Click here to follow the WP Minute+ podcast. It's where all of the podcast episodes have been going.In today's episode I'm sharing additional thoughts on Automattic vs WP Engine and where I stand with covering it. ★ Support this podcast ★

Imagine if Wix invested in open source? Imagine if Wix gained on WordPress?Imagine if Wix conquered our beloved CMS?Imagine if Wix focused on one area in WordPress: Data Liberation. I don’t think the closed-source CMS will supplant tens of thousands of WordPress professionals 1-click installing WordPress for their clients any time soon, even with their aggressive marketing tactics. With a whole section devoted to their open source initiative documented at wix.engineering, including a behind the scenes look at how they scale their platform for 100’s of thousands of users, it’s obvious they know the importance of connecting with developers. So why not call the bluff? Matt Mullenweg just mentioned in his summer update at WordCamp Europe that the Data Liberation initiative isn’t moving as fast as he’d hoped. He wants to unlock customer website content (and other data) proprietary CMS’s like Wix hold hostage from their users, if they decide to migrate away. What an amazing opportunity for Wix (and others) to take part in for the greater good of WordPress, open source, and all users of the web!I agree with one of Kevin Geary’s points: I don’t believe there’s a master plan coming from the sidelines at Wix. They are a product and profit first company, their core product isn’t open source. Automattic on the other hand, “started” with an open source product and now it’s trying to build the profit first part of their business. More of that in my last post, What Would We Do with the Keys to the Kingdom? Open source winning doesn’t mean that WordPress wins at every front. It shouldn’t. It can’t, really. We’ve lost the plot if we think that our goal is to build a defense against these other CMS platforms. Instead of devising a timeline where WordPress must win at all costs, we should be advocating and demonstrating the WordPress way to these commercial entities. Look, I don’t think it’s an easy task, but if anyone from Wix is listening — spending a few $100k in engineering time to create a plugin that sync’s data to/from a WordPress install is probably money well spent — much more than sponsoring a YouTuber. In the end, users win, which is the ultimate goal. The optimist in me hopes that the more proprietary brands sees the value in this type of portability, the more they might be enticed to go deeper investing in other parts of open source. Heck, imagine if you could install the Gravity Forms plugin on your WordPress site AND a Wix site — what a world that would be. But I’m not foolish, I know that these are epic challenges and largely not part of mainstream software’s agenda, or Automattic’s for that matter. I also know that the idea of wanting other platforms to look more attractive for developers means that WordPress could certainly look less appealing through the same lens. There’s a model here that we’ve halfway unearthed. It’s worked for 21 years. Instead of the goal to have WordPress installed everywhere, maybe it’s the impression of our community that should be spread first. Do we need to be more than 50% of the web? Can Wix and others have their share so long as they become good stewards of open source? My fear isn’t that other platforms will conquer WordPress, but that open source WordPress in collaboration with Automattic can’t move fast enough to find its footing. Loose terrain not just built on the rough edges of UI & UX decisions, but the lack of deep bonds threaded throughout the community. The stuff that gets challenged every day. More transparency from leadership, Automattic truly investing in partnership with us, and community members treating everyone with respect and integrity — across the board. Finally, a problem AI can’t solve, WordPress thriving because of humans. In the battle for a dominate CMS, it’s hard to pick a winner or a loser, because the real fight should be for more choice, everywhere.  ★ Support this podcast ★

Discussion on the challenges of shared control in WordPress, questioning the need for shared decision-making. Exploring the value of an open web and the future of WordPress, focusing on community influence and Automatic's business model.

