WP Mainline Episode 15 – WordPress 5.9 Proposed Features Are A Go for Launch

Speaker 1 00:00:20 Welcome everybody to episode 15 of the WP mainline podcast for Friday, October 15th, 2021. I’m your host, Jeff Chandler joined by my fresh off of Thanksgiving weekend, Canadian front of Malcolm Peralty. Malcolm. How are you doing sir?
Speaker 2 00:00:34 Well, uh, oh, you better have been sufficiently Turkey fied on Monday. And uh, now here we are on Friday and I think we just finished all of the Turkey, like all the banks doing related food. So, uh, there was a lot of leftovers.
Speaker 1 00:00:48 Did you, uh, encounter one of those posts, Turkey naps?
Speaker 2 00:00:52 I did not have been far too busy for that.
Speaker 1 00:00:55 Unfortunately Jesus. And that the life of all of us too busy, you can’t even enjoy it. Turkey fighting nap. Nope. Unbelievable. What, what, what’s your, um, so what was your spread up there? Is it, I wonder if it’s the same down here? Is it, uh, Turkey stuffing, cranberry sauce, all that stuff.
Speaker 2 00:01:10 Yeah. It’s, it’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect it to be in my family. Yeah. We also had ham for people that don’t like Turkey and the peas and corn mashed potatoes. Uh, yeah, just a huge spread. And then like pumpkin pie, apple pie, uh, ice cream, whipped cream, the whole nine yards.
Speaker 1 00:01:28 Nah, man. Thanksgiving is my favorite time of year. It’s my favorite holiday during the whole year, because you’re pretty much guaranteed a great meal. And, and if you do it right, you have great meals the rest of the week until you’re like, you don’t want to deal with Turkey or ham anymore.
Speaker 2 00:01:43 Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s pretty crazy for sure.
Speaker 1 00:01:46 All right. So, uh, for those listening, Hey, my apologies about last week there wasn’t an episode last week, last week was a bad week. Things kind of went to hell in a hand basket over the weekend and just wasn’t feeling it, but that’s all in the past. Here we are Friday evening, that kind of feels like old times doing a show recording at night here. It says, this is pretty cool. Let’s get into the news of the week. Cause there is a lot of it. And we’ll start off with the big news. Uh, today people were kind of waiting to see today was the deadline for features and WordPress 5.9, whether there would be a go or no-go. And we found out earlier today that everything that’s slated to work with 5.9 as they go, which is great news, especially for those out there who are looking forward to full site editing, uh, the 20, 22 theme black themes site editor, styling patterns, all that stuff, navigation blocks. So, uh, it looks like everything’s kind of on track to be released with WordPress 5.9 and speaking of full site adding, I wanted to get your ticket. How have you dabbled with full site editing? Have you, have you messed around with themes in this area yet? I mean, do you even have any idea what it is? Do you understand it? Uh,
Speaker 2 00:02:59 I have some understanding of it, but I have not used it myself. No.
Speaker 1 00:03:03 Okay. Yeah. I mean either, you know, I should, I should be like one of those people who, uh, who knows a full site editing until a lot, but I don’t, but apparently it is from my understanding and I could be wrong. I often am. But full site editing is the idea of being able to edit all the things. So apparently everything on your website would be able to be edited via the black editor. It’d be black of five, uh, some way somehow. So, uh, 2022 is actually going to be a black base full site editing theme. It’s going to be the new default theme. Um, I like it. Uh, I’ve already, I already liked the design of it. Cause if he just birds and I’m a bird, I’m a bird guy, bird, brain. I like watching birds. And uh, this, this theme, um, highlights, uh, birds pretty well.
Speaker 1 00:03:52 But, uh, speaking of 2022, the goal of this default theme is to create a strong foundation for features such as theme that Jason and there’s going to be very little CSS that the goal is to use as little CSS as possible. It’s going to be built for full site editing. First on the styles will be configured through, like I said, the theme that Jason file and edit editable through global styles and the theme development team will continue to work closely with Gutenberg poetry readers to build design tools in the black editor that enable that goal. Now based on the features that are coming to WordPress 5.9 and how this theme is going to depend on those, it looks like a you’re only going to be able to use 2022 with 5.9 or above. So don’t expect this is kind of a departure from default teams of old,
Speaker 2 00:04:50 But I mean, that’s what the default theme should be in my opinion is kind of pushing that boundary of what you can do with WordPress. I mean, otherwise it’s kind of, what’s the point, right? I, I love the idea that they are thinking about integrating new features or developing new features specifically to kind of push that barrier. Um, forward, when I looked at the go-no-go link that you posted, I laughed because I mean, it felt like every second word was blocked, right? Block the themes and the block, the new 2022 block theme and the myriad of design tools, including block gap and a navigation block and an improved block interactions. And I was just like, holy smokes, everything is just all about the blocks. And I think some of that has to do with making sure that 20, 22, um, as a theme works really well and works really, uh, in, in that kind of slick way that we would hope it would work.
Speaker 2 00:05:37 Um, I was talking to my co-founder of press Titan, uh, David Krug, and he’s not super excited about this theme, uh, at all. Uh, he didn’t see anything in there that that made him go like, this is the theme for me. Um, we’ve been using Blocksi a lot and really enjoying what it provides. And I think, you know, we’ve kind of holding that on the pedestal kind of, and saying like, if anything, like if, if this team doesn’t have those kinds of abilities to kind of quickly change things in the customizer, like Blocksi does, uh, I think it’ll be kind of a loss, uh, in, in my, in my mind, um, because that’s kind of, you know, the new kind of baseline expectation of, of what these teams can do out of the box.
