This Week in WordPress #158

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 158 entitled waxing your metaphors. It was recorded on Monday the 12th of April, 2021. I'm joined as always by my cohost Paul Lacey. But this week I'm joined by Anne McCarthy and Joe Casabona. As we talk about the WordPress news, we begin with some sad news as we commemorate the passing of a lot from idea box.
And then we move on to some more happy news. We talk about the fact that Wix has got into trouble with the WordPress community for a fairly bizarre and unusual advertising campaign. And Joe get into a conversation about full site editing, where it's headed and how you can take part. Cadence has been bought by themes.
What does this mean for people who already own cadence and the future of the product? We also talk about the page builder summit, which is an event coming up fairly soon in the near future. You'll be able to subscribe to that. We also highlight AB split tests, plugin update, and we talk about an event which Paul Lacey is doing later today.
By the time you listen to this, it will all be recorded. It's all coming up next on this weekend. WordPress, this week in WordPress is brought to you by Cloudways. Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that ensures simplicity, performance and security. It offers cloud service from five different cloud providers that you can manage through its intuitive platform.
Some of the features include 24 seven support free migrations and dedicated firewalls. Check it [email protected] and by AB split test. Do you want to set up your AB split tests in record time? Like in a couple of minutes, use your existing pages and test anything against anything else. Buttons, images, headers, rows, anything.
And the best part is it works with element or Beaver builder and the WordPress block editor. You can check it out and get a free demo at AB split. test.com. Hello? Hello. Hello. Good afternoon. It's Monday the 12th of April. It's this week in WordPress, 2:00 PM. UK time. I'm joined as always. I, my good friend or Lacey who's the co-host of the show.
And I don't know, Paul, if you want to take over the introductions for our two lovely guests today.
Paul Lacey: [00:02:40] Sure. We've got a repeat of a couple of weeks ago, haven't we? So it doesn't normally happen like that, that we have the same two panelists on on, at the same time. Anna Jo, it's not normally like that.
It's. And if you're wondering, if is a permanent ban list and Joe, you wonder if Anne is that they're not, it's just a, it's just a, but it's a really good coincidence cause we've got some great stuff to talk about. And so to give you both an introduction that probably went to you, justice we have Anne fro who is developer relations Wrangler working for automatic, and you are focused apparently on the wordpress.org space and leading the full site outreach program efforts, which we're going to talk about today.
And we've also got Joe Casabona, who is a podcast at educator developer and helps people launch podcasts and create content and has recently switched to using Wix.
Anne McCarthy: [00:03:31] That was
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:32] good. That was good. We'll find out more
Paul Lacey: [00:03:36] about that site news,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:39] actual fake news. That's the first news real
Paul Lacey: [00:03:41] piece of
Joe Casabona: [00:03:45] the tweets already gone viral and the correction.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:50] Just before we begin, if you wouldn't mind, it'd be really helpful. Just move away from the screen just for a moment and share what we're doing over on whatever platform you're using. If you go to WP builds.com forward slash live, you can find us over there.
WP belts.com forward slash live. That you've got to be logged into Google to comment, but we'd appreciate it if you did, or if you're in our Facebook group, you can go over there. WP builds.com forward slash Facebook, and just hunt around until you see the live video, which will be playing somewhere shape or form comments are open.
If you'd like to give us a comment, feel free to do thank you to those people who drop in and give us a comment. Sometimes I, we talk about them. Sometimes we just leave them out because we just want to keep the conversation going, but we're going to talk today about the WordPress news for the week beginning.
Now, what was it? I think it was the 5th of April. So during the last seven days, and actually quite a lot has happened during the last seven days. And we'll come to that in just a moment because I'm going to share my screen first. Let me just see if I can get this right. Cause I often get it wrong. There we go.
I think I deployed that successfully. WP builds.com is the website where we produce all of the content and we put it up there. We've got a podcast episode. You can see number two to four over there at the moment. That's probably all I'm going to say this week, let's just get stopped right into it with our first piece.
And the first piece today is not what we wanted to talk about. This is something that occurred while I discovered it on Facebook. I believe it was last night. But I feel it probably deserves top of the show. But I am going to give it over to
Paul Lacey: [00:05:24] is it is a tough one.
We, we had some sad news, a friend of the show passed away yesterday in a car accident. I'm never good at. Speaking about these things. So thanks Nathan for passing that to me, but, Oh, I'm sorry. A really good guy. Sorry. Really a really good guy. And he'll be greatly missed. And sorry, pony. I know you're listening out there somewhere up there.
Sorry, I'm doing such a bad job of John, to give you a couple of words here, but I think we wanted to dedicate this episode to punny. And so hopefully it will get better than I'm doing this. No, it's okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:05] It's hard. I actually texted Paul last night and I think
Paul Lacey: [00:06:09] maybe I can plugin at this time as well using his product.
She's a pack. I think most people know if you use BeaverBuilder or element or that it's got an add on pack cord power pack and it gives you some extra features in Beaver Virta or into elemental and man who was so shocking to hear that. Really young guy really good hero in blood press and done a lot of good things.
And you only hear good things said about S said about him. So
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:40] yeah. Thank you, Paul. Sorry, I didn't realize you were going to struggle to do that one, but I actually met him at WordCamp in Berlin. I was lucky enough to meet him and we did actually sit down and have a beer together. I know that a few people that I know did the same thing and it's hard to judge somebody in the space of a few minutes, but every interaction that I had with him on Facebook messenger, where it largely was a very cool deal.
He was a very humble is probably the word I want to reach for. Really felt like a very humble guy. And then when I met him in person that sort of veneer proved to be true, he really was an extremely humble guy. He's, he's done quite a lot in the short space of time. He was working with the Beaver builder plugin that he's got and he just didn't beat himself up or mention it, or try to be pushy.
He was just very polite deferential and just a really nice chap. So in as much as we don't dedicate these episodes, we're dedicating this one. Pony I hope all is well as it were, if a fan or J want to contribute to that's fine. If not, we'll just crack on with the rest.
Anne McCarthy: [00:07:42] I'll just say that I hope someone carries on his work.
When Alex Mills. Died. That was one thing that I really appreciated is that people were dedicated to carry on his legacy and his work. And I think that's the beauty of the WordPress community is that can happen. And his impact can live on beyond his life. And I'm all about feeling. So I love that you all have opened your hearts to sharing about him.
I think that's really, probably will mean a lot to the people who know him.
Joe Casabona: [00:08:04] Yeah, his his company tweeted something really nice, a really great picture of him. I didn't know him personally. I knew his work and it's always a shame to lose somebody, especially, so young and so dedicated to his craft.
Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:08:17] Yeah. Okay. Thank
you.
Paul Lacey: [00:08:19] There's some good podcasts upsides, I think out sorry, now I've got my my act back together now, does, I know you interviewed him. I think for dopey builds some years ago, Nathan, I interviewed him for WP
Nathan Wrigley: [00:08:31] belt and I also did an interview with him over on WP and up where we talk on the WP build side, we talked about the product and on the WP and op side, we talked about life and the way that his approach to business and how it might differ in, in, in the sub-continent than it does in say Europe or North America.
And it was quite a, it was a bit of an eye-opener actually, it was really nice. And again, speaking to a man who really did put. He likened repeatedly the business to a big family which I thought was quite nice. And I know, although that kind of probably could easily roll off the tongue, he demonstrated over and over again during that podcast things which that would demonstrative of how business is different there than it is here and the way that they share mealtimes and things like that.
So if you become part of their team, you become part of them, the wider kind of family and do things like share meal times and go to each other's weddings and all of those kinds of things. Yeah, it was nice.
Paul Lacey: [00:09:28] I think one what are the fun things we all remember from Powerpack? Anthony was his kind of perceived war with a brainstormed force.
The kind of the other company that also had a add-on pack for Beaver builder. It was you, it was a UAB versus power pack and there was some quite public, healthy competition. That used to go on in some of the forums and it would push both of those products forward. We did so far as we know Sue JM, Pinette Sujay is the CEO of a brainstorm force.
We're pretty good friends in by the end of it. So there was a lot of healthy competition. They pushed each of his products forward, but they were good friends in the end. So that was good to hear. And when you see this kind of, that the Wix versus WordPress, the competition there, sometimes you've got to push those things aside.
