Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Within WordPress, the podcast that mainly discusses all those people, those wonderful people making up our WordPress community. We also talk about tools and tooling and all those things. But today we're definitely talking people and we're definitely talking somebody I've known for a very, very long time. Welcome to the show, Tammy.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Oh, thank you so much.
[00:00:30] Speaker A: Yeah, because we Met more than 12 years ago, I've calculated, but I kind of lost where exactly and when.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: It's probably going to be a UK word camp, I would imagine, or the first ever one that I went to that was outside the uk, which was in the Netherlands. That was the first one that I went to.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: Yeah. So I was, I was in the same, like either working one of the 20. 20, 2010, 2012 or. Yeah, 2011 work camp, a word camp in the UK. I've been to a few more than one.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: Yeah. But it's been a long time.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: It has.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: For those people who have absolutely no idea who you are, Tammy, could you please do an introduction of some kind?
[00:01:19] Speaker B: Yes, I am. I'm trying the title of someone recommended. I use full Stack product, which is best way to describe that. I like to do everything about product. I like to do design development and I also like to do product work. So managing.
I am fractionally doing lots of different things. So I am a co founder of Guildenberg. I also work in my own spaces and I'm also a core committer. So there's a lot of different things, but I've spent a lot of time working with core and now what I like doing is making things.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: With WordPress, we call that a wearer of many hats.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I have lots of different hats generally. Lots of woolly hats.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: Lots of what? Woolly.
[00:02:10] Speaker B: Woolly hat. Yeah, woolly.
[00:02:12] Speaker A: Like you like you like you like to keep it nice and warm. I get it, I get it. I mean, I really get that. For those who have no idea what. What I am referring to, there's not a lot of hair on my head.
But Tammy, you have, from what I remember, a very strong preference for. Yes. Products, but also for design and community.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: One I would even say a product that kind of combines those things is BuddyPress, which you were quite active and vocal about what it could and what it did. What's, what's, what's going on there. Is that still a thing or so?
[00:02:57] Speaker B: It's still a thing. I don't contribute to it anymore. And the main reason I don't contribute to it anymore is I don't use it back in the day, I used it an awful lot in, in my work and therefore contributing to it made a lot of sense to me. I even actually wrote a book on it, particularly theming. A lot of things come back to theming with me in particular.
Buddypress, to me, I think is really powerful because of a couple of reasons. One, because it's a suite of plugins and I think the concept of a suite of plugins is incredibly powerful. And two, because being able to have a community in a box I still think is a really powerful idea. So I still firmly believe in the concept. I do think it's one of those projects that has pottered along, for want of a very English word, and moved along quite slowly. It's been through some, lots of different evolutions. It was one of the early adopters to have the theme moving away from being so firmly linked to code. So it's done a lot of, like, firsts along the way.
Yeah.
[00:04:09] Speaker A: I still maintain Quite a few BuddyPress installations for clients.
[00:04:13] Speaker B: Actually.
[00:04:17] Speaker A: My main focus on it now is more on the performance side of things. Whilst when BuddyPress started, which is 2009, I think 2010.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: Ish. Yeah.
[00:04:29] Speaker A: Very, very long because I had the first beta installed and played with it already. But that was basically helping people to set up communities.
[00:04:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:38] Speaker A: And yeah, I think you're. You're assessing the thing has gone stale a little bit. Is. Is accurate.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: Because you get all the.
[00:04:49] Speaker A: Resolutions now that Buddy Bears could be, but it's not.
[00:04:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's one of the things that I do feel like we're maybe coming back to something like that now, though. There's this feeling of owning, owning your community again and owning your things again.
I think we collectively as humans accepted that apps were going to own so much and gave so much control to apps and that kind of didn't work out very well. I've seen that recently with a lot more people going over to bluesky, but then also being like, okay, I'm over here, but how can I own what I'm putting over here a little bit more than when I was on X and not make the same mistakes? And I've seen people rediscovering, blogging again and thinking about, well, maybe if I don't want a Facebook community, how can I have a community where people are. How can they have the safety to be able to interact with people a bit more?
Buddy Press.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, so. So buddypress is still the solution to that, though. You know what I was starting to say, it baffles me still, how many people just don't build on something they control or own?
There's. There's just. I mean, I see support like you buy a premium plugin and then you were then forwarded to a Facebook group for support. And I go, what in the actual.
Like, what goes through your mind when you decide that you are forcing people on a particular platform?
[00:06:27] Speaker B: I had it the other day. I. I got an app from some somewhere and the support was on Discord.
[00:06:33] Speaker A: Yeah, same thing for any peace and quietness.
No, horrible.
[00:06:44] Speaker B: Yeah, it doesn't work and it does make me feel very old when I do that. But it's not old. It's more. If you are buying something and you're subscribing to something or you want and also from a community, there's an inclusion aspect and there is. You say about design and I guess design was used back in the day when we didn't use the word product because we didn't. Product wasn't even a thing back when I started design. It wasn't even a practice.
Now it's a way of recognizing that you do both and that you do. But, you know, and that it's actually a practice and it's established over my course of my career rather than when I first started. It was you do design or you do development. It was very binary.
But with regards to community, it's really important to have that safety of ownership and the safety of being able to be in those spaces. And Facebook is not safe for a lot of people to be able to function in. No, it really is.
[00:07:51] Speaker A: You know what I always thought that BuddyPress should have upon installing it, ask for the purpose of what. What are you. What kind of community are you wanting to have? So the. The one we have out of the box is the one we have right? That is.
[00:08:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:09] Speaker A: Body Press. It's looking at a few other solutions out there, sort of mimicking some elements. Elements of it. But yeah, that is your Buddy Press experience I would have liked to seen.
