Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Within WordPress, the podcast about WordPress and people working in WordPress. With WordPress. With us today is Kevin.
Welcome to the show, Kevin.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.
[00:00:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I think you're one of the. Probably the. One of the most vocal people on or in the Twitter bubble X bubble about WordPress. Facebook probably as well.
But for those who may have never heard of you, please introduce yourself.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Sure. My name's Kevin Geary. I am the CEO of Digital Gravy, former agency owner. We've now transitioned 100% into software. I'm a WordPress educator. We have a number of WordPress plugins, automatic CSS frames, and we are building the next era of visual development in WordPress, which we call Etch, which is a visual development environment. And it's got a lot of kind of unique twists and turns and a unique take on how development should be done going forward in WordPress. That's kind of everything in a nutshell.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: That in itself sounds already quite opinionated.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: It is.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: What is a visual builder?
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Well, everybody knows what a page builder is, obviously, and a page builder allows you to assemble pages. But of course, then they moved into what they would call site building, where you can have your header and your footer built as well. A visual development environment, though, removes all of the limitations that people. People don't like about page builders. It gives you access to the code, for example, it writes clean code instead of bloated code. And then it also combines a lot of other aspects of the workflow. Because my philosophy is that we are doing a lot of work in a lot of different areas. For example, custom post types, media management. These are all parts of our workflow. And right now they're very disjointed, and they're all done in what I call like a magic area. Like, I want to manage media. Well, that's not done here. Or I'm doing my work in this, in this environment. I got to go to a different environment, this magic area where I can magically manage my media. And then I want to create a custom post type for services or a team or something like that. I can't do that where I'm doing my current work. I got to leave where I'm at now. I got to go to this other magic area. I got to do this thing over here, and it becomes a very disjointed workflow and it's very inefficient. We're always, I mean, we, we know time is money. Like we're trying to work as efficiently as possible. And nobody enjoys stopping what they're doing and going to a completely different place to do the next bit of work and the next bit of work and on and on and on. And then when you're managing a website, you're constantly jumping all over the place. So a true visual development environment should unify all of this stuff. If I am building my page, I can also manage my media when I'm ready to do that, I can also inline. When I'm about to build a team grid, for example, I can make my CPT right there, I can make my custom fields right there. I don't have to leave where I'm at. And then, of course, like I said, I don't have the limitations of a normal page builder, where if I need to access the code, I can access the code. And it's writing code probably better than a normal developer would write it. Like, that's the standards that we're building to. And that's kind of a glimpse of what we consider a visual development environment.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: I find it a very interesting approach.
You indicate that there's a one place to do all the things that sort of suggests that there's a type of WordPress builder that favors that meaning what does your avatar look like? What is your ideal edge user? What. What is. What do they look like?
[00:03:52] Speaker B: Yeah, Etch is designed.
Etch is designed for professionals and aspiring professionals.
So people ask, can a beginner use it? Well, a beginner can use it if they're willing to learn the language of web design. One of the problems page builders is that they're all designed with the same premise in mind. And their premise is, how do we create an environment that is very easy and approachable for somebody that doesn't know what they're doing? And because of this, they've made a lot of decisions and they've come to a lot of conclusions, and they have been very opinionated in how page builders should work. And we think that that's not necessarily the wrong question. I mean, we can get into the philosophy of would somebody that doesn't know what they're doing ever actually be able to build a page versus just loading up a template and changing and things like that.
We feel that a much more interesting question is what would a visual development environment look like if it was actually tailored to professional use, if it actually innovated a professional workflow and did things that actual professionals wanted it to do in the way that they wanted it done? And that is exactly what etch is. So People that currently write code, for example. We have a number of people on our team, we have a number of people on our board of advisors that live in VS Code and they, they hand code WordPress themes. These are people that would actually want to move to Etch because again, it's going to speed everything up and make their life amazingly better without the limitations that they believe would be inherent in a visual development environment.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: Right. So that basically means your definition of a professional is somebody who primarily works on the front end, I would assume.
[00:05:38] Speaker B: I mean they could have a number of skills, but yes. And it's somebody that builds, it's somebody that builds websites of consequences how I refer to them usually for money. Right. Or there are a lot of people in our, in our community that are just very serious hobbyists and they don't, they don't. They're not an agency, they're not a freelancer. They're building their own sites for themselves. But they do care tremendously about quality, maintainability, scalability in their website, following best practices. Accessibility and regular page builders don't suit them. And so they're very excited about Etch as well.
[00:06:13] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I can see the use of it.
For the longest time I've been using Genesis as a framework and for, you know, there's a few reasons why I don't, why I never really have dived too deep into the page builder world. I think there's, there's a huge lock in there, combined less and less now. But certainly when, when this started to take, when this really started to take off, there was, there was serious performance concerns. Yep, there were.
Why are we adding three, four extra layers to do something very simple. I, I take it that what I hear you say is, in my mind is kind of a Genesis approach in a sense that you're talking code more than just, you know, everything in the, in the user interface and then sort of using the best parts of a page builder, a site editor, to basically marry the two together in a way that you can go back and forth. Is, is that, I mean I'm probably, yeah, oversimplifying but.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: Well, so every negative that you can come up with for a page builder we have removed because we believe those are negatives also and we believe that that should not be. You shouldn't have to make those trade offs in order to expedite your workflow. So for example, you mentioned lock in. That is very true. If you build in a normal page builder, your content will be locked into that page builder.
[00:07:58] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: You can liberate Content in various ways. So blog posts are liberated by using the Gutenberg editor and then pulling that content in via a template. Right. You can liberate certain data with custom fields, because those custom fields, that data is stored in WordPress and you bring those in dynamically with dynamic data. And a page builder etch actually liberates all of your data. So when you build an etch, everything that you build in etch. Etch is probably most interesting feature in terms of data liberation is what we call auto block authoring. So everything that you build in etch is replicated automatically in real time in the block editor. And we use only native blocks, there are no proprietary blocks. And it is a one to one replica of what you built in etch. So if you build a whole page in etch and you hit save and you go into the block editor, it's sitting right there, all built with native blocks.
[00:08:58] Speaker A: That's a very interesting approach.
That is basically how it should have been built. Now granted, every page builder out there that started predates the introduction of the Gutenberg product.
So the block editor, the site editor, both are results of the Gutenberg project.
