¶ Introduction and Recent WordPress Initiatives
Mark Szymanski with the marathon sprint today of live streams and recordings. Welcome back.
Matt Medeiros. Always a pleasure, brother. Thank you so much. Sorry for cheating on you earlier. Then you
were live streaming with, uh, the one, the only Kevin Geary. And, uh, I want to, we want to talk about some of the stuff that you guys chatted about today, not about the YouTube character guy, but you know, obviously the WordPress stuff, then you and I were just on the, What was it? The second or the third you, like WordPress YouTuber team meeting, whatever that means. And we're going to talk about a little bit about that today.
Folks who are hearing this, uh, and watching this, that meeting happened today, but you probably won't see the recording I'd imagine for another week or so, um, so you're hearing some of the results and some of our literally raw reactions to that, that meeting. Um, before it, you've actually seen the content of it and it's not all bad, but we're just reacting to some of the stuff, um, as we demystify WordPress seems to be, uh, the, the journey many of us are on.
It's like understanding not just WordPress, the software, but WordPress, the organization, uh, the foundation, wordpress. com, automatic folks like Ann who, uh, really extend, uh, the largest all of branches I've ever seen from, for, uh, from automatic to, uh, to the WordPress community and especially to content creators. So we're just going to chat about some of that stuff. Give you that, that, that raw feedback.
Do you, Mark, do you want to just set the stage to what this initiative is from and to YouTubers and other creators? Like, do you have a sense of how you would You know, pitch this to those of us, or those watching and listening to what this initiative is.
I absolutely have a Interpretation of what it is. I don't know. I don't know if it's actually even fully formulated Um, I want to start off by saying if anything we say here is I'm assuming this I would say 100 percent this goes for Matt, too We're not talking about like individuals or anything like that.
I think everything that we're talking about here is like extremely conceptual Because if we dive into some of the topics that were talked about there and everything, like there's definitely different ways to do things.
And the thing that I have appreciated so much about what Ann has put together with these calls here, just in two, two quick calls, like the amount of like Matt said, the olive branches that have been extended and the amount of open communication line that has been created here is incredible. And I learned more deep stuff and important things on that call than I had learned. In WordPress. Interestingly, Matt already knew all that. We'll get, we'll touch on that.
But the stage, the, the, the, the, the, to set the stage there is Anne McCarthy is a employee of automatic. She has her hands in many different projects. She does a ton of great work there. And she set up kind of like a uniting WordPress YouTubers initiative. And all it is is basically calls that get recorded and then ultimately post on YouTube. But it's with people like myself, Matt, Kim Geary, um, WP Tots was on there.
Imran, um, It wasn't on today, but like a lot, a lot of, a lot of big names, Jackson, Jamie Marsland. So we're all on there. And basically we were on there today with Anne McCarthy, Aaron Jorban, who is a core contributor. Um, I apologize if I get any of these titles wrong, but Nick Diego is also, I believe a heavy contributor, automatic employee, you know, better than me. And then also I believe did, was there another one Hector?
forgetting his last name, but I think there was a fourth that are all like very, um, in the know, so to speak, like their core contributors or they are automatic employees and sponsor, you know, automatic sponsored. Um, and we don't, I feel like in this space now that everything has gotten bigger, we talk a lot and we speculate a lot, but we don't talk enough to the people that are actually either making decisions or in the know, so to speak.
And I just loved that because I thought that was fantastic. Now. We could get into some of the details. Did I agree with all the details? Was I confused as hell? For sure. Um, and I know other people on the call were as well.
But, um, but the fact that it's, it's, it's way different to speculate and think that this is going on, like, like certain things are the way they are because whatever, and then actually Get the answers like the answer you need that you need that because then it's a totally different conversation And it's like actual fact based stuff. So I love it. I thought it was great and we can dive into it But we're you're
well, I want I want to lead with because I forget the the crumb trails of conspiracy theories. I've left Throughout either all of my content or on like other channels Podcasts and YouTube channels, but I think what we're seeing is the unfolding of or unpacking of a greater initiative dating back to when Josefa did her talk at the State of the Word. Uh, it was, I think I even said this, maybe it was the last show that you and I were doing.
It was, she either did this last State of the Word or the One before that, where, you know, she recognized in order for WordPress to thrive, it's going to need that, that community aspect all over again, like the, there's no feature that's going to happen anytime soon where everyone's gonna like, Oh my God, like, this is the thing I want. And all of a sudden WordPress trajectory is going to go up, um, nor should they just rely on like the software, the features to do this.
So I think there's this, uh, uh, overarching, uh, initiative internally at automatic. Um, directed from Matt down to Josefa and then throughout the, you know, whatever lieutenants or whatever you want to call them and Nick, rich, um, all these folks who are much more in the community these days, like doing hangouts, creating YouTube videos, doing blog posts like her source of truth that and does, I think there's an initiative to engage in content creation and content creators. in the space.
Now, my LinkedIn just told me Matt report hit the 14 year anniversary today or yesterday or something like that. This is a long road. This has been a long road and I'm not the only one there. Obviously, there's many other people who have been doing this.
But piggyback off of, um, some of the, um, the rants that not rants, but the, the, the, the very passionate remarks from Kevin in your earlier live stream today, where he was saying things like, Hey man, we're like, they should be building WordPress for agency owners and professionals because we're the ones bringing people to WordPress. And there was content creators out there who say the same thing. Like if it weren't for my content, This audience wouldn't exist.
People wouldn't be amped up because no one at dot org is doing that kind of like cheerleading the way agencies and freelancers do it for their customers and the way us content creators do it for like the hopeful average wordpress user. Um, so this is like 20 year, like 15, 20 years in the making where automatic is finally saying,
Oh,
yeah, like, let's work with these folks who have criticized us in the past, um, or, you know, or have crazy conspiracy theories or, or have made great content about us and nice content about us. And finally, like, let's, let's dig our heels into that. into that community because we need them. Like suddenly we need them, um, because there is no marketing budget. There is no Wix ad for a WordPress equivalent to a Wix ad in a Super Bowl or whatever.
Um, and I think they've finally, finally have realized that. And that's this initiative rolling out. Is it perfect? No, it just started. Let's. Be honest, it just started. Um, but with like the MediaCore and what, with Anne's doing and now the announcement of Jamie Marslin being the head of WordPress YouTube. I don't know if I really love that title, but we can unpack that in a moment. We're starting to see oh by the way, WordPress needs us content creators.
There's also a very, very big initiative to Kevin's um, um, to appease, not appease Kevin, but to hopefully make Kevin a little bit happier. This is a big initiative at Automatic for Automatic for Agencies, right? And this is, this big outreach happening to connect with the agencies more deeply in the Automatic realm of things, VIP. com, Jetpack, et cetera. So it's like, yeah man, we've been, we've been wanting this connection from Automatic for years. And we're starting to see.
the start of these, of these dominoes starting, um, you know, to fall, which, Hey, it's great, but I will be also on the sideline saying like I've done for my entire professional WordPress career is I will, uh, I will keep you at arm's length, uh, and understand like what you're after so that I'm not going all in and I'm getting the rug pulled out of me out from under me.
Um, and that I'm not, you know, Just giving up all kinds of, uh, you know, resources for something, uh, that is ultimately benefiting literal YouTube channels of, of other folks. Uh, so that's where we're at. Uh, that's how a lot of this stuff is playing out, at least from my perspective. And, um, I think the call was, went well with, with the lineup that we had today. Really wish there was more time.
And this is just like the human issues when you have like 15 people on a, on a call and I was going to, I was going to make a joke, like the title of this episode should be, can I just jump in a minute? Because that, that's what it was at, you know, as everybody had like these great, like, uh, you know, thoughts and stuff for, for the questions really wish Aaron would have, um, been able to. expand more for the folks on the call, how the whole apparatus works.
That's why I brought in one of my questions about, Hey, can you explain like track versus get hub and why we're there and how we ended up there? Um, so the, the idea behind this call, I think was to inform YouTubers on how the apparatus works so that we could sort of pass that knowledge down to our own audience is, is, you know, what I was getting out of that call.
Okay. Yeah. A lot there. Um, we need 15 more of those calls in my opinion. Oh yeah. To even scratch the surface. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, uh, it's a small, it's a small point, but I think that I agree with what you're saying about the, the initiative, but I think it's important to say that at this current moment, it's not. It's not an initiative that we know. It's still kind of based on perception and speculation.
It's not like, um, it's, we, we should have asked quite frankly, and we will on the next one. Like we should just ask like, Ann, is there a A consorted effort to do X, Y, Z. Like we are kind of seeing, like, is it, is it, cause I think, cause I think like we could be seeing something and it's like actually no way we're just throwing shit against the wall. Like everybody is doing something that looks like it's all tied together, but not at all.
