Post Status Podcasts

After Post Status Publish's main talks concluded, Joe Hoyle and I recorded the podcast during the reception. It was a laid back format where we discuss the future of WordPress, including our own wishlist features, and then we spent the majority of the hour taking questions from the audience. We recorded this prior to the announcement of the new development schedule and changes to major releases, but most of our conversation remains relevant, as many of our wishlist items are within the three release focus areas that have been chosen. You can listen to just the audio, also on our podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Or watch the video on YouTube. And don't forget to subscribe to my new channel on YouTube.

During contributor day of WordCamp US in Philadelphia, I was able to interview Matt Mullenweg to follow up on several items he announced in the State of the Word. We mostly discussed the new WordPress development cycle and how it will work with the three focus areas. We also discussed how that will affect other non-major updates and WordPress features. Matt also talked about the WordPress REST API, how he defines success for it, what he hopes to see out of it, and what he thinks would cause it to revert to a plugin only feature. And as this was the second and final year of WordCamp US in Philadelphia, we reflected on the event, and talked about what there is to look forward to in Nashville for WordCamp US 2017 and 2018.

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard. In this episode, Joe and Brian talk about how they learned WordPress development, how employers should look at candidates for skill hiring, and various resources they find valuable for learning WordPress. Links Just Build Websites Lynda.com WordPress tutorials WP in One Month WordPress Development Stack Exchange How to Become a Respected WordPress Developer Sponsor: Gravity Forms This episode is sponsored by Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms makes the best web forms on the planet. Over a million WordPress sites are already using Gravity Forms. Is yours? For more information, check out their website and thank you to Gravity Forms for being a Post Status partner.

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard. In this episode, Joe and Brian talk about the WordPress REST API and the core approval process Topics The API's journey How Core projects work What to know about the API know that it's in trunk What that means for the future of the API Links Build APIs you won't hate Legacy v1 API LEAN McMansion Hell: The devil is in the details Sponsor: OptinMonster OptinMonster allows you to convert visitors into subscribers. You can easily create & A/B test beautiful lead capture forms without a developer. Check out OptinMonster today!  

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard. In this episode, Joe and Brian answer listener questions. You can go to poststatus.com/ask to ask questions for a future episode. We spent the second half of the show talking about innovation in WordPress and what makes big innovation difficult. Topics and Links What is Publish going to be about? Post Status Publish What is A Day of Rest? A Day of Rest Boston 2017 Managing sites between local, development, staging, and live Mergebot VersionPress Theme review process Theme handbook WP Test Donations for free plugins The patronage model for free software freelancers Using Kickstarter to fund open source How can the WordPress project innovate? Sponsor: Pagely Pagely helps the world’s biggest brands scale and secure WordPress. They are the original managed host, and have been at it for seven years now. Check out Pagely today, and thanks to Pagely for being a Post Status partner.

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Brian Krogsgard and this week's special guest host, Diane Kinney. Diane is a web professional and solo practitioner based in Florida. She’s writing a book with Carrie Dils called Real World Freelancing, and I thought it’d be fun to chat with her about freelancing. Links and Topics Real World Freelancing The Versatility Group, Diane's primary business How much should a website cost? DianeKinney.com, a blog in development. It will focus on business topics, WordPress, and beyond Sponsor: Yoast Yoast SEO Premium gives you 24/7 support from a dedicated support team and extra features such as a redirect manager, tutorial videos and integration with Google Webmaster Tools! Go to yoast.com for more information, and thanks to Yoast for being a Post Status partner

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard. In this episode, Joe and Brian discuss WordPress themes, the functionality people put into them, and the challenges that face the WordPress ecosystem with the current state of theming. They also discuss various theme frameworks and how they are setup, common post types and how they can better be supported, and the popularity of page builders. Topics What should a theme do? Theme vs. Plugin functionality -- and mobility potential between themes Canonical post types Difference between commercial themes and .org distributed free themes Restrictions All-in-one solution "promises" Page builders and their role in theming Other theme options via the REST API Links On WordPress themes and frameworks Underscores CSS Zen Garden Hybrid Core Genesis WordPress.com and Jetpack should lead the way to standardizing CPTs Sponsor: WP101 The WP101 Plugin frees your time, enabling you to focus on what you do best, while providing our popular WordPress 101 tutorial videos directly in your client's dashboard. You can even add your own videos! Go to wp101plugin.com for more information, and thanks to WP101 for being a Post Status partner.

