Mark Zemanski. Welcome back to the WP Minute. Always great to have you. Matt, always great to be here, brother. Thank you. We're publishing this video on the WP Minute podcast channel. This way I see what I'm trying to do. Is get all that attention and awareness that you bring to the WordPress media landscape over onto this other YouTube channel so that we can get more podcast listeners for the WP minute proper. So I thank you for your time and efforts. Hell yeah, man.
Yeah. I don't, I don't know what, what traffic I'm driving, but I love it. I love it. Just trying to, just trying to talk. Generally you'll see Mark and I stream on the WP minute YouTube channel. Where we talk all things like WordPress, news, WordPress business stuff. Also where the, the home of all the WordPress tutorials go that I do. But you've been bumped Mark, next Thursday. Next Thursday I have another live stream. With the one Sam Smith. Wait, did I get his last name right? Sam Smith.
UK guy. He is a big Webflow guy. Ooh, I will be in the chat for that one. Sam Harrison. Sorry, Sam. I've not, I'm Sam Smith. I think it's a Smith Smith. It was so easy to just throw in there. Sam Harrison, he has a fantastic YouTube channel. Paul Charlton. So I saw him mention him in one of his live streams and I was like, Hey, wow, this guy, this guy's great. He's a huge proponent on Webflow likes WordPress is use WordPress.
So he and I are going to go about talking about WordPress versus Webflow. And his points of view, and it's going to be fun. So that'll be next Thursday. Mark, you yesterday had your stream a thon. It was about two and a half, two and a half hours, two hours. Yeah. Two 15, two 15 learning in public, as I like to call it. So some of us in the WordPress space build in public. Hey, I'm, I'm doing this thing with my business. What do you think? What features should I launch?
What do you think about this call to action? You're learning in public. Fun fact. Which I didn't tell you before we hit record, I had a lot of people DMing me being like, Hey, this guy you brought into the league, he's really going at it. He's really going at it. But there was a shared sentiment that a lot of us have gone through sort of like what you're going through now. It's just like poking and prodding and where are the boundaries here? Where are the lines? Who's doing what?
What is this thing? When you've, you've been doing this sort of live on Twitter and on your YouTube channel, learning all things WordPress community. open source, what this thing is, who it's for. You're not alone in this thinking. You're just doing it in a hyper compressed amount of time. I think a lot of us just stumbled around 15 years ago, trying to figure this stuff out. And, uh, you're just getting, uh, Shot of steroids from every direction on where to learn.
And it's a, it's a testament to your ability to want to do this stuff publicly and, and, and talk about it also to the WordPress community. There's so many more people involved than there were back in the day that you must be getting bombarded by people just throwing in their 2 cents every, every step of the way. But hopefully it's a, it's a positive outcome for you in the long run. Yeah. I mean, a lot there. Yeah. It's, it's been fun.
I mean, one of my life mottos that I've developed over my course of just doing other things on the internet and just in, in, in life in general has become learn, try and share.
So that's like something that I've just come to know that about myself and anything that I, whether it was like finance when I was trying to learn how to manage money when I was younger or just WordPress in general at the beginning or renovating my house when we, when me and my wife bought it, like just all those types of things.
Like now I'm in this space and I'm trying to take it more seriously because WordPress is something that I feel, as I've said, you have to, I feel like if you're not caring about the news, you're not caring about WordPress to some degree and you're building a business off it. I feel like that's slightly short sighted. And I've tried to take a more active role in that, you know, with again, mentors like yourself, just trying to understand kind of what's going on.
You guys have been around for much longer than I am trying to ask these critical questions to understand for myself. Honestly, educate others, because I know there's a lot of other people just like me that have been in it for a while too, and just don't know the ins and outs. I've never asked the questions, maybe haven't cared. But now.
Just with, you know, paradigm shifts in the, in the space and the industry and the, in WordPress community, there's a lot of reason to care and yeah, I'm learning a lot, but I want to also make some, you know, if I can. Possibly make a change or just continue to provoke thought as well. I think that would be good. I'm, I'm definitely trying to absorb, but, but I mean, overall it's been, it's been a great ride and I've met a lot of great people just like yourself, Matt.
So I, I'm really appreciative for everything that all the conversation, all the good thoughts, and I just think it's a, it's a net benefit when we're, when we're talking more. A lot of this stuff, when you were having your live stream yesterday, by the way, check out Mark's YouTube channel. We'll have that linked up. In the show notes, search Mark Szymanski on YouTube, a lot of the stuff that, you know, you heard me just type to you while you were live streaming.
A lot of other people said, Hey, this is, this is the same conversation we've seen over and over again, because everyone has like this, this question and every few years or so WordPress always goes through this growth spurt. Now WordPress is 20 years old. And, you know, I think one of the things that you were talking about in your life during your live stream was like, you know, what is WordPress CMS?
And what's funny is it's, it's funny to hear you say that because that was a very heavy, that was a big debate like 10 years ago. Is this really a CMS? Is this an app framework? There was a, uh, A moment in its growth cycle, WordPress, where, and I'm going to stop sharing this cause I don't remember if squad cast puts us side by side, but I want to go back to the new WordPress website. There was a moment in time in WordPress growth cycle where that was like a year long debate.
Like this debate that we're having now, is this for builders? Is this for man? There was a whole year where people were debating whether or not this thing was for making apps online because you had this framework, you know, and there are probably still people out there and you can still do it, but it was a healthy debate going on for a year. Is this an app framework?