Speaker 1 00:06:17 Do you remember back in the day when the idea of creating a default? I mean, this is way back, what’s the earliest default thing we have. Is it 28 years? 2010? I think it’s 2010 was the first default theme in WordPress. And I remember the conversations back in the day, even before then, like the idea was why, why isn’t there a theme that theme developers can use it. It’s like a, uh, it’s like theme school, you build the theme and it’s, it, it, it uses everything that WordPress has to offer, or you can use it to showcase what WordPress is capable of. And then other theme authors can look into that theme and develop on top of it or take things away from that or learn from it, you know, with default themes over the years. Do you, do you look at them and is that kind of how they’ve been designed or how they’ve turned out? I don’t think, I don’t think they’re, I don’t think they’re as much as a, uh, an educational footprint as it is. And I also don’t think some of them take full advantage of everything we’re presented to offer, but then again, it’s a default theme. It’s a baseline. Uh, I probably have, I’ve probably set too high of expectations
Speaker 1 00:07:29 Mean, plus they’re getting this done within a, you know, a few months timeframe, this theme. So it’s not like they’ve had all year to build a 20, uh, 20, 22, but this new default theme actually relies on features that are going to be in 5.9 and were not available beforehand. So it was kind of impossible to build a 20, 22 the way they want to do it and take advantage of full site. I didn’t because what they needed wasn’t there. So
Speaker 2 00:07:57 Now there, there were themes that were shipped with WordPress before there were these like default themes. I remember, um,
Speaker 1 00:08:06 There’s Cooper, Cooper,
Speaker 2 00:08:08 Classic, and Kubrick is the theme that I always in my head always like,
Speaker 1 00:08:14 Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:08:15 Man, that brings me back. Wow. Um, we’ve come a long way from there. And I think, I think that, you know, a lot of people, you know, her new to WordPress might look at this theme and kind of wonder if it’s for them. And I think we, you know, every time they do a default theme for those that haven’t been around for as long as we have every time they do a default theme, I think the first question everyone asks is who’s this made for? Um, you know, and I think we’ve had that since default themes were in existence. And I think this time who this is for are people that are interested in kind of pushing the boundaries of blocks and WordPress and how blocks can kind of, um, you know, create this full site editing to kind of not necessarily replace page builders, but, uh, to show that we almost don’t necessarily need them for every kind of implementation of WordPress at this point.
Speaker 1 00:09:06 I, I think that at FSE full site editing has become a buzzword buzzwords. I think that out in the outer ring of the WordPress community or users, I think the people that are following the news they’ve heard or through the grapevine, I think a lot of them have heard about full site at any, but maybe don’t quite know what that means and what that entails. So I think it’s great that the default theme 2022 will ship with WordPress. So it gives users an opportunity to play around with it and experiment and see for themselves what full site editing means. And then maybe take some of those lessons and transcend those into what the future of themes is going to be for WordPress, because everything developer that, that I’ve, I’ve talked to where I’ve seen on Twitter, or has looked into what the full site editing is and the future of blocks, they’re all super, super excited about this, these global styles team dot Jason and the complete reimagination of building themes. It almost seems like around the precipice of a, of another one of those milestone events where the post editor was replaced with Gutenberg, the black editor, you know, I, I, I know that to me, it was one of those monumental shifts. You know, if you’re looking at a timeline of, of, of the history of WordPress, that to me was a milestone marker. I think full site editing and WordPress is another one of those will be, uh, one of those milestones.
Speaker 2 00:10:29 Yeah. I, I think I agree with you. I, I think though every time we hit those milestones, one of the things that people need to remember too, though, is it usually means that we filter out a group of people who were more able or willing to be involved in the project before those milestones existed. Um, I think that this full site editing stuff will kind of, again, filter out some people who are maybe not as strong at, you know, um, PHP and JavaScript and development and react and all this stuff. So, you know, I’d be super interested to kind of get more time with people who are developing with this new mindset in place. Um, maybe get Brian back to kind of walk through what this will mean for something like frost to going forward, or, um, yeah, I dunno. I just, I’d be super interested to get their take on it because again, wherever my head, what they do,
Speaker 1 00:11:16 And at the end, then at the end of the announcement post, we, they, they mentioned that, uh, we’ve, we’ve come to look forward to, and the new default theme arriving every year, every December, that major version of WordPress, those three months, that time period was usually the time when we would expect to see a new, uh, default theme. But they mentioned that theme during a transition period today. And they said that it seems like this may be a reasonable time to step back and to reevaluate the annual cadence with which we build default themes. I’m reading from the announcement post to your quote innovations, like theme that Jason Black templates and black patterns of making deem development far simpler and are providing new ways for users to customize their sites. There’s reason to believe that the community can leverage all of this to build more frequent and diverse theme and customization solutions for our users in the coming years and quilt. So that could mean, uh, maybe more than one default theme during the year. Maybe they could happen every major release. I don’t know. I mean,
Speaker 2 00:12:20 I took it the exact opposite direction. I assumed that that meant that maybe we’d see a default theme, you know, every two years or every three years. Um, because there, the expectation in that text makes me think that there’s, there’s so much variety and options that will and do exist already that the WordPress team that are developing this stuff doesn’t necessarily need to take time, you know, and resources to kind of continue to do these default themes. Um,
Speaker 1 00:12:46 All right. Yeah. So, so basically instead of doing it once every year, maybe once every two years really showcase what, you know, the advancements that did or what’s new in WordPress, and because of all these things that they’re building in, you know, themes being far far simpler to develop that yeah, there, there’s going to be a wide variety of innovations taking place without the need to have, I guess, without the need to have a default team every year. I didn’t see it that way. That’s a good perspective. Now I kind of wonder, I kind of wonder if they’re going to come up with a plan to phase away these default themes, if you, if you, you know, and WordPress, one of the, you read security or articles and all these things, and it says anything you’re not using, whether it’s plugins or themes delete from your site. Well, every time if you delete all the themes you’re not using, as soon as you update to a major version of WordPress here comes all those default themes back into your back in your install. So I wonder if they’re just going to get, I wonder how they’re going to phase them out if they ever plan to phase them out.
