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On the podcast today we have Milan Ivanovic.
Milan is a WordPress Developer at Valet.io, and is a WordCamp volunteer, speaker, and organizer.
He’s the WordPress.org global translation editor, WordPress Serbia lead, and is now part of the WordCamp Europe alumni.
As if that weren’t enough, Milan is one of the lecturers of the WordPress Academy in Serbia, where he has given talks and WordPress Workshops. He’s also a member of the Theme Review and Community Get Involved Teams.
It’s pretty clear to see that WordPress and WordPress events play a major role in Milan’s life, and that’s what this podcast is about.
We’re drilling down on why the community which surrounds WordPress is a key part in the success of the whole project.
The recent hiatus of in-person events has meant that all the events moved online. Whilst this was a good stop gap, Milan, as you will hear, is pleased that real world events are back.
We talk about the importance of the WordPress community as a whole, as well as exploring what the situation is like in Milan’s home country of Serbia.
We discuss how Milan got started as a community member and the different roles that events like WordCamps can offer people wishing to dip their toes in the community waters.
We also get into the subject of diversity and how Europe as a continent might face diversity challenges which differ from other parts of the world.
Milan is an enthusiastic speaker and I’m sure that you’ll get a fresh perspective from listening to the podcast.
[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the importance of real world WordPress events.
If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players. If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, well, I’m more than keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured on the show. Head over to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox. And use the contact form there.
So on the podcast today, we have Milan Ivanovic. Milan is a WordPress developer at valet.io. And is a WordCamp volunteer, speaker, and organizer. He’s the wordpress.org global translation editor, WordPress Serbia lead, and is now part of the WordCamp Europe alumni. As if that weren’t enough, Milan is one of the lecturers of the WordPress academy in Serbia, where he has given talks and WordPress workshops. He’s also a member of the Theme Review and Community Gets Involved teams.
It’s pretty clear to see that WordPress and WordPress events play a major role in Milan’s life. And that’s what this podcast is about. We’re drilling down on why the community which surrounds WordPress is a key part in the success of the whole project.
The recent hiatus of in-person events has meant that all the events moved online. Whilst this was a good stop gap, Milan, as you will hear, is pleased that real world events are back.
We talk about the importance of the WordPress community as a whole, as well as exploring what the situation is like in Milan’s home country of Serbia.
We discussed how Milan got started as a community member, and the different roles that events like WordCamp offer people wishing to dip their toes in the WordPress waters.
We also get into the subject of diversity and how Europe as a continent might face diversity challenges which differ from other parts of the world.
Milan is an enthusiastic speaker. And I’m sure that you’ll get some new perspectives from listening to the podcast.
If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll also find all the other episodes.
And so without further delay, I bring you Milan Ivanovic.
I am joined on the podcast today by Milan Ivanovic. Hello.
[00:03:34] Milan Ivanovic: Hello.
[00:03:34] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. We’re gonna be talking about WordCamp Europe, and WordCamps and community in general. First of all, Milan, would you like to just spend a moment introducing yourself? What’s your background in WordPress?
[00:03:45] Milan Ivanovic: Yeah, would love to. I started really early with WordPress and just like looking for community back in Serbia. We, I didn’t know that if you are looking for community there isn’t one, like maybe you can start it. So 2013, I moved to Norway and then all of a sudden they already had the meetups in place. So I helped organize those meetups. You know, just being there as a speaker, as one of the organizers. So I moved back to Serbia in 2014 and I was like, you know what? They already had one meetup and nothing happened from it. And then I just started a little bit with no expectations, like how many people would show up, how many people will jump in.
Just like start it and see how it goes. 2014 was the first official WordPress Serbia meetup. And now we have 16 different cities with meetups across Serbia.
[00:04:33] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. That’s that is really impressive. From everything that I’ve seen, and obviously I don’t really know intimate details about your life, but from everything I’ve seen, you are really committed to the community. Like more so than almost anybody, it feels like.
[00:04:47] Milan Ivanovic: Pretty much. I got hooked up, like the first WordCamp for me was WorkCamp Europe, in Leiden 2013. I immediately knew that I need to help organize. I need, I saw volunteers dedicating their time. They’re passionate. I’m like, yeah. How can I help?
So they explained next year, follow the website, we are gonna open the call for volunteers, and then you can sign up. I think that it passed like one millisecond before I saw it. I’m like, yep, yep. Filling in the form already. So my first volunteering, official volunteering experience was 2014 already, just like, yeah. I was at the registration desk letters A and B. The happiest person at the registration, that’s me just like smiling all over the face. Like, hello, welcome WordCamp Europe.
[00:05:29] Nathan Wrigley: But you’ve really taken it to heart. And you’ve committed an awful lot of time and been involved in some of the biggest events that WordCamp, in particular has to offer. WordCamp Europes, and you were really influential in all of that taking off.
[00:05:41] Milan Ivanovic: I like bringing people. Like, I, believe in like that all of us, together we could like push mountains. And when you see these guys, like they come to the conference and all of a sudden you have like bunch of amateurs, like in organizing the event, but they give it all.
Organizing doing like all of a sudden, you see someone, you know, in charge for TVs, like, workshops, pushing tables and stuff. Everyone is giving what they have. But if you collect hundred of those, like different people willing to make this event happen, the best way possible, that was like heart touching for me, like in the beginning.
So yeah, I’ve been involved like into organizing. Started really slow, and low, you know, just like being the foot soldier. Working at the doors, or like happened with the registration. Then, you know, my involvement grew over the years. So in 2015 was in charge like for a small registration desk.
And then immediately we knew that we need to make this happen. In 2015, we had the first WordCamp in Serbia, WordCamp Belgrade, almost 200 people. And they were like, yeah, wow, this can really be a thing. Then we started with more meetups, more people got involved, more people willing to help, in Serbia. Expressly we had the growth, like in WordCamp Europe. You see the Seville, Vienna when Vienna happened in 2016, we had like 2000 people. I’m like, whoa, this was a big thing.
[00:07:04] Nathan Wrigley: The listenership, for the podcast is pretty broad because there’s so many people, of all different walks of life consuming WP Tavern content. Just give us an insight into the kind of things that you could do if you volunteered. And the reason I ask that is I know for a fact that many of the people that I now have as very good friends in the WordPress community, they tell the story of, I didn’t know. I didn’t know there was a thing.
I used the software because it was free and I enjoyed it. But no way. What, how could there be a community about software? That’s just not normal and yet here it is. I mean maybe some of the top 10 things that you’ve enjoyed or the jobs that you might find yourself in, if you come to an event like WordCamp Europe, and get involved.
[00:07:45] Milan Ivanovic: So I heard I’m not a hundred percent sure about the data, but looks like that we have like around 60% of first timers at this WordCamp Europe. Uh, we haven’t had like in person events three years now for WordCamp Europe. The last one was in Berlin, 2019. I think the power of this whole thing is our community. Just like people being here, being present, and then the networking simply happens.
Uh, you will see because of that diversity and knowledge and background, different backgrounds. The more diverse we are, the stronger we are. That’s why you end up with, someone sitting next to and chatting with someone who actually put the code in the core of WordPress. And then you see someone who just like installed it and they are simply using it. Not having a clue what’s behind it. Like who put up the code what’s there and then you see those two, the person’s just chatting.
Hey, what would you like to improve? Like, I think that’s the power of this whole mess that we are into. Yeah. So, uh, networking and just like being present. That’s what I think is the power of our community. If you do see like all those after movies or short interviews, when just someone goes, takes a camera and goes around and say like, Hey, what is the only thing that you, that you like here?
I think nine out of 10, we say community, community because of community, we are here because of community, and we are so supportive. We are highly opinionated community about everything, but we are so supportive.
[00:09:15] Nathan Wrigley: I strongly get that impression as well. That’s lovely. This particular event, everybody’s wearing a black t-shirt. And there are black t-shirts everywhere. I mean really everywhere, just in the corridor outside, where we’re recording this, I think there’s three people wearing black t-shirts. These are the people who volunteered their time for free. So there’s people assisting you to find me so that we can have this interview.
There’s people publishing the little lanyards that we wear around our neck. There’s people that are putting up signage. There’s basically people doing all sorts of hidden roles. You know all of this stuff intimately. There must be hundreds of different things, and if I was somebody that had never come across the community, I think there’s a chance that I would think, I don’t code, I shouldn’t go. But that’s not the case. There’s a job for everybody. So give us some of the, sort of the things that you might encourage people to do if they volunteer for a WordCamp, that first time.
[00:10:05] Milan Ivanovic: I got involved into volunteering because I want to make this event happen. when you see that your small role doesn’t matter, like how small it is, makes a difference. It’s amazing. Even if you’re a mic runner. Imagine that someone is expecting that mic and you like, feel so powerful, I brought that mic, like here is the mic. You can ask your question. Those small bits that we had, like in Seville I think we had around 70 to 80 volunteers plus the organizing team.
In Vienna we had 160. It’s an army of people wearing the same coloured t-shirts, This year we, I think they have, 70 to 80 organizers, and then 200 volunteers. That’s why there’s as many black t-shirts because everyone is having their shifts. Everyone is, you know, have a purpose. Everyone is just like enjoying the event and you see that all like happy or smiling, everyone willing to help.
I think like in the beginning, when we started the whole army of volunteers. You get to the event, and you don’t know where the registration is. You don’t know what to do after registration. You get the lanyard, like, how is it going? Like, should I just say my name? You say your name and you get a lanyard, you get a small goodie bag.
Everyone is happy, but all the volunteers like guiding you, like, Hey, welcome to event. Here’s the coffee. Here are some sessions, and there is something for everyone, if they’re willing to help. If you say that, I want to help with, I wanna be in a room or I would like to be at the registration, or I would like to help carrying boxes, there is job for everyone.
[00:11:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:11:42] Milan Ivanovic: And that’s a good thing.
[00:11:43] Nathan Wrigley: You basically don’t need to be into the code. You can, like you said, you can carry boxes, you can print lanyards, you can guide people, you can put up signage. There’s just so many things. If I was on the organizing team at the level that you were in Berlin in 2019, in other words, you were really responsible for that event.
How long before the door opened on the first day, how long before did you begin that planning process? And I’m just trying to get a measure of how many hours go into that, and how it trickles down and you know, how you disseminate that and discover the volunteers and basically how does it all fit together?
[00:12:13] Milan Ivanovic: Oh, it’s a, it’s a long process. It’s a long process because, selecting the future city, every year WordCamp Europe changes country. For WordCamp Europe 2018 in Belgrade, me and the local team, we worked on it from September 2015. To make it happen in June 2018. Because it’s a long process. You need to prepare your local team because it’s was a team around 10 of us. You are just investing so much time. The first thing you need to work on is the application, because we have that application process where you submit your application and it’s usually like three to four cities, you know, fully prepared to organize the event.
Then, previous organizers, foundation WordPress foundation. Uh, we go on a meeting and then we talk about, we’ll look at those applications and then we decide which city is that going to be? So, for Belgrade, it was a long, long period because we had to prepare our local community as well, to start with local meetups and just to educate people what actually WordCamp Europe is.
We had the same, like everywhere else. Like people haven’t had idea that you can, all of a sudden, you can have a conference with like 2, 3000 people. That’s creme de la creme of WordPress communities going to be there. we had to like go educate people, do the meetups, do the all kinds of stuff just to prepare it.
For Berlin, their team, like I’m talking about the local team for Berlin. It was again long process for them as well, because they worked on the application. Then they submitted application, they got approved. And then you want that team, future team to be on this year’s team. Because you want them to see how it goes, And yeah, just to educate them by watching and just like being involved. You need to have them in, involved, like you need to educate them. So, is a long process.
[00:14:12] Nathan Wrigley: And presumably you mentioned that you worked a lot. That’s gotta be something that if you volunteer you have to allocate time. It’s not a just show up and do a little bit here and there, maybe depending on where you step into that hierarchy.
[00:14:24] Milan Ivanovic: All the WordCamps where we are going, or I’m talking about the WordCamp Europe, wherever you’re going, like the local team is the basically most important team. I knew that in Belgrade, like the last, I call like photo finish, last couple of weeks, or like couple of months, just like where all the work kept on piling up.
I was getting up like super early, to make it like through all the meetings with the venue. To go through all the notes. Connect all the bits and pieces. And then because all of us, we have the day jobs. Some of us being supported by the companies, some are not. So involvement of the people change through time, and because it’s a long process and specifically for WordCamp Europe, you don’t have all the teams.
All the different teams. We had like 10 different teams working all together. Like at the same time, like the, the high level. You’ll see, like in the beginning you have a huge impact on sponsors because they need to put up a call for sponsors. They need to sell all those packages. They need to see with the venue, how big is going to be expo area.
There are just like so many things, yeah. Volunteers that they are coming into late, like volunteers, team. Communications. Communications team. It’s one that has been hit hardest. And the longest, because they like keep on putting all the things to the event because yeah, we had to like increase the number of organizers, but it is challenging.
[00:15:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:15:52] Milan Ivanovic: Yeah, as I said many times already, like it’s a long process, but it’s an amazing process.
[00:15:57] Nathan Wrigley: I’ve had a really interesting slight window into what is involved at this event, just because of the location of where we’re at and seeing all the sort of backstage stuff. Really fascinating, and just as an example, the attention to detail to allow us to be in this room at this exact moment. The coordination that goes on there, you know, great big spreadsheets. And, and although I knew that on some level that was happening, that’s a tiny part of a tiny part of a tiny part of the bigger event. And yet, somebody’s had to deal with that and take care of it. And it’s absolutely amazing.
[00:16:27] Milan Ivanovic: Through the years we learned, we from our mistakes. I’ll call it mistakes. I’m doing the air quotes Because how the number of attendees grew, our problems grew as well. In Seville all of a sudden we had an amazing, amazing thing. People bringing their kids. We’re like, oh, we need to provide childcare service for the event. So we have, since 2016, we have the free childcare service for every WordCamp Europe. Then all of a sudden you have like more volunteers.