Because we have a user management system, but we have themes that, you know, when custom fields came in and, and, and people started bringing, injecting other technologies, you're like, wow, you could build, there was a whole app ecosystem too. There were plugins that were making apps, people like, oh, this is, this is something that we can build.
You know, bespoke apps with, and then that was just like a whole other year long of what you're experiencing now started out as a blogging platform where it was just blogs and just for publishing, you know, blog posts, then pages, you know, then custom fields, and then the theming convention and all this stuff, you know, really started to, to come into play. And I think what this is, is an amalgamation of deck two decades now.
Yeah. Of just year after year stacking, you know, what is WordPress, where's the web going, where's the open web going, where's WordPress going, and humanity just injecting lines of code every year to build this thing and it ends up being what we have today. And coincidentally, WordPress. org launched a new website, homepage, landing page. Meet WordPress, the open source publishing platform of choice for millions of websites worldwide from creators and small businesses to enterprises.
And I think that's the key when we're looking at a lot of this of figuring out what WordPress is. Open source publishing platform. Figure out whatever publishing platform means to you as the end user. It's always been that for better or worse. You know, for better or worse, I think. And, and I think this new homepage is setting the tone for like where it's going, but I don't think it's just one thing, which isn't probably the best answer, but it's what we have.
It's definitely, I think if you're using WordPress or if you've ever gone somewhere else and came back to WordPress, you realize that it is probably the best that we have. It's not perfect. Nothing is perfect. I don't, I think you're kind of silly if you expect it to be perfect.
But that being said, the one thing that I. Have kind of, you know, with some of the live streams and like just talking different people is sometimes it seems I don't know constructive criticism is Is is just met with Maybe it's met with a little bit more resistance than I would hope but maybe it's just the way that it's delivered sometimes and obviously You know again, it's an open source project So you you got to be able to you got to want it to get better and contribute in some form But you
know, there's many different ways to contribute So, I don't know it's it's definitely uh It's definitely the best we have. It's fantastic. I don't think, again, if you're on the platform and you're, and you're actively like shitting on it, I think that that's like demeaning it in a way, like being completely negative. I don't think that's productive. But at the same time, I think that anytime you go into a conversation like that, both sides need to realize that.
Are we, are we, are we actively trying to make this better? Is that our actual goal? Cause I think in more, more times than not, that is the goal. I'd venture to say 99 percent of the time people that are having WordPress discussions, unless they're outside the community. They want it to get better.
So, and a lot of it is frustration, I think, because people have certain ways of thinking, certain ways of doing things, you know, the page boat versus the core thing, and they, they, they, this is literally the case. I try to stay in the middle as much as possible with the page voter versus core thing. Cause I'm kind of like in both camps and I see that, and.
And just the, the high level there is that people have ways of working that might work in an agency or whatever and they know it works for them because they've made money that way. And then they see a product being built that is like a part of their ecosystem, but maybe not something they use all the time. And they're like, why is that happening like that? Why are we doing this? But the thing that I had an epiphany with yesterday is that maybe it is literally just not being built.
for that audience. Like it's, it's literally built for everyone. Again, I questioned the marketing there in a way, but, but I mean, it's, it's built for the, like everyone to use, meaning that it's basically built for the lowest common denominator average user, which is not a demeaning thing to say, but anyway, it's just means that anybody can pop in there and do it, which is fantastic.
It's just that the, the question, the, the, the tough part is that under actually understanding that and being okay with it. And Again, I'm just trying to observe it and see what's going on, but that's what I'm seeing, you know. in the trenches, so to speak, you know, and it just, it causes a lot of mixed emotions and, and frustration, but at the end of the day, they're tools and we shouldn't be emotional about it.
So, yeah, I, you know, and again, I, I shared all, you know, these sentiments too, when I first got into the space, why are we doing this? I mean, We, I think we talked about this on the live stream last time, but I was selling themes years and years ago and it was the same thing, like bringing theme, bringing free themes into the space and you're just met with this weird, here's this rule set largely put in place by volunteers, you know, figure it out. And I had all the same.
you know, questions and concerns that, that you did or have. But what I have seen is, and I think that maybe what a lot of people aren't saying because we're just not like thinking about it or whatever, but it's like when we say, Oh, we've seen this before, like we've seen this debate before. We've seen this person come in and, and want WordPress to go one way when the whole thing's moving the other way. And WordPress continues.
To thrive, grow and, you know, and scale and get better iteratively slowly because that's the nature of open source. I think if you looked at open source anything, that's just the nature of it. It's, it's not sexy. WordPress is probably the sexiest open source thing that at least that I know of, you know, If anyone's watching this, go ahead, drop a comment on what is like flashier or like more adopted as an open source thing other than WordPress.
Mastodon maybe as a, you know, cause everybody migrates, everyone, a lot of people migrated there when they weren't happy with Twitter or whatever. So WordPress, you know, is, is fantastic, you know, for that. And the. Yeah, the thing, it still gets better. I think what the, what I have issue with is what, you know, recently we talked about is when people say, well, oh God, this other tool is so much better.
Like we'll have this web flow debate air quotes debate around web, web flow versus WordPress. But at the end of the day, you're paying web flow for that software. You're only getting web flow from web flow. And I think that that's where a lot of this conversation has to start at the top.
Is do you want open source and your data or do you just want something else and that's where I think a lot of people are missing the on the little adventure map and all of this stuff is that's where you have to make your decision because if you say yes, I want open source in my data.