So they've been locked into their own system, which at the time, from their perspective, I'm sure they thought of as a smarter way to do. You come in with this solution at a time that we have a relatively mature block editor, site editor, a lot of work to do still. But the block editor and what you can do with it and how you can play with it, it's in my mind quite mature, not where it needs to be. But that's a separate discussion.
There's still a lot of improvements that you can do there as well. But you're stepping into this from that perspective, right? I don't think you're targeting people still working with the classic editor as a, as a design your content principle type of user.
[00:10:06] Speaker B: Yeah, probably not. I mean the. To us, the block editor is a really great content editor. It's not, I don't, I don't agree with its use as a site editor, as a page builder or kind of anything beyond content editing.
But ideally, like people use the block editor, the data liberation aspect of etch is very important to a lot of people and they would need the block editor active and working for that to happen. Right.
The second layer of that is a lot of people tell us that what is very important for them is their clients are able to go in and make content edits and simple layout changes and things like that.
That is automatically possible with etch's auto block authoring because now you simply direct and actually a lot of people tell us their clients do like Gutenberg. Okay. So their client can go in and make those changes in Gutenberg after the page is built in Etch, they can make the change. So Gutenberg actually just becomes the client content editor and you don't need like a, well, how do I make Etch friendly to my client? That doesn't need to happen. They can just go into the block editor and do their changes there. And it all, it's the auto block authoring is a two way sync. So anything that happens in Gutenberg also.
[00:11:16] Speaker A: It would have to be back into Edge. Yeah, yeah, that's a very interesting approach.
I would say that by doing so, you know, obviously it's, it's a huge undertaking to build any version of a page builder, but to also have one of its core concept be that you are in full sync with the default editor, that's a huge undertaking.
But it also, I would imagine means you're going to have to approach basically every single aspect from a different angle and be all encompassing on that, which means you have to make tough choices.
So, so yeah, how do, how do you weigh those? Where. What.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: So actually it has not been that difficult. By the way, this is already, we're not talking about this in theory. This already is working, right? This already is happening.
So I know a lot of people haven't. The way that we launched at, we pre launched atch, we've been building it with the core group that participated in the pre launch. There's about 1500 users of etch already just based on the pre launch. And so those people have access to etch. Those people can see etch, they can see the progress. But essentially it's a black box. Nobody else on the outside has seen it now. They will see it later in March, like toward the end of March. We're doing another preview and then another rounds. So another group will be able to get in and they'll be able to see the progress. But this is stuff that is happening right now. And actually, you know, we, we thought in the beginning maybe we're going to need proprietary blocks. Maybe we can't actually do this with, with core blocks so far. And I mean we're, we're into components, we're into conditional logic inside of components, conditional logic.
[00:12:59] Speaker A: And what's a component in your language?
[00:13:01] Speaker B: So a component in my language is, and so that's a great question because components in page builder land are not true components typically.
So yes. We want a component where you can have obviously your design, your colors, spacing, all of that is mapped across your components. But you have a instance level control over the content in the HTML. And I can have attributes and I can have conditional logic that control those attributes. So that the basic example would be like a button. And I can create a button component and obviously I can create maybe an attribute to control its color or even an attribute to control what utility classes are attached to it. I can create a icon. Now we, we went into a deep philosophy about this. Like if anybody's familiar with Figma based components, you create like snapshots, like instances. Okay. Now I'll make a icon version of that button and we'll call it an icon button. And then when I add a button, I can choose whether I want the icon button or. Or the other button. Yeah, these are snapshots. We have gone away from that. We don't think that's the best way to do it. We're just going to use conditional logic inside of the component itself. So there's one master component and I can put an icon in and I simply wrap it in an if statement, which in a visual development environment is an if block. Okay. And I create a prop that is essentially a switch that says has has icon. Right. And so when I add a button, I can say this one has an icon or this one doesn't have an icon, and I can create an unlimited number of props and conditions and all this stuff. So I have master control over the entire component, but I have instance level control over the label of the button, maybe the URL of the button. Anything that I want is completely possible. So that is true component functionality inside of etch.
[00:14:47] Speaker A: Yeah, it goes a little bit further than what we have in, in the site editor as patterns and dynamic patterns and you know, any and all flavors of that. Yes, this is actually, I think the.
[00:15:00] Speaker B: Partially synced patterns is what they were going to call the next generation. Is that right where you can.
[00:15:05] Speaker A: I lost track.
[00:15:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know what they. Yeah, they changed the names too.
But yeah, until you can have instance level control over the content, components, mostly useless. It's just a globalized, like duplicate of something. And if you think about a card, I mean the cards need, they need unique media, they need unique titles, they need unique descriptions, they need unique everything. Right. And so if your component has to be detached from its global nature in order to do those things, and then you can't restore that in any form or fashion, that's they're useless components. Or I just say they're neutered components.
[00:15:40] Speaker A: Right.
[00:15:40] Speaker B: It's like this, like version of a component.
[00:15:42] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, they serve a purpose to some degree. And there's a lot of cases where you can say this is, this is fine, but you're giving up a percentage of freedom, a percentage of choice, a percentage of.
Can I have a variant that's not presently presented to me? Well, yes, in your case you could. And in my case I need to build a version of that block.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:16:13] Speaker A: And even in doing so, I still don't have granular control as assuming your components would work. Is that a. Is that a correct?
[00:16:22] Speaker B: Yes. And I'll tack on one extra bonus of our components. So if we imagine a section as a component. Right. No other tool right now allows you to create a section component. It wouldn't be useful because you can't put any random content into it. It like, it does kind of become a black box. You can only have props and assign data to props. But you can't just drag, like, I can't just drag an image into a section component. It just doesn't work.
And so our components are also going to have something called slots. And so we can put a slot in a component. And a slot can handle any content at any time that you want to put inside that component. So that's going to be another layer to the functionality. And this is why I say that actual devs, like people who write code, are going to want to use etch, because this is the kind of stuff that they can't do in a traditional page. These would be the objections. I want to do something like this. I can't. Well, you can do it inside of etch. And not only can you do it inside of etch, you're literally doing it in click, click, click seconds versus sitting there and writing all of the code yourself and figuring out all of the logic yourself and the architecture yourself. That's already done for you. We already know what you need. You're going to be able to do that kind of stuff in seconds, loops and logic.
[00:17:33] Speaker A: All.