That could be the possible, that could be a possibility. I'm not a hundred percent sure. So it'd be great to get some clarity on that. Cause that is a good thing because then that might tell us some things and we might be able to, you know, like help accordingly contribute or whatever. Um, So, I mean, if we kind of dive into the call from the top down, I thought, again, it was incredibly insightful and incredibly interesting.
I thought the, the minds and the questions that we had on the call and you guys can watch it, you know, we'll link it up or whenever, when it's, when it's live and I'll share it out on mine, I'm sure Matt will as well. Um, I thought it was really good in all of that sense that it was extremely eyeopening.
It was extremely interesting, but if I could summarize, like, what I What the overall call taught me was just like, I am like kind of shocked at the, like, it, because all of the things that people have been saying, like, why don't we do this? That is not at all what, like, apparently the core team of WordPress thinks WordPress should be. And at the, at the core of WordPress, it is very opinionated on what it should be, which I'm not, I'm not saying any of this is right or wrong.
I'm just saying what I learned here. We bring up the philosophy page, which we should show, like, you know, just type in WordPress philosophy or whatever. And, and it, and like I didn't read it in full, but like it got brought up and we were talking about it. And that is not it. Like I didn't even understand like the concepts got came up about like WordPress being obviously a blogging platform before and now it's still kind of is.
And there's a sentiment that every website on WordPress should still kind of be a blog, so to speak. To at least the point that it's still kind of the main concern even though like the words blog are no longer there. We talked about like everything that everybody comes up about the CMS, like the CMS should be better.
And the sentiment that I got there was that they, like the core team kind of does agree, but at the same time, that's, that's, it's more of just a base, like platform for people to grow off of. Which again, I could see some, some reasons to say that.
But. The main thing that I would say is that from the people that I know on that, on that call, the questions that were asked is that the way that the core team of WordPress, whoever is like making those decisions, those opinion, like literally the sentiment, the, the, the, the opinion of the core team is so far different than most people that I associate with in the WordPress space. Like it's, it's not at all the same. It is absolutely not in line with a typical agency.
Website situation, which, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is just different and that is extremely eyeopening to hear that directly rather than it being speculated. And I know that you, like I messaged you during the thing. I was like, are you learning in this call? Are you, are your eyes being opened or did you already know this? And you said, Nope, I knew it already.
And I'm like, that's crazy because like I'm learning and, and I think a lot of other people learned on that call too. And it was just like. I don't know how it happened, but maybe it's because like the core of WordPress, the actual, the, the, the marketing, so to speak, that is, or is not existing in WordPress is not opinionated, but the philosophy is opinionated. So then what has happened, happened over time is that creators have interpreted WordPress and use it in a certain way.
And then they give off the vision of WordPress, but it's not actually in line with the philosophy of WordPress. Right. Which is, uh, interesting, to say the least. Yeah,
it's, it's 20 years of, you know, a messy room, right? It's just like, the whole philosophy thing, like, I've known Aaron, you know, for my entire entirety of being in, in WordPress. Um, So when this philosophy, and I have it pulled up right here, and I'm not going to read the whole thing, but, uh, it will be linked up in the, in the show notes. Just go to wordpress. org slash about slash philosophy.
Uh, the, the out of the box, great software should work with little configuration and set up WordPress is designed to get you up and running fully functional in no longer than five minutes. That was like the famous five minute installer
¶ WordPress Philosophy and Core Mission
from decades ago, designed for the majority decisions, not options, clean, lean, and mean striving for simplicity deadlines, not arbitrary in the vocal minority. And then our Bill of Rights, which are the four freedoms, uh, of open source. Um, check that out if, if you've never seen it before.
And, and maybe this is why, and maybe I was explaining it to you wrong early on, cause I remember when, like, you and I first met, we were talking about all these things, WordPress, and we still do it today. And I say, that's why, cause WordPress is not a product like this. WordPress is not a product that's being designed the way that you think it's being designed. It's a product.
Nuances, like everything else, yes, automatic, largest contributor, et cetera, et cetera, but, and maybe it's because I've already forgotten, this is the messy room thing, like, I've already forgotten so much about, like, where it started and, like, the philosophy and, like, all of these things. Um, So there's that like maybe I was explaining it to you wrong, like this is why it's not a product. This is why you can't in there.
You know, when we first met, this is why you can't wrap your head around it because it's not a bricks or an element or where they're like, okay, here's the roadmap. Give me your feedback and we'll just do this because it just doesn't exist like that. And there's the benevolent dictator of, of Mullenweg and any open source product.
project like this, like a Drupal with Dries Butart, um, and Linus, or Linus from the Linux kernel, which powers Linux, um, there's that, that level of dictatorship, benevolent dictatorship, where Matt Mullenweg has crafted this idea, and it has spawned many different iterations over the last 20 years, right, he is still the visionary behind this, And then there's like the, the, like the core committing, you know, team that is sort of executing, but still against the backdrop of like this
philosophy. I also don't disagree with it being a blog first platform, but go ahead. You, you react to that and we can talk about the, the blog thing. I mean, I,
I would just say that, like, uh, I, I was sitting there and I was thinking, Okay, this is really eye opening because if this is all, like, actually a philosophy, I asked the first question in the con in the, in the conversation, and I was like, Okay. Because as soon as the philosophy thing was brought up, I was like, and there were some comments made about it. I was like, okay, so has this been the philosophy for 20 years? Has it evolved over time at all? Anything like that?
20 years is a long time. And like, I don't care how visionary you are in 20 years, because Matt Mullenweg has done an incredible job and he's, he's done, Amazing things. This is, we're not, I'm not discounting anything WordPress. However, times do change and needs change and just the world changes and software absolutely changes.
So I'm wondering like, like it's like, just did the 20 years ago, did this philosophy, like as it's changed a little bit and it was mentioned that some things were amended or whatever, like, do we still agree that that is like the actual best of all that? But as I say that, when I say, do, do we agree? I guess that doesn't matter. Because I'm actually really confused actually on that. And, and I think that I'm understanding it now, but I still don't have an answer for it.
I still don't have a full lab. So let me try to explain this. Like we have Aaron Jorban, incredible dudes done so much for the, for the project, as I understand and everything he is kind of representing the core. What is the core contributors, core committers, core team, core contributors that I have core contributors. So. Are we saying that the core contributors are the ones that actually create the opinions of the software? That's right, right? It's fair to say that?
No, it's not. So, okay. They, they are the ones, I mean, they're, they are a very vocal majority of like how things are going to get, literally, first of all, they're the, they're the last line, the last mile that actually commits, like technically speaking, they're the ones that have the power to commit the code. To WordPress, right? Um, our friend of the show, Brian cords, you know, great developer, but they're not just going to, Oh yeah, take your code and throw it in there.
Um, it still has to be obviously vetted through the chain. And then the last line of literal defense of like, who can get code into this thing that impacts millions and millions of sites are these people. Then they are also the ones that are from the broader perspectives, looking at the bigger features that are being built. I don't know. block API, notifications API, um, obviously Gutenberg, um, whatever like major pillar features of WordPress and functions of WordPress.
They're the ones that are sort of, I guess, overseeing that, those things. And then within those camps are the dozens, if not hundreds of developers who are like, Working towards whatever that goal is, right? So like we bring up, um, what's the, uh, the migration, um, not the data liberation, data liberation.
So that's like a, a project and like, you know, anybody could just pick that up and start building their own plugin or code piece for WordPress that says for the data liberation project, this is what I'm going to build. It's going to take Wix to WordPress, WordPress to Wix, um, you know, and those core contributors would once it. Gets up to the chain.
They would be the ones that look at that and evaluate it and say, yes, this is, this is good enough or for WordPress core, or maybe, you know what, this is going to stay in a standalone plugin that you're, that you'll just operate on the side. Good job. You run it as a plugin. You maintain it as a plugin, but it's not, it's not reaching into, into core right now.
Um, you know, and again, Mullenweg still, um, The one sort of painting the big picture for all of us and then the core team are the ones that kind of look at that and go, okay, this is what you want to execute. We're the team behind that and then we'll advocate for the rest.
I gotta stop. I gotta stop. Like, this isn't, this is another one though that I feel like we should have asked this question. Maybe we can. I, is, is what you just said there speculation or is it true? Yeah. Because you know that for a fact that Matt, that Matt Mullenweg is still like the guy he's still like doing everything. He's the release
lead. He's the release lead on every release except for one, I think. So like 6. 7 is coming. He's the release lead.
Does that, is that true though? I mean like, is he actually doing that? Is he actually doing that? Or is it, is it like a, it hasn't even the release lead on like every single one.
Yeah, or something. Yeah. Yep.
Is it just ceremonial at this point? Or is he
actually like, it's a good, I mean, it's a good question. Is it ceremonial? You should interview him, but I, I should have asked that guy. Um, I, you know, I think it's a little bit of, it's ceremonial, but there's also like, if there's a something there that is not going according to his plan, then he could step in at any time and be like, you know what? This is not really, this is not really the thing we should pursue.