In this episode of Post Status Draft, I talk to Pippin Williamson, and we discuss the renewed effort he and his team have made to rejuvenate Restrict Content Pro. Restrict Content Pro was initially sold without even a dedicated landing page, was successful on Code Canyon for a time, then he let it sputter as he and his team concentrated on Easy Digital Downloads and AffiliateWP. But Pippin knew that Restrict Content Pro still had more life in it, and he wanted to see it become the kind of product he knew it had the potential to be. So when John Parris -- at the time primarily working with Easy Digital Downloads -- said he was interested in helping make RCP a proper membership plugin, Pippin jumped on the opportunity. They have had a good bit of success early on in the attempt to rejuvenate this product: Our goal was to double or triple the monthly revenue within six months. In March, 2016, RCP brought in $7,700. Last month, July 2016, it brought in $11,400. August, 2016, is estimated to bring in a little over $12,000. We’re at the five month mark and have increased monthly revenue by about 1.5. That’s not double yet, but it’s getting close. Within another few months, I expect we’ve surpass $15,000 in monthly sales. Even with just an increase of 1.5, we’re still looking at more than $100,000 in annual revenue, and the monthly revenue is higher than it ever was in the past, so we’re succeeding. Our conversation picked up where the blog post left off. We talked about the pain points they encountered during this effort, some of the additional rewards they've had, and how he structures the business more generally to have the same team work on multiple products. If you are a business owner, or aspire to be one -- or if you are curious about managing multiple lines of business at once -- then I think you'll really enjoy this episode. And, if you're a Post Status Club member, Pippin and I recorded a bonus segment, where we discuss hosted WordPress eCommerce, and Pippin shares his opinions on the concept, and whether or not it's something they are considering for Restrict Content Pro and/or Easy Digital Downloads. Sponsor: Design Palette Pro makes customizing Genesis websites simple. The Design Palette Pro team has integrated with every Genesis child theme, and it’s the perfect place to send folks who need custom design, without a custom budget. Go to GenesisDesignPro.com for more information, and thanks to Design Palette Pro for being a Post Status partner. Original photo credit: Marc Benzakein at WCSD

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard. In this episode, Joe and Brian talk about various third party publishing apps available and how they work with WordPress. They dig into apps that currently exist, how the connect to WordPress, how the future of WordPress could improve the third party ecosystem, and many of the challenges that must be tackled when interacting with WordPress as a third party application. Apps We Discussed WordPress mobile apps Ulysses Desk Byword MarsEdit Windows Life Writer Evernote to WordPress Zapier iA Writer OneNote to WordPress Zapier Editor Interfaces TinyMCE (web editor) QuillJS (web editor) DraftJS (web editor) WordPress iOS editor (native editor) Other Links WordPress REST API Vienna Sponsor: Delicious Brains Today’s show is sponsored by Delicious Brains. WP Migrate DB Pro makes moving and copying databases simple. They are also working on an exciting new project right now for merging databases, called Mergebot. Go to Mergebot.com for updates on that, and deliciousbrains.com for more information on WPMigrate DB Pro, and thanks to the team at Delicious Brains for being a Post Status partner.