Here's a. I want to replicate something that Slack does. I want to replicate something that Circle does. I want to replicate something that, you know, my, my Facebook page slash forum slash group does out of the box. Click on that. Everything is set. And then you have a way more purposely driven community instead of. We can also do this in BuddyPress. Yeah, you can, but you have to think about all the solutions and things you need to set up and connect and all those things.
Like, it's not that hard. Like, I was bored. Doesn't happen very Often that I bored and I literally can't be bothered to do anything. So I figured, you know what, what would it take for me to create a Slack theme for buddypress that looks like Slack?
It wasn't too hard. Like it was an afternoon of work.
However, the functionality that I was looking for in terms of what the channels can do and the direct messages as a channel, that is the core functionality of Slack, it was totally lacking.
I needed to write a lot of code to combine things to make that working.
[00:09:33] Speaker B: I think what you're hitting on is also something that we've.
Things have evolved a little bit what we expect and WordPress also has this problem and I kind of. I really want that same screen for WordPress I want. Okay, what do you.
Yeah, what are you trying to make? Is the first question. And then we could have like the. The quick second install because it's it. So the framework I love is the jobs to be done framework. Because that's like literally like what jobs to be done. It's like, what are you trying to do?
People use Personas, whatever. But when it comes down to it, as soon as you start thinking in those terms, you're going to have an effective thing that you're building. And that way of thinking to make has come after. How long have we been making these things? How long has Buddy Press assisted? How long has WordPressisted? So we are retrofitting some of that thinking into these products. But that's cool. We should. And that's where like iterating the onboarding.
It's not really onboarding. It's actually just like having one because we haven't got one.
And just saying like, what do you make? The dashboard is a great example. Yeah.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: Which is funny if you think about it. When you and I were growing up, because we're likely above 40 in some way slightly.
Whenever we wanted to install a piece of software on our machine, our computer, we were forced to go through a wizard.
None of them came without a wizard. And then Apple said, you know what, you can just slide this in the applications folder and it's done, it's installed. That's great. I mean that's a great, great ux. However, with that came. We're skipping onboarding for some reason. I don't know how that I can.
[00:11:30] Speaker B: Ask you how many I've noticed how. And I'm going to ask you how many experiences lately have you noticed havoc wizards now? Because I've noticed more having wizards now.
[00:11:42] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: It's not like wizardy wizards actually Wizards with purpose. Because sometimes some wizards is pointless. They just wave in a magic wand. But actually ones that at the end are configuring the experience to be correct. And I think that's where wizards got a bad name.
[00:11:59] Speaker A: Yeah. And yeah, I would agree.
I see a few that are doing things correctly. There's. There's some that do the, the onboarding as a wizard, which is basically okay, we have a bunch of settings you.
Well, some of them like for instance, Yoast SEO. I like what they're doing because you have to have these things configured in order for that plugin to do what it actually should be doing. So it sort of pushes you through the settings you need to have a opinion on.
You don't need to visit everything inside that plugin. You don't.
That sort of onboarding wizard.
I like those. That's. Those. I'm fine with those. But there's indeed a lot of that just noise just forcing you to look. Forcing you to think they look very fancy on bringing you on board, but.
[00:12:47] Speaker B: They don't actually have 2 of 11 when you have like the thing that comes up and go for step 2 of 11 and click through and so.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: That, that for me personally, because that's very close to gamification. I'm. I'm not susceptible to gamification. I don't like it. I don't care. You're not going to get me to click the last two things just because it's in your seven step onboarding thing. It's not. I'm.
[00:13:13] Speaker B: Yeah, you're not going to collect those points.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: The transcript will read. Remkas made a face.
Yeah, no, no, I don't care.
[00:13:27] Speaker B: Going back to older ideas, I think and this happened during Budapest. There was a period. I don't know if you remember. This is really casting back. We've gone down. There was a World of Warcraft example that came out and it was the. The character game and you'd see the character and all the points and stuff and everybody wanted their dashboard to be like that. They were like, people want to collect points and trophies and some of what people want.
Actually most people don't. It turns out there's actually science behind it and when you put people in the of doing that, you don't get very positive communities. Turns out you actually get really negative spaces because all people are doing is chasing like fame and glory. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. Yeah.
[00:14:23] Speaker A: I don't think I've shared my grievances with that sort of gamification much before, but those that are around me when I install stuff are quite aware that I am. I'll use words not suitable for broadcasting like again and then a whole bunch of words. It just doesn't make sense to me. What I much prefer is that you onboard me onto making a decision of how to make best use of this software, period. That is what I love.
And for me, buddypress, you know, maybe there needs to be an entirely new plugin that does that functionality but then fully architecturally correct all those things right off the bat. Maybe maybe has seen its highlight and is just in maintenance mode altogether. I don't know.
[00:15:20] Speaker B: I think it still has a strong purpose, but I think like with anything it's going to need to adapt and I think that evaluating and adaption for me, one of the historic problems that a lot of plugins have is they're very dependent and it's not just a BuddyPress problem, it's everything. And BuddyPress has changed a lot from it is they were very dependent on themes and the decoupling from themes is really, really critical for a lot of those older plugins. And that's part of the story that they have to go on as well.
[00:15:57] Speaker A: Yeah, that said, for me it's. It's a chapter within WordPress or a book on of itself.
[00:16:08] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great entry for me. I mean I came into Core and it was very loud and very scary and too overwhelming and I went to Buddy Press and it was super welcoming and it was my first entryway. So for me it's definitely like in my DNA.
[00:16:24] Speaker A: Yeah, that's funny.
Where did you go to after that? What was your. Your next big chunk was that essentially, I think you moved around that time you moved to automatic.
[00:16:36] Speaker B: Yeah, so I started theming was my kind of thing that kind of led me into my journey and I was in automatic. I entered as a themer and just started finding out what was the problem with themes by working with them. Turns out back then there were a lot of problems with themes. There were still quite a lot of problems with themes.