I remember that there's people working at these companies are representing them. So competition is all good, keep it classy. And those
Nathan Wrigley: [00:10:27] guys did. Yeah. Nice. Okay. Let's move on, get on with the sort of show as it normally happens. And you mentioned Wix and Squarespace, let's jump right in because this is such an interesting thing that's happened during the course of this week.
I believe Joe is the best place to take on this story because he actually is in possession of a pair of expensive headphones. That sounds like crazy talk, but I don't know, Joe, if you just want to tell us what this story's all about, I'm showing WP Tavern at the minute, but we'll shortly soon as you get into it, I'll show your posts all about it.
Joe Casabona: [00:11:03] Yeah. I guess to give a quick high-level overview of what happened back in January a representative from Wix started reaching out to technology influencers was the term he used. It was a lot of people in the WordPress space, me included and he said that they said that they want to send technology influencers a special kind of swag thing for a marketing concept, a unique marketing concept.
So I decided that 2021 would be the year of opportunity for me. I would have said no to this. I don't need another t-shirt that I'm not going to wear. But I said, why not? I have a PO box and I'll have to give the person my home address. So I said, yes. And a few months later, people started getting these packages labeled top secret.
Here's a message from you from WP and you open it up and it is a pair of $400. Bose noise, canceling headphones. So not a t-shirt. And if you scan the QR code, you're brought to a website, it's this fellow pretending to be WordPress. And he's saying like Wix is launching a smear campaign against me and we know each other we've been through it all.
I don't want you to believe any of it. And as all of these people started tweeting these headphones a I'm going to say a negative ad campaign, right? It highlights the bad stuff in WordPress. The perceived bad things about WordPress started coming out and the reaction even before these ads came out was pretty strong.
Why is WIC sending people headphones? Do they think that I can be bought is, was something I read a lot. Like I'm not going to start using Wix because you sent me headphones. And so I'm a recipient of these headphones, but there are a few things that I wanted to unpack here and which I do in this blog post, is Wix bad for the negative campaign. And unfortunately, negative campaigns work. I read a book called contagious by Jonah Berger, fantastic book. And. He talks about the things that get people to share. And it's the things that's happened to the emotions. So the really happy, I saw a video of of these glasses that were made for babies who are blind and then they could see, and like that reaction, like I cried, I won't, I'm not gonna front that's like shareable content, it makes you feel really good, but the negative stuff also works and we've seen how effective that is. And so I think that highlighting, they identified pain points in word press. I don't think they're lying. I didn't watch all of the ads, but they're not lying about them. I assume they did a bunch of user research.
They said, what problems do you have with WordPress? And then they use those talking points where some of the. Video's tone deaf, maybe a little bit, right? There's one where like WordPress, the WordPress character is like in a, in an abusive relationship with his user and they're in therapy and in a year where record numbers of adults, including myself sought therapy for anxiety.
I think they cut, they could've made that point better. I say like they could've showed a user update, their WordPress site, and then their whole day is just blown up because they're fixing a broken WordPress site because they updated it. So there was there's that portion of it.
I think the ads are tone deaf, but they definitely know who they're targeting. And on, on that note, they are not targeting the word, the long-term WordPress users like me. They sent me headphones cause they knew I would tweet about it and it got people talking about it. And they could have spent a way more money on like a Superbowl ad right.
Where it was like one and done, but now it's a week later and we're still talking about it. That said the WordPress community is justified in their frustration. It's never fun to be on the other end of criticism. But I say in my post, I think it's a little bit hypocritical. It's okay for me a WordPress user to smugly say, why are you using Squarespace when you can own your platform, or why aren't you using that hosting company they're bad or, the whole jam stir the whole JAMstack drama that happened in August. So if you're going to dish it out, you should be able to take it. And on, on that same token, our reaction should not be anger right. In Matt's post.
He called Wix a Roach motel. I, I don't think that was the best reaction what we can do is say, okay. Yeah, maybe WordPress is hard to update, but we are working on that right. In 5.6, it's a lot easier to update WordPress. Okay. Maybe the security stuff is hard. We have a site health checker now where we talk about those things and then 5.7, we rolled out easy transfer to SSL.
And and he and Matt rightly points out that like you can't export in Wix, right? That's a pain point that we've identified that we have a good solution for it because ultimately that's what we care about that, this is actually right on the screen right now. We do care about democratizing publishing and it's why we're open source.
And it's why exporting data is so important. And if someone goes negative we should highlight our positives. I think the community action reaction could have been better. Wix was a little bit tone deaf, but I, I think that what we don't, we also don't know how much they spent.
We don't know. And we don't know what their key performance indicators are either at their KPIs. So if it was to get people talking about Wix, this is a hugely successful campaign. If it's to get the people, they sent headphones to switch to Wix, probably an ultimate failure. But I don't think that was the case.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:45] I just find the whole thing extremely bizarre. I have to ask Joe, what headphones have you got on right now?
Joe Casabona: [00:16:55] So right now I have my studio monitors on, these are the let's see the. DT seven 70 pro. So these you just saw how like terribly long my hair is. So these plug right into my interface, so I can monitor my audio when I'm, especially when the kids are awake, I do have noise canceling headphones.
And to be honest I have the Sony w H million numbers for, or whatever. The latest Sony headphones. And I was I'm a little disenchanted I'll say by them because multiple device switching is a little difficult and I was seriously considering getting the AirPods max. Even though there's they're obnoxiously expensive.
And then I got these and I was like, great. I was looking at new headphones and now I got them, so I'm happily using them. And and that was the other thing, I think it's a little. I don't generally like to use the word privileged or whatever. We all have like different backgrounds and things like that, but anybody who's what?
Oh, you sent me these headphones. I'm not even gonna use them. Dude, somebody sent you a $400 gift. If you don't want it, re gift, it don't be, I teach my toddler be grateful when someone gives you something, no matter what it is. Yeah. So I'm going to give my Sony headphones to my brother who doesn't have the same multi-device switching problem that I do put a
Nathan Wrigley: [00:18:13] WordPress sticker and I
will.
Joe Casabona: [00:18:16] Absolutely.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:18:18] Yeah. The thing that I sat down and did a back of the postage postcard kind of calculation, and I figured based upon what I knew of the numbers and I actually think I worked it out on the pace of them costing 300 pounds. I think it was the cost of the equipment. Was 30,000 pounds which is not an considerable amount of money.
This is you can cover it salary of a teacher for an entire year for this kind of money. And I think that's where my, where it sticks in my throat is it's okay. Like you said, Joe, if it purely looking for the hashtag WEX being spread a billion times, slam-dunk success, total win from the point of view of squandered money.
This is a really good example of that because I would be more or less, a hundred percent certain to say not one of the people they sent them to even went to the Wix page to see what it was all about, but that can't have been the point. I'm just really curious. It must've been a play on just getting some eyeballs on a hashtag or a, getting people to just discuss them and make them relevant for a couple of weeks.
Hey, we are.
Anne McCarthy: [00:19:26] I do think it worked too, because, when we, I think Joe, you touched on this in the post. It's like when you step outside of, the always word pressers, like you hear this a lot. And I actually, when I was doing freelance work, I lost a nonprofit. I say I lost, but like this nonprofit one day called me up.
I had been volunteering with them for free for five or six years. And they switched to Wix and. I tried to convince them. I tried to tell them all about open source. I had an hour long call with the board. Like I was like had a PowerPoint presentation and they were like, look, we just, we don't want to deal with the headaches of WordPress.
And I think a lot about the Maya Angelou quote of people forget what you said, people forget what you did, but they'll never forget how you made them feel. And I think about that in the context of WordPress, like how does using WordPress fuel and the thing that I think is so tricky with this is open source.
You don't feel things when you're using open source, you don't necessarily have something tangible in your hands. And until a decision point happens until you have to, until your site goes down until you get to migrate into whatever it is. But like for 90% of the time, you're not feeling like yes, I'm using open source.
You're just feeling I have to update my site. I have to change the header and whatever it makes it easier. And I think this is one thing Matt has spoken about is we need to make open source Better than the alternatives and the closed source alternatives. And to me, I see this as a great chance to step up.