Yeah. Or at least be like a real, obviously, you know, it's like your boss say, how's your job? And you're like, it's fine. You know, don't fire me. You know, it's like that same kind of vibe. Like, it's like, well, you know, I, I, here's my thoughts on this. And then a lot of people will react being a little Matt doesn't like that. It's, it's a pretty pressing matter. Um, He's not, you know, I don't know if he's writing code anymore.
You could literally check, um, Track or, or the, the Gutenberg repo. You know, I don't think he's writing any code anymore, but certainly evaluating it from a, you know, from a vision standpoint.
I just, uh, you know, again, from out, from the, from the call, I was just, I kind of learned that, The way that I see WordPress and it's, this is really, I mean, this is really kind of, kind of messes with your head. The way that like I've seen WordPress in my six year tenure, obviously not as long as everyone else. Like what I, it's so strange because like the way that I interpret it is so different than the way the core team and the philosophy of WordPress is like designed.
And then we also, we go a layer deeper where it's like democratize publishing and WordPress for everyone. Which admirable, admirable mission. But I asked the question specifically on the call as well, based off a couple other people that were talking. I was like, so what is the actual goal of WordPress? And again, I don't care what the goal is. Like I'm not at that stage yet. Right. I'm still like trying to gather the data. Like I need the, I need the truth. I need the source to tell me.
And then I can be like, okay, now I know what the truth is. It let like what, what the actual goal is according to the actual people that set the goal. And then I can be like, okay, do I agree with that or do I not? And then, and then we have another discussion from there. And the goal that I got was literally like democratize publishing. And I specifically asked, is it to get everyone and more people on the WordPress platform did not hear that as, as a goal.
And that's fine if it's not the goal, but that is totally different than what a lot of people think the goal is. Because, maybe it's because they're used to like a product mentality, where product is generally like, we want more customers, rather than an open source project which has like a completely different type of goal that's just like out for the good of people democratizing publishing and all that sort of stuff.
Which again, if that's the case, it's fine, But if we don't have that clarity, which now I guess we kind of do, then we can't have the same conversation as if we did. If we had that clarity is the way that I mean, it's like,
well, let's talk about like, I'm not against WordPress being a blog first piece of software. Um, you know, contrasted to maybe like the thoughts that, that Kevin shared about, you know, it, it can't be blog first at, you know, it, it, if people are building websites and his point is valid, It was literally the same that I've made many, many years ago was we're building websites.
We need, you know, X, Y, Z. We're the ones like for, for every me, I'm bringing online a hundred, 200, 300 WordPress websites. Not this one person who struggles with WordPress and then gives up on it and leaves. Like I'm bringing in at this point now thousands. At least a thousand websites over my professional history of helping clients launching websites, etc, etc. So I get like Kevin's and, you know, to your, to a degree, your frustrations, like this should be better for web professionals.
Putting that aside for a moment, I think from the human level, from a, you know, societal level, um, having a piece of software that you can install for free and start publishing your words to the internet is much more important. In my opinion, right?
It is literally the anti social network where you can have your own website, your own domain name and publish your words, your thoughts for whatever, you know, art, hobby, you're in an oppressed, uh, uh, country where you're, you know, you need to get these words out and maybe this is your only mechanism to do it, you know, I don't know, but it's the idea of being able for humans to publish words first and foremost.
Yeah. I'm still 100 percent around that, which is why I always sort of push back on you and I say I don't need core WordPress to compete with Bricks because that just takes the eye off the ball of like the freedom of publishing words for humanity and by the way, because it's open source, the third party market system will win.
That's the, that's the beauty of this chaos that we have is that Bricks can step in and say, you know what, I'm, we're going to do it better and let, for the website, for the professionals out there, let us serve you. And I think that's a perfect balance, um, because publishing words first is much more important to me.
Uh, you know, for my sons to learn how to publish and get their stories out and get their words out, not fucking TikTok and, you know, Facebook and all this other crap, like, start with your lineage of thoughts and expression with your own website. That's what I want to see for the entire world, and I think that's what Matt wants to see for, with the entire world.
That's why you'll never see I say never, but that's why you don't see like, Oh, we're competing pound for pound with bricks and Elementor and we're going to get the shadow box in there. You know, it's not going to happen. I mean, it, maybe it will eventually, but that's why it's not like that same product versus product feel.
Uh, yeah, I mean, I, I, I see where you're coming with all that. I mean, the one thing I would say is again, in their, um, conversation kind of moved to somehow I can't really remember exactly to like slightly a page builder. Thing. And, and said that her ideal world was where the page builders extend and build a top core, which I mean, again, that's, I understand where that is. But to me, the way I interpret that is that the current page builders like don't fit into that mold.
Now I'm not saying that I'm not saying, I'm not trying to put words in Anne's mouth. I said it on the call. Like I'm, I'm not, I'm not saying that she's saying that they're not going to. Be able to be in their page, voters and be outlawed or some shit. And that's not what I'm saying. But what I am saying is like, that is, that that is absolutely different than what I've heard in like kind of speculation type land, so to speak of, uh, you know, page builders, like we, you know, whatever.
And also to your point, like, I'm, I'm conf, I'm just, I'm still confused on the whole, like blogging thing and the platform of the, the core of the platform. Um, you know, the, the concept of the CMS type stuff came up with advanced custom fields and those types of things. And I mean, again, if it's, if it's the philosophy of it, then you really just have three choices.
You got to deal with it, you got to move away from it, or I guess maybe you can influence it, but the third one's pretty hard, so I don't know. I just, I mean, it, it, it, it sounds like. I don't know. I, I feel your, I feel the democratized publishing thing, but I think the way people normally are going to take that as like, do they think most webs and it got brought up in the call.
It's like, it kind of sounds like that's alluding to like most websites are blogs, which that's not really the exact point that's being made there. It's the ability to be able to like blog or just share your stuff like you just mentioned. So I mean, I get that. Um, but I don't know. I don't know.
It's just, it's a weird. You, you know, 20 years of an open source
¶ The Challenges of WordPress's Dual Nature
project. You know, it's, if you ever had to like demo a house or like demo a bathroom and, and then you, as you start to like demo something that somebody built a bathroom, like again, 20 years ago, but you, as you're breaking all that down, you find the original bathroom from when the house was like, well, at least where I'm at in the, in the Northeast, my house was built in 1930 and then all of a sudden it's like, why did they do it this way? And then you start, Demoing it.
And you're like, holy shit, this was the first bathroom underneath this, like, oh my God, it's like, this is what this is like that technical debt that is carried. And Jorban said that on the call is we would carry the technical debt so that the end user wouldn't have to, or I'm paraphrasing what he was saying there.
But you have this amalgamation, I think that's the right word, where of just like years of people like coming up with some concept 15 years ago, it was implemented and just by the nature of this thing, not being a purely commercial product or a product first thing, it's just there, right? You know, like a lot of the stuff that Kevin. Rails Against is just the stuff that is never has just hasn't been updated because it's just not enough manpower enough time and they're trying to move forward.
But at the same time there's all this technical debt stuff that's being left behind and it's, it's just in there and it's still moving forward and like they'll get to it when they get to it. Um, You know, it's a little bit of an excuse, but it's also the nature of like this open source product that we have does, does,
does
it
have to be like that? Does it have to be that in 20 more years, we're not going to rebuild anything. We're not going to have a legacy problem product project or anything like that. We're not going to have, like, we're going to have in, in, are you saying that in 40 years time? We're going to have 60 years of technical debt. It's a possibility. You know, you think that's like a good way to go about things. You think it's the only way to go about things?
There's how would you ever, you would literally have to rebuild from the ground up and maybe, maybe, you know, cause nothing is ever permanent. Like maybe there's a WordPress version two that Matt comes out with concept and it's like rebuilt from the ground up.
Do you think we're just too early into like the technical age that like we, we were not like, we're not really arriving at this. Like for example, Divi. Okay. From what I understand, Divi five is like a complete rewrite of everything. They realized that, Oh shit, this stuff behind here is not, is not keeping up anymore. It was really good, really innovative for a long time, but now we need to, we need to turn this stuff around and like go our next gen, so to speak.
Do you think that like with something this large, We're just too early in the cycle of software that like, certainly there's been gens of stuff, like generations of things, but like of a whole platform that like, I understand the thought of doing that is scary as shit. Like I get that, but I'm saying like, do you think that that is actually something that shouldn't be considered because it's just difficult?
Like, do you think like the, the ends would justify the means of trying to come out with a version two that potentially could be still like backwards compatible? But, or, or do you think the reason that's not done is because the idea of, and, and said these words on the call, like we got to make sure everybody, nobody's left behind basically, or something like that.