You want more bigger exposure like in media. So you need to organize one room. Then all of a sudden that room is too small, then organized two rooms. Then you need to be like, Hey, the venue is quite big. We need someone guiding. It’s like, okay. So we need dedicated volunteer who will take speaker or whoever to the stage. Will take to media room and how the number of attendees grew, our problems went.
[00:17:25] Nathan Wrigley: Genuinely in awe of the amount of things that are going on. Really remarkable. We’re very lucky though to be back. 2022, we’ve had a couple of years where, well, that hasn’t been the case for the reason that everybody knows. We’re all delighted that we’re back, but we’ve had a real moment where everything got a bit shaky, the community, every community, not just WordPress, but every community forced online.
And I just wondered what your thoughts were about the impact of that. Fatigue of zoom calls and whether or not local events have kind of taken a hit in numbers. Certainly I think where I live, the interest in turning up monthly or whatever it might be to these meetups, when it’s been online month after month after month, it seems like the interest is sort of slowly waning.
So maybe we’re an inflection point where it will begin to pick up again. But yeah, just interested in your thoughts on that.
[00:18:12] Milan Ivanovic: Oh yeah. When we started, I was so glad when we switched to online. I was in Bangkok, waiting on the WordCamp Asia. And it was like, Hey, it’s gonna happen. And then the team made the best decision ever that will turn out to be like the best decision ever not to have it. Even though everyone, we like super sad. We were like in Thailand, you know, just like waiting for that conference, and it’s been in the making for so long and the local team and everyone involved wanted so badly that conference to happen.
And then when we were there and someone said like, well maybe, maybe just, maybe we are not going to have it. And then they canceled. I’m like, yeah, what are we gonna do? So we stayed in Thailand, came back. Then when online happened, every day I have two meetings. It’s a Zoom meetings, I’m like, I’m not doing this.
Again, like a conference. I can’t do it. And then I was so happy, like, when it happened that I, again get to see all the people involved. I was amazed by the number of people who signed up. Like, I think 2020, 8, 9,000 people signed up. The good thing is that you have way more people being able to attend.
To just join the event. But I was super sad after it ended.
[00:19:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:19:28] Milan Ivanovic: Because, being involved so many years back, to see all those people hug everyone, talk to everyone. When it ended, I was like, whoa, no. It felt so empty. I’m like, no, no, this is not happening.
Yeah. I was glad that this was happening online, also for, for us in Serbia. Couple of guys decided like, Hey, we are not gonna go with online, but couple did. And I was so glad that it did because it kept something happening throughout the years. We are now in the limbo between those online events, someone wants to, someone is waiting on the in person events, like to start happening all over again, meetups with the restrictions over.
But yeah, in Serbia as well, you are going to a few now online, but yesterday on contributors day, as a part of the community team, we formed a plan that we gonna contact all the meetup organizers asking how their involvement is now, because it’s been so long, two or three years that, no in person meetup happened.
So we’re just gonna remind them, ask them about the help, how we, as a community can help them. People change jobs, a lot of things happen. In the meantime during COVID I got married, I got kid, but I’m still gonna be involved and see how we can help. So now the focus is on community to revamp and to see just like, Hey, how we can do with the meetups in person.
Is it possible? Are those organizers who are like organizing those meetups, they gonna do it, or we need to look for someone else from that meetup group?
[00:21:03] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a kind of reevaluation, where you’re gonna start again and see where we’re at right now? Yeah, it does feel like the involvement has gone down, but curiously, as you said at the top, 60% of the people who showed up to this event are new to the community. So there’s clearly some hanking for it. And so maybe when those events get rebooted with whoever they are, then maybe it’ll be the same, you know, 60% in the meetups will be new people, and that’s very encouraging.
[00:21:27] Milan Ivanovic: starting the day after tomorrow, we are gonna see so many new meetups and like so interested.
[00:21:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. We’ll see, see where we are next year. Let’s just change focus a little bit. You mentioned a, a moment ago about the fact that you’re based in Serbia. And Europe is a, is an interesting continent. Lots and lots of countries, some big, some very small. Lots and lots of languages, so that the barrier literally may be impenetrable. For example, if you are in Serbia, that may be the only way that you can engage.
A few months ago, there was some sort of coverage about diversity and whether or not the community organizing the team for WordCamp Europe had addressed that well enough. We actually did a podcast episode in which we aired those thoughts. So there is that to listen to. But the whole diversity debate, isn’t quite as straightforward, is it in Europe as it may be elsewhere, because, it’s not about the same things. Diversity might be language diversity, or it might be which country you’ve come from, or what have you. So, let’s just get into that.
[00:22:21] Milan Ivanovic: Europe is a strange place. Europe is a strange place. Every year we try so hard. I know even when I was involved, and we as a community, we just need to keep on, keeping on about diversity.
We need to educate people. I know that I had to educate myself first. I had to go for all the meetups. So when we start the meetup I’m doing, the first talk I’m doing, is about diversity. Is about code of conduct . And then yet again, people need to be reminded about it. I’m sure like this year as well, organizing team did a great job.
But there’s always, like every year, there’s a, just a little bit of that sense that we could do a bit more, every year. And I’ve been haunted, you know, when you are like selecting teams, you’ve been involved in some decisions.
I always had, just a a little bit like, maybe we could do more. When you see the organizing team, when you see event happening, I was like, yeah, well just maybe if we started early or maybe if we change this, or maybe if we put up a blog post, or maybe if we did something, something will be better.
But what we are not noticing that is getting better, it’s never going to be perfect. But as long as we are talking and we are constantly repeating and like wanting to change, sooner or later, like we gonna be so close to that perfect. So yeah, I know the difficulties. I heard about. Uh, wasn’t involved, but heard about difficulties, this year organizing team, and like, just that limbo of that is it going to happen? You know, so they organized like local team for Portugal. They organized in 2019, for 2020 and then like, yeah, it’s not happening. Online.
Then should we do like this year? Then, you know, some, some people from organizing team dropped off because life happened the meantime. So 2021, you kind of lost the momentum. Like 2022, you need to just like, Hey, this year is actually happening. You know, when you do like two tries and you fail, I’m doing the air quotes again. You fail, like you just need to pick everyone up. You need to form a team because as I said, like, this is a long event.
Now we need someone ready who will dedicate a time. Who will dedicate a passion. Who will be willing to help. But yeah, I’m totally supporting the organized team and all the decisions they made. So happy for them. Again, we are not gonna reach that perfect, but as long as we are like longing for that, we’ll be good.
[00:24:52] Nathan Wrigley: A couple of follow up questions from that. The first one is, do you, on a personal level, when you sort of hear these, criticisms from people, does it get you on a personal level or can you differentiate? Okay, that’s what somebody thinks over there. That’s fine. Okay. We’ll try our best next time. You’re giving up a lot of free time here.
[00:25:08] Milan Ivanovic: Yeah. So in the beginning it was harder. You know, in the beginning it was harder because, you know how much you give yourself into, you know, organizing and, you know that we all have different backgrounds. And you know the what’s the backstory of organizer being, or the organizing team.
And you know that people are sacrificing their time, sacrificing their families, relationship with friends. They can’t be with their friends, families. And then you hear that someone says like, Hey, well, maybe that. team, they could change this, and you’ll be like, because you know the both sides of the story. You can’t be like, no, like that’s not, but yet you can’t get into argue.
I was couple times being part of the WP drama. And I realized that because of the language barrier, because we all different that, defending yourself, you’re only going deeper. Like deeper into the problem. So I always try to talk to that person. Hey, there are things that you are not aware something. But, yeah, as I said, like highly opinionated community about everything. That’s what I love about, and that’s what I hate a little bit.
[00:26:19] Nathan Wrigley: When this event is over, presumably there’s a process of going, okay, let’s figure out what we did. What we did well. What could have been improved.
Is there a thing like that? And can people like attendees, somebody like me, for example, can I put my opinion forward about, okay, next time, less of this and more of this.
[00:26:36] Milan Ivanovic: Yeah.
[00:26:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There’s a process for that?
[00:26:38] Milan Ivanovic: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a process in place that you put up the form. Hey, give us the feedback. My personal opinion is that like you are not reading the, you know, the worst possible things. Luckily, we never had those and you’re not reading all those, the best things ever, like best WordCamp ever. You are looking, at least I am looking, for something that was constructive criticism. Yeah. You go through there and you know that you failed. I don’t know with food could be better or something could be better.
You are aware, but you’re looking for the constructive criticism. And we always like, till now, like waited for about two weeks because two weeks is, um, a period of time that people need to just think about everything. Because if you give like today, if you give that form to attendees and be like, oh my God, it’s so crazy.
If you give that form to me, I just won the hat on the claw machine, but is going to be like the best WordCamp ever, because I just won. We are waiting about two weeks just for people to breathe in, decompress, you know, sell their thoughts and then you’ll give the attendees a survey to fill in.
We did that every year and it turned out to be an amazing thing for the future reference. Team will also put up the handbook. They will put up the handbook of all the things that they’ve learned, challenges that they faced. What could be better, what could be improved? Because we have the internal P2 for organizers, for teams to communicate. So yeah, that’s their life, probably at next month. They would just like decompress and just all the thoughts put together in one place for the future organisers.
[00:28:21] Nathan Wrigley: Are you here as an attendee this year? Or do you have any?
[00:28:25] Milan Ivanovic: Yeah, well, I’m, I’m speaking, I’m speaking because, we started that and I love that rule actually. Whoever was like the global lead for the previous year, you’ll be like the keynote, speaker for the next WordCamp Europe. Like on track one, you’ll do the talk. My talk was about community and I knew that it’s going to be emotional.
But I never knew it’s going to be this emotional. Yeah. So yeah, I had, I had tears, but I’m proud of those. It was emotional talk because those are all the things that I’m super passionate about. I’m super passionate about diversity. I’m super passionate about community in general. I’m super passionate about changing myself first and then helping change community for better.
So many times, so many stories that I’ve heard about people just like attending one single meetup, and then they realize that, you know what, this is good. This is a solid foundation for the career change or changing life. I had one guy in Serbia attended our meetups. He was a hairdresser and I knew his face.
He was constantly attending our meetups, but he was always super silent. He’s like, no, no, no. All good. I’m just like listening to talks. But he’s a good guy. So after two years he switched roles and he said like, finally, I’m doing the front end work. I got my first job. Thank you so much.
Thanks to community. It changed me in so many levels. So I did this talk and I completely stopped because all those images flashed in front of my eyes. I have slide that how many, uh, how much this community and being involved, this whole involvement changed me as a person. I had all these images just like flashing because I’ve been through some like tough times, like everyone.
And then I knew how much this whole community’s been listening and helping, supportive. And I basically stopped just like froze at the stage. I’m like, oh my God, I’m gonna cry. You’re not gonna cry. You’re gonna continue. I got the applause and just like, and that’s the support I’m talking about, and I continued, but really personal talk for me and I loved it. I loved the subject that I was sharing and, people say that I’m quite passionate and that can, I can make something happen.
[00:30:47] Nathan Wrigley: Final question. And it’s a quick one. Will you be back next year?
[00:30:52] Milan Ivanovic: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
[00:30:54] Nathan Wrigley: Milan. Thank you for chatting to me today.
[00:30:56] Milan Ivanovic: Thanks so much Nathan for having me.
Ever found yourself at a restaurant wishing you could figure out how to split the bill with your friends or family? Building a calculator that can handle that isn’t as hard as you think! I am going to take you...
The post Build a JavaScript Tip Calculator appeared first on Treehouse Blog.
It used to be that in order to make your parents proud you had to go into management. Then along came the self-contained IC career path. Today, this dual-track career path remains the unchallenged standard of companies everywhere.
Or does it?
This past year of blogging has introduced me to a wide variety of people in the Perl community. Some I’ve admired from afar for years due to their published work, and even more, I’ve “met” while interacting on social media and other forums. This will be the first in an occasional series highlighting not just the code, but the people that make up the Perl family.
I first came across Paul Evans’s work during his series last year on writing a core Perl feature; he’s responsible for Perl v5.32’s isa operator and v5.34’s experimental try/catch exception handling syntax. I interviewed him about the latter for Perl.com in March 2021. He’s been active on CPAN for so much longer, though, and joined the Perl Steering Council in July. He’s also often a helpful voice on IRC.
2021 is almost over. This year JPA Buddy met its first user and grew up into one of the most rated plugins in the IntelliJ IDEA marketplace. In this article, we decided to share a short story behind JPA Buddy, its achievements in 2021, and plans for 2022.
Let us start with a few words about the history behind JPA Buddy. The idea of JPA Buddy as a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA was born back in 2019. Roots come from another product called Jmix (previously CUBA Platform). Jmix is both a framework and specialized tooling for productive business application development. As you may guess its data layer is built over JPA; it's tooling, Jmix Studio, provides great facilities to express your data model via JPA entities nearly without manual coding.
On the podcast today we have Tara King.
Tara has recently begun working for Automattic in the developer relations role. Tara will lead a newly formed team who will get out and about; trying to understand the pain points which people are having with the new Block Editor and Full Site Editing. They will then report their findings back to the developer and contributor teams, and hopefully establish a feedback loop to make the editor better.
They are also creating blogs, podcasts, courses and many other types of content to help people get up to speed with the Block Editor.
It’s no secret that whilst there are many people who love the Block Editor, there are many who remain unconvinced. Unconvinced might not be a strong enough word, but you get the idea. I wanted to hear about the purpose of this new team and how it’s going to be working. Will it have a real impact upon the future of the Block Editor? What will they be offering? How can they be reached? Who is deciding what’s included and what’s left out? What motivations are behind all these decisions?
