s not a matter of if we’ll get hacked, it’s when and what we’re doing continually. And I go, that’s part of the digital age. That’s where we’re at. So I love that emphasis from your point. It’s just not when it’s if. And what are you doing in the meantime to help proactively do that?

Rob Cairns (00:31:19) – And I’ll take that one more. Corey I have a saying in my business that’s not if you’ll be hacked, it’s when you’ll be hacked.

Rob Cairns (00:31:25) – And how do you recover where I take it? So I kind of look at this mess I’ve been dealing with, and a big part of the problem was the client didn’t have a site updated, the client didn’t have the PHP version updated, the client couldn’t find the backup. You see where this is going? Yep. And it’s we got to take care of those assets and we got to treat them like the they’re important. So that’s that.

Cory Miller (00:31:52) – Just like you would lock your car or your house at night or your car if you’re driving into the supermarket or the grocery store, whatever that is, you’d lock your car because, you know, you do those things. We don’t even think about those things. They’re so embedded now and we need to be doing that. I love this message. We need to be doing that with our digital assets.

Rob Cairns (00:32:11) – We’re a mutual friend of ours. You know, Kathy’s N over at K very well. And I turned to Cathy in January and said, I’m going to make you a prediction.

Rob Cairns (00:32:20) – And she said, Oh, I don’t like your predictions are usually right. And I said, I’m going to declare 2023 as a year of the vulnerability, the first week of January. And that was coming out of the whole LastPass debacle that happened. And we all know about that one. And sure enough, and I think it’s partially awareness, but I think there’s a multitude of factors and it’s kind of played out that way. The other thing I’m hearing from clients is clients don’t realize that websites have to have a budget attached to them for their business. So marketing budget and they say, Oh, we do it in house. And I say, okay, so what’s your hourly rate worth? Oh, it’s worth $40 an hour. How many hours a month do you do? Oh five. So your marketing budget is 40 times five. So that’s the other thing. Business has got to take this stuff seriously and start to budget for.

Cory Miller (00:33:17) – I love that Social Security and then budget, and that’s the mindset.

Cory Miller (00:33:21) – So, you know, a lot of the conversations I’ve been having is the recognition from clients that their website is not just valuable, it’s an integral part of how they do business. Covid accelerated a lot of that. I think it’s like, Hey, we got so many physical location, bricks and mortar type businesses realizing when you can’t actually see a person face to face. So I have two way of a way to be able to do business. So I love that it’s integral. So security, part of life budgeting, you need to budget for it just like you would any other part of your businesses in the essential part of your business. And so many of the agency owners have talked to here at Post Status, they the clients are recognizing that it’s in some of the instances, I would say more like a B2B. They see it’s at a very, very valuable part of their overall sales strategy and they value it deeply. Some run their whole operations or half operations, you know, and items and post those two, we run our whole operation through online space so it feels foreign.

Cory Miller (00:34:26) – But that’s not the way business is traditionally. It’s, you know, you go to a store, you travel, you walk, you ride in a horse and buggy or a car to get to. Things have changed. And that seems like what I’m hearing, too, is that mindset needs a change of like this is all a part of business domains, websites, all the platforms you might be on, all as important as that door that opens up into your business.

Rob Cairns (00:34:51) – 100% and then look at the criticality of it. So, for example, if you’re an e-commerce site that’s making 30,000 US a day profit, then you need a different level of support than somebody that’s got a brochure site that is out there just to be the face of their business. So you got to think about things like that, too. Very much so.

Cory Miller (00:35:12) – Okay, so security and budget. Anything else on your mind about when you when you’re working with clients and how they’re valuing their websites? Any perspectives you have to share there too.

Rob Cairns (00:35:22) – I think a lot of clients in this day and age are unrealistic and think that’s the world we live in. So it’s a very much an I want it now world. It’s I want it yesterday. There’s no patience out there like to tell you I don’t think clients are any different.

Cory Miller (00:35:39) – So. Yeah. So it’s the physical part of business, which I have a friend that has a restaurant supply business and I understand how like when you’re, you know, stove or cooktop is down, they can’t sell. And then now that okay, got to have it now. And that service side is pretty intense for them. I can see that now being applied to the business is where they see it as essential. I want to say that’s a good part, but when it comes with some mindset change of okay, we need to be able to budget for that and pay for that and, and knowing like in the middle of the night or whatever it is to have that kind of service turnaround is not always possible or realistic.

Rob Cairns (00:36:27) – And communication is a big part of it too. I don’t think some clients communicate well, don’t think some agencies communicate well. Like, for example, I’m going on vacation next Wednesday. Yay me, I’ve already sent out an email to my entire client was saying, By the way, the only thing I’ll deal with while I’m away is a website down issue. Everything else sits till I get home and just tell them upfront. Now, they might not like to hear it, but that’s you’re allowed to take time off. You’re allowed to recharge.

Cory Miller (00:36:58) – The good communication, getting ahead of it to manage those expectations? Yeah, absolutely vital. All right, Rob. Well, anything else you want to share that you’re excited about, that you’re working on or doing?

Rob Cairns (00:37:10) – I think the big thing is the security side of it. Think, think. We just got to be aware and and make sure you’re aware and if and if anybody needs help agencies otherwise reach out, be glad to help them and be involved in the community.

Rob Cairns (00:37:25) – That’s a big part of what you and I do. You do not repost status. As you know, I co-manage a large LinkedIn group with Courtney Robertson. I’ve got a podcast that’s, you know, it’s good for business awareness, but it’s also good for the community too. So get involved. The community. Somebody if you can go to a word camp, go says the guy who’s got no time to go to work. Camps right now have not been to a five check by I missed word camp Buffalo Oh boy did I take stuff for not being on that one because that was a that’s an hour and a half away. I didn’t go to Montclair this weekend because, again, I’ve got conflicts. And the other thing is, look after you and your family and look after how you feel. Look after your health. Because if you don’t do that, you can’t run your business. So keep that.

Cory Miller (00:38:14) – Absolutely. Well, thanks, Rob, for being on post staff. Appreciate your work in the community and what you do with WordPress out in the world to our story.

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

Equalize Digital, a WordPress accessibility products and services company, has added a new frontend highlighting feature to its free accessibility checker plugin, which is used to perform audits on self-hosted sites. The feature was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), through Equalize Digital’s consulting work on the new NASA websites.

Equalize Digital was contracted to perform accessibility testing, user testing with screen reader users, and provide accessibility governance recommendations.

“As part of the contract for those services, they also contracted us to develop this feature for the plugin,” Equalize Digital CEO Amber Hinds said. “They have an enterprise license but we decided in collaboration with them that we would make it a feature in the free plugin so everyone could benefit, not a paid-only feature.

“They were actually really interested in that because it’s part of their mission to give back to humanity.”

Prior to developing the frontend highlighting feature, the accessibility checker plugin only had reports inside the post edit screen, with output that is nearly indecipherable for less technical users who are not accustomed to reading HTML.

The new frontend highlighting feature makes the accessibility report’s output far more approachable for users who may not be developers. It puts a “view on page” link next to each issue found in the report, which brings users to the frontend where the element in question is highlighted with a dashed pink box. It also displays a panel that explains the issue in a way that is easier to understand as well as how to fix it.

The report in the admin has been updated as well so that it’s easier to read. A new image column displays any images related to issues and the Actions column includes a “View on Page” link leading to the issue highlighted on the frontend.

Hind said her team is working on making the tool more friendly to content creators and not just a development tool. The plugin will stay on the NASA website to help their team as they add and edit content over time.

“In the future, we’re planning to add the ability to jump to the element in the block editor as well,” Hinds said. “(That’s slightly tricky because we scan the whole page, not just the content area so we have to exclude elements created by other parts of the editor or theme.)”

“Our goal is to make accessibility testing easier for every WordPress user, not just developers,” Equalize Digital CEO Amber Hinds said. “Accessibility Checker was developed to include a robust free version with this in mind. We want to make building websites that work for people with disabilities standard practice and were excited to work with NASA to make accessibility testing reports easier for non-developers to understand and take action on. Adding this feature to the free plugin was a no-brainer for us. We’re looking forward to seeing more WordPress website owners finding and fixing accessibility problems on their websites.”

Join Ash Shaw from LightSpeed and Mitch Callahan from Saucal as they share insights from their WooCommerce agencies.

This year’s WordCamp US includes a Community Summit, an invitation-only contributor-focused event that will take place prior to the main conference on August 22-23, 2023, in National Harbor, Washington, DC. It will be the first summit in six years, since the last one was held in Paris, France in 2017.

Historically, the summit has offered contributors the rare opportunity to hold in-person discussions on important topics across teams. In order to ensure the gathering is diverse and inclusive, previous community summit organizers have included a travel assistance program to remove the financial barriers of attending.

The 2023 Community Summit travel fund is providing $48,000 in travel assistance, thanks to a group of sponsors that includes Automattic, A2 Hosting, Elementor, and Weglot. The funding will support 38 attendees with roundtrip transportation ($31K for 24 people) and hotel stays ($16,500 for 66 hotel nights for 22 people).