Like everybody comes with us, like, is that thought going to persist for the next, like 40 years, potentially, if you played it out and that would cause. It's a long time. I
mean, it's a super long time, you know, to, to try to forecast. I can tell you that from, if you thought about it from like a business or brand perspective. What you don't want to do because of the reach of WordPress, literally hundreds of millions of websites across the internet. Certainly. Yeah. What you, what you don't want to do is like, be like, you know what, I'm going to rewrite this thing and launch it. Right.
Because then like, if you think WordPress has a, has a air quotes, bad reputation now, If you literally broke 30, 40, 50 million websites because they weren't upgrading or whatever. Now it's like, Oh man, that's a huge, massive risk.
And technically, and I'm not a developer and I certainly was not involved in any of these discussions and I, my terminology stuff ends with the words I'm about to use, but it's technically going through a rewrite now, which is why it's so chaotic because when you get into the game. We were just getting out, we were just getting into JavaScript. Heavily in WordPress, which is all like Gutenberg, huge debates of like, which framework react, uh, you know, what, what are we doing?
We're gonna create something new. We're gonna pull in this framework, uh, for JavaScript. And then that's why Matt said you need to learn JavaScript deeply, which was like a whole thing that rippled across like the developer community because they were like, what the hell is this? The JavaScript, um, because largely up until this point, it was just HTML, PHP, CSS. That's all you need to know. Yeah. Right?
Largely, and then all of a sudden, like with the dawn of Gutenberg, it was like, okay, we can't rewrite all of WordPress. So what we can do, and again, this is my non developer, is we can just plop on this JavaScript stuff and build a whole new experience. And maybe, the tide turns where, You know, I don't 90 percent of WordPress is JavaScript.
I mean, you know, no idea if that's even possible, but maybe the tide is turning where it becomes purely JavaScript or some other technology that JavaScript evolves into or maybe PHP and MySQL evolves into, right? These, these tech stacks are really what, Held WordPress to what it was for many, many years. That's why you get like the real cutting edge developers are like PHP and they laugh at it and they move on.
Um, you know, it might've been an episode you were doing with somebody else and, uh, or I was on an episode, I can't even remember, but they're like, Hey, when you're hiring engineers, no one's out there looking at. Oh yeah, I want to be a PHP engineer. No one's looking at that anymore. Right. They're moving on. They're like AI, uh, or some like mobile stack or whatever.
Like they're looking at PHP as like this old antiquated thing, but it's stable and still powers a lot of, um, you know, obviously important projects like, like WordPress. Um, so I think we're like seeing it actively being redeveloped, um, you know, right in front of our eyes with, with Gutenberg. And, um, you know, I think that's where Anne was, was getting at is that sort of, uh, across the aisle with other page builders is, is the same.
And let's, let's remember she's, she's great, but she's also an automatician. And part of that ethos is you want Gutenberg to succeed and, and you have those probably the same points of views. If I were to label Anna, Matt Mullenweg, Lieutenant, um, you're having those same thought processes as Matt is like, well, if you want to give back to this experience, page builders, don't build your own experience, build on top of Gutenberg, right?
So it's very easy for a Divi to be like, Oh, we're going to rewrite. Yeah, no kidding. Because you don't have to worry about WordPress, the whole like user registration system, post pages, custom fields. That's all, it's all, it's handed to you. And then you build on top of it. Um, So, you know, it's easy for these third party tools to, to re to rewrite and have those, you know, change their experience all around or their efficiencies around.
Um, but they're also taking advantage of the core of WordPress.
I think there's, I don't know how deep I want to go into this.
Like, I feel like I need to like study like 16 other open source projects to see how they Work, but I would not do anything else after, if I did that, uh, because it takes too much time, like, I'm just, like, I feel like, um, still a lot of people, a lot of the, like the speculation of the gripes still come from, and these, again, these calls have been fantastic at communicating more of it, but I still feel that there's, there's still a lot of, uh, demystifying that we still need to do with like
how automatic and WordPress are. And I know you love automatic. So like, I mean, you know, like the, like that, that part of it to me is there's just such a, like a weird, it's not really like a conflict of interest. Cause it's all trying to go the same way, but it's just a weird situation where I'm just still not clear on it. And without the clarity, I feel like I can't have a good opinion on it or can't even like diagnose, like what I think about.
Parts of it, because you have one philosophy that's for like the open source project, but then you have, because automatic is so heavily influenced on it, right? There's got to be pieces of that that are slightly construed in a way. It's I don't, I don't know how to exactly formulate it right now. It's just no, but even
20 year veterans haven't right? And this is that sort of shared It's like that shared chaos and opportunity, right? So it's, I think I made a, an example to you once, like you can go out to lunch and if you go out to lunch and you talk about your business, you can swipe your business credit card, right? Loosely. And if you, if you don't, then it's like, Oh, I like, or maybe you pay for your golf, right? Oh, but you brought a client out with you so you can pay for his great golf round.
Uh, but if you're just going out, you're going to the local muni and you just say, I'm not paying, it's not going on the company, but I'm certainly not paying top dollar for it. Matt and Autumn Matt. So the biggest issue, and this is what everybody just has to openly understand and admit, is Matt is the biggest variable who sits on both sides of this.
And you simply just have to, like, Understand that, that it is confusing because he, he does run automatic and he started the WordPress foundation and he started WordPress, open source WordPress. He loves WordPress. It has grown so large that he realized that there's an opportunity here to keep it, to, to keep it survive, uh, surviving and thriving. He needed a commercial entity and that's where automatic was born.
You don't, you just have to fast forward 20 years and, and, you know, did he ever realize it'd be worth billions? Probably not. Um, did we all know how the tech landscape was going to evolve and values and, and, and what the value of a tech company would be years on? Did he know he's going to get 180 million from Salesforce? No. And all the other millions of dollars invested into automatic as a privately held company? No. Uh, but this is where we're at.
And the, uh, he treats it just like that credit card swipe at lunch, where. He on one half of his brain, he's giving back to open source where it's like, I, he is, he's going to keep WordPress surviving. Cause I know he wants open source WordPress to survive. And then he'll just have his commercial side where he will eventually say the best thing here, uh, the best thing for WordPress is over here at wordpress. com or jetpack or automatic. And, and that's how he's, he has to straddle that line.
That's why it is confusing. It's like, I think, I think a lot of veterans understand that and we're just like, Hey, we're still benefiting regardless. Like, we're done looking for the answer because literally the answer is right in front of us. Uh, it's just, it's not, it's just not really talked about or, or cleanly talked about. But we, we've seen it. We've seen all of the examples.
Um, You know, and I think that you, I think I said this in the last episode we recorded, like we got to be careful what you wish for because if, if people are like, we need something better, faster than it's going to be, would it be a, a vert, a brand new version of WordPress straight from automatic? How would you like that? Like, how would the world react to that? If all of a sudden he was building a better, faster WordPress at automatic, but you had to pay five bucks for it.
Right? I, I, you know, I know you've said that before, but I'm kind of confused on that example. Because like, I don't know how that's Because a lot of people
give pressure. This is why he snaps, snapped in the past, and it's why he's like, sabbatical, and in my opinion, he's getting a little bit more defeated on the, on the social pressure, having seen him evolve over the many years. Because I think a lot of people keep demanding things, and I'm, I'm being like, hypothetical obviously. But. Automatic needs to make money. It needs to survive. Uh, or there's going to be more investors and more pressure for him on the investor side.
So he has to make money. That's what WordPress. com is. That's what VIP, VIP is. That's what Jetpack is. Those are the means, and some other products. Those are the biggest means of him making money. But eventually, it's like, can he make enough money to have Automatic survive that way? Or, You know, with all of this pressure, people are like, you need a better WordPress, it sucks, it needs to compete with all these things. Okay, maybe he builds it, and he sells it, from automatic.
How would we feel? How would we feel?
We
would probably be like, well that sucks.
We're saying that's not an open, that wouldn't be an open source project at that point. No, that's what I'm telling you. Yeah, because,
because that's what I'm saying. That's, that's why I keep saying we have to be careful what we wish for, when we pressure. Specifically matte and automatic because that could, because that is a, that is literally what red hat Linux does. That's what Ubuntu does. Like there are commercial grades of their software, which are not purely open source and not downloadable for free. You have to spend, you know, thousands and thousands of dollars. Right.
And that's not the only, there's a lot of other open source software out there that operates at that. Um, So you have to be careful what you wish for.
I wanna play devil's advocate though. 'cause like, I don't, I, I just feel like, would you, would you pay for Word would, if WordPress didn't change, would you pay for it? Like if WordPress, if he, if he didn't make a better thing, like for instance, like if you just took WordPress, it's no longer open source, it's it's proprietary, commercial, whatever in its current form. Would you pay for that in its current form? Yeah, I mean, I would. Okay. I would.
So why wouldn't you pay for it if it was better?
I would. Because it's not open source? I would, but I think a lot of people wouldn't. That's the thing. I think a lot of people would all of a sudden be like, Whoa, whoa, whoa. You want to charge me for these features too? I mean, we already see it in the commercial, in the commercial plug in space. When people start, either raise their prices, or they start, they charge more money, or I can't believe how much that plug in is. Like, we hear it with Elementor.
