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Archives: Podcast

  • #46 – Nick Diego on Why You Should Be Excited About the Possibilities of WordPress Blocks

    #46 – Nick Diego on Why You Should Be Excited About the Possibilities of WordPress Blocks

    On the podcast today we have Nick Diego. Nick is a Developer Advocate at WP Engine. He can be found creating educational content, building plugins and themes, and contributing to WordPress Core. He’s on the podcast to talk about his passion and optimism for the future of WordPress using blocks. At the recent WordCamp US, Nick gave a presentation entitled, ‘Let’s Build a Custom Block in 15 Minutes’. It was his attempt to show a group of WordPress enthusiasts that the barrier to creating blocks is slowly being eroded, due to the creation of new tools. These tools are creating opportunities for people who might otherwise have stayed away from block development. It’s clear that Nick is all in on blocks, and during the podcast he makes the case for why you should be too. They offer so many opportunities for what can be displayed on a page, and their capabilities are only getting better. It’s a fascinating chat, especially for those who are, as yet, undecided about whether they want to embrace WordPress blocks.

    Nathan Wrigley

  • #45 – Alex Ball on Customizing Core Blocks for Clients

    #45 – Alex Ball on Customizing Core Blocks for Clients

    On the podcast today we have Alex Ball. Alex is a Lead Software Engineer at Mindgrub, a digital agency in Baltimore, Maryland. His website leadership experience continues to inform his decision-making today, especially for training clients and making the block editor as easy to use as possible, and that, in essence, is the subject of the podcast today. During WordCamp US 2022, Alex gave a lightning talk in which he laid out some suggestions on how the block editor can be made more straightforward for clients. Most regular WordPress users have become accustomed to the way the block editor works. Over time, we’ve understood how things work and where we need to go in the UI to alter things. For many clients, this familiarity simply does not exist, it’s confusing and mistakes occur. Alex talks about solutions to this problem, and he comes at it from different angles. Maybe you lock certain features down so that only certain users can achieve specific tasks. Or it might be that you need to take time to educate your clients more about the block editor and how it works.

    Nathan Wrigley

  • #44 – Joe Dolson on How To Fix the Six Most Common Accessibility Errors on Your Websites

    #44 – Joe Dolson on How To Fix the Six Most Common Accessibility Errors on Your Websites

    On the podcast today we have Joe Dolson. Joe is a WordPress plugin developer, a core committer, and a web accessibility consultant. He’s part of the Make WordPress Accessible team, the team dedicated to improving accessibility in the WordPress ecosystem. His recent presentation at WordCamp US entitled ‘Finding and Fixing the Six Most Common WCAG 2 Failures’, highlights some of the key areas where websites are not as accessible as they should be. The areas we discuss are, low contrast text, missing alternative text, empty links, missing form labels, empty buttons and missing document language. Joe explains what each of these problems are, both in terms of how they can be fixed, as well as what people with accessibility requirements might experience when they visit your site. We also chat about the fact that there’s an ever growing legal compulsion to make websites follow accessibility guidelines. Lawsuits are going through the courts with greater regularity, so now might be the time to look into this topic.

    Nathan Wrigley

  • #43 – Nick Ahmann on Testing Plugins With TasteWP

    #43 – Nick Ahmann on Testing Plugins With TasteWP

    On the podcast today we have Nick Ahmann. Nick works for Inisev, a company which provides SaaS services for WordPress and other platforms. They have a range of products, but today we focus on TasteWP. TasteWP is a service which allows you to spin up a disposable WordPress install in a matter of seconds. From there, you can use the site for free for two days. If you’re wanting to test out a plugin or theme, but don’t want the hassle of creating a site on your own hosting, or local machine, TasteWP could be a useful option. It behaves as a normal WordPress website and you’re not limited to what you can install on top of the defaults. We talk about what promoted Nick to work on this plugin and how he sees it as helping the WordPress community, as well as being a vehicle to make people aware of the products and services that his company offers. If you’ve ever wanted a WordPress site to play with for a few days, then this episode is for you.

    Nathan Wrigley

  • #42 – Marcel Schmitz on Finding Work With Codeable and Working With WooCommerce

    #42 – Marcel Schmitz on Finding Work With Codeable and Working With WooCommerce

    On the podcast today we have Marcel Schmitz. Marcel is a freelancer at Codeable for Pluginslab, a small agency based in Porto, Portugal. He builds solutions for WooCommerce, often connecting them with native mobile applications. We talk on the podcast today about the opportunities Codeable has offered him and how it fits in with his life. As you’ll hear, he’s pretty keen on the fact that it gives him a reliable stream of work without the need for him to go out and find it. He explains the nuts and bolts of how you get started, what developers need to bring to the table and how Codeable mediates disputes which might arise. Towards the end of the podcast, we talk about Marcel’s work using AR and WooCommerce, as well as a brief foray into how he sees headless WordPress working with WooCommerce in the future; what are the benefits and what are some of the drawbacks?