Get all the links here.With the beta of WordPress 6.6 releasing, and seeing the advancements being made with site building features like Overrides for Synced Patterns — I can’t help but be excited for where WordPress is headed. And I know you might have your druthers with it all, but I’m hoping you invest now because the future is bright for our favorite platform. Building websites with AI isn’t convincing me all that much, even if our Pillar sponsor Bluehost promises me a robot friend to help me build whatever I want with WordPress. Seriously, check it out. I like to be in control of the process, tune the things I need, craft a layout that hits the right marks for my brand. Give me a bunch of patterns, blocks, and some ready-made templates and I’ll adjust the 10% that’s leftover. The Rockbase theme does a great job at this. I recently used it on a new project, Our Beloved Medium, a 6-part audio documentary highlighting the impact of radio throughout history. Coming soon.Blocks, patterns, templates, all jiving together in your new web development canvas — the browser. It’s the no code process users have been longing for since Visual Composer left your site with a bunch of unhinged shortcodes. This is an exciting time, and it’s something we should be sharing with others. We need to keep WordPress thriving, even if you’re using some other tool to build your pages — WordPress remains your foundation. Rocio Valdivia highlighted that even with the number of in-person events on the rise, new attendees to WordPress events have declined. In the post, she prompts us with these 4 questions:1. What motivated you to attend your first WordPress event? What were you hoping to gain or experience?2. If you’ve organized an event in the past couple of years, what relevant feedback have you heard from new to WordPress attendees?3. What unique value or benefit do you find at other non-WordPress events that you think could bring value to our WordPress events? (for attendees, organizers, and sponsors)4. What type of new event or content do you think would be great for attracting and keeping new WordPress users (of any level) to WordPress events?If you look at the graph, which starts to decline in 2017 (and putting aside COVID; though a massive contributor) I feel this follows the same dip of WordPress burnout — exhaustion? — that we felt when Gutenberg was first announced. I’ve talked about this in the past, but the roll-out of Gutenberg came with a perfect storm: In tech years WordPress was already ancient. There was a rise in proprietary tools like Shopify and Wix that satisfied the lizard brain a lot of us early adopters in tech are looking for. The communication of it all was highly criticized (including yours truly), but looking back, I couldn’t use the classic editor to build pages or write blog posts ever again. Then you thrust the whole industry into warp speed with COVID and lockdowns — yeah, I’m still trying to gather my braincells too. Take a step back and ask yourself: Are you NOT excited for this software? Or are you just fighting the current because you don’t like change? I’m not talking about the politics of it all, I think it’s something you can abstract from WordPress the software, but to deeply evaluate the enjoyment of building a site with WordPress.When Wordpress events were at their height, WordPress was fresh & exciting. But most importantly, we needed a place to learn more about it. The advancements of the site editing experience can be that revival moment for WordPress events. Get people excited about building & publishing with WordPress again. A place to incorporate the real essence of the open source project, where we can stake our claim at the table to provide the necessary feedback to improve the tool. Maybe loosen up the stuffiness of local meetups, encouraging (and promoting) education & awareness at a local level. Linux opened my eyes to open source. Drupal showed me how to feel powerful as a non-developer. WordPress gave me all of that + an amazing community on top. For years the “builder audience” in WordPress was passed over for the advanced developers — but that’s all catching up to us, now. It’s time we revisit sharing with others what they can achieve with WordPress. Keep WordPress thriving!  ★ Support this podcast ★

Exploring the transition from traditional marketing to the innovative WordPress Media Core, highlighting challenges and the importance of data accessibility. Discussing the struggles of the outgoing Marketing team and the need for organic marketing in the open source WordPress community. Reflecting on the significance of promoting WordPress through dedicated management and exploring the evolving approach of the Media Core team in the WordPress community.