Attendees have been reminded about the non-attribution guideline which enables the event to offer a safe and inclusive environment for collaboration where comments are not attributed to specific individuals. Discussions, photographs, recaps, and summaries can be shared as long as they abide by the non-attribution guideline.

The schedule has been published, featuring 26 discussion topics. Contributors will have dedicated sessions to discuss the criteria for delaying the upgrade of foundational tech, understanding contributor leadership roles, refining Five for the Future for a robust WordPress community, accessibility in the WordPress project, open source participation in global legislation, backwards compatibility in Gutenberg, among other interesting topics that lend themselves to cross-team collaboration.

The WP Community Collective (WPCC), a non-profit organization created to support individual WordPress contributors and community-led initiatives, has funded its first fellowship. Alex Stine, a fully blind individual contributor who has been working with the WordPress Accessibility team since 2016, is the first recipient of the funds designated for the fellowship.

WPCC reports that the fellowship received donations from 59 individuals and organizations that want to support the cause of improving the open source project’s accessibility. The organization uses Open Collective as the fiscal sponsor for its 501(c)3 status, enabling donations to be classified as charitable giving. All donations coming into the organization are transparent and publicly documented.

The fellowship provides Stine with five paid contribution hours per week for six months, which allows him to continue his work on accessibility reviews and patches in WordPress core. It includes a travel stipend for WordCamp US where Stine is volunteering as a co-organizer and participating in the Community Summit. As the first to embark on a WPCC fellowship, Stine will also help establish a framework for future Accessibility Fellowship cohorts.

“I am really excited for the future as this will allow me to commit real time to improving the project,” Stine said. “The support I received from the community shows me there are others who recognize the importance of accessibility.

“Time itself is the biggest win here. The funding allows me to focus more of my day on WordPress and less on side work. The main projects include the Gutenberg post editor.”

Stine recently conducted an accessibility audit of Gutenberg, which shows the current state of the block editor in WordPress 6.3. This video is very enlightening for anyone who hasn’t yet seen how Gutenberg works with assistive technology like a screen reader.

Stine has performed many accessibility audits for different products in the WordPress ecosystem. The fellowship funds enable him to continue his contributions on existing WordPress open source accessibility initiatives without having to take on as much consulting work.

“Alex has demonstrated a deep commitment to creating an inclusive experience for all WordPress users,” WPCC co-founder and president Sé Reed said. “We are delighted by the community’s willingness to invest both in Alex and in the future of WordPress accessibility. In supporting his work, we aim to improve accessibility across the entire project, from the core software to the greater WordPress community.”

Jonny Martin from Built Mighty joins Robert, Robert and Mary Voelker from WooCommerce in this Woo AgencyChat.

Earlier this year, WordPressers around the globe united to celebrate 20 years of community and innovation. There were parties, blogs, videos, and social media posts aplenty. And, of course, the trending hashtag, “#WP20”.

Throughout April and May, community members reflected on their journeys – what brought them to WordPress and its personal meaning. The stories, tweets, and videos were inspiring, nostalgic, and even humorous at times. There was swag, and the cakes were epic.

Let’s take a look!

Bits & Bytes

Snapshots from WP20 Celebrations

Props

Some More Fun

A WordPress event is not complete without a Wapuu, and not only was there one, but there was a whole campaign to color it in! Thanks to Em DeRosia for creating the commemorative Wapuu!

The Marketing team ran an interactive campaign, From Blogs to Blocks, a series of prompts across 20 days for WordPress enthusiasts to celebrate all-things WordPress.

Additional campaigns took place on social media and included prompting folks to share their favorite WordPress memory and most cherished WordPress swag item, to highlight the 21 contributing teams, and even to share a birthday greeting.

We had lots of digital goodies too! From 3D desktop wallpaper, to selfie-props for the celebrations, and more. You can download them here.

Got Swag? Need Swag?

See you in five years for the 25th!

group.one, a European cloud hosting and digital marketing services provider, has acquired the BackWPup, Adminimize, and Search & Replace plugins from Inpsyde. Together the products have more than 1.1 million active installs and will join group.one’s growing portfolio of WordPress products, which include WP Rocket, Imagify, and Rank Math SEO.

“This sale lets us concentrate on our core competencies and work more closely with our clients, like PayPal, Payoneer, and Mollie, providing the know-how to develop and reach their full potential with new avenues for advancement,” Inpsyde CEO Alex Frison said.

The acquired plugins will be managed by the development team at WP Media, one of group.one’s brands, expanding its offerings beyond optimization and SEO to include backup and site management capabilities.

“Backup and recovery solutions are crucial to protect websites against data loss and we look forward to further developing BackWPup, along with Adminimize and Search & Replace,” group.one CEO Daniel Hagemeier said. “Together with WordPress hosting from WP.one and one.com, and our flagship products WP Rocket, Imagify, and Rank Math SEO, WordPress users can now come to group.one to optimize, secure, maintain and promote their online presence.”

When asked what specific features are being prioritized on the immediate roadmap, group.one representative Simon Kraft said “the smooth transition over to WP Media” is their focus following the sale. He was unable to comment on whether the commercial versions of the acquired plugins would be subject to any pricing changes.

WordPress.org’s support forums are a vital resource and communication tool for users supporting their own sites and developers extending the software. Visiting the forums often means users have gotten stuck somehow and need to have a successful support experience in order to continue on their WordPress journeys. They are looking for help deciphering the meaning of error messages, migrating sites, debugging their sites after an update, and many other common struggles of self-hosting.

A ticket on Meta trac, which was opened three weeks ago, proposes that WordPress.org remove auto-closure from support forum threads and instead add a warning that the thread is old. Threads currently auto-close six months after last reply, unless manually closed sooner than that.

Amber Hinds, plugin author and CEO of Equalize Digital, made a case for instances where it is necessary to respond to an old thread:

Hinds referenced a conversation on Post Status’ Slack where Matt Mullenweg recommended removing the closure for old threads completely and adding a warning in its place:

Not all participants in the discussion are in favor of leaving support tickets open. Several contributors contended that this approach can lead to unproductive replies piling up or multiple people jumping in on threads with similar unrelated issues, making it difficult for developers to solve the original request.

“Old topics mostly attract spam, me-too-pile’ons and random replies,
its very rare when an actual reply is needed to something that has no activity for six months,” WordPress support forums moderator Yui said.

“Current policy is to leave such topics closed, however, making an exclusion and manually reopen it at request can be made possible when the reasons for it are compelling (It can be discussed on Support team weekly chat, if needed).”

WordPress accessibility contributor Joe Dolson is in favor of giving plugin authors the ability to determine when a thread gets closed, a modification that partially addresses the issues at play.

“It would help alleviate it to give plugin authors the ability to close a thread,” Dolson said. “Though when you have thousands of open support threads, that would still be a pretty significant potential burden.

“I think there should be a better way of handling closed support threads – it’s a problem that auto-closed threads literally *cannot* be re-opened because they’ll just auto-close again. But I’m dubious about just leaving them open.

“At the least, I think that removing the auto-closing *must* come with some ability for plugin authors to close threads; otherwise this would become totally unmanageable.”

Changing thread closure policy could also impact the metric displayed on plugins, indicating how many issues have been marked as resolved in the last two months. If more people are allowed to jump in on threads with them open, the resolved threads metric may not be as meaningful.

Hinds recommends a hybrid approach, keeping auto-close in place but allowing plugin contributors to reopen threads, restarting the clock for auto-closure.

“I discovered 12 support tickets yesterday on a plugin I had not realized we were not subscribed to, which I want to at least comment on to see if they still need help,” Hinds said. “I can’t do this. It’s a frustrating experience for me and clearly a poor user experience for the original poster or anyone else who encounters that thread with a similar problem.

“Another option might be to auto-close them but add a button that allows them to be reopened by plugin contributors that sets another six-month (or maybe a shorter time period) timeline before auto-close.”

It’s easy to forget that most people do have a vast network of WordPress professionals available to answer questions for them on Twitter or other networks, so the forums remain an important lifeline for users. Contributors have not yet come to a decision about whether leaving threads open for longer will provide a better experience or not. The discussion on changing the auto-close policy continues on Meta trac.

Listen to Courtney Patubo Kranzke, Sean Blakely, Jonathan Desrosiers, Sumner Davenport and Destiny Kanno.

Here tips and teasers from George Woodard, Danielle Zacaro, Hari Shanker, Aid Correa-Jackson, Ryan Smith and Shambi Broome

Hello, my name is Jennifer Farhat, and I reside in Burnaby, a charming city nestled in British Columbia, Canada. My role as a Frontend Engineer at WebDevStudios, an amazing and globally distributed company entirely devoted to WordPress, allows me to collaborate with a diverse team across the world. Today, I’m excited to share my journey with you.

I was born In the enchanting land of Venezuela, a South American gem renowned for its warm-hearted people and diverse climate, It has snow-dusted landscapes in Mérida, gentle plains of Los Llanos, and the sun-soaked beaches along the eastern shores.