And back then it was like options panels and customizers and all those exciting things.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: Is that what you worked on a lot moving?
[00:17:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I worked on. I did some default themes.
I did. So back then it was making themes and just I worked on a lot of theme UX trying to understand where the problems were. And then I did this little thing called Gutenberg.
[00:17:28] Speaker A: Whoa. I don't think it's that little. That's a heck of a project.
[00:17:33] Speaker B: It didn't. The thing is, when you say yes to do something, it doesn't always feel as big as it's going to be. You just end up working on something.
[00:17:42] Speaker A: At some point, it was about, let's do this project and the products of this will be. That didn't ring a bell of revamping the block editor. That's going to be a thing.
Revamping the block editor. Introducing the block editor.
[00:17:58] Speaker B: Introducing block editor. The thing was initially it was a lot, so it seems a bigger thing now. But if you think back to phase one, the scope for phase one was actually pretty small.
It was like, can we have blocks Phase one? Like, it's. It feels like it's massive now because it's everything.
There was a lot of infrastructure, but it was. Can we actually have like a paragraph block? When you're so focused on, like, can you have one block?
The. The size of the project doesn't maybe feel as epic as it. It still felt pretty fundamental, but it didn't feel as epic as now. If you look back in history and you're also like excited to be working on stuff, that's one of the things, as a product person, you probably get this when you're working on a product, you can get very focused and excited on working on a product.
[00:18:53] Speaker A: Oh, for sure. I think that's one of the more interesting areas.
If you're able to focus on a product that you own in your head as well as in actual existence. I think that's one of the most fun things to do because it's. It's the ultimate creation, right? It's. You can think of it, you can build it, you can test it and you can validate it. You can do all of these things.
And if it doesn't validate, then you need to recourse. All of these things are fully in your control, which is something. I really enjoy you. So. But how long have you been working on Project Gutenberg before we saw the first iteration at workemp us?
[00:19:41] Speaker B: I'm not super good with Thai because it gets like the end of the 40s.
It was a little while, but we'd also been quite like, things were quite visible. It's just as with WordPress project, it's whether you look in the right places. With the WordPress project, I came to it where some work had been already worked on. That always happens because I'd been working on the issues with themes and then it was pretty much, let's start working on. Let's firmly start working on this. We're going to start working and then it was a good few years that I was working after that, but then it started being quite public quite quickly.
So there was a lot of public stuff. There was a lot of going around listening, finding out, and we did a lot of listening, finding out. We did a lot of usability testing. I remember doing usability testing in Japan that was really fundamental. Seeing how people couldn't use even WordPress, that was like, oh, better pay attention.
And if you can't even use the original WordPress, it was really something to then think of, like, how would then someone use a new editor? There were so many instances and I think one of the.
During it, there were a lot of people who were saying things like testing, where there was a lot of testing, there was a lot of going around, there was a lot of experiencing, there was a lot of watching and there was a lot of going, um, and just understanding how people were using it as well.
[00:21:23] Speaker A: Yep. Yeah, I, I would imagine, because I remember the, the outcome of that testing phase in, In Japan, that was not a positive one. Well, it. In. In the sense that it, it opened the eyes of, oh, okay, there's a few more things we need to take care of.
[00:21:39] Speaker B: Well, the Japan one was also native as well as. So it was native WordPress and Gu was also interesting. And what struck me was how problematic that WordPress without being Gutenberg was also hard to be used. And I think that's something to consider. It's very easy for us to think like. Like in my Englishness, how I understand WordPress, it's so important to understand how different cultures.
[00:22:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I was gonna say, do you mean the. The locale English or the. Yes in me?
[00:22:16] Speaker B: Me as a human, my head and locale as well. It's everything. Right. Like when I load up WordPress, what I experience isn't what someone else does. And so the more people I can see it through. We used to do this, and I would love to see it again, the usability testing at flagship events. We had a run of that and I hope that that happens again because that. That used to be invaluable to me to be able to go and see how people were using it.
[00:22:44] Speaker A: Yeah, I'd imagine. I mean, we have the same thing with what we're building for. Scanfully, there's a few things that just seem so straightforward and yet people use it differently. Go. Interesting. How did you. Okay. Yeah, good. Moving on.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: You know, the top toolbar is the biggest one because some people were very decided that it should be by the block. Some people decided that it shouldn't be by the block, and that shouldn't have an option. And it was literally 50, 50 in usability testing. So you needed to have an option. You know, normally it's like, don't necessarily have an option, but that needed to.
[00:23:22] Speaker A: The first thing I move, like, I cannot work with it per block, like, I get. Drives me mad.
[00:23:29] Speaker B: But it is such a personal decision. It is incredibly personal. Yeah.
[00:23:35] Speaker A: I wonder if that's personal driven on.
Well, I was going to say if that's an experience, because it came down.
[00:23:43] Speaker B: To there was no cultural factor. It was. It was almost like a very personal factor, which is fascinating. You could do a whole study on.
[00:23:56] Speaker A: Do you like iOS or Android? Kind of.
[00:23:58] Speaker B: Probably. Or dark mode. Are you a dark mode or light person?
[00:24:04] Speaker A: IOS and dark mode? Yes, please.
Oh, that's interesting.
What would. What would you say is your biggest learning from that whole experience?
[00:24:19] Speaker B: How important listening is as much as speaking.
Although. Can I have two. Can I have two learnings?
[00:24:27] Speaker A: You may.
[00:24:30] Speaker B: How to be aware of burnout, I think is another one. And sneaky burnout.
I think a lot of, like, for me, I took a long time to realize my own burnout. Like, it was a long, long journey. I think when you're doing a project like that, you don't, like, realize what the impact of it is on you.