And I, I heard Kevin on one of his live streams Um, which is one of the, the, I don't want to say the few things I agree with, but I certainly was like, yes, 100 percent Kevin. When he was like, people are complaining about Elementor prices regardless of what you think of the software. Uh, for whatever
¶ Content Creation and WordPress's Future
the price is, 50 bucks, 60 bucks, or Yeah, it's ridiculously
cheap. Right, for 300 bucks for 100 websites? Yeah.
Yeah, and he's just like, you're out of your mind. Like, that's nothing compared to what you're charging your clients. Uh, but I think Which you should be
charging your clients.
Or which you should be charging your clients. So, yeah, I mean, I think that. There's a world where you will see, could see, where you go to work, like WordPress. org is the best experiences to download WordPress powered by Jetpack from WordPress. com as the big banner that you click on and you get this premium experience that you paid five bucks for or maybe it just gets associated to a, A hosting account at wordpress. com and then, then the fine print below that is get wordpress.
org for free or get the open source version of wordpress for free. Cause that's how a lot of open source and free software works. Super limited features. I mean look at your favorite sass app that you, that you don't pay for. Right, like a MailChimp. Very simple. The guardrail is there. 12, 000 subscribers, 2, 000 emails a month. Or whatever the number is, right? And you hit that limit, and then you have to pay. Like, you could see that in a WordPress world. Maybe not that harshly, but why not?
And he's already doing it. Like, Jetpack already has a bunch of pretty nice features, and the rollout the experience of a better way to experience WordPress is with Jetpack.
Hmm.
So, I mean, that's, like, that's not on the table. I'm just saying, like, when we pressure him a lot, like, You don't know what's going to happen as him as an individual. He's so impactful on this software and this community that he could just make a decision to be like, you know what, for profitability to keep automatic going in defense of wordpress. org open source, I need another revenue stream and now five bucks a website or a buck a website, you know.
I think we need to, I think you need to talk to him or somebody needs to talk
to him. And you see it with real questions,
with a kiss, with a kismet, right? Which is another one of their products, which is the spam protection. It's like you are either using it on a free site and you just, you say it's free non commercial website. But if you're doing a bunch of traffic, they get notified and they look at your website. Is this a commercial thing? You need to pay for a kismet. And I actually just saw a blog post, someone.
Might have been on my Macedon account where they got notified by Jetpack that they were running free stats and free stats on a commercial site and their stats got shut down. Um, or Jetpack reached out and said, you have to pay for the stats if you want to continue to use this. It's a business model.
Uh, so are we, are we in favor of that? Are we not in favor of that?
No, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just giving out, uh, an example of what could happen. Because what, and I guess what I'm trying to illustrate is it's like, we're, we have a good thing in my opinion and, um, like constantly beating it up for like another feature or to like compete with a, a Wix or a Webflow is, is, is not the right discussion in my opinion, just my opinion.
Hmm. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Do you, do you, uh, how do you feel about the sentiment of, do you think, do you think, I mean, are you worried at all about like the future of WordPress? I'm not worried about it, but
yeah, no, I mean, I'm not worried about it. Like Kevin is worried about it. But I'm not in the agency space anymore, but I am at obviously at gravity forms and there's nothing like indicating to me that, um, that WordPress still isn't a great choice. Um, for, for, you know, for all the reasons is that the third, literally the third party ecosystem, like the third party ecosystem is still there. Like gravity forms is still there. Page builders are still doing their thing.
Countless, countless other, um, stop you for a second though.
Yeah. Is that. I'm not going to use the word business model, but how, if you were like, if you were looking at something and a thing, okay, a platform and you, and the first thing that you bring up is the third party add ons, the ecosystem of that third party, surely that's heavily weighted, but is that, is that not in and of itself like a slight concern that that's like one of the first things you bring up and the first things that come to mind? That like the actual I
was skipping the open source part of WordPress, but
that's well certainly that's like absolutely I mean, that's yeah number one. Yeah, but I Don't know I mean and okay, well because we have the alternative Well, there's a ton of alternatives But it's but it's not like we're not the problem with this this stuff is we're all in it and and none of us are having a conversation Wait, it's like we all say We all ask these questions and we talk about these things, right? We, we, we feel we're on the platform. We feel it's the best option,
right?
You know, like we, like we sort of knowing what's the best option. We are like 99 percent there. Like we're not moving. We're, we're, we're in it, but like it's the conversation isn't even about us. It's about. The seven other billion people like, I mean, less than that or whatever, but like the seven other billion people that aren't in this stuff that we're not talking to all the time.
And then like I was talking to Kevin today, like, like on the live stream, it's like, that's the question is like, are those people, how do we like tell those people and how do we, how do we communicate to those people that like this, you could do everything here. Like you could do it all here if you wanted to, because it's that robust, it's that versatile. Yeah. But they're not seeing it because I use this example. I've said in the live stream today I talked to my buddy on the golf course.
I'm like, yeah. Yeah, you know, I make content on the wordpress Wordpress land. He's like wordpress. I thought that was dead. I'm like, oh, you know what wix is though? Don't you he's like? Oh, yeah, 100. I see it all the time. So like I mean, I know it's not marketable in that sense of like marketing dollars and stuff like that But I don't know Is there an answer for that? Is it even worth being concerned about?
Does it end up leading to a situation it's like a death by a thousand cuts type thing where it's not just, yeah, obviously Webflow isn't going to spring up tomorrow and take 50 percent of the share, but
I don't know. I mean, I think if it were that bad, you would have way more people going, going to these other platforms, like go to those other platforms and build something for, for a customer. I was just on a call with my buddy yesterday. He's on like his fourth startup. Um, none of them have been home runs yet. Uh, but he's trying to build a, uh, a SaaS based business for, uh, enterprise, like medical and enterprise payments and messaging. And he's like, Oh, check out my pricing page.
I'm building. He's building it in Wix. Right. And that's fine, man. It's like, whatever. Like, if that's what, if that's what you're, if that's what you're using, Brendan O'Connell, um, brought up a question during Kevin's live stream today. It was like, Oh, has anybody tried statimic? Yeah, I tried statimic. It's, it's cool. It's like cool to have like this static website builder and you're like, oh yeah, all of a sudden you're like, this is great.
Like I build it and it's super fast and hey, it's got this cool editor, but then you're like, ah, I need a form or like, oh, like I want to change the, I want to put my logo in and change the header and the navigation. And instantly you will appreciate the chaos that you have, even with full site editing to be like. Holy shit, I can't even edit my navigation in this thing without opening up
a text editor. I got another one for you. Okay. Yeah. I got another one for you. You and I appreciate the chaos.
Yeah.
We know the chaos. Sure. How many more people do you think it's, do you think it's sustainable? I already have the answer to this. Well, I'm going to finish the question. Yeah. Do you think it's sustainable? Do you think it's sustainable? To expect more people to
voluntarily wade into the sea of chaos. This is not a website building platform, like you're thinking. This is a blogging platform. That's the answer. Elaborate on whatever you just said. What is this? What is this? Is this is like right here. I've got the, I still have the philosophy page, uh, up for me designed for the majority. Many of the end users of WordPress are non technically minded. They don't know what Ajax is in order. They care about the version of PHP they're using.
The average user WordPress simply wants to be able to write without problems or interruptions. Now we can obviously make the case, like how fast can somebody do that? But these things, WordPress. the lack of features, a lack of options. Yes. It's a resource and maybe a vision thing, but it's also, it's not being built for you, me and the Kevin Geary's of the world. You, me and the Kevin Geary's of the world will deal with the chaos and figure out a workflow to sell it to customers.
That's what we do. This WordPress core itself is made for the person to start a website, start a blog. without any costs besides your hosting. That's the, that is the building a website. This is not the vision. I know it's, it's weird to hear it, but building a website, like having a toolbox of things to build scalable websites, that's not the vision. It's democratized publishing. That's what it is.
Yeah. You got a page and a post, but you know, and, and users, because Hey, you might have a buddy who also wants to write. aren't sports articles, or you might have a community of people who are trying to tell the world that their water is being poisoned by some corporation. That's what this is for is for publishing those words, whether it's entertainment or humanity impacting events. That's what it is. It's not about building a website.
We're building nice little features like full Gutenberg to make that experience better. And sure. Does Matt want to compete with Wix? Yeah. Yeah. But the essence is about publishing and democratizing pub, uh, democratizing publishing. That's the answer. It's never going to be about you and me and Kevin and my friends and your friends.
Uh, okay. I mean, if that's, if that's the case, I mean,
again, that's my opinion, but that's my opinion. That's your interpretation.
Yeah. Over the last 15
years.