Before my journey to British Columbia, I enjoyed a vibrant life on Margarita Island, often dubbed the “pearl of the Caribbean.” This paradise on earth nurtured my passion for tennis from a young age. I climbed the ranks and became one of the top players in my country. Transitioning into a Tennis Coach, I imparted my knowledge to players of all ages. This continued even as I pursued my studies in computer science, graduating in 2010.

My path intertwined with WordPress, a platform I quickly grew to adore. The company I worked for began embracing it, using WordPress to cater to our clients’ needs.

However, the backdrop of my homeland’s struggles was undeniable. By 2016, the economic and political turmoil had escalated. Basic essentials became hard to find, despite having the means to acquire them. This dire scenario pressed upon my family, particularly my eight-month-old daughter who faced shortages of formula and diapers. The pivotal moment arrived in August 2016 when my family and I embarked on a tough choice – leaving our homeland. Our journey took us through Colombia before finally settling in the picturesque city of Vancouver, where reality felt like a picture-perfect postcard.

The initial phase was an uphill battle, marked by paperwork hurdles and employment challenges due to our uncertain legal status. Just when we were about to give up and were contemplating leaving Vancouver, an opportunity surfaced – centered around WordPress. This newfound role not only offered the means to secure legal status but also laid the foundation for a brighter future for my daughter and my two-year-old son, who was born in our new home years later.

It empowered me to craft a better life for my family. In return, I remain dedicated to contributing to the community that has given me so much, knowing that my efforts will always fall short of the boundless generosity I’ve received.

Una nueva vida gracias a WordPress

Hola, mi nombre es Jennifer Farhat, y actualmente resido en Burnaby, una encantadora ciudad ubicada en British Columbia, Canadá. Mi rol como Frontend Engineer en WebDevStudios, una asombrosa empresa 100% remota a nivel global completamente dedicada a WordPress, me permite colaborar con un equipo diverso alrededor del mundo. Hoy, estoy emocionada por compartir mi historia.

Nací en el maravilloso país de Venezuela, una joya sudamericana reconocida por su gente cálida y su clima variado. Cuenta con paisajes diversos, desde la increíble Mérida, las suaves llanuras en Los Llanos y hasta playas bañadas por el sol en las costas orientales.

Antes de mi travesía a British Columbia, disfruté de una vida vibrante en la Isla de Margarita, a menudo llamada “la perla del Caribe”. Este paraíso en la tierra nutrió mi pasión por el tenis desde joven. Escalé posiciones y me convertí en una de las mejores jugadoras de mi país. Pase luego a ser Entrenadora de Tenis, compartiendo mis conocimientos con jugadores de todas las edades. Esto continuó mientras estudiaba en la Universidad, graduándome en 2010.

Mi camino se entrelazó con WordPress, una plataforma que rápidamente llegué a adorar. La empresa para la que trabajaba comenzó a adoptarla, usando WordPress para atender las necesidades de nuestros clientes.

Sin embargo, la situación por la que pasaba mi país era innegable. Hacia 2016, los problemas económicos y políticos habían escalado. Productos de básica necesidad se volvieron difíciles de encontrar. Esta difícil situación afectó a mi familia, particularmente a mi hija de ocho meses que enfrentaba escasez de fórmula y pañales. El momento crucial llegó en agosto de 2016, cuando mi familia y yo tomamos la difícil decisión de dejar nuestra patria. Nuestro viaje nos llevó primero a Colombia y finalmente a la pintoresca ciudad de Vancouver, donde parece que uno vive dentro de una un postal perfecta.

La fase inicial fue una batalla cuesta arriba, marcada por obstáculos y desafíos laborales debido a nuestra incierta situación legal. Justo cuando estábamos a punto de rendirnos y pensábamos en dejar Vancouver, surgió una oportunidad de trabajo centrada en WordPress. Este nuevo rol no solo ofreció los medios para asegurar un estatus legal, sino que también sentó las bases para un mejor futuro para mi hija y mi hijo de dos años, quien nació años después en nuestro nuevo hogar.

Me permitió forjar una vida mejor para mi familia. A cambio, estoy comprometida a contribuir a la comunidad que tanto me ha dado, sabiendo que mis esfuerzos siempre quedarán cortos frente a la generosidad sin límites que he recibido.

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case Guildenberg, what it is and how it aims to help product owners.

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If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

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If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you, and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox and use the form there.

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So on the podcast today we have Jonathan Wold.

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Jonathan has been deeply involved in the WordPress community for almost two decades. He began writing tutorials and freelancing, which eventually died him to the agency world, where he worked on large enterprise projects. In the past five to six years, Jonathan has shifted his focus to the broader WordPress ecosystem. He’s also had the opportunity to work at WooCommerce and collaborate with the team at Automattic. Despite the demands of his busy career, Jonathan’s passion for WordPress has only grown stronger over the years.

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Jonathan is one of the co-founders of Guildenberg, and in the podcast today we discuss what this project is and how it aims to revolutionize the WordPress product ecosystem.

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We start the conversation by highlighting the importance of behavior in the WordPress community and the core values that drive the platform. Autonomy, meritocracy, utility, and giving credit where credit is due. Jonathan emphasizes the significance of giving credit to the original creators of work, even though it may not be legally required.

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We move on to talk about how Guildenberg aims to solve some of the key problems faced by WordPress product owners, such as monetization, compatibility and distribution. Jonathan envisions a system where product owners pay a fee for distribution of their products. With a portion of that revenue going back to the Guildenberg project. By aligning incentives and providing economic motivations for contributors, Guildenberg seeks to create a sustainable and thriving ecosystem for the open web.

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We get into the inspiration behind the name Guildenberg, which combines the idea of Gutenberg and the guild institutions from medieval Europe.

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We also discussed the team’s longterm vision of creating an app store for WordPress that spans the majority of installations, offering monetization options, and enforcing compatibility standards.

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If you’re a WordPress developer, who’s keen to find a way to create visibility for your product this podcast is for you.

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If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to. WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

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And so without further delay, I bring you Jonathan Wold.

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I am joined on the podcast today by Jonathan Wold. Hello, Jonathan.

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[00:03:58] Jonathan Wold: Hey Nathan, how are you?

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[00:04:00] Nathan Wrigley: Very good. Jonathan’s joining us, I think, for the second time on the Jukebox podcast. We’re going to have an in depth conversation about something which is close to his heart. It’s called Guildenberg. I’m going to make a link in the show notes to an article which I think probably would be a wise idea to read to give you some perspective.

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Before we begin and dive into the subject matter though, Jonathan just tell us who you are. Tell us about your WordPress journey.

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[00:04:27] Jonathan Wold: So I’ve been immersed in the world of WordPress now for about 18 years. I started out writing tutorials and I did a bunch of freelance early on. Spent a couple of years in the agency world doing some big enterprise stuff. And then spent the past five, six years or so focused on the ecosystem more broadly.

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I also got to spend some time at WooCommerce. The lovely folks over at Automattic, and yeah it’s been quite nonstop for me. I think a good indicator is that I like WordPress even more 18 years later than I did when I started. And I think that the community is a massive part of that. That’s what got me hooked initially.

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Folks on the .org forums answering my questions and showing me, oh wow, there’s something about this like open source space. And not just open source, but WordPress specifically that drew me. And yeah never looked back.

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[00:05:23] Nathan Wrigley: Great, thank you. So we’re going to be talking about something called Guildenberg. I’m going to repeat that word, Guildenberg. It’s not the word that I’m used to saying, which is Gutenberg. So we’ve got the berg bit, that’s the same. But then we’ve got this guild bit at the beginning and I guess maybe Europeans, I don’t know, maybe I’m mischaracterizing that, but it feels like Europeans who have a thirst for historical knowledge perhaps know what guilds are.

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I don’t know if it was something that came across the pond to North America, but did it? And if it didn’t, what are guilds?

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[00:05:57] Jonathan Wold: So that’s a fun way to frame it. So first I’ll call out that one of the things that I’ve loved about this community. Because it is by default, like international in nature, I’ve had the privilege of being exposed to a lot of ideas that might not have been as prevalent to me with my North American base otherwise.

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I can’t recall where the concept of the guild first came up, but where I went to immediately was reading about the history of guilds in Europe, right? That’s the foundation for a lot of my initial thinking about this. Here in the States we have the concept of unions, which has some parallels, but it’s focused more on trade and specific lines of work.

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Yeah my basis for this was reading about the history of guilds in Europe. The positives and the negatives from a few different perspectives and I found that super helpful.

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[00:06:49] Nathan Wrigley: I think at least anyway, that the guild traditionally was an organization which would bind together people who did a very similar thing. So, for example, you might have, I don’t know, a printer’s guild. Or you might have a blacksmith’s guild or something like that. And it would be a kind of club, for want of a better word, of people so that they could share their experience. They could share their knowledge. They could keep up to date with what the other people were doing. I think I’ve got that right.