I really enjoyed the conversation lead by Brian Coords on the topic of version control for WordPress developers and builders.He was joined by my recurring cohost, Mark Szymanski, as he asked the tough questions many beginners might be facing in their early development days. Yes, that’s the same Mark that cohosted the episode of Crossroads of WordPress with me last week on the WP Minute+.This post isn’t just about the advantages of using version control on your next WordPress project, but more of an example of how great the WordPress community is.Mark and I have talked about building and learning in public before, and that’s exactly what Brian’s livestream was. A veteran WordPress developer, sharing his experience and teaching someone coming up in web agency world.It’s fascinating watching Mark learn in public. I applaud him for having the humility to put himself out there in an effort to become a better agency owner.Earlier in the year I predicted that we’d see more Mark’s coming on to the scene.Tools like Elementor and Bricks have onboarded more enterprising individuals over the last few years to kickstart their own web services business. Most of them, like Mark, never had to crack open a code editor or SSH into a server and reboot the MySQL service when it ran out of memory.Being able to rapidly build websites with a turnkey plugin can be a blessing and a curse. The theme of Brian’s livestream was partly to highlight some of the weak links in the chain when delivering client websites. Certainly “version control” isn’t the answer to everything, but it’s a trait that you’ll see in more mature projects.So when do you actually invest in “version control?” It depends, and it might not be how and when you think.If we put the technical term aside for a moment: Let’s think accountability instead. Explore what your client relationship looks like. How much are they paying you, how mission-critical is the website, and who is on the hook for support?Themes, plugins, tutorials, free code snippets, all at our fingertips. It’s easy to pull something off the shelf and shove it into WordPress as a solution for clients. No one is the wiser. Until that off the shelf thing breaks, lacks a feature, or gets abandoned.Say you delivered a $25k project to a client, but you built the entire thing on Cwicly, then it closed. Now what? Or you were using SearchWP on bunch of non-profit sites, then it was acquired by Awesome Motive and the license fee doubled — with lots more upsells to other products. Now what?Now let’s talk communication: Novices might not mention they are using a page builder when they are quoting a client. “My God, what happens if they find out I paid $59 for a plugin that they could use themselves to build this site?!” I sympathize with that imposter syndrome, years ago I felt the same way.Flip the script!Instead you communicate in full transparency with the customer “Hey, based on your budget, I’ll have to build this site with a page builder tool. It gets us 90% of the way there faster and cheaper, but also has some limitations. You’ll save some money on the services side, but you’ll have to purchase a license in order for us to use on it on your site. If we had a bigger budget or more time, we could get exactly what you want with a custom theme.”It’s Spring in the US so I’ll use this other analogy with my desire to erect a shed in my yard: Do I build it myself? Nope. Do I buy a prebuilt one from Home Depot, and worry about the quality versus cost spent? Or do I hire a builder, knowing it will last longer, be exactly what I want, but cost 3x more?Open communication will always work best with clients, especially when you want to set clear boundaries of accountability.There’s always a balance. Obviously, version control isn’t the answer to this, but it is part of an overall solution where more mature agencies will measure the risk when putting a project brief together.Is this a mission-critical feature? Does the client have the budget? Can we build this? Do we want to build this?Even if you don’t register for your first Github account after listening to Brian’s livestream, the message that there’s a whole new layer above basic page builder services — the concept of building for continuity, therefore increasing project deal size — is why this is a standout episode.Catch the VOD replay and start leveling up, WordPress builder! ★ Support this podcast ★