Then you're going down this path, and just be ready for this long, arduous path of open source politics, versus, yeah, I don't really care, I'll pay for it, I'll pay for this cool tool, then you go this way, and then you can say, Webflow's got all these awesome things, insert other, you know, Squarespace has all of these awesome things, and it's so much easier than, then go that route, just know that the biggest sacrifice is open source, which comes with community, and your data, which means,
Hey, whatever happens at Squarespace, it's there. Whatever happens at Shopify, it's there, you know, pay for it. Better tool. A hundred percent, you know, yes, no one's really debating that. It's just when you say, but I can't take this, you can't do anything with it other than go to Shopify Squarespace or Webflow. And I think that's where a lot of people have to observe that, observe that when they're making these arguments.
And then when people really pin down WordPress for its faults, it's like, well, Go to another tool then and build. Yeah. And then when you go there and realize, Oh, I do have it kind of nice in WordPress land. Well, yes, let's appreciate that instead of just, you know, getting so fired up about, you know, things that are actually being solved by third party tools, which is a win, right. Which is a win. You and I chatted offline about that.
Like it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, It's a testament to WordPress and open source that something is missing in WordPress, somebody built it, turned it into a thriving business, and people can buy it and use it. That's I mean, you, you can't do that with a web and maybe you can do that with a webflow if they have a marketplace. You can do it with Shopify. They have a marketplace, but there's a tax. I don't know.
Like to me, it seems like it's sometimes we get lost in these silly debates, myself included. Yeah, I mean, last part of that, totally agree with, I mean, my only question would be, and I've probably posed it before, but probably not as, not as directly is, is, is what we're seeing with WordPress then. And again, I'm, I got a call on people that have more experience than I do for, for these types of answers is what we're seeing with WordPress and those, you know, like we, like you just.
You know, explain their kind of those frustrations, you know, Hey, why don't you go try somewhere else? And, you know, like whatever you, whatever you don't like about this, it's definitely, there's definitely cons elsewhere. I mean, my only question would be, is that just something that's inherent to all open source projects and WordPress is not, you know, immune to those, or is this, are we seeing the best it could possibly be? There's no way to make, alleviate any of those.
Cons we'll say, because obviously it's got a ton of pros, right? And I'm not, I'm not doubting you that, Hey, I'm not saying that, that, um, I'm not disagreeing with the fact that if you go to Shopify, go to web flits and maybe like certain pieces of the tools are better in a way, but there's still problems. I mean, like, let's not, let's not kid ourselves. So there's definitely still problems in paid tools. But at the same time, the biggest thing is the data, right?
So are you saying though in order to have the data in order to have an open source environment These are just things you absolutely have to put up with or do you think that there is? some level of extra, whatever insert political something here in WordPress that doesn't need to be there just because it's open source. Yeah. So data and code, right? Because the code is, is GPL, right? So you can modify WordPress. That's how we have themes and plugins and SAS services that, you know, plug up.
There's just huge, right? So that's huge. You also have to like, My background was, when I was growing up with computers, I was a salesperson at Circuit City. Way back in the day and selling computers, of course, and this is when they still sold software in boxes on the wall. And I remember this guy came in and he wanted the cheapest, cheapest computer that we had open box. Didn't care. I don't care if the thing is busted, broken.
I mean, as long as it turns on, I'll take it, but I don't really care what it is because I'm going to run this thing called Linux on top of it. I was like, what the hell is this guy talking about? This is Linux thing. There's another operating system, right? Besides Apple and windows. I don't know about this. And we had it on the wall. I just didn't know what it was.
And that sort of unlocked my open source experience into, into open source, bought a copy of what was called Mandrake Linux at the time, installed it, did all this stuff, started to realize that, Oh my God, there's a whole world of open source software back then to do different things. Bulletin boards, like real weird things on, on the web back then.
So. So I'm very used to like finding these things, unpacking them, and then, you know, further into the, my career running one of the first cPanel servers for a web hosting company that only use windows, right? So when I brought in Linux, first of all, you had, I had all these haters in the room that were all windows admins, cause they were like, First of all, we don't know how to admin this and it looks like you're coming for our job, right?
So, but I was like, Oh no, it's just this thing, you know, Linux servers, cPanel runs on top of it. It's like a fraction of the price that we pay for, for Microsoft windows. Like, why wouldn't we do this? It had. PHP nuke, which was a framework for building a website back in the day before WordPress, a couple other things that you could one click install. It was amazing.
When you look at it, the hosting game hasn't changed all that much, you know, from 20 years ago, but it was just amazing what open source unlocks. And, you know, that's, that's always been a part of me. And the same is true, you know, in the WordPress space, all of the advantages And this is why I'm so, I'm so strong on, you've got to keep WordPress thriving. It doesn't mean you have to commit code to it, show up at all these hallway hangouts, but you, you want to be a fan of it.
You want to be able to promote it, especially as if you're in the third party space, because you don't want that to go away. You want this thing to keep rising because it's only going to help you. Now, are there like, pain points with this stuff. 100%. Look how long it takes, right? Look at the ambiguity, the stuff that you're trying to figure out. Okay. There's open source contributors that are being sponsored by, let's say, automatic, the largest of the sponsorship pool.