We also get into a chat about the fact that WordPress is changing; moving away from a legacy of easy-to-understand PHP code and moving towards a JavaScript and React based future. Is the pain of learning these new skills going to be worth it, and is there going to be any support to help people get there?
It’s a wide-ranging discussion at an important moment in WordPress’ history.
Time will tell if Tara’s team can win the hearts and minds of unconvinced developers.
Have a listen to the podcast and leave a comment below.
Tara’s email address: tara.king [at] automattic [dot] com
Automattic: Developer Relations Job Description
Welcome to the ninth edition of the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, events, plugins, themes, blocks, and in this case developers and Gutenberg. Each month we’re bringing you someone from that community to discuss a topic of current interest.
If you liked the podcast, please share it with your friends. You might also like to think about subscribing so that you’ll get all of the episodes in your podcast player automatically, and you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player, or by going to WP Tavern dot com forward slash feed forward slash podcast.
You can also play the podcast episodes on the WP Tavern website if you prefer that. If you have any thoughts about the podcast, perhaps a suggestion of a guest or an interesting subject, then please head over to WP Tavern dot com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the contact form there. We would certainly welcome your input.
Okay, so on the podcast today we have Tara King. Tara has recently begun working for Automattic, in developer relations, and it’s an important role within the WordPress community. Tara will be leading a newly formed team who will be getting out and about, trying to understand the pain points which people are having with the new block editor and with full site editing. They will then report this back to the developer and contributor teams and hopefully establish a feedback loop to make the editor better. They are also creating blogs, podcasts, courses, and all sorts of other content to help people get up to speed, and perhaps begin using, or better understanding, the block editor.
It’s no secret that whilst there are many people who love the block editor, there are many who remain unconvinced. Unconvinced might not be a strong enough word, but you get the idea.
I wanted to hear about the purpose of this new team and how it’s going to be working. Will it have a real impact upon the future of the block editor? What will they be offering? How can they be reached and who is making the decisions about what’s included and what’s left out? And what motivations are behind all of these decisions?
We also get into a chat about the fact that WordPress is changing. It’s moving away from a legacy of easy to understand PHP code and moving towards a JavaScript and React based future. Is the pain of learning these new skills going to be worth it? And is there going to be any support to help people get there?
It’s a wide ranging discussion at an important moment in WordPress’s history. Time will tell if Tara’s team are able to win the hearts and minds of unconvinced developers.
If any of the points raised in this podcast, resonate with you, be sure to head over and find the post at WP Tavern dot com forward slash podcast, and leave a comment there. And so without further delay, I bring you Tara King.
I am joined today on the podcast by Tara King. Hello, Tara.
Hello. Thanks for having me.
You are very welcome. It is an absolute pleasure. We’ve spent the last couple of minutes just getting to know one another. We haven’t ever spoken before, so this’ll be a really interesting chat. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover. And first of all, I’d like to congratulate you on your brand new, shiny new job over at Automattic. I wonder if you might spend the first couple of minutes telling us what your new job is and what your title is and what you do.
Yeah. So I’ll give you the short version first, which is that my job is to lead a team that is basically going out into the community to hear where people are struggling with Gutenberg, struggling with full site editing. Bring that context back into the development teams and the contributor teams that are building the product and then make it better. And in addition to that feedback cycle part of things, we’re also creating content, courses, blogs, podcasts, all kinds of things to help people get up to speed with where Gutenberg is right now, where it’s going to go next and how to make the leap over from the Classic Editor.
That’s really interesting. I did actually read the job description that was posted on the website. I don’t know obviously what the final job description entails, but I was really fascinated to see that it was very much bolted on to the Gutenberg project as opposed to something a bit wider. And that is fascinating. It does feel at this moment in time, we’re recording it towards the latter end of 2021. And it does feel at this time that there’s quite a lot of, disagreement shall we say about how the WordPress project is being taken forward? And a lot of that disagreement is centering around Gutenberg and it seems that a few new roles, not just your role, but some others have been created particularly to handle the way that the community interact and the way that they feel and the way that they’re receiving knowledge about it. Have I got that right? Are Automattic putting jobs out there for people to do exactly that.
Yeah, I think my team especially it came out of the 5.0 retrospective. So when Gutenberg came out and it was pushed out into the community, I think anybody who was around at that time of the WordPress community was aware of the pushback and the unhappiness in the community, around some of the things that happened.
And looking at that, I was not part of the project in a serious way, at that point, I was actually doing support, so I was hearing all of the people who are unhappy tell us how can I change away from Gutenberg? How can I fix this? So that was my role in it at the time was just living through person by person with the impact of it.
What I’ve heard is basically they looked at the 5.0 release and said we need to communicate better, first of all right, but it’s not just pushing information out, it’s also, we need to listen better. We need to be aware of what people are feeling earlier so that when we’re trying to make this work, it’s not only perceived as, but I think experienced as a one-way street kind of thing, because I don’t think that’s ever been the spirit of the WordPress project, and I don’t think Gutenberg actually was meant to change that feeling, if that makes sense. But it did so for some people it really did. And so my team especially is really about listening and trying to engage more people, bring more people into the room to be part of those discussions, to be part of those decisions, because I don’t think anybody wants Gutenberg to succeed just for Gutenberg’s sake.
I think it’s a really good tool. And so we’re trying to make sure that everyone can be involved. So that’s my team in particular, but I think in general, there is a sense that Gutenberg is still struggling to be understood. It’s a really big change for the community on a technical level. And so we just need to be putting more energy and more attention to helping people bridge the gap between where they are now and where they need to be for Gutenberg.
Just dwelling on the team for a moment you may be allowed, you may not be allowed I don’t know, to describe how big that team is and what the specifics are about how it’s going to be implementing that. I’m just wondering if you can give us some insight, because it would be interesting, certainly from my part, it would be interesting to know how many people are on the ground now, doing that kind of work specifically in your team.
Yeah, there are four people aside from myself, so five people in total. We have people doing specific programs. Anne McCarthy has been doing amazing work around the full site editing outreach program. So that’s been part of this team before I started, they were doing that work. And then we have other folks doing courses and meet up presentations. Daisy Olson has been doing those also for a while. We have two new teammates, so Birgit from Gutenberg Times, which is a very amazing connection to have, is going to keep doing that. We’re basically supporting Birgit to do more and more Gutenberg Times as much as she’s willing to do. And then we have Ryan Welcher, a new hire from TenUp, who is helping on the sort of more technical side.
So we have four people which means each person is responsible for, I think, 10 and a half percent of the internet. So it’s quite a big job, I would say.
That’s a fascinating way of actually thinking about it. Forgive me, I’m going to quote from the Automattic job description that came to you. This is the thing that you applied for. And again, please forgive me if this has now morphed in some way, but it basically says “We’re looking for someone to join our Automattic team dedicated to aiding the WordPress open source systems effort, specifically around developer relations. Your focus will be communicating with community developers about WordPress, Gutenberg and the surrounding ecosystem to build a positive and sustainable relationship with WordPress developers and reduce barriers to Gutenberg adoption”. And then there’s a bullet point list of what the ideal candidate will have, which presumably you met admirably. Congratulations. The thing that jumps out for me, there is the word developer is used multiple times. And is that where your efforts are going to lie? You’re reaching out to developers as opposed say to end users or perhaps people that are new in the community who are unfamiliar with how Gutenberg and WordPress works.
Yeah. So we are one month in. So we’re still working out the details, but very much focused on developers. I think I’ll say for myself, I am actually from the Drupal project, I’ve been in WordPress for a long time, but I have a much deeper kind of contributor history in Drupal actually. And in the Drupal project, it’s always like developers first. Basically it’s not official, but it’s very focused on the developer experience and, coming to WordPress, I was always looking around… who’s talking about developers and WordPress, where are they meeting? Where are they talking? So it’s a very natural thing to focus on developers for me. But I do think it’s a little bit new in the WordPress project. Certainly not developer first. I think the user is still always, maybe even the visitor is always going to be first, but the user of WordPress is always going to be the primary audience. But I think Gutenberg is really a product, a tool for the user, but in order to get it out there, I think developers really need to adopt it. Especially anybody who’s extending WordPress. We need them to understand how to make Gutenberg work with that. Because that really does, I am blown away every time I use Gutenberg, and I know that’s my job to say that, but it’s actually also true. It’s part of why I took the job. I think it’s such a fantastic tool when you’re giving somebody a site and they’re going to be managing it. Without any code, they can do really advanced things in terms of layout and display.
We need all the developers in the community to get on board and make it available via their various extensions. So we really are focused on developers and that goes everywhere from, so there’s the theory of care in the WordPress community? I don’t know if you’re familiar. It’s there’s the leadership. There’s the contributors. There’s the extenders. Users and visitors, I’m kind of sticking with that model. There’s developers all the way down to the user level. People who are not writing a lot of new code necessarily, but maybe a little bit here and there. So we’re talking to those folks. We’re talking definitely to the extender group. So people who are writing plugins and themes, people who are running hosting companies or agencies, large universities, anybody kind of working with WordPress at a larger scale. And then of course the contributors who are literally developing the project. So it doesn’t sound very focused when I say it like that, because that’s a lot of people, but it’s everybody who’s writing code to support WordPress, whether that’s for one site or for all of WordPress.
I am really interested by the fact that this role in this team now exists. As far as I’m aware it’s the first time that your role has existed. That’s right, isn’t it? You are the first person to.
That is correct.
Okay. So that speaks to me that the team over at Automattic, as you said, they’ve listened and they’ve realized that this team needs to exist. WordPress is growing and fortunately Automattic have the capability to put this together. I suppose later on in the podcast, we’ll get into the problems that people are experiencing and some of the things that presumably you’re going to be addressing, but I am also keen to understand how people will be interacting with you.
So in the future, how are they going to be getting their concerns in front of you and your team. Is it all about outreach from you or is it doors open, you can email me. How are people going to make contact with you and your team and express what it is that they need to express?
Yeah, that’s a great question. Going back to the 10.5% of the internet per person. It’s a really hard problem to solve. We can’t be everywhere at once. As much as I would like to have someone who’s on every WordPress related Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, I could keep going with where we might go to listen to the community.
We’re still working that out in terms of the details. We’re in Make Slack all the time, but I know Make Slack isn’t always terribly welcoming. It’s welcoming, nobody’s mean, but it’s a bit confusing, I think when you’re new to the community or new to that space, there’s always meetings happening. I know I personally have had the experience of, I don’t know when I’m supposed to talk with, if I’m interrupting a meeting.
You know, there are places that we definitely are. I think my email is going to, I assume it’ll be in the podcast notes, it’s tara dot king at automattic dot com. I am happy to hear from folks. I may regret saying that I don’t know how many emails I’ll get, but I think for me right now, especially because I am transitioning from having one foot in both Drupal and WordPress into being more WordPress focused, I’m really looking to meet people and genuinely hear what folks are struggling with because it’s wide. So my mandate is Gutenberg focused, but, that’s not the only thing that causes problems. You might be also struggling with some particular part of Core that isn’t Gutenberg. Like it’s a very tangled knot in terms of when you’re having issues with WordPress. So I like to hear about it because maybe right now the radar is focused on Gutenberg, but we’re not going to be focused on Gutenberg forever. We can expand out from that narrow focus.
So long story long, I wish I had a super simple answer other than to email myself personally. We are listening as much as we can or going to events, camps, and meetups and things. We are listening on Twitter. We’re listening on Post Status. We are trying to be in all the major places, but feel free to reach out to myself or anyone else on the team that you feel comfortable with.
There’s a lot of people out there for a very small team, but we are trying to listen. One other thing I’ll say before I finish on this topic, is there are very specific calls for testing that we’re doing. So if you want to be more involved in the full site editing development before it happens, right? So a lot of people have a very reactive approach, which is, it comes out and they’re unhappy, but actually there are pathways to be involved sooner. And this was one of the easiest ones. You can go to the Make Slack, there’s a channel called F S E dash outreach. And if you join that channel, you will be presented with calls for testing that are, in my opinion, I hope that other people find this to be true as well, fairly clearly outlined. You know, step-by-step how to do the test in question. And then where to give your feedback. This is helping with everything from how a navigation block works from how widgets work. There’s been some open-ended ones around what themers, theme builders needs. So that’s one way to get a very specific kind of feedback, right? It’s not general, but it’s very effective to get specific feedback.
I sometimes feel that despite the fact that those channels are publicly available and anybody can hop in, I do sometimes wonder if things like the Make Slack and Github and so on, I do wonder if there’s room for improvement there. And I don’t mean throw the baby out with the bath water, but they can be quite intimidating. It is difficult to backtrack and figure out where the conversation began that’s currently going on. The interface for Slack is excellent if you’re a part of a team and your daily grind is to be in a particular Slack channel, and you’re constantly checking in and you see where the conversation has flowed from and where the conversation is right now. But I feel it’s difficult for people who are just hopping in to make almost any sense of those conversations at all. And so of course, the easy thing to do is to glance in open the door at a tiny bit, stare through the crack and then just run away in fear and continue to feel annoyed.
Yeah, I totally agree. I think, here I am barging in kinda new to the community. It was lots of opinions. I’ve been feeling very much like the Make Slack and the Make blogs are more welcoming to people who are contributing because they’re in it every day. It’s easy for them to understand what’s happening. Whereas I don’t actually feel like we have a great location for developers at large. We have documentation. We have the Github for Gutenberg, but again, they’re very contributor focused. There are people who just need to know how to build a plugin. How to build a block pattern on WordPress in general. And I don’t feel like we have a great place for those discussions to happen right now. I don’t know what we’re going to land on, but that’s one thing that this team is working on, trying to figure out what would be the right way to consolidate conversations for that community. Because right now it does feel like if you’re a developer who has a WordPress problem, you shout into the void and you hope somebody hears. That might happen on Twitter. It might happen at a WordCamp. There are ways to be heard, but they’re hard to find. I think we need much better pathways. To have those conversations.