And one thing that gives me hope is Joseph actually posted about this last week, I think she's looking to bring in some marketing professionals to help the WordPress community and to help the marketing team. Especially as now we're at 40% of the web or whatever it is. How do we have control over our narrative and what is the WordPress voice when it comes to marketing?
And I don't think it's going to be anything like Wix which gives me a lot of pride. Like I think this is my biggest takeaway was I'm very proud to be a part of the WordPress community and not I feel bad for folks who might work at Wix and might not agree with the ads. I did watch all of them as well.
And they're pretty brutal. Like it's, I'm also in therapy. So I was like, Whoa, like that was just like really a weird line to cross. And the whole idea of playing with an abusive relationship especially when domestic abuse is on the rise right now. Like I just was like, this is really some people are trapped at home with an actual abusive relationship.
Like you need to be really careful with those kinds of ads. But they did touch on the pain points of how word press feels and I, you can't, you can't to me, that's a chance to step up and do better and to pay attention to that. It was like, they gave us free information of Oh yeah, people still are worried about security or updates or what have you, even though core just rolled out auto updates and has like a whole new system where you don't have to worry about that, like that they were still able to play with that dynamic, which was really
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:56] interesting.
I wonder if the actual ads themselves costs. Significantly more than the cost of the headphones. I'm imagining that must've cost a bucket load of money to get people to, act as in a room and a film set and all of that kind of stuff. Must've been really expensive,
Joe Casabona: [00:22:11] When they shot it too.
But I just keep thinking like a 32nd Superbowl ad, which I'm pretty sure they've run before. Would have cost them like millions tens of right. And I want to touch on your point because I think it's really good that we're bringing in that we WordPress is bringing in marketing professionals because the messaging is so important.
I read an interesting piece after the 20, 20 election about messaging and ends, what works and what falls flat. And Joe Biden's messaging really worked in 2016, Trump's worked. Cause it said, make America great again, they made it about. The voters, whereas in previous campaigns, right? The I'm with her like Hillary Clinton's I'm with her for awhile, it made it more about about the candidate than about the people.
And I think when we say, but WordPress is open source, we're making it more about WordPress, whereas we need to say, but Hey you won't be locked in, right? Like you can move your stuff. Or I
Anne McCarthy: [00:23:07] always tried to describe it as like the life of your site. And that has, was like, Amber, that means there's a death.
And I'm like, okay, five, five, five. But the idea is it can grow with you. I tried to sell him on us at one point and yeah, but I love, I that's how I explain it. So I'm like, if you're, if you start with just a blog and you want to move to a store and then you're you blow up and you have this amazing, whatever translated in five different languages, like you can do all of that with WordPress and people get that clicks where it's like, Oh, cool.
I'd be like having a shoe that grows with you throughout your life. That's amazing. Of course I'd invest in that, but, you
Joe Casabona: [00:23:37] know yeah. And that paints like a super optimistic picture, right? Like you're here now. But you can be here and that's what WordPress does for you.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:23:45] I wonder know they just
Joe Casabona: [00:23:47] hire us.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:23:49] Yeah, that sounds good. I wonder if they hired a paid for a teacher's salary for a year, would we be talking about it? If they put out a press release saying Wix has paid for a teacher's salary and such a school, it'd be like, okay, thanks. That's really good. Yeah. Yeah. But it worked I've got a couple of comments here, Chris.
Chris, you saying that it's interesting that he managed to get a salty reply out of Matt, probably the icing on the cake for them. Yeah. It's interesting that I wonder if the fact that they did get the salty reply from and that if you see the post on Matt M a.tt go and have a look at that.
It doesn't. It doesn't sound like the map that we're familiar with. It almost sounds like he had to constrain himself before he hit publish and possibly retake some things. It sounded like he was bordering on getting a bit cross, which you don't normally see in the public arena with Matt, Paula.
We've left you out of this one. Did you have anything you wish to throw in?
Paul Lacey: [00:24:42] How has this enjoying, listening to the discussion? That was great. Yeah, in terms of the money spent on the campaign, I think this year and last year there hasn't been so many avenues for marketing budgets to be spent in the traditional way.
So it doesn't surprise me that this is more creative and more kind of gorilla sort of marketing tactics going on. And, yeah. It probably was quite. The, I didn't actually watch the videos. I didn't watch any of them. I think I watched it like the first 10 seconds of one of them. And I just knew what it was all be about.
But I think it, it feels like this is the sort of marketing campaign idea that happened that, Christmas party, 2019 or something, when, the CEO was drunk or something, and there was a stupid idea and they'd just hired, someone's cousin as an intern and gave them a job to do something creative and crazy.
And this is what happened in the end. The thing is, a couple of years ago, I was at a international cricket match between England and India. Edgbaston in Birmingham. And the entire pitch in between plays had GoDaddy projected on it. So the money, I can't even imagine the money that that it must be spent to, to have that, which is broadcast around the world on TV as well, having the entire pitch, having the logo on there and everything.
So I think like the 30,000, I know we can equate it to different things like teacher salaries and much better things that money in general can be spent on, but it doesn't, it's not. It's not something that matters to the companies because they're competing for to make their platform as well-known as possible.
And social buzz is a big thing and they did a good job of making a lot of noise about Wix. And Joe said, they've not really probably converted anyone. But they got in the conversation for over a week. And the bizarre thing was I helped a friend one of Lynn's in my wife's friends, actually Kelly weave her website just this week last week actually.
And her website is on Wix and actually what she wanted to do was she she needed another domain pointing out the websites that are two domains would end up on the website and then also have an email address set up with the new domain and. I was, I'm the nominated person to help with that kind of thing.
And I, jumped on a zoom call with Kelly. We'd logged into her Wix account, and guess what? You could do the domain within the panel easily. And they've hooked up with Google mail. You can even just create your Google mail account right there in the Wix panel. And then there's your website.
We didn't actually need to edit the website, thankfully. Cause I know last time I did help her with that, it was awful. The wigs user experience was terrible, but the onboarding experience for the other things, a business owner needs to do in and around just the techie bits that people like us are interested in and go, Oh, don't use this page builder because it leaves shortcodes, Oh, don't use this because you can't do that.
The business owner doesn't care about that. They're just like, I want my email hooked up to that. I don't want the domain go in there. And Oh, today I've heard web vitals. What does that mean? Can we make the website faster? And obviously that, so I don't know where I'm going with this point. But also I will say that I've also got a pair of Sony XM fours Joe.
And they are, they're not as good as the Bose, which I'm wearing here, which I didn't get given a, bought these for switching between different devices. And that's why I'm wearing these because I was having trouble with the audio just before we came on and I knew. I'll put the bows on and I'll just be connected to my laptop, whatever.
But yeah, that's a different point, but yeah, the point on, on, on the platform Wix has got a platform and it is consistent. It might not be very good for from what a lot of us think. And, but they can improve it and psych and Squarespace. And so can Shopify. Now, one of the items that we're moving on to a minute is around cadence getting bought out by I themes or liquid web, and we can move to that in a minute.
But whereas, a lot of users come to WordPress and they try and build their ingredients together. They get into trouble if they don't have the knowledge, but weeks', doesn't need to have a fight with Matt Mullenweg. Wix needs to be fighting against the hosts that are creating the platforms that will genuinely compete with Wix and Squarespace and push them out of the market.
Because as soon as those platforms exist, where you can do everything and you've got the block editor or the built-in page builder or whatever you've got, then Wix is going to start looking. Looking like it's in trouble more than ever. I think. So
Nathan Wrigley: [00:29:17] this one off quickly with Lee Jackson's comment, he said there's room for weeks.
And it seems to me it's target demographic of people who want to do it themselves as much as they can. A WordPress is where developers and designers use it to deliver a quality service where people want to pay for others to do the hard work weeks are creating a fight because it's a classic marketing tactic.
That is all. Yeah. Good point. Thank you. Everyone
Paul Lacey: [00:29:41] wins though, in this situation, WordPress gets attention. Wix gets attention. Everybody's attention. The big loser here was Squarespace, probably.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:29:53] Yeah. Oh, sorry.
Paul Lacey: [00:29:55] Squarespace. Want to send me some headphones? There's a
Nathan Wrigley: [00:29:58] Squarespace Holocaust right now making that very point.
