Episode transcript

Ryan Burgess
Welcome to a brand new episode of the front end happier podcast. After years of doing this podcast, we have seriously failed to dive into the topic of WordPress. I'm surprised that it's only coming up now. But this is actually our second episode that's focused on WordPress this year. So it's really great to have Fabian Louise and Matthew is joining us to talk about the current state of WordPress and what we can expect in the future. Fabian, Louise and Matt. Yes. Can you give us a brief introduction of who you are, what you do, and what your favorite Happy Hour beverages?

Fabian Kaegy
My name is Fabian, I'm live over in Germany. I work as an associate director of control engineering, an agency called 10 up and essentially focus on building client websites most of the time, my happy hour beverage most of the time, it's just Fanta Orange.

Luis Herranz
Okay, my name is Luis. I'm a software engineer. I founded a company called Franchitti, which was a headless react framework for WordPress. Two years ago, we sold the company to automatic and since then, I've been working directly on WordPress core. Leading the design of a front end framework for WordPress, which is about to be released in WordPress six. Oh, Beveridge. I'm a big fan of JMeter below

Matias Ventura
Matthias Ventura, from Montevideo the way originally, I'm an engineer, I started philosophy did filmmaking and I've been morale. I've been at automatic, which is a company that leases company since 2010. So it's been a while. And I'd be leaving the Gutenberg Project in WordPress for the past six or so years. And I can get into like, what that is later on. And yeah, like, just happy to be here. My beverage of choice is, well, I'm having like tea now. But I would say like, sec, a

Ryan Burgess
nice, I don't think anyone's ever picked soc. So that's, that's good. I'm happy to hear that. All right. And it is Jem and myself from the panelists. Jim, you want to give introduction, Jim Young engineering manager at Netflix, and I'm your host Ryan Burgess. This episode is sponsored by our friends at fetch press. unlock the power of easy seamless deployments from Git repositories. Keep your site up to date, secure and running smoothly without ever breaking a sweat, leverage patch press to deploy your themes and plugins directly from GitHub, Bitbucket and get lab experience the convenience of your code updating automatically with every git push. Don't let manual updates using FTP slow you down. Discover the future of WordPress site management with fetch press. For a limited time front end, happier listeners can now receive 20% off their subscription. Just use the promo code happy hour at checkout. That's press making WordPress get hubs best friend, let's dive into our topic of WordPress. Maybe we should start off for our listeners who maybe have never used WordPress. I mean, that's been used heavily for years, but not everyone's using it. So I'd be curious to know what is WordPress. WordPress is

Matias Ventura
a content management system that's open source and has been around for more than two decades now. And it was originally forked from another blogging project. Back in 2003, or so it was originally blogging software, but it evolved into building sort of any website that you can imagine from for from publishers like how to know, all the way to like commerce sites, and so forth. And it now powers for the 3% of the web. And it's been in a constant process of evolution scenes. And that was, for me, that was one of the ways I got into web development. I was doing like Flash websites, I believe at the time for like, filmmaking and stuff. So I discovered like the web standards movement, through WordPress and so forth, and that got me into web development fully fully.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, thank you define it really well. I remember the early days of 22,003 or 2004 was early days when I was using WordPress. Yeah, it has evolved significantly throughout throughout these years. So that's awesome. Yeah, like why has WordPress continued to be such a popular tool 43% of the web is not small, like that is huge. And I would love to hear your thoughts like why is it so popular and continues to be so popular? I think one of

Fabian Kaegy
the reasons why it has stayed so popular and why it just grows and grows is that essentially it can power both the kind of single business owner, do it yourself website that you can just host on any server out there. But essentially one click install all the way up to sites like nasa.gov, or the whitehouse.com. site. And any anything in between, they're really kind of you can jump into it not knowing any code at all, you can just get started build your own site and are happy with that. But you can also use it as a framework to build really, really complex applications. And there's a really, really rich plugin ecosystem that essentially allows you to do limitless things and a lot of that with kind of pre baked solutions that are out there in the ecosystem that make it just really, really easy to integrate lots and lots of things on top of it, I would say,