Speaker 2 00:13:51 I really think they should. I mean, uh, the, you know, the zip file that you get when you install WordPress is just getting bigger and bigger and maintaining all of these themes has to be kind of a development burden. Um, and I mean, 2010 was released, you know, over 10 years ago now. I mean, how many, how many things on the web, can you say that about it’s still included? Like what, so, uh, yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s time to get rid of some of these older default themes and just kind of maybe do the last two or something like that.
Speaker 1 00:14:25 Well, like they said, with WordPress 5.9 and the way 20, 22 is going to be built, and it’s going to be a black full site editing first theme that I don’t think you’re going to be able to, you’re not going to be able to do things in 2022 that you have all my training. You won’t be able to, the things that you’re going to be able to do and accomplish in 2022, you’re not going to able to do in the, in the default thing prior to that, because it’s not going to be built for full site editing. So I, I think it makes a good time to just here’s the line we’re going to start fresh from 2022 moving forward and all these other themes. If you want them, you can find them in the word pressing directory, but they’re no longer going to be bundled with the core product.
Speaker 2 00:15:09 You know, if you really want to prove that these new themes that are coming out, like if you really want to prove how amazing 2022 is, um, someone, you know, take some time and, uh, make 20, 22 with like 2010 and 20 11, 12. Like, I mean, if, if it’s so easy to be able to adjust the, how the look and feel of it and, uh, and roll out these other kinds of like designs, um, using 20, 22 as a base, like prove it, um, replace these using the new software
Speaker 1 00:15:38 And the last thing on 2022, if you don’t want to download core or trunk or whatever, but you still want to check it out, give it a test, or I’d see it, at least from the front end, you can keep track of its progress by visiting 20, 22 odd numbers that wordpress.net. And we’ll have a link to that in the show notes. And if you visit that, you’ll be able to see what the theme looks like in use right now. And as it’s being developed, a new features are created for it. There’ll be a patched into this version and people will be able to interact with the theme live. So that’s, uh, that’s pretty cool. I don’t know if they’ve ever done that for any other default theme that I know of. Uh, so there has been a proposal for a new team this week, the performance
Speaker 2 00:16:30 Team, so
Speaker 1 00:16:31 Excited. And what does proposal basically, basically this proposal was undersigned by, uh, people who are employed by Yoast and by Google and or some other, uh, community folks involved with this. But they, they say that, uh, the problems that they’re trying to solve is that well, research shows that fast websites can provide a better user experience, increase engagement, benefit, SEO, increase conversions, and be more economically and ecologically friendly. And they’ve posted some performance graphs and WordPress, and especially will commerce do not fare well against other platforms, such as Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, and Duda. And I’ve kind of some dude I mentioned here or there on, uh, on Twitter. I’m not familiar with it, but, uh, I, I am, it’s not completely foreign to me, but if you look at, uh, the performance graph numbers for CMS is on mobile clients, WordPress and WooCommerce has a lot of shortcomings there as well.
Speaker 1 00:17:38 And now, first of all, someone said that it’s kind of awkward to make these comparisons because Shopify or Squarespace, Wix, those are software as a service. They have more of an ability to tighten down and control the infrastructure and the code and the hardware and things of that nature versus WordPress has to be able to run on a myriad of different, uh, software and hardware setups. But with that said, uh, it’s just, uh, they’re looking to create a team to focus on the performance of WordPress because a WordPress could actually become a solution that is not preferred. Uh, if people, if those types of users care about their search engine, rank placement, uh, slow websites, just don’t rank as well as fast websites. That’s, that’s what the research has shown. And, uh, this proposal will allow the team to get together. There is power in numbers, and I’m kind of surprised that there hasn’t been a performance team created like 10 years ago, but you know, that,
Speaker 2 00:18:44 Hey, that would’ve meant admitting that word press out a performance problem. And that’s been something that a lot of the leadership in WordPress has had a really hard time with. I remember WordPress between WordPress two and three. Anyways, there was a lot of talk about how performant WordPress was. And, you know, if you had any kind of performance issues like Matt Monet himself would come on down, down from on high and like help you solve them because wordpress.com proves that WordPress performance can be amazing, no matter the scale of traffic and no matter what you do with it and what you need to install it on it, or what kind of functionality you need. And so it’s, it’s very refreshing for them to finally say, look like we could do better in terms of performance.
Speaker 1 00:19:26 I think they’re coming out and saying, we have to do better or else, you know, this, this, it almost comes across that way because of the search engine placement and what have you. And then, you know, that the last time I remember performance being a big talking point was when Matt mulloway came on on stage, it was, uh, it was during a state of the word. He basically said, look at these performance gains, you can get by switching from PHP five to, I think it was PHP seven at the time. And he says, oh, you got to do a switch and boom, you immediately get these performance gains. I actually did that one time and I got to experience the performance gains myself immediately. I, I saw an improvement in speed, uh, on my website, just switching from PHP five to seven. But what was interesting in reading this proposal and reading the tons of great comments on here, and by the way, the proposal, I think it’s got the green light.