And particularly, like, then things like pandemics happen and things like that, and you. You don't realize the toll of it. And I think we. You need to be very aware when you work on something, either like you're doing a. Like a. A product or you're doing a project. You need to be aware of like, sneaky burnout. Like if, like we. We always talk about, like, burnout as if it's a dramatic thing that happens to someone.
[00:25:18] Speaker A: Yeah. You flip the switch and now you're.
[00:25:20] Speaker B: In burnout and you're just burnout. It's that sneaky slow burn like that. I've never experienced sneaky slow burn. I now have. And that's worse, like, because it really just, like, chips at you. And then you do need to, like, be aware of it and rebalance yourself.
[00:25:41] Speaker A: Good, good learning points for sure.
That kind of brings me to your present, like, what it is you do today. You again, still the wearer of many hats, but you are part of Project Guildenberg. I was so close to saying Gutenberg again, by the way.
Gildenberg. Gildenberg. And we've had Jonathan on the podcast before, basically introducing. So if you, if you're listening and you go, like, I Don't know what that is. It's one of the earlier episodes but please explain as well.
First of all, when did you join?
[00:26:31] Speaker B: So I've been working and collaborating with it for about a year or so. Just over a year and I've been a co founder very recently. So it's. It's pretty new from a co founding perspective and it's myself, Luke Harbis and Jonathan and our co founders.
[00:26:52] Speaker A: Cool.
Would. So the. The project as. As it is intended has been there for quite a while. What would you say the original intent was? Because I know it's moved in terms of what it is now, but can you remind us what the original goal was?
[00:27:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I probably talk on the now and the reason I'll talk on the now is I think when something evolves it's really important to talk on what it is now. I think when and I would let Jonathan's voice speak for what it used to be.
It's now. What it is is it's become a, you know, kind of a board stroke is a space that helps businesses grow in the WordPress ecosystem.
In simple terms it is two form. It is a guild of membership so hosts, agencies or product makers can join and then they can have access to distribution and support to create their product and also have distribution. So that's like the guild part of it.
There's also a consultancy practice so it has evolved part of the historic and the thread that comes through that is also the core goals of creating and supporting those that want to develop products and really that collaboration and the people that are making products and I'm including like agencies because most agencies and hosts are also making products or productizing WordPress better collaboratively together to do that. And that may be through looking at how do they do distribution collaboratively. That might be through tooling. That also is something that we want to look into like how can we support through making tooling. That's something that very much excites me. How can we collaboratively make tools as well? So there's a lot of a bigger mission but the today mission and I'm very like with my product mind what are we doing today?
What do we keep the lights on with today? There's the guild and then there's the consultancy practice and the consultancy is the newer aspect of it that we doing where we actually a lot of companies that are outside of WordPress so we've been working with who are WordPress curious. They're looking at it and they're like wonder if we could be in space and we're working with them to be able to come into the space.
Or we're looking at how can we rejuvenate some of their interest in the space as well.
Yeah, that's a lot.
[00:29:30] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. That's an interesting approach, that last one you mentioned. So this is companies that are already existing in other spaces that potentially could bridge whatever they're doing over in their core product, like maybe bridge that into WordPress. And you would.
The goal you have as Guildenberg is to consult and facilitate as much as possible, bridging the two.
[00:29:54] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:29:55] Speaker A: Are we talking like, is there an example you can give?
[00:29:59] Speaker B: Yeah. So Lilly, Banking is one of the clients we've been working with. So it's a banking, banking and accounting client we've been working with. We've also done some work with BigCommerce as well.
[00:30:10] Speaker A: Okay, right, yeah. Those are existing things outside of the world of WordPress.
[00:30:15] Speaker B: BigCommerce is kind of adjacent, but Lily, Banking is definitely outside as well. Yeah, yeah.
[00:30:23] Speaker A: I mean, sure. Adjacent, but in a way they've been for BigCommerce. I've known their existence about four or five years, probably. Yeah, something like that. But they never really became part of WordPress. They were all like, no.
[00:30:43] Speaker B: And they.
Yeah. And so for. We've been working with them, they've got a plugin and they had a plugin and it was, it was a little bit unloved. And what we've been doing is working with them on how can they learn to have a plugin in the repo, how can they collaborate with hosts. And they've been collaborating with Pantheon and Conveysio and that's been really interesting to watch them start to actually have a proper open source collaboration plugin. So things like that have been good. Lily are really interesting because they're coming into the space and they know that it's a good space for them in theory, but they don't know anything about the space. And WordPress is a space that we have a lot of not rules, but we have some patterns that it's best that people have when they come into this space that they can, you know, they're going to thrive or they're not going to thrive. So trying to explain a plugin to someone for the first time. Right. Like the plug in approach is a good example.
[00:31:51] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can see the challenges there for anybody jumping into, into this world, growing up in it, mind you, for me, that started in my, in my 30s, but the, the growing up or coming along As a platform rises is a very big advantage you have towards somebody who's jumping in 20 years later.
What are the written rules? What are the unwritten rules? What is the dues and the don'ts? I mean anybody jumping in right now can, can do it because it's a free market. But if you come in within a very aggressive marketing tactics, you're just going to be ignored completely.
[00:32:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:38] Speaker A: Now for us, for you and I, that makes total sense because we know how that community came to be, how the core users are, how the drivers work and all those things.
But yeah, if, if you're unaware and you're just jumping in, hey, you can do this on WordPress and let me get you on a call and let me do this hard sell here and cold.
[00:32:59] Speaker B: We have such behaviors even down to the like uppercase P. Right? Like we have behaviors that, yeah, just like please and thank yous.
That's not the main bit of it. It's also things like we have a design system. Been able to like share the design system also from a distribution perspective, knowing where the best distribution avenues are. So yeah, there's a lot of like really interesting work to be done there. So I mean, I'm kind of excited about what next year kind of holds with that.