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[00:07:18] Jonathan Wold: Yes, and it’s curious too that just by the nature of who’d be involved you’d often have competitors. Yet they were working together. There’s benefits and trade offs, right? But overall though the idea is that they’d work together to improve the quality of their work.

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So you had guilds that took this quite far where they also have seals that, you know, used by the guild to say okay, we have a quality approval here. Others who it was more loose, like an association where we’re supporting each other, sharing ideas, et cetera. Some got pretty heavy into regulating production and monitoring, and there’s a lot of different facets of it.

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The heart of it though, and my primary interest is facilitating cooperation in what would otherwise be a decentralized space. And many of these just somewhat by their nature, the folks who’d be involved in these guilds, they were individual entrepreneurs doing their own things and decided to come together to facilitate cooperation, collaboration around opportunities of mutual interest.

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[00:08:21] Nathan Wrigley: So you’ve put a article together. It was written at the latter part of last year, August, 2022. It’s called a Guild for WordPress Businesses. And helpfully you start out explaining your knowledge of what a guild is. But the intention of that really is to begin the conversation in which you propose, perhaps there should be a WordPress businesses guild. And you’ve come up with the name Guildenberg which for obvious reasons, kind of fits the ecosystem just perfectly.

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Now in order to have a solution to something, presumably you have to have a problem for it to be solving. So again, right near the top of the article you outline three problems which you see going on in the WordPress product business space at the moment.

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Now I could introduce them but I feel it’s probably better to just hand it over to you and you tell us what your thoughts are.

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[00:09:11] Jonathan Wold: So quick shout out to my co founder Anna Maria Radu. She came up with the name, and it was a fun process. Like what are we going to call this thing? And she’s the one who picked it up and combined the idea of Gutenberg and the guild together. So she gets that credit, among many other credits.

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The key starting point here was like what problems are we setting to work on, right? And it was that problem set that we’ll touch on in a moment that became the basis for saying, okay, what construct could we use to solve these? And that’s where the concept of the guild began to fit in.

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So within WordPress specific product businesses, and I think that’s important to call out too. I care about the agency space, I have a lot of context and background for that. But what I think, let me take a step back. For about five, six years now I’ve been thinking more and more about WordPress as an ecosystem, and thinking about, okay, what are some of the leverage points?

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What are ways that we can grow and improve this ecosystem? And for me that matters because of the position that WordPress takes within the context of the open web. I believe that the healthier our ecosystem is, the better it is for the web.

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I like the proprietary platforms that they hold. They can foster innovation. They can bring clear value. I don’t want to see a web though dominated by proprietary platforms. And so I look at WordPress’ place today, it’s great in terms of its market share. We want to see it become even healthier and stronger, and be in a place where the proprietary and open source are meeting together. But there’s a balance of power there.

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So that’s a starting point. What can we do to grow the ecosystem and make it stronger? At first, and for several years, I was quite convinced that helping hosting companies work together was going to be how we move the ecosystem forward. I still think that’s a piece of the puzzle.

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But what I focused on, what I realised, in that process is that you have to figure out a way to align incentives. And there were some inherent problems with facilitating cooperation amongst the hosts. And that could be a whole topic in and of itself. What I ended up settling on though is that of the three primary business groups in the ecosystem, you have the service providers, that’s your agencies and freelancers, you have the hosting providers, and you have the product companies.

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I believe that the product companies have the greatest opportunity for leverage, to grow and improve the ecosystem. Because they’re the ones that are directly touching, okay so there’s that idea that they have the greatest leverage. And I think that the reason why is when you look at WordPress through this framing of being an operating system for creating on the open web, which is something that Matt Mullenweg has been talking about for years now. He first introduced that idea.

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If you think about WordPress as an operating system, and then you think about the products as being on the app store, that’s where I think it starts to come into perspective.

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You need a whole ecosystem of hosting providers and service providers, but the products are like the apps that bring the core value. And if you think about it there’s very few people these days who would use WordPress without any plugins, without any apps, if you will.

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And so I ended up settling on, okay, product companies are the key leverage point for being able to grow and strengthen the ecosystem. So what problems do they have? And there are three problems that stand out to me that are faced by product companies in the space. And I’m going to focus first on those that are just WordPress specific. SaaS is another category but they have some of their own, they have a different set of problems.

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For WordPress founders the first one is what I just call like monetisation. This category of monetisation. A lot of folks who grew up in the WordPress space, created products, often had developer backgrounds. Monetisation has been something that we’ve struggled with. Whether it’s pricing, whether it’s business model, whether it’s just that we’re copying someone else who didn’t get that figured out. We tend to be poorly monetised in the space.

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And the key here is it’s misaligned with value. There are end users, for instance, that look at the price of a WordPress product and don’t trust it. You’re telling me that I’m going to build my business on this product that only costs a couple hundred dollars. I’m supposed to have confidence in that when the SaaS counterparts are thousands of dollars.

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So there’s more to it than that. It’s great to be able to pass on value to the end users but it needs to be a conscious decision. And a lot of times folks making decisions on monetisation don’t have a strong basis for it. And they’re not focused on aligning with value to the end user. They’re just picking an arbitrary price. So that’s problem one.

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Problem two is compatibility. And it’s this idea that a lot of these products just don’t work well together. Not because they don’t intend to but because there’s so many different ways of doing things. There aren’t any shared, well there are intentions towards shared standards, but there’s missing alignment of interest to actually enforce those standards and improve them.

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It’s like product developers will do so because they care about it, but those tend to be the minority. And oftentimes some of the most popular plugins don’t do that. It’s a lot of work and there’s not a lot of incentive to make things all work well together.

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The last one, and I think the one that shows the most, that sticks out the most, that’s the most pressing, the most problematic for folks, is distribution.

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You have these products that solve a clear problem for their audience. There’s a clear value proposition. They have that, what we’d call product market fit. And yet the majority of their addressable market within the WordPress ecosystem has no idea that they even exist. According to WebPro’s data we have 92 million active WordPress sites.

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And on the one hand, if you’re building a product in the WordPress space that’s fantastic, right? You have a massive addressable market that you can get to. But on the other, there’s no clear cut way today to actually get to that addressable market. For the simple fact that all of those 92 million are spread out over thousands of different hosting companies, who are somewhat effectively their own ecosystems in and of themselves.

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[00:15:15] Nathan Wrigley: Makes perfect sense. So let’s deal with those in turn. The monetisation piece where you talk about the fact that businesses are often either undervaluing their offering, or there’s a perceived, prejudice is the wrong word, but just the idea that things in the WordPress ecosystem ought to be cheap, everybody else is cheap so I should probably be cheap because I need to undercut my main competitor.

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I don’t really have any insight into the world outside of WordPress, so I don’t really know how far that argument carries. Perhaps you do? What I’m really asking for there is a bit of clarification. Are we orders of magnitude behind in terms of the value that we put on our products? Are we, for example, charging a fifth, a quarter, a third of what you might typically find elsewhere?

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[00:16:02] Jonathan Wold: So it depends. I would say at least from what I’ve observed and my sense of things on just the small business front, we’re behind but not terribly behind. Where it really starts to show up is with mid market and enterprise pricing. If we even go that far, right?

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Like enterprise certainly makes use of WordPress and there’s a pretty big disconnect overall between value and price and business model even. And just for instance, offering enterprise level support.

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It’s hard to pin down because sometimes it will be based on verticals, like you’ll have a WordPress creator or WordPress product that will focus on a particular vertical. But they’re not really matching the expectations in that vertical. It’s all over the board. On the one hand, it’s delightfully autonomous, people have the freedom to do whatever they want.

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The real problem that I see with this is that they’re not explicitly aligning it with value to that end user, which can vary. An enterprise, for instance, they have a whole different, they’re doing millions of dollars a month in revenue and the plugin that they’re using as a basis for that is only a couple hundred dollars, that kind of scares them, right? Like how do we know that we’re gonna get the support that we need? And the author hasn’t even necessarily considered that.

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[00:17:17] Nathan Wrigley: It is interesting as well, you were talking about products that were in the region of sort of $200 and presumably that was the sort of southern estimate. But it’s not difficult to find plugins that are considerably cheaper than that as well. You know the number 49 and 47 dollars for a license, for a single site license, for something might be something that you see all over the place. And it does beg the question, how many of those licenses does a product developer need to move in order for their business to become worthwhile to them?

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You know if you’re going to be putting in the time to have that as your single focus, which in many cases I’m sure the developers would love to have. You really do have to be shifting tens of thousands of those, for support and all of the things that go along with that. So yeah, I think undervalued is an interesting term there.

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[00:18:08] Jonathan Wold: And it’s interesting. Some folks might infer from this that, oh we just want to like price fix the ecosystem. Like no that’s not interesting to me at all. I love folks having the autonomy to price whatever they want to. What I’m concerned about, because it’s also a good way to drive innovation too, right?

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If you’re going to charge more it should be tied to value. It’s not just about extracting. It’s how do you align with additional value to the end user? And just the general challenge I see, and I think this is one that we solve through education and through modeling, is developers and product owners, entrepreneurs who just aren’t asking the right questions, and aren’t focused on that value piece.