I am not committing you to any particular platform or any particular piece of software, but it’s just, it is nice to hear though, that you have that, on the radar, you’re thinking about that because I think that’s really important. Many of us are used to different platforms, probably more social in nature that seem to work in inverted commas, better, but that’s fascinating, thank you.
Okay. Let’s get stuck into the side of Gutenberg where people are concerned. Feeling disgruntled. Now I do want to definitively spell out at this point that you are not responsible for the way that Gutenburg is right now. I really want to make that very clear. So anybody listening to the podcast, it is not your fault, but people have concerns.
I think right now we seem to be seeing more concern than ever before. I’ve been using WordPress for about, I’m going to go for nine years, that feels more or less, right. Prior to that I was using a piece of software, which you just mentioned, Drupal. And I was extremely happy with Drupal. Drupal did everything that I wanted to do. It really was fabulous. In fact, if you could rewind the clock, I was telling my clients that Drupal was probably going to overtake WordPress in its use. How wrong could I have been? But there came a moment in time where that community became something that I no longer was part of. And it was because of the fact that Drupal deals with point releases, so from five to six to seven. There is a real line drawn in the sand. Drupal five doesn’t sit well with Drupal six and six doesn’t sit well with seven and so on. And I left at the point where there was one of these moments. It was from Drupal seven to Drupal eight, and I couldn’t cope with the fact that I was going to have to do an enormous amount of work, just to keep things that had already built, up and running. Now the parallels that are there are fairly major I think, WordPress has done an unbelievably good job of being backwards compatible, but now we have what feels like, I’m going to call it a Drupal moment. Where we are at an inflection point, something radical has changed in WordPress, and it really is bifurcating the path. Some users extremely happy, giving it a go, getting involved, loving it, other people, disliking it, not wanting to be a part of it and ultimately, just stopping being part of the community and not using WordPress at all. So I hope my analogy there with Drupal sits and you understand what I’m saying?
Yeah, it does. Yep. I was in the community of the Drupal community when that happened as well. It is very interesting. I think for a long time, I’ve talked to people in both communities, I’ve talked to people using both software. And one of the differences, when people ask what’s the difference is that WordPress is backwards compatible and Drupal’s not. And the seven to eight was Drupal becoming object oriented, was the main change. And so people were used to writing procedural PHP, and now they had to write object oriented and they weren’t used to it. And, not only were they not used to it, it was just unbelievable amount of work to update all of the extensions and make everything work. And then there’s no migration path that’s very clean between seven to eight in Drupal. Having lived through that, the Drupal project forked at that point, there’s now a separate fork of the project called Backdrop. It was a very painful time. It was honestly a very painful time for me personally. I’m sure it was painful for other people as well, but it was painful for me because I had gotten into Drupal in Drupal six and I was essentially a solo shop. I was building sites by myself, occasionally getting in a contractor and I could make sites pretty cheaply and pretty easily for lots and lots of people on Drupal. And like you said, loved, I just loved the software. I loved it so much. And the switch to Drupal eight felt very personal, like we don’t care about people like you Tara. Obviously, no one’s said that to me, but that’s what it felt like. It felt like I don’t have the resources to make this kind of a change for my clients. And I think ultimately it led me to stop freelancing and start working for agencies because they did have the resources. So it actually did change my career trajectory. So it’s very serious for people. These kinds of changes in a software project, it seems kind technical or niche, but it’s not, it’s people’s livelihoods and it’s people’s entire way of being in the world. Like you’re changing how someone is working, you’re changing, what kind of work they’re able to do.
So I think it’s a really relevant parallel to draw to Gutenberg because I think a lot of people are feeling that same way now, and it’s no surprise that they’re going to have very strong reactions when their livelihood is threatened. I don’t play a single person for having that struggle. The reason I took when I was talking about the job and interviewing and things like that, it definitely feels like we’re starting a little bit behind because the community is already upset. It would have been nice if we could’ve started before we Gutenberg came out and built those relationships earlier, but hindsight’s 2020.
And I thought to myself, there’s so many people doing so many cool things with WordPress right now. I think Gutenberg is a really powerful tool. And if we can help people make that bridge. Not have to build the bridge to becoming a Gutenberg developer themselves, but have one provided. If we can help people feel heard and welcomed and important again. Cause I think that’s why we come to these communities as we feel that way, we feel like we’re important and we have somewhere to matter. So anyway, for me, long story short, it’s very emotional and I really want to honor and respect people and meet them where they’re at because I’ve been there in the Drupal project.
A couple of quotes. I should say that I reached out to a few of my friends. I am going to name no names. They didn’t ask me to not to name names, but I won’t. Just a few little things just to give you an indication of where people are at. So this is from somebody who creates WordPress websites for a living. I don’t think they would describe themselves as a developer, but they say, “Push and you get push back. If Gutenberg had been developed as an add-on plugin, for example, which was optional, where folks could opt in, then it would have become something that they could choose. And that for me is what made WordPress so successful”.
So that was from one person, and then from another person who is involved in themes shall we say, “To every new feature or whatnot, which is added to Gutenberg, there’s a but to go with it. And those things are never addressed. All in all, that is why I’m losing passion for WordPress”.
It’s those kinds of feelings I think, I could probably have put in some stronger ones, and certainly there were some ones which were less strong than that, but it gives you an indication. This is really, like I said, bifurcating the community and it really isn’t a case of people just tutting a bit and being a little bit annoyed and then just shrugging it off and getting over it. This is genuinely people who’ve been doing things for a long time, are dedicated to WordPress, commit to WordPress, use it every day, promote it. And they’re thinking of walking away are, like I did with Drupal.
Yeah. Yeah. It’s really hard to hear quotes like that, but it’s also just so important. Honestly, I find that the WordPress community has been very patient. Gutenberg came out now, I think three years ago. And obviously some people were not patient, some people took off. But I do feel like people have been pretty patient. And whereas in Drupal before Drupal eight even came out, people were like, I made a fork. I’m leaving. Here’s my talk at DrupalCon about how Drupal’s terrible. I really hope, I’m not here to try to save people.
Everybody has to make their own decisions about what software project is the right for them. I think in general, this is about people’s passions, whatever that might be, it’s not necessarily about WordPress. They want to be able to do what they need to do. I’m not trying to save every last person, but I do think it’s important to hear when people are having these reactions and to really hear it right, to let it sink in.
I hope if my team can’t counteract some of these feelings about the software being pushed onto people about development, ignoring the feedback that’s coming in, I think we will have failed. I am very optimistic at this time, one month in, to say that I think we have some really good people who are really passionate and very deep in the community who know what people need. They’re on the other side too, they’re also developers. We’re not hiring marketing people, no offense to marketing people, but that’s not what this team is. We sit inside the product team. We’re talking to the developers of the product. We’re talking to developers in the community. And like I said, there’s four of us, 42% of the web. Can’t really hear everyone, but I’m hopeful that as we listen. One person who stands up and says, I’m losing passion for WordPress because of this, represents a hundred people who didn’t or a thousand people who didn’t, I don’t know what the numbers actually are, but if we can address these people, one-to-one with personal caring, with strong, clear feedback to the product teams that are working on WordPress. I am hopeful that we can make this feel more like a collaboration, more like you’re opting in, and it’s your choice to use this cool tool instead of, oh, I have to. So that’s the goal for the team.
The two things that keep coming up in the conversations that I have on this side of the fence are that it was pushed into Core without the sort of necessary time for it to be examined and the entire community to have their say on it.
And the other one seems to revolve around the fact that it’s now been going on for such a long time, and it feels like almost like a public beta that’s been going on for two, nearly three years where we are asked to use a piece of software, which is still very much in development. And so concerns around those. And I’m interested, you may know, you may not know what the decision-making processes were in the past for how that happened. You may be able to talk about that again, you may not, but I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on whether the decision-making process for how things are going to be implemented, are going to change. Is there going to be more openness about what’s coming up? Are we able to communicate directly with the people who are making these changes? I think the feeling is it’s top down. That a few people who make very big decisions and they make them, and the rest of us have to go along with that. And I think people would like to understand whether that governance model is up for debate. That’s my question really.
I don’t know if it’s up for debate, to be honest, in terms of the very highest levels of the project. I don’t think it is. I think that we have Matt, we have Josepha and they’re the leaders. And I think almost every major open source project has one or two people, typically one person in that position.
And I’m not in the room for those discussions. I should say there’s anything that’s it is going to change there. I don’t know about it. That said, I think it’s very clear to me, I actually have not yet spoken with Matt, but I spoken with Josepha who’s in dot org. Like we work together very pretty closely. And I can tell that Joseph is really listening. It’s obviously hard for someone who’s not seeing her regularly to know that. I fully understand why people think that it’s very top-down, but that is part of this team is to go out and to try to listen and to help people understand how their feedback can come in.
That’s why I feel kind terrible that I can’t say to you, this is exactly how you can give us your feedback, but that’s absolutely the top list of priorities. Hopefully by the end of this year, we can have something clearer. There’s the obvious ways of you can go in and contribute. But it’s a pretty high barrier to entry.
And I think what most people actually want is just to be able to give a little feedback. They don’t want to write new code to fix something, they want to be able to say, oh, this didn’t work for me because X, so that’s what my team is going to be doing. And maybe it’s not fair to call it a beta, I don’t think, but it is ongoing development in public because that’s the open-source way. But it’s very challenging, having come from the Drupal community where people are making these big changes all the time, it feels, yeah, that’s what we do. But I know in WordPress that hasn’t been the case. What we are trying to do very specifically with my team is, get ahead of the release. So 5.9 is coming out in December. We are working right now on documenting exactly what is and is not going in. Is there any kind of breaking change? Those are pretty rare still, but if there is anything like that, we want to get ahead of that. We want to know, is there education that needs to happen around a certain technology to make this a success.
And we’re trying to push that out, to, I think right now we’re going to try to push it out to things like large agencies, universities, big groups that can then disseminate it internally just for purposes of scaling. Not because we don’t care about individuals, it’s just hard to reach them. So we’re trying to work that process, get that smoothed out. While that is getting refined, also building ways for individual developers of any kind to opt into that kind of information. So it is very much an experimental piece of software at this point. It’s production ready to, it’s both. It’s very interesting to be in this middle, the middle of it all. And I know it feels like it’s been going on for a long time and I know it feels like it’s never going to end, but it actually is going to end.
And as somebody whose mandate is to work on it, there’s even almost a little bit of not dread, but existential sort of conundrum when Gutenberg ends. What do I do then? So as much as it feels like it’s never going to end it. It is, it will be done, it will finish.
Moving the debate ever so slightly, but more or less the same wheelhouse really, there seems to be this under current, and in a sense, it feels a little bit, I’m going to say conspiratorial. Seems to be a lot of people who are equating the Gutenberg project with, so the dot org side of things with the dot com side of things, almost as if the people on the dot org side are the Guinea pigs, for want of a better word that, is probably entirely the wrong word, but you get the idea, for the project and that the dot com side obviously has a financial model, which the dot org side doesn’t. And I just wondered if you had any thoughts on that, whether those concerns could be assuaged as well, whether there is in fact a problem there or not.
You know, I don’t see. I have only been there a month, I don’t have this sort of deep WordPress roots that other folks do. So I’m like new, I guess I’m an outsider still a little bit. And so I was concerned, I’m not going to, when I took the job, I was a little concerned about that because when I’m not working, before I worked at Automattic, I was constantly, oh, it’s so annoying that there’s a dot org and a dot com. It’s so confusing. It’s so annoying. So coming from the outside of the company and from like a fairly commercial place, honestly, from my interactions with WordPress, I don’t see it. I have not met anybody from the dot com side. And I mean that literally like the entire non.org side I’ve met one person because she lives in my hometown. We had coffee, that’s it? So, no one has told me anything from the dot com side needs to be implemented on our side. If anything, I almost feel like it’s inverted, which is that, I would guess if you talk to folks who work on dot com, they are just maybe not just as frustrated, but close to as frustrated as folks outside the company, as they’re waiting to ingest information from dot org, I’ve heard that from folks like we need training, we need to be able to, to train dot com customers. So there’s frustrations there too. So I hear the conspiracy. I see where that comes from and why it exists. My experience has been completely not that way.
Okay. It’s definitely something which gets raised from time to time. So I thought it was worth bringing up. But again, the caveats that we mentioned at the top of the podcast, that you’ve just begun in your line of work and so.
Exactly, I’m very new. And the thing about conspiracy theories is you can’t really prove them wrong. Most of the time, they’re unable to be proven wrong. So I can’t prove it. I just don’t see it.
One of the things that I guess you are going to have repeatedly over the next year or so is the chatter about the move into new technologies in WordPress?
So React, increased reliance on JavaScript and the move away from PHP. And this also speaks to the debate about people moving away and getting alarmed that their websites that they’ve already built and their capability to build things and have a business that’s easy for them to manage in the future, is going to be difficult. And I wonder what you thought about those horizons. I wonder if you’ve got any words of comfort for people who have those concerns. And a related question, I wondered if there was possible responsibility, that again maybe too strong, a word, but I’m going to use it, a responsibility on Automattic to provide guidance, training, materials, whatever would be needed to help people cross that bridge and to ease the burden of learning these new things.
Yeah. So I’m a PHP developer, I taught myself PHP and I always held JavaScript at arms length, right? It was like, nope, that is too far. I will not do it. When JavaScript started becoming more and more popular, I just was like, nope, I don’t have to, I know PHP. So I feel very much the pain of why do I have to learn JavaScript again?