[00:33:30] Speaker A: So yeah, that's implying there's big changes ahead or just big.
[00:33:36] Speaker B: Just growing more, growing up from where we are. Like, that's, that's kind of. This year has really been about clarifying what we're doing is the best way to frame that.
I think this year I've been on a personal quest to try on all the hats. I guess that's what I've been doing. And next year, I think for me personally what I want to do is I'm not really big on resolutions and I'm not really a resolution New Year resolution person because they don't work. But I think one of the big things I want to do is not focus.
Try and be like, where can I be? Where can I build up from what I'm doing now?
[00:34:20] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I think we all can use more than a little bit of focus.
I'm not, I'm not one for, for resolutions either, but I am one for setting goals as sound. But a goal for me is less tied in time. It's more about the discipline that I need to engage to make that goal happen. And resolution for me is like, okay, now we're going to do this and then feels, feels different to me.
I don't do the New Year's Eve 2025 is going to be my focus on. This is my resolution I will have. And that doesn't work for me partly because most of the things that I have set as goals are just, you know, stuff that's overarching a whole year. So does it make a lot of sense to narrow them down into smaller bits?
[00:35:17] Speaker B: I quite like doing like quarterly goals for that like, like product again, but literally like treating myself like the, the quarterly girls. I started doing that a couple of years ago, like trying to have like an annual kind of thing that I'm going to do. Although I weirdly link it to the financial year in England, just because it feels right to do it rather than the seasonal year and then trying to have like quarterly goals. It kind of works for me that way.
[00:35:50] Speaker A: Yeah. I think for me personally it's the thing that's closest to it is the two week sprints that we have. Yeah, I mean that's, that makes more sense in my head to have as a goal connected to the thing you're building, forcing you to make decisions because if you don't, you're gonna linger on and you end up with a half decision or an unmade decision. And yet you are, you know, somewhat expecting you to move along, which I don't think is really happening if you are just skipping things or postponing things. But now the whole goal setting is a.
And, and that resolution thing, I, I think it has its ups and downs, but in terms of Project Guildenberg, the whole.
You have. So that's a big change of what the original goal was in terms of what it's doing now.
Is there a connected timeline to it in terms of when things are in full swing? Or is that what you just mentioned, what you're going to focus on is that just Tammy Lister list?
[00:37:01] Speaker B: So the big change, it's still not massively changed. The idea of coming together for distribution is still there. So the underpinning of that is still there.
The consultancy is the add on, but the supporting products and agencies and hosts that are still in, already in the space is still there. But no, this is like collaboratively what we're doing. Yeah, I'd say it's more an adaption. I think that's a really important thing for any company to do is the people that are in the building and the people that as something is growing, it should adapt.
And as the people of the guild join, it also should adapt as well. So that's, that's by the nature of it, it's going to adapt and change.
[00:37:49] Speaker A: It does and then. But to me it kind of sounds like a small pivot in a way.
[00:37:57] Speaker B: I would more say it's in the evolution to the people that are in the building. But it depends on what your understanding of the original one was. Yeah.
[00:38:09] Speaker A: In terms of your other hats, which one is going to get a lot of focus in 2025?
[00:38:15] Speaker B: Ah, yeah.
Making my own things is really what I want to do.
I still need to keep lights on. Like that's, that's what you need to do. Right. We can always say ifs and buts and wishes like, but lights need to be on, bills need to be paid. But I have wanted to make things most of this year and I haven't been able to. There's been a lot of stuff going on and that's okay, but I really want to be able to use some of the really cool stuff that's going on in core and the cool things and I have so many ideas of things that I want to make and actually I want to be able to make those.
[00:38:56] Speaker A: Is there anything stuff that you want to make?
[00:39:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I've started to, I've actually committed to putting, I've put a site up and I've committed which is composition products and I'm starting, I will next week or so be actually having a survey. I'm going to start by asking people what they want to have made. But I want to make, start with photography and I want to start making products specifically for photographers that will be useful within WordPress. I have a few ideas of things, but I don't want to just make things just because I think they were cool. That's not where I want to start. Um, because that, yes, that's serving myself but I've learned over time that asking people is really good as well.
So that's what I want to start.
[00:39:45] Speaker A: I, I, I'd say that's more than a little bit good.
[00:39:49] Speaker B: Um, I have a few ideas of things that I just want to release as well. I want to do some like themes and different things but that I, I don't know whether any of this is going to be like charged or anything. It may just be things I put out there and a lot of it's going to be me learning how to use things. I want to do something that learns how to use some of the data stuff. I want to learn how to use AI a little bit more. All these different things that I want to learn and if I'm just creating stuff, it's not to say something I'm going to be releasing as a product to start off with.
[00:40:19] Speaker A: Yeah. If. If you're looking at what WordPress has been adding in the last, I would Even say last two years, there's a lot of new APIs and solutions in there. Is there anyone. Is there anything in particular that excites you? Like, oh, I want to really build on top of that. I want to play with that.
[00:40:36] Speaker B: Or Data Views.
[00:40:39] Speaker A: Data Views, yeah. Well, it's not fully in there yet.
[00:40:42] Speaker B: Is it like, well, can I have it?
[00:40:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I think probably in Gutenberg, the plugin, there's way more in there than there isn't. 4. Let me.
[00:40:55] Speaker B: You can have it as like an outside npm package. You can pour in. Maybe the reason why I think I'm so excited about it is just because of the potential of that and because of what you can do front and back.
And with Data Forms that if I think of like photography as well, and which is like my. One of my passions, photography and painting, if I think about like being able to have standalone things for that, if I think about theming as well, that gets me really kind of excited about that potential.
[00:41:32] Speaker A: For those who are listening and have absolutely no idea what Data views, what that means.
Can you explain a little bit?