Matias Ventura
Yeah, I think it's an interesting combination of the some of the philosophical aspects of the Software and the community around it. And, like, obviously, the open source and the GPL. But I think like it has made a lot of really interesting people gravitate towards it. And I think that has reflected itself on like a strong commitment to the user experience in the project. Especially if you go back then like, open source software was often synonymous with like, either like lower level infrastructure things, or things that were not very usable. And I think WordPress from the start had in mind that, for it to be a successful project, it had to measure itself with really good proprietary software that unmatched that sort of user experience. I think that's part of like why they had to evolve so much, because the expectations of what good software is these days, has been shifting so much. But I think like that the combination of like a strong commitment to the user experience, and then that inherent openness that allow the plugin ecosystem to develop that created software that was so flexible, that combination started to create this flywheel, I think that it continues to grow. And it's, but it's hard to like, it's sort of like easy to see retrospectively. But I think it's hard to tell like, exactly why, what are the ingredients that you need to like, put together because I think it's that combination of like, global community of people like very, like strong commitment to the to the user, the writing roots that it had, and so forth. The I remember, like the founder, like the co founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, once I think was one of the first time I ran across exit of the project, he was comparing open source with how we like we as a humanity have access to so much stuff that our ancestors that you'd like in music, you can go and read like conversations by bar, and there's so much stuff in the comments that allow us to do like the next thing. So applying that to the sort of software to like an expressive tool. How does that look. And I think that's sort of like the the ability for the project to reflect back on these more like, historical side of things, I think that also counts a lot for or at least has kept me for example, very engaged with the project, because I think it's something that can be can be shared, they can like be carried on like newer generation, some by now was like 20 Something year, there's been like multiple phases of people coming in, like contributing, going forward, and so forth.

Fabian Kaegy
And even being 20 years into it with I think there are about three or four releases happening every year. And every release seems between 608 100 contributors, a good portion of which is first time contributors, but also good kind of stable base, and just that amount of people all contributing towards that big piece of software is keeps, keeps it fresh and rolling.

Ryan Burgess
And when you say contribute to it, is that contributing to the core WordPress or is it plugins themes like is that all included?

Fabian Kaegy
The number of that I mentioned right now is specifically about core WordPress, the actual piece of software, not only code contributions, but also issue reporting, testing those types of things. But that is the actual core software, the actual plugin ecosystem is much, much more than that. I

Ryan Burgess
figured, because I think that's one thing that's been really awesome about WordPress is that it's so flexible, like you can create your own theme or go download a theme or download plugins, create your own plugins. So I think that that extensibility has been really impressive over the years. I think about the days that I've used WordPress is it was just flexible, where I could create something for a small client where they you know, they just need to manage like little text updates here and there. And you don't want to be the one stuck like getting that email, Hey, can you just update the, you know, small little thing here? We've changed our contact information. Can you just go do that when you can put the power into the users hands and that's flexible for them? I think that's and always really, really powerful. But then even just seeing over the years, how many sites use it in so many unique ways, publishing content into apps, right? Like I've, I've had to do that, where it's like you're giving like a content writer, the ability to write, and they don't want to, you know, they're not going to go download Xcode and try and like write content for that. But as a developer, you can ingest that content easily, and just give them something that they might be familiar with from other things they've worked on. So I think that's something that I've been impressed with, too. Yeah, I

Matias Ventura
think there was a lot of like, design creativity as well, in the in the early days as well, that funnel like I get, it was very connected with the web standards movement, and where the work that Jeffrey Selman was doing, and so forth. I think it's because it has gone through all of these steps, the flexibility and the plug in ecosystem, I think are huge. Both of plugins and themes, I think, has been like a huge driver of adoption. And I think it has led to Liberia where they've been more into the nitty gritty of the engineering, but I think there's, there's something about like the software that sort of grows as an organism that sort of starts to arrive at a sort of organic simplicity. After the years where like, the like, through all of these forces and planning and things and so forth, like, things started to emerge as sort of like the combination of these principles that I think has allowed these things to continue to be like, to continue to attract people to continue to be like, a tool that you can use to build anything,

Jem Young
like a whole ecosystem. And as developed around WordPress, you know, where people are making their living, making plugins. So it's not just like, the open source, like where you're kind of just computer contributing, like people are making a living off of it to ensure I'd say, like, contributed to its success, because people are now invested in good. There

Matias Ventura
are now like huge companies like built on top of like, either WordPress or like building plugins for WordPress, or as agencies for WordPress, or like, the the ecosystem is really rich. And I think it's also been, and there's not like one, one company that I like, controls the thing. And I think that has set has also been very, like a very fruitful environment. So

Ryan Burgess
I'd be interested to, you know, bring up some of like, there's obviously other things out there, competitors of WordPress, other platforms that people can leverage. You know, back in the day, I think when you try and think about which ones you wanted to do, I felt like Drupal was a big one at the time that was kind of comparable to WordPress, but I'm curious, like, what, what are comparables out there today? And what are the unique advantages that WordPress offers?