[00:17:33] Speaker B: All of the advanced things that. That pros want to do.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: It'll be built easily accessible in Edge.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:17:39] Speaker B: With, by the way, no extra code output. Like for example, you make a component in etch, you do a loop in etch, you do conditional logic in etch, you can do all of that advanced stuff. Hit save, go inspect the dom. There is zero indication. You cannot identify what is being looped, what is being conditioned, what is Being componentized, nothing in the dom. There's no extra wrappers. There's no. The code is clean as a whistle. It is as clean as it can possibly get. So there is no cost to using Etch where most people would have objections.
[00:18:13] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I, I haven't played with it yet.
Kind of looking at it from. I, I need more information in, in.
[00:18:24] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:18:24] Speaker A: You know what, what, what does this actually look like? Like, I, I've seen you introduce it and I've seen and read.
[00:18:31] Speaker B: Well, you. I can give, say I could give you a preview anytime you want. You know, I just can't give everybody a preview anytime they want.
[00:18:38] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I'll, I'll, I will definitely take you up on that. But what it sounds like is, yes, you're reinventing the wheel, but it actually will be a better wheel.
[00:18:51] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: How are you finding the developers that are having access?
Is the vast majority coming from either Oxygen or Bricks or Elementor type of environments?
[00:19:04] Speaker B: Vast majority from Oxygen and bricks. They're already familiar with the class first workflow with tokenized workflow, all of that. You know, many, many, many are ACSS users. Yeah. We have a good core group and.
[00:19:21] Speaker A: I would imagine, imagine that for them it's relatively easy to sort of get into the mindset of this is how it works within Edge.
What I'm very curious about is the group that has no clue on anything other than a classic theme, a hybrid theme, or a, you know, full site editing theme. How are they finding this?
[00:19:43] Speaker B: Anybody that has any sort of background in web design, if they understand HTML and they understand CSS and they've used css.
[00:19:51] Speaker A: Hold on. When you say web design, that is not your typical designer.
[00:19:56] Speaker B: Correct? Development. Yes, yes. The industry is referred to as web design.
[00:20:00] Speaker A: Yeah, I know, I know.
[00:20:01] Speaker B: But you're on the development side of web design. Yes, yeah, that's who I'm talking to now. So any, because this is an important point. Page builders do not speak the language of web development. Okay, we'll use the term web development. They speak a proprietary language. If you don't know anything and you go learn Elementor, you know elementor, you don't know web development, you know elementor because it speaks a completely different language.
Etch speaks the language of web development. So if you already know the language of web, you will feel right at home inside of Etch. There's nothing new to learn if you don't know the language of web development. We can teach you. So I have a, I have a free course, 100 free called page building 101. And it actually teaches it from a visual development environment perspective, but it teaches the actual fundamentals and principles and hundreds, maybe thousands, I don't know, probably thousands at this point of elementor, users of divi, users of traditional page builder users have gone through that course and I get emails from them all the time. They have completely switched over to a different workflow. They've left those builders. They're using bricks now or they're, they're not so much oxygen anymore. But most of them are using bricks now. They're. And they've never been happier. They've never been more confident. And they are actually happy that they're learning the. Like, they feel confident because they no longer feel like an imposter. Right. Like, people ask me where imposter syndrome comes from and I go out. I mean, if you don't know what you're doing, if you're doing the work, that's kind of where it's coming from.
[00:21:30] Speaker A: Well, I think, I think it's more than that. But, but I. That most certainly not understanding the foundation you're working with. Yeah. Like, you know, if you tell a. If, if there's a house being built and the carpenter only comes in to put in the window sills and, and you know, because we have brick houses here in the Netherlands, just FYI, we don't do the whole wooden thing you have over there.
[00:21:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:51] Speaker A: So then the carpet is like, you know, let me, let me just know where to put the bricks. And then somebody points them and go, go, go, go, go do your thing. But if they have no clue what the finishing touch is going to be between the bricks and the actual, you know, lumber, you're. You're kind of lost. You. You just do what you're told and you go, look, fine. This is, I guess this is how it works.
[00:22:15] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:22:16] Speaker A: Don't ask that person to find the best solution. Don't ask that person to be creative because there's no room for that. You're. You're basically, you know, you didn't see it get built. You didn't see the, the designs, you didn't see the architectural thoughts and spirit behind it. You're just doing your job, which is, I think, you know, there's a lot of people working with WordPress that sort of land in WordPress, because that's the way they could, could get into web development or web design.
[00:22:46] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:22:47] Speaker A: And, and to no fault of their own.
You know, that is a limiting way to do your work, which is, you know, I do a lot of focus on building things the way they should be built.
And it's surprising that when I. When I have questions about that, and I explained that there's multiple layers that we have to consider, and every single layer has a different approach or has a different, you know, application. Not like little application, but this is where you use it for, and this is what you don't use it for. And this is how it speeds up, and this is how it slows down.
People go, like, really? I didn't know that. I just thought I had to turn on a plugin. There we go.
[00:23:29] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:23:32] Speaker A: I mean, imposter syndrome, I think, is.
The other side of it is. I think it's a.
There's a part of it that is driven by somebody who wants to do better but doesn't know how to do it better. And always see somebody who does it better than they do and thus never says, you know, I. I got this. No, I don't think I'm good enough, so let me try and fix it.
But I think there's a. There's a. There's a lot of.
You have an educational part of your product, and I like that a lot.
There's a few more products out there that sort of, you know, they're built from that premise. Like, not only are we building a solution, but we want to educate you on how you actually should be building the entire solution.
[00:24:22] Speaker B: Right.
[00:24:23] Speaker A: And not just say, you know, here's. Here's a thing, here's a component, here's a thing, and here's another thing, and just sort of mix it together. And you have a working website. Sure you do. But you're going to run into issues at some point.
[00:24:34] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Page building 101, in the process of teaching fundamentals, and people ask me, you know, like, when we develop products, we're not developing products by looking at a market and saying, where's the gap? Where's the opportunities? Where's the money? Let's build a product to fit that. We are looking at the market and saying, where are the problems? Where are the challenges? How do we build solutions to those things? And so that's actually very freeing because I can do a course that's free, like page building 101. And if I did it with Etch, for example, it would sell Etch by itself. Like, I wouldn't have to sell Etch in the course.
[00:25:09] Speaker A: I get it. I get it.