[00:41:40] Speaker B: So any table or form type of thing in WordPress can now be rendered using it. So pages, any form. So pages, yeah, that's like. So it's used for pages, patterns, all those kind of things that. That's basically. There is probably a way better way of describing Data views, but it's that and it's Data Forms is a component part of it as well, but it's fundamentally, it's a unified way of doing it. So before if you wanted to have it in a plugin, you would have to either use an external library, so everyone would have a different library, everyone would have a different way of doing it. So there'd be different searches, different filtering, different ways of doing it. From a usability perspective, it's all the same and you can turn things on or off, you can adapt them. It just comes out of the box box. Able to do it so natively. Having it in core is just amazing and it's so easy to implement as well.
[00:42:49] Speaker A: So what kind of thing could you can you now do in a, in a, you know, in a less optimized way that once this is fully hitting in Core and fully available, you would be able to do much smoother. You gave the example of photography.
[00:43:06] Speaker B: You could have a filtered a presentation. You could in theory have a filtered presentation of Photographs on the front that you could, you could be able to filter and drill down and display even in a grid or in a table on the front of like a library.
[00:43:23] Speaker A: It's the presentation of data and filtering in one library essentially. So we would need to use much less filtering, external filtering, providing options. For instance, Facet WP is a good, good example of a plugin that adds that to your WordPress site.
Essentially. Data Views allows you to sort of have the underpinnings for that on a native scale for WordPress.
Yeah, the examples that I've seen that I, that make me excited are the things that are related to on the fly, creating of custom content elements. So whether that's post types or custom taxonomies, I really like that element of it. But I'm also scared of that element because once we're opening that for everybody, who's to say we're not, you know, we're not ending up with somebody who instead of creating one taxonomy with its terms, creates most times literally custom post types as terms. I mean, I can see that happening for sure once we make that publicly available for anyone to essentially use and in this case abuse. Aren't you worried about that?
[00:44:47] Speaker B: Yes and no. I think one of the things at core days, one of the it was, there was a workshop and in the workshop it was taken through. I think we need to see sometimes safely how bad these things can be, if that makes sense. So not putting it fully in core, not releasing it fully releasing it into experiments, releasing it. And so there's Experiments tab and you can have it in the plugin, or you say it's available in the plugin. So seeing it in there before it goes in there to see what happens with it, I think that's how you, you safely onboard it before we get to them.
[00:45:25] Speaker A: Would you, wouldn't you also argue that the ones that are using the Gutenberg plugin currently, that are turning on the experiments and that are playing with them, aren't those the advanced users which you.
[00:45:37] Speaker B: Well, my, my point is we get there through adding sensibility and adding catches. So I think that catches should be added before it goes into core. That's where I'm going. So I think we've learned with things like locking would be one of my examples. So with block locking, that was added a lot later than maybe it should have been.
[00:45:57] Speaker A: Oh, for sure, for sure.
[00:45:58] Speaker B: Yes.
But lessons like that are kept and learned in Core. It's, it's not that a lot of these projects at the moment, when they're in the plugin state, they seem like that should not go in core and that's exactly why they're in the plugin under experiments, because they shouldn't be in core yet.
[00:46:16] Speaker A: Yep. Yeah, I can see. So this is a good example to me where the issue is.
You're introducing something of which the general knowledge of structure of content is required.
[00:46:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:46:35] Speaker A: And. And even if you put it in there safely, you're still going to need the people wielding that power then to understand content structure. Given the amount of.
If you just look at SEO plugins, which are essentially in certainly the more advanced ones, that they help you in that direction and still there's a lot of people not fully understanding the choices that they have in front of them and what the consequences of those choices are. Now I can easily say, look, if you're adding so many custom post types, that's going to give a problem. If you're treating them as terms, it's clutter, cluttering your database. But you would then kind of need to have not only the restriction and the explanation, you may need to have a cleanup or conversion of systems in there as well. Because if somebody then says, you know, I did exactly that, I created 100 different custom post types for any type of content I can think of that really should have been a tag. Yeah, you're going to rely on SEO plugins to then say, look, this was not the smartest thing.
Let me help you here.
[00:47:44] Speaker B: So I think you're touching on a little bit is one of the things that I now realize would have been really great when I was working in the deep, awesome work that I was doing with Gutenberg and I now know that I wished I'd had and I maybe would like wish that people would share more back in is those examples. So since I left like doing that work, I've worked in agencies, I work in startups, so I've got that real world experience of what you're sharing. But when you are working full time on something, you are not getting that. Like it's awesome that you're doing these technologies and that you're like getting this feature and you're like, this is exciting and this is amazing, but you don't know all those examples. So what?
It's hard because I remember when I used to say, can you tell me your examples? And it feels quite shallow sometimes to say that because you're repeating that all the time. But you need that, you need someone to tell me like, like even now I do because there's like some of the Advanced stuff. You're saying I'm like never seen that, but. Oh, right, but, but that's the thing. Just because I haven't seen it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. And just because I've seen something that you've not seen doesn't mean it doesn't happen. And I may be able to share something that shares some light. A good example is how many sites do you know that use the red or orange for a button?
Right? That's the worst thing you can do. People don't want to click them.
Like it's known that that's not psychologically wanted to click, but people don't know that piece of, of information because it's like from a UX perspective, it's like one simple type. Again, how many do you know that use the word submit for submit? But it's like one of my pet peeves.
[00:49:40] Speaker A: Quite a few.
[00:49:41] Speaker B: Yes, again, but again, it's UX knowledge, right? It's that refined little bits of knowledge, but it's sharing those pieces of knowledge to the right people who are doing it. Right.
And from a core perspective, it's a double thing. One, the people who are making it need to share and have it before they get in. But also the people who are aware of those and they're not edge cases, they're normal cases, they're complete stresses. There's no edge in this.