Matias Ventura
A good question. I can say I don't want to monopolize that. I think like, again, is then it has changed so much. And usually I remember like, it was all the blogging software, including blogger by Google at the time, I think was seen as a competitor. for WordPress. There was a time yeah, like Drupal was emerging and so forth. I think then there was a period where I think Tumblr was a strong competitor. It's interesting. Now Tumblr was bought by automatic, like, a couple of years ago, they were still trying to switch it to be powered by WordPress. But I think that these days, I think there's so much competition around the like, there's all the sort of software as a service sites like Squarespace, Wix, there's like new cameras, like framer, and Cam, I think also has like, a lot of like, really interesting tools that are sort of in the, in that sort of space. On the on the open source side thing, it's easy to see because the I think right now it's less seen as then there's one way of looking at it, which is like all of the proprietary system and all of the open systems, like Drupal, for example. Now we like there's like a very good like back and forth and collaboration now on the projects, like for example, like we were helping and working with a team our like the possibility of integrating Gutenberg, which is this block editor that we created for WordPress, into Drupal itself so that he can run and we can share like those systems and so forth. So I think like for the open source systems, it's a lot more collaborative than than competitive and it's more about the proprietary systems the size

Fabian Kaegy
and width with a proprietary systems. I think two of the big points are really the plug in YouTube ecosystem that is still a very large driver where there are just so many different solutions out there already for WordPress that mean that you can integrate, essentially anything with your WordPress site. And then we've just recently seen Webflow crank up the prices and you just don't own the data and you're stuck with the new system that you don't control. And that that is is one of the big freedoms of just using open source software where you are in control of the full stack, you can move hosts, you can move systems, you can move theme plugin, whatnot, and it's in the end of the day, your responsibility, but also your freedom of, of just owning your content your stack. And that that is very large thing we're seeing many, many folks switch from proprietary systems that are in house solutions that kind of are completely proprietary to just using the common orange open source tool, because it has so much support so much. You can find so many engineers that have worked with it that kind of know their way around it. And that, that really brings a lot of freedom with it in a way. So I also

Ryan Burgess
feel like, you know, Wordpress, or with anything that's been out there for many years, there's always like, negatives, or not even negatives that but like perceptions of something like WordPress, and I'd be curious, like, you all are close enough to it. And I've heard them too, like, there's certain things that people are like, oh, you can't use WordPress, because it's slow, or it's not scalable. You name it. There's been I've heard many of them out there. I'm curious, some of the ones that you all commonly hear. And are they actually true, and, you know, maybe just comment on like, how you feel about those misconceptions in the front end, Speaker 1 there used to be a moment in time where many people using WordPress, will download or buy a theme. And that theme was full of JavaScript, because they wanted to sell you the shiny new thing. So we wouldn't load hundreds of kilobytes of JavaScript. And it will make your site's is low. And for for a time, that was the was the thing, but it was not the fault of WordPress itself. Because you could make a theme that was super lean, and super fast and super performant. So it was more of a I don't know of counter trend. I think that trend has stopped now, people spend a lot of attention to like how scores and things like that, and performance. And you can make WordPress as performant as any other tool out there. You're when you're creating a theme, or when you're choosing a theme, if you choose a performant one, you're in control, you can do it, therefore, you can make it very performant. And that's for PHP themes, classic themes. But there is a new type of theme now, which is a block theme, which is a theme that is created only using blocks in the editor. So you'll have to write the code for that for for not only for the parts that the content editors and add in the pages and posts, but for the rest of the site. And in those we are, WordPress is absorbing, like the performance optimizations. So by default, when you're using a new blog theme, you're gonna get the very performance sites, I think most of them will rank 100 out of 400 in my house, things like that. And we are taking in this kind of new paradigm we are taking performance very seriously. So if someone is using a blockchain, that's going to be performed by default,

