WP Tavern

Today is a little bit of a departure for the podcast. It's an episode all about the last 20 years of WordPress. You're going to hear a round table discussion with four WordPressers talking about their thoughts on the last 20 years. It features Sarah Gooding, Aurooba Ahmed, Masestro Stevens and Jess Frick, with David Bisset as the discussion moderator. They cover many topics including memorial WordPress release, a WordCamp or WordCamp experience, the most notable State of the Word announcement. It's great to hear so many varied opinions about what's been of importance in the evolution of WordPress.

On the podcast today we have Alex Standiford. He’s a web developer originally from Dover, Ohio, and has been tinkering with web technologies for years, but started his career as a web developer in 2015. Alex has built WordPress plugins, websites, and web applications, and is an active contributor to the WordPress community, making updates to documentation errors, and participating in the organisation of WordCamps. He's here today to talk about how he’s noticed a shift over time in his own content creation. He’s put less effort into his WordPress site and has posted most of his ideas on social platforms. This however is something that Alex has decided to stop doing. For a variety of reasons he wants to take back control of his own content and make his website the centrepiece of his endeavours. We talk about how platforms open platforms like Mastodon are making this possible; how he’s using plugins and his own coding skills to make it possible for cross posting of posts and comments between Mastodon and his WordPress site. It’s a really interesting conversation about the recent surge in popularity of these distributed social networks and how WordPress can become a first class citizen in your digital life.

On the podcast today we have Mark Westguard. Mark is an agency owner and the developer behind the WS Form plugin, and he’s on the podcast to chart his journey in the WordPress space and the different ways he’s explored to grow the reach of the plugin. First up, we talk about why Mark started to use WordPress, then we move onto the subject of turning a well-developed plugin into a viable business. We then explore the subject of turning a well-developed plugin into a viable business. It’s one thing to build a product, but if you’re going to make it commercial, much of the work will revolve around ensuring that the world knows about it. Marketing is a relentless enterprise and one that you should not ignore or underestimate. We also get into the subject of pricing, and what Mark felt was the right place to pitch his plugin. Is the WordPress ecosystem guilty of expecting a lot from plugins at prices which are realistic?

On the podcast today we have Ahmed Kabir Chaion. Ahmed has a genuine love of the WordPress community. He’s been an organiser at multiple WordPress events, including WordCamp Asia, the WordPress Accessibility Day, WordFest Live, WordCamp Santa Clarita, and the WordPress Translation Day. As if that were not enough, he’s also served as co-organiser of the Dhaka WordPress Meetup Chapter, is a former Design Team Rep and a current Polyglots Team Rep. So, Ahmed’s really engaged in the WordPress community, but how did this all happen? The podcast today focuses on Ahmed’s journey into WordPress. The podcast is all about how you can find a place in the WordPress community no matter what your strengths are. Maybe you’re into writing code, or SEO. Perhaps marketing or translations are more your thing. He tells us how he got started just by showing up repeatedly, slowly working out areas where he thought his contributions would be most valuable. It’s a lovely tale of a community member who is truly inspired to make the project better.

On the podcast today we have Ryan Welcher. He's a developer advocate sponsored by Automattic. He has been developing with WordPress since 2009 and before becoming a developer advocate, worked for agencies large and small and as a freelancer. If you’ve been using WordPress for any length of time, you’ll have come across the new paradigm for content creation, blocks. Every part of your website can now be created and amended as a block. Pages, posts, text, images, headers, footers, navigation and more. This has widened what’s possible for people who don’t want to mess around with the code of their website. You can add in blocks for almost anything, and change how it looks and behaves from within the block editor interface. Ryan is on the podcast today to tell you about the create-block tool, and how it can make your pathway towards block creation a little easier. It’s not a tool which is going to build the blocks for you, but it will help you set up the environment and build process, which you need to get started. Really, it’s all about saving you time and effort on things which don’t really get you building your blocks, but which you need to do that work. If you’ve thought about creating your own blocks, but have been put off by the technical barrier, this podcast is for you.

On the podcast today we have Steve Bruner and Timothy Jacobs. They've both been very busy in the WordPress space, and what brings them together is that they’re both founders of a SaaS app called Engine Awesome, where Steve is the CEO and Timothy is the CTO. What has this got to do with WordPress, you might ask. Well, they’re here today to talk about Gutenberg, but not how you might expect. It’s Gutenberg outside of WordPress, but Gutenberg nonetheless. Gutenberg is open source. You are free to download it, modify it, and use it in whatever way you like. When Steve and Timothy began working on their new project, and needed a way for their clients to interact with it, they found Gutenberg was the perfect tool for the job. We talk about what benefits they’ve gained by using Gutenberg. How it’s saved them time, and how it’s fast becoming a stable and mature product, which is easy for non-technical users to understand. If you’re looking to build your own SaaS app, or you’re just curious about how Gutenberg is being deployed outside of WordPress, this podcast is for you.

On the podcast today, we have Nathan Ingram. Nathan is the host at iThemes Training where he teaches WordPress and business development topics via live webinar. Based in Birmingham, Alabama, he has been working with clients to build websites since 1995. He’s also the creator of MonsterContracts, which helps WordPress professionals create contracts for their client work, and it's contracts which are the focus of the podcast today. If you’ve worked directly with clients, then you’ll know that things don’t always go according to plan. Assets might not be delivered on time. The client does not respond to your emails. The expectations of the client begins to creep away from the original proposal. We talk about how contracts can protect you, but also provide clarity to your clients about the process you follow. It’s an interesting conversation which makes contracts seem less adversarial and more about ensuring that your WordPress website projects run as smoothly as possible.

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.