Speaker 1 00:20:20 So it’s going to become a real thing. The real deal, um, is that performance is, is a very wide net. I mean, it encompasses multiple layers, multiple factors efficiencies. Uh, the way code is compiled, the way code isn’t queued, you know, uh, code that’s that’s run or code that’s loading, even though you’re not using it, but it’s still there. I mean, there’s like I was reading through this and I’m like, man, this is, and it was even mentioned by people that, that the, that the change, the performance of WordPress and then make it performance is a monstrous ship. That’s going to take a lot of time to solve, to get right, to turn and get it facing in the right direction. But no, it’s what better time than now to, to get a bunch of people who are interested in, in doing it to get involved.
Speaker 1 00:21:17 And hopefully there are people from different web hosting companies that get involved become part of this, because I think what most companies probably have the most to gain and have the most vested interest in having any performance WordPress, because the more performance WordPress is the less of a resource hog, the less resources it uses on their hardware and their software, and all users benefit from a more performance WordPress. So I’m all for it. And I’m probably going to be one of those people who, uh, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll try to contribute to the team or within the feedback, but I’m not gonna complain if I install WordPress update and boom, everything’s just suddenly faster.
Speaker 2 00:22:02 No, I, I mean, for me, it’s, it’s, there’s a business aspect of this too, right? If I can have a website run better, faster, and a more performant way or use less serve resources, then that’s, that’s a really good thing for me. And then secondarily, um, you know, some of the stuff that I’m working on, we’re working with in terms of clients, stuff for, for camera creative, um, you know, the, the, the amount of caching and cash priming and all these things that we’re trying to do to kind of make sure that we create the best performance for users possible is, you know, kind of doing work arounds to make WordPress better. And I would love it just to be kind of better out of the box. I mean, I remember at one point having an issue with how, uh, indexes in the WordPress database were set up, um, and it was like a default issue, but it only exists if you had over like a hundred thousand posts on your site.
Speaker 2 00:22:56 And of course I was running a website with like nearly half a million articles on it and running into this indexing issue. So, um, you know, there are some low hanging fruit, but this is, this is not an easy thing. And especially if we want to continue to kind of have that backwards compatibility, um, if we want to kind of retain a lot of the expectations on how things function and, and look, um, there might be some major structural changes that need to happen to really kind of have these performance solutions be put in place
Speaker 1 00:23:26 And mark Jake with who’s a very smart individual and who’s going to be part of this performance team made a lot of great points in his comments. And he says that the biggest performance issues that he has with WordPress these days are related to front end performance and the asset pipeline, so that you can always just throw a page cache around WordPress to get delivery down below 150 milliseconds. But he says many web, many WordPress hosts have this built in, but your performance problems are far from being solved by merely delivering HTML quickly. So then he goes on to describe that WordPress has no direct support for differing style loading. It has no system for critical theme styles for JavaScript. It has no support for differ async or type equals module or no module. He says the default is to load Allscripts in the header, WordPress itself, shoves this extra code for emoji and the black library into the header.
Speaker 1 00:24:17 WordPress also injects JavaScript code in styles that skew the asset pipeline altogether and directly attached to WP head NWP footer. And then he mentioned that the big Achilles heel plugins and all this plugins just directly bar file bespoke script tags that are difficult to alter. And by the time that you’ve added 10 plugins to your site, your odds of having jQuery loaded in the header on every single page load are extremely eye. He says that no one is incentivized to be a good citizen, including WordPress itself, because there’s always someone else who is polluting worse than you. And he says in quotes of jQuery is already in queued by something else. So I guess I better use it somewhat developers. So he ends his comment by saying it’s a huge problem. And fixing it is going to take a lot of effort, willpower and time it’s worth doing. If WordPress front end performance continues to decline, the project is going to cease to be a viable option for any site that cares about it SERPs. And when you have to read his comment, and you mentioned about plugins and performance teams, and you start to realize, boy, this is, this is going to be a tough nut to crack.
Speaker 1 00:25:28 It’s going to be, it’s going to be everyone on board. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:25:31 Um, I, I it’s, it’s not going to be easy and there’s so many aspects to it, right. I don’t know about you, but like WordPress search both in the front end for users and in the backend, um, when you’re searching through posts or looking through the media library, that there’s so many areas of performance improvement that just needs to happen. Um, I just, I don’t even know how they’re going to start to tackle this. It’s going to be very interesting to see how they prioritize things like do they do kind of focus more on that front end user experience? Um, when do they focus on the administrative experience? I don’t know. It’s going to be interesting.
Speaker 1 00:26:07 I was just thinking back, you remember those days of, of the dig effect and you’d visit the site and it’d be a white screen of death. And everyone said, well, that’s I trusted
Speaker 2 00:26:16 Hug of death.
Speaker 1 00:26:18 I know how to fix it. Just stick a caching plugin in there. That’ll fix it.
Speaker 2 00:26:22 That fixes everything. Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:26:24 Yeah. Cash boy. I did. So there was actually, I know the performance team had mentioned this. They said in their proposal that they believe that CDN should actually stay as like plugging territory. And that actually something with core. And I think anything that ties into a service, it’s probably best to be laughed as either a plugin or some kind of option to tie into. And I haven’t a CDN as, as part of a press core.