Matias Ventura
I think maybe other other things that historically has been really sort of similar like security, for example, like, the core WordPress experience is extremely secure. It has so many eyes from the Enter security community all the time looking at it. There's been historically like some, like special like in the long tail of the plugin system, like plugins that can introduce vulnerabilities, but like, it's been, like, super, super, like, I don't know, refined over the years, a plugin directory that reviews the, like the whole community, like coming together. So I think that's another sort of things that used to hang on top of it. But it was also like a question of like, just the size by being like the most popular CMS it just got a lot more attack vectors and, and trying things and so forth. But the I think that the performance story is very interesting, because the while you're good, like we're on top, but like maybe you could also imagine some of the front end frameworks has been like, in the space of competing with WordPress, even though they are not like CMS themselves. But like, yeah, what versal is awaiting or like deploying apps, like Netlify, and so forth. You could see and purely in the JavaScript framework, seen. I think also PHP has been something that people have like, like, like sort of caught up to it. It's funny now that like JavaScript frameworks are putting so much emphasis on server side rendering that like the whole story is like, is a bit more nuanced, at least, which is interesting. It's a we're having, like, better conversations on that. But like what Louise was saying about like, the front end like it, which is part of like, thing, though, is coming out on the 6.5, right, like some of the interactivity API items. So the idea that like, and yeah, we should, we should share as well like the WP movies dot dev demo at some point, like, which is a is a theme built on just using sort of, like use the WordPress editor to like, combine all these blocks. But on the front end, you get like, sort of single page navigation between things, you get real time interactivity, and you don't need to like call anything else. The idea is that if you use if you put these things together, well, you just WordPress does that for you. And it's so it's like, again, I think you can these days, you can get like an extremely fast performant reliable and

Fabian Kaegy
so website with with WordPress, and I'll let loose speak to the actual cool interactivity API stuff, since he's one of the masterminds behind it. But something that I think I also want to mention, in regards to just misconceptions is just developer experience of working with WordPress, that is something that every single person that I meet at a conference, when I say, Hey, I'm working mostly with WordPress, they kind of propel in a way where it's okay, that just means PHP and just old, outdated tech stack. And since kind of WordPress had that big paradigm switch about six years ago now where the actual editor, and the concept in WordPress is now, not so much a document based model anymore. But it's a block based model where every single piece of content, every single element on your site is just a block. And these blocks, there's a collection of I think it's somewhere way above the 30 days of core blocks that shipped with the software itself. But then it's also an API to allow you as extender, as a developer to build custom blocks for your integrations for your other elements that kind of need custom development. And in that world, we're essentially talking about, you have individual components that you're writing that have CSS code splitting, that have JavaScript code splitting, where only if that block is actually rendered on a page, will all of that stuff get included in your actual bundle on the front end. And the actual developer experience for it is, it's a modern tech stack, it's kind of the actual editorial experience for those blocks is written in react to the actual editor is written using React. And now with this upcoming version of WordPress, there's this front end interactivity API, which essentially, is what we're all talking about in Twitter these days with Alpine Jas or HTML X and kind of similar to all of that, in a way where, yeah, Louise can talk more about all of that. But I think the developer experience for somebody who has never worked with WordPress before and isn't using that. Yeah, you can still build a site the same way you did 20 years ago. But there also is this completely different approach to building modern WordPress sites that is much more similar to what you may experience on just straight up next Jas builder just so the whole developer experience is what I wanted to just mention, because yeah, that definitely got a bunch of improvements in the last couple of years. Speaker 1 Yeah, I think that the block editor has to be one of the biggest react applications out there. Because, yeah, and it's incredible, incredibly extensible as well. So yeah, most of the data the people working on on the block editor we're working with React most of the time. So you've

Ryan Burgess
kind of all alluded to that. Yes, there's a new version of WordPress coming, which is awesome to hear. What can people expect? I know you've mentioned some of the front end changes that are happening, what other features can people expect?