And one starts to say, well, boy, that must mean that there is automatic influence here. Yeah. Yes. There's no one. I think we're all over that. The fact that, yes, that is. Yeah. That is a thing. People will go further and say that, you know, it's, it's just a means for people to get free labor, to build into WordPress so that it funnels up, it shoots up to automatic and wordpress. com. It ain't happening because I have a wordpress. com account. I have a website on wordpress.
com and it's the same thing. It's not any better over there, right? It's not like they're like, Oh, I get this free labor and now wordpress. com is so much better. It's not, it's the same exact. problem. It's not any better. And then yes, there, everyone points as you have seen that it's, it's owned by Matt. Largely this whole thing is directed by Matt much broader these days. Cause he has a lot on his plate. If you go like, I just really sent out the newsletter for WP minute.
It's about looking ahead to WordPress 6. 6. He's the release lead again. He's always the release lead, right? He started WordPress, right? Him and Mike little. And now he, he, and remember WordPress open source came before automatic. It wasn't like automatic was formed and they released a little open source project for people to build on WordPress. Open source started first and then he made automatic in order to fund the project fund or run a profitable business.
You can take that either way, but automatic pours a ton of money into WordPress. And that's his frustrations. And maybe a lot of other people's frustrations is why don't more people contribute to WordPress so that it's not just automatic, you know, and I'll say this last thing I was watching our, you know, friend of the show, Jonathan Denwood is watching the tonic and, you know, they brought a blue host, blue host, thank you for being a sponsor of the WP minute, web hosts, tough game.
I was in the web host industry. I know there's a sentiment behind big conglomerate web hosts. Largely because people who complain about those web hosting accounts are paying for the cheapest of the cheap. And when there's issues, there's a lack of maybe support, response time, resources, but you've paid, you're paying 5 a month. What did you expect?
And there's, you know, watching his last episode and he was talking about, Oh, you know, blue host, you know, would never use them, wouldn't trust them, yada, yada. They're all this, whatever, you know, there's a, Oh, why does Matt always talk about blue hosts and have them connect on the partnerships page? Because they're the second. Most second or third most contributor to WordPress and they've been doing it for years and they sponsor events That's why they're good stewards of of open source.
And I say that not just because they're my sponsor, because that's what they do. You just look at the chart, look at the people. John Deroges used to work for me when I started my agency. He's the lead, one of the lead contributors to core on WordPress, works at Bluehost. They pay him to just work on Blue on, on WordPress.
You can't, you can't complain about companies with money on one hand, and then, you know, just disregard the fact that I don't know how much money they pour into it, but millions into. Supporting WordPress. Yeah, that's why Matt says, thanks Bluehost and puts them on hosting pages. I'm sure there might be other products out there that compete with them that one might say is better, but they are putting in the work. And, you know, and that happens across the board. It's not just Bluehost.
There's other organizations too. The politics, like we just talked about, that's the part that's, that's hard with open source. People have written books about it. You know, way smarter than me, you know, shared multiple governments is what this is shared multiple governments across, you know, web technology. That's you know, that's what we're, we're dealing with everything that you, that you maybe wrestle with in your local governments, your local politics, quasi the same thing.
But this time we're talking like PHP and JavaScript, you know, and who gets credit here. That's, that's, that's what it is, at least to me anyway. Hmm. That was a lot. I don't know what you want to hook onto with that one, Mark. I know. It's good stuff. I don't know. I, I mean, the way that I respond to that are, as you're talking about all that, I have a lot of thoughts and really it, it boils down to two avenues is, does it, does it, does it matter?
Is it a good idea to kind of like, like probe into that whole apparatus that you just, Lay it out at a high level, or does it not matter?
It's kind of like the root of the question that I first just asked and I don't want to I don't want to say does It not matter as in oh, we shouldn't care about this shit because I still think we should care about this shit But I'm saying like that's the part where I think that I've talked to a lot of people and they've, they've started to do what I've, what I've kind of like done here, you know, again, hyper focused and last, you know, so much, so many times, and I've gotten the response of,
hey, there's a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of red tape, can't really do anything, dah, dah, dah, whatever, and I'm not saying those are right or wrong, I'm just saying those were people's opinions, and To me, it's, you know, at a certain point you do have to ask yourself the question, is this a good use of my time?
Not just from a money standpoint or whatever, you know, and not just saying if you should or should not contribute to WordPress, if you're benefiting from it, it does make sense to contribute in one way or another, like a hundred percent, but I'm just saying like at the core of it, I'm a type of person that likes to understand. Like, when I get into something, obviously, I like to go all the way in and just, like, fully understand it as much as possible.
And to me, you know, the, the, again, that, that apparatus is something that I would love to dive into and I would love to learn more about. And, like, literally, I think you and I have talked about this before, almost like a documentary or just, like, an infographic of how everything works. I'm sure it's out there in some ways, but, like, actually, you know, present that.
And I'm just not sure if that matters, because, like, I don't know if that, uh, Is productive, I guess, is a word that everybody likes to use. So like, I don't, that's kind of my next thing is like, I'm not sure. Cause that's all good info, but at the same time I hear that presented and it's just, well, either we look into it more or it just doesn't matter. And we just still just try to continue to do the other things.
Cause I don't know, I don't know if it does matter or not, like from a productivity standpoint. Yeah. So. I've built a career on that after, you know, when I, when I launched the Mat Report podcast, which was a podcast I did before this, that was largely to just find out how, who are as, who is everyone in the, in the community, how do I get. like projects.
And again, you have to remember 15 years ago, different landscape people were just jumping into like big companies, jumping into WordPress because it was the best alternative to paying literally millions of dollars to, to launch websites. And I wanted to grow my agency. I just want to figure out how to, how I meet people so I can do the same thing as a non developer.