I'm sure. Should we segue cut, cut to the cut a few out, possibly because of the time and go straight to the cadence. One, we can come back to the other ones that we've got on the roster. If we need to, this totally caught me by surprise. I'm sure that if you've been in the WordPress space for any length of time, last couple of years, there's this theme blocks suite, which has had a meteoric rise more.
So I think than just about any other company that I can think of maybe elemental fits in that bill, but I've heard more and more about cadence as the weeks have gone on. And I was pretty sure that it would be a fairly valuable. Property by now. We have been written on the podcast about a year ago and just a year ago it was him and his sister.
And I know that is now no longer the case. Anyway, during the last week, I don't know how long this has been negotiated and it don't know how much money changed hands, but I'm imagining that cadence is worth quite a bit based upon the sort of the. The sort of journey that they've had recently they've sold to I themes.
And this took me by surprise because I just didn't see eye themes as being relevant in this space anymore. I know that years ago they were, they had their own builder technology. I think in fact it was called builder. If I remember right. They had a picture of a hard hat in those there as their platform.
And, but they've bought cadence. If you go to the themes posts that you can see here, then you'll see, you'll hear all about it. It's a sort of acquisition they're acquiring the people as always the cases stated that they're hoping not to disrupt anything that people who've got current memberships can go on.
I actually have a kind of lifetime one, so I'm hoping that's going to be the case. And yeah, just quite shocked. And then Joe earlier, before we hit record and Paul as well informed me, of course, that I themes has a big parent in the background. And it's flywheel of, I said
Paul Lacey: [00:31:56] that is that the right liquid web?
Sorry,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:31:59] so sorry. As I was saying, I knew I'd got it wrong. Anyway, liquid web fascinating story. I've no idea what amount of money changed hands, but if you're in this space, it just goes to show blocks are hot, really hot at the moment. So the floor is open. Anybody that wants to dive in, go for it
Paul Lacey: [00:32:18] would, I would say I don't necessarily think it's blocks.
That is the it's the reason it's such a, there is another article that we've got that we've partnered with this article, which is a recent podcast on the, you gurus a website by Brent Weaver. And it's an interview with Brian Gardner who was the founder of studio press, who were acquired by the engine approximately two years ago.
And he's he talks in this interview a lot about the. That it wasn't that let's say you go back 10 years when something like studio press started and I themes started because studio press themes were big competitors to each other, that they were starting, these companies to grow and not with an idea to sell out to a hosting company or something like that.
And in fact, I themes is John's liquid web and studio press has gone to doit B engine. And Brian is talking two years on from that acquisition. Now that he's left the whole snooze situation completely now. And he's talking about how these hosting companies up, what I said a minute ago, looking to build platforms.
So if you pop back onto the IPMs page again Nathan, just for a sec you can see. That they have hosting back up a minute, sorry. They have a backup solution. They have security solution. They have a dashboard sync. They've got a plugin suite. They've got training documents. They've required restrict content pro recently.
So I wouldn't be surprised to see more things. And to me I themes is basically liquid web's talent agency. Now I just see, I themes as a brand that had some people with huge knowledge about the whole ecosystem liquid web bought them. And I theme's job now is to go and start making those deals and bringing those people in and building that platform.
So that liquid web a bit like a GoDaddy has got a deal with automatic for some of the WooCommerce stuff. So you can get some of those things built into that platform. Liquid web has got stuff built into this. Now, if you buy dopey engine. You get the the Genesis framework, you get the atomic, I think they're called this the Genesis blocks now.
So does this platform stuff getting built and there's going to be more and more of it because at the moment, and then you've got element or on the flip side, who instead of being acquired by a house, look like they're trying to build a host hosting aspect to their thing.
We've a cloud much like dopey M you have done as well. So you can just see that the financial side of the industry. Is that such a critical point at the moment. And that's how I see it. I just see that this is just another example of the platform building and the hosting company will put a lot of money into this.
And I think that the products will probably improve because I imagine Ben is, has been juggling all sorts of jobs while he's been building this up in the last year and he and his team can get back to building the features again. And I hope right, Joe,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:29] before we press record, I failed that. You said that you had some input on this because you maybe knew that the teams around this was that right?
Joe Casabona: [00:35:38] Yeah. Yeah. I've been following liquid web in general, pretty closely since Chris lemme joined in And from there they built a managed WordPress platform. Then they built a managed WooCommerce platform. Then they acquired, I themes and I themes cadence comes hot off the heels.
Of or I guess lukewarm off the heels of acquiring the acquisition of research content pro and WP complete which is this sort of LMS ask thing where you can allow course creation without having the full kind of lifter or learn dash experience. So I, themes does offer hosting at a relative cheaper price than then liquid Weber, nexus, right liquid also owns nexus.
And so I think probably liquid web nexus has the management commerce bit. I themes probably moving into some sort of. Educational or membership space, and this is their emo, right? Th the themes membership gets you all of the plugins, but it also gets you the training side of things. I just did a nine hour training session with them over three days for their members only.
I think that if we look at items a year from now, they'll probably have some sort of offering where I themes hosting. You get cadence, which I think was a smart move. Cause it's like a essentially a Gutenberg native page builder. You get restrict content pro and you get WP complete, and then you can build a great membership or course site, in themes. So that's I think if I had to guess, and we see the same thing happening, that's like a blueprint, right? WP engine bot flywheel. And then they bought studio press go daddy. But Jilt and all of sky verge, right? So all of their WooCommerce offerings and things like that.
I think I think that Paul, as you said, this is the direction we're moving in. Hosting companies are becoming platforms. If you want bare hosting, go with lymph node or DigitalOcean, if you want an easy way to manage a complex WordPress site, you go with one of these hosts that we've just mentioned.
Yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:45] good 0.1
Anne McCarthy: [00:37:46] of the big concerns. Yeah, I was about to say what's been on my mind is moving between. So I used to work on full press, which was a backup and restore solution. And so as people would, you could use it to migrate hosts and sometimes things would go wrong because the host would have some weird configuration that we'd have to fix on the other side.
But in all of this is if everyone's building their own plans how do we maintain the promise of open source, where you have control of your content and you can move it around. And I was really happy to see how cadence is. Intentionally made sure it's compatible with the Gutenberg and the core editor, because I think that's a key part of this, but you could see differences happen where if someone, if a platform wanted to go more into a direction where it's harder to move and you'd have to continue to use their products, it makes me nervous.
So for anyone listening, who's on the other side of these things, I'd encourage everyone to think about movement between especially, even movement too, right? Because you could be moving into a host, how easy do you make it for that, to, for that to happen? But yeah, my brain immediately went to, Oh my gosh.
How would migrating is?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:45] Yeah. Cause it, it does speak of sort of siloed versions of WordPress. Doesn't it? If you go over here cause you've got the membership, the themes membership platform. Oh, you go over here and you've got something else. And over here is something else. Yeah. Makes that a bit difficult, but I guess it's Wix.
Anne McCarthy: [00:39:01] Yeah. It's like, how do we avoid doing that to ourselves? And how do we make sure we're fulfilling the promise of open source? Because my dad actually got I'm not going to say which one, but he got stuck on a marketing Sao platform. And I, it was, he basically was almost impossible to move him. It was based on WordPress, but it was built on top.
And I had to spend hours trying to get basically a backup and then translate the backup and discipline that I could use to restore to a different site. So it's, it happens in internally. And it's, I think, to be mindful of with these sorts of things popping up.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:31] Yeah. I'm guessing though that the price will be.
You won't have to pay for cadence or restrict content pro you'll just pay the innocence. Let's say it's $29 or something like that. You pay this one fee on a monthly basis, which is very profitable for the hosting company, but all of the other stuff just gets bundled in. And if you've used the managed WordPress hosts you know what, it looks like.
They've got their own little icons in the dashboard and they have the caching and everything thrown in there. And there's a membership button pre-installed and you're off to the races. Yeah. It looks like if you're a, an I themes user and you were in some way using their themes, they are going to sunset all of those.
I can't remember the date. I've got a feeling it's a year off or something like that. So hopefully anybody is still using the themes side of things to theme. Seems funny. He doesn't, there are themes. And yet we haven't heard about them doing theming for the longest time,
Anne McCarthy: [00:40:22] but then the article they're like, yeah, I know.
Yes.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:25] Yeah.