[00:25:11] Speaker B: Because they would see it. And this is what happened with bricks. They would see me doing stuff in bricks. And I'm saying why I do it. I'm doing this for maintainability purposes. I'm doing this for scalability purposes. I'm doing this because when I can, when I need to change this thing, and I, and I relate to them by telling stories, like stories about a fictitious person called Bev. Bev is the person who has all of her opinions. She wants shit to be pink. And she, you know, she, she has all these stupid ideas, right?
She's from accounting, by the way. She's not a designer. Because everybody from accounting obviously needs to have an opinion on the website. So, you know, Bev want you to change this, this card design. And you've styled everything at the ID level and you're using a traditional page builder. And so now your life exists of like copying and pasting styles to every instance of this card that's on the website. You don't even remember where half of them are, right? You're hunting them down. But if we had just designed this with classes, we could just change it in one place and we're good to go. And now Bev is satisfied and we can move on with our life, right? It takes two seconds. And so they watch me do that and then they realize, oh, well, oh, I, I can't do that in Elementor. I can't do that in Divi. They don't have a class first workflow. They don't have this thing that you're doing here.
[00:26:25] Speaker A: For those listening who have no clue what a class first approach means. Like in. So the most, most of them are going to connect it to a CSS class.
[00:26:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:34] Speaker A: So can you explain a little more?
[00:26:36] Speaker B: That's correct, yeah. So a CSS class is essentially a label. Like, you know, in Gmail you can label something and you can put, you can slap 10 labels on it if you want. And every label means something. And in web design, a label just contains specific styles. So you might have a background color and a border radius and something else, and you assign that to a class. And maybe my class is called card because I'm making this thing called a card in web design, right? And so this is how my card looks. And if all of my class, all of my cards have that card class, and I need to change something about them. Like they're border, radius, maybe it's set to 10 pixels, and I actually want it to be 5 pixels. I don't have to go from card to card to card to card, changing 10 to 5. I just go to the class which stores that border radius 10 pixels I change it to 5 pixels. Now all of my cards are 5 pixels. And so I have a single source of truth for the design of a thing that is repeated all throughout the website. Right. And anytime I'm repeating something, anytime there's going to be more than one. I do not want those styles to live with that individual thing. I want them to live with a class. And that class controls all instances of that thing. And that is tremendous for scalability, tremendous for maintainability.
[00:27:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that is the smarter way to go. I think there's some, some applications out there that call it helper classes.
[00:28:01] Speaker B: Yeah, Helper classes utility classes utility, different philosophies. There's a utility first workflow. There's a BIM first workflow. There's, there's. We can get into philosophy for sure.
And you know, I would say in a page builder, a utility first workflow is not the way to go for various reasons. And I've outlined this in, in detail in a bunch of different places, but that's neither here nor there. That's the, that's exactly what a class does, essentially.
[00:28:28] Speaker A: Yeah. So then a class based system basically means you end up with. I think. Yeah, you, you already said it. But the, the maintainability for me would be the core driver.
[00:28:41] Speaker B: Yes. Then you combine that with components because CSS classes will give you a single source of truth for styling, but they won't give you any control over the HTML of a thing. Right. Whether the card has an icon, whether the card has an image. That's a component level.
[00:28:57] Speaker A: Yeah. So, so how close is something like Tailwind, the, the philosophy of what, what that set of css. I don't even know how to best describe it, but it's, it's, you know, it's, it's a, it's a CSS utility class, I guess.
[00:29:12] Speaker B: Yeah. So Tailwind is a utility class library. It's a utility first workflow. It is. They kind of, I don't know that they pioneered it, but it's obviously the most popular option right now. Right. So that is a completely different approach to automatic css. Automatic CSS is a custom class BIM based system that is fully tokenized. That means that we're using variables for all of the values and you create your own classes and you use the variables in your own class is a completely different workflow. Tailwind is great in an IDE environment like an actual code editor because it relies on things like multi cursor editing, find and replace things like these things. Don't these helper tools and workflows and by the way, access to the entire code base all at once. This does not exist in a Page builder. The minute you go into a Page Builder, you are in a different territory. You're not in a file system, you're not in an ide. And so if you're going to litter utility classes all over the place, you're going to have the exact same maintainability and scalability problem as if you were styling everything at the ID level. You're just going to be able to move a little bit faster.
[00:30:23] Speaker A: Yep, yep.
Yeah, it's a, it's a very interesting approach how, how you're building edge.
Obviously I've been watching from the sidelines and I'm, and me personally not being a Page Builder fan, I've used Beaver Builder years ago, but certainly not nothing active in the last six, seven years, I would say. So, you know, the, the, the premise of what you're building is not, I'm gonna rephrase that was not yet touching me. Your explanation here now most certainly livens.
[00:31:06] Speaker B: It up for me and I will empathize with that. And I don't blame anybody for, you know, if somebody does, it has excluded page builders from their idea of an acceptable workflow for, you know, however many years.
I don't, I don't. I think you were correct to do that in a lot of cases like you, for sure. I can, I recognize and acknowledge all of the objections that we continue to hear. Etch is designed to take a. Brian Chords, if you're familiar with Brian. Oh yeah, very much, yes. And convert them to visual development. Brian Cord is actually on the advisory board.
[00:31:42] Speaker A: I know.
[00:31:42] Speaker B: Yeah. So you know that we want to open that door and it look, page builders have said like we're not for you. This is the biggest thing. Like I used to get so frustrated that page builders would do things certain ways and have all of these limitations and all of these problems. And then I, when I came to the realization that just the explanation is so simple, it's not built for me, it's not designed for me. And so I was like, well, we need one that is. And now we have it.
[00:32:11] Speaker A: I think the, so the vast, the vast majority of sites that I've built have had incredibly custom built themes with huge backend solutions. That's basically the type of work that I do. Right. So it's never had a big pull on me to have something that is very heavily UI based.
It's less relevant certainly with how Genesis was built. You know, every single thing is A function in of itself. So it's quite easily to be turned into something extra because it's just a few conditions and whatever you were building anyway is injected or removed or what. You know, it's, it's a very straightforward way of working and with that you can build very stable sites. So the poll for me has never been into the direction of let me click through and then end up with a site as I probably not very positively would describe it.
[00:33:12] Speaker B: So do you write a bunch of code or what does your workflow look like?