And. After, you know, after a while, after, you know, the business was up and running and, you know, really started to turn to the open source side of it and more like being critical of leadership in WordPress, mostly Matt, because, you know, I have this sort of like tagline, the blue collar digital worker, people who are just like rolling up their sleeves, building websites.
They're not trying to be like a 10 up a web dev studios, you know, doing millions and millions of dollars a year, trying to grow a team of 500 people. They're just, Hey, I want to run a, an agency. A couple people, maybe it's just myself, want to do good work, want to get customers, do good work by them and get paid reasonably well, right? And observing like where WordPress was going at the time, I was looking at a few avenues.
It was the dawn of jetpack, which at the time when that landed, it was like, Whoa boy, now we're going to get a commercial version for a commercial plugin from automatic that competes with all of us. Right. At the time, you know, Pippin Williamson, Gravity Forms, like all these people were just like getting their businesses off the ground. And then here comes Jetpack, which, you know, everyone called the Trojan horse of WordPress. This is not, this is not anything new.
They were like, wait a minute.
Cause Mullenweg was, was against a lot of the commercial side of plugins and themes, especially if you went up against, you Like the GPL or if you were selling it under the guise of oh, you're buying software You're not buying software in GPL because you can't you can buy the support or the licensing and you know There's some terminology in there for smarter people but that's where you saw him butt heads against like people like Pearson from thesis and a lot of people in the community because
There was a major growing point for WordPress tons of money theme forest the marketplace was massive. I mean, printing money for WordPress back in the day. And then Jetpack came along and you saw that. And I remember, uh, that's how Matt and I first interacted was. You know, him saying something that the growth of WordPress was thanks to, was thanks to Jetpack, loosely paraphrasing him, but it was pretty close. And there was an article written on the Tavern about that.
And I was just, and I think my comment was like, that's a slap in the face to all of the plugin and theme developers that are out there because WordPress growth has been built off the back of everyone that's been promoting WordPress, everyone, whether you're selling a commercial plugin or doing a free one, it all helps WordPress. And ended up getting on, that's how we, he and I first came together on my podcast or whatever, again, years ago.
So, I think it's important that people continue to question and have a watchful eye over how this piece of software evolves. Bias, because that's what I've been doing.
Years after that, Maureen Hendrickson, who's now at LinkedIn, along with Rachel Cherry, I forget where she's at right now, they were strongly advocating for I'm forgetting the actual words that they, that they, that they use, but to have a, not a constitution, but like bylaws for how the, how the WordPress project is being governed governance. That's what it was, the governance project.
I mean, a huge push people, contributors, you know, pushing hard and it ended up dying out, not enough energy behind it. Not enough people wanted to, you know, continue to, you know, push for that. and very hard. And even Matt brought it up a few times, you know, considering it a little bit, but that would mean that he would either have to be removed or have some means of, I don't know, rotation or voting in and out. And it gets super complicated. And at the end of the day, that lost steam.
And there's been countless other Things along the way. And so, you know, a long way of getting to know, I think it's important that we all keep an eye on it because it's, and this is my opinion is why I do it is because it's for, it's huge, massive amount of people use the software and whether you realize it or not, open source is important and the government who is the steward for WordPress is important because I said this a million times and I never want it to come true.
Salesforce is one of Automattic's biggest investors. If Automattic, if Salesforce was ever, if WordPress was ever run by Salesforce, we're all screwed. Forget all this stuff. Like what we're debating today will be a luxury if it's ever owned by Salesforce or a commercial entity. I mean, like maybe an entity like a Salesforce that would just chop it up and be like, we just want to make money with this thing now. Hmm. So We got a we got a hope that the torch is always carried.
Yeah, like the torch is always passed on and carried Yeah, and and I think automatic and Matt are still the best people for that That doesn't mean you can't disagree. That doesn't mean you can't have you know, criticism I've never gone into the levels of criticism other people have and said some outlandish stuff about him You know, I don't care about how much money he is Has made or is worth and people shouldn't bring that in either.
Like it's just, it's not relevant to open source WordPress because he, he doesn't own it per se, cause you can literally take it right now and go do something else with it. Not saying that's easy, but you couldn't do that with Microsoft windows. You can just grab it and be like, mine now you're done. Yeah. You know, you're going to get sued, but you could literally do that with WordPress and just do something else with it.
Yeah. And there is, there's classic, uh, classic press, I think is the, the project when, when there was a group of people who, when the Gutenberg was built into WordPress, they were like, no, we don't want this. And we're going to continue to, we're going to fork WordPress and try to maintain it and keep classic press with no Gutenberg. That's a project that's still running. Not a lot of people it's there.
And it's again, another Testament of it can be done to what degree it depends, but you know, it's possible. And I've had these same things. Like I, I wrote about, or I vlogged about it on my other channel when automatic released a professional services started with a 5, 000 website, then a 500 website. And I was like, here we go again. The title of that video is I spell it WordPress now with a lowercase P because you know, it's always, you know, it's that same thing, right?
WordPress, capital P. Okay, I get it. You know, it's just like every version of WordPress had hello dolly in it for years That was Matt's like placeholder plug in and everything is oh, it's so cute. We leave it in it's like nostalgia get it out Get it out of here.