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That’s like oh okay, well my competitors are generally doing this so I’ll just do less. Or they’ll think oh if I just do less I’ll get more volume. But they’re not considering the longterm consequences of charging less, and whether they’ll be able to support it longterm.

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So it’s a problem that we solve I think through education and through better examples in the space, and we’re starting to get more of those. But I just wanted to point out it’s not like I just want everyone to increase their prices. I want people to align with value for the end users. And a lot of cases that does include increasing your prices so that you can provide more value to them. But that’s not always the case. Sometimes it’s keep the price low.

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[00:19:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And then compatibility was the second point that you mentioned. This is really curious, isn’t it? Because I guess if you’re developing your own SaaS platform, really you don’t have any compatibility problems. You simply need to develop your own stack and you can ship whatever you like, whenever you like. So that doesn’t exist.

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But also if you are building on top of, let’s say WordPress’ rivals, for example Wix or Squarespace or Shopify. Again, you’ve really only got one target to worry about. And that’s what Wix are doing and what Shopify are doing. So long as you’re keeping abreast of all of that, you’re good to go.

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Whereas, as you say, in the WordPress space, 60,000 plus I think it is at the moment, WordPress plugins, the combinations there are almost infinite. And that really can upset your business. I would imagine that a typical WordPress company support channel is constantly filled up with emails saying, well I’ve got these plugins and they don’t seem to work together, what do I do? And yeah, what do you do? So yeah, this is interesting endeavor.

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[00:20:21] Jonathan Wold: This especially shows up with the hosting providers, right? They’re the ones who often hear this first from the end users. And it’s a bit classic, right? If something’s not working, a lot of times folks will, one of the standard advice is well try to disable all the plugins and then kind work backwards from there. Which is a bit of a nightmare scenario really. To uninstall all your apps, I’m like what I don’t to do that. Like I picked these, there’s a reason for all this.

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So this often comes up with hosts and compatibility is overall in all my conversations with hosts, like one of, if not the number one cost centre for WordPress is stuff that just doesn’t work together.

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And again, I think that the core problem here is aligning incentives. It’s open source. One of the things we love about WordPress is the flexibility to do whatever we want. What often happens, and there’s benefits to this, but you’ll have developers who will do their own custom interfaces. They’ll try some new things. They’ll bring this thing, this development practice in or that one. They’ll try to use this SDK or something else. Like it’s just all over the board.

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The flexibility is great, but the trade off really shows up on the compatibility front where these things just don’t work together. And there’s a lot of cost to the end user or to the developer, when they’re trying to make things work with someone else. Including just a lot that’s outside of their control entirely. You could care about compatibility, put in all the effort, maybe you even create a patch for some other plugin author, and there’s no guarantee they’ll ever do anything with it.

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[00:21:47] Nathan Wrigley: That’s true. I speak to developers fairly frequently, some of whom do literally patch other people’s plugins so that they can get their support ticket queue down to zero. Yeah that’s really interesting. I guess the model that we would love to have, on the one hand, would be something akin to you know the Apple ecosystem where if an app is literally crashing the iPhone, Apple will just remove it from the ecosystem until it’s mended.

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Now that’s brilliant in the one sense that you can just get rid of all problems with the flick of one switch. But the downside of that is that system is about as closed as it possibly gets, and 30% of the revenue goes to Apple in that case. So swings and roundabouts really. Seemingly this is going to be a really difficult one to tackle.

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So is your endeavor around compatibility really just promoting what compatibility is? And just letting people know what the guidelines are for developing things and just making people good citizens of the WordPress development landscape.

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[00:22:45] Jonathan Wold: That’s a part of it, but I really think we have to align incentives. Let’s talk about the app store piece. My longterm vision, so on the one hand, I’m okay with this looking like any number of things so I’m not caught up on the details of it. But like my longterm vision and what we’re laying the groundwork now with Gildenberg is for there to be a quote unquote app store that spans 80% of all the WordPress installs out there. That solves a lot of these problems built into it, right?

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You’d have the monetisation piece taken care of by just accounting for standard models and having examples, etc. You’d have compatibility built in by having standards that are enforced at that submission level. If you’re going to be in this app store you have to follow these standards and guidelines and best practices. There’s a review process, etc.

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The incentive is there because you’re offering distribution. They’re like yeah this is worth doing. A developer is like yeah we’ll align around this shared standard which is ideally community created because we want the distribution on the other side of this.

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Now no one has to do it. This is I think where the difference shows up between what Apple has done. And there’s some comparisons to like, what do you have in the Android ecosystem? Our goal is not a hundred percent. Our goal is just the majority of WordPress installs. There’ll always be people who don’t want it.

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But it’s more than enough to be significant and to create those aligned incentives for folks to say oh yeah I’m going to follow these standards. And we get the, I don’t want to just have guidelines and playbooks and things that kind of on their own. There needs to be real incentives for people to do it. And distribution to me is the big incentive.

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[00:24:23] Nathan Wrigley: So distribution then, which is the third part, you mentioned it in terms of the 40 plus percent of the web which is using WordPress. And I think I’m right in saying that, is this really around discoverability as much as anything else? It’s trying to get traction for your product in a marketplace where you’re up against thousands of people. So if a guild were to be created there would at least be some structure, some formal network that you could rely upon to help spread the word if you like.

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[00:24:50] Jonathan Wold: Yeah it’s a combination of things. Discoverability is one of them and there’s different ways that you solve that. But .org for all the things that it does well is not built around, nor incentivized to solve, commercial interest problems. Not today at least, not that it couldn’t be in the future.

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The plugin review team is volunteer led. We have specific guidelines for specific reasons. And while we want to see growth and improvement there’s only so much that you can expect given the incentives, right? Like it’s volunteers and they work really hard to be as agnostic and neutral as possible. And at the end of the day, just from a end users and a product perspective, from a product perspective being listed on .org is no guarantee that you’ll be discovered by anyone, right? It’s par for the course, but .org is not trying to solve the discoverability problem. And ultimately plenty of folks get stuff like outside of .org.

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[00:25:49] Nathan Wrigley: So the idea then behind all of those three problems is that you’ve got a potential solution, this idea of a guild.

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So let’s move on to that then and describe what that guild looks like. Again, I guess it’s probably apropos right now to say you have not really fixed upon these ideas. This is the beginning of this conversation.

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You presumably would love for people having heard this podcast get back in touch with you and say I like this idea. I want to put my idea to you, see if we can take it in this direction. But yeah just outline what is the guild that you would hope to build? What are the designs that you’ve got behind it?

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[00:26:22] Jonathan Wold: The core idea right is to say okay what vehicle, what construct, is best suited to solving these three problems? It’s all rooted in this idea of finding and aligning incentives. So the App Store vision is the North Star. And the idea behind Guildenberg is okay, how do we lay a foundation for these things?

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So what I’ve been focused on over the past year or so with my co founders is, what’s the right economic engine for this? Like there’s a ton of stuff that we want to do. We want to create playbooks, open source things, facilitate just a bunch of stuff in the space. I’m super interested in how this connects to Five for the Future.

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And for all of that it’s like we need a strong economic engine that enables us, that aligns with value, that builds momentum in the right direction and enables us to do these things. And in my piece I originally outlined some different ideas on revenue models et cetera.

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What’s become clearer since, and what I’m focused on now is this the distribution problem itself. Like monetisation and compatibility, those are things that are going to become clearer with time. What I’m focused on now is okay, how do we start helping products today grow through distribution? And distribution itself then becomes our core economic engine. That’s the business of Gildenberg Inc, Gildenberg .com if you will.

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And so basically what we do today is we take products, we onboard them, we evaluate, review things, give them guidance, give them a roadmap. And then we help those products get distribution deals with hosting providers. And we’re basically the ones facilitating that.

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And so the idea, and I’m curious to see where it evolves, is to say okay let’s solve those three problems now and do so in a way that lets us build momentum and scale over time. And I think there’s a lot of things yet to be worked out and much of that’s going to come through who we work with, right?

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So right now it’s a small group of products, but I’m rapidly expanding that. And with each new product that comes in, where they’re bringing new ideas, new questions. The heart of this has been how do we create something that naturally builds on itself as we have success with what’s in front of us?

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[00:28:34] Nathan Wrigley: The model that you’ve just described is you’re building this, as a company comes in you’ll onboard them and give them the benefits that you can provide at the moment. Presumably the idea is that over time more and more of these will come on.

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And then you will have some kind of quorum of companies, enough to make this guild have enough clout out there so that you’re widely recognized. The name is out there. Everybody knows there’s benefits in this. But you’re in that kind of onboarding phase.

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Now it strikes me that if I were to join a guild, maybe there’s a piece of me coming to you that would have some sort of exclusionary principle in the back of my mind. In other words, okay I am, I don’t know, let’s say I’m an SEO plugin or something like that. And I’m thinking to myself, I’m seeing Guildenberg all over the place. This looks like something I could be a part of. But I want to be the SEO person. How do we work around that?