I would love to hear that directly, but I mean, I don't disagree with what you're saying. I do think that's still, we make the. We've got to make the clarification that isn't our interpretation, but it's logically founded. So, I would love to, I would love to, have you ask him that, or somebody ask him that? I don't know, I'll ask him, I don't give a shit, but like, I mean,
Really, you just go back the last, just go back the last three or four years of, of WordCamps. Uh, not WordCamp, sorry, uh, State of the Words. Right, those are largely all recorded. I mean, those State of the Words, WordCamps. org Which, by the way, I got invited to as part of the media core, can't go because I can't drop like 18, 000 to go to Japan. Come on, dude, just look in your couch cushions.
Uh, but, uh, you just gotta go back and watch those, those moments in time, um, of, of the way that Matt is presenting and, and packaging WordPress. That, those are your answers.
Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess it checks out. Uh, it's, I don't know if it's like, I feel like it's kind of a shame that that's not at all what I've ever heard. Um, it's kind of been like co opted, not in a malicious way, but just like because of the, because of the nature of it and how it's been extended, it's, it's extremely, we're extremely fortunate, but it's not at all. It's so weird. If you
all went to Wix or Squarespace, you would be. Rattling the same cages that you're doing in WordPress. I'd imagine.
Yeah,
but No, I mean I'm not saying You don't, you think it's got the complete package? You're gonna go there and it's gonna do everything you want it to do? It doesn't.
It doesn't. But I'm, I'm trying to, I'm trying to formulate this. It doesn't have that. But what is the goal of those platforms? Those are website
builders.
Pure and Okay, so like that's my, that's my slight weirdness to this is that I am, I'm investing my time, energy, whatever. I'm not saying I'm not, I'm not saying I'm changing. I'm just saying like, that's the fundamental prop. That's the fundamental mind fuck with like people when they talk about this is that we have a goal.
I mean, the literal reason that you would critique WordPress for any reason is that you don't agree with like the goal or the vision or the feature or whatever the hell you're talking about. Right. And it's like, the problem is that the, the, The, the goal of WordPress is not the same goal as XYZ that is critiquing it. Like again, we're talking about Kevin a lot because the live stream is today and it's been a whirlwind.
I mean, in that thing he said to me directly, people, like not, not every, not anyone can build a website, period. And I, and I slightly pushed back on him. I was like, wait a second. Are you saying that you don't want anyone building websites? Right? I remember. Are you saying you don't think anybody can build websites or are you saying that not everyone can build a professional website? 'cause that's a very big distinction right there.
Right.
And it's a larger conversation and I'm of the opinion that like, I think everyone should have a website. I think you should probably get professional like assistance if you're trying to do other things, da da. We can have a bigger conversation there. But at the core of that, that is really what you are interpreting to me. And what we pretty much know now is. The, the messaging of WordPress and the actual goal of it is that anyone can have, we'll say a blog, right?
Anyone should be able to make a blog, which is valid, which is admirable. That's great. Great goal. But the problem is that being the goal of this platform and then us, I say us as in just like anybody that's building websites professionally or anybody like has that mindset of that is not really the same thing. Because it kind of, it just doesn't mesh perfectly.
There's some overlap, but then there's not enough over, like there is a lot of overlap, but then it doesn't, it doesn't end up funneling down to the point where it's like, Oh, we're just going to like, is a blogging platform at the very core of it. Anybody can build a blog. Anybody can democratize publishing. It's not an actual website builder. And then we look at, Oh, we look across the fence here and we see these other ones that are like, Oh, they are doing exactly. They're listening to us.
You know, people like us, they're doing exactly that. Now there are four pro, there's a lot of other pros and cons like everything in life, but they're actually listening to people like us. And that's where like, do you,
¶ The Role of Automattic in WordPress's Development
do you, what ends up happening? If that plays out like that? Do you have like an, any, any sort of an exodus? Probably not because you could still do whatever I guess over here, but do you have some sort of an exodus where WordPress is for anyone, right? So it's like, Oh, that's great. I can start up a blog for free and everything like that. I'm going to contradict everything I just said there. I'm going to kick it back to you. Do you think that that even still happens?
Do you think that there's a large, a large swath of people in 2024 that find out about WordPress? This, I have a real, real strong, like opinion just from my interpretation on this. Do you think there's a large swath of people in 2024 that are, Oh, I want a blog. I'm going to start with WordPress. I like, this is the, this is the actual root of the problem though. I don't think that actually occurs and I don't have any numbers.
But we, but we know according to sources, I don't know, we have, we should get better data that the number of WordPress websites being created is going down. So if it's for everybody, but not everyone's using it because are we not, are we not still having an issue here? I mean, I, I'm, yeah,
I mean, I don't know. I saw those, I saw those reports and I can neither confirm nor deny if WordPress is, is going down and at what level, uh, falling through the floor, uh, or just like losing a few feathers here and there. Um, I also, we should also say that like, again, we're in the mindset of web designers, tech people. So we see it differently. We're actually selling these services to customers.
So we have those strong opinions and we're in the U S so there's, uh, there's much more, you know, whatever, uh, capitalism behind this. People are like, Hey man, I'll just buy a Wix site. I'll just go and get up, send them to Webflow.
And the rest of the world may not have that, uh, Level of, of luxury, which is why, like when I, um, uh, did my interview with a Manuel from, uh, the Nigeria WordPress Nigeria, you know, that, I mean, his number was like 60 percent of the country runs on WordPress. Why? Because it's free and they can get access to it. It's also important to know. that there's different levels of where people can come in and out of WordPress.
So it's like, yeah, you could go and start, uh, your Wix blog, but then you mean like, yeah, you know what, I don't, I don't, I don't really want to pay for this anymore or whatever. And I'll, and I'll switch to something that's, uh, you know, blue host account for three bucks a month. And I just want to have this little blog. I just want to get some poetry out. That's what I want to do. So you switched to WordPress.
Um, and WordPress is also like, you know, That simplicity of starting with a blog, a lot of people laugh, laugh it off. But I think it's very important. Because if one day you're like, I want to start a blog or a website. You have this open source tool, this free tool that you can just learn with. There's no, I don't have to pay for this. You can go to playground. wordpress. net or download the free WordPress app. And just literally start learning this.
Whether you're 8 years old or 80 years old, this is a, to me, again, this is just my own opinion, my love of the software, is because you can unpack it, learn it, and that's just like, what's a domain? Like, you have to put yourself back in like the real infancy stage of like, somebody wants to start a blog. They learn what a domain is. That's like step one of the internet. How do I register a domain? What's this hosting thing? This is what it, this is what WordPress is.
Oh, WordPress is this app that runs on my hosting account. There's a database. I may not understand it, but there's a database and there's files. And somebody's starting to quick, slowly learn technology and software and how the web works. And that's a big thing. You know, versus just go to Wix and it's just like, oh, it's all right here. Click. Buy it. I don't know what the fuck. I don't know what it's running.
You know, I mean, it's, I think it's a, it's an enabler to so many different paths of life WordPress is. I know I'm getting a little romantic about it, but that's literally how I learned the web was unpacking. It wasn't WordPress, but it was PHP, Nuke, and then it was Drupal. And then it was WordPress. But the idea was, is all this open source software.
Uh, and Linux to how to run a server with Apache learned, uh, learned it all by reading a book, a physical book that I bought at Barnes and Nobles and how to put all this stuff together. Right. So it was that open source software that was allowed me to learn and enhance, you know, my, my skillset and do the fun stuff like publish, build websites. So it's, it's, it's something that is, you, you can't discount and just be like, ah, just this blog thing. It's a, it's, it is a lot more than that.
I'm laughing
at my next question. Okay. So
All makes, all makes sense. It's all checking out. Hey, you think I defend WordPress so much, I'd be the head of WordPress YouTube.
You like, are you, we have a, do we have a mind link going on here? Is there a link? We've been talking way too much. We've been sending way too many voice memos. Um, don't steal my questions out of my mouth before I send. Do you, okay, so I have a, I have a pre, pre, I gotta prime the question though. Do you think that WordPress as a platform On a scale of one to 10, 10 being really good, one being terrible.
How do you feel that it ranks on gaining new users in general, but I'm more so talking like next gen users, like, like younger gen. Yeah. And I know you, you, you put out this poll and it, but, and we could just stay on high level here, but like, what do you
think there? Yeah, no, that is a legit concern. Okay. Um, it's a legit concern because of more so on the younger side, I think. Well, It's the younger crowd who are developing and finding interest in WordPress, the community, and WordPress as software. And then there's the younger crowd who actually like, are users, end users, and why they should use this. You have social media, who's just like, consuming content. Again. Why it's important that WordPress focuses on being a publishing platform?
Because the reckoning of social media, I believe, is still yet to happen. Um, so, very important that you can have a, an app that you can quickly install and start quickly publishing content on the web, not wrapped in a social walled garden behind an algorithm. On the technical side, why isn't there adoption? Pfft, you know, Yeah, PHP, JavaScript, HTML, nobody wants it, right? They want more advanced stuff. That, there is, we do have that issue. We do have that issue of getting new people on.