All right, we did it a couple versions get it out, you know And the word first capital P thing is like, oh, you got to respect the name I get it But when the name isn't respecting us and they're doing something like this I feel like it was you know a slight in you know, To the builders out there that have, you know, brought and promoted WordPress. I was wrong about that because it didn't really go anywhere.
Didn't impact the freelancers for sure because it's a services business just like everybody else. So, you know, it's not like they wiped the, the, you know, wiped the deck with everybody, but, but still it's like one of those things like, Hey man, we're here, we're the blue collar digital workers of WordPress and. If you come up against us, like we'll, we'll push back, you know, where we can. So, yeah, I don't, I just, I just think there's a lot of, there's a lot of intricacies to it.
I don't know enough about the history of open source and other open source projects, but I would just still wonder if like other ones are similar in that regard, it does seem like there's like a, um, a mixture of almost like lobbying and then. Commercialism mixed into it, and regardless of if it actually has a tangible impact on it or not, definitely has an impact on the perception of the use that the users have on it.
Again, just people in the comments all the time, in the live streams and things, and I'm just like, I'm the one kind of, you know, trial by fire with me, you know, talking to People and like yourself and all that, and just trying to get all that information, and then I'm just trying to regurgitate, regurgitate what I'm hearing and other people are like, yeah, you know, I've always thought that too. Like, why is, why is it like set up like this at the top?
Obviously it's for some, for good reason in certain cases, it's just the mixture of obviously open source doesn't mean like completely like it's more based on the, obviously the licensing and the code and stuff like that, but just like the nature of that mixed with.
You know, like when you're saying you don't like that automatic kind of swoops in and try to, tries to undercut people basically, or whatever on the service side, it's similar kind of on the software side when it's, okay, now we have paid, you know, commercial companies contributing. And is that, is that like kind of a form of, we're going to get a say in that? Cause we've had other discussions where we'll make, what if, what if other companies want to do that? And it's well, okay.
We only want the good guys to do that, I guess. But what happens is that. Other guys, we don't do that. And it's, that just seems, I mean, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not posing a solution here cause I don't know the solution right now, but I'm just, I'm just bringing these things up because I still think there's a lot of, there's people that don't care and then there's people that like do care and it's just, it's still a little foggy.
So yeah, at the end of the day, it's still like all the, the majority of problems that WordPress has are human problems, less about. The software and get, well, those things happen a hundred percent. I mean, plenty of times I say plenty of times, nothing is coming to my head, but there are times where, you know, Matt has come out with decisions and was like, where, where did that come from?
Like you guys were, nobody said anything about that, you know, and you know, there are countless times I'm sure people could chime in that haven't, you know, heard about all, you know, all the different things. I mean, just the recent stuff with, you know, who controls the WordPress, the WordPress Twitter account.
I mean, Yeah, I'm sure you saw that when he tweeted out about getting support for the San Francisco Bay Bridge project or something like that non profit and he tweeted it out and people are like, wait a minute, why is the, why is the WordPress Twitter account tweeting out, you know, I Save, uh, save the bay project and he was just basically, he was like, I, cause this is my account, you know, it's okay. And, but you know, that was, yeah, nobody likes it and it blew up.
But those are the, the, the things that, that happen. And those are the human things. Yeah. You know, contributions, people start to know each other, start to each other. I don't really think anyone is, I've never seen anything. There was one time, maybe again, somebody could jump in when Google released AMP. Okay. Wait, I don't know if you remember that Google amp, there was like a big push to have that. And I think it was in WordPress core or in jetpack. I forget what it was.
It was like this whole thing that was unfolding. That was a pretty big like technical debate. I remember that from back in the day and you know, they were a sponsor or whatever. So I remember that being kind of like, Oh, you're trying to get that in there because you're at Google. So maybe there are a few times that have, you know, that has happened, but I've never really seen anything like.
Go into WordPress core that just benefited some other like organization Certainly nothing like you see in commercial software You know like a default web browser that you can't change or pre loaded apps on phones that is like rampant Imagine if WordPress came with you know pre loaded plugins. Holy shit. People would lose their minds. I do Think that that's where it's going to head for automatic to survive in the future I think what we will see is when you go to wordpress.
org, it will be Download wordpress with jetpack the best experience for wordpress and then below that with no shiny icon in little text download free open source WordPress you got to clip that well because it's a crazy prediction How else will automatic? Has to make money at some point and there's nothing wrong with that I actually wouldn't mind if we just got there sooner. So people could just be like, okay, here's the line in the sand. Jetpack is the way they make money.
And then we have free WordPress. Fine. As long as it's not, you know, as long as it still remains open source, which it will, because that's why he, and that's what you have to do is zoom out and look at it from that perspective. He, Matt could have said, we're going to, instead of making Jetpack a standalone plugin, I'm just going to build these features into WordPress. And then give you. A feature a WordPress with these features. And I would WordPress an open source without these features.
He could have done that. But he didn't. He decides to jetpack. There's other reasons like integrating with other web hosting companies probably saw that thought that was a better play. He's a better play probably. But you know, it could've gone, it could be a lot worse. I think. Help me. Help me for a second though. So you, you I've heard you the Jetpack, you know, prediction there, which like makes sense to me, but how. In that prediction, is Jetpack a paid tool?
I've never specifically used it. Are you saying that like you would be forced to download WordPress with Jetpack or you could still get the regular version? Obviously this is hypothetical, but I'm, we're saying from a business perspective, how is that generating revenue? What, what's the, help me there. How would that be? So Jetpack is a product by Automatic that enhances the usability of WordPress.