[00:50:10] Speaker A: Oh, I can give you examples of things that you would assume people understand.
But you know, every now and then I'm having to clean up a site to make it more fast and performant. You go in and there's three page builders and you.
[00:50:28] Speaker B: And I mean, you don't need one, you need three.
[00:50:31] Speaker A: Exactly. But here's their logic. You and I know that, you know, incompatibility and all the extra data layers and the, you know, that just inherently makes stuff slower.
But if you go and ask like, why did you install another one? First of all, they didn't know it was a page builder. Second of all, they didn't know the thing took it over the entire WordPress because they only needed it for a very specific thing. They couldn't figure out how to do it in the core of WordPress, they couldn't figure out how to do it in the number one solution. Then the number two solution was introduced and then years later some other solution introduced specific ready made landing pages. So a third option was added because it just made sense in their head. Like, you know, I'm just using it for that. No, but it loads Everywhere it does all these things and it makes everything complicated and there's conflicts constant. Did you not see them? Yeah, well, we kind of did, but you know, we figured out how to way to work around it, all of this. Anybody working with WordPress, certainly from the performance standpoint or UX standpoint, understand that's not the smart way to go about. But people will do it, they will just add it because they have a problem that needs to be solved. They don't know where to go to, to give the, to find the answer that is actually solving their issue.
So they just Google and they find stuff and they go for it and.
[00:51:53] Speaker B: They don't know to uninstall it. I kind of wish there was this like.
So we have like stale in GitHub, right? Like if something like the stale bots, there should be like one in, in WordPress, like from a safety perspective, like you haven't used this plugin in 30 days, just going to install it for you because maybe you don't need it.
[00:52:17] Speaker A: Obviously with what we're doing with ScanFly site health monitoring. And also are you doing that?
[00:52:25] Speaker B: Because I think that's a feature that you could.
[00:52:27] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, we are, we are, we're going to. So we're, we're still building in the layer where we can do all the things we want to do with plugins and how you're using plugins. We're, we're, we're logging a portion of it. We're going to add more logging to it and we're going to say, look, we see that you have two different page builders or contact forms or two, three, whatever. We're going to tell you this is not the smart thing to do in general. You maybe have a really good reason for it, but here's the consequence. It's making it slower. You know, all of these things that you, that I just listed as in, these are not the smart choices. And this is, this is one of the things that we can solve with a particular tool like we build with Scanfully, but the general problem is still there.
I'd love to have all. I don't know how many million people that are using a WordPress site or having a WordPress site installed. It's beyond what I can fathom, but I'm, I think it's fair to assume not everybody's going to have scanfully installed. Let's just, let's be, let's be, let's be honest.
[00:53:30] Speaker B: I can dream.
[00:53:31] Speaker A: I can certainly dream. I can certainly dream. But what I'm Trying to say is that we can solve these problems in other solutions but the inherent problem is still there. It's a very difficult one to tackle. So all this to say that I agree Data Views is a very interesting tool which are. Which is going to allow for way more user friendly type of building of sites, especially combining with the blocks that we have. Like here's another thing that I by the way should think that I have a strong opinion on should be in Core. That's Blog Visibility plugin by Nick Diego.
I pretty much use it on all the sites that I maintain because there's always a block and sometimes the block is just used as a note now by the way, which is a funny thing now. So a paragraph is just hidden for everybody else but it's.
Once you logged in you're reminded why that content exists like that. I found that one of my clients.
[00:54:32] Speaker B: Leaving it like a feedback note. Is that what people are doing?
[00:54:35] Speaker A: Yeah, they just hide it for everybody else. Which I thought was. But that's an example of something that I think that should be part of Core because it allows you certainly with Data Views to be so creative in how you present data, what you're showing when and where based on what condition, all those sort of things. So we get back to having a simple UX to create these more complex presentations of data for which you used to be have to go into really deep custom code like yeah, Facet WP again is a great plugin. There's more plugins but that's my favorite and I'm not. I don't think Data Views is going to replace that plugin. But there's a whole bunch of stuff going on in that plugin that is now that now has a UI that I go, okay, this makes sense. I can, I can kind of cobble things together. But what if, what if that's even a smarter layer already existing in WordPress? I'm. I'm very excited about that. Would you say that's your favorite feature of current WordPress and where I take current a little loose.
[00:55:40] Speaker B: Yeah. So I mean one of the one, the other one is that the fact that we're actually documenting and we're not seeing that Figma is a design system that's pretty favorite of mine. That's always been like my, my English sarcasm of like Figma's not a design system because it's not the fact that we're not doing that. That's been great and I mean that with love and an open heart, but it's really, really Important like from an outside perspective people are coming like agencies. All of them are working in design systems and you speak to anyone, they're like where's. Where's the design system? It's in figma.
Have you seen it? Like that doesn't cut it. Right.
So the fact that that's happening is fundamental and the fact that the decoupling a little bit more of.
But how we get that and that. That's one of my curious things like from a. So we've kind of spoken about the product but the other thing that I always like is where is my contribution focus? Like we talk about goals is like where's going to be my contribution focus next year? And one of them is like how. How can we kind of sprinkle or get some of that in to the old. Because we have older areas that like settings page or areas that like fields and settings.
[00:57:04] Speaker A: Jeez.
[00:57:06] Speaker B: But you change those to white instantly feels pressure like just put a white. Like like there are ways to.
[00:57:15] Speaker A: I'm referring to the layer behind it. The. The settings.
[00:57:20] Speaker B: Scott's been working on that something you said. Yeah but you said something about that. One of the.
I think one of the areas that we do need to do at some point we've spoken like media. All the things that we've got focus on are totally areas we need but is our permissions and control. Like if you look at any apps anymore their levels of. Of permissions and control just makes like grouping or all of those kind of things just makes it a little bit more sense than admin editor.