I think the concerns I’m hearing, and again, I said my email, I’ll say it again at the end of the podcast, but the concerns I’m hearing and the concerns I’ve had are, yeah, it’s just, I don’t want to learn JavaScript because I don’t need to, why do I need to? There’s a build step, right? There’s often a more, a slightly more complicated kind of environment needed to Gutenberg development versus just straight PHP. You just write it, hit save and I’ll see if it works. So there’s additional complications of writing Gutenberg code. Not every host necessarily well, set up if you wanted to do that remotely or something like that. For some of us, I thought we stopped compiling things. I have to compile things. It feels a little, old. So I hear all of that and I’m sure there’s other objections people have. The things that I’m excited about with it, now that I’m having to do more of it, I’m realizing JavaScript’s not that hard. We’re all going to be okay. It’s not that hard. And it opens up so much in terms of greater web technologies.
And again, this feels very parallel to Drupal seven, to Drupal eight, which was moving to object oriented programming actually made me a better developer. I was a fine PHP procedural programmer. I was a reasonable developer and then having to learn it, which I know it’s frustrating when you have to learn something, but I don’t regret having done it. It made it easier actually for me to get into Gutenberg development, it’s made my whole development life much easier. I don’t think JavaScript is going away on the web in general. I think if anything, it’s going to continue to eat the web. As an individual, it’s powerful to have that tool in your toolbox as an agency, it’s powerful to be able to sell that work. Talk to people, have a more diverse kind of set of skills on the team. I’m pro learning in general, right? It’s I think something that helps every open source project grow. I think the backwards compatibility with WordPress, I hesitate to say it, but it feels like it’s gone a little bit too far. At some point, if you maintain backwards compatibility, the software can’t move forward because the old stuff is pulling it back.
I think it’s a wonderful model and Drupal is moving more towards it. It’s kind interesting to see the two communities converge there, but this might just be a case where there’s going to be a few pain points. Every web developer, no matter what tool they’re working with is going to have pain points where they have to learn something new.
I think it’s useful on an individual level. And then in terms of offering support for the transition, that is absolutely something that I think needs to happen. Whether or not it’s Auttomatic’s responsibility. I think it’s best when these things are community-wide efforts. I would love to see WordCamps and meetups offer, people volunteering to run… hey, this is how I got started. That happened a lot in Drupal. I have a friend who ran a talk about how Pokemon can teach you object oriented programming. Very accessible. And so I think, it’s not necessarily Automattic’s responsibility, but that said it is something that my team is actively working on right now is what kind of materials are needs to help people get over there. Is it, we need to help people understand how to make, build environment, that dev environment that can do the build steps for React, or is it just general JavaScript knowledge? So we’re actually, this week, looking at what options are currently out there. What’s up to date. There were, when Gutenberg launched, there were a number of products and educational things that came out from the community that were great, but have not been updated. And people are still being directed to stuff that’s two years old, and doesn’t help them now? So my team is actively working on this.
How can we help people do this? Because like I said, it’s actually not that hard, but we don’t give the tools people need. I tried to build a Gutenberg plugin recently entirely just from wordpress dot org documentation. I was like, no blog posts, no outside resources, just wordpress dot org. And it was not easy. So whether or not it’s Automattic’s responsibility, it’s something that we’re taking on, because it needs the community does need it. So look for something better in that space, soonish.
Thank you. Encouraging, just to hear that the flag has been raised and the concern has been written down and it does sound to me like you are actually planning to bring something to the table and it’s been thought about, so that’s really encouraging. Thank you for that.
It feels like we’ve been bashing for a long time, we’ve probably spent half an hour dissecting all the bad. So before we draw to a close let’s flip that entirely. Let’s turn it to the good. And I just want to offer you a platform to say why it is you’ve taken this job with Gutenberg as the sole focus. What is it about Gutenberg that you feel is better? Why do you think it’s the future? In other words, what I’m saying is, here’s a crowd of naysayers, here’s a crowd of people in front of you, they’ve got their pitchforks out, they are furious about the way that things are going, you’ve got an opportunity now to just address that crowd and see if you can turn some heads.
Oh, I wish I had practiced. WordPress has always been about freedom and empowerment of people, of individuals. This is my personal take on it, this is not the Automattic take on it necessarily, it’s just how I feel. When I was building small sites, I used to run a consultancy for artists, artists are famously, not necessarily wealthy. Don’t have a lot of money to put into these things. And they’re also a very do it yourself kind of group. So I was making websites for artists. And if I could just get them started, give them a little push, install, some WordPress on a server, maybe pick out a theme for them. They could do it. People who almost refuse to touch computers because they’re just busy off making their art could come back and use WordPress and share their work, talk about it, sell it, do really cool things.
And I think I’ve always been very passionate about that kind of end user being able to make their own website. I am personally just so not interested in having to go to a developer to say I need to post my new blog post. I need to add a little widget here with my new event. It’s feels so old fashioned to me, and it’s so disempowers, like I said, the user of the website. And so when I was looking at this job, thinking to myself, self, nobody, like everybody’s mad about Gutenberg. Do you really want to talk about it and try to make them like it, what it really came down to was a genuine feeling, when I was interviewing and talking to people at Automattic, genuine feeling that they wanted this to be a collaborative experience, that they wanted it to be in conversation with the entire community, which is really where my passion derives from. And then Gutenberg itself as a tool is just incredible. I wouldn’t have taken it if I didn’t think the tool was worth it. If it was like, oh, there’s this like terrible piece of software, but it’s okay. I’m getting a salary. I’m not going to work 40 hours a week on something like that. So the tool allows people to do really powerful things and really control stuff that I haven’t seen in other CMS’s. I’ve built sites for clients in Wix and Weebly and Squarespace and Drupal and WordPress and other more niche platforms. And I just see my clients over and over again, bumping up against, oh, I just want to put two pictures next to each other. And they can’t because they don’t know HTML or they don’t know how to make a table.
I just want to be able to make all my pictures, have a little, like a header cover image with some text on it and they have to call me and I have to code that in and put it up there. And obviously Gutenberg doesn’t have every kind of block and every kind of pattern that you might imagine. But having now built several sites, just with vanilla WordPress, I haven’t installed any themes or anything like that, and just a couple of block packages that are out there, you can get pretty far, I think much farther. Yesterday I was watching a video on YouTube about, it was 10 minutes to a block theme, and it was like, make these five files and now you can put a block widget as your header, which means the users can make their own headers. And I don’t have to go in and do all of those little things for them all the time. I think that’s scary for some folks because they rely on that work. They rely on it being difficult. But ultimately, it’s really empowering. It makes more people able to make more websites. Like it really grows the size of the pie if you will. Drupal’s like jealous of it and there’s a Gutenberg port to Drupal and it’s really very cool. It’s very powerful. And I think, the community can really benefit from it. We just need to be able to actually speak to each other and hear each other and work together. And that’s the part that my team is really trying to build that bridge and to make that a reality, obviously we can’t fix everything for everybody, but we can fix more things than we have been fixing.
That, I feel is a really excellent place to call it a day. You mentioned just before we finish, you did mention earlier that you were going to drop your email in once more. It may be that people have heard it and haven’t written it down. Can I encourage you to do that once again?
Absolutely. My email is t a r a dot k i n g at automattic dot com. And there are two T’s on the end of that. So it’s a u t o m a t t i c dot com. I’m also sparklingrobots on Twitter. Like I said, R I P my inbox let’s see how this goes. But I, I believe my DMs are open on Twitter or you can just tweet at me because I am actively looking to have conversations in the community. One-on-one conversations actually move things forward quite a bit. So I’m excited to have those.
Tara thank you very much for coming on the podcast today.
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Today’s topic is a tough one in particular for me. I’ve come to learn that it’s not an easy one to discuss, and I haven’t perfected how to say it. Because of this, I’ve found that I just blurt it...
The post Let’s Talk: Miscarriages appeared first on Treehouse Blog.
So on the podcast today we have Cory Miller.
Cory is likely well known to many of you, he’s been a big part of the WordPress community for many years. He founded, grew and sold iThemes and is now the owner of Post Status, which is a community dedicated to informing WordPress professionals and enthusiasts about the industry.
So the topic of the podcast today is the WordPress Mergers and Acquisitions Landscape, and it’s the perfect subject for Cory. He’s been on both sides of the equation having sold iThemes to Liquid Web in 2018 and then buying Post Status earlier in 2021.
When we talk about Mergers and Acquisitions in WordPress, it really seems to polarise opinions. Companies are being bought and sold on an almost weekly basis at present.
There are those who worry that we’re at a point where larger companies have bought, and continue to buy up, smaller businesses. They see this as a cause for concern; a concern that we’re in danger of straying into a future where a few big brands own ‘all-the-things’.
On the other hand there are people who see this as a sign of the maturation of the WordPress ecosystem. It’s a consequence of the success of the WordPress economy that smaller teams have a pathway to profitability, one in which the possibility of being acquired is an attractive option.
There’s a great deal to discuss here, some of it unexpected, and I’m sure that you’ll have your own opinions.
We try to tackle the subject by going through a list of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ of WordPress Mergers and Acquisitions. We don’t attempt to cover every single angle, but we do try to look at it from both sides.
It’s great to get Cory’s take on the topic.
Welcome to the sixth edition of the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast all about WordPress and the community surrounding it. Every month, we’re bringing you someone from that community to discuss a topic of current importance, and this month is no different. If you like the podcast, I’d suggest that you ought to subscribe, and you can do that by going to WP Tavern dot com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. Use your favorite podcast player and click the subscribe or follow button. If you have any thoughts about the podcast, perhaps a suggestion of a guest or an interesting subject, then head over to WP Tavern dot com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the contact form there because we’d certainly welcome your input.
Okay, so on the podcast today, we have Cory Miller. Cory is likely well-known to many of you. He’s been a big part of the WordPress community for many years. He founded, grew and sold iThemes and is now the owner of Post Status, which is a community dedicated to informing WordPress professionals and enthusiasts about the industry.
So the topic of the podcast today is the WordPress mergers and acquisitions landscape, and it’s the perfect subject for Cory. You see, he’s been on both sides of the equation, having sold iThemes to Liquid Web in 2018 and then buying Post Status earlier this year.
When we talk about mergers and acquisitions in WordPress, it really seems to polarize opinions. Companies are being bought and sold on an almost weekly basis at present. There are those who worry that we’re at a point where larger companies have bought and continue to buy up smaller businesses. They see this as a cause for concern, a concern that we’re in danger of straying into a future where a few big brands own ‘all the things’.
On the other hand, there are people who see this as a sign of the maturation of the WordPress ecosystem. It’s a consequence of the success of the WordPress economy, that smaller teams have a pathway to profitability. One in which the possibility of being acquired is an attractive option.
There’s a great deal to discuss here, some of it unexpected, and I’m sure that you’ll have your own opinions. We try to tackle the subject by going through a list of the good and the bad of WordPress mergers and acquisitions. We don’t attempt to cover every single angle, but we do try to look at it from both sides. It’s great to get Cory’s take on this subject.
If any of the points raised in this podcast, resonate with you, be sure to head over and find the post at wptavern dot com forward slash podcast, and why not leave us a comment there?
And so without further delay, I bring you Cory Miller.
I am here with Cory Miller. Hello Cory.
Hey, Nathan. Good to see your face. And I know this is a podcast, but also hear your voice again.
I don’t think Cory that we need to introduce you in all honesty, I think you are one of those people that goes with no introduction, but nevertheless, just in case there is a handful of people out there who’ve not heard of you before or come across you. Would you just take a moment to explain a little bit about your journey with WordPress and how come we’re chatting to you on a WordPress podcast?
Yeah. So my original start with WordPress started in 2006 as a blogger. In 2008, I started a company called iThemes. Ran that for 10 plus years, we did backups security and maintenance for WordPress websites, in addition to in the early days themes, thus the name iThemes. And then in 2018, we were acquired by Liquid Web. 2019 I started on my next chapter in my journey. Currently, I am the… I don’t know what my title is, but Post Status dot com is now I’m full owner of it. Brian Krogsgard, the founder, and I partnered up and then he is onto awesome stuff in the crypto software space. And I’m now the community lead, I guess, for Post Status, a awesome community of WordPress entrepreneurs and professionals.
There’s an awful lot to unpack there, but regrettably, we don’t have time to go through the history too much. But what was highlighted there is that you have been through the very thing that we’re going to be talking about because we’ve got Cory on the call today to talk about mergers and acquisitions and whether this is potentially for the good or for the bad, whether there’s upsides or downsides. And let’s go back to your journey. I’m sure that things are different now, that is to say, I think things have hotted up since you sold iThemes, probably there’s a lot more paperwork going involved and a lot more scrutiny on how things are transferred and so on. But just wondering if you could tell us, what was your journey like, how did you come to sell iThemes? What were the reasons behind it? And what were the options available to you at the time that you sold iThemes? Were there people clamoring at that time, or was it very much we don’t know, people don’t sell things in the WordPress space. How did it all work out?
There had been a couple of acquisitions in the WordPress space, for sure, and I shouldn’t say a couple, numerous acquisitions in the space, but it wasn’t like the last year. Last year, the space has been on a tear with mergers and acquisitions, but there had been acquisitions before, in fact, at Post Status, we’re working on a page to document all that, the acquisitions that happened in WordPress.