It basically has a, uh, It's a dozen plugins and features in it in one, one plugin, all the feet, like if you go and sign up for wordpress. com, all the cool features that they talk about at wordpress. com, it's all jetpack. If you look at pressable, another sponsor of the show, all the features in their backup security scans, statistics, it's all jetpack. That's the value add. It's to say, Hey, you don't need any other plugins. We have it all here inside Jetpack.
So somebody could just put a contact form in. Do they need to go and buy gravity forms, which supports my family? No, because it's inside Jetpack, right? So it's built to enhance the experience of WordPress. So it's how they make money. It's one of their, You know, revenue makers aside from wordpress. com and, and VIP and WooCommerce, which are their, probably their leading products. I don't know their revenue.
I would say that Jetpack is probably either third or fourth place in the automatic lineup in the automatic stable of, of revenue. And there will be a point where automatic instead of just continuously going out to get investment from VCs, how do we make money with this thing? And it's going to be. Looking at the millions and millions and millions of websites that are not being monetized.
Can you imagine having a million Facebook profiles that didn't run ads and Facebook being like, Oh God, how are we going to monetize this network? You know, freaking run ads. That's what you're going to do. You're going to go to your million users and you're going to run ads against them. That's what you're going to do. And the same thing's going to happen. That's my prediction in order to make money. The same thing might happen where WordPress has Jetpack built in.
Do you think that there would be a change to the plugin and theme situation? No, I don't. No? No, because again, open source, it's like freaking water in your basement, right? You know, water starts seeping up. And you're like, let me plug the hole over here. Water comes in another way. Let me plug that hole. Water comes in another way.
And then you're like, I got to just build French trains around this thing and spend 10, 000, wrap the walls and put a sub pump in, you know, it, as long as, as long as it remains open source and it's thriving, everything is moving forward. You may, it might not be in the direction you want it to go, but the framework is there. You'd still be able to do what you need to do.
In a third party ecosystem might look different, might mean there's less contact form plugins in the space, you know, but you're, you know, you already see that happening. You see web hosts, acquiring plugins, awesome mode of acquiring plugins, wordpress, automatic, you know, acquiring plugins. I don't think it drastically all of a sudden there's no options. What happens to, what would have to happen for wordpress to not be open source anymore?
Matt would not have to be, Matt would not be in the picture anymore. Which is a scary outcome, you know, talk about really wiping off an economy. That would be, you know, that would be huge. Imagine having, imagine license every light you would have, it would be now again, WordPress is being published. This is, this is why the GPL and open source is important because it's not like boom, all of a sudden.
This thing is wiped off the face of the earth, all of that code being licensed under the GPL right now could be forked and turned into something else. So if there was like this catastrophic event where suddenly they were like, we're bringing WordPress in house, that last version of WordPress is open source and you would have, and this is why open source is great because as long as you can rally the humans, the humans would come in and say, we're starting a new project. Right.
And this is actually happening. I'm not super educated on it, but Sarah Gooding, who used to write for the tavern, she's now writing for another company. I'm forgetting the name right now, but Redis, which is a, I just heard about that. It decided to, you know, pull out of the open source software and now I don't know what licensing they're on, but that's massive, right? That's massive.
Any other company would be like, I'd love to make 1 from every website would be an immense amount of money because of how expansive the WordPress ecosystem is. The, the only, I don't know, I don't know where to go with this, but like the only other thing I would say there is like, how many people in like the WordPress ecosystem of the one point, how many, how many we got now? A billion? We're not 800, 800 million was the number recently of websites. Yeah. I don't remember what article I think.
I think I saw 800 million and then, and then maybe some of them are dead. So maybe there's six or 500 million or something of all those. What percentage of those do you think people are using WordPress for because it's open source versus just using it? Because what percentage of those people you think actually care about open source?
So if it went to, that's a crazy event, but I'm saying that that part of it's interesting to me, just like the same thing of like, how many are DIY wires versus agency based built sites. And I'm sure the number for DIY wire is a lot higher. And, and obviously that, that triggers a lot of the, the decision making and the, I don't want to say marketing necessarily, but like the actual positioning of the platform because it is for everyone, right? It's democratizing it.
So those, those types of numbers and, and stats are, I think can be extremely eyeopening because I think somebody like me, I, I don't, I didn't realize until recently, there's probably a lot more DIY websites out there than, Yeah. I guess this goes full circle back to, should you care? This is why I say the, the, the adventure has to start at, do you want open source or not? Because what happens is, is people, so let me answer your question.
How many people who use WordPress actually care about open source? Probably 10 to 15 percent that know it, who are responsible for all of those sites. But the other people who are using it are, they don't know. That is open source. What they do know is that they pay five, let's say 5 a month from a big web host or 10 a month from a big web host. And the only reason they can pay 5 to 10 a month is because it is free and open source.
So it's the web hosts that really, web hosts are largely the ones who are responsible for getting WordPress into the globe, across the globe. Because they do it in mass and they do it affordably, right? But they will know, the end users will know that their bill is going to go from from 5 to 10 a month to 30 a month. If suddenly there's some licensing model behind WordPress, then they will care, which is going back full circle.
This is why I keep talking about freaking open source and WordPress, because I want people to appreciate what WordPress, what WordPress open source affords them. It affords them a tool that they can publish their website or their thoughts and their blog with. They can move it around from web host to web host. You don't like that web host, you pick it up, you move it to another web host. They give you more, you know, give you more features. They charge you less, whatever. You can't do that.