Speaker 2 00:26:54 I I’d be interested. I’d be interested in them having like a core plugin that I would enable if I wanted to, to be able to kind of, you know, make JavaScript decisions or,
Speaker 1 00:27:04 Uh, yeah. Yeah, that’s right. Um, I I’m glad you brought that up because there were, there were quite a few comments that said that the foundation is kind of already in place to educate users and developers with the site health check, you know, WordPress now has the built in if he has a site health check and it tells you things about plugins that are disabled or things you need to turn on, on your host. And some developers are saying, well, what if we could use site health check to tell you, uh, uh, queries that are taking too long to load or JavaScript that is too big and size or too, or JavaScript it’s being called from here or there, like, like psychic health check would actually be a nice place to begin in terms of educating users and developers, uh, to get more people on board with the whole, um, to get smarter with performance, uh, performance WordPress.
Speaker 1 00:27:57 So there you go. I’m glad you brought that up. Uh, do you remember video press, uh, whose whatsits oh, let’s see. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you, but it’s actually a service at automatic launch back in 2009, it’s their video hosting service. And if you’ve ever watched a video on WordPress that TV, then you have interacted with and seeing the video press player where they’ve just announced it, video press has undergone a facelift. So now it’s fully integrated with the post editor. Uh, there was drag and drop options. Now users can customize a player’s colors to match the design of their site. There’s also support for private video options, which opens up the possibilities of exclusive content. Uh, collaboration is easier now because multiple users can access an account. And because it’s a paid service, there are no intrusive ads or branding.
Speaker 1 00:28:51 Now video press is included in the premium business in e-commerce plans on wordpress.com. You get up to one terabyte of space, which I seems like a lot of space to me. Um, and if you run a self hosted WordPress site, you can video press is now available as a standalone product. And this is where things got a little dicey in terms of what does that mean? Because I think you, uh, you know, you need Jetpack in order to use a video press well, in this instance, the marketing team to a standalone product, as you no longer have to purchase the larger jet pack bundles, I E the old premium plan or the current Jetpack complete plan to access a feature, you can simply pay for the single feature you will like. So you still have to use jet pack to use video press, but you can purchase a plan to where it’s video press and, you know, know that’s the only feature you’re paying for.
Speaker 1 00:29:44 And I’ve noticed this trend now over the years. And I think it’s, it may be based on user or customer demand, or it might just be based on it’s a lot easier to develop for and maintain, but they’re, they’re taking these things out of Jetpack, which used to be a behemoth plugging in all these different modules. They’re taking those things out and you’re creating these different bundled and packages and services. And I think they’re going to get to a point where you can kind of do Ella cart, where you could just select different features you want, and boom, it gets into your hosted Jetpack service, which I think is a good idea. You know, the, the days of, of loading Jetpack and getting everything all in one, or, uh, I’m glad those are going into the past.
Speaker 2 00:30:27 Yeah. I think, I think most people would be happy to see Jetpack split up into its requisite pieces. Right. Depending on the functionality you want. Um, I still don’t know what the value proposition here is. There are so many other services to do this with, I mean, Vimeo or even just YouTube or, um, I mean, yeah, you, you name it.
Speaker 1 00:30:51 So now outside of WordPress, that TV and I’m, I’m, I’m, I’d be curious to know how many people, how many customers they have on video press, how many videos they’re hosting. And I’d kinda like to know the reach. I mean, it’s been out, it’s been out there for since 2009 and over the years there’s been revamps and improvements, but you know, it hasn’t been one of those heavily marketed services, at least not in my opinion. Um, so I’m just curious as to, I wonder, wonder what kind of reach it has. It obviously has enough reach to where it’s still a viable service for them to continue offering and to continue work on. So yeah, I guess, well, I guess you couldn’t just access video press. Cause if you act video, press by, by word, press that TV, you don’t want to do that. Right. So there you go.
Speaker 1 00:31:40 Oh, and by the way, if you, um, if anybody actually goes through the video press checkout, at least I did a few days ago, they’ve had a really nice coupon deal going on. So it’s a pretty affordable, uh, it’s a pretty affordable price for a year. If you decide to purchase a plan with video press. So next up was a tweet by Josepha Haden, executive director of the WordPress project. She, uh, tweeted out what I consider a fun and interesting question because I always enjoyed things. I made me go back and WordPress time, cause that’s kind of, uh, that’s, that’s where I’ve been. That’s where I was. That’s what I know. And she says, think back to your first WordPress site, do you remember which task first made you head to a search engine for learning? And she says that hers was creating a menus.
Speaker 1 00:32:30 So I started thinking about it and I was thinking about the days of using WordPress when I was creating my web 2.0 review site. And I was using a free WordPress theme. I find in that directory and I was hacking and slashing trying to add this and trying to add that. And I remember using the plugin and I had to Google how to change the plugins parameters in order to achieve the desired effect. You know, nowadays you go in the back end and plugins have knobs and buttons and things you turn and there’s all these different options. Well, back in the day, there were no a lot of plugins didn’t have any UI. You had to actually go into the plugin files, look at the parameters and change some numbers around or change the order of the numbers and that control maybe display order or the type of thing that was actually being displayed.
Speaker 1 00:33:19 So it was actually kind of modifying the parameters of plugging in, uh, that, uh, had me go to Google to figure out, to learn how that, how that process worked. And I got to tell ya, um, I never could figure out how to add sidebars to themes that always tripped me up at the register, this and registered that and naming this and naming that. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve I I’ve edited functions that PHB found ended up with a white screen of death over the, over the years. Um, so before I want to go over some of these other responses I think is cool, but thinking back what’s, what did you encounter? What issue do you encounter first where you had to Google the solution to WordPress?