So in 2016 or so I started to think, what does the future look like? It feels like one day somebody at all the hosting companies goes, I wonder how much this thing called WordPress, what kind of footprint is it in our customer base, in our stack and somebody came back and probably said 40%, 50% or something like that, I’m sure way back in the day. And it seemingly overnight a bunch of money and attention from particularly the hosting space turned to WordPress and rightfully so, I mean WordPress is a huge CMS and its footprint on the web is enormous. So around that time, I’m seeing all these players kind of come in and, big money, start to come in, and we’re talking about billion dollar companies or billion dollar valuation companies or companies with private equity in the billions coming into the space and really turning their attention, and I thought, my job as the leader is to fast forward the movie and see where we’re going and make sure, you mentioned in our pre-talk about Monopoly, the game Monopoly, and I thought, wow, we are definitely the David versus Goliath now. We’ve been bootstrapped from the beginning from 2008 on, and what does the future look like, and our toolset, the software we’re offering at the time, it was very utility, backup security, and maintenance. GoDaddy had bought Sucuri, ManageWP. Automattic was already kind of our competition from the beginning anyway, with Jetpack and at one point their backup service VaultPress. And so Jetpack is another behemoth out there. And, I just go, I think it’s time for us to figure this out, what’s the next step in a big way, and really that ultimately came down to being acquired. We had a partner in Liquid Web. So they were obviously the first people that had been partnered with him for like a year and really appreciated their leadership team. Eventually my friend, Chris Lema joined them and then my friend AJ Morris was the one that put us on the map for Liquid Web. And they were doing some, wanting to really do some big things and WordPress and long story short that just all worked out. But for us, it was like, at what point do you just need to pull up your stakes and tents and move on and see what you can get? And two reasons, one is financial, of course, but the other is my team. You know, we had about 25 people at that time and I want to make sure our team has a place to land and a great career, and that up until that point, it was either Matt Danner and I, and we had to leave for anybody to have upward mobility really well. When we joined a Liquid Web, at the time, they were like 600 people. So there was a lot of opportunity, career opportunity to move within the company. And they were also doing some great stuff. Now, maybe early in my worries, you know, Mark from Wordfence a great founder, co-founder over there told me, he said, great book called only the paranoid survive. I spent about 10 years in paranoia, like insecurity. But it was time it’s turned out to be everything Joe Oesterling and the C Suites team over at Liquid Web, everything they said to me, they have been to the letter of their word. I have really great respect for them. And so iThemes is under the leadership now of Matt Danner is killing it. There have been on the acquisition tear in the last year.
It is amazing because I think there’s two sides to look at it. And we’ll explore that as the podcast goes on. There are the good sides and there’s possibly some downsides to this whole thing. And certainly from your perspective, it sounds like you had a really positive experience. You managed to hook up with a company who delivered on everything that you hoped that they would. So that’s great. But then of course, I suppose there’s the other side. The customer side, where there may be more concerns about, well, what does this mean for the product going forward? How is this going to affect the thing that I’ve deployed on all my websites? Will it still be maintained? Are these people good custodians and so on? So just to unpack this a little bit. Over the last, like you said, maybe a year or something, we seem to have a real landslide of things happening. There’s lots and lots of things, to the point where really a week doesn’t go by where there is some merger and acquisition news.
Truly.
Yeah. You follow this probably more closely than I do, but it’s happening every single week. And some of them are big names, some of them are much smaller names, but there’s a story there every week if you choose to go and find it. I’m just wondering if you think this is inevitable. And what I mean by that is, was this always going to be the case? A rising tide carries all boats. If WordPress is getting bigger, it’s inevitable, all the things which are supporting WordPress and are built on top of it are going to get bigger as well. Did you see this happening all over the place five, ten years ago? Or did you feel yourself to be a slight exception all those years ago?
No, no, no, no, no. 10 years ago I was just living my dream as an entrepreneur growing a business. Most of the time, just holding on to the runaway stagecoach and was just loving every day and every week and every month and every year of our journey. I had a five-year commitment when I started the business, because I knew I’ve been a career hopper since I was 16. I’ve had a job on average about every two years. Until I started iThemes. I knew when I started iThemes, I had to have a five-year commitment minimum just to get the bird off the ground? So when five years came up, I was like, well, do I want to renew and this is about that time that I’m talking about. And I was like, heck yeah, I want to re renew. I want to keep renewing these things. I worked with the most amazing people on earth. That were my friends and my coworkers who held my babies when they’re born, who’ve been in my house for dinners and fun times, and I got to meet their children, because we had a hybrid remote team. And so I just wanted to keep pushing renew, renew, renew, renew. And it was just at the point where I was like, I don’t know what the renew button looks like now. I probably got in a little bit of a dark space in my fast forward in the movie to the end, but no 10 years ago, didn’t understand the world of all of this M&A stuff.
But as I’ve come to learn, this is a by-product to WordPress’ success. That’s it. First and foremost, it’s a by-product that people would go there’s money here, there’s value to capture all that kind of stuff. And this is what’s called we’re kind of seeing it, it’s call it a roll-up that they say in that kind of a industry, the M&A kind of field. You’re just seeing right now, a big roll-up going on. Small players been scooped up adding features or customers or revenue and all that, but I just wanted to keep renewing until I thought, I don’t think my chances are very strong to be able to renew, was concern for all parties involved.
The thing that I find curious is that I was in a forum the other day, and we were talking through this exact topic. It was a real split. Essentially the conversation was fairly polarized. It was, is this a good thing that we’ve got all of these acquisitions? Is it a bad thing, you didn’t really get to sit on the fence? You were either going to be one or the other and the people on the, this is a good thing side really were talking about the fact that this is what happens. This is a maturing thing. When an ecosystem, an area of business matures, this is what goes on. There is a coagulation that the people who’ve been successful, the people that have got the money to buy things, they go out and they shore up the offering that they’ve got. So that was the one side. This is just maturation of an industry. And then on the other side, there were the people who didn’t see it that way. And they saw it more as it’s just the big guys getting bigger, and there’s concerns there because that’s going to stifle all of the competition and we’re terribly concerned about whether or not things that we’ve been built with dedication and heart and by an individual are going to be consumed and they’re going to lose their focus and they’re going to lose their way. So it really split either way. And because of that, because it was so split, I decided that we’d take the podcast in that direction and we’d talk about the good bits and the bad bits. So let’s go with the good, let’s start with all the good things. And I actually think the good list, I was able to come up with more good things than bad things, not many more, but more, some of them really unexpected to me.
So first of all, If you want to espouse all of the things that you think are good, and then I can do my list or I can do my list, and then you can tell me whether or not you agree with it. It’s entirely up to you.
Before we dive into that, I wanted to say, if you pushed me to say yes or no on it, I’m very conflicted. Given a broad statement, I’m very conflicted. And I started to parse out, is it good for the platform, WordPress? Is it good for the entrepreneurs in the space? Is it good for the people doing the acquisitions? That’s a firm yes. The firm yes is for the people acquiring. This is a great thing for the people acquiring. Because of WordPress’ success the entrepreneurs that have built and help build WordPress to what it is today. I’m talking specifically the service agencies, the freelancers, the users, the people that built products like me and my team and others out there that have really contributed to the success of 40% or whatever the footprint is to WordPress today.
That’s been a significant contribution by the commercial community, the Post Status type tech community, the people of WordPress. So I wanted to say that first cause I was like, oh, that’s interesting, if you forced me to pick, I’m really conflicted. But if I parse out some of those, I’m like, okay, maybe I can share. It’s still a yes here and a no there, yes here, on each audience. So all that to say, you go with your list and we can talk to you that for sure.
Okay. So this list in part came out of conversations that I was having with people who had been in the middle recently of acquisitions, and some of them were unexpected to me. I couldn’t have worked them out myself. So imagine you’re working in a company, a small company, much like you had at iThemes, 25 employees. Curious thing, better working conditions came out. So that is to say that the people working at the small company are now working at a big company and they were able to make use of all sorts of things that weren’t available to them. So that might be heathcare.
Yeah, I would reframe the phrase, working conditions to benefits and the worker benefits, absolutely, at least in my case. Way better PTO policies, way better health insurance. I’m still on Liquid Web, we went on what’s called Cobra because my wife worked there before we were acquired, by the way she’d worked there three or four years or so. And then when she left last year to start Content Journey for her business, we continued on with Cobra. I’ve been on Liquid Web health, probably five years, I think, five years now, I want to say. And so absolutely. And most of the other ones, yeah, they can do it at scale. So, yes.
Yeah, you’re right. I don’t know why the word conditions came into my list of there, but yeah. So job security. Better healthcare and… the UK, we have a different healthcare system and it doesn’t require quite so much money up front if you know what I mean? So those kinds of things don’t matter.
Ah, so jealous.
Well, yeah, health insurance and so on. But then, more of the nuts and the bolts. There’s obviously more resources to throw the development of the project, because it may be the developer of a particular project. Maybe they were a solo person, or maybe they were working with a small team and they’d reached the end game of what it was that they felt that they could achieve. That really, they were running out of runway. They’d run out of inspiration, perhaps they were fed up with it and it gave them an opportunity to hand it on. Maybe they’re going to carry on the journey. Maybe they’ve been acquired as a part of the deal, but it gives them more people to talk to more ideas and more resources to update their plugin, theme or whatever it might be.
I would say yes, with this caveat, is the direction is no longer in the hands of the original founder, entrepreneurial team, always, there’s new owners, they get to decide what the direction is. That’s why you got to be really careful what you carve out in your agreements. But, it’s a new owners. Yes, I would think for sure, like us going to Liquid Web, we had the resources of a hosting company who owned their own data centers. I want to say that again, hosting company actually owned their own data centers, which I had set foot in and go, wow, this is kind of rare in today’s age. So that was exciting for us because we’re like, what would happen if we could control the server hosting environment. Wow. Okay. That’s awesome. So, yes, I think in theory and most what I’ve seen in practice, absolutely more resources in terms of team products, money, even to fund.
Yeah, I guess everything that we raise on one side probably has a flip side, but in this case, I think we can easily understand and pass the good side of that. The other thing of course is that if you bring along your product or service, just to keep it simple, let’s say that you are a plugin developer and you brought along a plugin, then you are rolling into a bigger ecosystem of plugins. And so it becomes a more desirable thing. So from the end user’s point of view, my point of view, if I can subscribe to one subscription service and get four or five different plugins all rolled into one. That’s a real benefit for me. I’m getting them from one vendor. I’ve got one support channel, one price to pay. And I don’t have to worry now about those three or four different plugins, which I’m hoping will cobble together and make my website work perfectly. They’re now being managed by the one team. And so there’s something to be said about the fact that it’s all getting rolled in and you might have just one subscription. I mean, obviously you tried to do that and succeeded with that at iThemes, you had a whole bunch of stuff going on, loads of different things and having them all under one subscription was a great offering. And the bigger that subscription gets in the more things that you can feed into it, the better it is.
Yeah. I think the team that probably does this the best that I’ve seen is Syed and his team over at Awesome Motive, which has brands of Optin Monster, WP Forms, Monster Analytics, all that. I don’t know if I see a lot of cross selling going on, but I see them being able to take products and promote to an ecosystem to expand that. You’re right, at iThemes we call it the Toolkit and it was like the treasure chest. I don’t know if you ever get to a dentist’s office, and there’s this big treasure chest, like a pirate treasure chest. And after you get your teeth cleaned or whatever you did, you can go and dig through that. And that’s the way I thought about our toolkit. If I fast forward the tape, I want to see a company within the space actually do that.
I don’t know if I see that right now, one subscription to rule them all kind of thing. I get hosting. I get my plugins, maybe themes in there too, but really, hosting and plugins. I want to see a company doing that. Maybe if we get close to that is maybe Jetpack, where they bundled security and backups and maintenance. And now they’ve got these, in their whole ecosystem. Jetpack just rolled out their own mobile app. That’s really interesting to me where it’s like one price, because here’s the problem. Nathan, you’ve seen this, you know this. Wix, Weebly and Squarespace, when I first started back in 2006 with WordPress and in 2008 with iThemes, we could gobble up all this, what I probably think of as the lowest end of the market, the ones that I just want to buy hosting for five bucks a month, they want to get a domain name and cobble their site together and do it for under a hundred bucks a year or something like that. Wix Weebly Squarespace came on the scene. I can’t remember what it was. I want to say 2013, 14, 15, somewhere around that maybe, and started eating at that bottom level. And now as WordPress has gotten more complex and maybe the dashboard hasn’t been updated as much as it should have been, Wix, Weebly and Squarespace come in and just provided this complete ecosystem for one price.
They don’t have to go over here and buy a theme or plug in and pull it in, separate recurring fees and all that stuff. I don’t have to worry about updates because it’s SaaS and they started eating at the bottom of that. Now that affected our theme business in a big way. And that’s a dynamic I’d love to see like awesome motive can pull it off. GoDaddy can, they’ve made some huge strides with their onboarding. It is pretty dang incredible. I think WP Engine has with their Studiopress acquisition is starting to do some of this, pull it in, into their ecosystem. Liquid Web for sure. Now they’ve rolled out Stellar WP, which is basically their brain for all their WordPress products, but I want to see it. I want to see it. I don’t have to have 15 subscriptions, I can have one. Now somebody smarter than me, with financial engineering is going to have to do all the math and see if that plays out. But I want to see it as a user.
I feel that that’s the inevitable direction of travel and we’ll come back to that because I think possibly that has negatives as well as positives, but yeah, good point. Although the promise of one subscription is a nice one. We don’t appear to have that.
You mentioned, here’s a subset of this whole conversation is WooCommerce itself. WooCommerce is a platform in itself, even though it’s technically a WordPress plugin and all that. But its footprint is enormous. It’s the default defacto software e-commerce software on the planet and it’s going to be for the foreseeable future. But if you have five ad-ons, you could probably go through the store to do that. Again, somebody had done initially when they rolled everything together, it’s like how much you would spend on a WooCommerce store. I have any commerce operation I’m partnered in called the vidibars dot com [?] And it’s my first physical product and stunt months it’s Anna’s who runs it, CEO, but we are not going to go with WooCommerce, we’re going to go Shopify. We were started on Big Commerce. Because I didn’t want to handle the tech stack. I’m not a developer. I might seem sometimes like one second at a, you know, a whole interview that I know what I’m talking about, technically, but I wanted to relay all that over there. I didn’t want to have to worry about separate plugins and updates and potential car crashes. I wanted SaaS for that. So we went Big Commerce, now we’re going to move over to Shopify soon, and it’s probably going to be cheaper than tagging those together. I think WooCommerce is fantastic, but that’s this result of now one company can controls the ecosystem too, which it has all along, but, you start add up these separate things and it’s quite a bit of money.