WordPress 4.6, “Pepper”, has been released. It’s named, as always, after a famous jazz musician, and this release is named after Park Frederick "Pepper" Adams III, a baritone saxophonist and jazz composer. The Release Lead for WordPress 4.6 was Dominik Schilling, known often as Ocean90, and the Deputy Release Lead was Garth Mortensen. There were 272 total contributors to this release. According to Aaron Jorbin, 85 of these contributors were first timers, so congratulations to all new WordPress contributors! For this release, we did a special episode of the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle — the CTO of Human Made — and me, Brian Krogsgard. In this episode, Joe and I discuss WordPress 4.6 and deep dive on a few of its features. About WordPress 4.6 Overall, this was a planned iterative release from the beginning, with a goal to fix as many longstanding bugs as possible, and to refine existing features, rather than to focus on a lot of brand new features. Folks have been clamoring for a release like this for a long time, and in most respects 4.6 delivered. According to Trac, 489 tickets were closed, across 53 components, during the 4.6 milestone. Also, it shipped exactly on time. User facing features WordPress 4.6 has a few user facing features that aren't huge functional changes, but nice interface enhancements. Shiny updates No more bleak screen of sadness, as the team working on this termed it. The plugin installation, updates, and delete process is much smoother than it used to be. There's a nice video of this from the initial proposal: This was the second release where "shiny updates" features were a focus. To see some under the hood considerations for developers, there's more information on that from Pascal Birchler. Native fonts WordPress is leaving Open Sans. You may have seen GitHub’s change to native fonts. Or if you’re running 4.6 in development, you’ve seen native fonts replace Open Sans in the admin too. Matt Miklic explains the switch from Open Sans to native system fonts in the WordPress admin. By the way, the declaration of fonts has a good bit of science behind it, and may be useful for those of you who wish to do something similar for your site body copy. Marcin Wichary has a really interesting post describing Medium's process for the switch. And if you're curious, the new declaration is this: font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; Inline link checker WordPress will now automatically detect improperly formatted links, as you write. While this doesn't check the validity of any properly written URL, it will ensure the URL you add in an href is properly formatted. So, it will catch if you accidentally type something like htp://w.org or http:/w.org and outline it in read for you to fix. If you copy and past a URL into the link editor, but don't include http:// at all (I do this a bunch), it auto detects and inserts it for you. Browser content caching Yet more efforts have been made to always ensure that you do not lose your content as you write. I followed the steps in the Trac ticket to see exactly what happens here. So I typed the first sentence below, saved a draft, then typed the second paragraph: What if I start typing and save a draft? Then start typing some more, because that's what bloggers do. And I chill here for a few seconds, then stupidly just reload this page? Then I reloaded the page without saving again, and got a notice that there is a more up to date version available. And just like that, the content is back, because it was saved in the browser's local storage. Pretty cool. Developer features There are several important developer centric features that you should know about. Enhanced meta data registration This is a significant aid to the (pending) REST API meta handling, but also improves other meta data functionality. The register_meta() function allows developers to tell WordPress more about what specific meta data is designed to do. In WordPress 4.6, the arguments for this function have changed, enabling more information to be communicated in the third parameter, which is now an array. The show_in_rest key, an experimental key (until the API endpoint goes in), finally solves the issue for the REST API for knowing when to include meta data in the API's default responses. It's one step of a few that need to be made to better support meta for the API, but it's a good step forward. For plugin developers not using register_meta(), be sure to learn more about it and the advantages, as there are quite a few. Jeremy Felt describes how to use register_meta on Make Core. Translation priorities and changes WordPress will now default to the translations from Translate.WordPress.org community translations, then pull from theme or plugin translation files. A procedure called “just-in-time” translation loading will be utilized, and for plugins and themes distributed through the official repository, load_plugin_textdomain() and load_theme_textdomain() no longer need to be used. Commercial plugin authors will still largely follow the same internationalization procedures they always have. In a related note, and quite impressively, WordPress 4.6 shipped 100% translated in 50+ languages. Resource hints Joe helped teach me more about resource hints on the podcast, and Aaron did a much better job detailing resource hints than I could, in his excellent field guide: Resource Hints is a rather new W3C specification that “defines the dns-prefetch, preconnect, prefetch, and prerender relationships of the HTML Link Element ()”. These can be used to assist the browser in the decision process of which origins it should connect to, and which resources it should fetch and preprocess to improve page performance. In 4.6, WordPress adds an API to register and use resource hints. The relevant ticket is #34292. Developers can use the wp_resource_hints filter to add custom domains and URLs for dns-prefetch, preconnect, prefetch or prerender. One needs to be careful to not add too many resource hints as they could quite easily negatively impact performance, especially on mobile. Resource hints can be very useful for certain situations, and it's a technique that I personally need to explore further. Those of you doing advanced performance-driven development will surely be excited about support for this in WordPress. Customizer APIs The Customize API continues to evolve and improve, and Nick Halsey walks through new developer-focused features and changes to the API for WordPress 4.6. Also quite notably, Weston Ruter describes new APIs for both settings validation and notification management in the customizer. Other developer-centric changes Multisite changes: Jeremy Felt describes WP_Site_Query and WP_Network_Query, and goes over a few new functions and filters. There is now a persistent comment cache, allowing more performant comment loading functionality. The WordPress HTTP API now uses the Requests library, as Ryan McCue describes. Aaron Jorbin describes some of the lower level WordPress loading priorities and defaults that have changed. He also describes how WP CLI and core have reconciled their differences in wp-settings.php, which makes backward compatability for WP CLI possible now. Boone Gorges describes the introduction of WP_Term_Query. He’s the term whisperer. As Joe and I discuss in the podcast, these sorts of changes make for better consistency in WordPress, and provide an improved developer experience. Learn more WordPress 4.6 is the result of hundreds of community members. You can find their names and links to their profiles on the official release post. Also check out the official 4.6 Codex page that has a lot of handy information and links to source Trac tickets. You can see all closed tickets from 4.6 on the Trac milestone. View all new functions, classes, methods, and hooks on the official Developer Reference. And learn more about some of what I discuss above, and other items, on the ever-helpful field guide. For the record, WordPress 4.5 was downloaded more than 45 million times. You can track 4.6 downloads on the page dedicated to the task. Thank you to everyone who contributed to WordPress 4.6! I hope you have a 🍺 or 🍻 to celebrate if that's your kind of thing, or otherwise 🎉  your efforts. Podcast Sponsor: Prospress Prospress exists to make the world’s best eCommerce platform a little better, because they want to help entrepreneurs prosper with WordPress. They are the creators of WooCommerce Subscriptions, PayPal Digital Goods, and One Page Checkout. Check them out at Prospress.com.