WP Tavern

On the podcast today we have Steve Persch and Brian Perry. They’re both employed at Pantheon, an enterprise website operations platform, and they’re here to talk about the evolution of website hosting. Back when the internet started, hosting was a fairly straightforward enterprise. You created HTML files and uploaded them to a server. That was it. An HTML file was a page. Things have changed a lot. We’ve got CDNs, headless, React, Gatsby, Node.js and much more. Is it even possible for the non-technical to have any understanding of where their website is? What’s certain is that there’s no end in sight in terms of the rate of innovation in the website hosting space. What’s popular today might not be several years from now, and so it’s a timely discussion of what Steve and Brain see as the best bets for the future.

On the podcast today we have Joost De Valk. If you’ve been in the WordPress space for any length of time, it’s likely that you’ve come across the Yoast SEO plugin. This was the brainchild of the guest today, Joost, same pronunciation, different spelling. We talk about how Joost found WordPress and quickly started working on his SEO plugin. How it rapidly grew and became his career. We discuss the WordPress landscape during this time and whether it’s more difficult now to have the type of success that his plugin received, given that there are more players vying for our attention. The conversation then moves into why the plugin was recently sold to Newfold Digital. What were the guardrails that were put in place to ensure that the plugin continued and the employees felt safe? We end up talking about whether it's time for the WordPress Admin area to receive a UI refresh.

On the podcast today we have Chris Reynolds. Chris has been working with WordPress for over 15 years, and is now at Pantheon as a CMS Ecosystem engineer, and WordPress technical lead. He’s spoken at WordCamps and at OpenWest about all aspects of WordPress. He's here to talk about Composer and what it can do to assist you with your WordPress website workflow. I suspect that many of the people listening to this podcast are not using Composer, and to Chris, this is something that you should think about implementing. We then get into the weeds of what Composer is, and the benefits that it brings. It’s essentially a package management system and makes it easy to set dependencies for your project and manage them within Composer. Chris describes scenarios in which he thinks Composer is a good fit; if you want to add in specific packages, and how those packages are managed and updated. He explains how you can install Composer depending on the OS that you’re working with, and how it structures the files and directories that are created. If you’ve thought about using a package management system such as Composer, this episode is for you.

On the podcast today we have Talisha Lewallen. You might have found your way into WordPress intentionally, or perhaps you stumbled across it and decided to explore further. Whichever it was, you've learned things along the way. Perhaps you’re a coder, or a designer. In fact, there are dozens of different pathways in the WordPress ecosystem. Given the broad range of knowledge you might possess, how can you prove that you know what you know? With WordPress being such a dominant force in the world of websites, would it be a good idea to have a certification for WordPress? Talisha certainly thinks so and has founded CertifyWP to try to make that happen. We approach this subject through the work that she’s been doing at WPConnects in which she’s been trying to provide training to military veterans, so that on their departure from the services, they have the prospect of finding work in the WordPress space. Is there a need for a certification for WordPress and how such a certification would come about. We discuss whether the WordPress community is ready for a third party to be certifying people’s abilities and whether this strays away from the approach that we’ve had so far, in which routes into employment have relied upon other, less formal, methods. If you’re curious about certifications in the WordPress space, this podcast is for you.

On the podcast today, we have Sé Reed and Courtney Robertson, and they’re here to talk about the WP Community Collective, or WPCC for short. The WPCC is a non-profit that is hoping to fund contributors to the WordPress project. WordPress is built on top of a dedicated base of volunteers. People give up their time and expertise to contribute towards the project, and in this way make it free to download and use. But we all have to earn money at some point. Most are not in a position to donate their time completely freely; they have to put food on the table. Often contributors are sponsored by the companies that they work for, either part time or full time. There’s nothing wrong with this model, but what about the capable, willing volunteers who are not in this position? The people who have the skills and motivation to contribute, but not the time or finances to make that a reality. The WPCC wants to act as a go between for companies or organisations who are willing to spend money improving WordPress, and the individuals who can implement those improvements. Listen to find out how it's all going to work.