Yeah. So a good example of that would be Stellar, who just recently acquired Iconic. So they’ve obviously got the hosting side taken care of, and now they’ve got Iconic WP, which is a suite of WordPress plugins specifically for WooCommerce. You feel that that could become an interesting rival for something like shopify in the e-commerce space because you know that those plugins are going to work. Hopefully they’ll maintain them. They’re going to sell it as a part of a package. Presumably the support will go with it as well. Just feels like that could become a one subscription rival. And then of course you’ve got companies which are still independent, people like Yith and so on, who knows maybe by the time this goes out that have been bought. But for now, it remains by itself.
Okay. That’s intriguing. The other thing which occurred to me is still on the good, is innovation. The ability to innovate, and grow things. Obviously, if you are a solo developer, you are probably hands down, writing code most of the time, your ability to market is going to be constrained. And I actually see this quite a lot in other things that I do. I get quite a lot of email from people who have been building their own plugin. They’re simply asking for a bit of advice and a bit of help. And can you assist me in marketing this and you feel that the quickest way to do that would be if it was sold and then the company who have all the chops, they have a marketing department, they could do that on your behalf. So I saw that as another possible area, the ability to grow it, market it, and just push it out in front of more.
Yes. If the leverage all, when you pull in, let’s say in your latest example, Iconic. Pull their customer base and then be able to share that with the Liquid Web, Nexcess customer base. That’s awesome. Fantastic. Yes, absolutely. From an innovation standpoint, I will say my commentary on it and you probably have bad where I can say good or whatever, but my thoughts are, you and I root for the little guy, the David or the Sally or whatever, we root for the entrepreneur. I think today, capitalism or entrepreneurship, the ability to go out there, make money by innovating and serving people and their problems. Now I subscribe to the mantra of purpose plus profit is awesome entrepreneurship. It’s not just profit. Profit shows, we’ve seen so many weak, terrible examples of people bulldozing other people to just make a buck. I don’t believe in that kind of entrepreneurship, but the real awesome entrepreneurship when you want to innovate to serve someone’s need better, make their life better, that kind, I bet on all day, every day, because that’s where I think innovation comes. Not to say that innovation can’t come from any of these companies. It can and does, and will like, for instance, in 2015, 16, maybe, people they’d ask me, do you think someone can start a theme business in 2016, 15, 16. And I was like, no, I don’t think so. I think the likelihood is very small that would be successful. And then you had companies like, even though they’re, I guess technically a plugin, Beaver Builder. You had Elementor, even though those we could nuance that and say their plugins and all that stuff, they innovated in the theme space. And I was like, nope, it’s done. But see there again, entrepreneurs will prove you wrong. They’ll show, I’ve got an idea, I’ll execute on the idea and innovate for my customers. And I did look at those two companies, Elementor is gigantic. They are a platform in itself just like WooCommerce is a platform within a platform, but they’re a platform. So I think innovation happens in the spark from entrepreneurship, but that’s my comment there. It will happen at the bigger companies for sure.
Maybe it starts with the smaller companies, that seems to be my experience, certainly over the last 10 years, is that the real fascinating innovation is happening on the solopreneur side or the small team side. And then I wonder maybe it gets stifled a bit, but certainly from a marketing point, you’ve got the opportunity to spread your message wider. That’s interesting.
This comes back to our discussion. Overall, our theme is M&A, and let’s take a company like Apple. Huge. I mean, insanely profitable on that. The one I think about a lot is Shazam. It started out as an app on the platform where you could hear something, push the button and like me, this is how I learned, finding music is like, I would Shazam it and it would tell me what the song was and then I’d go buy it from iTunes.
Well, Apple at some point goes. Wow, this app is big, they have technology we want. I don’t know if Apple actually acquired them or how. I think they eventually did. And I don’t know what the details were, but think about that big company like Apple known for innovation takes a smaller startup, pulls it up into their platform. That’s a great example of how M&A can work, where the smaller people, the innovation labs known as entrepreneurs in my mind get snapped up by the bigger one, that’s harder sometimes to innovate on a large scale like that and pulled in and done that. parts of iThemes we’re a strategic acquisition for Liquid Web in that we had iThemes Sync, which does software updates, theme plugins for wordPress websites from one dashboard. They wanted to do that in their product. Cool. Now they got to do that with that product. So connecting that back, you see how there’s an natural progression of flow, where an industry like a WordPress starts, at least entrepreneurs innovating, putting products out, making money, and then big money comes in and goes or big companies, whatever, and I was like, wow, let’s see what we can do. And they start to pull these pieces in. Like Iconic WP. That is a great product set. I know James, he’s a member of Post Status, talk to James. I love his products. That’ll be a great add on to whatever WooCommerce hosting that Nexcess – Liquid Web has, you know, to accelerate, I guess, is the word, accelerate their technology.
The big companies, which as you say are often hosting companies, they get to fill in the gaps as well with their offering. You just described Shazam, it’s a perfect way of Apple making more money because you discover it and you go and buy something off iTunes. Nearly said iThemes then. And so it just fills in the gaps. You can acquire things where you feel that you want to be going in this direction as a bigger company, but you don’t have that technology, build it yourself, or just buy it out from somebody who’s already built and on 90% of the hard work that you need.
The other option of course, is just from the point of view of the developer, they might want to just move away. They may just wish to have a slightly different life. They want to stop what it is that they’re doing and having a bulk injection of cash very quickly and suddenly being able to take a breather and reevaluate what it is that they want to do with their lives. I know that’s a bit of a peculiar one, but I’m sure, maybe there was a bit of that with what you were doing at iThemes.
You mentioned that in our pre-talk with Elliot Condon, from Advanced Custom Fields, that’s the stories. I don’t know him personally, but everything I’ve heard and saw written about it was he wanted his startup baby to go to a good company. And it did with Delicious Brains, and Brad Touesnard over there is fantastic, and this whole team. But Elliot was ready for a next chapter and whatever that is, he was ready for the next chapter. When I was going through mine, I will not say Nathan, consciously, it was like, I’m ready for my next chapter. I was really in, oh, wow, we got to figure this out. I got to transition our team, make sure they’re taken care of. I want to pull value out of the business, that’s my 401k. That’s my nest egg, was the business. And so all those things needed to happen, but I’ll tell you now what, three years after it, I needed a kick in the butt for my next chapter, I would have kept pressing renew and what had happened to me and here’s the downside for entrepreneurs is I put, at some point you experienced some success and you’re like, oh gosh, this was tough. Maybe I just want to sit back and enjoy the ride for a little bit. But what happened was I put my career, my skills on autopilot and didn’t really grow some key skills, cause I didn’t have to. What the acquisition did, and when I left was actually put me in the box of like no other torch, you got to. I didn’t get live on a beach forever money. And I didn’t, I don’t want to live on a beach forever. I want to work. I want to do things that makes people’s lives better. And in this thing we call video game, we call it entrepreneurship, but I’ll tell you, in retrospect, looking back, I needed that, even though I hated, I still miss my team, I still miss my friends. I still get to talk to some of them, but I’m like, I miss those people. They were incredible people. They still are. That was the biggest pain of that. The other probably secondary was identity, and, what am I going to do next? I didn’t have a plan B. I put all my eggs in one basket.
It’s just a great option though, isn’t it? You mentioned Elliot in that particular case, if those were the thoughts going through his head, he could either just walk away from it, and let the product stagnate, or he can move it along to somebody that he, in his case, like you said, Delicious Brains, trust them feels that that’s a perfect place for it to go. He’s happy. It’s going to have a good future. Millions of people are using it and they continue to be happy, but also he gets to do what he wants, which is to take a bit of time out and have a bit of a change of lifestyle, which is really nice.
Okay. That’s my list of goods. I don’t know if you’ve got any that you feel we missed, but we’ll move on to the bads if you don’t.
No, let’s go.
Okay. Let’s do the bads. One of the things which I fear in all of this is the stifling of competition from it. So you get to the point where a particular product has so much reach. It’s got so much marketing clout, they’ve got all the money to spend on the advertising of it, and it just becomes… there is no competition. The other thing which I’ve seen happen, I won’t mention any names, but people who have the money simply buying out the competition and then just letting it go to waste. They literally take out the competition with money so that their own product is the last man standing for want of a better word. So I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that, but that was one negative.
Your competition is a very valid point because what happens when there’s only four players, right? Which, it may be like four players in a couple of years, four or five, maybe, I don’t know. And that’s a very fair point that you see these entrepreneurial companies like us. We’re scrappy. Every day, we felt like we had to wake up and earn our right to continue to serve our customers because we’re not hugely funded and got all the steam in the world to own it. We were ultimately building on another platform and actually two platforms, WordPress and hosting. Whatever the hosting company they were with.
So I think that’s a very fair point, like competition, where you kind of seen that within the managed WordPress hosting industry, look at all the different players. And I won’t say about names cause you know them all, but go and just research and look at the prices and the feature sets. They’re pretty similar. I know because about six months, eight months ago, I was looking for managed WordPress hosting. I was dismayed. So you see that where I’m not saying there’s collusion or anything, but you go, well, there’s just this many competitors. They’re going to all look at each other and see how they can co-exist and outmaneuver each other.
But I fundamentally believe even though I hated us as an entrepreneur, Nathan, I’m never going to tell you otherwise I hate competition as entrepreneur, but it is absolutely essential, for entrepreneurs for our customers because without competition, you’re absolutely right. So they’re going to be in a monopoly and then you can force any changes out that you want.
A great example of this is Google. They are dominant. And from the beginning I’ve been saying like a broken record, their thing was don’t be evil. Well, I want to have a sign up that says Google… remember… don’t be evil. Remember this are you straying against this, but that’s the pressure we put within the environment because all those publicly held companies have stockholders to satisfy that stock price, they manage religiously because it’s part of their job security. And unfortunately, this is a system we’ve created is that they’ll keep pushing down and ultimately become about money. It’s a big cycle that I’ve seen that I just baffle at. Down here at the bottom, you got people that have 401ks., Like I had at Liquid Web and my team had it and iThemes and all that. Right. And that gets invested into the stock market and you want it to grow. You expect it and demand it to grow. Well, on the other side of this equation are the people that are at these big companies that you’ve invested your nest egg into you. And what’s the message out? Go increase value, make sure it’s whatever percentage, year over year, quarter over quarter, all that stuff.
And it’s a vicious cycle where then they push it back down to the same people contributing to the 401k to say more money, more money. We got to have this money. It’s a crappy viscious cycle. Back to your competition thing. That’s part of it. I think competition is good for the space and ultimately for the user, particularly the WordPress user, you got my diatribe here.
No, no, that’s good. It’s a pleasure to hear it. I guess the flip side of that might be the country argument may be that in a vacuum where the competition has been basically bought up, possibly stifled. The vacuum creates the opportunity for the next round of people who suddenly want to fill up that vacuum with their own plugin, keep saying plugin, it could be anything, but we’ll go with plugin.
So, okay. All of the decent things, decent plugins in the WordPress space have been acquired by these large companies. Now there’s space, now I can come in and pivot and of course the question is, whether you’ve got the nouse to compete against the giant marketing budgets, but yeah, Google was a great example. It became something gigantic. It became the incumbent. And at some point there’s no choice left. If you want to have a decent search, they seem to be the way to go.
Okay. What about this one? The fear that licensing or terms and conditions that you signed up to, maybe changed. So a plugin is acquired by another company. You’ve got it as a WordPress website builder or developer, you’ve got it on 50 sites spread around the internet and it works, and you read through the terms and conditions. You know what you’re expecting, you know, what your license fee is, you know, the tier that you’re on that fear that whoa, hang on. This is all going to change. I don’t know what’s going to happen now. All of my websites are in jeopardy. That’s a thing.
I’ve seen it happen. You’ve seen it happen, Nathan. And I’ll tell you. My values are and do right. Do good. And then you do well. If you do right and good in the world, right? And well in the world, or good in the world, you should do well. If you serve people and help them make their lives better, you should do well.
You should be handsomely rewarded for that. But sadly, I’ve seen companies that kind of went back on their word or whatever had been initially agreed. And I would challenge my colleagues and my friends in the space not to do that. Do right. Do good by people, which means honoring your word. And if you did a lifetime deal or you did something like that, you got to honor that because I’ll tell you, I think in the future, Nathan, there’s going to be a swell of, in the United States back in the early part of 20th century we had unions. They came about because they were needed because workplace conditions were terrible, particularly in manufacturing and these unions sprung up. Now, today, we see some of those professional unions going down, but I think in the future, there’s going to be consumer unions. And you talk about one that’s like right, for a consumer union, it’s called WordPress, the WordPress community, because all the people around there can band together and say, we won’t accept what you’ve done.
I think that’s going to have to be the way, we the people are going to have to band together and say, no, that’s not right, Google, don’t be evil. Facebook, don’t be evil. We’re going to have to band together and put our force. And that’s the only way. And the way you do it, as you hit their hot pocket book, we felt like every customer came in with a dollar voted for our business. And if they stop paying, they voted our business out, out of office or whatever you want to call it. And we can do that, Sally is going to have to happen in the future is because there’s going to control so much of the space. So much of the key parts of the board that consumers are going to have to band together and say, no entrepreneurs are going to have to rise upand say, here’s my innovative solution. Thankfully, we have a little bit of the GPL to cover us maybe downstream. That is one. I’ll give it to Matt Mullenweg, he’s been the champion of the GPL from the beginning. Keeping products that aren’t SaaS, particularly in the WordPress repo, GPL. And I applaud him for that. I haven’t always agreed with him, but I’ve respected them. And that’s one that I think will help ultimately the WordPress user in the future.