    Nathan Wrigley

  • #41 – Laura Nelson on How To Create a Profitable Newsletter

    #41 – Laura Nelson on How To Create a Profitable Newsletter

    On the podcast today we have Laura Nelson. Laura is a Content Marketer at WooCommerce where she’s responsible for creating and planning engaging content for their users. Prior to WooCommerce she worked at MailPoet, an email marketing plugin for WordPress, and it’s this experience that she is bringing to the show. Her pitch is that email newsletters can themselves be a product. That people will pay to receive your emails, and she’s got data and examples to back it up. I suppose that the closest analogy would be people who create an online course. You have an area of expertise; you do the hard work of creating the course and people will pay for a membership to have the benefit of learning from your expertise. Laura is describing something similar to that. The only difference being that instead of a course, people will pay to receive your emails, knowing that you’re going to bring value to them regularly. This is not a get rich quick scheme. It’s hard work and you’ve got to cultivate your audience and give them something of value, repeatedly.

    Nathan Wrigley

  • #40 – Andrew Palmer on Using AI To Help Your Website Workflow

    #40 – Andrew Palmer on Using AI To Help Your Website Workflow

    On the podcast today we have Andrew Palmer. Andrew has been in the WordPress space for many years as a product owner and open source advocate. He founded and later sold Elegant Marketplace, and more recently is the co-founder of Bertha.ai, which is a WordPress plugin which assists you in creating text content directly in the WordPress admin. We get into how you can create AI content and when it’s suitable to do so. Can you rely on the text that’s created and hand over complete editorial control to the plugin, or does the generated content still need human intervention? We also dig into some aspects of AI which have people concerned. Are we going to become too reliant on AI tools, and will they put copywriters out of work? Will people create content simply to swamp the search engines and make it harder for truly important information to rise to the top?

    Nathan Wrigley

  • #39 – Marieke Van De Rakt & Taco Verdonschot on Yoast, the Past, Present and Future

    #39 – Marieke Van De Rakt & Taco Verdonschot on Yoast, the Past, Present and Future

    On the podcast today we have Marieke Van De Rakt & Taco Verdonschot, and they’re both from Yoast SEO. I sat down with them both at WordCamp Europe and we talked about some of the recent changes that have taken place within the company. Having worked hard to build and maintain their company’s reputation, they decided that it was time to steer the business in a new direction by selling it to Newfold Digital. We get into the reasons for this acquisition and the subsequent reshuffling of the management of the company. What were the details of that agreement, why did they join forces with Newfold Digital in particular, and how has the acquisition gone? We also talk about their longstanding commitment to contributing back to the WordPress project. Why have they done this and what benefits have they seen from this approach? Why do they bring so many of their team to WordCamps? Finally, we talk about their move into the Shopify space with their SaaS Shopify app.

    Nathan Wrigley

  • #38 – Paul Bearne on How Working With WordPress Allows for Different Lifestyles

    #38 – Paul Bearne on How Working With WordPress Allows for Different Lifestyles

    On the podcast today we have Paul Bearne. Paul is a WordPress enthusiast who loves to come up with ways to make WordPress do things it doesn’t normally do. Having engaged with WordPress almost from the start, he specialises in the creation of highly performant, scalable, accessible and SEO friendly code. In the podcast today Paul talks about the many ways in which it’s possible to work within the WordPress ecosystem. He’s tried many of them out over the years. Paul talks through some of the different ways that you can work and draws out the benefits and drawbacks that they have. How can you find the work and what can you do to make sure that it’s as stable as it can be? If you’re already a remote worker, much of this conversation will resonate with you, but if you’re not, but are curious about your options, this podcast will be of interest.