[00:33:18] Speaker A: So for the most part I'm using Site Editor now. So.
But I'm also less in building new, more in adapting whatever is there into a more performant version. And sometimes that is a full rebuild of a theme.
There's just, you know, you've seen the themes, right? There's, let's call it four or five different Elementor add on plugins on top of Elementor Pro on top of Elementor and you're, I don't know how many levels deep into trying to solve what thing to do, the most impactful performance gain and whatnot. At a certain point you're gonna, you're going to have to say look, this is not how it's meant to be, right? And, and I have sites that are pulling in, I have clients that have sites that are pulling in millions of page views per month like extreme high. And you would be probably not, you probably won't be too surprised, but you'd be surprised about, at, at the, the, the complexity level in, in, in stupidity levels of what's being built out there. But you know, somebody starts building the thing and it takes off and it goes. And somebody does all the best they can do to maintain it and build it out. And oh, there's another functionality that I didn't have yet, but you know, there's a plugin for that. So let me just install that thing and come what may, that, that sort of approach that you can get away with a lot, which is a positive and a negative of what Priscilla would say.
But if you end up with I don't know how to fix this, or we're running into issues whenever we're sending out emails and all that sort of stuff, that's, that's the thing that I help with. So I do less of building from scratch. Okay. And for the things that I am building from scratch, I'm, I'm fine with what I can do in the side editor.
[00:35:20] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:35:21] Speaker A: Is it perfect? No, but it gets the job done in the, in the sense that it's, it is relatively straightforward. That said, the complexities of any of the, the larger sites that I have on their maintenance, I would not know how to do that with unless I would build a huge array of custom blocks and you know, flexible this and flexible that and all the extra, that's.
[00:35:50] Speaker B: That'S an area where, you know, you don't have to get, when you have that, you don't have to get into custom block development anymore because you're essentially everything you're building is a custom block, you know, and that's what clicked with.
[00:36:01] Speaker A: Me when you were explaining it. I'm like, okay, so that means I don't have to do that. So one of the things I'm not keen on is, is learning more JavaScript. Yes, I like JavaScript for the level that I know it, but I have for instance my co founder Barry for scanfully.
He is absolutely a wizard in, in React and does things. I can read what he does and I get it, what he does, but I go like, I ain't touching that.
[00:36:31] Speaker B: Right.
[00:36:32] Speaker A: That's just not my thing.
And I've never had the desire to dive deeper in the net. If anything, I'm moving away from, you know, more to terminal type stuff and solutions. I love building those things out. Integration with AI much more fun, you know, that excites me more. I have no desire to dive any deeper into JavaScript than I currently am.
So yeah, building blocks, I then look at what is the feasible solution for me and that's using acf.
[00:37:02] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:37:02] Speaker A: Because it's mostly, I personally think the way ACF has implemented how you can build blocks that should have been core, like just, just very simple, very straightforward few files and you basically treat it as PHP.
[00:37:19] Speaker B: Right.
[00:37:19] Speaker A: And have WordPress take, take care of the rest. ACF does that and I think that's the way it should have been.
But you know, like I said what you're describing.
[00:37:28] Speaker B: I. Yeah, because I still ask. I mean that's obviously a very viable thing. I mean all of the people who we' polled, I would say, you know, because I, I did this like who's actually building custom blocks? And I found all the people who do it, as many as I could and I polled them and I said how are you building custom blocks? And nine out of 10 of them said ACF. Yeah. And so you know, that, that, and that lets us know that the actual from scratch workflow for building a custom block is not palatable to most people. No. And, but I also argue that the ACF version When, when you've seen that it no longer has to be done at all because nobody wants to. I mean, you said you're working in the site editor and so how do you build a custom block with acf? Don't you have to open VS Code or an ID of some sort and do your work there? You've now splintered your workflow from where you were to somewhere else. It's a new magic area and now exists.
[00:38:21] Speaker A: Right. In all fairness, I have not known a different world.
[00:38:26] Speaker B: Right.
[00:38:27] Speaker A: It's always been the case.
[00:38:29] Speaker B: That's why etch is called Era4 of WordPress. It is. It's literally usher. Ushering in a new era.
[00:38:35] Speaker A: Yeah. And I get that now, but I mean, you know, I come from Dreamweaver, front page, so, you know, I'm already living in heaven, so.
[00:38:43] Speaker B: Right.
Yes. When people see it, I think it's going to click for them. And it's, it's one of those things that I don't, I don't have to sell it, they just have to see it.
[00:38:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I get it.
And it, it's going to require people to change.
[00:38:59] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:39:00] Speaker A: I find as much as we live, you and I live in a world where people are building solutions that are software and then that software introduces changes. I find that the world we live in is predominantly inhabited by people who don't like change.
Is that something you can. That resonates with you or do you.
[00:39:27] Speaker B: Go, I think so, I think so. I don't know what the exact numbers or, or percentages are. What I mean, that people are willing to change when they realize the current situation that they're in is a lot painful. More painful than a situation they could easily change to? Yeah.
[00:39:46] Speaker A: There is changing, changing editor, changing their favorite tool, changing hosting companies even.
I've had clients that reach out and I do a performance scan and it's super obvious you need to move away from your hosting company. And then the hosting company promises the heaven and the earth and they stay with them, but the problem is not solved. It's just, you know, more power thrown at them for discounted prices and all that. But that's not a solution to the problem. What I mean to say is that there's, there's a very big, as I see it, reluctance to change and switch over to more new modern tools.
[00:40:25] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:40:26] Speaker A: Is that something you find at all in your talking to?
[00:40:29] Speaker B: It is because the way most tools are engineered is they're engineered to be a little bit better than the last tool. So everybody is like, oh, yeah, okay, I like this one. It's got some problems. Let me go ahead and make a better one and then I'll release that. And you get to a point where the better is just the margin between the better one and the one is so small.
So I kind of use the analogy of a phone and a smartphone, right? When the smartphone came out before the, before anybody had seen smartphones before, it was kind of like an obvious like, okay, that's like so much better. And then everybody changed to smartphones because they had so many advantages. When I could surf the webinar, I could send emails on, I could go social media and I could do all these things on it. It. And the cameras are way better and yada, yada, yada. I mean, it was like a laundry list of stuff.
[00:41:23] Speaker A: No, no, no, no, no. It had a camera.
[00:41:26] Speaker B: Yes, it had a camera. That's right.
