WP Tavern

On the podcast today we have Adam Silverstein. Adam is a WordPress core comitter where he works to fix bugs and improve modern web capabilities. As a Developer Relations Engineer in the content ecosystem team at Google, he works to invigorate the open web by empowering and educating developers. At the recent WordCamp US, he gave a presentation entitled ‘Images on the Web - past present and future’. In it, he outlined his thoughts on where the web is going in terms of support for different image formats. This then forms the basis of the podcast. How do browsers actually display images to your website visitors, and what formats are most appropriate where? We also talk about the new image formats, which are seeing more widespread adoption; WebP, AVIF and JPEG XL. We learn about the roll out of browser support, how they have smaller file sizes and when we can safely to use them.

On the podcast today we have Nick Diego. Nick is a Developer Advocate at WP Engine. He can be found creating educational content, building plugins and themes, and contributing to WordPress Core. He’s on the podcast to talk about his passion and optimism for the future of WordPress using blocks. At the recent WordCamp US, Nick gave a presentation entitled, ‘Let’s Build a Custom Block in 15 Minutes’. It was his attempt to show a group of WordPress enthusiasts that the barrier to creating blocks is slowly being eroded, due to the creation of new tools. These tools are creating opportunities for people who might otherwise have stayed away from block development. It’s clear that Nick is all in on blocks, and during the podcast he makes the case for why you should be too. They offer so many opportunities for what can be displayed on a page, and their capabilities are only getting better. It’s a fascinating chat, especially for those who are, as yet, undecided about whether they want to embrace WordPress blocks.

On the podcast today we have Alex Ball. Alex is a Lead Software Engineer at Mindgrub, a digital agency in Baltimore, Maryland. His website leadership experience continues to inform his decision-making today, especially for training clients and making the block editor as easy to use as possible, and that, in essence, is the subject of the podcast today. During WordCamp US 2022, Alex gave a lightning talk in which he laid out some suggestions on how the block editor can be made more straightforward for clients. Most regular WordPress users have become accustomed to the way the block editor works. Over time, we’ve understood how things work and where we need to go in the UI to alter things. For many clients, this familiarity simply does not exist, it's confusing and mistakes occur. Alex talks about solutions to this problem, and he comes at it from different angles. Maybe you lock certain features down so that only certain users can achieve specific tasks. Or it might be that you need to take time to educate your clients more about the block editor and how it works.

On the podcast today we have Joe Dolson. Joe is a WordPress plugin developer, a core committer, and a web accessibility consultant. He’s part of the Make WordPress Accessible team, the team dedicated to improving accessibility in the WordPress ecosystem. His recent presentation at WordCamp US entitled ‘Finding and Fixing the Six Most Common WCAG 2 Failures’, highlights some of the key areas where websites are not as accessible as they should be. The areas we discuss are, low contrast text, missing alternative text, empty links, missing form labels, empty buttons and missing document language. Joe explains what each of these problems are, both in terms of how they can be fixed, as well as what people with accessibility requirements might experience when they visit your site. We also chat about the fact that there’s an ever growing legal compulsion to make websites follow accessibility guidelines. Lawsuits are going through the courts with greater regularity, so now might be the time to look into this topic.

On the podcast today we have Nick Ahmann. Nick works for Inisev, a company which provides SaaS services for WordPress and other platforms. They have a range of products, but today we focus on TasteWP. TasteWP is a service which allows you to spin up a disposable WordPress install in a matter of seconds. From there, you can use the site for free for two days. If you’re wanting to test out a plugin or theme, but don’t want the hassle of creating a site on your own hosting, or local machine, TasteWP could be a useful option. It behaves as a normal WordPress website and you’re not limited to what you can install on top of the defaults. We talk about what promoted Nick to work on this plugin and how he sees it as helping the WordPress community, as well as being a vehicle to make people aware of the products and services that his company offers. If you’ve ever wanted a WordPress site to play with for a few days, then this episode is for you.

On the podcast today we have Marcel Schmitz. Marcel is a freelancer at Codeable for Pluginslab, a small agency based in Porto, Portugal. He builds solutions for WooCommerce, often connecting them with native mobile applications. We talk on the podcast today about the opportunities Codeable has offered him and how it fits in with his life. As you’ll hear, he’s pretty keen on the fact that it gives him a reliable stream of work without the need for him to go out and find it. He explains the nuts and bolts of how you get started, what developers need to bring to the table and how Codeable mediates disputes which might arise. Towards the end of the podcast, we talk about Marcel’s work using AR and WooCommerce, as well as a brief foray into how he sees headless WordPress working with WooCommerce in the future; what are the benefits and what are some of the drawbacks?

On the podcast today we have Laura Nelson. Laura is a Content Marketer at WooCommerce where she’s responsible for creating and planning engaging content for their users. Prior to WooCommerce she worked at MailPoet, an email marketing plugin for WordPress, and it's this experience that she is bringing to the show. Her pitch is that email newsletters can themselves be a product. That people will pay to receive your emails, and she’s got data and examples to back it up. I suppose that the closest analogy would be people who create an online course. You have an area of expertise; you do the hard work of creating the course and people will pay for a membership to have the benefit of learning from your expertise. Laura is describing something similar to that. The only difference being that instead of a course, people will pay to receive your emails, knowing that you’re going to bring value to them regularly. This is not a get rich quick scheme. It’s hard work and you’ve got to cultivate your audience and give them something of value, repeatedly.

On the podcast today we have Andrew Palmer. Andrew has been in the WordPress space for many years as a product owner and open source advocate. He founded and later sold Elegant Marketplace, and more recently is the co-founder of Bertha.ai, which is a WordPress plugin which assists you in creating text content directly in the WordPress admin. We get into how you can create AI content and when it’s suitable to do so. Can you rely on the text that’s created and hand over complete editorial control to the plugin, or does the generated content still need human intervention? We also dig into some aspects of AI which have people concerned. Are we going to become too reliant on AI tools, and will they put copywriters out of work? Will people create content simply to swamp the search engines and make it harder for truly important information to rise to the top?

On the podcast today we have Marieke Van De Rakt & Taco Verdonschot, and they’re both from Yoast SEO. I sat down with them both at WordCamp Europe and we talked about some of the recent changes that have taken place within the company. Having worked hard to build and maintain their company's reputation, they decided that it was time to steer the business in a new direction by selling it to Newfold Digital. We get into the reasons for this acquisition and the subsequent reshuffling of the management of the company. What were the details of that agreement, why did they join forces with Newfold Digital in particular, and how has the acquisition gone? We also talk about their longstanding commitment to contributing back to the WordPress project. Why have they done this and what benefits have they seen from this approach? Why do they bring so many of their team to WordCamps? Finally, we talk about their move into the Shopify space with their SaaS Shopify app.

On the podcast today we have Paul Bearne. Paul is a WordPress enthusiast who loves to come up with ways to make WordPress do things it doesn’t normally do. Having engaged with WordPress almost from the start, he specialises in the creation of highly performant, scalable, accessible and SEO friendly code. In the podcast today Paul talks about the many ways in which it’s possible to work within the WordPress ecosystem. He’s tried many of them out over the years. Paul talks through some of the different ways that you can work and draws out the benefits and drawbacks that they have. How can you find the work and what can you do to make sure that it’s as stable as it can be? If you’re already a remote worker, much of this conversation will resonate with you, but if you’re not, but are curious about your options, this podcast will be of interest.