Joe Casabona: [00:40:27] That's a very like 2007 name. Isn't it? Because it came out around the same time as the iPhone, and then I themes. Yes. Yeah. Naming. That's not a criticism. Naming is hard,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:37] but that's an interesting story. Congratulations, Ben. Anyway, I'm sure Ben and his team have profited mightily from that.
And honestly, when I interviewed him, it was a thoroughly nice guy. Good luck to you, Ben. I hope it will works out for the best. Okay. The next one, which is totally related to this, Paul G do you want to lead on the, probably won't be a very long piece, but the connected piece about toolset.
Paul Lacey: [00:41:03] Yeah. Yeah.
It's just seen and this nicely moves us in a minute onto full site editing. We've got two tool set, which is a plugin that gives you custom fields, custom Custom post type creation, plus custom taxonomy creation. So let's say you want to create a bookshop or something like that.
And you want your ISBM number in there and different, different fields about books and you don't want books to be pages or posts. You want them to be a section in WordPress code books. It also allows you to do that and it's been around for a long time. It just went, everyone was stopped talking about tool set for quite a while, but they are pretty much Lee.
They've been leading the way for a long time with the block editor in terms of they've just rewritten their entire product to use the block editor for all its layout tools, because it used to have a layer of data structure and it used to have a presentation layer and it had its own interface for doing that, which requires you to know a little bit of code, but they switched in the last couple of years to using the block editor and investing a lot of time in that.
So Tulsa is even more. Low code than it ever has been before. And it just so happens that an article came out that it's now connected. It's dynamic data sources to the majority of the useful cadence blocks that you would be interested in connecting data to apart from apparently the button block, which everybody uses apparently in the comments here saying, Hey, can we have cause clearly you would want a dynamic source link into a button that might be in a database and link into something else.
Apparently that's coming, but it was complicated for some reason, but they seem to be really leading the ways of third party. To the whole Gutenberg project in terms of giving us the possibility to do things like create search results, create post templates for different custom post types search search boxes, four Oh four pages, all this kind of stuff.
They are leading the way on that. I think for, in terms of being able to use the block editor as for an enterprise type level website, potentially,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:43:11] I'm just curious as to the fact that a company like toolset who create custom post types, custom fields, and all of that kind of stuff, there's a lot more going on.
Isn't there it's a fairly robust suite of tools if you want to more or less point and click and it doesn't like you say, Paul, there's a little bit going on in there that you need to learn, but I'm just curious that they've jumped ship into a block suite as opposed to building out their own.
Blocks. I know they've got their own blocks. I actually installed it just to see what it looked like. And there's, I don't know, there's half a dozen of their own blocks, but they've decided to offload the presentation layer to what they presumably believe is somebody's path for the future of they've
Paul Lacey: [00:43:55] done that.
You strictly though haven't they used they were not that, they weren't one of the first integrations with, I remember you're right. You have to remember your video on that. That was absolute classic video on the BeaverBuilder set integration and Oh, is that the one
Nathan Wrigley: [00:44:10] where I just constantly got it wrong?
Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [00:44:13] That's brilliant. You remember that one too? Yeah. But they, and they, I know you would use toolset and there was a list of themes that they D they made sure worked really well with their system. And I think that's what they're doing now. They're looking at the popular block sets because it's not just cadence they've linked up with a few others, but I think adding the cadence blocks into the mix is is a big win for their users to take on a theme like that, which is known for being really good with things like woo commerce and law, an LMS type sites.
So if you think, I want to try a new site. I want to, maybe we commerce or a bit of an animus, but I want to use toolset. You see all the, they all they've ticked all the boxes and you can give that a go we've confidence that. Both sides have done a bit of integration work of each of us.
So it's progress. I think that's what it was
Nathan Wrigley: [00:45:02] curious. I'm curious if an ever breaks out a thing like tool set or ACF or anything like that and plays with it. I try
Anne McCarthy: [00:45:11] to play around with those different, like how people will try to accomplish the same thing that you could accomplish with the block editor.
I do looking at that kind of stuff. Cause it is important to see like why would someone choose this over going straight Gutenberg? And a lot of it is just easier to set up, especially with ACF blocks. That's a big one that I, I see people reference where they're like, Oh, if you don't want to deal with that, just use this.
And it's like, how do we make it easier to go core first,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:45:35] joe, anything to add Jos. Joe's having a play with there. The camera there, hopefully. Yeah,
Joe Casabona: [00:45:40] my my camera overheated. So I had to go to the bathroom,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:45:43] okay. I won't pass to you cause it looks like you're fiddling with the tape unless you've got something to say, I'll just press it.
No,
Joe Casabona: [00:45:49] I think everybody made really good points. And yeah, I'm really excited to see what else cadence ends up doing in the near future. Thank you.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:45:57] Thank you. Thank you. Okay. We will move on in that case. Paul mentioned this just a moment ago. I feel this is one for perhaps an. To mention this is a piece just, I'll just quickly introduce it.
This is a piece over on make.wordpress.org by Joe Cepher entitled full site editing scope for WordPress 5.8. So what's all this about.
Anne McCarthy: [00:46:18] This is a really exciting post. I am thrilled it's out. But it's basically covering April, has to go and no-go dates. And this is basically where project leadership is coming together to figure out what will the scope of what's shipped in 5.8 look like, and what work can be done between now and then to make it possible and just have a really wonderfully lays out the plan.
And part of the plan is actually this week Four different people from Matt Mathias, Josepha and Helen are all going to gather to do a demo and talk about what full sighting looks like right now, and then figure out from there, what can possibly be included in fact, 0.8. And one of the things I really appreciate in this post as it touches it, I think in this section, it says, yeah, this part of the FSE merge will not change the user's default experience, but will instead focus on bringing tools to the extenders and our community so that they can experiment with their users in mind.
So essentially what that's saying is that 5.8 as of now, and where things stand is going to focus on bringing the design tools and the tools that like theme authors and plugin authors can actually use. And then 5.9 will be more of the user facing. So it actually gives the extended community time to adapt.
And I think that's. That's going to be huge. I was I run the FSE outreach program, so we do a lot of testing and I'm really happy to say that a lot of that testing and feedback that we got from people in the community who took the time to test and be involved, helped influence these kinds of decisions to figure out what's actually ready and what's not.
And I think it mentions if you scroll up perhaps Or no, actually, sorry down. Haven't memorized the post. Yeah, it says the later dates polishing, these components have been moved out of the focus for 5.8 for proper prioritization and like making the saving flow more intuitive was a big piece of feedback that came up.
And the efforts FSE average program. So it's really neat to see this, the demo's going to be this week. And I'm very curious to see what comes out of the demo and the discussion. There's another go, no go date at the end of the month on April 27th, these both align with Gutenberg releases as well.
And I think after then there'll be a lot more clarity. So stay tuned for end of April and get excited for 5.8. I think this is going to be really big, especially cause the users won't be impacted directly so to speak unless they like hyper opt into this, but it allows the extenders to let loose and have fun and see what they can build.
With the new design tools that the core team has been working so hard on.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:48:29] And just, can I just give you a chance to plug's the wrong word, but just talk about the outreach program and how people get on board, if they're curious to, to shape the destiny of all sides. Yeah. Love to talk
Anne McCarthy: [00:48:40] about the outreach program.
Yeah, so basically the outreach program is dedicated to getting feedback about the full siting experience to the developers who are working on it. And it's also become a bit of an education tool, so people can jump in and just listen. If they'd rather, or keep up to date with the latest stuff without actually testing, but at the core of it, it's about testing the actual experience and go through testing flows.
And so I released Calls for testing we're on, are about to start our fifth one this week and actually be on query blocks, which might tie in nicely with another piece. But it's essentially meant to help tie that feedback loop and help with these decision points to know what's ready and what's not.
And you can join. It's very easy. You can join just by jumping into make Slack. So if you search like making WordPress Slack, you'll find a place where you can sign up and then there's just a dedicated channel called FSC outreach experiment. The other way you could possibly follow along is following the make test site, which is just make that press posted work backslash test.
I post the calls for testing there. I'm also starting to do some what I call hallway Hangouts, where people can just jump on and we can chat about FSE related items. I just started my first one last week, but I'm hoping to do those more in the future to tap into that kind of educational piece and discussion piece, because I think there's a lot of I think there's been a lot of Curiosity and fear around FSC.