[00:41:28] Speaker A: My first smartphone is from 2000. This, the, the SPV E hundred.
It was this like, I, I, I still have it. I, it's amazing. It still fits in my hand. I go like, did my hand grow or whatever?
[00:41:42] Speaker B: Right?
[00:41:42] Speaker A: Yeah, but that, what you're saying, that was a revolutionary thing.
[00:41:46] Speaker B: It's a, when there is a laundry list of, it's just obvious that change needs to happen. Now that's that. And that's two. For two years, people asked me to build a page builder and I said no, no, no, no, no. Because I did not have a vision for what would be fundamentally different at the time.
And I hadn't even come to the conclusion yet that the ones weren't. I was still in frustration mode. I thought I could just convince page builder developers to do the right thing.
And then I finally realized, like, oh, they don't care about, you know, people like us. They're going after the money, which they think is the beginner market. It's actually not the beginner market. But, you know, that's another, another philosophical conversation. But I finally came to the proper realization. I finally started to envision what was actually needed and what was fundamentally different and what would truly usher in a new era. And that's when I said, yes, that's when I said, okay, why we're gonna, we're gonna do it.
[00:42:43] Speaker A: I get that, I get that idea. That for me is scanfully, you're not going to see it in its entirety as we have it envisioned in its current form. But I would say by the end of this year for sure, you're going to see what we actually are building. And it's somebody, it's Something that nobody else is doing. And, you know, all the, it's like all the little components that are part of what we find and define as site health and part of performance, we approach it just differently. Like, it doesn't make any sense from some. So from thinking it about, like, there's current plugins doing X, there's current solutions doing Y, and we're combining it in a way that once you see everything hooked in together and working in, in unison, you go like, why didn't anybody think of this before?
[00:43:42] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:43:42] Speaker A: It's. It's the same approach. I like that. I think, I think all, every single solution you work with and it doesn't, you know, there's always stuff about it you don't like, but you're kind of used to it, so you just park it. You don't spend any money, money and time in, in, in the, in the, you know, trying to fix the thing you can't fix because sure, you could, you could. You know, there's plugins that I work with that have a solution in there. What I don't like. Now in a few rare cases, I will build a helper class that sort of overrides whatever they're doing and I'm no longer bothered with it, but I have to spend time and money on it. Right.
I know I'm an exception on that.
The vast majority just sort of start, you know, working around and like, I'm not going to be bothered, but it annoys me if you ask me about it. But it's fine. I'll just work with what I have and to then go, no, hold up. This is, this is not the way it should, should work. This is not making me happy. And I know for a fact it's not making other people happy either. Why aren't we changing?
I think, and this is still me just putting my finger in the wind, going like. I think I see this changing, but I have a hunch that with the vibe coding thing we have going on with AI, now that we're starting to see people, oh, let me try and figure this one out. Like, hold on, hold on. The end result kind of the same. Sure. But can we do this smart? Can we build this differently? And I think that's inherent to somebody building a solution slowly iterating it to whatever version it is now, never really considering what would the rewrite look like? What would this look like? If I start from scratch, not knowing anything, not being hindered by the current situation.
[00:45:37] Speaker B: Right.
[00:45:39] Speaker A: That to me is I see that changing slightly and I have good hope that we're sort of fumbling into this mode more and more.
Is that something you recognize from the way you approach things?
[00:45:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. I mean, the AI situation in general is obviously, it throws wrenches in things. It raises a tremendous amount of questions.
I'm thinking about it in terms of, okay, like, how does etch exist in a heavy AI world? Right.
How do developers. How are developers currently professionals? How are professionals currently using AI in their workflows? What are the limitations of AI? Because you know as well as I do, all these page builders that currently exist are trying to rush into the AI space, you know. Yeah, yeah.
[00:46:36] Speaker A: Dominate it.
[00:46:37] Speaker B: And what they're doing with AI is very limited. And I've come to the realization that what they're doing with AI is very limited primarily to content. It's like content authoring for people, choosing images for people, yada, yada, yada. Yeah. Their architecture was not built in an AI world in their architecture. And the decisions that they made, which were primarily, what features do beginners need, don't suit what anybody would be doing with AI structurally in these tools. Right. Where etch. Because etch gives you access to the code, which is extremely helpful when you're working with AI, because we know AI is not perfect.
And if you constantly have to prompt, prompt, prompt, prompt, prompt, because you can't fix anything the AI is doing. Whereas, like, if AI gave me 90% of the solution and I can just tweak the code to fix it up, clean it up, and be on with my life, that's one prompt. I'm good to go. You can't do that in any other environment.
[00:47:32] Speaker A: No. And I think the.
In the same way that people are not good at finding stuff online. I mean, I don't know if you've ever watched somebody who is not familiar with the Internet search on the Internet. It's a frustrating way to think to, to see happen, because they're just typing two, three words, hit Enter, and then that's it.
[00:47:56] Speaker B: It's like, yeah, you realize the engine's not gonna. Not gonna find, but you're. You're not giving it any, any real information here.
[00:48:02] Speaker A: Exactly. And the same thing is, is, you know, tenfold, 50 fold for AI.
I saw somebody create a prompt today, and the result. And I go, is that really what you were looking for? And they go, no. I mean, kind of maybe. And then. And the AI had like five bullet points with a paragraph. Like, and the information in there was factual, was correct. It was. I could validate it, as I was reading it, and I go, like, but what you're actually looking for something unique, something that's a different approach, something that's, you know. And then the. Listed a whole bunch of things. So I adjusted their prompt with me being very specific in what I want, what I don't want, how I want it to present it, the things I don't want it to inject and assume. You know, it was two, three paragraphs on my end. Sure. And that's work. That's more than, you know, a full sentence of this is what I want. But the end result was I. And I, I kid you not, literally exactly what we were looking for.
[00:49:05] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:49:06] Speaker A: And to then see that realization, like, is this how it works? And I go, yeah, this is exactly how it works. Yeah, because it's, it's just a dumb machine. The. They assume. And I've said this on, on previous podcasts as well, so I'm, I'm repeating myself. But the, the I in AI may stand for intelligence, but there is none.
It is just an interpretation. And that's what it should stand for.
[00:49:31] Speaker B: Yes. And I totally agree.
[00:49:34] Speaker A: As soon as you realize that.