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Because I think in the traditional guild structure that was part of the deal, right? You got to be part of the guild and then you were the person in and we closed the door a little bit behind you because you’re living in that geographical area or whatever it may be.

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So the way to describe that here would be, okay you’re the SEO plugin. You’re the form plugin. You’re the speed optimization plugin. From the article that I’ve read you don’t want to do that. You want to welcome as many people in as you can, but from a product point of view, I guess I’d be thinking well I don’t really want to be in a guild with all my competitors.

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[00:30:03] Jonathan Wold: That’s a great question. And I think this is a good example where like the guild framing is, I think, the right framing for how we facilitate cooperation and collaboration amongst peers and that includes competitors.

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The piece of it though that puts it all in perspective is the app store direction, right? Like an app store that only has one SEO plugin for instance, I would argue and I think most people would agree, is not the best for the end users, right? And this is certainly the case for the hosting providers as well. They’re looking for options.

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So for us to do our jobs effectively, it’s not for us to like decide who’s the best one in this space. It’s to level the playing field to the benefit of the end users and for the host. Like okay let’s have security standards now, performance standards. Let’s have standardized design kits that can be used, right? Let’s abstract out the baseline stuff and let the product creators innovate on top of that and let the market determine. Let the end users determine which ones are the best through that feedback loop.

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So I think there’s people who certainly won’t like it. Oh there’s a competitor in here as well. But if you just take it through the app store framing, I certainly don’t want to be part of an app store or have one that only has one app for a particular category. It’s like I want choices.

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[00:31:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah it’s interesting because it’s just the language of guild I think is what promoted that question because it kind of feels like that maybe was the value of a guild back in the day.

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[00:31:31] Jonathan Wold: And certain types of guilds, right? One of the common examples was of a trade craft. Everyone in the guild was a certain type of trades person and they’re all competitors. So to your point yes, sometimes there was geographic differences but there’s also plenty of these be in the same city. But they were aligning their interests against sometimes other guilds. As long as you’re clear on what you’re after there’s not a problem with people competing.

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It’s going to be a challenge I’m certain of that. And part of why it’s so important to get the incentives right is much of that can sort itself out when you’re clear on what you’re here to do. And for me I’d always bring it back to hey we’re here to create a better ecosystem for end users. We all benefit from that.

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And so for instance one of the dilemmas ends up being, someone creates a great WordPress plugin. How do they handle it becoming part of Core? Or if some piece of it’s sort of taken out. And those are examples of things that we have to come to terms with.

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I’m sure that there are people who are upset when Apple baked a flashlight into iOS. The flashlight apps kind of died overnight, right? But from an overall good of the ecosystem perspective, I think the majority of folks would agree that that was useful and that was best to have just built directly in.

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So there are things like that that you have to deal with. And my hope is that the construct of a guild on the people side of things gives us a place to do those things fairly and openly, rather than just like arbitrary and behind the scenes. There will be challenges. I think if we stay fixed on where the incentives are and aligning them, it’s going to be at least easier to navigate the challenges.

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[00:33:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You mentioned earlier that the kind of app store, for want of a better word, was the North Star. Now you’re not there yet. Presumably the distribution piece, which is what you said you’re concentrating on at the moment, that’s the low hanging fruit, because if people come to you you’re very well connected, you have that within your grasp. You can connect people. You know people in the ecosystem.

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The other bits and pieces will come over time. But now this raises the always difficult question of finance. Because something like this will not be easy. And if it’s going to stretch just beyond the bounds of you and your co founder then presumably real work needs to be done, real time needs to be spent. And although that could be done with volunteers, really what would be the difference with what we’ve got now?

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So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about how you’re thinking of structuring this financially. I’m guessing at the moment people that come to you are paying you a fee. Maybe not. But in the future do you want to move this to more of a, I don’t know, subscription model, a percentage of revenue model? Something like that.

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[00:34:10] Jonathan Wold: So great question. That’s a lot of what we focus on figuring out. So I have two co founders, Anna Maria Radu and Matt Fields. And so the three of us together, sort of the core base. We started this a year and a half ago but we’re slowly but surely also expanding the team.

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So the way that we make money, we have the Gildenberg Partnership Program, that’s the one that focuses on distribution. For a product that wants to get distribution they come in and they pay an onboarding fee. That will vary. It generally starts at like 10,000 up to 30,000, but it’s dependent on sort of what’s involved.

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And that covers our work on especially the first two things. So we look at the monetisation, we look at compatibility, we create a roadmap for that product. Like, all right, these are the things that you need to do to get ready for distribution. We look at the foundation for partnerships.

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So there’s just time upfront there that’s involved. My hope is to see that reduce as time goes on, right? Become more standardized, more just open source as we create playbooks. That’s a starting point but the real heart of the business is a rev share model. So what we do is when we bring in a product and we do distribution deals with them, our standard approach is 25% of the deals in the first year. And then it goes down to 15% on average thereafter.

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So if we take in a new product and we help them sign a million dollar deal then $250,000 of that revenue goes to Guildenberg. And so we’re not taking from their existing. We’re not tapping into that business. It’s all on what we add which is the heart of what brings folks to us to begin with.

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What’s great about that is that we’re able to be really upfront with the hosts. When we go to a host and bring them in as distribution partners we’re not taking anything from them. We’re aligned on the interests of the products. And when the product is winning that’s when we get paid.

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[00:35:59] Nathan Wrigley: So just to be clear on that, in the scenario of a million dollars, so you connect company A with hosting company B. And the deal there was a million dollars. I think you mentioned $250,000 would go where?

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[00:36:13] Jonathan Wold: So that’s actually a good question. That somewhat depends. And this is a good example of what we’re working out. So in some situations we might be splitting that with the host who did the deal. And others the host would be on top of that. That somewhat depends on the product type and the category.

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That’s a lot of what work we’re doing now is figuring out what’s fair, what makes sense. The guidance is we want to win for all involved, right? But the heart of it is, it’s like two things. One we’re incentivising ourselves. We make our money on the successful distribution side, right? So the revenue share is the heart of Guildenberg’s economic engine.

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And two, we’re directionally going towards that app store. You can imagine the future state where it’s a straight 15%, right? And that covers the app store costs. And there’s a split there with the hosting providers who also offer it. So it’s like I’ll be flexible along the way to get there and do what makes sense, but I’m very clear on where we’re going. Which is going to be this sort of standardized target of 15% across products.

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[00:37:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay so in the Apple ecosystem which we had a moment ago, we were talking about that, there was some parallels there. The entire model of the Apple ecosystem really is profit, and dividends to shareholders. That’s the mantra. So I guess that question has to come next. Is there some alignment there? Is this the model that you’re going to be promoting?

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In other words, if you grow do the coffers of Gildenberg grow? Or is there some reasonable, I don’t know, churn of those finances giving back to the community, giving back to the WordPress project? How does all of that work? In other words is Guildenberg a for profit? Is it a for profit with benefits to the WordPress community? Is it just a not for profit? What’s going on?

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[00:38:02] Jonathan Wold: That’s a great question. This is another good example of something that I’m still working out. So let me start with my intentions. One of my motivating pieces behind this, if I could just wave a wand based on how I see things today, acknowledging that they could change and there’s pieces that I’m sure I’m missing. My ideal would be to get to where a product is paying 15% for distribution. And 5%, so 33 of that 15, of that revenue is going directly to the project.

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In my current thinking we have two organizations if you will. Guildenberg Inc. which is for profit and does the distribution work, and returns dividends to its shareholders. Which can include members, it includes investors, etc. I want to be moving increasingly towards being community owned.

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And then you have the .org, if you will, which is basically the member pool. So in my ideal an increasing amount of revenue goes into that pool to then be managed and directed by the members, right?

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As one example, let’s say someone joins the app store in the future. They’re paying the 15%, they don’t really care about the project at all. So 5% or 33 of that 15 goes into the member pool on their behalf. And they really have no say over what it. So it’s directed by the members into projects, into initiatives and .org that matter to them.

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Now, if that member, that product, decides that they do care they can then join the guild and now they have a say over where their funds go. They might say oh I care more about this initiative over here. So that’s the high level idea. Part of what set me out, what I set out to do here is like, how do we solve an incentives problem across the space?

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I don’t want people to do Five For The Future just because they love WordPress. I want there to be an economic incentive behind it. And to me, what I’m intrigued by, what I’m working towards is, how do you just build that into this App Store model?

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So that’s the direction. I don’t know how we get there. I suspect that you have the for profit piece and then a separate organization for the member pool. I don’t know and people have ideas, I want to hear them. I’ve had a number of inputs already. We don’t have to solve that problem today. We’re working on just getting the economic engine up and running, but that’s the stuff that I find especially motivating.

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And that’s been a big piece of this. How do we create incentives that provide funding that the project needs to work on the things that might not get the attention otherwise?

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[00:40:29] Nathan Wrigley: You said something a moment ago which, I’ve got to say, I’m not entirely sure I understood it. Because you implied that you could opt out say of the Five For The Future piece if you weren’t a part of the guild, or if you hadn’t joined the guild. But the implication would have been that you were still part of the App Store, let’s call it that. So have I misunderstood? Can you be somebody who can have a plugin on the Guildenberg marketplace but not be a part of the guild?