And I want to demystify that. And I think this post from just, if it does a really good job of showing how the community is trying to move forward in a way that allows everyone to come with which is really exciting.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:50:05] I'm going to ask you one more thing on the FSC outreach program story. If somebody comes to over to the make Slack and commits themselves mentally, I'm going to help out what may be a time commitment for something useful to give back to you, what would they be actually doing?
And how long may they give up in minutes or hours?
Anne McCarthy: [00:50:23] How long does it take to read my posts? I would say I try to make the calls for testing. If you're actually going through them five to 10 minutes. Okay. But you have to read the posts, you have to set up a test site. So in actuality, I would safely say 30 minutes to an hour, depending upon your ability and your technical ability.
But one thing I'm also trying to experiment with as possibly holding office hours. So people get stuck or need help with a test site. I can jump in and help them out. But yeah I haven't done that yet. It's just, it's a lot of work to do the culture testing in the summer posts and then these high-level posts on top of everything else.
But yeah, I would say 30 minutes to an hour, but anytime you can give, even if it's yeah, I tried this for 10 minutes and here are my thoughts. I welcome it. I know time is very precious,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:51:02] thank you for clarifying all of that. That's great. Joe Paul,
Paul Lacey: [00:51:04] you can spend more time.
You can spend more time, because you can have a look at what the other people wrote in response. And that's one of the aspects I enjoyed about getting involved in that was, you read the post, you set up the test site, you have a go with it and you can spend as much time as you want playing around the kind of challenge that's set to you by an and so you can see, for instance just in Tadlock, he's often taken on these tests and he's publishing his results on the dopey Tavern website, I would say.
And I think he does more effort than. Because what he does instead of just what I did was I just followed him. Instructions went through and I just took the experience for what it was and fed back what I felt. But Justin goes a step further and some of the other people do as well. And that he tries to make the example look right as well.
So he's I made it for a full page, but I could really use this for a full page in real life. This isn't just, I did what was that? But then that the thread of comments in the hub or wherever you want to post the different your feedback too. And you can see other people saying the same kind of thing as you, and you do feel right.
I'm going to comment in support of that comment over there, because I totally agree with what that person has said. And I know that. Was really useful too, and in the team because she fed back to us all. And I could see this stuff that the small group of people who got involved, I saw that have an influence on.
The next steps. And I can see in that blog post from Josepha Joseph was talking about getting the extenders involved. And I know that was something that myself and other people were worried about. And we were trying to come to terms with, why is this got to go into core? And the fact is we don't need to worry.
It's going to go into core. That's always going to happen at some point, and it's not going to, into a core set of everybody's user experience suddenly goes crazy and Wix can do another advert about a disaster or something like that. It's Ann said, no, one's really going to see it. It's there for the people like extend, is it extended and his products it's people like that.
And tool set and thinker is unplugging creators to say, it's in corn now I'm not interacting with a plugin in Gutenberg. I'm interacting with the core set of WordPress for my experiments and the products that I'm building. I think it's called. The other thing I'd say as well, is that I think it's helping and the more outreach and that happens.
And the more people I think that get involved, that aren't necessarily the it's probably the wrong word but the inner circle in Slack as such the people who are naturally in Slack all the time, cause I'm not. I came in there and was trying to figure out what I was going and everything.
I think the more the word can get spread out a little bit more. I think it reduces the fear because me and Nathan were talking about this earlier this week. The block editor Gutenberg full site editing is not gonna destroy page builders and page builders are not going to beat the block editor.
It is not a zero sum. Fight and Wix, isn't going to destroy WordPress and WordPress. Isn't going to destroy Wix. There are millions of people who like to do things the way they do them. And there will always be a product, whether it's a big product or a small product, or the core set of WordPress that is going to work for it.
So I think the stress of this whole full site editing and the changes in WordPress for me is just reducing all the time. I'm just less concerned about it. And for anyone who is concerned about it, just go and take part in the full site. Editing, have a little chat with some of the people involved and you'll see, it's a, it's not a, it's not as conspiracy theory as we might all think.
Anne McCarthy: [00:54:45] Oh, yeah, I totally I'm like darling along the whole time. I totally agree.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:54:51] Hey Joe, anything are you you all sorted? What? Just for those of you that are listening to this, Joe's like the consummate professional, there are things technologically, it would appear not functioning as he would quite like, but being Joe is totally on top of it and he's got six or seven different options available to him.
I'm doing that's it.
Joe Casabona: [00:55:11] Thank you. I thought I was really being clever. I have a little app on my phone that relays, the camera, feed it also relays the notifications which is why I've managed to switch back. But thank you. I appreciate that. Again I just, I agree with everything that's been said here.
I, I love and how open the process has been because there is a lot of a lot of nervousness, a lot of consternation around it and. I'm using full site editing regularly. I'm trying to do it at least monthly on my live stream or in a YouTube. Yeah.
Anne McCarthy: [00:55:42] Your YouTube videos are awesome. I really, I was so stoked when I saw the poster for, I was like, yes, this is fantastic.
Joe Casabona: [00:55:48] Thank you very much. I appreciate that. And it's largely a really good experience. I loved creating that four Oh four page and this week on the docket I know is last as last week's challenge. But I'm just, I love everything you're doing. I love how open everything is and I'm happy to see the core team trying very hard to get this right.
Because it is super important. I think Matt said in the state of the word, we need to get phases one and two, otherwise three and four are doomed. And I really see how much you do want to get this right.
Anne McCarthy: [00:56:21] Especially with 40% of the web. And one of the things I've noticed is there's like the 40% of the web piece.
And then there's also just engaging people in contributions is really hard right now. Like people are going through a lot. So there's this dance to get, right. And I think this is where Moving forward, sustainably and ethically is really evermore important, especially as WordPress's share the market grows.
I'm very excited by the decision process that's happening. And I'm very curious to see how the demo goes this week with project leadership.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:56:47] The 40% of the web piece is a bit that gets lost. Isn't it? That, the other proprietary page builders, they really don't have to worry about 40% of the web.
They've got to worry about their own users and they probably know an awful lot about them. Whereas you, in many cases, don't know a great deal about who's using it and what array of plugins they've gotten, how it may break things. So yeah. Point well-made, it's harder for you. I would imagine by a country mile.
Do we, Paul, do you want to do this? Shall we do this query block, but, or do you think times pressing us, should we do that? In which case I'm just going to introduce it again. I feel, and it's And is primed to to, to feature a lot today. So this is a piece over on WP Tavern. It's called old coding, old theme as design the next round of query block patterns.
Yeah. And it basically, it brings to us the fact that these are coming in the near future he's as Justin always, as he takes things to pieces and gives it a thorough grilling. But as this is not an area of my expertise, but it is for you. I'm just going to give it to you if that's all right.
Anne McCarthy: [00:57:47] No, that's great. I actually am working on the next call for testing for full siting on the Curry block. I'm coming up. I think query request is what I'm going to call it. I don't know. I haven't out a good, I like to have fun names. Cause it's, you got to have fun with this stuff. It's cool.
It's cool to be on the cutting edge. Yeah. The crew block is what I would call like a power user tool or like we think of it more as a theme author tool where users will more interact with a variation like a post-loss block where latest posts. But you can see, yeah this preview is what it currently looks like, which isn't, there's a lot left to be desired with some of this design, but a lot of what's being talked about in this post is how can we set up these initial patterns in a way that.
Helps guide the user and actually create like a delightful experience. Like how do we set people up for success with these initial patterns? And right now there's an open GitHub issue, which is what the post is about. Asking for people to share what sort of patterns they want to see. And Justin makes a really, he's a really good comment on there that basically is saying we can't predict like the community can't predict everything that people need.
I think it's I wrote it down. Yeah. I think Juniper team cannot know everything it needs to build without the spider source. And I want to really underscore that because that is very much the truth. A lot of the people who are commenting on the get hub issue or. We're pressed insiders, and I'd love to see some folks from in the community share directly what they want to see with these patterns.
What they're noticing on the web is how cool would it be if a really common pattern that you see across the web? That's a really cool websites could be integrated directly in decor as an immediate placeholder set up option. I think that'd be a really amazing experience. So I highly encourage, if anyone has, maybe they're like a power blogger who really loves to blog and pays attention to all of the sites, like share what you're seeing, share what you're noticing and who knows, maybe it'll make it into in decor or make it into future.