Matias Ventura
So it makes sense to tell me the way that WordPress does releases because WordPress tends to do like two, three releases a year. Those are like, split through the year. But we've been on what we call like the four phases of Gutenberg scenes, or like five, six years ago. And these four phases were like introducing this block editor written in JavaScript to allow essentially content creation that was the initial phase. The second phase was to use the system to allow you to build enter sites. So not just the content of posts and pages with everything around it like your header and your footer the site So all of the mechanics of the site, we've been on that face for the last like, three, four years or so. And over the last year, we got to the point where like, which to me has been very interesting to see the signers be able to build entire WordPress themes without touching code at all, sort of like using like the same way that you might use, like framer or Webflow, and so forth. Just combining like the blocks that's been so these the release that that is coming up now is like strengthening some of those concepts. And you bring in like, new tools for developers as well like the ability to have like, we have this notion of reusable blocks where you can like, modify the content, but the layout of the block of the pattern, you can retain it across different pages, and so forth. And, and one big piece is like introducing this interactivity API. And this affects like the way that you write the front end of sites, because the block editor is mainly a creative tool for the offer. But the interactivity API is also for like, the front end of the site and the visitors coming in like and being able to create these, these richer interactions. There's a long tail of like, fixes and improvements over this as well. But it's like, it's really putting some of the finishing touches on these phase two around customization. And, and then we're starting to get into like phase three, and phase four, which are phase three is about like real time collaboration. So adding the ability to collaborate on posts on the signs on anything across the WordPress experience. It's doing things around workflows as well, we're starting to expand the sort of the, the sign that we apply to the block editor to the rest of the admin experience. So they worked seamlessly across the whole experience. This is part of like that evolution thing of like, okay, you can trace back the interface of WordPress through the years. And this latest iterations are like really making sort of like come together as in a way more like a, like a single page application with like, a lot of these interactions with a team and so forth. And the phase four, which is still like a bit further away, is about multilingual, just for completion sake. So that's like the says, Six, this is WordPress 6.5, the one that's coming up, and

Fabian Kaegy
I'll just mention, because there's always a little bit of confusion with folks about WordPress release, releases. WordPress itself does not strictly follow semantic versioning. So I, in my mind have kind of switched to not thinking of it as 6.5, but rather, least 65. And then there's about three releases a year. And so WordPress itself always has the goal of backwards compatibility, updating your site from 6.4 to 6.5, or even from 6.9 to 7.0, won't break, things won't, there won't be a breaking change, it was really just, maybe, maybe in the future, sometimes they'll switch to a database system. But it's there about three or four releases in a year that just roll out new additions, new updates, features. And then sometimes there are security fixes. But it's not like there is this really big release that is in the works for years and years that then drops but it's more of a continuous improvement cycle. And this is just the latest one, I think the last one dropped in December, early end of November or December. And this will no drop at the end of March.

Matias Ventura
Yeah, that's a great point. Because I think it ties back to the the one of the first topics about like, why has WordPress grown so much. And I think that idea of like continuous improvement and backwards compatibility is really strong, we don't have like, you can have the size that we're like, and they continue to work. And I think that has, it makes development a lot easier, a lot trickier is very challenging, very challenging. To like, apply a lot of ingenuity to like, figure out how to bring, and we like to joke that we are both about like the Ship of Theseus around WordPress and how like, just like this metaphor of how like, if you change every piece of a shape while it's sailing, like is it still like the same shape because that's that sort of reflects the WordPress development in how like we want to like replace all the pieces but without the ship sinking in. So like we had like a strong commitment to backwards compatibility but also want to find a way to like, keep it going with shape all the pieces. And it's for people I think it's a fascinating challenge. It's difficult sometimes, but it's also very rewarding when it works when Yeah, when you can just like upgrade and things continue like just Failing smoothly. Speaker 1 Yeah, and it means that when you're designing for WordPress, for WordPress Core, you have one chance, it's like, you have to make it right the first time. Because what goes in core, it stays in core kind of thing. So it's very challenging, but very rewarding as well,

Fabian Kaegy
that in regards to actually, the release of WordPress 6.5, there are some cool features, there's this concept called patterns in WordPress, which essentially is a collection of blocks that is storage that you can reuse across your site. And kind of, if you've, if you're thinking about atomic design blocks, or atoms and patterns of the molecules of your, of your stuff. And we've had this concept of synced patterns, where just the entire pattern is synced across all of the different instances of the site. If you change the text in one of those instances, it just propagates through the rest of the site. And now there is this new concept called pattern overrides, which will allow you to say, Hey, I actually want to be text content or this heading. And I want this image and maybe this button text to be over writable by each individual instance. But the design portion of it is still synced. So if you update the layout, if you update, the style is the color any of those other elements of that pattern that will propagate throughout your site. But the actual overrides that are applied to the individual instances, kind of like figma components, will will stay present and will stay true to it. Which, especially for kind of the no code audience and actual end users, it will be a great, great improvement that I'm really excited for.