[00:57:55] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:57:57] Speaker B: And yes we have plugins and there's always going to be. And I think it's a fine line between there's a plugin for that which is always like there's a plugin for that. Right. Like which is great. But core should do the best out of the box as well. Like it should have good default and I personally think it could do better defaults from a permissions perspective as well.
[00:58:20] Speaker A: I would agree but it's also a very difficult one to implement. Oh it is because there's so many layers of scenarios which you would then have to provide for.
[00:58:33] Speaker B: Yes. I mean you can also get rid of what you have already to do it. You have to layer on top of what you have.
[00:58:39] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Are you thinking like a smarter version of what the members plugin does or.
[00:58:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's more in addition. So what you said about the block visibility plus one interesting tangent to that. The other block that I use which is also here is the icon block. I use that. So many sites, so many sides.
I want that in closer if.
[00:59:06] Speaker A: If you're listening, you are my hero. For real. Those two.
[00:59:10] Speaker B: So many sites.
It is ironic how many sites that one is in.
But the. Those. But that's also the. That's a flippant but nice. Good comment. How many of these free plugins just should be right like in Core like we're talking about like that. I think with the permissions is just the ability to have sensible grouping of permissions or just a grouping of users. We have that as just standard. Like that's just a practice that is now accepted in applications that you can group people and do group permissions or do your own custom grouping. Just a custom grouping of permissions. Just that like in Core that. That. That's like a low lobe through. That feels.
[01:00:01] Speaker A: That is a low. But it's still a very complex one to solve.
[01:00:04] Speaker B: It is very complex. I. I'm gonna back away.
[01:00:13] Speaker A: Yeah, no, but there's. There's, you know when. When you sit down and you. You actively start looking at all the areas that we are now getting ready to have fixed as we're working on our new revamped Dashboard. A lot of these things in my opinion should not be copy paste into the new Dashboard UX ui. I think we need to rethink a lot of how these things work and do them smarter where we can. And I don't think that should be optional. I think that's a must.
[01:00:54] Speaker B: Interesting when you say Dashboard.
The dashboard in WordPress is one of the ones that I wonder if we should even have.
[01:01:06] Speaker A: Depending on certain scenarios, there's a lot of users that really don't need one.
[01:01:11] Speaker B: But that goes back to what we were saying originally. If you pick. I just want to.
I just want to have a life block. I just want to like log like my. My. My life and I just wanna. All you would want would be hosts, media library and a simple blogging thing. Everything else just turns off. Right. That. That would make sense and that would be a really beautiful experience. And I. For me that is where I. If I could dream and hope that that is what I hope that WordPress can become out of the box without a plugin because then I feel that plugins can then build on top of it and become incredibly powerful. Same with them.
[01:01:57] Speaker A: So that is a great way to wrap up this conversation because that brings us back to the beginning.
If we install a plugin was the example we started with and that plugin gives you a sense of direction of what you want to do with that plugin and we, we apply that to WordPress itself in a smart way, we get a way better and we did touch on it this but just to circle it back around, I think we. I fully agree with you. You end up with a way better tailored solution that doesn't leave people with wildly confusing screen real estate settings pages. All of these things that they just don't need. Like they don't need it just have one setting screen and one at the bottom that says switch to different mode.
[01:02:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
I love the editor because I worked still like it. But there's probably about 70% I wouldn't want for most of the work that I do. And that's okay because that's the work I'm doing and if I've typed that in and I have an install and that's the work I'm doing like on, on my blog, 70% of the edited should go away as well. But if I'm using so when I do make do site editing like if I'm doing like my themes I describe it as like using it like Dreamweaver. Because it kind of is. Yeah. Then I just, I want it up in my space. I want everything up in my space because that's what I'm using. I'm using it like an editor. That's very different. When I write my own blog, I going back to dark. I want dark mode and I want just simple. I don't want a side panel, I don't want patterns, I don't want anything. I just want. I probably want markdown because I'm weird, but I just want that.
[01:03:57] Speaker A: Again. I agree. I agree. I think that's. Yeah, I think this is a future we need to start become more vocal about because we're getting to the point where we have to make these decisions to make WordPress more relevant than it has been over the last couple of years.
[01:04:13] Speaker B: Well, it's one of two things and I think I come back to is I'm not sure whether Core needs to have all of that in it, but I think Core needs to have the ability to have that if that makes sense.
[01:04:25] Speaker A: Well, it's the same thing, right. If you go to the first I'm done installing and I go to the first next screen, if that says look, this is just a blog, then I don't need to download anything else. But if I have a few other things that needs to be part of my core experience of WordPress and some feature slash canonical plugins are loaded in the background and they are presented as.
[01:04:43] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the thing. Opens up more apps, it opens up more products. So you can then have multiple reduced editing experiences or multiple different experiences that can latch onto to it. It's just the core needs to be more extensible. That's what it comes down to is just being more flexible. And I guess that comes back to data views. One of the core things that excites me about it is just. And the design system. It sets us on a path to just have more Lego pieces to be able to build from and be able to have that flexibility. And before with WordPress, it was more about how can we add not importance into a CSS file and how can we override things. It was though, wasn't it? Like, how can we, like, comment out things in a core file to get around it? That's what it used to be. Rather than how can we just take what we need and then suddenly, like, it's a better experience.
It's a different approach.
It's a better world.
[01:05:46] Speaker A: Well, that's a wonderful. That's a wonderful final statement to leave this conversation on. We are so ready for a better world.
[01:05:55] Speaker B: It's more fun to build things and.
[01:05:57] Speaker A: It'S fun to build a better world. Yes.
[01:05:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:06:00] Speaker A: Thanks so much for this conversation, Tammy. Appreciate it.
I love to see where Project Guildenberg and Gutenberg are going next.
Thank you so much.
[01:06:13] Speaker B: Thank you.