The pattern directory is coming up as well, which I'm very excited about, and maybe it'll be a block pattern that could exist there.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:59:34] I'm showing on the screen right now. There you go. Paul, there's just been making it look really nice. I think he borrowed some inspiration from Mel. Yeah. But it's nice.
Okay. Thank you for that.
Paul Lacey: [00:59:46] Joe, it seems like there's a good opportunity to get your name in the history books, if you can contribute some great query block patterns, for instance. But I think what I like about this and also an item that I did remove, but maybe you still got the link there.
There was a new theme called the Michel theme. Is it? I still have it. I'll put it on the screen as in the name, Michelle. Yep. Yep. And. So what I like about this, because you've got, you've got weeks, you've got the hosting companies quite in their platforms. And then really you, at the hardest that you could say that the core team is trying to constantly create an alternative to you getting locked into these sort of things, and you see something like the Michel theme come out and it shipped with something like 67 blog trends.
And I think that is a really cool thing because what you've got there is you've got a framework of a theme using the block editor, but it's already thought out the design process that you probably need. If you like the look of this particular website. Now Matt MedU us did a podcast the other day about his favorite WordPress themes which is usually a kind of clickbait.
So a title, but I can't remember the theme that he was talking about, but it was similar to this in a way that the theme of the had to said, this is what this theme is really good at. And I'm giving you all the options. To do that really easily within the theme. If you want to go outside of that, you probably want to be skilled in some way in a technical way or a design way.
But if you want to use the theme as I intended it, I'm giving you all the options here. So this Michele theme has come with some things that kind of lean towards the, how I see the future of full site editing as well, because what we've got here on the screen at the moment is that within the theme, you can identify a block-based footer or a block-based for a four-page.
So it seems to me that whether or not you like the interface that the core team create for full site editing, the third part is we'll probably not even have you used that interface. If you are a no-code or low-code kind of person you'll come becoming in the plugins that allow you to create your websites, we'll be hooking into the foresight editing experience.
But you won't see it. It will be like this in this side panel of what we can see on the screen at the moment where it will have a things, a little wizard create your footer. Here's some examples. There you go. Here's Twitter. Number one, foot number two, foot number three. I'll have number foot number three.
Okay. That's the one you've chosen. Let's now go and create your head. So I can see the block patterns and onboarding experiences and wizards, and third parties can work together to take what the core team is doing and make some really cool things like like what this Michelle theme is. He's doing rivets 67 block patterns
Nathan Wrigley: [01:02:34] and 404 footers, it would say, Oh no.
Paul Lacey: [01:02:38] Yeah.
Anne McCarthy: [01:02:40] It was pretty interesting how the author basically hacked together this like editing block. That's super good it, but it shows that there's a desire for this and that it's like people are, chomping at the bit waiting for these tools to be released and like this, what he's creating here, a future theme update could just integrate directly with core rather than using a hacky reusable blocks solution.
Which I think is pretty brilliant. I was like that's pretty interesting. It's obvious that these tools are needed in that theme authors. The 67 block patterns. That's we always have that thing where it's like, Oh, I saw this really cool theme, but I want my site to look like that. How do I do that?
And having integrated block patterns where you can not only make it look like the theme demo, but also love what up even more because there's 67 block patterns I think is so cool. And helping set users up for success. I think it's really exciting. And the starter content comment. Yeah.
There's just so much good coming from this. And this is, I very much agree that it should be the future of themes where theme authors can actually set users up for success rather than just giving them the bare bones and letting them loose to figure it out. It's no, literally here's how I made this homepage section, and actually giving them that directly.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:46] Thank you, Ron, Joe, anything on
Joe Casabona: [01:03:48] that one? Yeah, I think this is great. Just to go off Ann's point like the starter content stuff, especially in making themes look like, this is like a pain point from like the theme forest days, right? Like you download this beautiful theme and then you're like, how do I do this?
And Genesis and studio process has helped a little bit and other themes have the starter templates, but with block patterns, like imagine installing a theme and then going which demo did you like? And then it just happens. You don't have to download extra plugins or extra assets or extra anything.
You just have those blocks that come with the theme. I think that's, I think that's amazing. And then going back to the query block, like that's, I'm really stoked that this is like the next problem you're solving. Because are there, the team is solving because in, in playing with the query block a little bit, I'm like, it'd be nice if you could almost get a little bit more granular where you can design what you want a archive posts to look like, and then not get built in and stuff like that.
Again, I just, I can't say enough nice things about how, what, like such a great job, the full site editing team is doing. I'm really excited. It's E it's either based on feedback or experience use, you all seem to be doing a really good job of intuiting. What the next step is.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:05:07] I'm going to encourage everybody to, yeah.
I'm going to encourage everybody to just quickly rewind about 20 minutes and listen to what Andy said about how you can get involved so that you can get involved. And with that, I'm going to move us along and I'm going to go to, what am I going to go to Paul? I'm going to go to you because you put this one in, because this is something that you're involved in.
This is the GoDaddy summit. That's happening really soon.
Paul Lacey: [01:05:33] No,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:05:34] no. That's
Paul Lacey: [01:05:36] okay. No, the summit is a different thing that we were talking about the other week. This is actually just the meetup. They have a weekly meetup in Europe and a weekly meetup in, in the States. And so they invited me a couple of weeks ago to run one of the meetups, which is the one that I'm doing if you Oh yeah.
So I'm talking about, I think the title changed a few times actually when it got marketed. So I was like, Oh, I need to change a little bit. So yeah. So now it's definitely seems to be the best marketing tools for your WordPress website, but. I totally invite people to come along. It's on, it's in about three hours from now.
If you go to the events.godaddy.com, you can sign up an RSVP there and it's like just a 20, 25 minute talk from me and then just a group discussion. I think, I don't know if that happens with everybody on a zoom call or if there's, or if there's people commenting in the zoom in, I don't know if it's that way around.
I'm not sure. But just to give you a hint of the kind of direction I used to be addicted to buying tools as Nathan knows it, we, we were both probably a bit addicted. Yeah, I was. Yeah, no, yeah. I'm sure we all know the tree forever, obviously, and all that stuff. And my philosophy is totally changed in the last year or so.
I'm very much, less moving parts keep things simple. So a good chunk of my talk is really going to be about not using all the tools. And then just focusing in on a little case study of what might work well as a small light tool set for WordPress, if you are an agency or a freelancer looking to get clients and those kinds of things.
So they've got experience in that and I've done it all wrong and I've done it. All right.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:07:31] No, I haven't. Have you ever done it? I know at the same.
Paul Lacey: [01:07:33] No. I never, no, I never done it perfectly, but I I know where I went wrong and I've seen it. Yeah. So I just want to share some of that knowledge and go, daddy invited me to do that.
So it's not their main event. It's the meetups that they do every week.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:07:47] This is the first piece of news we've ever featured, which is actually going to be stale by the time most people are watching it. So let's quickly try to read the gigantic URL. I can't it's enormous.
Paul Lacey: [01:08:00] If you just go to events.godaddy.com, I think you can
Nathan Wrigley: [01:08:03] just go then.gov.com.
Paul will be there in about three hours. He's only just learnt what the title is, but I'm sure it will be. Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [01:08:11] Yeah. I'll prepare the talk. After this time, it'll be amazing.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:08:14] Yeah. Okay. I'm sorry. I completely misunderstood why you'd put that one in. Sorry about that. So next one is just a quick shout out for me for a friend of mine.
Well, a friend of, I think Paul, you know him as well. This is Tom Carlos from AB split test. It's a YouTube video outlining the fact that he's updated his AB split test plugin. He's completely read on the UI. The video takes about four minutes. If you're in a current owner of the product, you'll have to get familiar with a new and easier UI is also added full page split testing in which is a brand new feature, which you never had before.
And basic, you just tick some boxes. You go in and you say, I want to test this page against this page, or you can do 10 pages if you really want to. I think he says something along the lines of, if your sanity can cope with split testing 10 pages, then you can do that. And he's also got integrations with EDD.
Woo commerce and WP pizza, which is quite a quirky third one to throw in there, but there you go. AB split test has a nice big update today. And forgive
Paul Lacey: [01:09:16] me. Have you tried, have you seen this product?