    Nathan Wrigley

  • #37 – Jonathan Wold on How Partnerships Might Help Your WordPress Business

    #37 – Jonathan Wold on How Partnerships Might Help Your WordPress Business

    On the podcast today we have Jonathan Wold. Jonathan joined the WordPress community seventeen years ago, and he’s been here ever since. He likes to think about WordPress as an operating system for creating on the open web, and invests his time and energy into growing the WordPress ecosystem. With that in mind he gave a talk at the recent WordCamp Europe called “Growing in WordPress through partnerships”, in which he laid out his thoughts on how WordPress companies can enable greater growth by joining with other, like minded companies. Jonathan talks today about how strategic partnerships can, in some cases, make the job of selling a product easier and more rewarding. Are partnerships for everyone, or are they only for a subset of companies? How do you go about finding a partner and what are the ways that you can ensure that you’re working with the companies which offer the most benefit to you and your customers?

    Nathan Wrigley

  • #36 – Sean Blakeley on Transitioning a Large Agency Over to Gutenberg

    #36 – Sean Blakeley on Transitioning a Large Agency Over to Gutenberg

    On the podcast today we have Sean Blakeley. Sean works for a large agency called American Eagle, a platform agnostic organisation working with enterprise clients on a wide variety of projects. After years of experiments with different approaches and collaborations between designers and developers, their team has begun to rely heavily on block patterns, and they’ve found it is greatly increasing their productivity. It’s fair to say that block patterns have revolutionised the team’s approach to the entire design process. We talk about how and why Sean’s team decided to jump in early with block patterns. When they did, this was a somewhat risky strategy. There was no guarantee that patterns would begin to be widely adopted, but this strategy is now starting to bear fruit. It’s allowing their team to work with their clients in new and unexpected ways. It’s an interesting episode, and if you’re curious about how you can start to use blocks and patterns with your clients, there’s sure to be something here for you.

    Nathan Wrigley

  • #35 – Akshat Choudhary on the State of WordPress Security

    #35 – Akshat Choudhary on the State of WordPress Security

    On the podcast today we have Akshat Choudhary. Akshat is the Founder and CEO of BlogVault, MalCare, WP Remote and Airlift. These WordPress plugins allow their customers to build, manage and maintain their WordPress websites. He’s based in Bangalore, India and we begin the podcast talking about the state of the WordPress community there. We also talk about why Akshat sees it as useful to bring himself and other members of his team so far to attend WordCamp Europe. What’s in it for them and what’s their approach to the return on this investment? We then get into a discussion of the security landscape and how the products that Akshat and his team make enable site owners to rest more easily. We go into some of the technical details of how the products work and how they fit neatly into an agency wishing to sell care plans to their website clients.

    Nathan Wrigley

  • #34 – Felix Arntz on WordPress and Performance

    #34 – Felix Arntz on WordPress and Performance

    On the podcast today we have Felix Arntz. Felix is a Developer Relations Engineer at Google and a WordPress core committer. He is the lead engineer for the Site Kit plugin for WordPress and has been a regular contributor to WordPress for several years. He’s also been involved in the newly created WordPress performance team which is trying to work out how WordPress can stay ahead of the performance curve. He’s on the podcast today to talk about how the WordPress community need to be focussing more on performance. Not only do search engines place more emphasis upon speed, but the rise of other CMSs might also reflect their ability to optimise their platforms, given that they don’t have the plugin and theme architecture which WordPress does. It’s an interesting conversation about an area which is going to matter more and more in the months and years to come.

    Nathan Wrigley

  • #33 – David Lockie on Why Web3 and WordPress Might Work Together

    #33 – David Lockie on Why Web3 and WordPress Might Work Together

    On the podcast today we have David Lockie. David is the Web3 Lead at Automattic, which is a new role. He’s trying to understand what Web3 is and how it’s going to alter the course of the internet in the future. Web3 can be confusing. It’s new and has many different meanings depending upon which implementation you’re working with. It also works in a fundamentally different way to how the web has been thus far. Perhaps you’ve encountered crypto currencies or NFTs, and maybe they’ve convinced you about the future of Web3. Perhaps they’ve raised concerns. David tries to explain how this decentralised approach to gathering and storing data is just beginning to find some practical applications.

    Nathan Wrigley

  • #32 – Daisy Olsen on Why You Should Try Out Block Themes

    #32 – Daisy Olsen on Why You Should Try Out Block Themes

    On the podcast today we have Daisy Olsen. Daisy works for Automattic as a Developer Relations contributor on the WordPress Project, and she’s on the podcast today to talk about Block Themes. These new themes bring additional possibilities for WordPress users in what they’re able to build in the Block Editor. Now, non-technical can start to add and style things like headers, footers and navigation menus. Daisy talks about how this all works as well as what’s not quite ready. We also get into what new skills you’ll need to learn, as well as what new tooling might be required. It’s an interesting subject and a good primer on Block Themes if you’re considering jumping in.

    Nathan Wrigley

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