Jem Young
I'm learning so much like, I feel like every every front end developer at some point has worked in WordPress or touched it. It's one of those. Yeah, it's like a common story for all of us. So like this is a fascinating episode. With all these big changes, y'all are announcing how do you generally interact with the community and keep people up to date on all the happenings that as WordPress evolves over the years, there's no

Matias Ventura
question that I think there's multiple channels that there's wordpress.org has a blog, and a lot of these things like more end user facing are announced there. The blog is also linked in the dashboard of your site. So like there's like a wager where you can see like those news so it keeps like the broader community engaged. The community is more about like keeping up with like, the API's, the changes and the builder community. There's a make network that is like a set of blogs where like everyone contributing shares, the progress shows like coming projects, the roadmaps and so forth. For the WordPress core development happens in tracking some version for like the Gutenberg Project that happens on GitHub. And all of that is a all of the roadmaps and stuff are completely open. So it depends on the how close you are to the thing like how much awareness you have anything sort of goes in repulse, I think the different, like hosts would choose to communicate to their users, like when a new version is coming and all of those things. And there's also like WordPress does work camps, which are these events throughout the world, where people present both people making the software but also part of the, the ecosystem and the community. And there's like a couple of major work camps. thing right now we'll have three, like work work on Europe WordCamp us work on Asia, which is coming up now. And generally in those like, we present the okay, what's, what's been the latest work and what's coming up. And we talk about these phases of goodwill. That's where we talk about like, those things more in detail. Am I missing anything any other like, channels,

Fabian Kaegy
I would highlight that since mid last year, there is new developer focused blog on developer.wordpress.org/news. And that, on that blog, there is a monthly update what's new and developers in December, what's new for developers in January. And just subscribing to that essentially, once a month newsletter, I think is all the overview. Any developer that actually works with WordPress ever needs because it really highlights and curates all of the new happenings all the things to be aware about that are kind of on the horizon. And then also things that have just released or other cool blog posts, other cool topics, podcasts, YouTube videos, stuff like that just highlighted on that post on that blog. And Speaker 1 I think that when when you go to a workout for the first time, let's very special when you see the community gathering together and the why, and all the different people coming from different angles and experience. This and getting together, those are great. And people like to present on the work camps and they do a lot of networking and so on. For example, the we talked about the interactivity BI is not even there yet in work and Phenix in in there. In February, there was a talk about interactivity bi, made by I think this was Richard Robert Richardson. Yeah. And it's so people, he was not involved that he liked idea and he likes to, to, to share it with with other WordPress folks. And that, I think that kind of community thing goes very far. So

Ryan Burgess
before we dive into pics, I'd be curious to know from each of you, we've talked a lot about how flexible WordPress is extensible and and has been used for so many things. Since you all been very close to this for many years. I'd be curious to hear some of your thoughts on like, what are some of the creative things that you've seen over the years that have been WordPress has been used for think the

Fabian Kaegy
inverse question also is a good one, because I'm struggling to think of things that I haven't seen somebody tried to do with WordPress, even if it doesn't make sense at all to build it. Because it is, it is, for me as just somebody who has been developing with it for years, the easiest way to get a system that has off built in that has kind of management of individual entities kind of if you just use that bare bones back end and use the REST API, it can power pretty much anything which it may not be the right tool for it. But it is it is certainly capable of that. And so it's I'm still trying to think through the proper answer to your question. But I've seen so many so many weird things that I've seen a meal planning app that somebody had built, where it's just building a custom post type for the different meals and then schedule and then just using the REST API to manage kind of a Trello board style application where somebody's doing their meal planning powered by WordPress and the end which don't know whether you want to do it. But it's it's possible that I've seen it before.