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[00:40:56] Jonathan Wold: Yes. The idea is, so at least in my current thinking, what would happen is that if you just join the app store, it’s like a level one, there’s requirements and standards to do that. But you don’t have to be active in the community and be participating and kind of doing all this stuff.

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You can join for just the pure business incentives. As long as you play by the rules you’re in, right? Because it’s merit based, it’s based on your behavior. As long as you’re playing by the rules, you’re in. And my thinking, so at that level, you don’t care where your 15% goes to.

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We’re going to spend it on your behalf on the project, we’ll direct the funds. And the idea is that a year later you’re like hey this WordPress community is quite cool. You discover that the guild is something that you can join and you apply to do so, the members accept you. Then at that point, that 5% of the 15, the funds that have been allocated on your behalf automatically, you could now have a say over where they go. That’s the idea. Does that make sense?

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[00:41:56] Nathan Wrigley: That’s cleared that up. Yeah thank you. That makes sense. Now you said the word behavior there, which is kind of interesting. Let’s extrapolate that because if we run that forwards, you can imagine a nightmare scenario where there is just this cabal of people who have control over the behavior.

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What the behavior is that’s appropriate to be in and out of this community. And you can imagine a scenario in, let’s say that in 10 years from now Guildenberg is monstrously successful. Almost everybody’s going there to inquire about premium plugins and what have you. And yet we have gatekeepers of behavior and all of that.

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So I want to address that. Almost every part of human history shows that given power things start to go a little bit pear shaped. And maybe the incentives that were there at the beginning of the project are not the incentives that approach when money is involved, or you’re becoming successful, or you sense that somebody else has an idea which conflicts with you.

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So let’s just get into that. Who moderates the behavior? Who creates that charter? And how do we ensure that this cabal doesn’t occur?

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[00:43:07] Jonathan Wold: Okay so there are two threads here that we have to look at. First, why behavior, and then second, how do you do the governance piece? It’s basically what we’re touching on, right?

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Oh I love this stuff. So first one of the challenges when I was looking at the history of guilds is that because of human nature I’d argue, we tend towards exclusivity. We want to work with people like us, that look like us, talk like us, whatever the reasons are, right?

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And so this is just like how we tend. So while there were a lot of good things that guilds did, they were also highly exclusionary at times, right? Where it just sort of propagated and just made even more prevalent some of the challenges that we recognize today of inclusivity and diversity, right?

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So I feel like we can’t trust ourselves because we’re going to tend by default to just attract people that are like us. Which I’d argue is not good for the ecosystem as a whole. So in sorting through that for a while, it’s like well okay then what can you use? What becomes the basis?

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And the only thing that stands out to me as fair is behavior. So it doesn’t matter where you’re from, what you look like etc. If you abide by the same rules. And so let’s start with this. It feels to me like the right idea in principle. The question becomes, how do you practice it?

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[00:44:24] Nathan Wrigley: The devil is in the detail here, isn’t it.

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[00:44:26] Jonathan Wold: But you got to get that right first, right? So it’s like okay we can say behavior. Now there’s a couple of things we have to work with. We have our core values in WordPress. Andrea Middleton did a fantastic talk on this a couple of years ago. And there are a few things that stand out. Someone didn’t make a list somewhere these are just what we practice. And she did the work sorting through them.

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We have this concept of autonomy. We value in WordPress doing what we want and we respect the freedom of others to do the same right?

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We also have this concept of like a duocracy, like you get credit for doing. We care about utility, making stuff that works, that solves problems. We’re generally skeptical as a community. This conversation is a great example of it, right? We ask why, and we keep asking. And then quite importantly, we do a good job at our core of giving credit where credit’s due, right?

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And so there’s a lot here Nathan to be figured out but I’ll just kind of give you one example. One of the behaviors that I would expect members to adhere to is, let’s take that last one, giving credit where credit is due. This is GPL, right? So on the one hand, you’re free to take someone else’s work, change the name on it and resell it as your own. You’re legally free to do that. And I respect your choice and freedom to do that anytime that you want to.

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But in terms of who I want to work with, I wouldn’t want to work with someone who doesn’t give the credit to the person who originally did that. They’re legally not obligated to do so, right?

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You can just kind of do whatever you want, it’s GPL. But when I think about the behavior that I would want to build around it’s like hey yeah I copied someone else’s work and I gave them credit for doing so and built on that.

\n\n\n\n

That’s one example of a behavior where I would want people in who are happy to give the credit where it’s due to those that they worked with. And if you made a mistake, oh wow yeah I forgot to give attribution there. No problem. Let’s fix that. And they prioritize that because that’s one of the things that we value.

\n\n\n\n

[00:46:29] Nathan Wrigley: I guess the other piece there would be the cabal piece as I mentioned, you know, just idea that you would have people who had been there from the very beginning. You can see how this works. It all boils down really to the word governance I think.

\n\n\n\n

Who’s governing and what gives them the right to stay in that position? And who ultimately would be the person to say well you’re right at the top of this pyramid here? But your behavior isn’t living up to the code therefore you’re going to have to think about either modifying your behavior or going elsewhere. That’s a difficult thing to do because they’re the people that are governing, if you like, and yet you’re wanting them to adapt their behavior.

\n\n\n\n

[00:47:06] Jonathan Wold: Okay so let’s talk about that. So again, that’s another one, lots to figure out there. But my guiding point, my starting point here, Leslie Sims pointed me to Elinor Ostrom’s book, Governing The Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. It’s a fascinating book. I highly recommend it.

\n\n\n\n

And it goes back and looks at the history of commons. And contrary to what people think there are groups who’ve successfully self governed for as long as a thousand years over scarce fixed resources. And what Ostrom does in her work here is she looks at all the data and breaks it down. Figures out what’s working, what doesn’t. And she came up with eight design principles for what she calls a common pool resource.

\n\n\n\n

So I’ve still yet to figure this out. But in my mind part of the key here is you have the commercial interest like the Guildenberg .com, right, if you will? And then you have this member pool which is like that Five For The Future type resource.

\n\n\n\n

And the key there is that over time we want that to become the biggest thing, right? If the .com interests are successful we’re slowly but surely making the guild more and more powerful, if you will, by it having more and more resources. Every new product that comes in, that is growing.

\n\n\n\n

So then it comes down to okay how do we then govern that growing pool of resources? And this is where Ostrom’s work comes in. She has eight principles for self governance in a commons scenario. And there are a couple of different pieces to it.

\n\n\n\n

The first one is this idea of having clear boundaries. So there’s a very clear definition of what it means to be a member. This is where the behavior standards come in. You need to make sure that those make sense for the ecosystem that you’re in. They need to hold up to scrutiny. You need to make sure that the members themselves can modify the rules. That’s the key piece here, right?

\n\n\n\n

And there’s a number of things that you have to think through. It’s not, it’s tricky, and a lot of it is this idea of you’ve creating an environment where there’s intended to be a healthy tension. And that’s part of how you prevent capture, right? So it’s not trivial.

\n\n\n\n

But we have plenty of examples of how people have done this in the past. And the heart of my interest and what I’m moving towards is like okay let’s take what’s already been established here, let’s combine some of these ideas. The construct of a guild but then adding in the concept of a member, a resource pool, that is governed by the members. Which is something that guilds often didn’t do. It tended to be kind of arbitrary but they had some of these pieces.

\n\n\n\n

So yeah there’s a lot of work to be done there. I feel directionally clear and the focus right now is on the economic engine. But as time goes on what I’m excited about is drawing in people who have a lot more experience than I do to take some of these ideas and break them down.

\n\n\n\n

I know that we’ll make mistakes and my intention is that by staying focused on aligning incentives we’re giving ourselves a reason to learn from those mistakes and make it better. Yeah I at least feel confident in the direction where it’s all going.

\n\n\n\n

[00:50:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So you’re working on the distribution piece at the moment. It in a sense is the underpinnings of the monetisation and the compatibility pieces. They’re going to grow hopefully out of all of the distribution model that you’re working on.

\n\n\n\n

Okay so you’re a year and a half in. This is the final question I’ve got for you. Do you have cause to be optimistic? Having had 18 months of playing around with this and obviously bringing some people on board. Do you have optimism? Does this still seem like it’s a long way off? Or do you feel that there’s legs to this? And two years from now we might be having a more in depth conversation about something that’s moved forward.

\n\n\n\n

[00:50:47] Jonathan Wold: So I’m optimistic by nature. What’s been interesting to me about this is that I’ve tried somewhat hard over the years to kind of convince myself out of doing this. And Nathan after a year and a half of effectively full time on this, if I knew how hard it was going to be I probably would have tried harder to convince myself to not do it.

\n\n\n\n

So hey I’m optimistic as a visionary. And I’ve been cautious about this. But the main reason that we are where we are and we have had significant traction is that at every turn I’ve either had yeses or affirmation of direction, or we’ve identified an obstacle that has offered an opportunity to clarify which has then led to a yes.