The Biggest WordPress Moves While Mullenweg was on Sabbatical Matt Mullenweg is returning from his 3 month sabbatical, dubbed “Samattical”, which kicked off February 1, 2024. He handed the CEO reigns back to Toni Schneider and placed Daniel Bachhuber in charge of WordPress.com in his absence. I thought we’d see the whole organization coast while the open source benevolent dictator dug his toes into the sand, but Automattic/WordPress stayed as busy as ever!I don’t know how much Mullenweg was involved with all of these milestones — something tells me he didn’t stay as disconnected as he had hoped. Let’s take a look at some of the big moves that happened with WordPress, Automattic, and the community while Matt was away. 1. The WP Tavern Hunger GamesOne of the first major activities to kick off was the search for two new full-time writers to breathe life back into WP Tavern. It was a Hunger Games-esque approach, where 7 or 8 writers, duked it out to be crowned winner #1 & #2. Author Brian Coords was the last contestant to publish a post on March 14th, 2024. There hasn’t been any clear announcement on who earned the position or what happens next, and most authors I’ve spoken to are still wondering what’s next for their writing careers at the Tavern. 2. Woo.com → WooCommerce.comSomething I didn’t have on my Bingo Card was the short-lived woo.com domain defaulting back to the original WooCommerce.com domain. “Moving to Woo.com created challenges for our users to find WooCommerce in Google searches, which were made worse following Google’s March update. To address those challenges, we assembled a group of SEO experts and consultants to evaluate the best way to build on the strength of the WooCommerce brand.” Kevin Bates wrote in an update.3. The Old WP-Admin Dashboard is New for WordPress.comIn another, what’s old is new again, WordPress.com is giving users the ability to “roll back” to a traditional WP Admin interface. It seems there’s no future for the once innovative Calypso project, citing that developers were looking for a more familiar interface when working on WordPress.com sites. This might be a sign that more WordPress consultants are starting to recommend .com more to their customers now that the platform has been supporting user installed plugins on the $30/mo+ plans. 4. Automattic spends an additional $125 Million on Messaging with Beeper Acquisition Automattic is pouring money into messaging, with its latest acquisition of Beeper. Which I’m assuming Mullenweg was quite active on during sabbatical. I like the idea of Automattic building up a strong solution for messaging. In a world where SEO is getting squeezed and social media feeds being curated by ad-driven algos, we need more direct channels with our readers/subscribers/customers — and I think that’s direct messaging.It could be an exciting new frontier with Automattic leading the charge, and I’m here for it!WordPress Studio: The Future of Local Development?5. WordPress.com Launches Studio AppThe new Studio app allows users to run WordPress installs, locally on their computer. This is a great way to learn WordPress and develop WordPress sites for free. It’s powered by the same technology that runs the official WordPress playground and gives users the ability to publish their local websites to a temporary WordPress.com account to share with the world. Other hosting platforms like WP Engine and Kinsta offer local development environments making this a natural fit for Automattic to offer.6. Big Sky: WordPress.com starts waiting list for AI designed websitesWordPress.com decided to throw their hat into the AI web design ring by opening a beta signup for their latest project, BigSkyI’ve signed up to trial the product, but I also signed up for access to Studio before it was released and didn’t hear anything — fingers crossed. If anyone at Automattic is reading this: I have found 100% AI website builders underwhelming. It’s basically machine learning with blocks and patterns that are tagged with keywords that just get mashed together based on the prompt. I prefer starting with a collection of professionally designed themes and patterns, but I’m happy to see if they can change my mind! That’s not all! The above marks 6 of the biggest moves I think happened around the WordPress space while Mullenweg enjoyed some time off. But, that’s not all! Here’s a quick list of other notable events that happened over the last 3 months: WordPress 6.5 Launched.The Community-lead Make Marketing Team was shutdown in favor of a new Media Corps experiment.WordPress.com now supports Github integrationWordPress.com launched a new public pattern directoryWooCommerce launched a new update managerWas there anything on your list that didn’t make it here? Let me know on Twitter/X! ★ Support this podcast ★

WordPress is amazing not just because it’s a great tool to publish words on the internet, but that it has the potential to encourage you to learn more about the web — if you want. If you remember the golden age of automobiles, enthusiasts would change their own oil or make the repairs themselves to avoid bringing them to the dealership. An act to save a few bucks or just because you loved the idea of doing the work yourself. Back then, cars weren’t powered by computer chips or electric motors — they were mechanically pure — this was your rig. You rolled up your sleeves, got out your toolbox, and slid under the chassis of your daily driver. Not only were you learning how cars were built, you were extending that knowledge to work on other cars as well. Industry knowledge that lead folks to have a career in automobiles, wherever that took them.There was a whole economy of DIY auto mechanics — a whole industry, really. Chilton Books used to publish guides for the DIYers which included detailed diagrams of the cars they were repair until the internet accompanied by the production of more complex cars laid waste to their business. Breaking apart a car to learn how it worked just wasn’t feasible anymore. You could even draw the parallels of open source WordPress to the likes of a closed source Webflow, for instance. Sure, you can learn how to build and design website with Webflow — in fact you kinda need to know how to before you dive in — but that mechanical purity is what’s missing. In other words, you can’t dismantel Webflow and see how it’s doing its thing, but you can with WordPress. You can’t bring closed source systems to a different hosting server and reconfigure the stack to get it dialed-in for optimum performance or to change where you store your data — you can with WordPress. The big debate happening right now is understanding who WordPress is for. What kind of software are we building? It’s certainly trending towards a more competent website builder for the everyday user, but I also think it’s ushering in a new type of developer class as well. Developers are finicky. They are mostly stuck in their ways, have their preferred toolset, and come equipped with strong opinions. Artists in the very sense. Your typical development stack for WordPress, along with the definition, has been challenged over the last 5 years as page builders became more nascent. If you’re not cracking open Notepad++ to change your theme, are you even a developer? Advancements in the Site Editor and the Gutenberg project aside, Automattic has been quietly changing the way people can get started with WordPress faster than ever before thanks to Playground and the recently launched Studio app. Now to the point of the article: This is how WordPress is helping beginner developers.With Playground, you can export the site you build right in the browser as a ZIP download. Want to try a new feature that is only in GitHub and not committed to the release? Pull it from Github and try it out. Studio lets you run multiple WordPress installs locally on your Mac (Windows soon) along with a full filesystem to interact with. Want to share your customized site with someone? They’ll give you temporary hosting on WordPress.com to share the site you built. This onboarding into WordPress is lightyears ahead of where we were in the past. Even if you’re a curmodgeoned developer stuck in your ways, you must admit, it’s never been faster to start exploring WordPress than it is today. I haven’t even told you about the Block Theme Builder plugin, which allow you to design an entire theme inside your WordPress install, allowing you to package it all up into a nice distributable WordPress theme. I love software that makes me feel powerful. A power user, that isn’t quite a full-blown developer, but I can see the other side of the fence and I want to get there.This is what I love about WordPress. I’m not saying this experience is fully baked, and it might even change course, but I think we’ll see a whole new fleet of WordPress developers onboard because of these efforts. A true open source no code solution may be coming soon. What if I never posted the news again?I’m just catching up on all the things, back up from vacation, so I don’t have time to wrangle all the news links again this week.Which makes me wonder…what if I never did the news links again? Hit reply and let me know. Do you come just for my weekly 5 minute take on the state of WordPress? Do you like the curation of links or are you getting that fill from other WordPress newsletters? Hit reply and let me know if we didn’t do the weekly news round-up, how would that make you feel?See ya next week! ★ Support this podcast ★