On the podcast today, we have Bob Dunn. If you’ve been using WordPress for any length of time, and you’ve been consuming content in the ecosystem, it’s highly likely that you’ve come across Bob before. He’s been using WordPress since 2006, WooCommerce since 2011, and has been podcasting since 2014. In another life before he discovered WordPress, Bob ran a marketing company, but now his endeavours are all about WordPress. We talk about how Bob found WordPress back in the day when he was creating websites with HTML and Flash. Bob branded himself as BobWP and has never looked back. Given the size of the WordPress community, Bob was able to discover his niche within the greater whole and concentrate on WooCommerce. His popular Do the Woo podcast was born, and he’s been working on it ever since. We talk about how Bob has managed to keep the momentum going, and what he thinks are unique about his podcast and community. We also talk about how growing a community such as this can be financed, as well as the ways Bob is trying to innovate in the near future to give value back to the WordPress project more generally. It’s an interesting conversation about how content creators can find a place in the WordPress ecosystem and what impact they can have.

On the podcast today, we have Patrick Posner. Patrick is a solopreneur and has been developing with WordPress since 2010. He’s worked in many environments, as a freelancer, a senior developer in a WordPress product company, and since 2020 he’s been working full time on his own projects. One of his projects is a plugin called Simply Static. Its purpose is to make a static version of your website. This, of course, begs the question, what is a static site? We explore the idea of 'flattening' your website, only putting the files needed for your website, whilst taking WordPress offline. We get into the pros and the cons of why you might wish to do this as well as some plugins and services which will enable this. It’s a really interesting subject and one that you might like to explore, and this podcast is a great primer for that.

On the podcast today we have Paul Halfpenny. Paul is the CTO at Filter, a remote-first digital agency that specialises in open-source tech, as well as a WordCamp speaker. He has an interest in making websites a more personal experience. Website personalisation is the idea of amending content served by your website to match the conditions of your current users. It might be that you want to show (or hide) content to people during certain times of the year. Perhaps it would be helpful to translate content if the user comes from a specific locale. Or maybe you would like to offer a product based upon pages that a user had previously visited, or items that they have bought. All of this falls under the umbrella of personalisation, and it’s an area that Paul thinks is going to be more important in the future. We talk about what techniques you can use to offer up personalised content. That could be WordPress plugins or options within blocks, but there are also more complex setups with a whole range of ‘at the edge’ technologies. It’s an interesting chat with many insights and tips, and so if you’re looking to explore this subject further, this episode is for you.

On the podcast today, we have Naoko Takano. A few days from now, from the 17th to the 19th February 2023, to be precise, the first in-person WordCamp Asia will take place in Bangkok, Thailand. If you follow WordPress events closely, then I’m sure that you’ve seen the excitement mounting. Naoko is on the podcast today to talk about this important event; how it came to be and why it matters. We start off getting some background on Naoko and her personal journey with WordPress. She’s currently sponsored full time by Automattic to work with the wordpress.org community and polyglots teams. The conversation then turns to the event itself. It’s sold out, but you can still take part by watching the live streams of the three tracks that are running. Towards the end of the podcast, we get into the important question of why we need a WordCamp Asia. Naoko makes the point that the other ‘flagship’ WordPress events are not that accessible for some people. This could be because of the difficulty in acquiring visas for the U.S. or Europe, but also the costs of travelling to the event and accommodation whilst there. If you’re attending WordCamp Asia in-person or online, this podcast will give you a new perspective on the event, and if you’re not planning on being there, maybe this episode will make you rethink.

On the podcast today we have Robert Rowley. Robert is Patchstack's security advocate, where his time is spent interacting with open source communities to share the word about security best practices. Given his background, the podcast today is all about internet security. We start off with a topic which is very much in the news at the moment, the LastPass security breach. LastPass is a password manager. It will lock up your passwords, and any other data for that matter, in a secure vault, which can only be read if you decrypt it with the correct password. Towards the end of 2022, LastPass announced in a series of blog posts that customer vaults had been taken from their cloud storage. The way that this was communicated left many of their customers questioning their use of the service, and whether they now could trust LastPass with their data. Robert explains how the incident occurred, and if you should be concerned. This then leads to a conversation about the broader issue of website security and the security of WordPress websites in particular. If you’re curious about website security, then this is a podcast for you.