Speaker 2 00:34:02 I mean, I, I know you even remember.
Speaker 2 00:34:06 So I was using a custom written PHP, um, not quite CMS system that I had built. Um, and my blog on that website was being powered by blogger. And the first thing that I looked up when I got WordPress up and running was how to migrate from blogger to WordPress. And I, it was back before there were like import tools or, or export like those kinds of things for WordPress. And I, I remember creating a PHP script to be able to like pull my content from blogger. And then I just like manually copy and pasted it into the WordPress editor in the HTML view. And it was good to go kind of, um, but I remember looking it up on how, like trying to figure it out and see if anyone else had already done it.
Speaker 1 00:34:55 Uh, Justin tailback responded to the thread. He said that, uh, 16 years ago, he actually, um, you visited the WordPress support forums and he was looking up how to fix or how to put a sidebar on a separate page. And nowadays you just click a page template or assign a template to Nate and there you have it. Um, Eric said that it likely had something to do with creating the database. He was terrified of them back in the day. I’m still terrified of them. I’m still terrified of PHP. My admin. I try to avoid that area at all costs, even though nowadays, I kind of know what I’m doing and what I’m looking for, but it’s still page P my admin. It’s like walking on, walking on coals and Jake Sperlock and this one kind of made me laugh. He says how to make list items, be stars instead of bullets.
Speaker 1 00:35:47 And the reason I laugh is because I absolutely remember various tutorials being published on blogs throughout the WordPress community and how to change the bullet types. And I believe it was a change in CSS, like your CSS, um, deems related to list items. And I believe I followed one of those tutorials one time and switched the bullets to an image I had. So a custom image of something to be able to tie into the, uh, WP Tavern website. It was probably a little beer mugs or something. I changed that I had a set of bullets, had a little beer mugs, which I thought was pretty cool. And then something that I clearly remember was a pain for so many people or drop down menus. Um, I know Brett Brett bum meter says that he was stuck on that for about nine months and how to create drop down menus.
Speaker 1 00:36:39 And then he says, I finally figured it out for pages as well as automatically putting some categories under a category. And he says, a week later someone came out with some theme builder software, and it was only a five minute process, which is funny. And then that kind of reminded me about the wound naps and Bouneff was specifically created by WooThemes cause they had so many customers that had so many issues of creating menus drop down menus and just a menu management system itself. And a wound have actually became the foundation of the menu management system and WordPress 3.0, so just a little WordPress history there, but I thought it was a nice, a nice fun question there. And shout out to Bob WP front of the show. He made me laugh because he’s, he said he was impressed at so many repeats. So many people remembered what they for school would about it. And Bob, Bob replied that it’s just been a blur to him.
Speaker 1 00:37:35 Could that be an age thing? I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m just, just messing with your Bible of your Bob GoDaddy meets the big news this week. Uh, they’ve created, uh, well, back in September, they created a, uh, POS system was called GoDaddy payments. And what they’ve done now is, uh, their GoDaddy payments point of sale system is now fully integrated with WooCommerce online stores, which will make in-person payments quick and simple. So they talk about, uh, people being able to make in-person payments and it will affect things in the backend of WooCommerce immediately. You you’ll be able to see things take place immediately in addition to your online ordering. So they say that businesses will be able to securely accept securely except payments anywhere their customers are, where the that’s at their storefront or on the go at events, farmer’s markets or food trucks.
Speaker 1 00:38:35 They say that the dashboard provides business owners, the state of their business, and one snapshot. Uh, now if you’re thinking about fees, go, daddy payments offers transaction fees with 2.3% per in-person transaction, and 2.3% plus 30 cents per online transaction. But they say that this saves businesses on average, 20% off of their credit card transaction fees and go to any payments does accept major credit cards and debit cards and businesses are paid as soon as the next business day. So this was a, this was making the rounds. And, uh, if you, uh, get, um, hosting WooCommerce hosting, which, uh, GoDaddy pro does offer you get this as, as part of the, as part of the planet, just right there in your dashboard. So pretty big deal. If you’re, uh, if you’re over there, you’re using GoDaddy and you have a WooCommerce site, um, go to any, now you could do in-person. So I believe that would be mean, you get to, you could use like, uh, a mobile device and have people pay on the spot and then boom, it goes right into your excesses as your store, which I, which is cool. Yes.
Speaker 2 00:39:47 They have like the little card reader with documentation and that’s like 49 us dollars. And then they have their smart terminal, which is like more like the dual screen kind of thing, where there’s a screen for the, the cashier or the person check, checking your you out, and then a screen for the customer to see kind of what they’re getting. And that’s only 249 us dollars. So, um, like they’re all in on this and it’s pretty cool.
Speaker 1 00:40:10 Yeah. I enjoy the low, uh, transaction fees. That’s pretty cool. I mean, be able to, to walk around and get people to give you money, buy your products and then boom. It goes right into yours to your store. It’s uh, that’s pretty nice. Um, speaking of GoDaddy, I want to give a huge shout out to GoDaddy because they are the first company to financially support the show and the work that I do on WP mainline. Thank you very much, Phil daddy for helping me pay the bills. AI. Yes. A round of applause, sir. Thank you very much. Um, and are you looking to increase your productivity? One tool that helps thousands of what developers and designers do more everyday is GoDaddy pro combining site client and project management. GoDaddy pro is an all-in-one solution made by and for web professionals, whether you’re new to web design or looking to grow your business, you’ll find free tools, products, guidance, and support to help you deliver results for clients.