Matias Ventura
There's games built with it as well, like, so all sorts of like crazy. And I was also thinking about like, not just WordPress but now with like this blog building API. There's been so much gratitude around like, I don't know VR 3d things built into the blogs and all sorts of like there's a there's this new thing like called playground which runs essentially like WordPress in web assembly in the browser, so you don't have like, and there's like, I wrote Ember blog where you can run WordPress inside that block. There's like, you end up running WordPress inside Gutenberg log written in React that sitting inside like WordPress and sort of like all sort of inception.

Ryan Burgess
I love it, you turn my question around, because it is true. Like I think of the things that I've even had to develop over the years where someone is very familiar with WordPress, like someone who's asking me that, whether it be like, maybe it's a leader that I'm working with our client, whatever it's been, and they're like, no, no, it needs to be done with WordPress, there was even times I remember I was at Evernote, and the director has was very familiar with with WordPress. And he had asked that he wanted to do some app notifications, or they were like announcements in app. And they were like, well, we should use WordPress now. Like, to be honest, I was like, No, we probably shouldn't, because like, it's a lot of heavy lifting. And those were the days before the REST API even existed. So it was like having to digest XML and making a linkage to it. But yes, we ended up doing that, just to give like certain announcements to people on the other end. I mean, it worked. And I think that's the beauty of this is like you can make anything work. And at the end of the day, whoever was writing the content was very familiar with WordPress. So that was the kind of bonus

Fabian Kaegy
it certainly I think, that is something where you, you can build pretty much anything with it. That doesn't mean you should build anything with it. For example, a while ago, I was working on a documentation site, essentially just documenting developer API's and kind of best practices around that stuff. And I, as somebody who is active in the WordPress community, I got a lot of heat for not choosing WordPress word, but instead choosing docuseries as the back end and using just straight up markdown. And in that case, it was really just, we wanted to be able to have markdown files collaborate in Git and have individual developers working on it. And because of that, just for this specific thing, WordPress wasn't the right choice. And I think that is perfectly fine. And I'm very happy with people using the actual tools that are specifically He built for it, while also kind of seeing that, yeah, it is such a flexible tool. And you can build all those things with WordPress. And so all I want to say is essentially, I think there are many other tools that also have a place out there. And the world is not just how you should do everything with WordPress, there are many things I wouldn't do with WordPress. But it is cool that you can start kind of pushing those boundaries sometimes helps us learn a whole lot about what it's actually good at. And what would be maybe never thought about right

Ryan Burgess
on. Well, I think it's probably a good time for us to dive into your picks. In each episode of the front end, Happy Hour podcast, we'd like to choose things and share with all of you that we found interesting, sometimes they're related, sometimes they're not to the topic, Jim, and you want to start us off. Yeah,

Jem Young
these are not related. But I have two picks for today. The first one is an article by Axios called take care of middle managers in a hybrid world. It's actually written in 2022. But the contents still relevant, where they kind of dive into the challenge of being a manager, where, you know, executives and the top people are saying like returned office, it'd be more productive when the managers have to be the one to kind of enforce that and take on the challenges of working the hybrid team. So I think it's really funny, it was a good article in 2022, not much has changed. And we're still there in 2024. So we're worth a quick read. And anything on Axios is usually a pretty, pretty easy and digestible read, because they write really well even wrote a book on it that which writers recommended in a previous podcast. My next pick is a Netflix show called Six Nations full contact. It's a documentary about rugby, which is really fascinating, because I've always seen rugby, but I've never really got into it. And like watching the documentary just gave me so much respect for the sport. These guys are hardcore, like they're hitting each other. And they're not wearing any pads or any helmets. Obviously, they don't hit each other in the head. That's like a very big penalty. But yeah, it's like, and they're running up and down and keep doing it for 75 minutes or so. So really, really great documentary, I'm really digging the Netflix sports documentaries, right? Just kind of shows me more insight into sports that I had known about, but not known as much about. So those are my picks for today. Who

Ryan Burgess
would like to go next? Or should I just start picking people?