[00:49:35] Speaker B: Yeah. I did a video actually, because I was, I was trying to make the point that I kept seeing all these tweets and messages like, oh, AI, we're done. Like, we don't need developers anymore. Everybody's. Everybody, anybody off the streets is going to walk in and they're going to build apps, they're going to build websites, and I sort of prove a point. I played dumb with Claude and I was like, I want Claude to do something relatively simple in the development space. And. But I'm dumb because I'm off the streets. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm asking, really. And so I went and I asked Claude questions the way somebody off the street would ask to demonstrate how I could not achieve what I wanted to achieve unless I actually already knew what I was talking about. Right. Because if you can't prompt correctly, you're not going to get any workable answers.
[00:50:25] Speaker A: No, no. And, and the, that whole realization is something when you are on the front line, as we are. Sure. AI has been here now for what, 18 months, two years, whatever.
The amount of people that are actually using it to its full benefit is surprisingly low.
I, I set up so I, I use a, An AI wrapper called Typing Mind.
I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it basically is a.
I hook it with An API key to whatever API I want, want to use. And it allows me to sort of build environments. So I showed my daughter, who is about to go off to uni, like, there's a lot of information coming your way, so here's a few things that we can start preparing you for. And there's these topics that she needs to research and do things with. And I show her there's an agent, you copy that one, you feed it the documents it needs to know as a base. It works with the AI, but your base documents tell it the context of your questions, and then you. In, in the, the.
The area where you're predefining the way the prompt should be interpreted with what extra context, you know, irrespective of what you're actually assigning it to do. And that whole combination, she was like, so I gotta spend like 30, 40 minutes to prepare that thing for me, right? And I go, yeah, but you want that?
Because once that's done, you don't need it to ask, please write it in my writing style, because it'll have it. It'll. It'll understand what you're doing.
And then, you know, the light bulb went on like, oh, oh, well, that's an hour easily spent, she said. And off she went. Because you need to see the connection to. Why am I spending this much time to do this? Because there's a lot of work. No, no, just use typing mine, configure it to your liking, and, you know, it'll do magic for you. But we're still on the forefront when it comes to applications like that, that using it. Like, I am pretty sure that I'm the only one in my whole family that uses this.
[00:52:46] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah, I think. Good.
[00:52:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I was gonna say. And that's wild to consider because everybody around me is using it, but nobody actually is using it yet. That's. I think that's.
[00:53:01] Speaker B: Until it can actually read your mind, right. And the pictures that are going through your mind. Because if people can picture things in their mind that they want, then they struggle to communicate those things. Right. Until the AI can actually see the picture you're seeing before you have to communicate it. So that they just takes your communication out of the chain. It's, it's. It's going to be a prompt game. And if you can't prompt, if you can't communicate correctly what you're seeing in your head and you can't turn that into a workable prompt, you're going to be limited in the output.
[00:53:33] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
I like that you, that you have the, like the, the foreknowledge, like people are going to want to use AI with the product and yes. How are we going to build this inside? Because I mostly see the types of integrations where you go, yeah, I can do that, sure.
This is really exciting. Not really.
And again, maybe, maybe I'm blase already because you know, I've been working with it quite intensely for quite a while now.
But yeah, that's an interesting approach to be building something from scratch, understanding the capabilities of AI. We're going to use it for ScanFly as well. Right? Makes sense. If we have bulk data over thousands of sites, of course we're going to use it because we can start predicting stuff.
[00:54:28] Speaker B: Right.
[00:54:30] Speaker A: It's simple, it's a no brainer.
If it's not for Edge, if it's not for AI. What are you most excited about in WordPress?
[00:54:44] Speaker B: Well, I'm excited for, I don't know when it's coming. I mean I've been advocating for a cleanup of the ui. Like I want something to happen that gets me excited about WordPress, I guess from the core side. But I think the biggest need 100% is the WP admin UI interface. The unification of the AIs between the UIs between site editor and the block editor and WP admin regular pages back there. Right. It's just, it's, it's kind of embarrassing at this point to show a client, you know, if a client's not super familiar with WordPress already, they're like what you built my site on again, this thing looks like it's from 2000, you know.
[00:55:26] Speaker A: And it is.
[00:55:27] Speaker B: And it is. That's the IC explanation, right? It is. I really would be excited about, about cleanup there and I would really be excited for a focus on the CMS side of things. More, more power to the cms.
I, I, I'm one of the proponents that thinks that custom fields and custom post types and bidirectional relationships and more robust taxonomy architecture should have been in core. Custom tables, all of that should have been in core. Like the core product is the CMS and it's been abandoned and it's been neglected and that's really sad to see and I would be tremendously excited to see a refocus on those areas.
[00:56:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I can't fault you for that. That logic that is like one, like, like I mentioned before, ACF is something in, as, as a, as a general set of features and functions should be core.
I'm happy it's out there and it does what it does. But if I'm really honest, I think that should have been core.
[00:56:33] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean we're still in an era where I don't know how many times I've made the cases for custom post types for literally anything services, team reviews, I mean anything that is compartmentalized content like that.
And people still argue with me that that's not important and they just, I use pages for that. I just. And so they're, they're taking this junk drawer approach and I have to bring them back to. Well guys, you know this is called a content management system. You're supposed to be managing the content and it not throwing it all in a junk drawer. Right. And so custom post types and custom fields and taxonomies is the way you manage content. And so the idea that the cms, the content management system doesn't have the appropriate tools for managing the content is mind boggling in 2025.
[00:57:22] Speaker A: Yep, I agree. I mean it, it is a bare bones cms. But if we're, if we're being really honest the, the way content should be treated. So for instance, every single big build that I do, every complex build has those custom post types and compartmentalized for whatever purpose that is, if it's, if it's press releases, if it's, if it's reviews, if it's team, if you know, I don't care. It's a custom post type. It's a separation of concerns that I think everybody should understand the benefits of it. And they go, yeah, but it's, I can't loop in one loop through everything. If that's the problem you have, then you have a different problem than you thought you have. Because that's not the actual problem.
[00:58:03] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:58:03] Speaker A: The actual problem is stuff is not compartmentalized in the ways that you know, it helps teams, it helps structure, it helps thinking.
For me, the dashboard is one of those things as well. When you enter that dashboard, I should be presented with the things that I want, slash, need to do.
[00:58:22] Speaker B: Yeah, that's it. Yep.