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Sam Harrison, a professional Webflow consultant and content creator. He was open to co-host a WordPress vs Webflow debate with me, while also unpacking how business is going for his services company. Heading into the debate, I spent a a few hours watching his content and really enjoyed his Webflow Components Basics + How to Start a Web Design Business. So why did I invite Sam on? Page Builders, especially Bricks, has been the topic du jour of late.That crowd really wants WordPress to have much more power inside the editor — and I totally get it. These powerful 3rd party tools can be really attractive, and if you haven’t been in the WordPress space for the last 20 years, you start to wonder why our favorite CMS is lacking these features. Bricks is often framed as the tool that brings a Webflow experience inside WordPress — all the powerful design and page building tools you could want, surely. I’ve had some conversations with prominent WordPress agencies now offering Webflow as an alternative solution to WordPress. It all makes sense…But the choice shouldn’t start at which tool to use, but whether or not you want open source software or a commercial solution for your project.To simplify: do you care that you have the benefits of open source WordPress (along with the baggage) or does having a single turnkey app provide the best solution? Now how does that play out if you’re selling services to clients?Sam and I played a little game where we placed the winning cards of particular features of the competing platforms in their respective columns. I’ll admit, the odds were stacked against Sam (and Webflow) seeing that he was on my podcast, but WordPress comes out the winner in most areas, so long as you’re siding with the advantages of open source. The ecosystem, the community, the ability to customize the platform — it’s a hard sell to get me to use Webflow. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn from Webflow and their users. Let’s face it, it’s not a fluke that they’ve been successful for this long.Having a comprehensive toolset to design pages makes a lot of sense. Also not having to worry about updates, hosting, and 3rd party software conflicts sounds like a dream that Webflow users get to live everyday. Though I noticed that in this short time of exploring Webflow, WordPress isn’t massively behind, pound for pound. And I’m talking specifically just core, not even when you decide to bring in plugins like ACF or Gravity Forms. If you like the design tools and interface of Webflow, mixed with their new Components libraries — the gap in WordPress isn’t all that wide. However, when you look at something like the writing experience — specifically blogging or posts in general — Webflow isn’t even competing in the same league. Sorry, Sam. I guess what I’m saying is, as much as we can learn from the UI/UX and passionate community of Webflow — their team could also learn from WordPress. Heck, Gutenberg is an open source project, even Drupal has a fork. Maybe Webflow could improve their content editor with…Gutenberg? Go open source! Let me know what you think! Watch the WordPress vs Webflow video: https://www.youtube.com/live/p82lLK56XOE?si=2_1zuEPsKHI7aft7 ★ Support this podcast ★

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