Matias Ventura
I don't know most. All right, one, one related, which is the dial up movies, dot them website, which is built with these like interactivity API. And in one recent example of like, extremely fast site, built exclusively with blogs, sort of as a showcase of what's possible with modern WordPress. And the other one is like something that I find really fascinating that they happen very recently. I know you've seen it around, I think it's made the news, the the Vesuvius challenge, where the so the, like the recovering the papyrus that were burned by the Soviets eruption in antiquity. And there's been this challenge, I think their website is crawl price.org. And it's been, it's been a very fascinating thing to see. So the idea is that, like, we have these completely carbonized scrolls of papyrus with like, last words from antiquity. And there's been like, a community coming together to apply like, AI and machine learning to try to like extract the text from these tools. And there was a challenge posed to like trying to get there. And end of last year, they managed to like having like a breakthrough and actually, like, have like the context of scroll without like, the process means like, they need to, like digitally like, sort of open up the scroll the text, where like, where are they where's the ink and so forth. And it has been like, really, really interesting to see. And through this year, I think they will try to get to read more of these girls. So the idea is that this villa was, was a philosopher and Andouille. There was like, sort of philosophy in residence at this villa cara a huge library. So there may be a lot of words that we have lost through times. So I'm really fascinated about that.

Ryan Burgess
Fabian, what do you have for us?

Fabian Kaegy
I wanted to pick the Apple TV plus show lessons and chemistry that I just watched the last couple of weeks. I was fascinated by it. Didn't know anything beforehand, but is really kind of really cool showcase of just gender, race, all of those things in the 60s and just beautifully written, beautifully shot and really, really liked that show. Highly encourage everybody to check that out.

Ryan Burgess
Right on Louise, Speaker 1 I think I would choose it talk by John Cleese, one of the month The buttons on creativity, talking about how to switch from open to close mode. And what do you have to do to be in open mode and stay creative when you have to solve problems? I think it's been the single most impactful thing that I've seen kind of online, that Hafstrom have been translated into something really useful for me to know when you're in closed mode when you're in open mode, and when you need to think about something, and come up with creative solutions. So that definitely, also one of my favorite books, I love real stories. And this was this is one of my favorites is called, I think it's not very well known. It's American Kingpin. And it's the story of the founder of Silk Road, which was the first shot of the web. And it's a fascinating story. It's how you say it's a novel. But based on the real facts, absolutely fascinating.

Ryan Burgess
Very cool. That does sound interesting. All right, I have two picks for this episode one is actually related. But we have a front end masters has a new blog that they've called and just released earlier this year, I believe, called Boost. Guess what it's built on. It is built on WordPress. But it's been it's been a great blog post starting out already. They've had some really great contributors being one being the main one, Chris coIour. So there's a lot of great material on that. So I highly recommend checking out front end masters blog, obviously to have front of Masters is a great one for courses. And my other pic is not related. It is a photography related item called the DJI Osmo six, it's a gimbal really just small handheld gimbal for your mobile phone. If you'd like to take videos on your phone, I highly recommend it acts as a nice little tripod has like active tracking and keeps your phone nice and steady. So you have nice, clean shots and not that jumbled mess when you're walking. So definitely been a cool tool that I've been playing around with the three of you. I want to thank you all for joining us, Louise Fabian and Matt Diaz, where can people get in touch with you? This has been really great. And I'm sure you have a lot of advice to share on WordPress, where can people get in touch with you online, you

Fabian Kaegy
can still find me on Twitter. I wouldn't call it x or anything at Fabien kaigi. Same across all social media you'll find me on message on all the places and in the WordPress like using the same handle. So it's that handle and all the places Speaker 1 it's the same for me, Luis Iran's name and surname in Twitter, in GitHub, in Slack everywhere. Go

Matias Ventura
and for me, Matthias underscore Ventura on X Twitter and Matias ventura.com on my blog, the

Ryan Burgess
TSE just had to say x ninja All right, well, thank you all for listening to our episode. You can find us on things like Twitter at front end ah, ah, we are on YouTube at @frontendhh, subscribe to us on whatever you like to listen to podcasts on any last words

Matias Ventura
I think like I'm just like so happy that we had this conversation so thank you very much for stayed up. I would I would love for like people to check out what WordPress is up to and to like, reach out and like if anything strikes or Francie to like, get involved like see what see what how things are going. And yeah, this

Ryan Burgess
has been an awesome conversation. I know Jen mentioned it. I've learned a ton to just because I you know, I've been so close to WordPress earlier in my career and haven't really done much with it since. And it's so cool to see how much it's evolved. So thank you all for educating us as well. This has been great. Thank you. Thanks you