Speaker 1 00:41:10 And at the heart of GoDaddy pro is the hub. You may have seen the hub mentioned. There’s a lot of things going on over there at go daddy with the hub. The hub is a very cold place, but the hub is an intuitive dashboard in a hub. Seamlessly brings your sites, clients, and projects all together. You can monitor, manage and monitor all of your client’s WordPress sites from a single place, no matter where they’re hosted with a single click, you can perform bulk updates, backup security checks, and more to save time and free up your day. And for more information, you can visit godaddy.com forward slash pro forward slash hub dashboard. But easiest thing to do is just visit the site, visit the show notes, say thank you to bill daddy on Twitter for helping to support me in this show. Very much, appreciate it here at press.
Speaker 1 00:41:55 Hey, how about the hero press a network boy, husband and wife do over their toe from cake to Rosa. They’re a little busy bees. And, uh, they’ve announced that the, the launch of the hero press network, which is a collection of content from various sites that they are working on putting in a centralized location. Now, according to Kate pierogis, he says that its overarching goal is to be a hub and it will display the newest items from around the hero press and network, as well as news from the community, uh, that they’re currently adding into the site. Uh, they can also post information that they think is helpful or educational. So right now the hub incorporates or the hero press network incorporates here, a press hallway chance, WP podcast, find it WP. They also have a slack group which I’ve recently joined and they have two additional projects in production.
Speaker 1 00:42:44 I got to imagine that, oh, well it’s already listed WP podcasts. That’s a pretty cool place. So they’re, they’re putting a lot of resources that are available in the WordPress community. And this is, this happens from time to time. We go through these spurts of, um, websites, gathering things and putting them kind of organizing them to be in one location. And those are always beneficial, uh, for the WordPress community. And, uh, the WP podcast thing seems to be going pretty well. And I’m kind of interested to see what find it WordPress turns into, uh, so congrats to Kate and Tofor for the, uh, the launch of their hero press network and looking forward to seeing what that turns into and something that recently came up in the WordPress community. Uh, back in September, a gentleman by the name of mark Zuhair, uh, published a tweet mentioning that he had been contacted by someone in the WordPress community who was working on a post that would list some of the best plugins to use. But what set this email apart was that the author told them that in order to be included in the post, you got to pay up buddy.
Speaker 1 00:43:52 That’s funny to me. Um, the folks over at WP scan received a similar email in August and they policy exchange, which shows how much each position costs. If you wanted to be in position zero with a featured plug-in position, you paid $199 for position one. It was $149 positions, two, three and four, $119 positions, five and six $99. A WP scan actually showed, um, showed in the email that they received. And based on, uh, another tweet by Sahara who shared a link to an article that was published on WP hive, we now know which website was contacting these individuals and asking them, or kind of much negotiating with them saying, Hey, you know, we’re going to do a best plugins list if you want to be on it, you know, give us some money. And that’s just, that just rubbed me the wrong way. I think it rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Cause if you go and visit WP Hyman, you look at the article, you have no idea. You think it’s their opinion as to what the best are assessed, feed plugins are for WordPress. And if you, if you knew ahead of time as a reader, that based on those positions, the order that you’re reading those in that those developers or those authors paid money to be in that spot, I think it completely changes your perception and your outlook in the way that you, that you consume that information.
Speaker 2 00:45:18 Yeah. I mean, we should all probably be looking at all of these things with a, with a little bit of, uh, like a questioning eye, but could you imagine if either of us had done that in our career? I mean, we wouldn’t be here today to be able to have this podcast and you wouldn’t be running WP main line, like,
Speaker 1 00:45:34 Uh, trust would be gone or, you know, I think people, people might end up forgiving me over time, but I already know at a time look and this is in the, and that’s why the name of the article is being honest to readers is free. And, but losing trust is very, very expensive.
Speaker 2 00:45:54 And not only that, but now it puts into question every other article or comparison.
Speaker 1 00:46:00 So
Speaker 2 00:46:00 It’s, it’s, it’s not a one and done thing. Like you can’t do this and then go back and be like, oh man, I Copa, like we only did it that one time. We’ll never do it again. And you have to go, did you though, did you,
Speaker 1 00:46:11 I tell you what, because of this, you know, I actually recently was looking for an ad management plugin for WordPress. So you type, what do I type into Google ad management plugin forward presser, or maybe best ad management plugin. And I get these posts from WP beginner and some of these other posts, and it’s always the best ad management plugins and this, that, and the other. And that was viewing those articles. And because of what I read here from now, what would just mention NWB hive? I started wondering, I said, well, why is this plugin first? What, you know, was there anything going on here? Is this really the honest opinion of the, of the author? Do they really think, you know, this way about this plugin does it, where they paid for this position where they paid the right this. Now I’m asking myself all these questions and, uh, uh, what a bomber, what a bummer and this crap, like, this is not good for the WordPress community, because it’s just, if you’re going to do it, just be honest with the users to me, look, it’s not a bad way to, I’m not complaining about this as a way to monetize your content.
Speaker 1 00:47:17 It’s, it’s not, I have no problem with the monetization. The problem is in the transparency. Yep.
Speaker 2 00:47:24 A hundred percent.