I can't take my iOS and put it on another phone. I can't take my Apple phone and put another iOS on it. I'm locked in. That's commercial software. With open source software, I have that movement. I have that affordability. I have that movement. It just comes with a cost of a learning curve. Right. It's not sexy. It's tough.
It's difficult, but it's ours, you know, and that's why like, you know, My local area is like federal federal politics the news the global news I'm like man, you gotta focus on these people that are right here in front of us Let's focus on this and fix this first and that's how I feel, you know about open source Like you should appreciate not you directly mark, but we should appreciate open source Yeah, obviously A lot of benefits To open source. I don't know.
I yeah, I mean just a lot of thoughts there.
I mean, I don't know if you have let me go What one more step and then we'll wrap it up because we're hitting the hour This is why I'm such a huge proponent on podcasting because of RSS RSS got its ass kicked by all the big tech companies and now you consume content on platforms platforms that run ads that that mine your data and You know resell to other people and lock in that content Imagine if RSS won, which, which, and the point of me bringing this up is Matt is a huge proponent to
democratizing the web. Again, you can get on the fringes and be like, Oh, you know, does he really, you can break it down, whatever, but he does. That is one of the core things. And it's why I still respect what he has done and what he continues to do in that department. because he is a huge proponent to understand whatever freedom of speech, freedom of publishing, you know, I know you brought up the data portability project, our data liberation project.
Like that's not, you know, I know on the surface you look at that and you're like, Oh God, like they just want to, they just want to take it from everybody else. Yeah. But it's also both, it's both ways. It is both ways. He's a huge proponent on that. So RSS open publishing, very important.
You know, for, for humanity, because then where do you get your, your information from if it's all just in Facebook, Twitter, and social media platforms, what that doesn't do any of us any good, there'll, there'll be an algorithm, there'll be a price of the entry, there'll be a filter on it, and we're all screwed.
Again, that's why WordPress is so important because WordPress, every website has an RSS is built in by default, still to this day that you can just subscribe to any WordPress site with an RSS reader. You know, it's, it's, it's freaking amazing. Imagine the world goes dark. The only way you can communicate is through a low latency, a low bandwidth network is going to win. It's like the QR code had its heyday come back when the pandemic hit. Can't touch anything, gotta scan it.
Thank God for the QR code, everyone's shit on the QR code for years. That's so stupid. Look at that thing. It's ridiculous. Who's ever gonna do that? And then the QR code came back. Remember me? Like, you guys can't touch these menus. You gotta scan this thing. Right? RSS is like the same thing, man. It's, it's there and it's gonna be one of the most important things. It's the most important thing in, in, in podcasting for sure. But it should be back in content publishing.
Fediverse, etc, etc. Again, I'm not this diehard. About it because it's a lot of technical stuff. I don't know, but I know I, I vote with that because it gives us the most freedom and movement as humans with our content and our communication and our communication speechless, man. I mean, I mean, that has nothing to do with, you know, can I make money with my WordPress business this way?
But again, this is why it all starts up up here for me picking, do I want an open source thing or do I want a commercial thing? Go commercial if you do it, you know, if, depending on what it is that you need, I get, I'm excited to know about Webflow next week with not Sam Smith, Sam Harris, and a lot of, I guess her friends at 10 up and Brad Miller and he hit me up the other day, he's like, you want to be in the Webflow group? I'm like, no, I want to be in the Webflow.
I don't want to be in the Webflow group. What the hell do I want to be in the Webflow group for? And he's like, Oh, we've been using Webflow at 10 up and it's a, you know, it's a great solution for certain customers. Okay, well that's telling. Hmm. You know, if a open source agency built off a lot of historic things in the WordPress space is starting to explore Webflow makes sense from a business, but I love my open source. I'll be really interested to hear that perspective.
I've watched some other Webflow content and I know some agencies that have kind of adopted it here and there makes sense from a simplicity standpoint, but.
In certain ways, but yeah, I'm in the open source side of it, you know, not so sure, but again, I mean, at a high level to wrap like the, to wrap kind of like a lot of, you know, what you said and what we talked about here is like, if WordPress is going that way and like with core and Gutenberg and everything like that, and we're building for, you know, you know, that editor at its core kind of is being built like pseudo for DIY and obviously simple, but extendable.
Then I think if we just understand that too, as agencies and other users of WordPress, then there's always going to be other tools to use, you know, Elementor, Bricks, Divi, whatever, XYZ. I, I think that's still going to be a win, you know, it's going to be still the best platform for a long time, assuming none of those things that we kind of, you know, those crazy events that we talked about here change, you know, and I'm, I'm definitely optimistic on it.
It's just, I always wanted to see it continue to get better. And that's the only thing I would say is a lot of times when people are critiquing, I think we're, we're doing it from a place of. Love, ultimately, and, and goodwill, even though if it's not presented, always the best, and Yeah. That's just, I don't know. I'm excited to see where it goes. This is a great community to be a part of, for sure. Mark Szymanski, where can folks find you to say thanks?
If you just go to MJ Bio, it's kind of like a, all my links there, my socials, and sign up for my newsletter if you want, if I ever send anything out of there. Working on a website. So, more content coming soon. Painter's house is never painted. The WP minute. com the WP minute. com slash subscribe. You're watching today's video on the podcast YouTube channel. Don't forget to subscribe to youtube. com slash at WP minute. We'll see you in the next episode.