Good point. That’s one of the things I’ve got down, neither in the good, nor the bad side, is that depending on how it goes, somebody with the right skills can just fork, whatever it is that they feel aggrieved about. But it does concern me that the terms and conditions change, we had a really good example of that not so long ago where there was confusion, it would appear. I think it was a tweet or an email or something led people to believe that the licensing terms were going to be changed. And then the social media storm happened. That seems to be the way at the moment to get everybody’s voices out and say, we don’t want this to happen, please honor what was the case, and in this particular case, you’ll probably know what I’m talking about. The company said, oh, okay, that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll give you. And it all resolved itself very quickly, but concern that those kinds of things in the future will happen. Especially if you’ve got a plugin, which is used on millions of sites and literally as the underpinnings of your website business, that would be terribly, terribly worrying.
The other… an another concern that I’ve got is the simple acquisition of the audience. You are buying the plugin. You have no intention to maintain it at all. You are just buying, dare I say it, you’re buying the opportunity to put a little advert in people’s WordPress admin area, or you are buying an email list or what have you, and I’ve seen that happen as well. So that’s a point of concern, not often, but I have seen it happen.
Yeah. It’s an effect, potentially effect of all this, but that’s back to let your voice be known. WordPress is so strong because, it’s eclectic, it’s so diverse in a good way, but democratize publishing is the WordPress mission. And so like that means have your voice, say your voice, share your voice. Even if I don’t like it, I still promote it. WordPress users are going to have to wake up. And I’m going to say it again. WordPress users have to wake up. They have to let their voice be known. They have to find the place to let their voice be known and congregate and share and rally.
Now it doesn’t mean like a coup all the time. It means, let your voice of displeasure be known. Mostly, I love how WordPress has been built. Obviously I’m so thankful for the thousands of contributors that have made WordPress, what it is today, selflessly over the years to build it to what it is today.
I’m so thankful for that legacy and their work, but it’s also a meritocracy where when you contribute and we listen to people. By and large, we, the community listen and let the minority voice be heard. And it’s one of the great things about our community is you can have a voice in the community if you choose so. WordPress users have to start choosing to do so.
That is basically my list. There’s a few others, but that was my good / bad list. I have a question for you to round us out and it’s a peculiar question and it’s yes, no, you got a binary choice or I suppose you could try and sit on the fence on this one.
Given the exact same plugin from a big company or a, let’s say solo preneur or a small company. So literally if they were the same Who would you buy from?
Solopreneur every single day.
Really. That’s interesting. And is there a reason behind that? So obviously we’ve had this discussion, we’ve decided there are these merits and there are these drawbacks to both sides of the argument. Why that way?
If there’s feature parity, both are doing what you need, and you can rely on support and updates and all that, solopreneur every single day. Because I go back to man, I root for the entrepreneur. I am an entrepreneur. I root for the entrepreneur. So I would for sure lend my support to the entrepreneur over the big company every single day.
Like I’m going to go for the David over the Goliath. Every single day I’m going to root for the underdog. That’s what I take a lot of calls I don’t get paid for from Post Status members and others asking, hey, how did this acquisition? Can you give us any tech ways? I’m always eager to have those calls because I’m trying to walk the talk
I root for, I believe in the entrepreneurs. I think entrepreneurship as a career vocation in the world is a sacred one. It’s a noble one. If done right. If we do the kind of equation. Do good, do right in the world, and you should do well in the world. What happens when it gets poisonous and terrible and all that is when the script gets flipped and people just say, oh no, no, the equation just profit, profit, profit.
Well, I’m sorry if you’re just in the profit, profit, profit, and you bulldoze people, I hope you fail. You’re not in the entrepreneur category, you’re a mercenary. Only about profit. So that’s why he said, this is binary and I gave you all this commentary, but I root for the entrepreneur and the one that’s doing it right, and doing good for people and serving people and taking care of their people, customers and their team. I’ll put my money there every single time.
Really interesting. I wonder what the take-up would be from the audience listening to this, which way they would flip on that one. I had a comment, I said earlier that I was, and I’ll round it out here. I was in a forum and we were talking about this exact same thing. Somebody in that forum, I won’t mention the name in case they didn’t want it to be mentioned, but they compared the current marketplace for WordPress to a game of Monopoly. And in that game of Monopoly, we’re at the stage where the houses are being slowly replaced with hotels.
And what was once a fun game starts to get really serious. And big money starts to move around the board and things blip out of existence with one roll of a dice. It’s just struck me as a perfect moment. We are putting hotels on the board, the WordPress board. Fascinating.
That’s a very good example or analogy or metaphor, whichever one it is.
Hey, here’s another question. I’ll answer. I’m going to give you a question and I’m going to answer it. If I have a chance between a non WordPress company and a WordPress company, who am I going to buy from? And that includes Automattic. I’m going to say WordPress every single time. I’m going to go with a WordPress company for sure. I am a customer of all the companies we’ve talked about. Including Automattic. I give my money to those. So WordPress company over non-WordPress company, I’m sorry. I’m biased. I’m going to pick WordPress. Just why I live in Oklahoma. I root for every Oklahoma sports team, because this is my home.
WordPress is my home entrepreneurs are my people, which is why I love what I do at Post Status. Cause it’s the club. It’s the tribe. It’s the community of WordPress professionals. So Viva WordPress and viva the entrepreneur.
Cory Miller. Thanks for joining me on the podcast today.
Do you want to allow blog users to moderate comments in WordPress?
If your site gets a lot of comments, then it can be difficult to moderate them all. One solution is creating a separate user role so that other people can manage the comments for you.
In this article, we will show you how to allow blog users to easily moderate comments on your WordPress blog.
Comment moderation can take a lot of time and effort, especially for big blogs that get lots of comments. If you are slow to approve comments or delete spam, then visitors may stop interacting with you.
By giving blog users the power to moderate comments, you can combat spam and deliver a better experience for your visitors.
These users might be members of your customer support team, your community manager, or even an active and trusted commenter on your WordPress blog.
By default, WordPress doesn’t let you create a user who is only responsible for moderating comments. With that being said, let’s see how you can easily allow blog users to moderate comments using a WordPress plugin.
Simply use the quick links below to jump straight to the method you want to use.
The Comment Moderation Role plugin allows you to quickly and easily give a comment moderator role to specific users. This plugin creates a new WPB Comment Moderator role that enables the user to approve, decline, or edit comments on any post without giving them access to other parts of the WordPress dashboard.
The first thing you need to do is install and activate the plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you will have access to a new user role called ‘WPB Comment Moderator’.
To assign this role to an existing user, simply go to Users » All Users. Then, check the box next to that person’s username.
After that, simply open the ‘Change role to…’ dropdown menu and select the ‘WPB Comment Moderator’ role.
You can then go ahead and click on ‘Change’.
Now, this person will have access to the WordPress comment moderation panel.
You can also create a new user and assign them the comment moderator role. To do this, simply go to Users » Add New and enter the person’s information, such as their email address.
Next, you need to open the ‘Role’ dropdown and select ‘WPB Comment Moderator’.
When you are happy with the information you have entered, just click on the ‘Add New User’ button.
Now, this person can log in to their account and see a comment moderation dashboard, similar to the image below.
As you can see, this person can only moderate comments and edit their profile. All other WordPress admin dashboard features are hidden.
You can also add the comment moderation permission to a user role or even create a completely new user role for managing your site’s comments.
This is a great choice if you want to allow multiple people to moderate comments.
For example, you might create a comment moderation team or give your site’s Contributors permission to moderate comments. This makes it easy for guest bloggers to interact with their readers.
The easiest way to edit user permissions in WordPress is by using the Members plugin. This free plugin allows you to customize the permissions for every user role and even create completely new roles.
The first thing you need to do is install and activate Members. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, go to the Members » Roles page to see all the different user roles on your WordPress website.
To start, you can add the comment moderation permission to any existing user role.
To do that, simply hover over that role and then click on the ‘Edit’ link when it appears.
The left column shows all the different types of content, such as reusable blocks and WooCommerce products. Simply click on a tab, and you will see all the permissions for that content type.
To allow users to moderate comments, you need to select the ‘General’ tab in the left-hand menu. Then, find ‘Moderate Comments’ and check the ‘Grant’ box.
With that done, simply click on ‘Update’ to save your changes. Now, anyone with this user role can moderate your website’s comments.
Another option is to create a new user role by going to Members » Add New Role. You can now type in a title for the new role, such as Community Manager, Comment Moderator, or something similar.
After that, you can add the comment moderator permission to this role by following the same process described above. To give this role additional permissions, simply check any of the other ‘Grant’ boxes.
For more details on user roles and permissions, please see our beginner’s guide to WordPress user roles and permissions.
When you are happy with how the user role is set up, don’t forget to click on ‘Add Role.’
Now, you can assign this role to anyone who needs the comment moderator permission. For step-by-step instructions, please see our guide on how to add new users and authors to your WordPress blog.
We hope this article helped you learn how to allow blog users to moderate comments in WordPress. You may also want to see our expert picks for the best email marketing services for small business and read our guide on how to allow user registration on your WordPress site.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
The post How to Allow Blog Users to Moderate Comments in WordPress first appeared on WPBeginner.
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WordCamp US will be held online this year on October 1, 2021. Organizers are planning a free, one-day event that will feature networking opportunities, speaker sessions, and workshops. Michelle Frechette, one of the organizers, said the team is planning on hosting a contributor day and will add more information to the event’s website over the next few weeks. In August, WCUS will send out the calls for speakers, sponsors, and volunteers.
Planning for the 2020 virtual WCUS ended up as somewhat of a debacle after organizers decided to cancel due to pandemic stress and online event fatigue. The cancellation came after volunteers had already invested hundreds of hours of free time in planning the unfortunately timed event. Outbreaks in the US were worsening and political tensions were at an all-time high ahead of what went down as one of the most contentious presidential elections in US history.
Bringing back WordPress’ flagship WordCamp as an online event was a necessity in 2021, as COVID-19 cases rise and ICU’s are filling up in US hot spot regions where vaccination rates are lower. The delta variant has thrown the world another curve ball in what has become one of the most stressful and traumatic 18 months in recent memory.
Despite the continued public health crisis, the WordPress community is eager to restart in-person events. Rocio Valdivia published a proposal today, summarizing the Community Team’s discussions on how to establish a path for returning to in-person WordCamps. The proposal is based on using the current guidelines for meetups with a few additional guidelines pertinent to WordCamps. It uses the same decision-making flow chart that applies to green lighting in-person meetups:
After these guidelines for meetups were announced in early July, in-person meetups have been held in six countries, including Russia, US, New Zealand, Uganda, Australia and the Netherlands.
“Resetting expectations for WordCamps may be necessary, as the world has changed significantly,” Valdivia said in the proposal. “This is a great opportunity to rebuild the program by restarting locally, and then building back up to the levels we had in 2019.”
WordCamps had mostly fallen into a fairly predictable format before the pandemic, but the Community Team is now keen on organizers experimenting with new formats and content. One example suggested in the proposal is delivering WordCamp content entirely online, followed by an in-person social gathering, for a more inclusive experience that makes it possible for those who cannot attend to participate in the educational aspects of the event.
The Community Team is embracing the current hardships as an opportunity to improve WordCamps and rekindle the community spirit after such a lengthy absence from in-person events:
Additionally, the normal WordCamp application process requires that there be an active local community in place. As the community has faced many changes this year, Deputies are thinking about how to handle this requirement. One possibility could be more flexibility with WordCamp applications, allowing communities that had a meetup pre-COVID to host a WordCamp, even if they weren’t as active in the last year, to help build excitement and restart community activity again.
The proposal includes a list of more practical considerations, such as securing fully-refundable venues, providing individually-packaged food instead of buffets, and limiting capacity to provide for social distancing. It also notes that WordCamps taking place during this transitional period would need to be prepared to cover 100% of their expenses, as WordCamps are currently exempt from the 2021 Global Sponsorship Program. Inclusion in the Global Sponsorship Program will be reconsidered once WordPress returns to in-person camps in all regions.
The Community Team is inviting feedback on the proposal, which is still under active discussion. If you have ideas that you think should be included in the guidelines or suggestions for this transition period for in-person WordCamps, leave a comment on the proposal.
After considerable discussion, the WordPress Community Team is lifting the requirements of the in-person meetup safety checklist for meetups that gather fully-vaccinated attendees. The checklist is still applicable to all meetup groups but in places where vaccines are freely available, meetup organizers can now forego its requirements if they limit gatherings to those self-reporting as fully vaccinated.
When Andrea Middleton proposed adding vaccination status to the checklist in mid-May, the idea was met with a wide range of concerns and strong opinions. WordPress’ global community has experienced the pandemic in different ways, living under a spectrum of local restrictions, with disparate access to vaccines and varying responses to available vaccines. Some participants in the discussions were concerned about organizers having to request information about vaccination status from attendees, which is illegal in many places. Middleton clarified that attendance would be based on the honor system, and organizers would not be requesting any health information from individuals.
“The WordPress community team is not expecting or requiring local organizers to organize in-person events for fully-vaccinated people — we’re simply removing the barrier to doing so,” she said. The decision announcement includes a flow chart for the conditions that are now in place:
Middleton characterized the proposal as contentious and something that may be an unpopular decision. Participants in the discussion got heated in expressing their opinions, which varied greatly based on each person’s unique pandemic experiences and convictions.
While some think it overstepping to prohibit unvaccinated people from attending meetups, others think only allowing vaccinated attendees would create a “two-tiered” meetup program.
“This proposal means that multiple groups of people will no longer be allowed to attend our meetings,” Taco Verdonschot commented. “They’re limited to the meetings that are streamed online. They’re basically second class citizens in our community now. They can’t join the party, they have to watch through the window. Just this idea makes me extremely uncomfortable.”
Verdonschot cited several examples of people who might be excluded by the proposal to restart meetups for vaccinated attendees:
“I realize there are some on the team who do not agree, and I hope that these guidelines are flexible enough that you are able to disagree and commit in this case,” Middleton said in the decision announcement.
“While I agree that it’s only a matter of time when fully-vaxxed-only meetups are a thing of the past, I do think it’s important to make that possible for our communities.”
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