Speaker 1 00:47:26 So, and it’s kind of funny. Uh, Zara saved himself from cash. He commented on the post and they actually published a comment. And then his comment, he had mentioned the plugin that, uh, that he’s a part of called WP RSS aggregator, which is a fairly popular plugin, which wasn’t included in the list. And, uh, uh, Sahara did not hire, did not pay the author to publish his comment. So he ended up getting linked to his product on that post. But in the comments, it’s kind of funny, funny how that all worked out. And uh, so last but not least something really cool happened this week. Um, WP mainline. Um, I got in touch with Joshua Daley, who is a designer, he’s part of the team, the web three WP team. Uh, that’s doing the wahoo NFT project. And I gave him an idea and I said, Hey, what if, uh, we created a box car, you know, on the railway buys, cars are already branded with the company name and all kinds of other information.
Speaker 1 00:48:36 So it just makes perfect sense. This is what if we could create a box car and then have companies be able to bring them or put their logos on them. And each one would be custom design and whatnot. And I said, do you think you could do it? He says, yeah, well, let me, let me try and whip something up just for fun. I’ll give you a concept and let’s try it out. And man, this guy, he hit a home run. I was blown away by the concept. He even added little details like the, the red lug nuts on the axles, the Springs, there’s a little ladder. There’s a little handle on the door, on the box car. It looks to me,
Speaker 2 00:49:10 It’s worth saying like, if you haven’t gone to the WP mainline website recently, and you’re just like downloading this on your favorite podcasting app, go check out the website. You got to see this it’s really, really,
Speaker 1 00:49:21 So the plan is I’ve hooked up with him. I partnered up with him. If you, you can go to WP mainline that calm. And at the top of the website, I’ve got, uh, there’s two bikes, cars that you’ll see that show up. It’s pretty much my take on a banner ad display banner advertising, except these are ads you want to see, you know, these are, these ads are cool and they’ll randomly show up there on the front page for 60 days for $500, you get to keep the box car and you could do whatever you want with it. But the box car will also go onto a, I have a box card gallery page. So whatever design you get, I will put that boxcar onto that page. I will leave the link intact or whatever it is you want to link to, and it will live there.
Speaker 1 00:50:08 So these, these things are so cool that I felt like it’d be a disservice to have them just disappear. So they’re going to live on, on the gallery page. So if you’re interested in having a really cool, um, train theme, banner advertisement, and be part of this train via a boxcar, um, definitely go to the website, check it out, you’ll find it under, uh, there’s a link at the top of the website says ways to support me. It’s the first one says custom box car, banner design very much appreciate it in the turnaround times within the week. And I’ve got, uh, speaking of Bob Dunn, Bob WP, he’s actually going through a complete rebranding right now for do the womb. And we got him a box car made and it looks awesome. People are gonna love it. And I wish I could show it to everybody, but, uh, I gotta wait till November because that’s yeah, because that’s when his branding that’s when it’s burning, it comes up, but I showed it to him and he absolutely loves it. He loved the first concept, which is awesome. So it’s my take on display banner advertising. And I’m stoked that so many people in the WordPress community have, um, have, uh, pretty much showed your appreciation. I just say it’s a really cool concept and design and that blends in with the website. You don’t have to block it now. I just need to get, uh, some more bass cars made. So well you also,
Speaker 2 00:51:32 And engine, you need to do like mainline engine at some point too, right? Because then that just completes the whole lot.
Speaker 1 00:51:38 Yeah. I need an engine, but you, you, you know what else I need? I need the caboose. I gotta have, I gotta have a caboose because,
Speaker 2 00:51:46 Uh, uh, J uh, triple J J and I am the caboose. That’d be hilarious.
Speaker 1 00:51:52 Ah, you know, all right. You may be on to something. I may see something within the next week or two. All right. Um, other than that, there was a lot of news to cover during the week. There were other things that took place, but, you know, I can’t cover it all, I guess I could, but I just, there’s only one Jeff row. Right. I’m trying to do the best I can. Other than that, Malcolm, anything to add,
Speaker 2 00:52:22 Uh, I mean, if, if you’re not interested in the box car design, they can also support you through, uh, the $49 per year rail fan. Um, so Jeff, Jeff has these yearly ways to support, uh, makes the podcast continue to happen. If you want more of these episodes, please go over there and check it out. Um, he also has podcasts advertising. Um, so if you want to kind of get your ad, read on air, check that out as well. And, uh, of course I’m gonna plug myself, uh, and then Jeff can tell you where to find him. And it’s the reverse of normal cause I started talking so you can find me on Twitter at find purpose. And, uh, I work at Canberra creative and Prestatyn so check me out there. If you need any kind of help with, um, getting a cool website developed or any kind of project developed. And, uh, if you need web hosting, check us out at press Titan,
Speaker 1 00:53:09 Capital T, dang it.
Speaker 2 00:53:12 Where can they find
Speaker 1 00:53:12 As you Jeff? Uh, you can find me, uh, at Jeff Rowe, J a F F R zero or at WP mainline on Twitter, Twitter. That’s like my water cooler. That’s where I hang out. You can also find me on the various slack channels on the WordPress slack, uh, hero, press slack, post status, slack, a big orange heart slack. Um, I’ve actually recently joined the Matt Madeiros by the way, happy ninth birthday. Uh, the Matt report turned nine years old. He celebrated his ninth anniversary is a very cool kudos to you, man, for, for sticking it out this long. He’s got this cool, uh, project he’s working on Cod WP minute, uh, news, uh, news and views from, from different people throughout the community. I just recently joined his discord. He’s got a discord community. So I dunno, I meant Jeff was being stretched a little thin here, but, uh, but we’ll make it work. We’ll make it work. So that’s going to do it for this episode of the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode and all other episodes, WP mainline.com, just click the podcast link. And there you go. And that’s going to do it. Uh, so everybody enjoy your weekend and we’ll talk to you again next Friday afternoon. So long everybody