But, you know, I'm not a statistician, but I think, you know, if we're this big, you know, does that inertia continue to, do we continue to grow? Um, When we're this big already and like, what would happen if we really shrunk would be, you know, would things really change? You know, I don't, I don't know. Um,
that's what I got. Obviously, obviously what I'm about to say is kind of like a gross generalization, but I feel like you have like an, a crazy optimistic outlook on people like, like, like, like it's like when I, what, the way that I interpret what you just said is there that like, you think that somehow, and maybe this is true, I'm just saying like, but what I'm interpreting is you think that somehow people are going to be more willing to spin up hosting or even just go to wordpress.
com and like start a blog than they are to go onto like tick tock Instagram medium. Like do you actually think that that's the direction we're going to swing
back that way? I think eventually the, you know, I think eventually somebody gets savvy to the fact that their content is all disappearing on social media. If, if you're talking about like, Hey, this would be a content creator. I mean, I don't disagree with
you. I don't disagree with you obviously, but I'm here with you. You know what I mean? Like I don't, I don't, that's an interesting question. It's a side topic, but, but okay.
So, um, So I was priming that with the sense of like, if you, if you do think that that's a legit concern and you are at all concerned about the fact that next gen and like new users and stuff like that, do you, I would, I feel like we would both agree that YouTube is at least a very prime watering hole that we need to capitalize on, so to speak. Yep. Right.
So. Like, do you think you could go as deep or as shallow as you want with this question, but like, do you think, like, what do you think Jamie as the, as the head of WordPress, YouTube now, or anybody in that space, like, what do you think needs to happen there? Or like, what, what, like, how, how do we turn, turn that around, so to speak, or like, or just capitalize and leverage on those types of things? Like, what is the, is there even, what can we even do? Like, I don't know.
Uh, so. First thing is, is like, I don't know a head of anything in WordPress, uh, an automatic, it's a new title. It's a new title. It is a very opinionated, uh, title to be the head of. Um, that was interesting, you know, to see that, um, a lot of thoughts around it, uh, you know, for the same reasons why marketing and the marketing team at, at wordpress. org. Struggled so much is that you weren't going to get the data of like wordpress. org to an untrusted volunteer.
And by untrusted I mean like, yeah, like somebody who has access to that data could get compromised accidentally. And all of a sudden like all the wordpress. org data is out there. Like traffic, keywords, you know, top performing pages. Like talk about immense value of that data. Um, How can you do a marketing job like that? How can you do a marketing job when you don't have access to the primary WordPress, uh, Twitter account or social media accounts? There's a huge trust factor there.
But suddenly we're just going to like give the, those like take that same risk on the YouTube channel, right? Because in my opinion, yeah, like what we're doing, very important. Um, As somebody who's been doing it primarily audio for 15 years, 14, 15 years. Yeah. YouTube and video still outperforms audio. Unfortunately, I have my reasons for continuing to do audio. Um, for the same reasons why I think blogging is important because if YouTube changes shit, then we're all screwed.
Um, so, but my podcast remains, um, so like giving him like giving someone, uh, the access to the YouTube account with that data and that control, that's like. It's crazy town. You know, in my opinion, um, when, when we just saw what we struggled with, with the marketing group for those same concerns, like how do you give somebody the ability to be the brand identity and the marketing team of WordPress for free with no data, impossible. Right.
You'd either have to like, you'd have to give one thing to make this work. They can either have the data and not post anything. They could post everything, not have data. All right. But now you're like, they're the face of WordPress, but you're, but you don't have any data. Now somebody's going to be the face of WordPress. If, if it's just, uh, stamp repeat what Jamie does on his own personal channel, which is be the face of his channel, training people on WordPress.
Now suddenly, somebody's going to be the face of WordPress, which is what I had said maybe on another episode with you, was the biggest lacking feature of, uh, WordPress. com competing with Wix, or Shopify, or Squarespace. When you look at their messaging and stuff, there's no human there, it's just WordPress. Come here because it's WordPress. There is no human part of that organization representing the cool software that we have. Okay. Back up though.
Now it's going to suddenly going to be Jamie.
Are you, are you simultaneously saying it's, it's going to be Jamie, but also kind of saying that it should be somebody. Like we need a face, but like, you're not sure how this happened.
Well, listen, and
also, also timeout, we got to stop. This just happened. So we don't actually know what the actual thing is. Like, we don't know what it's going to manifest into. You might just be like telling people to make videos or something like separate conversation sort of, but,
but sorry, go ahead. Yeah. So again, this is, this is that gray area. One foot in commercial land, wordpress. com one foot in wordpress. org. Open source land. How do you represent somebody? Uh, how do you represent the open source? Um, We all know it works in content marketing. Personal stories, human interaction, YouTube, podcast, right? Human, a human representing this, the emotions, everything. So, yes, the answer is we need somebody to do that for wordpress. org.
We need people to do that for wordpress. org. Not just one. Not just one, we need many people across the community to represent that. That's why I think what Anne's doing, the Olive Branch, the Media Corps, taking podcasters, bloggers, YouTubers, newsletter people, getting them together, as long as they're sharing our content, and it's this reciprocal effect, then it makes sense to me.
So the WordPress YouTube would be great if it's you, me, everyone, everyone who wants to, you know, maybe there's obviously, uh, checks and balances and it doesn't just get published right away, but there's a theme of the month and, you know, video creators are, are putting out content. Because to just give it to one person is, is, is a, a deep rooted issue across a lot of the stuff in, in open source WordPress.
I remember, uh, I was telling you this in slack when Yoast became the mark head of marketing for wordpress. org and they were like, what the hell, why Yoast? He has a plugin. It's it, this is when he was still running it. And people like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, what's happening here? Like this guy's going to be, you know, the head of head of it. Um, you know, and, and now. You're going to bring somebody on to be the head of, of, of YouTube while he still gets a YouTube channel. Am I jealous?
Of course I'm competitive, right? In YouTube land, we're all hoping our channels grow and we can, you know, gain an audience, but to, for somebody who also is getting paid to do it on wordpress. com and now on wordpress. org, now you're getting double FaceTime across the WordPress brand. And you can still have your own YouTube channel that you're, that you've monetized. and grow an audience. I mean, massive brand recognition to one individual in the, you know, zero to a thousand really quick.
Um, yeah, it's, and it's just that it's just one person. Then you look at community WordPress community. This isn't the first time in this has happened, but it's like, Was there a job opening for that or was it like Jamie at wordpress. com saying, Hey, I did some cool videos over here. Or Matt said you did some cool videos over here. Now you, how about you do that for wordpress. org? Would I do the same thing
¶ Community Engagement and Decision-Making in WordPress
as him? 100%?
I jump on it too. So that's, that's um, something that like I, Okay. Correct me, because I don't have the thing pulled up. Is it, is it org? Is there two YouTube channels? Yes, there's com and org. So this is for org?
Yes,
but
he's also doing stuff for com.
Gotcha, okay. So, but my thing is like, regardless of like, Jamie, let's slightly take that out for a second, like him. Like, How was that? And I should have, maybe I should have asked this on the call, but I don't know if we were talking to the right people specifically on the call. How does that, how does that decision even get made though?
Like you're saying, like, you know, like, I don't know, that's a, that's a question, you know, if it wasn't open or whatever, but like, I'm not personally, I'm not of the mind that like, you have a different opinion on it because you're, you're, you have a better understanding of like how the open source side of everything has worked, should work. Everything like that. I'm still fully formulating it.
So from like an actual like business perspective or just like an opportunity perspective like I congratulate him like I don't know if he Asked I don't know if he was whatever like whatever happened there.
That's that's cool but at the same time though It is weird because and I mean this was said on the call like it's kind of like uncharted It's like an uncharted area of like content First, like sponsoring content, so to speak, or like having somebody like be a, uh, like the head of the, the content specifically on YouTube.
So like, I expect them to kind of make some mistakes, but I would hope that because it's the open source leg of it, that there would see, you know, you can't even make that argument though. You can't make that argument. You can't make that argument. No, you can't. You can't. I'm learning because you, you, you don't get any fucking say in, in what happens in WordPress. You don't get any say in what happens in the content. I'm actually lost now. I literally am lost.
Another, here's another example from like themes and plugins. You can't sell themes and plugins directly through your theme or plugin if you're distributing it through WordPress. org. In other words, if you made a plugin, put it on WordPress, just like Elementor, is free. There's no buy now, you can't have a buy now button.
Inside of Elementor and just boom instantly you've bought the license of Elementor it you have to go you have to do The little ads and stuff like that Which we've talked about or I've had Elementor on the channel before Talking about like the ads and the nag nags for AI and all this stuff so you can do that. There's that Gray area of like you can have little call to actions Little or big you you decide on how much you want to annoy your users.