Anne McCarthy: [01:09:18] The videos? I thought it was really cool that WooCommerce was integrated. I could see that being the most valuable right now.
I was like hoping he would have that integrated in it whenever I saw it in the video. I thought it was pretty
Joe Casabona: [01:09:27] cool. Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [01:09:29] I have not. It's a great, it's totally with the block editor. Isn't it? It's sorry.
Joe Casabona: [01:09:36] yeah, I haven't. Yeah, but now I'm going to check that out and also get pizza. Cause now I want pizza.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:09:41] Yeah. The mere mention of the word pizza is all it takes for most of us to celebrate. I've got to stay drinking water.
Joe Casabona: [01:09:47] I'm a New York Italian. So if you just start to say it if you say pizazz, I want pizza to you.

Nathan Wrigley: [01:09:52] But what even is WP pizza? I'm guessing it's a plugin to enable you to set up your own pizza. Real pizza shop to sell it to the world. I'm
Joe Casabona: [01:09:59] guessing, I don't know.
Anne McCarthy: [01:10:01] It looks like it's to keep track of online orders, right? Oh,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:10:05] who wouldn't need that right now, if you're afraid to join, that would have been, I bet they've had a bumper year anyway.
So there you go and check that out. And lastly, forgive me. I'm going to plug something and that is, I'm going to do this really quick page builder, summit.com. We're running the page builder summit again. And if you want to sign up, you can, Oh, I should probably show it on the screen. That's hopeless.
Isn't it. Page builder, summit.com. If you're interested, you can join the wait list by clicking that pink button and filling in a form. And that's my piece on that. Go and check it out. But I think we've run out of things to say we probably haven't run out of things to say, but I've got nothing else to say, Paul, anything I missed?
Paul Lacey: [01:10:44] I got nothing.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:10:45] It's always good. When Paul says he's got nothing, it means the show is coming to an end. We do often mention things that we're going to do during the course of this week. Obviously Paul's got a whole bunch of stuff in the next four hours. Bless him. But anything else Paul, this week?
Paul Lacey: [01:10:59] I'm getting a new picture for my wall as part of my studio
Nathan Wrigley: [01:11:05] project. I'm going to interrupt. I'm sorry, Fritz arrive. If you watch the show, you'll have noticed that. My background is pretty terrible. Paul has really raised the bar this week. Paul has called, do you mind me saying that you've moved house, but it's too late.
I've said it and he's moved house. And so he's got himself all TECNODE up with colorful backgrounds on
Paul Lacey: [01:11:26] cameras. In my house for the first time in my life, I've always had to rent an office cause we've never had a room in the house for it. And now I've got my own office with my stuff. My X-Box is there, my blue light.
I'm loving it. And I've got a gigantic picture of Milky way to go on that wall back there is that was coming. Oh, nice.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:11:45] Yeah. Can I just say
Paul Lacey: [01:11:47] you should see what it looks like from here though? The bit I'm looking at is basically everything that was on that desk before the show.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:11:55] We're all the same.
Paul Lacey: [01:11:56] It's all fake.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:11:57] It's all fake. If we turn the camera on Joe and there'd be clutter. Yeah, exactly the same. Can I just make a recommend, lose the X-Box nothing's going to happen? Is it, let's be honest. It's just going to get really into the X-Box anyway, moving on. Anything happening this week, Joe, and he's an exciting,
Joe Casabona: [01:12:14] well, someone would Paul, I'm getting a new picture right over here.
It's a combination of Wanda division and the haunted mansion. If you've ever been to the haunted mansion at Disney world or Disneyland, they have those. Elongated pictures and there's a one in a one division style I'm super stoked on. But aside from that, I will be working on my next set of YouTube videos and an update to my Gutenberg course, which will have a whole section on full site editing.
So where can
Nathan Wrigley: [01:12:42] we find that the YouTube channel and the Gutenberg course? Where do we
Joe Casabona: [01:12:45] go? Thanks you for the YouTube channel, you can go to casabona.live. When I don't have a live stream there, it just redirects to my YouTube channel. And the courses are [email protected].
Nathan Wrigley: [01:12:58] Thank you so much. I feel I need a picture now.
I'm just Anna. You getting a picture of this. I'm
Anne McCarthy: [01:13:03] such a minimalist. It's no, there's no way. It's so funny to hear. I keep forgetting that you can do that. Like it's Oh, I couldn't, I could, but I never, it never occurs to me. I've always been the person with like empty walls, which is really funny.
I have a lot of friends being like, how do you live? Like this? I'm like, it's great white space.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:13:20] Anything this week.
Anne McCarthy: [01:13:22] I actually have a big presentation for WordPress, Megan meetup talking about full sightings. So if you ever want to get like a deep dive on everything, I've I recorded the presentation last week and I'm getting feedback today and probably I'm gonna have to rerecord again.
It's pushing on 30 minutes right now. I'm not including Q and a, so trying to condense it, but also make sure it's really high impact, but that's the big thing coming up. It's on Thursday, probably best for folks in the U S or in Asia Pacific, but it's at 6:30 PM Eastern on the 15th. So I'm really excited about that.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:13:53] Have you got a URL for that? Is that an easy one to say or?
Anne McCarthy: [01:13:56] Yeah. Now if you go to bring it up how would I share this? Maybe if he went to it's on meetup.com. Okay. But it's a SF hyphen WordPress hyphen users. And then they'll, that'll be the latest event that's on there. Okay.
Paul Lacey: [01:14:10] I'll tell you what, if you send us the link?
Joe Casabona: [01:14:14] Yeah. Dave is also tweets it a lot. I'm really bummed cause I have my own meetup that I organized at that same time. So I'm going to have to catch the replay later.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:14:25] All about the personal touch here. You get the actual video from the extra two minutes at the end where you forgot to turn the camera off. Yeah. So I'm not getting a picture this week. I'm just going to be editing video and things like that, but hopefully it'll be a fairly stress-free week.
The kids are going back to school in the UK, so I'll have a bit more time and space, but okay. That's the short story.
Paul Lacey: [01:14:45] Oh,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:14:45] such a big thing. Yeah. Since the end of middle ish, before Christmas, the shop shot, all of them shot. The only shops that have been allowed to open in the UK are food shops basically.
And today they're all allowed to open again. So as is always the case, I will be avoiding them like the plate, shopping.
Joe Casabona: [01:15:05] I get my second dose of the vaccine tomorrow. I'm so excited.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:15:09] Yeah. Good for you. That is good news. Yeah. So in just a matter of days, you'll be fully treated. Yeah.
Joe Casabona: [01:15:16] I have planned multiple date nights.
Oh,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:15:20] that's great. That's so cool. Isn't it? Do you have a passport system where you are? Are they going to demand some certification or
Joe Casabona: [01:15:27] no? And so yeah, we have those cards and I will ha I bought a laminator just to laminate it. But we don't have anything of
Paul Lacey: [01:15:36] teacher, always a teacher.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:15:39] Can it be laminated? Yes.
Joe Casabona: [01:15:42] Laminated might've been that friend's episode, but yeah, there's a big discussion going on about whether that the pros and cons of having a passport system, but. If I'm asked, I will gladly show it wherever and still mask up and everything.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:15:57] It seems this seems like the U S are doing great guns with the vaccination efforts.
So I'm really pleased for both of you hopefully, and just showed us on the screen,
Anne McCarthy: [01:16:06] my first dose, which I got very lucky. Got an appointment April 3rd. Yeah. Considering for my age range. And so I'm like, yes, amazing.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:16:13] Yes, exactly the same for me. Cause I'm, 28 or something and and I've had my first Paul cause he's 21.
Yeah.
Joe Casabona: [01:16:26] Being Husky has really worked out for me.
Anne McCarthy: [01:16:28] I have a friend who's a smoker who, same thing she got in North Carolina, they had a smoking roll and she was, I was like, I've never been so happy you smoked.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:16:35] Oh, wow. Yeah. That is interesting. Yeah. This is the typical segue at the end where, we should probably just end the show where we'll be back next week.
I can't honestly remember who is going to be on the show, but an absolute pleasure as always co-host Paul Lacey. And thank you so much to Joe Casabona and to Anne. And we've got that typical, awkward wave moment coming up. Thanks a lot, guys. See you next time. Bye.