\n\n\n\n

So my core focus has been talking with product companies and with hosting companies. And in those conversations I’ve just continued to get clearer and clearer on the problem sets and where the incentives are and what’s motivating. And I’ve either had explicit like, yes we want to be a part of this or, yes if you solve that of course we want to, like, let’s talk again.

\n\n\n\n

And so it’s been a curious tension for me where it’s really hard because you’re tackling a lot of pieces at once. There’s a lot of moving parts. But it’s also easy in the sense that what we’re really just trying to do is create incentives to solve these problems that people recognize exist.

\n\n\n\n

I’m happy with the progress. A lot of it’s been around like for me, one of my marks or my indicators is what am I hearing when I go to a WordCamp, right? I was starting some of these conversations about a year ago at WordCamp Europe. And if I look at what was happening then which was encouraging and optimistic, encouraged my optimism then versus now, it’s all just dialed up.

\n\n\n\n

And now I’m having conversations with investors about giving us more capital to grow more quickly. And those are also going well. So we’ll see. We’ll see what happens but I’m encouraged. And this is one where as much as I believe in it, I’ve tried pretty hard to convince myself to like go do something easier.

\n\n\n\n

And it just kept coming back. And my co founders are also encouraged that they don’t share my optimism. And so when I talked to Anna or Matt about this and they’re really like okay this is good. We’re seeing pieces of the puzzle sort of come together and they’re encouraged. I’m like okay well, then that’s another indicator that we’re going the right direction.

\n\n\n\n

And what’s going to really matter though, what it all boils down to, is are we able to successfully help these products get distribution? And can we do that at scale? I’ve done it for individual products. We’re seeing good early signs, it does take time. And that’s going to be the proof, right? Can we have a meaningful impact on these products?

\n\n\n\n

And that’s what all of our focus is on right now. I’m encouraged with what I’m seeing. And I think what you’ll see over the next year or two is that becoming a lot more public. And what I want to see happen out of this is to take the things that work and open source them. Make it available for folks. There’s no benefit because we have this clear overall guidance to grow and improve the ecosystem. We’re not trying to keep it to ourselves.

\n\n\n\n

[00:53:55] Nathan Wrigley: It certainly will be worth listening back to this in a year’s time and see where you are. Obviously from my point of view, I hope it goes well. Fingers crossed that it’s going to all pan out for you. If somebody has listened to this and I would imagine probably they are a product maker will be most interested to get in touch with you because they’ve got things that they want to discuss with you. What are the best places for us to find you?

\n\n\n\n

[00:54:16] Jonathan Wold: Just reach out to me through the Guildenberg website, guildenberg.com, jonathan@guildenberg.com. Or find me at a WordCamp. I’ll be at WordCamp US. Looking forward to WordCamp Asia next year, WordCamp Europe, and I’m going to start going out to some of the regional ones as well.

\n\n\n\n

[00:54:31] Nathan Wrigley: Jonathan Wold, thank you for chatting to me today on the podcast.

\n\n\n\n

[00:54:34] Jonathan Wold: Thanks for having me, Nathan.

Jonathan has been deeply involved in the WordPress community for almost two decades. He began writing tutorials and freelancing, which eventually led him to the agency world where he worked on large enterprise projects. In the past five to six years, Jonathan has shifted his focus to the broader WordPress ecosystem. He’s also had the opportunity to work at WooCommerce and collaborate with the team at Automattic. Despite the demands of his busy career, Jonathan’s passion for WordPress has only grown stronger over the years.

Jonathan is one of the co-founders of Guildenberg, and in the podcast today we discuss what this project is, and how it aims to revolutionise the WordPress product ecosystem.

We start the conversation by highlighting the importance of behaviour in the WordPress community and the core values that drive the platform; autonomy, meritocracy, utility, and giving credit where credit is due. Jonathan emphasises the significance of giving credit to the original creators of work, even though it may not be legally required.

We move on to talk about how Guildenberg aims to solve some of the key problems faced by WordPress product owners, such as monetisation, compatibility, and distribution. Jonathan envisions a system where product owners pay a fee for distribution of their products, with a portion of that revenue going back to the Gildenberg project. By aligning incentives and providing economic motivations for contributors, Guildenberg seeks to create a sustainable and thriving ecosystem for the open web.

We get into the inspiration behind the name Guildenberg, which combines the ideas of Gutenberg and the guild institutions from mediaeval Europe. We also discuss the team’s long-term vision of creating an app store for WordPress that spans the majority of installations, offering monetisation options and enforcing compatibility standards.

If you’re a WordPress developer who is keen to find a way to create visibility for your product, this podcast is for you.

Useful links.

This Week at WordPress.org (August 7, 2023)

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What are blocks? WordPress has added a new resource to its website at wordpress.org/blocks that attempts to explain blocks visually with simple language. The landing page is aimed at those who are new to the block paradigm or those who may not yet fully understand blocks’ ease of use and powerful features.

Automattic-sponsored core contributor Anne McCarthy announced the new page on WordPress.org with a request for feedback, as this is the first iteration. The project was born out of ticket on GitHub which outlines the need for more effective block marketing:

One important consideration for contributors working on this project is the overlap with wordpress.org/gutenberg. The Blocks page is more of a static brochure style introduction, whereas the Gutenberg page is a fully interactive demo that offers an overview of how the editor works. Although they are similar resources, they both have distinct purposes.

McCarthy created a tracking issue for the first iteration of this page, which functions as a mini roadmap for future improvements based on feedback she has already received. More accessibility improvements are coming in future versions, along with some sort of visual that will concisely demonstrate the connection between blocks, patterns, and themes. Contributors are also considering integrating WP Sandbox to make it possible to see blocks in action.

“This is intended to be a starting point and not a final destination,” McCarthy said. “Your feedback is welcomed and needed to get to the next iteration.”

The blocks page is one area of contribution where even people who are brand new to blocks could help to make the content more compelling and less confusing by leaving feedback on the post.

Blocks are something many casual WordPress users may still be trying to wrap their heads around, not to mention how they impact the ecosystem of plugins and themes. The Classic Editor plugin, which insulates users from the world of blocks, remains one of the most popular plugins with more than 5 million users. Its continued support is not guaranteed forever, especially as WordPress looks to revamp the admin design to be more similar to the block editor. This landing page’s marketing for blocks offers a safe entry point for those who are curious about the block editor and want to explore more resources.

From his earlier experiences to an active WordPress community member, Jorge shares his journey and building products for WooCommerce.

The summit will cover practical use cases for AI in development, marketing, design, web agency management, and freelance services. It will include mixed formats, including case studies, workshops, and live panel discussions with Q&A.

Over the course of three days, speakers will give presentations in English from 10am – 2pm EST. The schedule features 10 speakers with commercial experience and proven success at applying AI to build WordPress sites. They will cover topics like how to build a search engine for a website using AI, AI tools for daily tasks, AI and accessibility, AI translations, and more.

If you are interested to learn more about AI’s impact on the WordPress ecosystem and how to apply it to agency work, add the event to your calendar and sign up for free on the Crocoblock website.

WordPress’ Themes team launched its Community Themes initiative earlier this year with the goal of bringing together contributors to build block themes year round, the same way that default themes are built and officially supported. Their first theme release was Stacks, a single-purpose theme for creating slide decks that can be used for a presentation.

The team has now released its second community theme called Blue Note, inspired by American jazz record label “Blue Note Records.” It’s more versatile than Stacks, as it can be used for writing/blogging, a personal website, portfolio, nonprofit, memorial, event, or other types of landing pages.

Although Blue Note does not package any style variations, it comes with 14 beautifully designed patterns inspired by jazz record covers. The patterns enable users to quickly add images with text or quotes with multiple designs for each. There are also patterns with striped images, an artful way to break up a single image, paired with text. Users can select from multiple headers and footers, among seven page templates and four template parts.

Blue Note was designed by Automattic-sponsored contributor Beatriz Fialho, inspired by her work on the State of the Word slides in 2020. It was developed during the WCEU contributor day with the help of more than a dozen contributors. The Community Themes GitHub repository has other themes they are working on which are in various stages of development.

Check out Blue Note on WordPress.org and download it for free via the Themes browser inside the admin.

Andrew Wikel shares thoughts and insights working on WooCommerce support specifically for builders and developers of Woo shops.

With every developer we have a conversation with, there is a story. Woo DevLife brings those short stories to the reader.

Aaron Campbell has a passion for the Open Web, open source and WordPress with the goal that everyone should have access to all things on the web.

We have an in-depth conversation on custom tables including a recent experience with them migrating from Joomla to WordPress and WooCommerce.

Atarim Web Agency Summit speaker Anne-Mieke Bovelett shares a valuable tip on accessibility and WooCommerce design and development.

Co-hosts Robert and Jonathan both attended CloudFest 2022 and share some interesting perspectives and comparisons.

Whether you are looking to grow or change your WordPress or WooCommerce development career, here are some tips from Marcus and Courtney.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

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