You can't have like that direct monetization I'm sure if you're at automatic You can't be making a commercial plug in at the same time as working at Automatic. Do you know that for a fact? I am almost 100 percent sure. That's something
that, that's something would, like, almost like a non compete clause or something like that that would be in the contract, right? I know, I know you can't, like, for Amazon, for instance, you can't be doing anything similar. Yeah. Okay, I'm just wondering, I'm just wondering, I don't know if we know that or not.
Right. So I guess until these more details come out. So, you know, with, with Jamie situation, I look at it, I can only act on the information that I have. Number one, blog post came out from Josepha. Boom. There it is. Okay. There was no like, uh, job description. There was no thing. There was a little announcement from Jamie on Twitter, whatever, but, but I see it as like, well, he's a content creator in automatic now. If there's an engineer or developer in automatic right now.
Can they make a commercial theme or plugin and start selling it on their own site? Because he is doing the same thing as a content creator. He has a monetized YouTube channel that he monetized through Google ads and sells direct sponsorships with. To me, it's the same exact thing. I'm a developer at automatic and I'm making a plugin. I'm selling it on the side or I'm a content creator at automatic and I'm monetizing on the side. It's the same content.
I would have to assume because this seems like a theme slightly from the phone call that we just had. That it's probably a situation where, like, I feel like this is a good idea. I'm just talking in generalities here from, like, an automatic and, like, a WordPress situation. This seems like a good idea, so let's try it. Even though we don't have any of the particulars fully set up for this particular arrangement. I mean, maybe they do. I'm just saying, like, from an outside perspective.
Because the analogy you just brought up does make perfect sense. It's whatever to me, but like, I, this is where
I, this is where I lose Mark. So don't agree with anything I say, because you don't want to dig the same grave I've dug, which is to be hypercritical about, uh, unfair decision making, right. Or non transparent decision making, right. Cause I've made a career of, of it, and this is why, this is why, you know, I'm not included on, on stuff critical to, uh, the, the core of WordPress, uh, because I constantly criticize and, um, but I'm doing it because it should be open, right?
I was doing this when I was selling themes and plugins. I was doing it when I had my agency. I'm doing it when I have my podcast, when I had my newsletter. Now, when I have my YouTube channel, it's the same thing. Why, why, why can't everyone be in the little news widget on the WordPress dashboard? Question I've been asking for years. Somebody said, oh, yeah, you can submit it. Yeah, I'm sure I could
Well, you know you got there's
all this like gray area
Good first thing you got to do is you got to change it from criticism to critique. You're start saying well Yes, I've been using that's the first thing a lot more. That's the that's the first thing second thing is I Lost it. Yeah, I don't know. Um, I think
So I'll be interested to see if it pans out. And I'm sure like, if Jamie's watching this or somebody is watching this an hour and 20 in, you know, my chances of being included in that might have gone down a smidge, but you know, I would say, look, I've been doing it just as long as, uh, anyone else, uh, on, on YouTube since 2010, uh, was my first YouTube video covering WordPress stuff. And, um, yeah, it'd be great to see if there's going to be, uh, a community effort, you know?
The, the, the, the more and more I talk to like specifically you and like other people, the more, the more that I feel like it's just almost an impossible situation, all of these things put together, like, it seems like, you know, you're, you always come from it from like you're pro WordPress, you're pro open source and. You're incredibly consistent in that thinking.
And I don't want to say it's like to a fault, but it's like, it's that, I don't know how that actually ends up materializing in almost the utopian way that I just, I literally don't know. Like we have a, we have a, a goddamn platform called WordPress and then we have a commercial entity called wordpress. com. Like just there, that was probably the worst decision. Maybe not worst is the best way to describe that, but that is probably the most confusing decision I have ever seen. Smartest
decision.
Some would say the smartest decision. Could be smartest, could be smartest. But I'm saying like from, from like a, your perspective of like understanding open source, the, the, the, the everything around that understanding and having clarity and transparency, the absolute. Most anti decision. I could, and I'm not saying it's malicious. It could have just been like, Oh, we just, let's just do it. Like, you know, we got both domains. Let's just do it that way.
I don't know how it was, the decision was made, but like looking back on it, like the worst decision, like so, so bad that like it should probably be changed to something else, like, because it's so confusing and it doesn't, it's not even operating. It's confusing and it's also not like explained enough to like a lay person. Like lay people have no chance at understanding that. And then people don't need to, they just need to use a software. That's it.
Okay. I mean, fair, but it's not the same software, so I don't,
you know, I'll, I'll go back to the blog posts I did, which I'm going to continue to reference, I think for the rest of my career, what would we do with the keys? Yes. What would we do with the keys of the kingdom? We go into the opening salvos. Where I say, the fight for WordPress is futile. It's a distraction, really. One must stop vying for shared control over the decision making, the features, and the direction.
You either choose to participate and leave your mark in the direction it's being led, contributing, debating, communicating, etc. Or simply observe. There is no clawing away ownership. So, we, we should take from WordPress as much as WordPress takes from us. All at the same time. Because WordPress will continue to exist as long as it's being led in that open source way. nature.
And we have this community that we find a lot of chaos in, but it's also granting us the privilege to continue to grow WordPress, take from it, give back to it. And we all carry on. Couldn't have summed it up better if I could. I mean, that's my, that's, that's my approach, which is why, like, because I was also, I, I had the same emotions, KG to take your. To take your line that KG had when I started getting to themes and plugins.
And then I did it again when I was like, why isn't, why doesn't my agency get the opportunity? I mean, there was a time where you couldn't be a VIP partner unless you were paying in a hundred thousand dollars to VIP to be a partner. And I was like, why we have the same capable people as all I've seen it. This is a rinse, repeat episode for me. Has it gotten any better? No. Oh, shit, that's not good. No, it has. It has, because largely WordPress has gotten better since then.
I mean, vastly better. Um, you know, the community has changed, obviously, but the software has gotten better, and third party software has gotten better, in my opinion. Hmm.
We're learning a lot. Well, you're not learning anything. You already knew all this.
I'm learning a lot, so I'm excited. I'm
excited.
No, I mean, it is great to like, relive all this and what it is teaching me is something that I try to employ in a lot of stuff in my life is to not forget the fundamentals and like going back and re living these things and being like, oh yeah, this is why, because how are we going to get new people in if like we're forgetting all the stuff that, you know, that we've, we've learned over time, like the philosophy and like all this stuff, like it is good to relive that so that as new people come
on board. We can point to that and say, this is the essence of why, why we're here.
Well, I guess let's keep going. I don't, I don't know what else to say. Let's just, uh, do we, maybe we should stop. Should we stop making critical content or critiquing content? Should we stop, uh, trying to influence the project? Then we should just, um,
well, I'll leave you with this. I know you got to go, but I'm, I'm working on a blog post. I told you about this already. It's titled, If I Was Running Automatic. And step one, speaking of being critical, is to cut all unnecessary products at automatic. If WordPress is to thrive and survive, the biggest contributor to its success needs to be hyper focused on one thing. WordPress. Automatic has many products that zap the attention from the core mission of WordPress.
You could even argue that WordPress doesn't have a chance to focus on its core mission while trying to play catch up, refine the product, find the features end users want, patch all the bugs, etc. Yet, inside the world of Automatic, you might find yourself sprinting from the Tumblr offices to the SimpleNote cubicle all in one day. If the product doesn't impact WordPress at any capacity, it needs to be under a microscope. That's just step one. There's like 15 steps if I was head of automatic.
But step one, cut all the stuff that distracts from WordPress because we need WordPress to survive and automatic is the best suitor for that, that task right now.
Hmm. Well, I hope, uh, stay subscribed.
I'm
excited to hear you publish that. I hope everyone on the
automatic squad reads that. Uh, boy, that'll be out there. That'll be out there soon. It's a, it's a long one. I, I gotta keep editing it, but
nice.
All right, brother. We'll, we'll end this one. This is a good one. This is fun, man. I don't know if you, if you, if you've come out on the other side of this, uh, any wiser, but. I don't, yeah, it's, it's a, it's a life, it's just like golf. This is a lifelong game, you know, it's, it's, it's the journey, right? Yeah. It's the journey, but always a pleasure. Mark Zabanski, uh, mjs. bio. This guy knows it. I've been on here too many times.
I love going to it and see the little changes happening every now and again.
Yeah. It's it'll be a site there one day, pretty soon, you know, wait, there's a new website. Well it's, that's, that's my kinda Lincoln bio area. That's the way bio, right. So you go there, you go there and you can see some other stuff. But Mark semanski.co is gonna be the actual website going to be. It's not, it's not very shortly. Okay. Just, I mean, depending on when you launch this or release this, maybe we'll see. Yeah.
Um, send all your criticisms and critiques to the WP Minute at, uh, the wp minute.com. The wp minute.com/contact. You wanna be on the show. Go ahead and hit that contact page. Um. Subscribe to the newsletter, the WPMinute. com slash subscribe.