[00:58:24] Speaker A: I don't give a hoot of what's in the dashboard currently. Doesn't make any sense to me.
[00:58:28] Speaker B: Right.
[00:58:30] Speaker A: I guess maybe the meetups. I like to know there's a meetup nearby. That's, that's for me, that's about it. Oh, and I use Coco analytics for a bunch of people's site. They don't need Google Analytics or Fathom or big things. I just need, hey, the truth.
[00:58:48] Speaker B: I don't even know what's on the dashboard anymore because my blueprint website has all of the widgets removed and so literally it's gray thing with like these drop areas with nothing in them. That's, that's my dashboard.
[00:58:57] Speaker A: It's only on my personal site that I still see it because I, I, I need to know what it is there.
[00:59:03] Speaker B: Right.
[00:59:03] Speaker A: Should somebody ask? I guess. But the rest indeed are custom builds. But, but yeah, the pushing the whole thing to 2025 and there's movement, but it's just, you know, we all know the situation.
[00:59:20] Speaker B: It has to happen. Like it has to happen. It's, it's such a, you look at all of the CMSs that are actually coming up now taking market share away from WordPress or they're all smart. Yes. And by, by continuing to neglect the CMS and the UI side of things, which is, I mean, people look for UI these days like that is a very, very important thing. People like using beautiful software, they like using easy software.
[00:59:44] Speaker A: It exudes confidence.
[00:59:46] Speaker B: Exactly. Professionalism, Professionalism, all of that, everything. And so the, they are just opening themselves up to it. They are electing to have a, just a major problem that any competitor can harp on, can just say, look at the distinct, like, this just looks like a modern tool, this looks archaic. Right. Which, why would you choose that archaic tool? And then they can actually make the case that it's not just the UI that's archaic, it's actually a lot of the architecture is archaic too. This, this bleeds throughout the entire project. They have to address it and it's happening.
[01:00:24] Speaker A: It's just not going fast enough, I guess.
[01:00:26] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's going to go slower now because we have less funding, so.
[01:00:30] Speaker A: Yep, yep, yep.
I'm wondering, and I say this half jokingly, I'm wondering.
Most of the folks that are working on this particular side of WordPress, they have come up with WordPress, so they saw version 1.5, 1 point, whatever, and then the move to 2.0 and then the move from 2.7, which basically induces the dashboard we have now, then 3.0. But you know, that was, those were huge improvements over time.
I think this is one of those things where I, I, and I, again, I say this half jokingly, but I'm, I'm sort of guessing that they're still kind of happy that we have what we have because they knew how bad it was, if that makes sense.
[01:01:21] Speaker B: I guess, yeah, you could say that. I mean, there's a lot of reasons I'm moving forward.
[01:01:26] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but to, to then hide all the new stuff inside the Gutenberg plugin.
[01:01:32] Speaker B: Right.
[01:01:32] Speaker A: That just doesn't make any sense to me. Like, yeah, why would you install that plugin? It's meant for testing purposes and introduce introduction of new features so we can start sort of testing it on live production. Kind of. Sort of.
[01:01:46] Speaker B: I think that a lot of, I think that a lot of people involved in WordPress are resting on. So WordPress has essentially a Pocket Aces. Like if we're playing poker, they have Pocket Aces out of the gate and they flopped an ace too. And all of that happened within the concept of how open source is sold. If you compare WordPress to Webflow or to any other CMS that's not Open Source, those CMSs are trying to win the poker match when WordPress already has three aces on the board.
[01:02:20] Speaker A: Right, agreed.
[01:02:21] Speaker B: You know, because people just, they, they love to own their data, they love to not be controlled by a third party. They, they love that aspect of WordPress and pricing rested on that.
[01:02:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I agree.
Yeah.
I think that's, I think there's more stuff going on in WordPress that I'm excited for as a, as a polyglot. I love for it to have a native translation internationalization module. I'm. I'm stupefied that that's not part of what we have.
There's solutions out there that I know how to use, George, but it's just this. By now this should have been core.
[01:03:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:03:07] Speaker A: And again, we have to wait for Gutenberg phase three to have that finally be an option in phase four.
Yeah, I don't, I don't get it. So I'm just gonna build cool stuff on my end and see where that goes.
[01:03:26] Speaker B: That's what we're doing. I mean, you know, etch. Etch kind of liberates people from having to worry all that much about the outdated UI of WordPress. Because I don't. If I'm using Edge, I don't have to go into the media manager in WordPress. Like, we, we could make a laundry list of what's wrong with the media Manager. Well, guess what? I don't have to go there anymore. We can make a laundry list of objections like, well, there's no native custom post types. There's no. Well, I don't care about that anymore. Right. And I don't need ACF and I don't need metabox. I'm just doing all my work in this interface that I actually like, and it's all in one interface and, and that's kind of. Again, why it's like era four of WordPress. I mean, if you're waiting around for the UI to be fixed, I mean, good luck. Like, you're going to be the skeleton meme, you know? So you might as well just forget about it and start using a tool that does what you want and it looks the way you. That looks the way you like.
[01:04:14] Speaker A: Last question for me.
For you.
Have you worked with Thesis at any point in your.
[01:04:22] Speaker B: Very, very briefly, a very long time ago.
[01:04:25] Speaker A: Are you familiar with the fork in the road that Chris Pearson introduced? I don't know which version of Thesis that was where he started coming up with a.
Almost a CMS within the cms where you would have little elements of snippets of codes. I don't even know what type of code that was, if it was a JSON or whatever.
But he started obfuscating so much away from WordPress and in, you know, in a way that it became faster the way he did it, but ridiculously complex.
[01:05:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm not familiar with the details.
[01:05:06] Speaker A: It basically meant the ending of Thesis because it's, it's, it's nowhere now. But there are elements of what he tried to solve that I think you're solving the right way.
So the, the question was very small. It was basically hiding a compliment I was giving, I guess.
[01:05:28] Speaker B: I appreciate it.
[01:05:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yeah. Very.
I've learned a lot and I think anybody listening to this would have to. Will have to thank you so much for, for joining.
[01:05:41] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you for having me.
[01:05:44] Speaker A: It was fun. Let's do it again.
[01:05:45] Speaker B: Absolutely. Anytime.
[01:05:47] Speaker A: All right. Thanks, man.
[01:05:48] Speaker B: Thank you.
